 In today's lecture we're going to be focusing on American society in the 1920s. We're going to focus on three particular trends that really played a big role in shaping American society during this decade. The first of these trends we're going to be looking at is the growth of a consumer society. This is a society that's primarily focused on buying things, really for the sake of buying things, not necessarily because you need them, but because you want them. This is a huge change from the previous century and we'll talk about in just a minute why. Next we're going to look at the growth of the movement to ban alcohol in the 19 teens that it develops into what we call prohibition. And this is during the decade of the 1920s, the production and sale of alcohol in the United States is forbidden by federal law. It has again, once again, a big impact on the United States and on American society. The only thing we're going to address is the great migration. This is a mass migration of African Americans from the deep south to the northeast, the Midwest and the far west during the late teens and in the 1920s. So these are three important trends, all three of which have a huge impact on American society during this decade that we'll be discussing today. The growth of the American consumer society reflects a changing attitude in the United States about the relationship between people and things. Prior to the 1920s, especially during the first half of the 19th century, Americans tended to look at stuff, in other words, the things that they owned, things that they needed and that they used in life as essentially the stuff was there to make life easier. And people didn't necessarily buy things unless they were very wealthy, just for the sake of purchasing things. They only would buy things if they absolutely had to. Most of the time, they would make things or they would barter or trade with their neighbors for things that they couldn't make themselves. Because Americans in society, by and large, was cash poor. People didn't have a lot of cash, a lot of money to spend on things. Most of that went into their basic living expenses. Well, by the end of the 19th century and certainly into the first couple decades of the 20th century, American attitudes about the stuff that they owned or the stuff they wanted began to change quite conservatively. And people began to think that instead of buying things only because they absolutely have to, they didn't even think about buying things because they want to. Or perhaps they need things, you know, I need that new jacket. I need that new sweater. I need that new car. These kind of ideas about want and need began to change quite a bit. And a lot of this has to do with attitudes, changing attitudes about work as well. Americans by the 1920s are working far fewer hours than they had in previous decades. They have a lot more disposable income. And their attitudes about work itself began to change. And work ceases to be the end of it and, you know, kind of an end. Essentially, you know, people going to work because that was how they fulfilled themselves in life. During the 19th century, people often talked about, well, you know, this is my profession and that's what I want to do and I'm going to do it until I die. Well, by the 20th century, those attitudes began to change. People stopped thinking about work necessarily as kind of the end all and be all activity. Work is simply there to provide you with money that you can then use to buy stuff that you want. And so this is a very important social and cultural change that has an impact on American purchasing and spending habits during the 20th century, especially in the 1920s. And the impact of this, of course, is that for the most part, American society becomes much more reoriented around buying stuff. And American businesses become much more focused on selling things to consumers. And of course, the idea way to do that is to create what people at the time call palaces of consumption, the department store. Here we have department stores in Pittsburgh and in another case. Here we have a food court in a turn of the century department store, a place where people could go shop and then have a nice meal and then go back to shopping again. And so places to sell stuff become very important as part of this growing consumer culture. Advertising becomes very important, especially the celebrity endorsement here. We have Babe Ruth. He drinks Red Rock Cola and so should you because if he drinks it, it must be good. Advertisements for, you know, in this case, a pocket watch or a bread company on the side of a car. And so people begin to see a lot more exposure to purchasing. And advertisers begin to use psychology, you know, a source of psychological selling principles to get people to buy stuff. And so advertising becomes a very important part of this growing consumer economy. Certainly, fashion is an important part of this economy. People stop buying clothing because they've worn out their old clothing. They buy clothing because it's in fashion and fashion becomes a huge part of the 20s identity for women, especially if they're not wearing the latest fashion, then they're just not part of the hip scene. And so it becomes a very important part of knowing what's in fashion because that's important to purchasing. Advertisers focus on getting people to focus to worry about things that they never worried about before. Listering focuses on breath, you know, how's your breath? Is your breath good enough that people will put up with you? This is not something people tend to worry about in the 19th century, but by the 20th century, Listering has created an entire industry focused on making your breath smell better, making your oral health better. And this is the sort of this genius of advertising is that they create issues. Essentially, you have new products that you can buy to solve problems you didn't even know you had. Lastly, and probably one of the most important aspects of this growing consumer culture is the automobile, the automobile, which predates in the 1920s. But during the 1920s is a massive decade for automobile sales, certainly among men and also among women. Women for the first time really become drivers in the 20s, as new cars have been developed that are easier to start, they're easier to operate, they don't break down as much, they can go greater distances. And so women take to using the automobile for shopping and for enjoyment for just going out and having fun. Cities, of