this clip above shows the kind of inventions that people created during the 1920’s.
Even though most of the inventions we saw in use in the video aren’t things that caught on today some did. Such as the full body suit for going under water and the hat that “we assume” let the man breath underwater. Obviously these inventions at the time weren’t big hits but thanks to the creation of video, people throughout the country/world were able to see things like these. And it seems safe to say thanks to this that it got other people trying to create their own inventions. This is a huge part in modernity because America is all about innovation and it seems very likely that people wanted to out-perform others inventors and it led them to create even better inventions. And even though most probably didn’t make the cut, many did and we use them every day.
According to www.thenagain.info, ” The leading theory regarding the cause of The Great Depression holds that it resulted from the stock market crash in 1929. Prior to the crash, around the beginning of 1928, the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates due to financial speculation and inflated stock prices. Industrial production turned down in the spring of 1929, and overall growth turned negative in the summer. This prosperous decade had proven the old adage that all good things must come to an end, when a recession began in the summer of 1929. In the two months before the crash, industrial production fell to an annual rate of 20%, and continued to drop well into the fall months. “By mid-November, the market had declined by a half.” ”
I believe that, the prosperous decade, mostly due to the stock market success, represents an aspect of modernity achieved during the 1920s. On the other hand, Great Depression caused a lot of financial, political and cultural changes. This video show us, how people were optimistic in every aspect of their life, during the decade before the crash of the stock market and how evrything changes after.
The video above shows an example of the type of silent movies viewed during this time period.
The 1920s are greatly known for the entertainment developed during the time period. People had more free time and began spending this time several different types of leisure activities. People began watching sports especially baseball as well as boxing. Some even became involved in sports such as tennis baseball and golf (Chudacoff & Smith 217). The movie business continued to expand as more and more people began too visit theaters. For example about 110 million people visited the movies in a week when the population of the U.S. was only about 120 million (Chudacoff & Smith 217). Music advanced and flourished as Jazz became increasingly popular (Chudacoff & Smith 218). Radio allowed listeners to hear a wide variety of things from music to the news to advertisements about retail products that convinced them to go out and buy them (Chudacoff & Smith 218). This modernized the city by making it a thriving entertainment center with a wide variety of things to do during peoples free time. These developments brought forth the technologies of entertainment in the future that lead to inventions such as the television.
Picture of Babe Ruth who was an important figure in baseball during the 1920s
The city, not the farm, had become the place of national experience. By 1920, four-fifths of the country’s African Americans living outside the South lived in the cities. During the 1920s, urbanization took place on a wider front than ever before. Maturing industrial economies increased the populations of many areas, particularly steel, oil, and automobile centers. Social and cultural diversity continued to be a unique quality of urban life that distinguished cities most sharply from the relative homogeneity of rural and small-town social relations. Leisure activities were another type of consumption mostly supported by city dwellers. In 1923, 300,000 fans attended the six-game World series of baseball between the New York Yankees and the New York Giants. The increase of show business paralleled the rise of sports, maturing with the growth of cities. In the 1920s motion pictures also attracted huge crowds. During 1927-1929, weekly movie attendance reach an estimated 10 million people when at that time nations total population was just over 120 million and total weekly attendance to church was under 60 million. Movies helped to popularize urban culture as nation culture by showing scenes involving diverse city people. In 1920s radio also brought the new world of entertainment and advertising directly into urban homes.
Suburban expansion in the 1920s owed much to the automobile and its related industries. Real estate interests, the construction industry, the auto rubber, and oil industry joined automobile owners in pressing for new roads to facilitate high-speed travel. The building of expressways and parkways encouraged still more suburban migration. In 1920, the growth rate of suburbs exceeded that of the cities for the first time. Many were residential communities for the upper and the middle classes, and others were industrial and mixed-use suburbs where factory workers constituted a fifth or more of the population. 1920s was also witnessed the country’s first suburban shopping center. Due to all of these developments in the 1920s helped the cities to become modern.
In the 1920s, women adopted a new fashion trend where they liberalized themselves from the constricting clothes to more comfortable and sporty clothes. In the early 1920s, there were still alot of those who continued to wear conservative dresses but younger generation women began to wear sported shorter skirts. The main look that many women strived for was the straight-line chemise, a bob hair cut, and a hat to top it off. Fashion back in the 1920s was influenced heavily by a movement called surrealism which features elements of surprise and unexpected juxtapositions. Thus, the smooth, mechanized, and geometric forms were incorporated into clothing instead of the usual curvy look. Coco Chanel, a French fashion designer, brought her modernist philosophy to fashion by designing clothes that were menswear inspired and also comfortable.
The automobile was first introduced in the early 1900’s. It was available only to the wealthy upper class. In the 1920’s, the automobile became more mass produced and many Americans were able to buy it. This allowed for an even greater expansion of New York City than the Mass Transit system. More and more people could move out of the over crowded city and drive to work. The automobile changed the way New Yorkers lived and helped make it what it is today: a commuter city.
These machines changed NYC forever
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At the beginning of the century the automobile entered the transportation market as a toy for the rich. However, it became increasingly popular among the general population because it gave travelers the freedom to travel when they wanted to and where they wanted. As a result, in North America and Europe the automobile became cheaper and more accessible to the middle class. This was facilitated by Henry Ford who did two important things. First he priced his car to be as affordable as possible and second, he paid his workers enough to be able to purchase the cars they were manufacturing. This helped push wages and auto sales upward. The convenience of the automobile freed people from the need to live near rail lines or stations; they could choose locations almost anywhere in an urban area, as long as roads were available to connect them to other places. Many states in the US established motor fuel taxes that were used only to build and maintain highways helping the auto highway system become self-supporting.
Affecting not only American culture during the 1920s, the automobile also helped American industries. The sharp demand for automobile sparked the creation of a whole new industry in the 20s, the automobile industry. Ford had to provide for his clients somehow, so he expanded his factories, creating more jobs, more revenues, and improving the American economy in virtually every way. Automobiles that drove around a lot found it hard to drive on the poor dirt roads that were common back then, and they required a lot of fuel to run also. So nation wide road construction took place, which created even more jobs, and strengthened the economy even further.As a result of the automobile, Americans and America itself benefited greatly from the advantages it brought to them. Improved transportation and an improved economy made the automobile one of the most important inventions of the 1920s.
This youtube video shows a documentary about the assembly line in Ford’s Company in Detroit. It explains the life of people who worked at this assembly line. Even though the automobile brought many benefits to Ford and the people in America at the end of the video shows somehow an isolation of these workers in society. The workers there, later on, were prohibited to talk to each other, or walk around , or even refrain to go to the bathroom. As one of the people interviewed in this video states: “to see them, they were like marionettes….. human machines.”
