"The Dark Side of the 1920s The 1920s (pronounced "nineteen-twenties" often shortened to the "' 20s" or the "Twenties") was a decade that began on January 1, 1920, and ended on December 31, 1929. People lost respected for the government and started doing business illegally with no concern for the law. He set about giving the group a more political focus, and gradually the Klan gained more influence as politicians sought its endorsement. However, the rise of radio technology produced fears among governments that it could be used to radicalise public opinion and so political content was sometimes restricted. Despite flimsy evidence and obvious prejudice shown toward the defendants during the trial, Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted and sentenced to death. People were also listening to the same views and ideas making for a more united society. Al Capone was one of the most notorious criminals of, The temperance movement in the United States first became a national crusade in the early nineteenth century. But by the mid-1920s, so many people were doing it, the industry "needed a traffic cop," Ducey says. Defending radio was James Harbord, a retired army general who applied his wartime radio experience to his role as president of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) from 1922 to 1930. Radio quickly became a way for American families to stay connected and receive news. "1920s: TV and Radio Hoover continued to lead the FBI into the 1960s. The fashion of the era is a reflection of people's luxurious lifestyles and liberated minds. A ban on the manufacture and sale of liquor was now written into the U.S. Constitution. Newspapers had the potential to reach a wide audience, but radio had the potential to reach almost everyone. Do you remember, a few years ago, how we all felt a vague sort of. Another event that highlighted the suspicion that native inhabitants felt toward the foreign-born was the trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Presidential advisor, newspaper columnist, presidential candidate, anti-immigrant crusader Programs included broadcast news, entertainment programs, and popular music, such as jazz. Sixteen-tube Super-sophistication The 1920s saw the next great surge in radio wave technology development. Radio Broadcasts In the 1920s, mass media expanded to include the radio. African Americans were highly influential in the music and literature of the 1920s. After his release, his criminal career was over. They asked people to sign a pledge and to write a "T" next to their name to stand for total abstinence; that is the origin of the popular term "teetotalers," still used to describe people who do not drink alcohol. In 1920, Burns provides an astonishing array of statistics that were the result of Prohibition: drunk and disorderly arrests increased 41 percent; drunk driving increased 81 percent; violent. These inventions radically transformed the lives of people around the globe, with many changes originating in the United States. Cultural broadcasts made radio popular before the Nazis appropriated it for their propaganda. Why or why not? Radios could more easily be incorporated into the decor of private homes. Anti-radio, the first excerpt was penned by Jack Woodford (a pseudonym of Josiah Pitts Woolfolk), a writer of pulp fiction and caustic commentary on the times. 1. His writing, laced with exaggerations and couched in sarcastic wit, amuses the reader while hammering home a point. For the first time, millions of people around the world were connected through radio signals. Further steps were taken by individual states, where, for example, foreign-born people were sometimes banned from owning land. . Other famous trials of the decade shed further light on the darker side of human nature, as well as the public's fascination with crime. Whether those transformations were a boon or bane to society provoked as compelling a debate then as do the changes wrought by social media and the Internet today. The identities of the killers were never discovered, however, and it was never proved that Capone was involved. Higdon, Hal. Suffering from the effects of syphilis (a serious sexually transmitted disease that may result, as in Capone's case, in brain damage), he lived in Florida until his death in 1947. The atmosphere of lawlessness, violence, and suspicion that Prohibition created made people more and more uncomfortable. All rights reserved. the impassioned gesture is wasted Though it may mark me as un-American and even impious, he later stated, I must say I do not share the general enthusiastic opinion of radio.2 In his Forum essay, Woodford lambasts radio as an innovation gone awry. The positive influences of movies outweighed the negative impacts in society. There is little doubt that the widespread use of the automobile, especially after 1920, changed the rural and urban landscapes in America.It is overly simplistic to assume, however, that the automobile was the single driving force in the transformation of the countryside or . Thus rises the wonder of the century Radio! Altman, Linda Jacobs. 2019Encyclopedia.com | All rights reserved. Although the decade was known as the era of the Charleston dance craze, jazz, and flapper fashions, in many respects it was also quite conservative. 1. Resistance to these efforts by white southerners, who mourned the loss of a system and way of life they had cherished, took many forms. More and more voices were raised in their defense, and demonstrations of support were held at locations around the world. Jazz became popular in America. 4 Radio was also used for politics. By contrast, most of the immigrants who arrived in the first few decades of the twentieth century came from such southern and eastern European countries as Italy, Greece, Armenia, Slovakia, Russia, and Poland; in addition, some arrived from Puerto Rico, the West Indies, and Mexico. In addition, the United States had always prided itself on being a refuge for people fleeing from hardship or mistreatment in their own countries, or seeking expanded opportunities for themselves and their children. But the Greeks did not foresee radio, with its revolutionary effects upon the mechanism of democratic government. The Influence of 1920s Fashion. 15. Bettmann Archive / Getty Images. All the automobiles were black color. Those who opposed the Klan were, of course, alarmed at the progress the group was making in the political realm. Encyclopedia.com. Hoover was born in 1895 in Washington, D.C. Radio had a lasting and drastic. It suggests that radio is a transitory phenomenon. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and President John F. Kennedy were among those Hoover investigated. Helped fuel the creation of a national system of highways. It was home to the most famous gangster of them all, Al Capone (18991947), the man whose name would become permanently linked with Prohibition and the darker side of the 1920s. 1908. Miller, Nathan. Repeal of the Fairness Doctrine While talk radio first began during the 1920s, the emergence of the format as a contemporary cultural and political force . 19. They did not imagine that the day would come when spellbinders like Demosthenes would give way to a Herbert Hoover talking confidentially to a whole continent. The most popular setting for illegal drinking in the 1920s was the speakeasy, an unofficial drinking establishment that could be either glamorous or seedy, depending on its location and customers. -Photograph entitled The shut-ins Sunday service, Clark Music Co., March 28, 1923 (detail). Tier 3 words are explained in brackets. The old Klan had targeted the newly freed African Americans of the South, as well as a few people who supported them. ." The evening before, many bars and saloons had held mock funeral services, with patrons throwing their glasses into wooden coffins and bands playing mournful music. Available online at http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/scopes.htm. Technology in the 1920s influenced the American lifestyle by allowing more time for women in particular to engage in social concerns. How does their commentary resemble todays discussions about social media and the Internet? The guests sit around the radio and sip watered gin and listen to so-called music interspersed with long lists of the bargains to be had at Whosits Department Store by those who get down early in the morning. Brookfield, CT: Millbrook Press, 1995. Nevertheless, the two men were executed on August 23, 1927. Cite evidence from his essay to support your answer. These young men had shocked their families and the rest of the nation by confessing to the killing of Bobby Franks, a fourteen-year-old acquaintance. In his lengthy closing statement (see Closing Argument in the Leopold and Loeb Trial Primary Sources entry), he appealed to the judge to look toward the future, when the death penalty would certainly be viewed as a brutal relic of the past. "The Dark Side of the 1920s Radio shifted from being a novelty to becoming a mass medium between 1920 and 1940. This royalty-free sound effect also provides a variety of glitch-y sounds that add interest to a show. In 1921 an article in New York World magazine about the violent acts committed by Klan members spurred an investigation by the U.S. House of Representatives. Radio became a new form of communication and entertainment. Omitting the phrase robs the sentence of vividness and force. 