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TEDed - Booze, Blood, and Bootleggers: Prohibition 

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TEDed - Booze, Blood, and Bootleggers: Prohibition 

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Prohibition: Banning alcohol was a bad idea... - Rod Phillips

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From PBS's The American Experience, this article covers the origin and development of organized crime in the 1920s.

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Prohibition Profits Transformed the Mob

Before Prohibition started in 1920, members of criminal gangs in large American cities existed on the periphery of society. Since the 19th century, there was, as sociologists call it, a social hierarchy with big-city "bosses" of political machines financing their control of votes in neighborhoods with payments from criminals running gambling and prostitution rackets and bribing police to look the other way. Under them were many local gangs of various ethnic groups, such as Irish, Italian, Jewish and Polish, focused on street-level crimes such as extortion, loansharking, drugs, burglary, robbery and contract violence.

In cities such as New York and Kansas City before 1920, the Sicilian Mafia, whose members were among the four million people who immigrated from southern Italy to America starting in about 1875, made money through the "Black Hand" racket - sending cryptic letters demanding payments from ethnic Italians with threats of violence or death. New York's Tammany Hall political machine sanctioned gambling and brothel rackets by crime groups such the Five Points gang before Prohibition. But activities by the Mafia and criminal gangs generally were not coordinated under an organization, and in fact terms such as "organized crime" and "syndicate" would not enter popular use until after Prohibition began.

Prohibition practically created organized crime in America. It provided members of small-time street gangs with the greatest opportunity ever - feeding the need of Americans coast to coast to drink beer, wine and hard liquor on the sly. Organized racketeers dominated the illegal "bootlegging" industry as well as the urban machine "bosses" and the vice kings. They understood banking and other legitimate business and bribed policemen, judges, juries, witnesses, politicians and even federal Prohibition agents as the cost of doing business.

By the early 1920s, profits from the illegal production and trafficking of liquor were so enormous that gangsters learned to be more "organized" than ever, employing lawyers, accountants, brew masters, boat captains, truckers and warehousemen, plus armed thugs known as "torpedoes" to intimidate, injure, bomb or kill competitors. They bought breweries closed because of Prohibition and hired experienced brewers. They ran boats out into oceans and lakes to buy liquor from Great Britain and Canada, leading to the term "rum running." They paid individual citizens to operate stills at home to make gallons of bad-tasting booze. They sold illegal beer, watered-down whiskey and sometimes-poisonous "rotgut" booze in thousands of Mob-owned illegal bars known as "speakeasies." Often, to screen customers at these illegal bars, a bouncer would look through a peephole in the front door before refusing them or letting them in.

The new alcohol trafficking gangs during Prohibition also crossed ethnic lines, with Italians, Irish, Jews and Poles working with each other, although inter-gang rivalries, shootings, bombings and killings would shape the 1920s and early '30s. More than 1,000 people were killed in New York alone in Mob clashes during Prohibition. The period sparked a revolution in organized crime, generating frameworks and stacks of cash for major crime families that, though far less powerful, still exist to this day.

Bootleggers operated across the United States, from Boston to St. Louis to Miami, Seattle and San Francisco. In Detroit, the Purple Gang smuggled liquor on the Detroit River. In Cleveland, Moe Dalitz's Mayfield Road Gang's speed boats shipped liquor across Lake Erie from Canada. But the largest syndicates born out of Prohibition were based in New York and Chicago, both port cities with considerable populations of downtrodden immigrants from Italy, Ireland, Poland and other parts of Europe. Many of these mobsters were part of a generation born in the 1890s and early 1900s that came of age with Prohibition. The infamous Italian-American "Five Families" of New York (Gambino, Genovese, Lucchese, Bonnano and Colombo) would emerge from the wealth produced by Prohibition.

The main instigator of modern American organized crime was Charles "Lucky" Luciano, an Italian immigrant (from Sicily) who at the outset of Prohibition, at age 23, began working for illegal gambling boss Arnold Rothstein, an important early investor in bootlegging. Other mobsters who rose as Rothstein's protégés included Dutch Schultz, Owney Madden and Waxey Gordon. Schultz's gang featured triggerman Jack "Legs" Diamond and brothers Vincent and Peter Coll.

By the mid-1920s, Luciano was a multimillionaire and New York's top bootlegger, making and importing alcohol with other Prohibition-rich associates including Meyer Lansky, Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, Louis "Lepke" Buckhalter and Abe "Longy" Zwillman. Luciano also partnered with Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, who like him served their Sicilian boss, Giuseppe "Joe the Boss" Masseria. In 1930, Masseria's operation ran up against that of another boss, Salvatore Maranzano, for control of organized crime in New York's Italian community. The bosses engaged in a conflict known as the Castellammarese War. Luciano, who liked Maranzano's flexibility and willingness to welcome in Lansky and Siegel, who were Jewish, left the old-school Masseria for Maranzano's camp.

The year 1931, two years before the repeal of Prohibition, would be a formative one for Luciano in New York and the future of American organized crime. Luciano arranged for the death of his longtime boss Masseria, in April, 1931, fearing that Masseria was out to get him. Maranzano, who succeeded Masseria as "the boss of bosses," allowed Luciano to run one of New York's five families. But five months later, after finding out that Maranzano was plotting to kill him, Luciano had his new boss killed, giving Luciano the role of undisputed leader of the New York Mafia. But Luciano rejected the traditional position of "boss of bosses." He instituted a new organization for crime family chiefs across the nation, known as the Commission, which operated something like a corporate board of directors and met to talk over and settle disputes peacefully and agree on courses of action. The Commission would last into at least the late 1950s.

