Transcription
[Music] I am the [Music] Ed. What your country choose to be? Self-evident that all men are created. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. [Music]
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 oddly enough, nobody, uh, paid any attention to it. You went to people's homes, they served 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 speakeasies. 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 speakeasies. 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 showed 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 raided 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's 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 [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 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] desires. And Wall Street came to represent the decade's 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 to 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 Fifth Avenue when I was growing up. We had a, uh, 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 maid, and you had a laundress, and then you had a paa maid, 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 feet or over. There was a great deal of entertaining, and it was all done in people's houses. Seated dinner parties for 50, 60 people. Always after dinner, there would be entertainment by guests. George Gershwin 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 downstairs. Gershwin, who wrote Rhapsody in Blue and other anthems of the decade, 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 Louis 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 Harlem at night to dance and everything. We all saved up for months to get the money to go out 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 hotbed 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're 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. Harlem 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 time.
While Harlem seemed a promised 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 where they blocked hats, men's hats, and he was making, you know, like $9 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 schall herring out of the barrel, and my mouth waters 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 thread, like a narrative of a story, a feeling that anything may unfold.
The decade's startling changes would soon spread from America's cities to envelop the entire nation. Far from the speakeasies and 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 quiet, 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 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 surge of new power came first to the cities, and by the decade's 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 Holland Tunnel. This was opening night. All the causable lined 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 so-called 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 gentlemen 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 listeners. Within six months, every store in America, even grocery stores, 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. 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 clubs, 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 '20s 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, 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 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 a Vamp 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 an 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 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 and 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 ape 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 Bryan, three times presidential candidate and a Christian fundamentalist himself, came to prosecute. Clarence Darrow, the celebrated Chicago trial lawyer, came to defend Scopes. Outside, as the trial progressed in the scorching summer heat, Dayton had itself a 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 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. Scopes' trial 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 halls were filled, and the walls were lined with newspaper people from England, from Spain, from France. We had so many newspaper people there that you couldn't stir them with a [Music] stick.
When all the hoopla ended, John T. Scopes was found guilty and fined $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 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 tension within American society that is then looking for somewhere to go. And it goes into hatred towards immigrants, hatred towards people who are simply different. It goes into intolerance and into the Klux [Music] Clan.
Klan membership soared to 4 million in the 1920s. Almost everybody that was a good citizen in the South was a member of the Klan. I think they were encouraging morality by turning the light 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 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 them, equipping them and things of that [Music] kind. This was not just peculiar to the South, not Alabama, it was nationwide. The Klan was actively recruiting in many northern states. My father was asked if he would like to join. Joe the Klux 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 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 Klan-inspired mob, enraged by reports of the rape and murder of a white couple. Many of them out in the crowd had had the robes and hood on too. 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 threw the other end over the tree, and I kept crying and hollering, "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 Klan. 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, Klansmen marched 50,000 strong down the streets of the nation's capital. Clearly, the forces of '20s modernity had stirred a bit of resistance. Then the Manassa Mauler lashed out in his old ferocious start. Several fast, deadly punches. In a decade fraught with so many changes, people in the 1920s seemed hungry for old-fashioned heroes. And an explosion in spectator sports provided them. Sports giants became household names, their every move followed by radio and an 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 three and a half hours, we were from Scranton to Yankee Stadium. It was 35 cents to see the Babe. Lou Gehrig, the Yankee players. Babe Ruth was a hero. Lou Gehrig was always my hero. Seems like everybody back then was a hero. We'd write and get autographs. They graciously sent us pictures, three-cent 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 feet, it was like I was home. And that's the only way I can describe it to you. I was home. 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 Lindbergh, 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 had three 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 a half 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 hadn't heard from him for a long time. And I was walking up 125th Street, and someone shouted, "They found him!" 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 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-won achievement. When Lindbergh came back, it was as though he walked on 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 Lindbergh down Broadway was the biggest national celebration since the end of World War I. [Music] Everybody became Lindbergh. 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 Lindbergh'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 the boundary. One of the century's great explorers, Admiral Richard Byrd, set 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 Byrd was going to select, I forget how many Boy Scouts to go to the Pole. 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. It was in all the papers. I can say, "Ma, what do you think? I'm going to go to the North Pole with Admiral Byrd." She says, "You can't go." I says, "Why?" She says, "You'll catch your death of cold." I never went. My cousin went instead. Isn't [Music] that there were 120 men connected with the Byrd 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 two-year mission was to conduct geological research and prepare for Byrd's record-breaking attempt. We were responsible for getting out onto the interior of Antarctica as far as we could, to be there for Admiral Byrd's rescue expedition should he have had a force. [Music] [Music]
Landing just after midnight on November the 29th, 1929, Admiral Byrd's aircraft flew 500 feet above the geographic 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. The most extraordinary thing about the decade of the '20s was a pandemic air of optimism, a feeling that the future of the country was unlimited. One of the great jazz songs of the day was "Blue Skies." 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 maker, everybody, oddly enough, was in the stock market. One of our chauffeurs 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 29th of 1929. It was obvious from the opening bell that things were wildly amiss. At 9:30, there was a rumble on the floor. One of the page boys said, "Hey, Mike, look at 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, the bell rang, and that was it. [Music]
More than $30 billion 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 decade's [Music] optimism. People are every penny that they had. Nobody had any pensions. There were no Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. 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] e e