www.UsHumans.net: Chapter 16
The early 1900s brings college for the middle class, instant and mass-communication by radio, massive advertising, movie stars, sports, and blues and jazz music
A short description of some aspects of the first decades of the 1900s will bring us to the modern world. The following description of the United States of the 1920s is a summary of the two books The Twenties, Fords, Flappers & Fanatics, which is a collection of articles describing contemporary issues edited by George E. Mowry, and The Changing Years by Arch Merrill. Merrill describes the first automobiles, movies, and planes and such along with the decline of steamboats, bicycles, trains, annual floods, ice harvests, and the general store. He describes Western New York during the years 1900 to 1967.
In the early 1900s, most of us were still working on the family farm. To view a video of feeding the doves in the year 1896, see http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mbrsmi/edmp.4044. Visit www.livinghistoryfarm.org to view the video Thrashing During the 1920s along with discussions of farming during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. You might view the Library of Congress video at http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mbrsmi/lcmp002.m2a29915 to see a typical New York City street scene in the year 1903. Visit http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/coolhtml/coolhome.html for photos of the 1920s. Visit www.thirteen.org/tenement/virtual.html for panoramic views of home interiors in the 1870s and 1930s. Visit www.lahacal.org/film/crashbash.html for a video re-enactment of 1929 dance ball. You might like to view the PBS show The 1900 House, see www.pbs.org/wnet/1900house. For a typical street in 1930 Sweeden, visit www.skansen.se/pages/?ID=322. See http://kclibrary.nhmccd.edu/decade20.html for more information about the 1920s. Visit www.riedesel.org/boyhood_days.html for one person’s description of life in the early 1900s. You might like to visit www.jazzbabies.com and http://home.earthlink.net/~rbotti/.
Many aspects of the 1920s are fully understandable by us today; it is easy to put ourselves in their shoes. Those things that make the world modern were then emerging. The number of hours worked per week was cut from sixty to forty-eight. Women's social movements changed our society forever. There was an explosive growth in the number of automobiles and in the recreational industries of sports and entertainment (for some songs and video from vaudeville, see http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma02/easton/vaudeville/vaudeville.html). Rather than just being home decorations and tools, new mechanized consumer products began to reduce the physical effort of our daily chores within the home. For example, washing day used to involve several hours of physical exertion, including the raising and hauling of a few hundred pounds (150 kg) of water, boiling clothes and fingers, scrubbing and wringing by hand, and hanging and folding. Clothes washing and drying machines save nearly all of that work. Visit www.kancoll.org/articles/bus/bc_washday.htm for a description of washing day in 1920 and www.sciencetech.technomuses.ca/english/schoolzone/Domestic_Technology3.cfm for a discussion of household machinery, including irons, washing machines, toasters, vacuum cleaners, and fans.
Since the time of our first cities, education has mostly been available only to the children of the wealthiest of us. Through the 1800s, primary education became available for most everyone. Since the origin of the medieval university, higher education had been an option for upper class persons only. That too changed through the 1900s. Now millions of persons were enrolling to learn about the world and to increase their options in life. But still today, college education is out of reach for the poorest 10% of us in the U.S.
Record players and radios made music available for everyone–anytime someone feels like listening. Before then, music had been performed and heard only on special occasions. Today’s instantaneous, nationwide mass communication began to occur with the radio. For the first time ever there was instant news in which we could hear an event as it was taking place. A succession of national crazes swept the country, driven in part by radio's instant influence on a national audience.
The earliest machine resembling a bicycle was made around the year 1800 as an adaption of a wheeled cart. The Velocipede was an early model merging wheels and hobby horse. With the addition of steering, peddles, and springs, bicycles became usable motion machines around 1870. Within a couple decades, they had spread throughout the world. The PBS documentary The Bicycle Corps describes an 1895 experiment by the U.S. Army concerning the military use of bicycles, in which the 25th infantry rode from Missoula, Montana to St. Louis, Missouri.
Today’s bikes have peddles connected by chains to rolling wheels, while a child’s tricycle peddle is instead attached to the center of the front wheel. As with today’s tricycles, early bikes also had their peddle attached to the center of the front wheel. The larger the diameter of the wheel, the father the bike will roll with each peddle rotation and the faster the bike can go. You may have seen pictures of old bikes having front wheels as tall as a person. Today’s bikes increase speed through gearing rather than wheel diameter.