In Chicago, Johnny Torrio and Al Capone created their criminal group, the Outfit, just after Prohibition started. Torrio, who toiled under brothel racketeer Big Jim Colosimo before 1920, had Colosimo killed after the boss refused his pleas to get into bootlegging. The Outfit under Torrio, with Capone as his right-hand man, ran bootlegging, brothels and illegal gambling in the Windy City's downtown and South Side. Torrio made deals with other Chicago gangs to share the spoils of bootlegging to avoid bloodshed. But gang shootouts flared during the Chicago "Beer Wars" from 1922 to 1926, when mobsters killed 315 of their own and police officers killed another 160 gangsters. The Outfit was a mostly Italian-American group that would fight violently in the 1920s with gangsters of Irish and Polish extraction, including Dion O'Banion, Hymie Weiss and George "Bugs" Moran, who controlled the illegal liquor trade on the city's North Side.

The Outfit gunned down O'Banion in 1924. Torrio, nearly killed in a retaliatory shooting planned by Weiss in 1925, retired and turned over the business to Capone. Weiss was murdered in public by Capone's men in 1926. Huge sums were at stake. Capone made as much as $100 million a year (equal to $1.3 billion in 2016 dollars). At one point in the 1920s he paid out $500,000 per month (worth about $6 million today) to police to let him operate his illegal booze trade.

In 1929, seven of Moran's associates were shot dead in a garage in Chicago during the storied St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Moran, Capone's target, luckily avoided the area moments before the shooting. Capone was immediately suspected of orchestrating the massacre, but never charged. The murders stunned the country, greatly eroded national support for Prohibition and influenced President Herbert Hoover to order federal authorities to "get" Capone. By 1930, Capone still ran about 6,000 speakeasies and made more than $6 million a week. His powerful cohorts, who met with Chicago and Illinois pols to negotiate deals, included Paul "the Waiter" Ricca and Murray "the Camel" Humphreys. But Capone finally met his downfall in 1931, when he was convicted of federal income tax evasion and sentenced to 11 years in prison.

Some individual entrepreneurs turned criminal and made a fortune by exploiting loopholes in the Volstead Act. One such bootlegger was George Remus, a well-known lawyer in Chicago who at first defended bootleggers in court and figured almost right away that he would be better off being one. Remus took advantage of the Act's exemption for the manufacture and sale of alcoholic drinks for "medicinal" reasons. A person was allowed a quart of wine or a pint of whiskey every 10 days if prescribed by a doctor for treatment of an illness. The Volstead law also exempted alcohol used by clergy for sacraments - in order not to violate constitutionally protected religious rights - and undrinkable industrial alcohol. Remus had bought up 14 distilleries in Cincinnati by 1924 and earned a fortune estimated at $50 million from selling liquor supposedly for medicinal use to illegal liquor dealers and speakeasies. But an undercover agent exposed him and Remus received a three-year stretch in prison. Famously, while out of prison in 1927, Remus killed his wife but was acquitted at trial.

After Prohibition's repeal on December 5, 1933, organized crime, with its top unlawful moneymaking racket gone, was forced to regroup and focus on other things. While some gangsters entered the legal and licensed liquor business, the laws made it harder to earn as much cash and as fast. But all was not lost. There were still the lucrative vice rackets of prostitution and gambling, as well as drug trafficking and labor racketeering. Organized crime had to be more organized, but many former rumrunners still had plenty of money saved from the Prohibition days. Luciano, for one, continued to enjoy the high life as New York's crime kingpin, living at the luxurious Waldorf Astoria hotel, until his prostitution rackets led to convictions and prison in the mid-1930s. For others, such as Lansky, Siegel, Costello and Dalitz, Las Vegas and its legal casinos awaited, starting in the 1940s.

While organized crime groups made infamous during Prohibition remain today, they earn only a fraction compared with the proceeds of bootlegging.
Next Story: Rumrunners Delivered the Good Stuff to America's Speakeasies

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Prohibition Profits Transformed the Mob - Prohibition: An Interactive History

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Before Prohibition started in 1920, members of criminal gangs in large American cities existed on the periphery of society. Since the 19th century, there was, as sociologists call it, a social hierarchy with big-city "bosses" of political machines financing their control of votes in neighborhoods with payments from criminals running gambling and prostitution rackets and bribing police to look the other way.

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The 1919 World Series Fix that Tarnished America's Passtime

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The 1919 World Series Fix that Tarnished America's Passtime

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The 1919 World Series Fix that Tarnished America's Pastime

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How does money laundering work? - Delena D. Spann

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The Roaring Twenties Explained in 11 Minutes

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The Roaring Twenties Explained in 11 Minutes

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The Roaring Twenties Explained in 11 minutes

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Mass Production and Advertising in the 1920s

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Mass Production and Advertising in the 1920s

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History Brief: Mass Production and Advertising in the 1920s

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The Roaring Twenties - an overview from History.com

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The Roaring Twenties - an overview from History.com

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Flappers: The 'New Woman'

Perhaps the most familiar symbol of the "Roaring Twenties" is probably the flapper: a young woman with bobbed hair and short skirts who drank, smoked and said "unladylike" things, in addition to being more sexually "free" than previous generations. In reality, most young women in the 1920s did none of these things (though many did adopt a fashionable flapper wardrobe), but even those women who were not flappers gained some unprecedented freedoms.

They could vote at last: The 19th Amendment to the Constitution had guaranteed that right in 1920, though it would be decades before Black women in the South could fully exercise their right to vote without Jim Crow segregation laws.

Millions of women worked in blue-collar jobs, as well as white-collar jobs (as stenographers, for example) and could afford to participate in the burgeoning consumer economy. The increased availability of birth-control devices such as the diaphragm made it possible for women to have fewer children.

In 1912, an estimated 16 percent of American households had electricity; by the mid-1920s, more than 60 percent did. And with this electrification came new machines and technologies like the washing machine, the freezer and the vacuum cleaner eliminated some of the drudgeries of household work.

