3-century

 3-century

part-3

'

Part three of a 15-part series of documentaries produced by the American Broadcasting Company on the 20th century and the rise of the United States as a superpower.

The 1920s ushered in an era of great social change, general prosperity, Prohibition and what historians refer to as "modernity." This episode examines these great cultural changes and their affects on the nation. The 1920s, in stark contrast to the Victorian era, "roared," as bathtub gin flowed and more and more Americans moved to urban areas. But the decade also saw limited prosperity for many, especially farmers, and the unrest and discord between the values of small town America and the rapid pace of science and technology. The optimism of the decade would end in the most severe economic depression in American history. Episode 3 presents some of the major events that shaped the decade including The Scopes Monkey Trial, Prohibition, the rise of leisure pastimes, and the impact of inventions such as the automobile, radio, movies and electricity.

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reated Mr gorbachov tear down this wall

[Music]

Prohibition

New York City's great white Way

Broadway throughout the 1920s The Nightlife here glittered bands played

and liquor flowed and everyone who was drinking it was breaking the

law in the first month of the new decade the 18th Amendment became the law of the

land the sale and consumption of alcohol was now [Music]

illegal there was Prohibition but odly enough nobody uh paid any attention to

it you went to people's homes they sered Dreadful things called

orange blossoms which was gin and orange juice

revolt and bad J that liquor was now sold behind closed

doors in places called speak easys Proprietors took the risks and reaped the profits

it was good money in B I was 15 years old I was riding around with an ash converter but we had four speak easys

one by The Daily News one by the Daily Mirror you had a people you let him in okay a guy had to explain who he was and

he show you ID or something and you let him in you got to know was like family after

a while every corner had a saloon on it

course you know they were never raid by their cops were big part of that business too

people wanted to drink it was a great game it became a dangerous game for the

high stakes players battles between rival gangs for control of illegal liquor territories riddled American

cities with mushrooming murder rates prohibition aim was to sweep liquor off

the city streets now they were flooded with gangsters and guns I used to carry

two persuaders myself you had to have them or else

[Music] prohibition and the general disregard

which followed it was the perfect symbol for the 20s a decade which was about crossing the line smashing tradition

breaking boundaries as modern America came of age

in the 1920s boundaries of All Sorts technological geographical and social

were shattered

the roar in the Roaring 20s was the birth scream of the modern America was now about to leave behind the formative

experience of its rural past and embrace the promise of an urban future but

progress would have its price a sudden wrenching departure from the certainties

of the traditional and the familiar spread by an emerging mass media movies and the radio things that seem old and

familiar now were just beginning to take shape in the

New York

[Music] 1920s at the dawn of the

1920s America was clearly entering a new era an era defined by a vast and

complicated Urban culture that would dominate the rest of the 20th century

after World War I there was an eagerness to embrace the new and it was in America's cities most dramatically in

its biggest New York where the Modern Age was [Music]

born the very architecture of the city spoke of America's new ascendancy and her

[Music]

aspirations the skyscraper was an example of the new form achieving a kind

of uh thrilling scale and nobility more people worked there uh

than lived in the average small town in

[Music] America a movement to the cities that had started during World War I

accelerated in 1920 for the first time more Americans lived in urban centers

than in country towns and [Music] Villages their pace is being set in the

cities the city is irresistibly attractive is really at a kind of high

tide in this decade it's a forest a

magnet the very names of New York streets would become synonymous with progress and

Innovation Broadway would represent the best and latest in in American

entertainment Madison Avenue would come to stand for the bustling new business of advertising which was uniting the

nation in a set of shared fantasies and [Music]

Millionaires

desires and Wall Street came to represent the decades expanding economic opportunities

[Applause] [Music]

[Applause] [Music]

Wall Street was where the action was people came from everywhere to get in on

it the reason I come to New York was there was nobody there after they closed the mines in 1926 in Pennsylvania there

was no money coming there this feri got me the first job and he said Come on

Down the Wall Street the streets are paved with gold

it seemed that way too on Park and fifth Avenues where the tycoons lived the

number of millionaires in the 1920s jumped 400% over the previous decade the

20s feeling of Limitless Horizons was fueled by their lavish

lifestyle our family had a house at 934 5th Avenue when I was growing up

we had a u place in Tuxedo Park and a house in New York and then we used to come to Southampton in the

summer everybody seemed to be having a good time in those days you had lots of help

you had a cook you had a kitchen made and you had a laundress and then you had a paa made a

