HIS 384 The Roaring Twenties - Canisius College



HIS 384/CRN 46618

The Roaring Twenties

Canisius College, Spring 2013, TR 11:30 am-12:45 pm, Old Main 408xxx

Dr. Bruce Dierenfield CT607 (888-2683) dierenfb@canisius.edu

Office hours: MWF 8:30 am-3 pm, TR 10 am-11am, 1 pm-2 pm & by appointment

“There are no second acts in American lives.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

[pic]

Course Description

This course examines the extraordinary decade of the 1920s in America, which saw the “noble experiment” of Prohibition, the hedonism of “flaming youth,” the changing role of women; the automobile revolution; and the reactions of white supremacists, Christian Fundamentalists, writers, and the “New Negro.” It was also a time of escapism, following a generation of reform and the horror of the Great War. Many Americans now delighted in gold-fish swallowing, flag-pole sitting, bathtub gin and Al Capone, larger-than-life athletic contests, and movie-watching of vamps like Clara Bow. There was never a decade like it before or since.

Objectives

1. Develop a clear understanding of the personalities and social, political, and economic developments of the 1920s.

2. Evaluate a variety of first-hand materials from the 1920s (e.g., films, speeches, reports, letters) from a historian’s perspective.

3. Practice and improve oral and written communication skills.

Teaching Methodology

This course will be taught topically, primarily, except for subjects at the beginning and end of the 1920s when chronology can be more clearly followed. Besides lectures, the course will feature audiovisual presentations, often original music, radio programs, and films. Student participation in the form of questions and observations is not only welcomed but expected.

Requirements (These requirements are subject to change based on student enrollment and student performance).

1. Attendance mandatory

Students are permitted two unauthorized absences without substantial penalty, including course failure. Please keep the instructor informed when absences become chronic.

2. Discussion 10 percent

Students should keep current with the assigned reading and contribute regularly to class discussion. Audiovisual presentations should also elicit student comment.

3. Movie review October 20 10 percent

4. Midterm (optional) October 27 20 percent

5. Term paper or Radio program December 1 30 percent

6. Final exam December 15 30 percent

100 percent

If you have any condition, such as a physical or mental disability, which will make it difficult for you to carry out the work as prescribed or which will require extra time on examinations, please notify the instructor in the first two weeks of the course so that appropriate arrangements can be made.

Books (available in paperback in the college bookstore)

Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s, 1995

Edward Behr, Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America, 1996

Steven Watson, the Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920-1930, 1995

Edward Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion, 1997

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 1926

KKK in the 1920sxxx

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Jeffrey Moran, The Scopes Trial: A Brief History with Documents, 2002

Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, 2010 (4 parts)

Michael Lerner, Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City, 2007

Barry Hankins, Jesus and Gin: Evangelicalism, the Roaring Twenties and Today’s Culture Wars,

2010

James Fentress, Eminent Gangsters: Immigrants and the Birth of Organized Crime in America,

2010

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Douglas Abrams, Selling the Old-Time Religion: American Fundamentalism and Mass Culture, 1920-1940, 2001

Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties, 1931

Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows, 1925

John Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, 1997

Paul Carter, Another Part of the Twenties, 1977

Pete Daniel, Deep’n as It Come: The 1927 Mississippi River Flood, 1977

Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, 1995

George Douglas, The Early Days of Radio Broadcasting, 1987

Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land:L The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, 1982

Melvin Ely, The Adventures of Amos ‘n’ Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon, 1991

Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1976

Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s, 1977

James Flink, The Car Culture, 1975

Kathryn Fuller, At the Picture Show: Sall-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture, 1996

David Goldberg, Discontented America: The United States in the 1920s, 1999

Ian Gordon, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890-1945, 1998

Harvey Green, The Uncertainty of Everyday Life, 1915-1945, 1992

John Hallwas, The Bootlegger: A Story of Small-Town America, 1998

Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness, 1995

Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, 1971

Kenneth Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the Cities, 1915-1930, 1967

Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural Histroy of Advertising in America, 1994