Did you know? Because the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act did not make it illegal to drink alcohol, only to manufacture and sell it, many people stockpiled liquor before the ban went into effect. Rumor had it that the Yale Club in New York City had a 14-year supply of booze in its basement.

Fashion, Fads and Film Stars

During the 1920s, many Americans had extra money to spend-and spend it they did, on movies, fashion and consumer goods such as ready-to-wear clothing and home appliances like electric refrigerators. In particular, they bought radios.

The first commercial radio station in the United States, Pittsburgh's KDKA, hit the airwaves in 1920. Two years later Warren G. Harding became the first president to address the nation by radio -and three years later there were more than 500 stations in the nation. By the end of the 1920s, there were radios in more than 12 million households.

People also swarmed to see Hollywood movies: Historians estimate that, by the end of the decades, three-quarters of the American population visited a movie theater every week, and actors like Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino and Tallulah Bankhead became household names.

But the most important consumer product of the 1920s was the automobile. Low prices (the Ford Model T cost just $260 in 1924) and generous credit made cars affordable luxuries at the beginning of the decade; by the end, they were practically necessities.

By 1929 there was one car on the road for every five Americans. Meanwhile, an economy of automobiles was born: Businesses like service stations and motels sprang up to meet drivers' needs-as did the burgeoning oil industry.

The Jazz Age

Cars also gave young people the freedom to go where they pleased and do what they wanted. (Some pundits called them "bedrooms on wheels.") What many young people wanted to do was dance: the Charleston, the cake walk, the black bottom and the flea hop were popular dances of the era.

Jazz bands played at venues like the Savoy and the Cotton Club in New York City and the Aragon in Chicago; radio stations and phonograph records (100 million of which were sold in 1927 alone) carried their tunes to listeners across the nation. Some older people objected to jazz music's "vulgarity" and "depravity" (and the "moral disasters" it supposedly inspired), but many in the younger generation loved the freedom they felt on the dance floor.

The novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald chronicled the hedonism and excitement of the Jazz Age-Fitzgerald once claimed that the 1920s were "the most expensive orgy in history"-while other writers, artists, musicians and designers ushered in a new era of experimental Art Deco and modernist creativity.

Prohibition Era

During the 1920s, some freedoms were expanded while others were curtailed. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1919, had banned the manufacture and sale of "intoxicating liquors," and at 12 a.m. on January 16, 1920, the federal Volstead Act closed every tavern, bar and saloon in the United States. From then on, it was illegal to sell any "intoxication beverages" with more than 0.5 percent alcohol.

This drove the liquor trade underground-now, instead of ordinary bars, people simply went to nominally illegal speakeasies, where liquor was controlled by bootleggers, racketeers and other organized crime figures such as Chicago gangster Al Capone. (Capone reportedly had 1,000 gunmen and half of Chicago's police force on his payroll.)

To many middle-class white Americans, Prohibition was a way to assert some control over the unruly immigrant masses who crowded the nation's cities. For instance, to the so-called "Drys," beer was known as "Kaiser brew." Drinking was a symbol of all they disliked about the modern city, and eliminating alcohol would, they believed, turn back the clock to an earlier and more comfortable time

Immigration and Racism in the 1920s

Prohibition was not the only source of social tension during the 1920s. An anti- Communist "Red Scare" in 1919 and 1920 encouraged a widespread nativist and anti-immigrant hysteria. This led to the passage of an extremely restrictive immigration law, the National Origins Act of 1924, which set immigration quotas that excluded some people (Eastern Europeans and Asians) in favor of others (Northern Europeans and people from Great Britain, for example).

Immigrants were hardly the only targets in this decade. The Great Migration of Black Americans from the rural South to Northern cities and the increasing visibility of Black culture-jazz and blues music, for example, and the literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance-discomfited some white Americans. Millions of people, not just in the South but across the country, joined the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

By the middle of the decade, the KKK had two million members, many of whom believed the Klan represented a return to all the "values" that the fast-paced, city-slicker Roaring Twenties were trampling. More specifically, the 1920s represented economic and political uplift for Black Americans that threatened the social hierarchy of Jim Crow oppression.

Early Civil Rights Activism

During this decade, Black Americans sought stable employment, better living conditions and political participation. Many who migrated to the North found jobs in the automobile, steel, shipbuilding and meatpacking industries. But with more work came more exploitation.

In 1925, civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph founded the first predominantly Black labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, to draw attention to the discriminatory hiring practices and working conditions for Blacks. And as housing demands increased for Black people in the North, so did discriminatory housing practices that led to a rise of urban ghettos, where Black Americans-excluded from white neighborhoods-were relegated to inadequate, overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions.

Black Americans battled for political and civil rights throughout the Roaring Twenties and beyond. The NAACP launched investigations into Black disenfranchisement in the 1920 presidential election, as well as surges of white mob violence, such as the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.

The NAACP also pushed for the passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, a law to make lynching a federal crime, but it was defeated by a Senate filibuster in 1922. A political milestone for Black Americans finally occurred when Oscar De Priest, a Chicago Republican, became the first Black congressman since Reconstruction to be elected to the House of Representatives in 1928.

The Roaring Twenties ushered in several demographic shifts, or what one historian called a "cultural Civil War" between city-dwellers and small-town residents, Protestants and Catholics, Blacks and whites, "New Women" and advocates of old-fashioned family values.

But coming immediately after the hardships of World War I and the Spanish flu epidemic, the Roaring Twenties also gave many middle-class Americans an unprecedented taste of freedom, unbridled fun and upward economic mobility unsurpassed in U.S. history.

Sources

What Caused the Roaring Twenties? Not the End of a Pandemic (Probably). Smithsonian Magazine.
The Roaring Twenties. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
The Roaring 20s. PBS: American Experience.