chambermaid and mother's maid how many does that make six but I think there were eight

actually terribly nice people almost everybody had a

boat I recall in the 20s you would uh see a harbor filled with Yachts I mean

really filled uh almost gunnel to gunnel and we didn't refer to Yachts as such

unless they were 100 ft or over

there was a great deal of entertaining and it was all done in people's houses

seated inner parties for 50 60 people always after dinner there would

be entertainment by by

guests George gerswin was there with his orchestrator bill Daly uh they got up

and played on two pianos mother always had two grand pianos in the big uh room

Harlem Renaissance

downstairs gerswin who wrote Rap City and blue and other anthems of the Decades was profoundly influenced by the

new music he had heard and loved called Jazz the capital of jazz in the 1920s

was just a subway ride uptown in Harlem it was in Harlem clubs that one

could see the artists at the Forefront of this fresh and uniquely American Music perform such as Lou

Armstrong Bessie Smith and a Dapper young man named

Edward Kennedy Ellington his friends simply called him

Duke who was the essence of what black

music was all about everybody else was heading in that direction but Duke was there

[Music] the first time that I was seized by the

music was the first time I heard Duke G broadcast from The Cotton Club where

Broadway Hollywood and Paris rub

elbows people came from all over the United States to experience what was

going on in Harlem in the 20s

when I was young then often we went up to hem at night to dance and

everything we all saved up for months to get the money to go out to

a to a nightclub of course the music was

[Music] wonderful Harlem was contributing more

than music to America's new Urban culture the world above New York's 125th

Street was in the 1920s a hot bed of political social and cultural activity

it was later called the Harlem Renaissance the Harlem Renaissance was one of those fancy terms that white

folks invent when they want to take a particular look at some aspect of uh black

folks I don't think black folks run around saying but we going to have us a Renaissance or something like that but

it was a holiday of the spirit in Harlem was born this idea of

the new negro someone who stood up for the Negro who advertised his and her

contributions to American culture who was proud to be black hem was the end of the line the

promised land the place where all our fantasies uh came

[Music] true if I had to choose between heaven and

Harlem Harlem of course would win every

New York City

time while Harlem seemed a promis land for black Americans New York's Lower East Side was for European immigrants

their gateway to the American [Music]

dream we were blessed because we were in America my father came from the Ukraine

he went to work in New York City and worked in a factory with they blocked

hats men's hats and he was making you know like9 or

$10 a week working a six day week and he would tell me how he was able to buy a

lunch every day for 12 cents and the lunch consisted of um a herring a big

schal Herring out of the barrel and my mouth w is now to think of it and a big

roll with poppy seeds and an onion and life was

beautiful this was perhaps the most mixed City racially ethnically um in the

country but cities all around the country had become more important because change was centered in the

cities business industry [Music]

culture nothing was like being in New York just the magic of

everything the world full of things to be

explored that time is one of my feeling of Adventure and your life is having a

shape to it sort of a threat like a narrative of a story a feeling that anything May

unfold the decades startling changes would soon spread from America cities to

envelop the entire

nation far from the speak easys in the dance halls and the nightclubs there was another America in the

1920s here people still lived as their parents and grandparents had

and they liked it that

way in the early 1920s this was a qu Easy

Life neighbors would come over what we call the front porch

visit and that's where there would be discussion maybe a little

gossip throughout the 1920s new techn Technologies would transform daily life

at the beginning of the decade most Americans lived without electricity when night fell only candles and lamps held

off the

darkness America was electrified in the 20s electric lights extended the day

opened up new possibilities for work and

play that that surge of new power came first to the

cities and by the decades end the majority of American homes had

electricity you can't understand this Century without understanding the effect

the impact of Science and

Technology my father's generation is the one that really saw amazing

changes he was born in 1900 in a world where the horse was still the main means

of getting [Music]

about the car seemed to me uh more revolutionary in a way than anything

that's happened since totally changed the kind of space

we live in really the car would give Americans a

sense of autonomy and Freedom the freedom to escape their city or town to

go away on a vacation or simply on a day's outing by mid decade the government was

spending more than $1 billion on the construction of Highways Bridges and tunnels the beginnings of a national

infrastructure which knit the country [Music]

together my father took my mother and me in the car for the first ride through the

harand tunnel this was opening night all the

causable line up to go through the tunnel I was

petrified I cringed suppose the water leaks in how did they build the tunnel

under the water where's the water and I imagined as we were running for the tunnel that I heard the waves

overhead

out on the socalled highways of those days outside of New York we saw the

Billboards roadways were soon dotted with a new phenomenon roadside

advertising they were big and colorful and Beautiful

Life advertising helped transform not just the physical landscape but the cultural one along with advertising came

the expansion of a brand new consumer concept credit the old inhibition against debt

came tumbling down as everything from Cars to clothes could be bought on time

buy now pay later became the order of the day by 1927 75% of all household

goods were bought on credit and in the last years of the decade the item desired most was the

radio just a moment but first we'd like to ask you to let us know if this broadcast is from its scratchy

