24

Postwar Society and Culture:

Change and Adjustment Postwar Society and Culture:

Change and Adjustment

CONTENTS

■InAmerica Today: City Activities with Dance Hall(1929), Thomas Hart Benton

chronicled the glitz and glamour of the “jazz age”—dirty dancing, illicit

drinking, cigarette smoking, and, above it all, a broker studying the ticker tape

with the stock results.

Source: Thomas Hart Benton, City Activities with Dance Hallfrom America Today, 1930, dis-

temper and egg tempera with oil glaze on gessoed linen, 92  1341 ⁄ 2 inches. Collection,

The Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States. Photo 1988 by Dorothy Zeidman.

639

banning alcohol at the football stadium, another profes-

sor cited the nation’s experience with Prohibition eighty

years earlier. “You cannot root out the drinking of alco-

hol by outlawing it,” he added.

The mural accompanying this introduction provides

some support for this view. Painted by Thomas Hart

Benton in 1929 and entitled America Today, it shows that

drinking—though illegal—was an integral part of popu-

lar culture. It also suggests that flaunting Prohibition

contributed to a more general loosening of social and

cultural conventions.

Such changes unsettled many. The recent flood of

immigration had strained the nation’s social fabric, espe-

cially in cities. Young women were challenging traditional

gender roles. African Americans were leaving the South in

droves and demanding rights that had been long

deferred. Gays were becoming visible—at least to each

other. Movies and radio, and even artists and writers, stim-

ulated a rebellious youth culture. Advertising encouraged

people to lose themselves in the delights of consumption.

These transformations also elicited opposition. The

federal government curtailed immigration and cracked

down on foreign-born radicals. The Ku Klux Klan

reemerged to intimidate immigrants and blacks.

Traditionalists inveighed against the enticements of pop-

ular culture and decline in faith. Prohibition was only the

most visible expression of a reaction against social and

cultural change. ■

■Closing the Gates to New

Immigrants

■New Urban Social Patterns

■The Younger Generation

■The “New” Woman

■Popular Culture: Movies

and Radio

■The Golden Age of Sports

■Urban–Rural Conflicts:

Fundamentalism

■Urban–Rural Conflicts:

Prohibition

■The Ku Klux Klan

■Literary Trends

■The “New Negro”

■Economic Expansion

■The Age of the Consumer

■Henry Ford

■The Airplane

■Re-Viewing the Past:

Chicago

■Debating the Past:

The 1920s: A Decade of

Self-Absorption?

HeartheAudio Chapter 24 at http://www.myhistorylab.com