Themes in American History

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The “Roaring Twenties”  was an era of great economic growth, prosperity that emphasized the  social, artistic, and  cultural  diversity in the city. It was an era of new inventions, discoveries that led New Yorkers to experience new technologies, entertainment, mass media, that brought changes in life style and culture of the people living in the city as well as the people living outside the city by giving hope of getting prosperity and wealth.

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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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The entertainment industry took advantage of Americans increased leisure time and income during the 1920s. As people celebrated postwar prosperity with indulgence in entertainment.  Movie change the form of entertainment. When the “talkies” was available. The motion pictures with sound. Movies presented audiences with spectacular sets that they could only dream about. In the 1920s, there were 20 Hollywood studios, and the demand for films was greater than ever and it is the greatest output of films in America; it is about 800 film releases in a year. Also, movies were a very inexpensive form of entertainment. By 1922, almost every community in America had at least a 100-seat movie theater for total 40million people go to watch movie every week.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79i84xYelZI

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

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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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xmqc_wJN4_M&feature=related

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