Beginnings in 1920 as a mere hobby radio would become a nationwide phenomenon as

important as the car young radio Enthusiast Albert sindlinger was there

at the birth of modern radio in 1920 the night station KDKA broadcasting from a factory Rooftop

in Pittsburgh transmitted the results of the presidential election running well one of the

gentleman was reading the election returns he got sick so for about 45 35

or 45 minutes I read election returns uh nobody had any comprehension of the

significance of what was going on but don't forget there were only a couple hundred

Radio

listeners within 6 months every store in America even grocery stories where s and

radio says suddenly all Americans were

listening to the same things laughing at the same jokes it was a kind of communal exercise here and a

very much a strengthening of your notion of what it was to be an American along with and sometimes propelled by the

great technological leap in the 1920s social patterns in place for decades also began to shift nowhere was

this more obvious than with the changes for American women an expanding job market had given more and more women

careers and the disposable income to do with what they wished throughout the

1920s women would assert a newfound freedom and Independence and nothing

symbolized it more than the 19th amendment in 1920 after 81 years of agitation women

won the right to vote

Women

a woman's lot had changed in almost every way she thought that she had the

right to live for herself rather than for her family for others as women were

always supposed to she went to bars she went to After Hours club she went to

wild parties she had much shorter hair she wore much more makeup

you go from having young women whose dresses reach to their ankles to flesh flesh

everywhere and a lot of 20's culture is about the fun of Smashing

prohibitions the more daring women of the day were known as Flappers and Vamps sure I remember Flappers they were

all over the place I mean they were older than me but uh you know you look

at when you look at the flappers with the eyes of the of a young guy wow

who I think a flapper was the type of of young woman who just wanted to see how

far she could go and then would stop because she'd be afraid to go too far and aamp didn't care how far she went

the shattering ways of 1920s City Life were spread by the media to Rural

America places where the changes were not always so easy to get used

to smoking or drinking uh being loose with

talk using profanity this sifted down from the cities from New York and

Chicago go and this finally had a unwanted place

in our little Community here was a girl who come home from she'd been working in Chicago she

comes home with short dresses on but they were not wearing short dresses they were going to church with hats on and

with white gloves on they were decidedly concerned about what future generation

is going to

pray this country was founded on a respect for God and a sense of righteousness and keeping with the

Sabbath day and and people brought their children up under discipline and under

the reading of the scripture and all of those things were part of the things that bound us together in

America the people were solid with church going in

very little crime in [Music]

home as the cities grew in size and influence many people in small town

America found them threatening a breeding ground for new and often alien

ideas in one small American town the force of traditional religion and modern

science would Clash in a battle heard around the world here in Dayton

Tennessee in the summer of 1925 one of the Century's most famous

courtroom battles would take place John T Scopes stood accused of

teaching Darwin's theory of evolution that man and eight shared a common

ancestor that was against the law in Tennessee the Pop's trial attracted the

best legal brains of the time William Jennings bran three times

presidential candidate and a Christian fundamentalist himself came to

prosecute Clarence daro the celebrated Chicago trial lawyer came to defend

Scopes outside as the trial progressed in the scorching summer heat Dayton had

itself Carnival people would bring in trained

chimpanzees dressed in suits and ties and they'd lead them up and down

the streets read your Bible was everywhere in town posted up on the street across

the street banners and you walk maybe 100 yards this way and you'd have a Street

Preacher I didn't know what he was preaching about and you'd ever saw the same people

twice you go to the same place next next day there'd be some other people some other part of the United States there

but it was it was a lot of hoopla I enjoyed it sculps Tri became

emblematic everybody had to make up their minds people who never been to Tennessee couldn't even find