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Roaring Twenties: Flappers, Prohibition & Jazz Age - HISTORY

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The Roaring Twenties were a Jazz Age burst of prosperity and freedom for flappers and others during the Prohibition era, until the economy crashed in 1929.

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Women's Independence

Multiple factors-political, cultural and technological-led to the rise of the flappers.

During World War I, women entered the workforce in large numbers, receiving higher wages that many working women were not inclined to give up during peacetime.

In August 1920, women's independence took another step forward with the passage of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote. And in the early 1920s, Margaret Sanger made strides in providing contraception to women, sparking a wave of women's rights to birth control.

The 1920s also brought about Prohibition, the result of the 18th Amendment ending legal alcohol sales. Combined with an explosion of popularity for jazz music and jazz clubs, the stage was set for speakeasies, which offered illegally produced and distributed alcohol.

Henry Ford 's mass production of cars brought down automobile prices, allowing the younger generation far more mobility than in earlier eras. Many people, a number of them young women, drove these cars into cities, which experienced a population boom.

With all these pieces in place, an unprecedented social explosion for young women was all but inevitable.

What Is a Flapper?

No one knows how the word flapper entered American slang, but its usage first appeared just following World War I.

The classic image of a flapper is that of a stylish young party girl. Flappers smoked in public, drank alcohol, danced at jazz clubs and practiced sexual freedom that shocked the Victorian morality of their parents.

Flapper Dress

Flappers were famous-or infamous, depending on your viewpoint-for their rakish attire.

They donned fashionable flapper dresses of shorter, calf-revealing lengths and lower necklines, though not typically form-fitting: Straight and slim was the preferred silhouette.

Flappers wore high heel shoes and threw away their corsets in favor of bras and lingerie. They gleefully applied rouge, lipstick, mascara and other cosmetics, and favored shorter hairstyles like the bob.

Designers like Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli and Jean Patou ruled flapper fashion. Jean Patou's invention of knit swimwear and women's sportswear like tennis clothes inspired a freer, more relaxed silhouette, while the knitwear of Chanel and Schiaparelli brought no-nonsense lines to women's clothing. Madeleine Vionnet's bias-cut designs (made by cutting fabric against the grain) emphasized the shape of a woman's body in a more natural way.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald found his place in American literary history with "The Great Gatsby" in 1925, but he had already garnered a reputation before that as a spokesperson for the Jazz Age.

The press at the time credited Fitzgerald as the creator of the flapper because of his debut novel, " This Side of Paradise," though the book didn't specifically mention flappers.

The credit stuck and Scott began to write about flapper culture in short stories for the Saturday Evening Post in 1920, opening up the Jazz Age lifestyle to middle-class homes.

A collection of these stories was published that year under the title "Flappers and Philosophers," cementing Fitzgerald as the flapper expert for the next decade.

Zelda Fitzgerald

If Fitzgerald was considered a chronicler of flappers, his wife Zelda Fitzgerald was considered the quintessential example of one.

A native of Montgomery, Alabama, Zelda was a stylish, free-spirited young woman who met Fitzgerald in 1918 while he was stationed there in the military. She was 17 at the time and-as the daughter of a prominent local judge-her hedonistic escapades scandalized her family.

The pair was married in New York City one month after "This Side of Paradise" was released and soon embarked on a lifestyle of reckless partying and publicity-seeking in Europe and across America.

Both publicly claimed that Zelda was Fitzgerald's inspiration for all his female characters, bringing her in as much demand for her insight as he was. She was soon writing articles about the "modern" flapper lifestyle.

Lois Long

Lois Long was another writer chronicling flapper culture in print. Using the pseudonym Lipstick, Long began writing for The New Yorker shortly after its inception.

Her work chronicled the life of a flapper and recounted her real-life adventures of drinking and dancing all night long. She typically wrote her column-first named "When Nights Are Bold" and "Tables For Two," launched in 1925-directly after her nights out, typing into the wee hours.

Flappers in Advertising

Recognizing that women now had disposable incomes of their own, advertising courted their interests beyond household items. Soap, perfume, cosmetics, cigarettes and fashion accessories were all the subjects of ads targeting women.

Helen Lansdowne Resor was the most powerful woman in advertising at the time. The head of women's advertising at the J. Walter Thompson Agency, she worked her way up from secretary thanks to her keen understanding of selling to women. She was the first advertising executive to push sex appeal as a method of marketing to women, often focused on getting male attention.

Flapper style regularly graced the covers of magazines like Vanity Fair and Life, drawn by artists like John Held and Gordon Conway.

Flappers on Film

Anita Loos' book "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" and its follow-up "But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes" were famous satires of the world of flappers. The books focused on flapper Lorelei Lee and her male conquests. The first film version of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" was released in 1928 (another version was released in 1953, starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell).

The popularity of movies exploded during the 1920s, though the screen versions of flappers were typically less permissive than the real-world versions. The first popular flapper movie was "Flaming Youth," released in 1923 and starring Colleen Moore, who was soon Hollywood's "go-to" actress for playing flappers onscreen.

Louise Brooks auditioned for a part in "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" but failed. Nonetheless, the image of Brooks and her precise bob has become the archetypal vision of a flapper. The Hollywood portion of her film career featured several starring flapper roles before she moved on to more serious dramas.

The 'It' Girl

Clara Bow 's nickname was "the It Girl," referring to her 1927 film "It," which was adapted from a magazine article by Elinor Glyn. Bow was the most successful screen flapper, beloved for the unpretentious manner of her portrayals and her frank sex appeal.

Anna May Wong broke barriers as the first Chinese-American movie star. Her image as a flapper off-screen was encouraged by movie studios to increase her appeal beyond the exotic roles in which they cast her.

Dancing was a crucial part of flapper culture. The Charleston and the Black Bottom were popular and considered more suggestive than any moves that had come before. The acclaimed 1923 British play "The Dancers," which starred Tallulah Bankhead, examined the dance obsessions of two flappers.

Criticism of Flappers

Not everyone was a fan of women's newfound sexual freedom and consumer ethos, and there was inevitably a public reaction against flappers.

Utah attempted to pass legislation on the length of women's skirts. Virginia tried to ban any dress that revealed too much of a woman's throat and Ohio tried to ban form-fitting outfits.

Women who populated beaches in bathing suits that were deemed inappropriate were escorted off the beach by police or arrested if they refused.

Popular Washington, D.C., hostess Mrs. John B. Henderson attempted to start a mass movement against what she considered vulgar fashions, appealing to prominent women's clubs and colleges for help.

Clergymen like Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and Baptist pastor Dr. John Roach Straton became known for their tirades against young women's fashions.

Flappers also received criticism from women's rights activists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Lillian Symes, who felt flappers had gone too far in their embrace of licentiousness.

End of the Flappers

The age of the flapper came tumbling down suddenly on October 29, 1929, with the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression. No one could afford the lifestyle any longer, and the new era of frugality made the freewheeling hedonism of the Roaring Twenties seem wildly out of touch with grim new economic realities.

Many film-star flappers had already met their end two years earlier with the advent of talking film, which was not always kind to them. The Hays Code in 1930, which severely limited sexual themes in movies, made independent women in the flapper mold almost impossible to portray onscreen.

Sources

Flapper. Joshua Zeitz.
Flappers: A Guide To An American Subculture. Kelly Boyer Sagert.
Flappers and the New American Woman. Catherine Gourley.
A Perfect Fit: Clothes, Character, and the Promise of America. Jenna Weissman Joselit.

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Multiple factors-political, cultural and technological-led to the rise of the flappers. During World War I, women entered the workforce in large numbers, receiving higher wages that many working women were not inclined to give up during peacetime. In August 1920, women's independence took another step forward with the passage of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote.

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Prohibition Inspired a New Generation of Rebellious Women

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Prohibition Inspired a New Generation of Rebellious Women

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Prohibition Inspired a New Generation of Rebellious Women

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Meet the Real Flappers - AI Enhanced 1920s Fashion

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Meet the Real Flappers - AI Enhanced 1920s Fashion

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Meet the Real Flappers - c.1929 | AI Enhanced 1920s Fashion

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Make doubly sure you notice who the last state in the union to ratify this was.....

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Women's Suffrage

During America's early history, women were denied some of the basic rights enjoyed by male citizens.

For example, married women couldn't own property and had no legal claim to any money they might earn, and no female had the right to vote. Women were expected to focus on housework and motherhood, not politics.

The campaign for women's suffrage was a small but growing movement in the decades before the Civil War. Starting in the 1820s, various reform groups proliferated across the U.S. including temperance leagues, the abolitionist movement and religious groups. Women played a prominent role in a number of them.

Meanwhile, many American women were resisting the notion that the ideal woman was a pious, submissive wife and mother concerned exclusively with home and family. Combined, these factors contributed to a new way of thinking about what it meant to be a woman and a citizen in the United States.

Seneca Falls Convention

It was not until 1848 that the movement for women's rights began to organize at the national level.

In July of that year, reformers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized the first women's rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York (where Stanton lived). More than 300 people-mostly women, but also some men-attended, including former African-American slave and activist Frederick Douglass.

In addition to their belief that women should be afforded better opportunities for education and employment, most of the delegates at the Seneca Falls Convention agreed that American women were autonomous individuals who deserved their own political identities.

Declaration of Sentiments

A group of delegates led by Stanton produced a "Declaration of Sentiments" document, modeled after the Declaration of Independence, which stated: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

What this meant, among other things, was that the delegates believed women should have the right to vote.

Following the convention, the idea of voting rights for women was mocked in the press and some delegates withdrew their support for the Declaration of Sentiments. Nonetheless, Stanton and Mott persisted-they went on to spearhead additional women's rights conferences and they were eventually joined in their advocacy work by Susan B. Anthony and other activists.

National Suffrage Groups Established

With the onset of the Civil War, the suffrage movement lost some momentum, as many women turned their attention to assisting in efforts related to the conflict between the states.

After the war, women's suffrage endured another setback, when the women's rights movement found itself divided over the issue of voting rights for Black men. Stanton and some other suffrage leaders objected to the proposed 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which would give Black men the right to vote, but failed to extend the same privilege to American women of any skin color.

In 1869, Stanton and Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) with their eyes on a federal constitutional amendment that would grant women the right to vote.

That same year, abolitionists Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell founded the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA); the group's leaders supported the 15th Amendment and feared it would not pass if it included voting rights for women. ( The 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870.)

The AWSA believed women's enfranchisement could best be gained through amendments to individual state constitutions. Despite the divisions between the two organizations, there was a victory for voting rights in 1869 when the Wyoming Territory granted all-female residents age 21 and older the right to vote. (When Wyoming was admitted to the Union in 1890, women's suffrage remained part of the state constitution.)

By 1878, the NWSA and the collective suffrage movement had gathered enough influence to lobby the U.S. Congress for a constitutional amendment. Congress responded by forming committees in the House of Representatives and the Senate to study and debate the issue. However, when the proposal finally reached the Senate floor in 1886, it was defeated.

In 1890, the NWSA and the AWSA merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The new organization's strategy was to lobby for women's voting rights on a state-by-state basis. Within six years, Colorado, Utah and Idaho adopted amendments to their state constitutions granting women the right to vote. In 1900, with Stanton and Anthony advancing in age, Carrie Chapman Catt stepped up to lead NAWSA.

Black Women in the Suffrage Movement

During debate over the 15th Amendment, white suffragist leaders like Stanton and Anthony had argued fiercely against Black men getting the vote before white women. Such a stance led to a break with their abolitionist allies, like Douglass, and ignored the distinct viewpoints and goals of Black women, led by prominent activists like Sojourner Truth and Frances E.W. Harper, fighting alongside them for the right to vote.

