Chicago Tale of the 20s and 2000s 2

The Twenties: A Paradoxical Period

The 1920s were a time of roaring contradictions, as is reflected by the struggle between the two most memorable motifs, the “Jazz Age” and Prohibition. The pleasure principle triumphed in the Jazz Age with its celebratory, ecstatic nature, where immediate gratification was implicit (Maltby, 1989). Prohibition began in 1920 with the enactment of the 18^th Amendment, and America officially went dry. However, the intended results of this conservative effort, to control these unruly influences, seems to have backfired. During this time, organized crime increased and bootlegging and bathtub gin abounded. Because alcohol was prohibited, people actually began to drink more. In 1924, J. Edgar Hoover was appointed as the director of the Bureau of Investigations, which later became the FBI.

Conservative Constrictions And Underworld Activities

The 1920s began with a “ red scare” and the arrest of suspected communists, a bombing on Wall Street, and the formation of the Negro National Baseball League, this restrictiveness of prejudice and fundamentalism were very prominent, and the term "fundamentalism" was even coined during this time. Pentecostalism, faith healing, and evangelicalism were increasingly popular, with sermons of Fundamentalist Preacher Aimee Semple McPherson, a Hollywood evangelist, being broadcast in 1924. McPherson was supposedly kidnapped and then later escaped in 1926, but the circumstances surrounding the case were questionable.

The KKK resurged in the 20s. After being disbanded in 1870, it was revived in 1915 and had two million members at the height of its powers in 1924. In 1925, the KKK staged a mass rally in Washington DC where 40,000 marchers took to the streets, but by 1926, the numbers were declining due to a high ranking member’s arrest and conviction for rape and murder.

In 1924, the National Origins Act restricted immigration to 165,000 a year, while prohibiting all Asian immigration. This anti-immigrant hysteria influenced the judicial process and Italian Immigrants Sacco and Vanzetti, victims of discrimination, were executed in 1927 after being convicted in 1921 under questionable circumstances.

The Fascists seized power in Italy and Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 led to his imprisonment. There was a famine in Russia in 1921, Lenin died in 1924, and Stalin took power in 1928. The U.S. Stock Market crashed at decade’s end in October 1929, signaling the beginning of the Great Depression.

There were two “trials of the century” to choose from during the 1920s, the famed Leopold-Loeb trial in 1924, for the murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks in Chicago, and the Scopes “monkey” trial the following year in Tennessee. Clarence Darrow represented the defendants in both trials. In the Leopold-Loeb trial, Darrow was trying to spare the lives of the two young men, because he opposed the death penalty. Darrow charted new legal ground with defense of Leopold and Loeb, using psychoanalytic doctrine to show the effects of “campus mind.” In the Scopes trial, a high school teacher was being sued for teaching evolution in a biology class instead of creation. The Scopes trial was the first trial ever to be broadcast nationwide, live on the radio. The trial was so sensational that the city of Dayton, Tennessee competed for the chance to host it, in order to attract tourist dollars (Jennings & Brewster, 1998, p. 123). Darrow lost the court case and Scopes was fined. However, Darrow won the war, essentially putting Fundamentalism on trial, because Darrow got his opponent William Jennings Bryant so upset that Bryant seemed absurd. Bryant died shortly after the trial.

Gangsters ruled the 1920s after Prohibition caused revenues to explode, since rum running and racketeering proved very profitable. In 1929, several gang members, as well as an innocent bystander were gunned down in a Chicago garage, in what became known as the St. Valentines Day Massacre.

Women And Youth—Return Of The Repressed

The 1920s was an interesting time for women. Women got the vote in 1920 with the 19^th Amendment, and in 1924 and 1925, Texas and Wyoming elected their first women governors. The Equal Rights Amendment was proposed in 1923, became very controversial, and never made it out of committee.

The elasticized bathing suit was introduced along with acetate fiber in 1920, just in time for the debut of the Miss America pageant in 1921. The American Birth Control League was founded the same year, and Betty Crocker was invented as a fictional model character to sell Gold Medal Flour.

Styles were changing in the 1920s and fashions became associated with speed, daring and travel. Clothes became more movement friendly, and corsets and other binding garments were shunned. The flapper style was a mixture of sexual and innocent, skirts were shorter, while waists were longer—reminiscent of little girl fashions. Mary Jane shoes with heels juxtaposing bold sexuality and juvenile fashions were in vogue, capturing an adolescent, sexy, “baby doll” kind of look. Speaking of sexy, the term “sex appeal” was also a 1920s creation. Thin was in, and dieting and counting calories became popular.

The 1920s was the first decade that had a sharply defined “generation gap,” as well as the emergence of nationwide popular culture. The youth of that time enjoyed unprecedented opportunities, unknown by previous generations. The emerging mass media encouraged youth to fashion their own identities, based on Hollywood starlets and professional athletes, marking the debut of our current culture of celebrity. Anyone who was in the papers was automatically a celebrity and people felt on a first name basis with them. By identifying with the stars who embodied glamour, rebellion, and self-indulgence, the youth distanced themselves from their more conservative elders. As this phenomenon was new, it soon became the focus of national popular culture, and Americans became fascinated with the concept of youth. Actually celebrity became an obsession, as the creativity and energy of the youth culture fueled fashions. Youthfulness was seen as valuable and a fashionable commodity. Flappers epitomized fast changing fashions and cultural trends, and the reckless, flamboyant spirit of the Jazz Age. Indeed “flapper” was a term that originally meant a very immoral young girl in her early teens. The tremendous death and destruction of World War I, along with the modernization and industrialization that was occurring are believed to have played major roles in changes in social, racial, and gender roles.