Tennessee had to think about this question do I believe in modern science

at times it seemed that the whole world had converged on Dayton the HS were filled and the walls

were lined with newspaper people from England from Spain from

France we had so many newspaper people there that that you couldn't stir them

with a [Music] stick when all the hoopla ended John T

Scopes was found guilty and find 100 $ a ruling later overturned on a

technicality what Scopes represented and what the world came to witness was a colossal Clash of ideals the cool reason

of science seemed to threaten the deep and abiding roots of religion it was one

thing to replace the family mule with a Model T but quite another to trade Matthew Mark and John for Einstein Freud

and Darwin for many people these were confusing times and what may have been

the most unsettling about the pace of change in the 1920s was that people really wanted both the benefits of the

future and the familiar Comforts of the

Ku Klux Klan

past they want the fruits of modernity they want automobiles

electricity radios and at the same time they want it to remain 1850 and they know they cannot

have both and this creates a psychological attention within American

society that is then looking for somewhere to go and it goes into hatred

towards immigrants hatred towards people who who are simply different it goes into

intolerance and into the Klux [Music] Clan Klux Clan membership soared to 4

million in the 1920s almost everybody that was a good

citizen in the South was a member of the clan I think they were encouraging

morality by turning the light on on immorality and deceit and

unfairness it created a great deal of I'd say consternation and debate and so

on they were not just uh opposed to the blacks but they were opposed to the

Catholics and the Jews or anybody else came

somewhere going to people's houses and calling them out and insulting him

equipping him and things of that [Music] kind this was not just peculiar to the

south at Alabama it was

Nationwide the clan was actively recruiting in many northern states my father was asked if he would

like to join Jo the kluck's clan he grabbed the guy by the collar

and threw him down the stairs three nights later almost

directly across the street there was a large cross

burning I still can say it in my mind it was a dreadful horrifying

experience my mother said it's just as though they're guarding the gates of

hell and those white people who who catered to us and were in sympathy with us they caught hell

too James Cameron was living in Indiana when he and two childhood friends were seized by a clan inspired mob enraged by

reports of the rape and murder of a white

couple many of them out in the out in the crowd had had the robes and and hood on

to and then the leader said take all these [ __ ] out and hang them his two friends were lynched James Cameron

barely escaped with his life they put a rope around my neck and they thrw the other end over the tree and I kept

crying and holling I haven't done anything but before they could hang me

up a voice said take this boy back he had nothing to do with any killing or

raping I looked up to heaven and I said Lord have mercy

[Music] throughout the decade an estimated 200

people were lynched by the clan this organization claiming to uphold the

values and virtues of the past became so powerful in the 1920s that it seized

political control in seven states and in 1927 clansmen marched 50,000 strong down

the streets of the nation's capital clearly the forces of 20's

modernity had stirred a bit

Sports

resistance then the Manassa mer lashed out in his old ferocious start several

fast deadly punches in a decade fraught with so many changes people in the 1920s seem hungry

for oldfashioned Heroes and an explosion in spectator sports provided

them Sports Giants became household names their every move followed by radio

and in eager tabloid press one name was known in more households than any other

in our family we were never baseball oriented but I would have had to be deaf

not to have heard about Babe [Music] Ruth George Herman Ruth The Babe

reshaped America's pastime in an era of big events he excelled at the game's

biggest excitement the Home Run he hit 60 of them in a single season in

1927 a record that would stand for four decades fans drove from miles around to

see it we used to get in a truck seven of us

put hay in the truck and just sit on it and in 3 and 1 half hours we were from Scranton to the Yankee

Stadium it was 35 cents to see the Babe Lou gar are the Yankee players

Babe Ruth was a hero Lou gar was always my

hero seems like everybody back then was a

hero we'd WR and get autographs they graciously sent us pictures three set

posters St you got your picture back very very nice time to

live felt good to be an American [Music]

The public's fascination with flying in the 1920s seemed fitting for a time when

even gravity couldn't hold down progress and when every boundary seemed just waiting to be

broken once I got up about 1,000 ft it was like I was

home and that's the only way I can describe it to you I was home I I never wanted to be any place

else in 1927 One Pilot would put Aviation and

himself on every front page in the world on a Misty May morning outside New

York City a plane called The Spirit of St Louis was ready to take off for Paris

no one had ever flown solo across the Atlantic before six others had tried

failed and died ready to take the chance this time was Charles Lindberg the 6'2

son of a former congressman from Minnesota thousands of people came to

watch him take

off once he was out of sight it seemed as if all America held its

breath in Yankee Stadium they they had 3 minutes of silence praying for them

everybody in the country was praying for

them flying the fuel heavy single engine plane was a battle against weather

hunger and fatigue for the entire 33 and 1/2 hour

flight the Western World wondered about the fate of that tiny plane Somewhere over the vast Atlantic