4. Linder, Douglas. The case is still cited as an example of a miscarriage of justice resulting from public paranoia. Mitigating the negative effects of UDI and UHI should focus on restoring the evapotranspiration power of urban ecosystems. Darrow quickly determined that the boys, though very intelligent, had never developed a sense of right and wrong. Radio makes political speeches dull and impersonal. That meant, for example, that in Texas they attacked people of Mexican heritage, while in California they focused on Japanese people and in New York on Jews. There was also a concern about the power that the liquor interests, such as large beer breweries and distilling companies, many of which owned saloons, wielded as they pursued high profits. Harbord does not address the cultural and entertainment aspects of radio broadcasting. In the years following the American Revolution (177583), alcohol consumption in the United States had greatly increased. In 1925, for instance, Grand Dragon David Stephenson (18911966) was found guilty of second-degree murder. He would dismiss them. Omitting the word would suggest nothing about its future. In his opening paragraph what point is Harbord making about radio and American democracy? Woodford attacks radio as a mere novelty, a toy for advertisers that will soon be discarded. Rather than exposing the Klan for the terrorist organization it was, the investigation served as free publicity for the group, which actually gained more members as a result. After WWI people wanted to enjoy life. Barry, James P. The Noble Experiment: 191933. The Automobile's Imprint on the Landscape. Some people were convinced that these cases provided evidence of social disorder caused by modern developments and influences. Even more restrictive was the National Origins Act of 1924, which set the yearly limit at 150,000 and made the quota 2 percent of those present at the time of the 1890 Census (this part was aimed directly at immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, not many of whom had lived in the United States at that time). Herbert Hoover is a better speaker than Demosthenes. If they are feeling particularly loquacious, they nod to each other. Radio appeals to mass audiences more than old-fashioned political rallies. Negative effects of the automobile have been air pollution, auto accidents, excessive traffic, and the ability for criminals to get away from a crime much more quickly. Grote Reber (born 1911) was a radio engineer who became interested in radio astronomy as a hobby. Consequently, radio has played many roles in society to meet the changing needs of the public. Although it is difficult to gauge exact numbers, most historians agree that at the height of its popularity the Klan had as many as five million members, who included not only the group's traditional base of southerners but also midwestern farmers and factory workers in places like Detroit, Michigan, and Cleveland, Ohio. . Snyder's married lover, Henry Judd Gray, was also found guilty, and both went to the electric chair. . The marvel of science By the end of the year, however, the Red Scare was over, as the majority of U.S. citizens realized that the threat posed by suspected radicals was overblown. Therefore, that information is unavailable for most Encyclopedia.com content. It seems that many followers were attracted as much by these frills as by the chance to impose white supremacy (the view that people of northern and western European descent are superior to all others) on society. The judge ruled in favor of a life sentence in prison rather than execution. This trend caused alarm among "old stock" citizens of the United States, those whose ancestors had come long ago from northern and western Europe. Instead of trying to win their acquittal (a judgment of innocence) on the basis of insanity (in other words, they were not guilty because they had not been aware of what they were doing), Darrow directed his clients to enter a guilty plea. As people came to have more. However, both the Democratic presidential candidate, John Davis (18731955), and the nominee of the Progressive Party, Robert LaFollette (18551925), did speak out against the Klan. Accessed on June 17, 2005. By the 1920s, a few decades after Marconi's first broadcast, half of urban families owned a radio. Another disintegrating toy https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/dark-side-1920s, "The Dark Side of the 1920s 18. Roaring Twenties Reference Library. Some people liked the changes while others did not accept these changes. Thus dies the art of conversation. Early Visual Representations of the New World, Failed European Colonies in the New World, Successful European Colonies in the New World, Benjamin Franklins Satire of Witch Hunting, Lexington & Concord: Tipping Point of the Revolution, America, the Creeks, and Other Southeastern Tribes, America and the Six Nations: Native Americans After the Revolution, The Expansion of Democracy During the Jacksonian Era, Individualism in Ralph Waldo Emersons Self-Reliance, Aylmers Motivation in Nathaniel Hawthornes The Birthmark, Thoreaus Critique of Democracy in Civil Disobedience, What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?, The Chinese Question from a Chinese Standpoint, 1873, To Build a Fire: An Environmentalist Interpretation, The Radio as New Technology: Blessing or Curse? Side of the 1920s, mass media expanded to include the radio radically transformed lives. 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