Trash Tabloids to Literary Heights—Arts and Entertainment Abound

The 1920s was a time of tabloids. The New York Daily News set up shop in 1919; by 1924, two other tabloids, The Daily Mirror and The Daily Graphic (nicknamed the “Porno-Graphic”) were also fiercely competing for market share. Although the tabloids sometimes had questionable content, they forced a corrupt judge to resign in St. Louis and exposed a KKK leader as a murderer. Flashing forward to the 1990s one recalls that the National Enquirer broke many stories in the O. J. Simpson case. “Racily written, lavishly illustrated, sensationally headlined, the tabloids served up a daily dish of sex and violence that pulled in readers by the hundreds of thousands” (Bowen, 1969c, p. 184). The tabloids pioneered gossip columnists and their aggressive coverage was unprecedented. The tabloids also thrived on controversy and were themselves the center of a raging debate almost from the day they appeared as they “introduced a style of journalism that concerns itself primarily with the drama of life” (p. 201).

Time Magazine, Readers Digest, and The New Yorker also began publication in the early to mid-1920s. On the literary front, in 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald published Tales of The Jazz Age and The Beautiful and the Damned, giving voice to the times and naming the age. In 1925, The Great Gatsby arrived on the scene, championing hedonism and all night partying. James Joyce wrote Ulysses, Herman Hesse wrote Siddhartha, and T.S. Eliot wrote The Wasteland, while Emily Post published her bestselling book on etiquette all in 1922.

Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and Bruce Barton’s national bestseller The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery Of The Real Jesus appeared the same year, in 1925. This pseudo-biography of Jesus, which was a best seller for two years, portrayed Jesus as a master salesman who picked effective colleagues (the 12 disciples), and used simple but powerful language (parables)! It paired modern advertising with Christianity. 1926 yielded Winnie the Pooh and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.

The Art World— From Gay Paris to Broadway and the Blues

Andre Breton published the First Surrealist Manifesto in 1924. Surrealism undermined concepts of everyday reality, and was especially dominant on the art scene, also inspiring the Dada movement, as well as influencing literature and film. Surrealists created unexpected juxtapositions, which mirrored the irrational dreamlike workings of the unconscious (Drowne & Huber, 2004, p. 270). The Dada movement used new ways to express ideas and shock audiences. Although the Museum of Modern Art did not open its doors in New York until 1929, the “Surrealist Exposition” in Paris in 1925 showcased the work of Max Ernst, Picasso, Miro, and Man Ray, while Josephine Baker appeared in La Revue Negre.

Back home in America, jazz and blues were on everybody’s lips. African-American culture greatly influenced the arts, from jazz to blues, and dance. In 1922, Louis Armstrong, nicknamed Father Dip, joined Joe “King” Oliver’s band in Chicago, and made his first recording the following year, as Bessie Smith was recording her first blues records. The all-black musical Running Wild introduced the Charleston to the country in song and dance, which started another dance craze the same year. Duke Ellington made his first recording in 1926.

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Science—From Chromosomes and Cloning to the Cosmos

In 2001, the stem cell research controversy began and The Human Genome project was completed. The “Y” chromosome was redeemed, after the first comprehensive analysis of it was completed in 2003. Previously the much maligned “rotting Y” was looked down upon, having once been the size of the “X” chromosome which has 1000 genes, the “Y” chromosome now only provides 78 genes and the “X” chromosome comes in pairs, while the “Y” does not. Recent research, however, has found that the “Y” impressively recombines with itself, “pulling itself up by its own bootstraps” repairing its most crucial genes, and hence the "Y" chromosome's image has been rehabilitated.

The world’s largest living organism, and possibly the oldest, was found in eastern Oregon in 2000—a honey mushroom that measured 3.5 miles across, about the size of 1,665 football fields and is between 2,400 and 7,200 years old.

From something old to something new, cloning caused controversy during this time as well. Dolly the sheep, the first cloned animal died at the age of 6 in 2003. The first pet was cloned, a kitten called “copy cat,” and the first clone of an endangered animal, a mouflon, survived in 2002. Scientists also implanted spinach genes into pigs, hoping for healthier pork.

The fog at the beginning of the universe and evidence of the cosmic dark ages and cosmic renaissance came into view in 2001. Two major cosmological discoveries occurred two years later in 2003: WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) showed us the oldest light in the universe—the cosmic background radiation; while gamma rays, the most powerful explosions in the universe were identified and were caught on film. These very unpredictable and thus elusive occurrences were found to be supernovae, associated with the violent deaths of massive stars.

Stephen Hawking reversed his theory about black holes in 2004, resolving the prior paradox which had black holes at odds with the laws of the universe. Black holes as theorized in 1997, were believed to be cosmic vacuum cleaners which sucked everything in, and from which nothing escaped, the contents of black holes were thought to be lost forever. Hawking now believes that black holes do eventually open up and reveal information about what went into them.

In 2003, Earth witnessed the first pictures of itself from Mars, the telescopic tables turned back on the Earth from another planet instead of pointing out to other planets. Sedna was discovered on the Ides of March 2004, three-quarters the size of Pluto and twice as far from the sun as any known object previously, with an orbit of 10,500 years. For some, this discovery along with others called into question Pluto’s planetary standing. Lila or Xena, a.k.a. 2003 UB313, another possible planet, was captured on film in October 2003 but its official discovery was not announced until July 2005.