In many parts of the world still today, bicycles are more numerous than automobiles. (My Dutch friend Hester Amstel says that in World War II, the German army would confiscate bicycles. When a Dutch person today runs into a German they might joke "Bring back my bike.") Merrill explains that the sputter of the horseless carriage was first heard in the late 1890s while the bicycling craze was at its peak–when it was said to be "all the go." Many bicycle shops began selling autos.
The automobiles or "mechanized buggies" of the 1890s were noisy, smelly, and continually stuck in the mud. Many dismissed them as a passing fad of the rich. Fashion required goggles and dusters for men and veils for women. Mechanics, tinkerers, and horseless carriage manufacturers began making models. During the years 1895 through 1905, 2,200 models were introduced. Most had gasoline-powered engines but there were also 125 steamers and 125 electrically-powered models. Merrill lists the names of many brands and models, including the Seldon, Sullivan Brothers, Foster, and Thomas Flyer. The Silent Northern was the first to have running boards, while the Locomobile was the first to have its engine placed in the front. Steering wheels, speedometers, and windshields were soon added.
The earliest models were steered with a stick and had kerosene headlamps. Their engines were started with a hand-crank, which had to be operated in just the right manner or a person might have their arm broke by its recoil. So it was best to have a friend do this chore. Since these "devil wagons" scared horses, many localities passed laws requiring an autoist to pull over and shut off the engine if an approaching horse-rider raised a hand signal. You can see a parade of automobiles in a movie from the year 1900 at the Library of Congress website at www.americaslibrary.gov/cgi-bin/page.cgi/jb/civil/ford_4.You might find it directly by going to the website http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mbrsmi/lcmp002.m2b46029. Visit http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mbrsmi/awal.1952 to view a 1904 automobile race. Visit www.deutsches-museum-bonn.de/ausstellungen/meisterwerke/benz/feault_e.html for a photo and video of the first 1886 Benz motor carriage.
For several years there were no traffic lights or laws. As traffic laws first appeared, police rode bicycles but later began using motorcycles. The first speed limits were typically six miles per hour (10 km/hr) but by 1910 these had been raised to fifteen mph. Auto owners paid $1 for a license number. They did not receive a license plate, just a number. They would hand-paint their number onto a metal plate attached to the rear of the car.
The first death from an auto accident in Rochester, New York occurred in 1903. In many years, more persons are killed in auto accidents than in warfare. Deaths during car accidents were seen as acts of fate; our automobile manufacturers believed they had no reason to attempt safer designs until padded dashboards and seat belts were introduced in the 1960s–some seventy years after the introduction of the car. Today’s professional car racers will crash and tumble at 200 miles per hour (320 km/hr), usually without injury. This tells me that our automobile industry can do much more to eliminate 50,000 deaths per year in the U.S., one-million worldwide. They might start with a spherical enclosure, since it is the strongest shape. Historically, they have shown more concern for trimming $1 locks and such from the cost of a car than in raising costs with injury-proof designs. You might like to visit the U.S. government highway safety and transportation departments at www.nhtsa.dot.gov and www.dot.gov. Also visit www.citizen.org/autosafety.
In the early 1900s, auto clubs formed in every town. Members planned weekend picnics and other such "doings," and cried "get us out of the mud" until governments began building "hard roads." (You might like to view a 1927 film about roads and travel at www.archive.org/details/Wheelsof1927.) The U.S. Congress began to authorize the National Highway in 1916, paving a strip of land from Maryland to Illinois. Highways were soon built everywhere so that traffic jams would have a place to exist. We see that our governments had taken on a huge new expense; paved highways might have been constructed by the auto industry (what fee do you think would be charged for their use). Today, the U.S. spends fifty billion dollars per year on highways, while General Motors receives 200 billion dollars annually from its sales of cars. Before there were highways, people might follow telephone poles to get from one town to another. Bellamy Partridge wrote that his 112-mile (170 km) trip took twelve hours and required four flat repairs, a fender repair, and one motor repair. In 1912, another person drove from New York to San Francisco in just two months. There were few gas stations along the way, and these had no pumps. Instead, a filling can was used to scoop gasoline out of a larger container. Often, drivers were expected to bring their own cans. By 1942, the cross country trip could be made in a week.