course, have to be modified for the automobile. You have to have wide streets so you can park your cars on the streets. They'll park in garages, as many cities do, and make it easier for people to go shopping in the downtowns, as opposed to having to make it much more difficult to get in and around. So certainly, these growing shifts have a big impact on shopping in the 20s. Now, the last point that kind of shapes this, of course, as I mentioned, is that there's an economic shift in the 20s. Wages in the 1920s lead inflation of prices by 15%. In other words, wages are higher, are going up higher than the cost of items. So people just have more money to spend. This, of course, leads to expansion of the middle class as well. We also see that changing, for instance, people before the 20s tend to work 60 hours a week, this drops down to about 40 hours on average. And so people have more time free to go to movies, to have fun, to buy stuff, to go shopping. And it just really changes attitudes towards this. The final point that shapes this, of course, is the rise of consumer credit. And credit has a huge impact on the 20s because, well, people don't necessarily have a lot of money and they want stuff now. And how are they going to do that? Well, they're going to put it on credit. They're going to take a loan. They're going to pay by installment. They're going to do all these different ways to get things now and pay for them later. And of course, during the 20s, well, the economy is really good. This is no problem. But by the 1930s, the economy goes into a depression. And suddenly, people have loans they can't pay. And they have more house mortgages they can't pay. And so this credit culture of the 20s does lead to some really bad negative side effects that Americans eventually began to experience in the 1930s. Well, the second trend we're going to be focusing on today in this lecture is prohibition, this effort to ban the production and sale of alcohol. We're getting rid of alcohol in the United States. Prohibition predates the 1920s. In fact, it really goes back to the early decades of the 19th century. Primarily in the 19th century, the groups that were anti-alcohol were evangelical Christians. They were primarily against alcohol because they felt that alcohol had bad consequences for Americans. It led people to do stupid things. It led to abuse in the family of women, abuse of women, abuse of children, by drunken husbands and fathers. It led people to spend all their money on booze when they should be saving it for a rainy day. And so for a large part, this was Christians organizing to try to make life better for people. And because they viewed alcohol as a kind of a moral evil in society. Well, by 1910s, the Christians had begun to team up with progressives. Remember these progressive political groups who wanted to improve society and fix all the problems in societies. And the progressives liked prohibition because, again, it aimed at making people better or more productive citizens by getting rid of their attachment to alcohol. And so the prohibition is the progressives who are against alcohol. By the beginning of World War I, they have an opportunity to enforce nationwide prohibition because, of course, during the war, efforts are made to reduce waste and promote thriftiness and help Americans live better lives. And one way to do that is by banning alcohol production. Those distilleries and breweries that are using, that are making alcohol for people to consume could be making other things for the war effort. Alcohol can be used in explosives. And so efforts are made to pass laws to ban the production of alcohol for consumers. And ultimately in 1917, the Volstead Act is passed. And the Volstead Act is what becomes the 18th Amendment, which bans the production and sale of alcohol nationwide, beginning in 1920. Of course, for these progressives, even though the war is over by 1920, have been over for almost two years, this is a great victory. They've banned this scourge of alcohol. The US is dry, you know, the last call for alcohol because alcohol is going away. And pretty soon the nation will be better off than it was. You know, the nation's children will be protected. Uncle Sam will be happy. And so progressives, of course, are very thrilled about this. And they think it's a way of making Americans happier, healthier, and ultimately for them, doing away with a lot of the vices associated with alcohol. But it quickly becomes obvious that prohibition is not this panacea, it's not this universal solution that many of the progressives thought it would be. Because very quickly it becomes obvious that while many Americans are willing to sort of publicly support prohibition in private, they wanted their liquor. They wanted their beer and their whiskey and their alcohol and their wine and all the other things that people like to drink. And so while many Americans kind of publicly support prohibition, privately they wanted their liquor. And what we begin to see is the emergence of an underground drinking movement quite quickly after prohibition. The emergence of what's called the speakeasy. These underground bars where you could go and if you knew the password, you could get your alcohol. Well, as liquor drinking is pushed underground, it means that criminals get involved. People like Al Capone here who makes a fortune smuggling in whiskey from Canada to the Chicago area and makes this, you know, as a mob boss, makes a huge amount of money by doing this. Organized crime takes over the essentially smuggling in of alcohol from Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and in some cases using speed boats to run shipments of liquor in from ships offshore. And alcohol becomes big business for organized crime. Leads to lots of corruption of public officials. Leads to huge amounts of violence as rival gangs fight it out for control of the whiskey award. In some cases, it's simply just the alcohol industry. Leads to a lot of deaths as people manufacture alcohol illegally in some cases causes people to go blind because of bad ingredients mixed in with the alcohol that they're being sold. And this creates a huge amount of turmoil in the United States during the decade of the twenties. In many cases, local law enforcement refuses to enforce prohibition and go after local speakeasies because they think it's a waste and they think it's useless. And so oftentimes it's the federal government, federal agents who are being involved with having to break