J. Stanley Lemons, The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s, 1971

William Leuchtenberg, The Perils of Prospertity, 1914-1932, 1955

David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 1981

Thomas Lewis, Empire of the Air: The Men who Made Radio, 1991

Robert & Helen Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, 1929

Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940, 1985

Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the motion Picture Industry, 1980

David Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940, 1990

Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middle-brow Culture, 1992

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Movie Review

Students are expected to write a review of at least two films produced in the 1920s, including the following which will be screened in class, i.e., The Gold Rush, It, The Jazz Singer, and The Sheik. You may also select and review other films from that decade which are available from the college’s Media Center or video retail outlets around town.

The purpose of this 3-5 page assignment is to examine the films for evidence of American life in the Roaring Twenties.

The best reviews will be those that are comparative, detailed, and insightful.

Term Paper

Students are expected to write a 10-15 page term paper on any aspect of life (esp. society, culture, politics, and the economy) in the 1920s. These papers should draw upon reputable secondary works and contemporary newspaper and magazine accounts. See the bibliography at the back of this syllabus for initial research suggestions.

Students intending to order materials from interlibrary loan (ILL) should be forewarned that this can be a lengthy and occasionally unreliable process. Please see me and librarian Sally DiCarlo to discuss the feasibility of your planned request. Your best strategy is to check area libraries before using ILL.

Use Kate Turabian’s Manual on Style for endnote and bibliographic form. Students may purchase a copy of this writer’s bible in the college bookstore or rely on a distillation of the Manual that will be distributed to the class.

Superior papers contain the following characteristics:

1. narrowly focused topic

2. thorough research among a variety of rich sources

3. clear statement of purpose and subsequently developed reasonable argument

4. vivid, revealing quotations and examples/stories

5. no typographical, spelling, or grammatical errors

6. correct notation (endnotes permitted) and bibliographic form

Hints: The best papers are invariably the ones which are begun early in the semester, checked by the instructor, and rewritten.

To guard against loss or theft, make a copy of your paper before submission.

Warnings: Papers recycled from other courses will be failed.

Computer difficulties do not justify lateness.

Papers without notation for all borrowed material and bibliographic references will not be read.

Papers which rehash secondary works will receive “D’s.”

Plagiarized papers (i.e., the theft of published writing) will be failed.

Possible Paper Topics

The following titles may be modified to reflect your own research angle or interpretation. Obtain instructor approval for other paper topics, some of which may be located on pp. 12-16 of this syllabus.

A Puritan in Babylon: The Life and Times of Calvin Coolidge

The 1928 Election: A Study in Religious Prejudice

“I’m the Law in Indiana”: David G. Stephenson and the Fall of the Ku Klux Klan

Bootlegging in Buffalo

Anarchist Martyrs: The Trial & Execution of Sacco and Vanzetti

Henry Ford—Antisemite

Car Culture: How the Model T Changed America

The Wild Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald

When Harlem Was in Vogue

Angelic Aimee: The Extraordinary Career of Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson

False Hope: American Diplomacy in the 1920s

A Black Horatio Alger: Louis Armstrong and American Jazz

Forgotten Farmers: Depressed Agriculture in an Age of Prosperity

Americans on the Couch: Freudian Psychology in the 1920s

Flaming Youth: Young Americans as Seen in Popular Culture

Fundamentalism on Trial: The Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee

H.L. Mencken: The Sage of Baltimore & His Victims

Middle America as Viewed in 1920s’ Advertisements

The Wit & Wisdom of Sportswriter Grantland Rice

The New Negro as Seen Through the Eyes of Black Novelists

Sultan of Swat: The Legendary Life and Career of Babe Ruth

Alice Paul & The Origins of The Equal Rights Amendment

European Nirvana: American Literati Overseas

The Changing Lives of American Homemakers

The Cinematography of Cecil B. DeMille

Fads of the Twenties

The Botched Generation: American Society in the Writers’ Mind

Lucky Lindy: The Aerial Exploit of Charles Lindbergh

W.E.B. DuBois & The NAACP: The Crisis in American Race Relations

The Teapot Dome Scandal

Al Capone & Organized Crime During Prohibition

The Rising Popularity of Jazz

The Great Crash on Wall Street

“You Are There” Radio Program

Students wishing to prepare a radio program on the 1920s are advised to listen to old-time programs. Programs prepared for this course must meet these stipulations:

1. reports & advertisements must be rooted in historical fact

2. a typescript must be prepared in advance and given to the instructor

3. practice delivery several times as did Ronald Reagan (a child of the 1920s)

These programs may consist of some or all of these parts:

a. news (domestic politics, international events, and business developments)

b. features (women, literature, religion, music, popular culture)

c. advertisements

d. social commentary (à la Mencken)

e. adventure/mystery/comedy segment

f. sports

Any programs that are prepared will substitute for the term paper and therefore count for 20 percent of the course grade. Time limitations allow for no more than three such programs with two, three, or four students each.

Examination(s)

The midterm exam is optional and will consist of terms and essay questions. Students bypassing the exam will have its 20 percent value redistributed to other assignments, especially the term paper/radio program and final.

The final exam is cumulative and will consist of essay questions drawn from a list distributed one week in advance.

Test answers will be evaluated according to reasonableness of interpretation; comprehensiveness; abundance of pertinent evidence drawn from lectures, assigned readings, audiovisual presentations, and your own research; and competitive ranking in class. Students may present divergent interpretations from those advanced by the instructor or the authors we read, but these views must be firmly supported by historical evidence.

Please use a blue-ink pen when writing your examination.

Grading

Student performance in the course will be judged by the following qualities:

references to the readings & audiovisual presentations

analytical statements

inclusion of specific examples

synthetic & summary remarks

If all students do well in their written and oral work, all will receive correspondingly high grades. Course failures will be given to any student who sidesteps ANY of the requirements.

Term papers may not be submitted for dual credit in another course. Late papers will be penalized a half grade per day after December 1. No papers will be accepted after December 8 without the instructor’s prior permission.

Course incompletes are granted at the instructor’s discretion. Customarily, incompletes are approved only for medically documented illness, personal injury, or some other extraordinary circumstance beyond student control. Incompletes will NOT be granted for tardy term papers.

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(Ken Burns Jazz)



(Monkey Trial)





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COURSE SCHEDULE

Presentations, Readings, Discussions

This schedule is subject to change depending on the pace of presentations, weather conditions, and the instructor’s health and other professional obligations. Notification of class cancellation will be posted outside the classroom, or, if the college is closed, by radio broadcast.

|DATES |TOPICS |READINGS/DOCUMENTS/WEBSITES |MULTI-MEDIA (tentative) |

|T JAN 15 |The Great Witch-hunt |Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper, |The Twenties* |

| | |pp. 218-226 |The Roaring Twenties (online) |

| | |A. Mitchell Palmer, “The Case Against | |

| | |the Reds,” Forum (Feb. 1920), p. 63 | |

|R JAN 17 |Wait Not, Want Not |Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper, |Henry Ford: Tin Lizzie Tycoon |

| | |pp. 56-91 |& The Gold Rush* |

| | |Henry Ford, My Life and Work, 1922, | |

| | |excerpt | |

| | |Earnest Calkins, Business the | |

| | |Civilizer, 1928, pp. 1-3, 12-18 | |

|T JAN 22 |Uncle Warren & Silent Cal |Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper, |The Jazz Age* |

| | |pp. 15-55 |Warren G. Harding & Calvin Coolidge speeches |

| | |Samuel Hopkins Adams, “The |“Warren G. Harding for President” & “Keep Coolidge” |

| | |Timely Death of President Harding,” 24 pgs. | |

| | |William A. White, Autobiography, 1946, | |

| | |p. 616 | |

|R JAN 24 |Damp Yankees |Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper, |Prohibition: Thirteen Years that Changed America* |

