A. Cultural Confidence
B. Booming Economy
We have emerged from the losses of the Great War and the reconstruction following it with increased virility and strength... In the large view, we have reached a higher degree of comfort and security than ever existed before in the history of the world. President Herbert Hoover
Inaugural Address March 24, 1929 |
C. Women's New Roles
D. Movie Industry
“Go to a motion picture . . . and let yourself go,” Middletown reads in a Saturday Evening Post advertisement. “Before you know it you are living the story - laughing, loving, hating, struggling, winning! All the adventure, all the romance, all the excitement you lack in your daily life are in Pictures. They take you completely out of yourself into a wonderful new world. . . . Out of the cage of everyday existence! if only for an afternoon or an evening - escape!” Robert S. Lynd & Helen Merrell Lynd
Middletown: A Study in American Culture 1929 |
E. New Technologies
...there is something fresh in all the American devices. For instance, a shoeblack [shoeshiner], after moistening my boots with liquid blacking, dried them with a small electric fan. I don’t know that this dries them any quicker or any better than the wind, but I like the mechanical idea. I like, on railway platforms, to see little electric trucks carry the luggage, replacing men who shout and perspire. If this is excess, it is in the right direction—namely, toward the minimization of effort. The United States has done more in this way than all the other countries put together. For instance, the electric iron, price eight dollars or so, which is fitted to a light plug and enables the housewife to save its cost in a month by doing her own ironing. . . .
Walter Lionel George
Hail Columbia!: Random Impressions of a Conservative English Radical, 1921
Hail Columbia!: Random Impressions of a Conservative English Radical, 1921
F. The Automobile
“We’d rather do without clothes than give up the car,” said one mother of nine children. “We used to go to his sister’s to visit, but by the time we’d get the children shoed and dressed there wasn’t any money left for carfare. Now no matter how they look, we just poke ’em in the car and take ’em along.” Even food may suffer: “I’ll go without food before I’ll see us give up the car,” said another woman emphatically. Robert S. Lynd & Helen Merrell Lynd
Middletown: A Study in American Culture 1929 |
If any sign had been needed of the central place which the automobile had come to occupy in the mind and heart of the average American, it was furnished when the Model A Ford was brought out in December 1927... And as it came, it changed the face of America…. Villages of Route 61 bloomed with garages, filling stations, hot-dog stands, chicken-dinner restaurants, tearooms, tourists’ rests, camping sites, and affluence… In thousands of towns, at the beginning of the decade a single traffic officer at the junction of Main Street and Central Street had been sufficient for the control of traffic. But by the end of the decade, what a difference! – red and green lights, blinkers, one-way streets, boulevard stops, stringent and yet more stringent parking ordinances – and still a shining flow of traffic that backed up for blocks along Main Street every Saturday and Sunday afternoon. Frederick Lewis Allen
Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen Twenties, 1931 |