At first, ninety percent of cars were open-air models having a folding top that could be quickly raised when a storm began. By 1929, 90% were closed models. There were forty-five makes in 1920 that have since disappeared. General Motors was created through a merger of a handful of companies. Henry Ford's Model T was introduced in 1908, and by 1927 there were 15 million of them on the roads. Ford said that he got his idea for his automobile assembly line after seeing those used in Chicago meat butchering plants, which we saw in the previous chapter.
Cars typically cost one or two year's wages–in fact, they are designed to cost this amount. Car manufacturers soon found that people running short of money would make the car payment first, and they would never let a car go back to the dealer or bank. The only time they got rid of a car was to get a better one. They would also buy every new gizmo available for their car. "Antique cars" came to be those that forty-year-old persons could not afford to buy when they were twenty years younger. Some car retailers were already complaining that the manufacturer was unfairly pushing them around, for example, in trying to dictate how many cars they should sell each week "regardless of the prosperity of their local area." (I have heard many franchise operators making similar complaints today about being pushed around by their franchise headquarters, see Chapter 18.)
Cars were considered to be a luxury at first, but they were soon believed to be a basic necessity of life. In fact, it was a social error to walk just three blocks to go shopping. Unfortunately, the auto was soon followed by traffic jams, accidents, and air pollution. Half of today’s air pollution comes from car exhausts while the other half comes from industrial plant emissions. Junkyards did not exist before cars came along; wooden wagons were never piled into heaps on the edge of town.
At the time of their first introduction, few persons dreamed that this machine would drastically alter everyday life. In the United States, the automobile caused the end of the steamboat, horse-and-buggy, bicycle, and many passenger railroads, including city trolleys and inter-city trains, which had just become common. These things are used only for recreation today but still find everyday use in other, more environmentally gentle countries utilizing mass transportation. Automobile engines mechanized both farm machinery and warfare, putting an end to the calvary. Both the isolation of the rural farm and the independence of the small town were ended because the mobility of the auto enabled long distance shopping and excursions. The local, general store was doomed to extinction. Downtown hotels were replaced with outlying "motor hotels" or motels. Merrill says that horse-drawn fire engines were spine tingling to see, and that it was sad for them to be replaced with trucks. You can see a video of horse-draw fire engines at http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mbrsmi/awal.4182. For a generation or two, the village pastime had been to watch the 5:15 train pull into town. But this too came to an end.
We saw that in the 1790s, people were thrilled by the newly invented air balloons that were able to defy gravity. It’s a safe bet that humans have been dreaming of flight for a million years. The Wright brothers made their historic airplane flight in 1903. (You can view a re-enactment of the Wright brothers conducting a 1900 glider flight at www.first-to-fly.com/Programs/Return%20To%20Kitty%20Hawk/flying%20the%201901.htm. Visit http://firstflight.open.ac.uk to run a flight simulator.) The success of the Wright Brothers was due to their practice of making measurements on scale models. By 1927, Charles Lindbergh was able to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Merrill says that a shout about a passing flying machine brought everyone into the streets. We are still thrilled today to see them fly into motion, especially when they are heading for outer space. Visit the Library of Congress website at either www.americaslibrary.gov/cgi-bin/page.cgi/aa/explorers/earhart/learns_1 or http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mbrsmi/trmp.4087 to view a 1920 video of President Roosevelt taking a flight. For photos, see www.wisconsinhistory.org/libraryarchives/aviation.
Movies, sports, and other entertainment
The moving-picture first appeared just before the year 1900. Nickelodeons quickly appeared everywhere, charging a nickle–five cents–to watch a silent "flicker" from a hand-cranked projector. The films usually lasted fifteen minutes and were accompanied by piano. A slide would say "Then came the dawn." Plots were not important; only movement mattered. Audiences were thrilled to see moving trains, calvary charges, bathers, horse races, and prize fights. People loved this new art form. You can see the 1903 video The Great Train Robbery at www.americaslibrary.gov/cgi-bin/page.cgi/jb/civil/wister_2 or by going directly to the Library of Congress website at http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mbrsmi/edmp.2443. For a movie of people sliding into a pool visit www.americaslibrary.gov/cgi-bin/page.cgi/jp/vacation/season_2 or http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mbrsmi/edmp.0063.
