"Dancin' in the Jazz Age," 1902s by John Held, Jr.
History 2710 MacKay
The Jazz Age/Consumer Capitalism
"Dancin' in the Jazz Age," 1902s by John Held, Jr.
The Roaring Twenties
The popular image of the 1920s as a decade of prosperity and riotous living, of bootleggers and gangsters, flappers and hot jazz, flagpole sitters and marathon dancers, is indelibly etched in the American psyche. But this image is also profoundly misleading. The 1920s was a decade of deep cultural conflict. Unlike the pre-Civil War decades, when the fundamental conflicts in American society involved geographic region, or the gilded Age, when conflicts centered on ethnicity and social class, the conflicts of the 1920s were primarily cultural, pitting a more cosmopolitan, modernist urban culture against a more provincial, traditionalist, rural culture.
The decade witnessed a titanic struggle between an old and a new America. Immigration, race, alcohol, evolution, gender politics, sexual morality--all became major cultural battlefields during the '20s. Wets battled drys, religious modernists battled religious fundamentalists, urban ethnics battled the Ku Klux Klan.
The 1920s was a decade of profound social changes. The most obvious signs of change were the rise of a consumer-oriented economy and of mass entertainment, which helped to bring about a "revolution in morals and manners." Sexual mores, gender roles, hair styles, and dress all changed profoundly during the 1920s. Many Americans regarded these changes as a liberation from the country's Victorian past. But for others, morals seemed to be decaying and the United States seemed to be changing in undesirable ways. The result was a thinly veiled "cultural civil war."
Consumer Capitalism
The decade following World War I was a time of unprecedented prosperity — the nation's total wealth nearly doubled between 1920 and 1929, manufactures rose by 60 percent, for the first time most people lived in urban areas — and in homes lit by electricity. They made more money than they ever had before and, spurred on by the giant new advertising industry, spent it faster, too — on washing machines and refrigerators and vacuum cleaners, 12 million radios, 30 million automobiles, and untold millions of tickets to the movies, that ushered them into a new fast-living world of luxury and glamour their grandparents never could have imagined. (From: Ken Burn's Jazz in Time.)
The fundamental unit of meaning in capitalist economic thought is the object , that is, capitalism relies on the creation of a consumer culture, a large segment of the population that is not producing most of what it is consuming. Since capitalism, like mercantilism, is fundamentally based on distributing goods—moving goods from one place to another—consumers have no social relation to the people who produce the goods they consume.
In subsistence economies, such as colonial American societies, people have real social relations to the producers of the goods they consume. But when people no longer have social relations with others who make the objects they consume, that means that the only relation they have is with the object itself. So part of capitalism as a way of thinking is that people become "consumers," that is, they define themselves by the objects they purchase rather than the objects they produce.
Readings:
Recommended Reading:
Discussion Topics: The decade of the 1920s is often characterized as a period of American prosperity and optimism. It was the "Roaring Twenties," the decade of bath tub gin, the model T, the $5 work day, the first transatlantic flight, and the movie. It is often seen as a period of great advance as the nation became urban and commercial (Calvin Coolidge declared that America's business was business) chastened by the first world war, historians often point out that Americans retreated into a provincialism evidenced by the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the anti radical hysteria of the Palmer raids, restrictive immigration laws, and prohibition. Overall, the decade is often seen as a period of great contradiction: of rising optimism and deadening cynicism, of increasing and decreasing faith, of great hope and great despair. Put differently, historians usually see the 1920s as a decade of serious cultural conflict.
Project #6: Chose one:
