Brief Timeline of Literature and Events: The 1920s (Dr. Donna Campbell, Washington State University) "F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Age of Excess," essay by Joshua Zeitz (Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History) Kansas City: Paris of the Plains: The Jazz Age in Kansas City, 1920-1940, online exhibition (University of Missouri, Kansas City) Low wages, high rates of seasonal unemployment, chronic stagnation in the agricultural sector, and a hopelessly unequal distribution of wealth were the darker story that lurked behind 1920s-era prosperity. ‘It was an age of miracles,’ F Scott Fitzgerald once wrote of the Jazz Age. Share prices began to fall and $30 billion was lost in just two days. It wasn't only the jazz. The same farmers and workers who fueled economic growth early in the decade by purchasing shiny new cars and electric washing machines had reached their limit. If you are trying to determine the age of a piece of American antique furniture, it will require investigative work.Look closely at the the different elements that make the piece of furniture. was another clergyman's reaction to the Charleston when it came in - a dance which more than any other is associated with the Twenties. . Depression, 1920-1932 Chapter 20 Unit 5: 1920-1945 Roaring 20s • Age of excess as the economy boomed • Jazz Age was a protest against traditional valuesand culture • Women’s liberation brought about a “modern” women known as the flapper Towards the end of the decade, fashionable women wore an Eton crop - so short that when they donned trousers it was hard to tell the men from the girls, especially when they wore jumpers. For as the book’s narrator, Nick Caraway, discovers, Gatsby’s money and fame were built on a lie. In Gatsby, his alter ego, Nick Caraway, recalls wistfully the America of his youth. Just as Nick Caraway could not discern the lie behind Gatsby’s wealth and upbringing, many wealthier Americans now had trouble discerning between social classes. I am part of that . But perhaps no era welcomed as much radical, yet creative, change as the 1920s. The feverish hedonism of the Jazz Age, which ran through the Twenties, was a reaction to the horrors of the previous decade, when World War I and the flu epidemic killed more than 20 million people in Europe alone. Americans were also able to buy vast quantities of mass-produced glassware, jewelry, clothing, household items, and durable goods, which blurred the distinctions between rich and poor. That was Black Tuesday, when the stock market collapsed. The Paris “L’Exposition International des Arts Décorative et Industriels Modernes” became the mantra for designs of everything in this period. Land which three or four years earlier had been sold at £380 an acre was now going at £1,500 an acre. For the similar cultural period in France, see Années folles. Per-capita GDP rose from $6,460 to $8,016 per person, but this prosperity was not distributed evenly. 3) Provide a biography of the three Republican presidents of the 1920's. Prohibition (1920-1933, the nationwide ban on the sale, production, importation, and transportation of alcoholic beverages) lasted just four years longer than Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age, ending with the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment on December 5, 1933. 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In the early days of bottle parties, the host was expected to provide a good dancefloor, impeccable waiters and luxurious surroundings. The Roaring Twenties (sometimes stylized as the Roarin' 20s) refers to the decade of the 1920s … DANCE CHARLESTON, 1920s poster by Granger. Cocaine, usually in tonic wine, was regularly taken as a pick-me-up. or debate this issue live on our message boards. The genius of his signature character, Jay Gatsby, was his ability to create a veil of celebrity that masked his true origins. . . They and their friends played jazz and drank gallons of White Lady, (recipe: a quarter lemon juice, a quarter Cointreau and half dry gin - shake well and strain into a cocktail glass). Examine the level of work that went into the furniture from the joinery, finishing, knobs, and more. This meant that the average family could replace hours of manual toil and primitive housekeeping with the satisfying hum of the electric vacuum cleaner, the electric refrigerator and freezer, and the automatic washing machine, all of which came into wide use during the twenties. In towns and cities throughout America, a revitalized Ku Klux Klan railed against African Americans, immigrants, Catholics, and “loose women.” Supporters of prohibition drove through a restrictive law that banned the sale or production of liquor (judging by Fitzgerald’s novel, that ban was of limited effect). There's nothing surer, The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.'