The ‘20s: Culture, Consumption, and Crash 143Harlow, Greta Garbo, and Gary Cooper, but it ended the careers of many oth-
ers. As a harbinger of things to come, that same year, 1927, the image of
President Herbert Hoover was transmitted via television from Washington to
New York City. Until the rise of television in the 1950s, movies remained
America’s main form of entertainment.
The rise of the radio and film, along with the expansion of the consumer’s
economy, also turned sports into a national pasttime as people had the time
and money to listen to games on the air or attend them in the large stadiums
that were being built all over. Americans closely followed the golfer Bobby
Jones, who won 5 U.S. Amateur Championships in the decade along with 3
U.S. Opens. They were mesmerized by Babe Didrickson Zaharia, the greatest
female athlete of that era, who won Olympic medals and became a successful
professional golfer. Heavyweight champ Jack Dempsey was a national icon.
And on the first Saturday in May, millions of Americans sat by their radios to
listen to the Kentucky Derby. Professional sports became a huge industry, as
well as a distraction from the problems of society, with teams and players like
the New York Yankees and Babe Ruth, the National Football League and
George Halas, or the Notre Dame “Fighting Irish” and their famous coach
Knute Rockne becoming icons of that era.
Long before Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, or Peyton Manning became
sports stars and appeared in dozens of advertisements, sports figures in the
1920s became, though the word was not used, “superstars.” The New York
Yankees became the most famous team in sports, and remain so, when it cre-
ated a baseball dynasty featuring Babe Ruth, the “Sultan of Swat.” In 1914, a
brewery owner, Jacob Ruppert and another man bought the Yankees for
$460,000 and put the team in their famed pinstriped uniforms that year.
Ruppert later bought out his partner for over $1.2 million, a huge sum in the
1920s. The Yankees’ best move, however, was making a trade with the Boston
Red Sox to get the best player in the game [he was both the best pitcher and
best hitter] George Herman “Babe” Ruth, giving the Red Sox $25,000 in cash
and an “I.O.U.” worth $75,000. Ruth singlehandedly changed the game by
hitting more home runs than anyone in baseball history at that time, and
drawing record numbers, about 1.3 million fans in 1923, into Yankee Stadium
in the Bronx, which came to be called “The House That Ruth Built.” Maybe
more importantly, Ruth rescued baseball from the “Black Sox Scandal” of
1919, an allegation that players for the Chicago White Sox threw the world