| | |pp. 226-235 |Part 1 (The Dry Crusade) |

| | |Edward Behr, Prohibition: Thirteen Years |Part 2 (The Roaring Twenties) |

| | |That Changed America, all |Part 3(The Road to Repeal) |

| | |Felix von Luckner & Fiorello LaGuardia on Prohibition |“Water Wagon: I’m Off the Stuff” |

| | | |“Repeal” |

| |Organized Crime | |The Prohibition Years: Birth of the American Mafia |

| | | |Public Enemy |

| | | |Little Caesar |

|T JAN 29 |The New Negro |Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper, |Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues* |

| | |pp. 160-165, 283-302 |Against the Odds: The Artists of the Harlem Renaissance |

| | |Steven Watson, The Harlem Renaissance, all | |

| | |Jeff Kisseloff, You Must Remember This, | |

| | |1989, pp. 276-287 | |

|R JAN 31 |Sheiks & Shebas |Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper, |The Sheik* & It* |

| | |pp. 98-144 | |

| | |Eleanor Wembridge, “Petting and the | |

| | |Campus,” Survey (1 July 1925), | |

| | |pp. 393-395 | |

|T FEB 5 |Spellbound in |Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper, |The Jazz Singer* |

| |Darkness |pp. 91-95 | |

| |Radio | | |

|R FEB 7 |That Old Time Religion |Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper, |Elmer Gantry |

| | |pp. 169-185, 191-200 |Aimee Semple McPherson, “Life Begins at Foursquare” |

| | |Carey McWilliams, Aimee Semple | |

| | |McPherson: “The Sunlight in MySoul,” | |

| | |31 pgs. | |

|T FEB 12 |The Monkey Trial |Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper, |Inherit the Wind |

| | |pp. 185-191 |Monkey Trial |

| | |Edward Larson, Summer for the Gods, all | |

| | |Jeffrey Moran, The Scopes Trial, excerpt | |

|R FEB 14 |Bigotry in Bedsheets |Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper, |Cross of Fire |

| | |pp. 201-217, 235-249 |“KIGY” |

| | |Robert Coughlan, “Konklave in Kokomo,” |“A Christian in The |

| | |1923, 15 pgs. |White House” |

| | |Hiram W. Evans, “Klan’s Fight for | |

| | |Americanism,” North American Review | |

| | |(Mar.-May 1926), excerpt | |

|T FEB 19 |PRESIDENTS’ DAY | | |

|R FEB 21 |Cross Words |Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper, |The Sun Also Rises* |

| | |pp. 145-160, 165-169 |F. Scott Fitzgerald*xxx |

| | |Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, all | |

|T FEB 26 |“Oh, How They Played the Game!” |Gene Tunney, “My Fight with Jack |Babe Ruth |

| | |Dempsey,” 17 pgs |Mahjong |

|R FEB 28 |High Tide of the Twenties—1927 |John Ward, “The Meaning of Lindberg’s |Lindbergh* |

| | |Flight,” American Quarterly, (1958), | |

| | |pp. 3-16 | |

| | |Phil Stong, “The Last Days of Sacco and | |

| | |Vanzetti,” 21 pgs. | |

| | |Walter Lippmann, editorial, “Sacco & | |

| | |Vanzetti,” New York World, | |

| | |19 Aug. 1927 | |

|T MAR 5 |Gotterdammerung: Black Tuesday on Wall Street |Fred Allen, Only Yesterday, pp. 241-281 |The Crash of 1929* |

|R MAR 7 | | | |

|T MAR 12 | | | |

|R MAR 14 | | | |

|T MAR 19 | | | |

|R MAR 21 | | | |

|T MAR 26 | | | |

|MAR 28-APR 7 |EASTER RECESS | | |

|T APR 9 | | | |

|R APR 11 | | | |

|T APR 16 | | | |

|R APR 18 | | | |

|T APR 23 | | | |

|R APR 25 | | | |

|T APR 30 | | | |

|R MAY 2 | | | |

*Can be viewed in the Canisius College library (periodicals collection)

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