The Jazz Age and the KKK

Klan Resurgence > Timeline of Klan History

• founded during Reconstruction, collapsed in 1870s

• revived in 1915 (in part because of the movie Birth of a Nation)

• resurgence of popularity in the 1920s, but collapsed again by the 1930s

• again reappears in the 1950s

Klan Resurgence > Poster for the Film The Birth of a Nation by W.G. Griffith (1915)

Klan Resurgence > NAACP Protest the Screening of The Birth of a Nation, 1947

Klan Resurgence > Key Scenes in The Birth of a Nation

• intertitles drawn from A History of the American People (1902) by then-president Woodrow Wilson

• black legislators lolling in their chairs in the South Carolina legislature in the early 1870s

• white children don white sheets and scare black children nearby, “inspiring” Klan outfits

• Klansmen dump the body of the character Gus, an African American, who they had killed for causing a young white woman, Flora, to jump off a cliff

Klan in the 1920s > Washington, D.C. Parade

Klan in the 1920s > Social Movements Supported by the Klan

• prohibition

• anti-immigrant sentiments

• anti-radicalism

• religious fundamentalism

• morality and family values

Klan in the 1920s > Different Historical Explanations of the Klan

• racist and nativist movement

• populist movement

• reform movement

• reactionary movement

Immigration Restriction > Ku Klux Klan Marching in DC

Immigration Restriction > Cartoon on the Literacy Test

Immigration Restriction > Cartoon on the Quota Act of 1921

Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act)

• Based ceilings on the number of immigrants from any particular nation on 2 percent of each nationality recorded in the 1890 census

• Was directed against immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe who arrived in large numbers after 1890

• Barred all immigrants ineligible for citizenship on racial grounds, including all south and east Asians (including Indians, Japanese, and Chinese)

Immigration Act of 1924 > Annual Immigration Quotas

• Germany - 51,227

• Great Britain - 34,007

• Ireland - 28,567

• Italy - 3,845

• Hungary - 473

• Greece - 100

• Egypt - 100

Immigration Act of 1924 > Map of Europe, Literary Digest, 1924

Immigration Restriction > U.S. v Bhagat Singh Thind, 1923

Prosperity > Who Prospered in the 1920s?

• 1200 mergers caused the disappearance of over 600 independent enterprises

• top 0.1% of U.S. families in 1929 had combined income as large as bottom 42%

• i. e. approx 24,000 families had combined income as large as 11.5 million poor and lower-class families

• per capita income in the U.S. rose 9% between 1920-1929

• per capita income for the top 24,000 families rose 75%

• 80% of families had no savings

• farmers did not prosper - 1/4 of all employment

• less than 10% invested in the stock market

Prosperity > Bruce Barton, author of The Man Nobody Knows, here with Hollywood producer Cecil B. DeMille, 1920s

Prosperity > Welfare Capitalism: Shoe Company’s Billboard Ad, 1923

Prosperity > Comic Strip on Workers Owning Shares, 1929

Automobile > Automobile Sales and Registration

Automobile > Ford Model T, 1920s

Automobile > Ford Model T French Ad, 1924

Automobile > General Motors Ad, 1925

Automobile > Cadillac Ad, 1925

Automobile > Ford Assembly Line, Model A, 1928

Automobile > Ford Model A Ad, 1929

Automobile > Song about Ford Model A, 1928

Automobile > Chevrolet Ad, 1931

Automobile > Paige-Jewett Car Ad, 1929

Great Migration > Social Patterns

• from rural areas to cities

• from the South to the North

• Appalachian whites

• Puerto Ricans

• African Americans

Great Migration > Motives

• immigration slows down because of WW I

• more work because of WW I

• more jobs for groups previously left out--women, rural migrants, racial minorities

• racial segregation and violence in the South

• sharecropping

• natural disasters such as floods and boll weevil infestations

• conscious choice on the part of migrants (many did not leave)

Great Migration > Railroad Routes

Great Migration > Painting by Jacob Lawrence, 1940

Great Migration > Painting by Jacob Lawrence, 1940

Harlem Renaissance > Marcus Garvey’s Supporters Parade in Harlem

Harlem Renaissance > NAACP Anti-Lynching Ad in the New York Times

Harlem Renaissance > Zora Neale Hurston Photo by Carl Van Vechten

Harlem Renaissance > The Crisis Ad for Black Swan Records, 1923

Harlem Renaissance > The Crisis Cover, 1929

Leon “Bix” Beiderbecke, “Sorry,” 1928

Louis Armstrong, “Weather Bird,” 1928

New Woman > Magazine illustrations: “Gibson Girls” by Charles Gibson--a beauty standard of the 1900s--and a flapper by John Held, Jr. from the 1920s

New Woman > Suffragists picketing the White House, January 1917

New Woman > Department Stores and Consumer Culture

New Woman > Working-class women at the turn of the century

New Woman > John Held, Jr.: Flappers have no manners or brains

New Woman > John Held, Jr.: “It’s all right, Santa-- you can come in. My parents still believe in you.”

New Woman > John Held, Jr., dustjackets for F. Scott Fitzgerald novels

New Woman > Film Actress Louise Brooks and a comic strip she inspired

New Woman > Actress Clara Bow, the ultimate flapper in It (1927) and Dangerous Curves (1929)

Fundamentalism > Timeline

• Word coined at around 1910

• Denotes religious groups that take the Bible literally

• Popular and active in the 1920s

• Then the movement retreats from politics until 1980s, in part because of the Scopes Trial

Fundamentalism > Church Membership

Fundamentalism > Actor Lionel Barrymore and Modern Christ

Scopes Trial > Cartoon on Evolution

Scopes Trial > W. J. Bryan’s Cartoon against Modernity, 1924

Scopes Trial > Cartoon comparing Bolsheviks and Scientists, 1925

Scopes Trial > Bryan and Darrow

Scopes Trial > Bryan as Don Quixote

Scopes Trial > Darrow as a Street Player

Scopes Trial > Monkeys Vote on Evolution