As the fight for voting rights continued, Black women in the suffrage movement continued to experience discrimination from white suffragists who wanted to distance their fight for voting rights from the question of race.

Pushed out of national suffrage organizations, Black suffragists founded their own groups, including the National Association of Colored Women Clubs (NACWC), founded in 1896 by a group of women including Harper, Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. They fought hard for the passage of the 19th Amendment, seeing the women's right to vote as a crucial tool to winning legal protections for Black women (as well as Black men) against continued repression and violence.

State-level Successes for Voting Rights

The turn of the 20th century brought renewed momentum to the women's suffrage cause. Although the deaths of Stanton in 1902 and Anthony in 1906 appeared to be setbacks, the NASWA under the leadership of Catt achieved rolling successes for women's enfranchisement at state levels.

Between 1910 and 1918, the Alaska Territory, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota and Washington extended voting rights to women.

Also during this time, through the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women (later, the Women's Political Union), Stanton's daughter Harriot Stanton Blatch introduced parades, pickets and marches as means of calling attention to the cause. These tactics succeeded in raising awareness and led to unrest in Washington, D.C.

Did you know? Wyoming, the first state to grant voting rights to women, was also the first state to elect a female governor. Nellie Tayloe Ross (1876-1977) was elected governor of the Equality State-Wyoming's official nickname-in 1924. And from 1933 to 1953, she served as the first woman director of the U.S. Mint.

Protest and Progress

On the eve of the inauguration of President Woodrow Wilson in 1913, protesters thronged a massive suffrage parade in the nation's capital, and hundreds of women were injured. That same year, Alice Paul founded the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, which later became the National Woman's Party.

The organization staged numerous demonstrations and regularly picketed the White House, among other militant tactics. As a result of these actions, some group members were arrested and served jail time.

In 1918, President Wilson switched his stand on women's voting rights from objection to support through the influence of Catt, who had a less-combative style than Paul. Wilson also tied the proposed suffrage amendment to America's involvement in World War I and the increased role women had played in the war efforts.

When the amendment came up for vote, Wilson addressed the Senate in favor of suffrage. As reported in The New York Times on October 1, 1918, Wilson said, "I regard the extension of suffrage to women as vitally essential to the successful prosecution of the great war of humanity in which we are engaged."

However, despite Wilson's newfound support, the amendment proposal failed in the Senate by two votes. Another year passed before Congress took up the measure again.

The Final Struggle For Passage

On May 21, 1919, U.S. Representative James R. Mann, a Republican from Illinois and chairman of the Suffrage Committee, proposed the House resolution to approve the Susan Anthony Amendment granting women the right to vote. The measure passed the House 304 to 89-a full 42 votes above the required two-thirds majority.

Two weeks later, on June 4, 1919, the U.S. Senate passed the 19th Amendment by two votes over its two-thirds required majority, 56-25. The amendment was then sent to the states for ratification.

Within six days of the ratification cycle, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin each ratified the amendment. Kansas, New York and Ohio followed on June 16, 1919. By March of the following year, a total of 35 states had approved the amendment, just shy of the three-fourths required for ratification.

Southern states were adamantly opposed to the amendment, however, and seven of them-Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, South Carolina and Virginia-had already rejected it before Tennessee's vote on August 18, 1920. It was up to Tennessee to tip the scale for woman suffrage.

The outlook appeared bleak, given the outcomes in other Southern states and given the position of Tennessee's state legislators in their 48-48 tie. The state's decision came down to 23-year-old Representative Harry T. Burn, a Republican from McMinn County, to cast the deciding vote.

Although Burn opposed the amendment, his mother convinced him to approve it. Mrs. Burn reportedly wrote to her son: "Don't forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt put the 'rat' in ratification."

With Burn's vote, the 19th Amendment was fully ratified.

When Did Women Get the Right to Vote?

On August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment was certified by U.S. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby, and women finally achieved the long-sought right to vote throughout the United States.

On November 2 of that same year, more than 8 million women across the U.S. voted in elections for the first time.

It took over 60 years for the remaining 12 states to ratify the 19th Amendment. Mississippi was the last to do so, on March 22, 1984.

What Is the 19 Amendment?

The 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote, and reads:

"The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

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19th Amendment - Definition, Passage & Summary

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The passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 guaranteed women the right to vote. Learn how suffragists fought for the cause and hear a summary of amendment in this brief video.

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The 19th Amendment to the US Constitution

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The 19th Amendment to the US Constitution

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Passed by Congress June 4, 1919, and ratified on August 18, 1920, the 19th amendment granted women the right to vote.
The 19th amendment legally guarantees American women the right to vote. Achieving this milestone required a lengthy and difficult struggle-victory took decades of agitation and protest. Beginning in the mid-19th century, several generations of woman suffrage supporters lectured, wrote, marched, lobbied, and practiced civil disobedience to achieve what many Americans considered a radical change of the Constitution. Few early supporters lived to see final victory in 1920.

Beginning in the 1800s, women organized, petitioned, and picketed to win the right to vote, but it took them decades to accomplish their purpose. Between 1878, when the amendment was first introduced in Congress, and August 18, 1920, when it was ratified, champions of voting rights for women worked tirelessly, but strategies for achieving their goal varied. Some pursued a strategy of passing suffrage acts in each state-nine western states adopted woman suffrage legislation by 1912. Others challenged male-only voting laws in the courts. Some suffragists used more confrontational tactics such as picketing, silent vigils, and hunger strikes. Often supporters met fierce resistance. Opponents heckled, jailed, and sometimes physically abused them.