Shows became longer and the price went up. Advertisements soon appeared. In 1927, Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer contained some talking and singing scenes but the first movie to talk throughout was The Lights of New York in 1928. (Visit www.filmsite.org/index.html for movie history.) Those silent stars who had nice sounding voices continued their careers in the new "talkies." It is human nature to form friendships. When we see a particular person acting in a series of movies, we sort of think of them as a friend. Movie makers know that we prefer new movies having our “friends” in them. Film making moved from the East Coast to Hollywood, California to take advantage of its easier weather. Some people worried that movies would shut down Broadway plays or ruin the morals of the youth.
The decade of the 1920s saw the rise of mass spectator sports and of the sports hero. The amusement and recreation industries became big business. Previously, outdoor games were for children and aristocrats; now, millions of people began to play golf, baseball, and tennis. Each year, seventeen million persons attended college football games and twenty-seven million attended big league baseball games. In 1895, the city of Boston provided just three sand piles for children to play on. A short time later, by 1923, there were 6,600 playgrounds in 680 cities with 1.5 million attending daily. Visit http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/awlhtml/awlhome.html for video clips of early twentieth-century entertainment.
The mass-communication that began in the 1920s meant that the people of the entire nation could jump from one fad to another in rapid succession. The rapid rise of a fad showed that for the first time public opinion could be mobilized in a few days. Examples of fads include crossword puzzles, flagpole sitters, marathon dances, and Mah Jong, which is a Chinese game in which pairs of identically patterned tiles are sought from a collection of numerous patterns. Some newspaper editors warned that these fads would be an end to the republic. (Today, video games are predicted to end the republic.) By the way, Simon and Schuster's big break occurred when they published the first book of crossword puzzles.
For some of the town's elderly persons, entertainment still consisted of being "sitters" on the benches placed in front of the stores along main street. They had nothing to do but change to the next bench when the sun had moved. We still see this being done in today’s small towns. The town elders would talk about the changing world, including the silly language used by the young. Popular sayings of the 1920s included "Smarty," "Oh, you kid," "23 skidoo," “What’s eating you,” and "Does your mother know you're out?" Many of today’s slang words originated in the 1920s, including jalopy, ritzi, baloney, nookie, and bootleg. Many other words are defined at http://local.aaca.org/bntc/slang/slang.htm.
Radio's first public broadcasting step occurred in 1906 when Reginal Fessenden transmitted a musical program to a small audience. (Visit www.old-time.com for information about radio shows.) Radio grew slowly during its first fifteen years. The story of its slow commercial acceptance was much the same as for those of the more recent personal computer and internet. Radio's use was laughed at by business until it was suddenly learned that it could instantly influence the people of an entire nation–and sell products to them. A radio show would advertise a product, toothpaste for example, and that company would find a 300% increase in sales.
Radio exploded from wireless telegraphy in 1920 to a billion-dollar industry in 1930. At the beginning of the 1920s, there were only amateur radio enthusiasts (like the home computer enthusiasts around the year 1980). The businessman Mr. Davies was one of the first to realize that radios and programs could be sold to the masses. The first radio station in Pittsburgh, KDKA, had no competition for ten months. Just a few years later, in 1926 RCA bought the radio station WEAF from AT&T to form NBC for one million dollars. (We still recognize the companies behind these abbreviations.) Three years later, NBC grossed $150 million, mostly from advertising (the internet is now being used for advertising, and the same humongous growth is occurring). The Federal Radio Commission, see www.fcc.gov, was created in 1927 to assign radio station broadcast-frequencies. By 1930, there were 600 stations in the U.S.
Radio brought a barrage of advertising. A survey showed that just 5% of listeners had become tired of the newfangled radio, but 53% were annoyed by its advertising. This didn't keep people from purchasing huge numbers of radios. In the year 1929, people bought $850 million worth of radios in the U.S. alone. Some people warned that advertising would ruin radio's noble purpose. In Europe, people paid $250 per year to hear advertisement-less radio.