up these illegal alcohol operations and busting people who are involved in alcohol production and sales. And so ultimately, for many cases, it's a huge expense, huge waste of federal money to try to enforce these anti-alcohol laws. And growing over the twenties, Americans become increasingly vocal against prohibition. You know, they want their beer, they want their wine, they want their hard liquor and they're less and less willing to accept this argument that the government knows best, that prohibition is just good for everybody, it makes for a happier, healthier society. And so prohibition, like I said, has sort of noble ambitions, proves to be increasingly unpopular in the United States and ultimately is abolished in the early 1930s, as we'll talk more about in our next lecture. The third trend I want to focus on in the remaining time of this lecture today is the great migration. And the great migration, as I mentioned at the very beginning, is this huge movement of African Americans from the deep south, from these deep southern states into the industrial northeast, the Midwest, and the far west, the west coast. It's a migration of about one and a half to nearly two million African Americans. So we can certainly characterize it as a mass migration. It fundamentally changes the cultures of urban environments in the northeast and the Midwest and the west coast. It changes the environments in the south as well and it gives African Americans new opportunities that they had not had previously. So it's a very important social trend during this time period. Why does the great migration happen? The main reason is this is because there's a growing demand for labor in factories in the northeast, Midwest, and the west coast, especially once World War I begins. Because when World War I begins, this huge supply of European immigration is cut off. And since European immigrants were the ones who were working in most of these factories, factory owners are desperate for workers and they start offering higher wages, they start employing African Americans. And so a few African Americans begin to migrate north into these cities. They find the jobs are pretty good. The treatment isn't too bad and they send that money home and encourage their family to migrate and pretty soon entire families are making the long trek by train out of the deep south and into this north, the Midwest, and the west coast. And in this case here we have a picture of a waiting station and a train station. You have huge numbers of people all waiting for that train to take them up north so that they could go to work in the factories. I'll give you an idea of numbers. But before the 20s, from about 1916 to 1920, about half a million African Americans migrated. During the 1920s, over a million. So we're a huge, huge number of migrants. Now of course, many African Americans found that the north was better than the south. Well, it wasn't a perfect place. You didn't have the kind of oppressive Jim Crow legal system that you had in the south. You didn't have the oppressive segregationist laws like you had in the south. They do find of course that there is violence, racial violence in the north. There are a lot of whites living in cities that are not happy with African Americans migrating into the north. And there is a sort of informal segregation that takes place. And so what we tend to see are the emergence of African American neighborhoods in northern cities. Neighborhoods like Harlem or the south side of Chicago. Become dominantly African American because those are areas where African Americans could get homes or could rent apartments to live in. Harlem in particular becomes kind of synonymous with this African American migration. We get the Harlem Renaissance as it's called. And this is a movement of African Americans embracing kind of new artistic, new literary traditions that are identified with this migration out of the south and into the north. Harlem Renaissance in particular leads to a huge change in African American artistic and kind of cultural identities. A rejection in some ways of European and white literary artistic traditions in favor of pan-African, sort of this broad sense of African culture that had really not been necessarily a part of African American identity prior to the 1920s. And so in Harlem in particular, we see the emergence of really significant figures. Here we have W.E.B. Du Bois, he's a writer, he's a historian, he discusses African American experience in the United States. People like Langston Hughes, a poet. Other people like writers and playwrights and others who were involved. We see the growth during the 1920s of an African American middle class and in some ways that was trying to copy the same sorts of trends that white middle class people were adopting during the course of the 1920s. And so certainly this is a great shift in African American culture and population during this time period. And this neighborhood of Harlem especially becomes very majority African American. Now of course, life was on all good in the North. Just like in the South, African Americans encountered extreme racism and were sort of forced to self-segregate to find places where they could rent or own houses. Harlem, which was the center of this renaissance of remained white people may own most of the buildings in Harlem up through the end of the 1920s. In some cases, African Americans, even though they were welcomed into many of these new clubs, for instance, like the Cotton Club, which is the center of jazz and African American cultural expression, they could come as performers, they couldn't come as guests. And so there's segregation even in Harlem. And in other places throughout the United States, of course, racial violence leads to rioting, leads to people being killed or abused in horrible ways. So that great migration will of course improves the situation for many African Americans who leave the deep South. Not everything is perfect. And certainly the US remains a very racially segregated whether legally or informally throughout much of the 20th century, well and certainly into the post-World War II era the 1960s and 1970s. So ultimately these three trends, this trend of consumer society, this trend of prohibition and this trend of the Great Migration have a huge impact on the United States in the 1920s and really, really shape American society in a profound way that even to this day can be seen. You can still see the hints of these 1920s trends in modern American society.