By 1916, almost all of the major suffrage organizations were united behind the goal of a constitutional amendment. When New York adopted woman suffrage in 1917 and President Wilson changed his position to support an amendment in 1918, the political balance began to shift.

On May 21, 1919, the House of Representatives passed the amendment, and 2 weeks later, the Senate followed. When Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the amendment on August 18, 1920, the amendment passed its final hurdle of obtaining the agreement of three-fourths of the states. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certified the ratification on August 26, 1920, changing the face of the American electorate forever.

The campaign for woman suffrage was long, difficult, and sometimes dramatic; yet ratification did not ensure full enfranchisement. Decades of struggle to include African Americans and other minority women in the promise of voting rights remained. Many women remained unable to vote long into the 20th century because of discriminatory state voting laws.

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19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Women's Right to Vote (1920)

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EnlargeDownload Link Citation: Joint Resolution of Congress proposing a constitutional amendment extending the right of suffrage to women, approved June 4, 1919.; Ratified Amendments, 1795-1992; General Records of the United States Government; Record Group 11; National Archives.

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Joy Bennett is the Curator and Archivist of the Hancock Historical Museum, and has worked there for nearly 9 years. She graduated from Bowling Green State University in 2011 with Masters degrees in 20th Century American History and Public History. She loves the history of fashion, classic movies, and reading.

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Good old Khan Academy.....

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For many middle-class Americans, the 1920s was a decade of unprecedented prosperity. Rising earnings generated more disposable income for the consumption of entertainment and leisure.

This new wealth coincided with and fueled technological innovations, resulting in the booming popularity of entertainments like movies, sports, and radio programs.

Leisure and consumption in the 1920s

The increased financial prosperity of the 1920s gave many Americans more disposable income to spend on entertaining themselves.

This influx of cash, coupled with advancements in technology, led to new patterns of leisure (time spent having fun) and consumption (buying products).

In this period, movies and sports became increasingly popular, while commercial radio and magazines turned athletes and actors into national icons.

Cinema in the 1920s

As the popularity of "moving pictures" grew in the early part of the decade, movie "palaces" capable of seating thousands sprang up in major cities. A ticket for a double feature and a live show cost 25 cents. For a quarter, Americans could escape from their problems and lose themselves in another era or world. People of all ages attended the movies with far more regularity than today, often going more than once per week. By the end of the decade, weekly movie attendance swelled to 90 million people.

The silent movies of the early 1920s gave rise to the first generation of movie stars. No star captured the attention of the American viewing public more than Charlie Chaplin. Sad-eyed with a mustache, baggy pants, and a cane, Chaplin was the top box office attraction of his time.

In 1927, the world of the silent movie began to wane with the New York release of the first "talkie"- The Jazz Singer. The plot of this film, which starred Al Jolson, told a distinctively American story of the 1920s. It follows the life of a Jewish man from his boyhood days of being groomed to be the cantor at the local synagogue to his life as a famous and "Americanized" jazz singer. Both the story and the new sound technology used to present it were popular with audiences around the country. It quickly became a huge hit.

Southern California in the 1920s, however, had only recently become the center of the American film industry. Film production was originally based in and around New York, where Thomas Edison first debuted the kinetoscope in 1893. But in the 1910s, as major filmmakers like D. W. Griffith looked to escape the cost of Edison's patents on camera equipment, this began to change. When Griffith filmed In Old California -the first movie ever shot in Hollywood, California-in 1910, the small town north of Los Angeles was little more than a village. As moviemakers flocked to southern California, not least because of its favorable climate and predictable sunshine, Hollywood swelled with moviemaking activity.

By the 1920s, the once-sleepy village was home to a profitable and innovative US industry.

The power of radio and the world of sports

After being introduced during World War I, radios became a common feature in American homes of the 1920s. Hundreds of radio stations popped up over the course of the decade. These stations developed and broadcasted news, serial stories, and political speeches.

Much like in print media, advertising space was interspersed with entertainment. Yet, unlike with magazines and newspapers, advertisers did not have to depend on the active participation of consumers: Advertisers could reach out to anyone within listening distance of the radio. On the other hand, a broader audience meant advertisers had to be more conservative and careful not to offend anyone.

The power of radio further accelerated the process of creating a shared national culture that had started when railroads and telegraphs widened the distribution of newspapers. Radio was far more effective than these print media, however. Radio created and pumped out American culture onto the airwaves and into the homes of families around the country.

Syndicated radio programs like Amos 'n' Andy, which began in the late 1920s, entertained listeners around the country. In the case of the popular Amos 'n' Andy, it did so with negative racial stereotypes about African Americans similar to those portrayed in minstrel shows of the previous century. With the radio, Americans from coast to coast could listen to exactly the same programming. This had the effect of smoothing out regional differences in dialect, language, music, and even consumer taste.

Radio also transformed how Americans enjoyed sports. The introduction of play-by-play descriptions of sporting events broadcast over the radio brought sports entertainment right into the homes of millions.

Radio helped to popularize sports figures and their accomplishments. Jim Thorpe, who grew up in the Sac and Fox Nation in Oklahoma, was known as one of the best athletes in the world: He medaled in the 1912 Olympic Games, played Major League Baseball, and was one of the founding members of the National Football League.

Other sports superstars were soon household names as well. In 1926, Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim the English Channel. Helen Wills dominated women's tennis, winning Wimbledon eight times in the late 1920s. "Big Bill" Tilden won the national singles title every year from 1920 to 1925. In football, Harold "Red" Grange played for the University of Illinois, averaging over ten yards per carry during his college career. The biggest star of all was the "Sultan of Swat," Babe Ruth, who became America's first baseball hero.

What do you think?

Why do you think the development of cinema radio was so important to American culture?

In what ways is today's media culture--broadcasting sports, celebrities, and advertising--different from the media culture of the 1920s? In what ways is it the same?