Nationally selling shows and songs made large incomes for some persons. A common annual salary for a U.S. radio show star was $100,000, which was 170 times the average annual income of $586. Today's movies reach a global audience and today's movie stars are commonly paid ten million dollars for a single movie, which is 400 times the average annual wage of $24,000 in the U.S. Company sales and profits grow as the number of persons they sell to grows from one-thousand to one-million, and on to one-billion. Today's global companies want to market to everyone living in the industrialized nations.
In Chapter 2 we saw that in 1865, the nature of electromagnetic waves was already understood. We saw that light is an electromagnetic wave, and that radio waves are light waves of a color we cannot see. Light waves and sound waves are different. Sound is a traveling pressure wave. In radio, music is not directly sent through the air; instead, it is encoded onto a varying radio wave. To transmit music, radio stations vary either the amplitude or frequency of emitted radio waves. Our home and car radios wiggle speakers in step with the wiggling of the amplitude or frequency of the received radio wave. Engineers knew that they could similarly send pictures by encoding them onto electromagnetic waves. It took a couple of decades for this television project to be completed. The wiggling of the received waves tells the television set which fluorescent screen dots are to be lit up. When television became a reality, many persons warned that it would ruin the morals of children (we hear that today, too). Visit www.tvhistory.tv or www.tvdawn.com for television history.
Music
Instead of hearing music only on special occasions, radio makes it continuously available to everyone. Radio brings both classical music and the new Jazz music to the masses. Dance crazes become a cultural expression of the masses. Phonographs also became widely available. One person stated that “the new Jazz is not just music but is a spirit of joyous revolt from convention, and a safety valve against machine-ridden and convention-bound society.” What do you suppose the parents of this person had to say about the "evil" new music? (We see that people have complained about mechanistic society, from Rome to the 1920s to today.) Proponents said Jazz was here to stay: "Don't fight it, join it."
In the United States, every ten years or so a new type of music would develop–from ragtime through hip hop. Ragtime came from cakewalk–both of which were African American innovations–and developed into jazz, big band, swing, be-bop, rhythm and blues, and modern jazz. Country swing is ragtime played on a fiddle. (Throughout the previous few centuries, the fiddle had been the standard instrument of village music, including western "barn dances." It was brought to the New World by European immigrants.) Blues has continued throughout the last century and is heard within every other style. Bluegrass, country, cajun, zydeco, rock-and-roll, disco, hip-hop, and new age are some other musical types that have evolved through the decades of the last century.
The same thing happens in every other region of the world–and between the regions of the world. Some of the musical styles of the world include gypsy rhumba that has further evolved through Cuban and African styles. Musical styles bounce back and forth between musicians throughout the world. African chimurenga music is played with the traditional Mbira thumb-piano. The Mbira is heard in Cuban son. In turn, the son is the mother of salsa and many other Latin musical styles. Nigerian high-life music was a local continuation of big band music. Cajunto is a Texas-Mexican adaption of European polka.
Other musical styles include tango, val, samba, cumbia, reggae, zouk, ska, compas, calypso, kwela, mbaqanga, juju, soca, soukous, groove, lounge, and chill. The United Nations has a list containing a sample musical artist from each nation at www.unesco.org/culture/worldreport/html_eng/stat2/table5.pdf. See also www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/cultural/music and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genres_of_music. Many of these are as much an attitude as they are a musical style. Various forms of music are meant to make you mad, happy, relaxed, or to give you strength to endure tough times. In Murmurs of Earth, Robert Brown says that "music is primarily a means of communicating emotional, spiritual, and intellectual states." Today's African and Carribean music makes me feel happy. Latin music energizes me, as do thousand-mile-an-hour speed metal, Celtic fiddle, and cajunto accordion music. Groove and lounge are cool–especially Asian and Arabic–as is Cumbia. New Age and chill music put me into a pleasant trance. The larger the number of instruments and sounds, and the faster they go, the better– which is why modern jazz is so neat. Of course, Louis Armstrong is my hero and the most important American ever–more important even than any scientist, business person, or politician–because music feeds our spirits and makes us alive. Oppress me and I’ll make music. Thrill me with science and I’ll make music. Music has a magical effect on us. It drugs us.
