Themes in American History

1920s is the decade of the rise of consumer culture. New mass production techniques enabled American industrialists market goods that many white collar and working class families could afford. Installment buying made people more possible to acquire automobiles and refrigerators and other big home appliances. Advertising became the tool to create the demand American industries needed to sell mass quantities of goods. They claimed that washing machines, stoves, canned goods can help housewives easy from housework. Radio also played an important role in launching the consumer culture. It was the medium through which advertising worked its magic. For the first time in history, one person, one ad, or one product could reach every corner of the American landscape. It provided a form of entertainment and source of information. The radio became as necessary as food or shelter as its position moved from luxury to necessity. Motion pictures also attracted many people in the 1920s. During 1927 to 1929, weekly movie attendance reached an estimated 110 million people. (Chudacoff pg217, 6^th Ed.) There were independently black-owned theaters served only for black audiences in New York. Movies presented scenes involving diverse city people, which helped to popularize urban culture.

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Chicago’s first generation of movie theaters, most of which opened in the early 1910s, were mostly small establishments located wherever a vacant storefront could be had. By the late 1910s and early 1920s, increasingly large theaters were constructed throughout Chicago. Every neighborhood had one or more movie houses to call its own. As profits from existing theaters soared, promoters opened ever-grander theaters which entertain the masses of movie-goers. These so-called movie palaces were distinct from their predecessors in a number of ways. The city’s theater circuits, the most notable of which was Balaban & Katz, expected their movie palaces to draw audiences from across the city, not just the immediate neighborhood. Also, by incorporating classical architectural details in the new palaces, they hoped to allay middle-class fears that movie theaters were corrupting the minds and morals of the city’s youth. Their efforts worked. By the end of the 1920s, movie-going was one of the city’s most popular leisure activities, due in large part by the increased willingness of middle-class Chicagoans to go out and see a show.



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