[Music] it was a Saturday

night they they hadn't heard from him for a long time and I was walking up

125th Street and someone shouted they found him he he was flying over Ireland

and within an hour or so he landed in uh in [Music]

Paris 100,000 parisians were there to welcome the shy young pilot lucky Lindy

emerged from from his plane carrying only a razor and a [Applause]

passport his flight had represented the best of an era a Mastery of modern

technology joined with old-fashioned values of Courage individualism and hard

one achievement when lard came back it was

as though he walked on the water the public couldn't get enough of him

he was the star there wasn't a woman in America that wasn't crazy about

[Music] him he was a hero he was a nice guy he

was new he was young he was you know kind of gawky but that was what they

wanted the parade for Lindberg down Broadway was the biggest national celebration since the end of World War I

[Music]

everybody became in bird they became the person that he was and represented it

was great made a big impression on me it was very exciting for all of us

because we realized that a young man could do great things

[Music]

after lindberg's Triumph there remained only one continent for the airplane to

conquer Antarctica the Frozen and forbidding landscape at the bottom of the world was

Little America

the boundary one of the Century's great explorers Admiral Richard bird sat out

to break his goal was to fly over the South Pole his expedition was flooded

with young and eager volunteers all of them wanting to be heroes

the Admiral Bri was going to select I forget how many boy Scots to go to the poll now I was about 12 at the time and

I was nominated as one of the guys to go now this was a big thing was in all the

papers I can M says ma what do you think I'm going to go to the North Pole with

Admiral bird she says you can't go I says why she you'll catch your death of

cold I never went my cousin went instead am isn't

[Music] that there were 120 men connected with a

bird Expedition 20-year-old Harvard student Norman Vaughn dropped out of school

trained for a year and was finally selected to go on the adventure of a

lifetime we stepped on land that had never been seen or touched

before and that just excited me beyond words absolutely a new

frontier the expedition's home base was called Little America its 2-year mission

was to conduct geological research and prepare for Birds record-breaking attempt we were responsible for getting

out onto the interior of Antarctica as far as we could to be there for Admiral

Bird's uh rescue Expedition should he have had a force

[Music]

[Music]

Landing just after midnight on November the 29th 1929 Admiral Bird's aircraft flew 500 ft

above the GE graphic South Pole he dropped a stone wrapped in an

American flag Americans and their airplane had

reached the ends of the

Earth by the end of the 1920s anything seemed possible

Blue Skies

the most extraordinary thing about the decade of the 20s was a pandemic air of

uh optimism a feeling that uh the future of the country was

unlimited uh one of the great jazz songs of the day was blue skies uh only but

blue skies do I [Music]

see the president promised blue skies in the country's future at his inauguration

in 1929 Herbert Hoover repeated the common wisdom of the day that Americans

were on their way to riches if proof was needed all one had

to do was look at the bubbling pool of wealth the stock market the butcher the baker the

Candlestick makeer everybody oddly enough was in the stock market one of our chauff Furs was in the

market if he can be in the market anybody can be in the market there were no regulations as we

have now people got away with murder all the time the government didn't bother them

so they were all making money they were doing very well a boom in buying had driven up

stock prices suddenly in October of 1929 investors started cashing in their

overpriced stock a panic of selling

started on October 29 of 1929 it was obvious from the opening

bell that uh things were wildly uh a Miss at uh

9:30 there was a a rumble in the on the floor

one of the page boys said hey Mike look at the the sell orders coming out of those

phones the wheels really started to come off the stock market went into a free

fall crowds gathered in the street outside of the

exchange no at 3:00 it the bell rang and that was it

[Music] more than $30 billion dollar in paper

value simply vanished that day as the stock market crashed the famous word the

crash overnight it was like bombs

[Music] fell the 20s bubble had burst and with

it the decades [Music]

optimism people are every penny that they had nobody had any

pensions uh there were no there was no Medicare Medicaid Social

Security uh if people lost their money that was it they were down and

out people jumped off the George Washington Bridge which had only just

then not long ago been built people we knew my father was wiped

out he never psychologically he never

recovered in 29 I lost a million dollars what do you do it's the same

story wash your face and hands and comb your hair and start all over

again but as people would find out in the decade to come A decade is different from the 20s as night is from day

starting over was not going to be so

easy America along with much of the world faced the Great Depression that's

on the next episode of the century America's time I'm Peter Jennings thank you for joining us

[Music]

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