The United States outlawed alcohol in 1921, and of course, the very first result of this was an increase in the number of saloons selling alcohol. In one region, the number of saloons grew from 1,500 to 15,000. They were now operating illegally but there was much more profit to be made. Drinks cost $0.25 to $0.50 each. Bartenders were paid $75 per week and received $50 each time they were arrested. There were Speakeasies and Blind Pigs by the thousands; they were selling anything resembling alcohol. Our officials tried to order police officers to stay out of the speakeasies while on duty.
We women went to speakeasies and publicly drank for the first time ever. We also began to smoke tobacco again for the first time since we had dropped our pipes a century earlier. Some frightened people begged women to refrain from smoking "for the country’s welfare." The Women's Christian Temperance Union called for the scientific study of the health dangers of smoking.
Prohibition proved to be a criminal disaster. Half the people of the country refused to obey. In general, rural people were for it, while the urban population was against it. There was a general willingness to buy illegal alcohol and to condone lawlessness. Prohibition also meant the invasion of personal rights by overzealous federal agents, the corruption of government officials due to the tremendous funds of the bootleggers, the choking of the courts with alcohol cases, wholesale smuggling across the borders, and the growth of organized gangsters. These things are all too familiar to us due to today's illegal drug business. For a while, Detroit had a law allowing police to enter a saloon without a search warrant. This meant they had thrown out the U.S. Constitution in their efforts to save the U.S. Constitution.
From the first moment of Prohibition, the government raided illegal stills. One person hid and operated a still on senator Shepard's Austin, Texas farm (he was the bill's author). Just two weeks after the law took affect, two Internal Revenue Department workers were indicted on corruption charges. In 1924, the police in Detroit made 7,391 alcohol arrests but won only 450 convictions. In Chicago there were 1,000 bombings in the 1920s and 1,500 murders in the years 1926 through 1929 alone. The attempt to rid the country of liquor instead created the perfect opportunity for criminals, gangs, and racketeers. (Racketeering involves selling “protection” to shopowners, who will coincidentally find their shops busted up if they refuse to buy that protection.) Merrill says that the non-enforcement of liquor laws led to a more general contempt of law and a corruption of government officials. The experiment of prohibition was found to be a national disaster. Prohibition was repealed in 1933.
With prohibition came the "flapper": the new women who drank and smoked, visited speakeasies, wore knee length dresses, “bobbed” her hair, and entered the business world. She became a major purchaser, causing manufacturers to begin designing products to meet her demands. One woman said that the flapper “will pursue a man if she wants to, and that she won't knit you a necktie but she'll drive you to the lake, don knickers and go skiing with you. She is educated and will talk to you about current events or theology. She'll be the mother of the next generation and free them from hypocrisy.” Visit www.geocities.com/flapper_culture for a discussion and copies of contemporary magazine articles.
Petting and necking became new aspects of courting. One flapper said "I don't care to be kissed by some of the fellows but I'd let them do it rather than have them think that I don't dare." She says she has heard of scandals with sudden departures and hasty marriages. She said "necking" is "petting" only from the neck up and that what her mom didn't know wouldn't hurt her. At the same time, she was sure that her mother hoped her daughter would get her full share of attention.
We saw that during the 1840s, we women were beginning to state publicly that we too are persons. In 1920, women won the right to vote in the U.S. The flapper's rebellion helped us women win the freedom to choose our own lives. These freedoms occurred throughout the world. By 1970, women had won the right to vote in nearly every nation. Today there are just seven nations in which women are not allowed to vote, see www.pbs.org/stantonanthony/wherearewe/suffrage_rights.html.
Merrill describes many little things that occurred as the world of the 1920s developed into the modern world of the 1960s, in going from "sleigh bell days to the space age." In the early 1900s, it still occurred that most everyone was born and died within their home, and that one in six infants died before reaching the age on one. Since antibiotics had not yet been discovered (that occurred in 1928 when Alexander Fleming accidentally contaminated a dish of bacteria with a common Penicillium mold), our lives were still often shortened by a simple illness or accident. We live longer today because we survive our first year of life, take antibiotics to cure mild illnesses, and often have a $50,000 (in the U.S.) hospital visit at age sixty-five to cure a more serious illness.
The towns near most every stream and river used to suffer annual floods before dams became ubiquitous. Ice harvests used to occur on every northern river or lake until the arrival of the refrigerator. Winter ice would be cut into large blocks and placed into storage houses to be used in the warmer months. (We saw that the ruler of Medieval China had fast-moving boats bring ice from the north.) You can view a video of ice cutters at work in 1902 at http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mbrsmi/awal.1555.