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Movies, radio, and sports in the 1920s (article) | Khan Academy

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For many middle-class Americans, the 1920s was a decade of unprecedented prosperity. Rising earnings generated more disposable income for the consumption of entertainment and leisure. This new wealth coincided with and fueled technological innovations, resulting in the booming popularity of entertainments like movies, sports, and radio programs. Leisure and consumption in the 1920s The increased financial prosperity of the 1920s gave many Americans more disposable income to spend on entertaining themselves.

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1920s Dance Styles and Fashion in the Roaring 20s

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1920s Dance Styles and Fashion in the Roaring 20s

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Today, organized dancing is a niche activity. In the past, however, 1920s dance styles were a staple in society. Young women and men would head to popular speakeasys or dance halls, where they would socialize, drink liquor, smoke cigarettes, and dance the night away to live music. While these were considered "indecent" activities during this time period, a group of young women called Flappers saw it as a way to challenge cultural norms while also having a bit of fun. Popular dance crazes swept the nation - some of which were considered more salacious than others. Because dancing was such a popular activity, Flappers also needed clothing and shoes that could keep up with their active footwork. Read on for more information about the famous dance crazes of the 1920s and learn how they effected the fashions that was popular during the period.

Popular 1920s Dance Styles

The Charleston

The Fox Trot

The Texas Tommy

The Black Bottom

The Shimmy

The Brazilian Samba

As the name suggests, the Brazilian Samba originated in South America during the late 1800s. This popular dance took center stage at events like Carnival before making its way to North America in the early 1900s. While early samba music was performed by unknown musicians, in 1917, a tune called ""Pelo Telefone" was recorded by a famous Brazilian musician and became popular thanks to radio air play. This opened the door for other Brazilian musicians and eventually these exciting sounds became mainstream. While the samba was the most popular Brazil, it still managed to make its way across the Western world. In the early 1920s, the Samba was performed in Paris and became a sensation. The samba's sensual dance moves eventually became popular in North America among the dance hall set. This music would also go on to influence modern later Blues and Bossa Nova music. Click here to see a couple from the late 1910s performing traditional samba steps.

How Dance Fads Changed Fashion

Flappers are famous for changing cultural norms. Not only did they partake in scandalous activities like drinking and smoking, they also cut their hair short and wore clothing that changed the way women dress forever. Perhaps surprisingly, their love of dance halls is what largely influenced fashion trends during this decade. When it came to dancing, proper undergarments were key. As one can imagine, restrictive corsets had no place in a vivacious dance hall. Women needed to move and breathe freely, which meant restrictive dresses and undergarments were no longer in vogue. Some halls even had "Corset Check Rooms" where women could ditch their corsets before heading to the dance floor. Flappers didn't just wear short skirt to raise eyebrows of the older generation - they wore them because they needed garments that allowed their feet to move freely while dancing to The Charleston, The Black Bottom, and The Fox Trot. This is one of the reasons that short dresses became so popular during the 1920s. Not only were they more comfortable and contemporary, they allowed young ladies to show off their fancy footwork. Handkerchief hemlines and dazzling embellishments also enhanced the beauty of every single movement. Appropriate footwear is also key if you plan on drinking and dancing the night away. That's why the T-strap sandal became so popular during the Jazz Age. Traditional pumps and boots, after all, would be difficult to dance in. Footwear with extra straps ensured that a flapper's shoes wouldn't fly off while kicking her legs and swinging her feet. While today we look at T-strap or ankle-strap scandals as purely a fashion statement, they originally became popular because women wanted to partake in popular dances.

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1920s Dance Styles and Fashion Today, organized dancing is a niche activity. In the past, however, 1920s dance styles were a staple in society. Young women and men would head to popular speakeasys or dance halls, where they would socialize, drink liquor, smoke cigarettes, and dance the night away to live music.

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1920s consumption (article) | 1920s America | Khan Academy

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Learn for free about math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, finance, history, and more. Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

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The Lost Generation:  American Literature - Britannica.com

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The Lost Generation:  American Literature - Britannica.com

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This article was most recently revised and updated by

Lost Generation, a group of American writers who came of age during World War I and established their literary reputations in the 1920s. The term is also used more generally to refer to the post-World War I generation.

The generation was "lost" in the sense that its inherited values were no longer relevant in the postwar world and because of its spiritual alienation from a United States that, basking under Pres. Warren G. Harding's "back to normalcy" policy, seemed to its members to be hopelessly provincial, materialistic, and emotionally barren. The term embraces Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, Hart Crane, and many other writers who made Paris the centre of their literary activities in the 1920s. They were never a literary school.

Gertrude Stein is credited for the term Lost Generation, though Hemingway made it widely known. According to Hemingway's A Moveable Feast (1964), she had heard it used by a garage owner in France, who dismissively referred to the younger generation as a "génération perdue." In conversation with Hemingway, she turned that label on him and declared, "You are all a lost generation." He used her remark as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises (1926), a novel that captures the attitudes of a hard-drinking, fast-living set of disillusioned young expatriates in postwar Paris.

In the 1930s, as these writers turned in different directions, their works lost the distinctive stamp of the postwar period. The last representative works of the era were Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night (1934) and Dos Passos's The Big Money (1936).

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Adam Augustyn.

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Lost Generation | Definition, Writers, Characteristics, Books, & Facts

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Lost Generation, a group of American writers who came of age during World War I and established their literary reputations in the 1920s. The term is also used more generally to refer to the post-World War I generation. Learn more about the Lost Generation in this article.

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This is satire. He was not a fan of the new car culture.

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Wheels of Progress : U.S. Bureau of Public Roads, Department of Agriculture, Educational Film Service : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

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Reviews the history of transportation in the U.S. and promotes the economic and social benefits of more and better public roads..

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Use this only if you're choosing the Wheels of Progress film. This is only the text "cards" that appear in the silent film for your easy reference.