. The decade marked the flourishing of the modern mass-production, mass-consumption economy, which delivered fantastic profits to investors while also raising the living standard of the urban middle- and working-class. Snuff, now regarded as harmful, was very popular. Many peers - those who owned property, such as the Dukes of Westminster and Norfolk - remained inordinately wealthy. At the age of 24, the success of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, made Fitzgerald famous.One week later, he married the woman he loved and … https://daily.jstor.org/what-the-great-gatsby-reveals-about-the-jazz-age In the music halls and the nightclubs they were singing the credo of the decade: 'Not much money, oh but honey Ain't we got fun? This, after all, was the era of the modern girl, who during the war had done 'a man's job' and earned her own money. They were impetuous, they were known to drink too much, and they were prone to bouts of serious depression and self-destructive behavior, but no one could ever accuse them of frugality. Two-thirds of the national wealth belonged to 2.5 per cent of gainfully employed adults. It was also the decade that led up to the devastating economic collapse of the Thirties. “It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire.” ... During the 1920s, the Fitzgeralds lived the high life in New York City. 'Stake your claim at Edgware!' Like the cinema, dancing was classless and a good way to meet people. Joshua Zeitz has taught American history at Harvard University and Cambridge University. The decade gave rise to sports legends like Babe Ruth, who was just as renowned for his voracious appetite as for his homerun record, and Jack Dempsey, the heavyweight champion who by the mid-1920s appeared in almost as many films as he did title fights. The 1980s: an Age of Excess KENT STATE UNIVERSITY MUSEUM | 2017-02-03 05:00:00 to 2018-01-07 05:00:00 | Broadbent Gallery | Jean Druesedow, Director "The 1980s: an Age of Excess" will highlight the sparkle and glamour of the 20th century's ninth decade. By 1920, a majority of Americans lived in cities. Few decades have been filled with so much yet ended so quickly as the 1920s. In the mid-Twenties, there were reckoned to be more than 300 millionaires in Britain, at a time when a thousandth of that would have lasted a labourer a lifetime. It was considered vulgar until Edward, the Prince of Wales, danced it (and very skilfully, too). skyrocketed during the 1920s. He is currently writing a joint biography of John Hay and John Nicolay. This they did through private bottle parties, organised by a 'host' on private premises. A Stuffed Shirt, squirming to black-mail in a lifelike … Businesses boomed, the stock market soared, heroes abounded and Americans reveled as part of the "happy-go-lucky generation." The newspapers brought sex into their pages when they could. Wealth seemed to breed innovation. . Americans in the 1920s were also obsessed with a new cult of celebrity. Streamlining was the buzzword: not just cars but planes, airships, irons, floor-polishers and prams. Our posters are produced on acid-free papers using archival inks to guarantee that they last a lifetime without fading or loss of color. The roaring 20s made the split between being considered high society and having to … The “Modern” and Conservation Reactions – 1920s; New Deal Era; World War II; The Beginnings of the Cold War; The Atomic Age; New Frontiers – the Early 1960s; 1968; Age of Excess – the 1980s; Why Study History? By the late twenties, when advertisers told them that their cars and washing machines were outdated and needed to be replaced, the working class simply couldn’t afford to buy new ones. American Consumerism 1920s Fact 28: The Total Consumer Goods purchased on Credit in 1929 was $7 Billion. In 1923 the young couple (he was twenty-seven, she was twenty-three) set sail for France. - New Yorker cartoons on "the Age," 1925-1929 (13) Felix the Cat Animated Cartoons , 1922-1927 (8) - Felix Busts a Bubble , 1926 [flapper's dream of stardom] For the first time, the middle classes could also afford sea travel. In 1921, the Irish Free State was declared after a five-year fight for independence from Britain, … On week-ends his Rolls Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city . The Great Gatsby continues to fascinate and grip Americans today. However determined the police were to crack down on out-of-hours drinking, young men who worked all day and wanted the company of women at night were determined to get round the law. It was an era of excess, when money seemed limitless and they believed the boom would never end. “There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights,” he confides. They took people to the cinema and to the seaside, where the beautiful people discarded their skin-tight corsets, if they were wearing one, and acquired a tan. All the while, the number of telephone lines almost doubled, from to 10.5 million in 1915 to 20 million by 1930. From a relative standpoint, America was rich, and it showed. The 1920s, roughly the period between the end of World War Iand the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929, is often stereotyped as the Roaring Twenties. In 1924 she was sentenced to six months imprisonment for breaching the licensing laws, winning indignant sympathy from her clients, who included the king of Romania, the crown prince of Sweden, and the actress Tallulah Bankhead. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach . Politics in the 1920s: The Republican Era • Warren G. Harding (1921-1923) • Most remembered for the scandals • Numerous affairs • Too many close friends holding high positions = abuse of power • Teapot Dome Scandal (oil reserves on public Thus, the same decade that gave rise to Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald also witnessed a powerful backlash. The Novelty and Excess of American Design During the Jazz Age … as victim's mom questions why offender has NOT been expelled? London's immense prosperity, as the decade drew to a close, was shown in the fact that fashionable restaurants could afford to spend £12,000 a year on dance bands. Drunkenness was not just the preserve of the working classes, although they were the target of temperance reformers. in his 1925 revue On With The Dance. The Age of Excess. For much of the decade, when they were not wearing trousers, well-dressed women wore short, tubular dresses with very low waists. “It was an age of art, it was an age of excess.” In his fiction, the author beguilingly captured the sybaritic Roaring 20s – hedonistic, glamorous, decadent, opulent. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”. Hauling along seventeen pieces of luggage and a complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica, they rented an enormous stone villa that rested 2.5 kilometers above St. Raphäel, “a red little town built close to the sea,” Scott explained to a friend, “with gay red-roofed houses and an air of repressed carnival about it.” Their villa was studded with balconies of blue and white Moorish tiles and surrounded by a fragrant orchard of lemon, olive, and palm trees that gave way to a long gravel road—the only passageway out of their Mediterranean castle. Scores of new factory products flooded the burgeoning consumer market, bearing soon-familiar brand names like Scotch tape, Welch’s grape juice, Listerine mouthwash, Wheaties cereal, Kleenex tissue paper, the Schick electric razor, and the lemonade Popsicle. When it came to sheer luxury, the great airships competed with the ocean liners, until 1937 when the fiery end of the Hindenburg would spell their doom. F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Age of Excess.pdf. Flappers and philosophers. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, . He is the author of Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity and the Women Who Made American Modern (2006) and White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics, and the Shaping of Post-War Politics (2007). In an era much like the 1920s—one in which we have come to enjoy new levels of comfort and convenience, in which we celebrate celebrity and opulence, but in which there remain glaring inequalities of wealth and privilege—Gatsby is more relevant than ever. Conservative Christians formed Fundamentalist churches and sought to restore God to his traditional place in homes and schools. Caraway described the opulence of Gatsby’s beachside mansion on Long Island and the extravagance of the parties he threw. To be sure, most Americans didn’t have gold faucets, and very few enjoyed anything approximating Jay Gatsby’s wealth, but ordinary Americans still shared in the general prosperity. All posters include a 1" white border around the image to allow for future framing and matting, if desired. The United States had entered World War I a debtor nation and emerged as Europe’s largest creditor, to the tune of $12.5 billion. Caraway described the opulence of Gatsby’s beachside mansion on Long Island and the extravagance of the parties he threw. Cabaret star Leslie Hutchinson and his band played aboard a floating nightclub organised by composer Cole Porter and moored on Venice's Grand Canal. Aside from the economic recession of 1920-21, when by some estimates unemployment rose to 11.7%, for the most part, unemployment in the 1920s never rose above the natural rate of around 4%. Jazz is the only truly American art form and provided the perfect soundtrack for the 1920s. The Tango, though, was here to stay, greatly assisted by the Western world's heart-throb of the time, silent movie-star Rudolph Valentino. For the similar cultural period in Germany, see Golden Twenties. The aristocracy, for all their display, were not the only engine of great wealth in Britain. We are no longer accepting comments on this article. It was an era of excess, when money seemed limitless and they believed the boom would never end. Before 1920 almost three-quarters of these articles featured political and business leaders; now, over half concerned key figures in entertainment and sports. Consider the context in which Fitzgerald was writing: America in the 1920s was undergoing dynamic changes. For ten years the moneyed classes in Britain and America partied without heed for the reckoning. It was curled with heated tongs, although the rich could afford one of the 'Marcel' permanent waves, done at Harrods for the huge cost of five guineas (£220 today). 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