We saw that in the year 1800, the New England town had a store or two and a meeting house that was also the church house. In the early 1900s, a typical town had two blacksmith shops, two grist mills, a cheese factory, a saw mill, a small woolen mill, and three general stores. The general store would stay open until midnight on Saturdays to give the more-remote families time to make it to town for their weekly visit. The general store continued to be a place for conversing. During the late winter it was common for a family to trade maple syrup and sugar cakes at the general store for its "produce tickets" that they would use later in the year; this was the last remnant of the barter system that we saw had begun to disappear eighty years earlier. Area farmers used wagons and sleighs to take their milk to the cheese factory. For a video of sleighs and maple syrup, visit www.scenesofvermont.com/webmovies.html.
Before unit-packaging arrived, the general store used to stock many things in bulk barrels, including corn flakes, flour, molasses, and crackers. A family would take home fifty to one-hundred pounds (100 to 200 kilograms) of flour. (We saw that Ancient Mesopotamians were grinding gain into flour everyday, and that throughout the last 1,000 years, individual families were taking sacks of grain to the miller to be ground into flour.) The arrival of the chain store and its buying power meant the end of the general store and the replacement of the traveling salesperson with the warehouse order-taker.
Suburbia paved over the pastures and crop fields that used to surround the city. Now hundreds of houses were crammed into a small area "in your choice of three models." Rochester had only five apartment buildings in 1925 but hundreds by 1965, see www.open-video.org/details.php?videoid=4252. Independent school houses were replaced with big-budget school districts. Motorized farm machinery sped the exit of farm youth for the cities. Cities built civic halls, court houses, jails, and public safety departments. Today, we take all these things for granted.
Questions
1. Interview your oldest relatives to find out about some details of daily life for them in their youth. Some interview topics might include the following things. Describe the social aspects of bicycles. The first dial telephone. The sound of their first car. Hand-crank starting. Car repairs. The purpose of a car. Bike and car clubs. Motorcycles. The sight of the first airplane. Descriptions of wars and the Great Depression. What stories do they remember hearing from their own grandparents. Playing baseball at school. Flappers, gangsters, speakeasies and prohibition. Reactions to the first radios and movies. Ice and milk deliveries. Jobs they have had. Occupations that no longer exist. The musical styles of their youth. Births, dating, marriage ceremonies, and death. The home town. The general store. Chain stores. Political events. Yearly floods. Natural disasters. The town dances and other festivals. Typical meals. Pets. Greetings and conversations. Traveling salespersons. Drive-in theaters. The proper usage of some tools. Fashions for clothing and hair styles. Upper class and lower class. Art. Apartment homes. Suburbia. Trains. Traffic. School. Home. Childhood. Health and health-care. Church. The court house. Retirement. Heroes. Leaders. Friends. Love. Relations among siblings and the extended family. Babies. How to raise a family. The major events of their life. What life is about. The roles of religion, science, technology, business, government, and our civilization. Where the world has been and where it is headed.
2. Describe music, sports, and entertainment today.
3. Compare the rate of acceptance of one of today's new technologies with that of radio. Compare the funding of both the initial scientific and technological development of radio and its commercial spread with a more recent technology.
4. Discuss advertising.
5. Who are today's celebrities? What makes them a celebrity?
6. How are cars different today than they were in 1920?
7. Describe some recent innovations in film making.
8. Describe some recent national fads.
9. Which things are threatening the moral fiber of today's youth?
10. Compare the ability of a woman to choose her own life during the 1820s, 1920s, and today.
11. Compare some of your favorite musical genres of the world. Describe the world's violin styles, including classical, and the 150-year-old fiddle music of Polish, Irish, and Gypsy peoples with that of U.S. barn dancers during the 1850s, and with the more recent fiddle music of Maritime Canada and Nashville. When was the accordion invented and why does it appear in so many musical styles? Compare accordion styles in polka, cajunto, cajun, zydeco, and cumbia music. Today's bluegrass music is based on the banjo. Describe some other forms of banjo music as you trace the history of this instrument to its origins in Africa. View Ken Burn's history of Jazz. Discuss the relations of Latin son music to salsa and cumbia. Describe some of the mutual influences of African, Asian, Caribbean, European, North American, and Latin American music. Compare the world's drumming styles. Which musical styles use a harmonica? Describe the throat singing of the people of Tuva (see www.kiku.com/electric_samurai/virtual_mongol/four.html.)
