Post War America: 1920's

SS5H4 The student will describe U.S. involvement in World War I and post-World War I America.

b. Describe the cultural developments and individual contribution in the 1920's of the Jazz Age (Louis Armstrong), the Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes), baseball (Babe Ruth), the automobile (Henry Ford) and the airplane (Charles Lindbergh).

Vocabulary: culture, cultural, renaissance, transatlantic, innovation, tradition, jazz, urbanism, modernism, industrialization, Prohibition, religious fundamentalism, urban, status quo, suffrage, migration, professional baseball, mass production, assembly lines, airplanes, aviation

The 1920's Economy

The United States emerged from the World War I as a full fledged world power. Many women who had begun working to help the war effort continued working. Many war time factories were converted into productive businesses which were able to mass produce popular new inventions such as radios, cars, refrigerators and much more. American stocks also made great gains after the countries success in World War I. Many people began investing heavily in the stock market causes stocks to rise even higher. Banks even loaned out large amounts of money, so people could invest borrowed money in the stock market. This increased flow of money into the stock market drove stocks even higher, but the poor financial decisions people were making were not going to last forever.

People who had a surplus of money also began spending an increasing amount of money on entertainment such as sports, music and art. Professional baseball took off spurred by the tremendous hitting of Babe Ruth. The National Football League also had its beginnings. Charles Lindbergh became a national celebrity by flying his plane solo across the Atlantic Ocean.

http://www.jonathanfeicht.com/the-roaring-twenties.html

Babe Ruth

Babe Ruth was very talented and he made the game exciting. In his 15 seasons with the NY Yankees, the team won 4 World Series championships, and Ruth set many hitting records. • Many people loved to listen to games on their new radios, and baseball became the most popular sport during the 1920's.

Jazz Age

The 1920's in America were known as the Jazz Age, or the “Roaring Twenties”. Americans enjoyed baseball, dancing, listening to the radio, and fun new music called jazz. Jazz music developed among African Americans in the South, and quickly became popular all over the US. Its popularity quickly spread to America’s biggest cities.

Louis Armstrong

Louis Armstrong, an African American musician from New Orleans, made a big impact in the 1920's. He played the trumpet, cornet, and he sang. Armstrong rose from poverty to become a legend in jazz.

Harlem Renaissance

Many African Americans moved into cities in the 1920s, especially into New York. African Americans made the Harlem section of New York their home. A cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance was started when African American artists and writers expressed their talents. It focused on literature, music, theater, art, and politics. Their main goal was to inspire African Americans to succeed and change racial stereotypes.

Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes was one of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance. He wrote more than 60 books, including poems, novels, short stories, plays, children's poetry, musicals, operas, and autobiographies. Hughes wrote from his own experiences and combined African and American culture in his work. His technique involved using jazz rhythms and dialects. This helped readers understand the life of African Americans in the big cities during the 1920s.

Henry Ford

Henry Ford did not invent the automobile, but his assembly-line innovations made it possible to sell cars cheaply. When Ford installed his assembly line, each worker on the line became a specialist. One worker bolted on 1 wheel on each car as it moved along the line. He worked faster than if he had to move around the car bolting on all the wheels. This increased productivity and meant that Ford produced its cars at a lower cost and could sell them at a lower price. As a result, more people could buy cars. Ford’s mass production of the automobile resulted in more jobs, greater mobility, movement to suburban areas, and the growth of transportation-related industries.

S5E1 Use the basic economic concepts of trade, opportunity cost, specialization, productivity, and price incentives to illustrate historical events.

c. Describe how specialization can improve standards of living and productivity (e.g., how Henry Ford’s use of the assembly line reduced the price of automobiles).

Specialization benefited Americans and people could focus their productive energy on a smaller set of skills. This allowed them to become better at those skills, which in turn, meant that those customers who consumed those goods and services ended up with a higher quality product. At the beginning of the 20th century, industrialization had already begun to deeply affect American life. Certain areas of the country had numerous large cities, where people worked in factories or other large-scale businesses. Other pockets of the country still had many people in agrarian communities. In these areas, farming was mostly for self-sufficiency. As the years passed, the agrarian traditions remained in the South longer than they did in the North. Thus, many people in Northern cities worked for monetary wages, rather than just as producers of food for their families. Also in the north, many farms existed on larger tracts of land, which provided them with the opportunity of growing crops for sale. This meant that they could use profits to purchase items they could not make or grow. In the South, farmers were often sharecroppers or tenant farmers, who had smaller farms and less access to cash. As a result, they were less able to buy consumable factory goods. People working successfully in businesses had to purchase all their food, but were also able to pay for what they wanted. Again, this economy that was reliant on cash and not bartering was more common in urban areas, and more common in the North. In fact, during the first few decades of the 20th century, many people left the rural South for urban areas in the North to take advantage of job opportunities and specialization to improve their lives. Henry Ford’s development of mass production, the assembly line, and inter-changeable parts lead to specialization in manufacturing. As a result, Ford created an automobile, the Model T, cheaper and faster. As a product, it was in high demand because Americans could purchase it at a lower cost, and it was a high-quality product.

Vocabulary: specialization, agrarian, self-sufficiency, monetary, tracts, consumable

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: The growth of American manufacturing during the late 19th and early 20th century was greatly affected by the growth of the steel industry. The Bessemer Process, a process to manufacture steel more cheaply, was brought to the United States where it increased steel manufacturing particularly in the Pittsburgh area. Students should understand that the steel industry grew here because of the region’s proximity to coal and waterways.

Charles Lindbergh

In 1927, Charles Lindbergh became the first man to fly in an airplane across the Atlantic Ocean. He traveled from New York to Paris in a single-engine airplane named the “Spirit of St. Louis”. His flight created interest in airplanes and air travel, and more people started flying as a result. A little over a decade later, airline passenger travel was common practice throughout the United States.

1920's Newspaper Project Assignment: All Newspaper articles due on 11/8/19

Additional Research Links:

Jazz Age links: -History of Jazz

Harlem Renaissance

1920s Newspaper article Project Instructions.pdf

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