5-4.1

It is essential for students to know:

• The economic boom period of the 1920s had a significant effect on the daily lives of many but not all Americans.
• Although the 1920s are often called the “Roaring Twenties,” it was not a good time for all Americans. The standard of living rose as new technology such as automobiles, airplanes, radios, and movies that were mass produced on assembly lines became available.
• New appliances and an increased reliance on electricity to run them also changed the daily lives of many Americans, particularly women.
• Students should be able to describe how these new advances changed the everyday lives of Americans.
• However, they should also understand that some groups such as sharecroppers, farmers and underpaid factory workers were not able to enjoy the rising standard of living. They could not afford to buy the automobiles and appliances that they helped to manufacture. Indeed only wealthy Americans were able to take advantage of air travel.
• American culture came to be more standardized as people embraced the mass culture offered by the movies and radio.
• The Great Migration of African Americans from southern rural to northern urban areas was the result of push and pull factors. Jim Crow laws and lynchings as well as the economic hardship of sharecropping, the effects of the boll weevil and lack of alternative economic opportunities prompted many to leave the South.
• Job opportunities in the factories, especially during World War I, brought African Americans to the cities of the North and Midwest.
• The Harlem Renaissance was one result of this migration. As African Americans migrated they took their culture with them. Gathered together in cities, African Americans had an opportunity to allow their culture to flourish. Writers, artists and musicians celebrated the African contributions to American life in their art.
• Jazz music, which grew out of the African American musical tradition, and had become the rage in France during World War I, now became popular among whites in the United States as well as African Americans.
• Racial and ethnic conflict also affected the lives of Americans during the 1920s. Although segregation was not enforced by law in the northern cities, it was widely practiced. African Americans were often the last hired and the first fired.
• Some riots in the cities targeted African Americans, especially immediately after World War I when racial violence reached a peak during the Red Scare of 1919. White Americans in both the North and the South were determined to dilute African American aspirations for participation on a more equitable basis even though many African American soldiers had fought in the “war to make the world safe for democracy.”
• Anti-immigrant feelings which had started in the early part of the 1900s got worse. More Catholics and Jewish immigrants came from the southern and eastern parts of Europe and became additional targets of a new Ku Klux Klan. Laws establishing immigration quotas were designed to limit the number of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe.
• Prohibition outlawed the production and distribution of alcohol and was intended to control the immigrant population, people the native-born Americans thought drank too much. However the law was widely ignored and speakeasies and bootleg liquor gave rise to crime. The amendment was repealed in the early 1930s.

It Is Not Essential For Students to Know:

• This indicator does not require that students be able to identify specific automobiles, airplanes (Model T or The Spirit of St. Louis), or other specific brands of the new technologies.
• Students are not required to identify specific artists prominent during the Harlem Renaissance.
• It is not critical for students to describe, in detail, the various racial and ethnic issues facing Americans during the 1920s.