12. Compare the U.S. social movements of the 1840s, 1920s, and 1960s.
13. The gangsters of the 1920s were selling bootleg alcohol and using part of their huge profit to bribe police, judges, and politicians. Certain aspects of the U.S. Constitution were being suspended to combat illegal alcohol. During the last few decades, other drugs have resulted in some of the same situations. Compare the 1920s trade in illegal alcohol with today's illegal drug trade. Can the United States alone control this international drug trade? International trade in illegal drugs amounts to over $300 billion per year and is second in volume only to the arms trade. (For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_drug_trade and www.unodc.org/unodc/en/world_drug_report.html.) The U.S. appetite for illegal drugs has created today’s billion-dollar crime rings in the U.S., Columbia, Mexico, and Southeast Asia. What have been the effects on these countries? Should we legalize certain drugs just as we do alcohol? Would the crime rings instantly end? Why do some of us use drugs? Is drug addiction a criminal activity or a health issue? Which nations consider drug use to be a criminal activity and which consider it to be a health issue? What approaches do they take in dealing with drug addiction? Which approach has the most success?
14. There were a number of new things in the decade of the 1920s. Throughout the last one hundred years, has the number of changes been about the same during each ten-year span of time? Has this number been the same throughout every ten-year span occurring since the origin of farming villages? Is every decade different for gatherer-hunters?
15. Are there deities for the auto, highway, Jazz, radio, and computer?
16. Were the 1920s or the 1960s the "wilder" decade? Which was a more-drastic change from its preceding decade? You might visit www.lib.virginia.edu/small/exhibits/sixties/index.html.
17. Create a piece of art to describe some aspect of life during the early 1900s.
18. Compare the public's rate of acceptance of iron cooking stoves, microwave ovens, gas lighting, electric lighting, x-rays, radio, television, computers, and the internet. Compare their effects on our way life.
19. Orchestras and theatrical plays are similar in that they are combinations of the efforts of many persons. Some American pan pipes play a single note. To make music consisting of a series of notes, a series of persons each has to blow a single note in rapid succession. This makes pan pipe and Jazz music the result of the simultaneous interplay between individual artists. Can a group of people generate a story or other work of art through contributions by a series of persons–for example by each adding a word or brush stroke? Is this the way technology and civilization changes? Are bureaucracies, governments, scientific research institutes, and corporations similar to orchestral combinations or to a series of individual contributions?
20. Do we feel that celebrities are friends, respected leaders, or heroes?
21. Discuss the influence of mass media on the general public. What controls have the nations of the world placed on media ownership. What has been the effect of the current deregulation of media ownership?
22. Describe the life of a person whose history has been recorded by the 1930s Folklore Project of the U.S. Works Progress Administration found online at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpahome.html.
23. Which mode of transportation was used by the Wright brothers as they commuted between Ohio and North Carolina?
Primary sources for the chapter
The Twenties, Fords, Flappers & Fanatics, edited by George E Mowry, 1963, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.
The changing years, Arch Merrill, 1967, American Books-Stratford Press, Inc., New York, New York.
Suggestions for further reading
Merrill lists a few related books, such as "Fill 'er up" by Bellamy Partridge, which contains early driving stories.
Only Yesterday, An Informal History of the 1920's, Frederick Lewis Allen, first published in 1931, published in 2000 by First Perennial Classics, New York, NY.
The Search for Order 1877-1920, Robert H Wiebe, 1967, Hill and Wang, New York.
The Jazz Age, The 20s, 1998, Editors of Time-Life Books, Alexandria, Virginia.
The Blessed Town, Ofxord, Georgia, at the Turn of the Century, Polly Stone Buck, 1986, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Polly tells us about kitchens, grocery stores, the Yankee invasion, the mulecar, telephones, school, children's games and home entertainment, visiting relatives, full-moon events, church, seeing her first Baptist person, cutting pictures from the Sears catalog to make doll families, fashion, laundry day, and Oxford's response to typhoid.
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