(dramatic music)
- [Man] The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor--
- [Crowd] Sieg Heil!
Sieg Heil!
- [Kennedy] Ask not what your country can do for you--
- [Reporter] President Kennedy has been shot.
- [Armstrong] One small step for man--
- We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal.
- [Reagan] Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
(dramatic music)
- [Peter] New York City's Great White Way, Broadway.
(upbeat music)
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,
and the sale and consumption of alcohol was now illegal.
(upbeat music)
- There was Prohibition, but oddly enough,
nobody paid any attention to it.
- We went to people's homes.
They served dreadful things called orange blossoms,
which was gin and orange juice.
Revolting.
And bad gin at that.
- [Peter] Liquor was now sold behind closed doors
in places called speakeasies.
Proprietors took the risks and reaped the profits.
- There's good money in them.
I was 15 years old.
I was riding around with a Nash convertible.
We had four speakeasies,
one by the Daily News, one by the Daily Mirror.
You had people, you let them in, okay.
A guy would explain who he was
and he'd show you ID or something and you let him in.
You got to know, it was like family after a while.
- Every corner had a saloon on it.
Of course, you know, they were never raided by,
the cops were a big part of the business too.
People wanted to drink.
It was a great game.
- [Peter] 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 him (chuckles) or else.
- 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 mow
were just beginning to take shape in the 1920s.
(soft music)
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 born.
The very architecture of the city
spoke of America's new ascendancy and her aspirations.
- The skyscraper was an example of the new form
achieving a kind of thrilling scale and nobility.
More people worked there
than lived in the average small town in America.
- [Peter] 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 villages.
- The pace was being set in the cities.
The city is irresistibly attractive.
It's really at a kind of high tide in this decade.
It's a force, a magnet.
- [Peter] 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 desires.
And Wall Street came to represent
the decade's expanding economic opportunities.
(frantic music) (men shouting)
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 fella, Jerry, got me the first job.
And he said, "C'mon down to Wall Street.
"The streets are paved with gold."
- [Peter] 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 place in Tuxedo Park and a house in New York,
and then we used to come to South Hampton in the summer.
Everybody seemed to be having a good time.
- In those days, you got lots of help.
You had a cook, you had a kitchen maid,
and you had a laundress.
And then you had a parlor maid,
a chambermaid,
and mother's maid.
How many does that make?
Six, or I think there were eight, actually.
Terribly nice people.
- Almost everybody had a boat.
I recall in the '20s,
you would see a harbor filled with yachts.
I mean, really filled, 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.
You see the dinner parties with 50, 60 people.
Always, after dinner,
there would be entertainment by guests.
George Gershwin was there with his orchestrator, Bill Daly.
They got up and played on two pianos.
Mother always had two grand pianos
in the big room downstairs.
(upbeat jazz music)
- [Peter] Gershwin, who wrote Rhapsody in Blue
and other anthems of the decades,
was profoundly influenced by the new music
he had heard 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,
performers such as Louis Armstrong,
Bessie Smith,
and a dapper young man named Edward Kennedy Ellington.
His friends simply called him Duke.
- Duke was the essence of What black music was all about.
Everybody else was heading in that direction,
but Duke was there.
- The first time that I was seized by the music
was the first time I heard Duke Ellington
broadcast from the Cotton Club,
where Broadway, Hollywood, and Paris rubbed elbows.
People came from all over the United States
to experience what was going on in Harlem in the '20s.
- I was young then and out,
and 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.
And of course, the music was wonderful.
- [Peter] 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 wanna take
a particular look at some aspect of black folks.
I don't think black folks run around saying
that we're gonna 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 came true.
If I had to choose between heavens and Harlem (chuckles),
Harlem, of course, would win every time.
(soft music)
- [Peter] While Harlem seemed a promised land
for black Americans, New York's Lower East Side
was, for European immigrants,
their gateway to the American 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 nine or $10 a week,
working a six-day week.
And he would tell me
how he was able to buy lunch every day for 12 cents.
And the lunch consisted of
a herring, a big Schmaltz 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, in the country.
But cities all around the country had become more important
because change was centered in the cities,
business, industry, culture.
- Nothing was like rain in New York.
It's the magic of everything,
the world full of things to be explored.
That time was one of the feeling of adventure,
and your life is having a shape to it,
sort of a thread, like a narrative, or a story,
a feeling that anything may unfold.
- [Peter] The decade's startling changes
would soon spread from America's cities
to envelop the entire nation.
(soft music)
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 visits.
And that's where there would be discussion,
maybe a little gossip.
- [Peter] 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.
(pensive music)
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,
but he was born in 1900 in a world where the horse
was still the main means of getting about.
The car seemed to me more revolutionary in a way
than anything that's happened since.
It totally changed the kind of space we live in, really.
- [Peter] 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 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 cars were 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 riding through 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.
- [Peter] Roadways were soon dotted
with a new phenomenon, roadside advertising.
- They were big and colorful
and beautiful, I thought.
- [Peter] 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 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.
- [Radio Announcer] In just a moment.
But first, we'd love to ask you to let us know
if this broadcast is reaching you.
- [Peter] 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.
- [Radio Announcer] The Republican ticket
of Harding and Coolidge is running well ahead--
- One of the gentlemen was reading the election returns.
He got sick.
So for about 45, 35 or 45 minutes, I read election returns.
Nobody had any comprehension of the significance
of what was going on.
But don't forget,
there were only a couple of hundred listeners.
Within six months, every store in America,
even grocery stores were selling radio sets.
- Suddenly, all Americans were listening to the same things
and laughing at the same jokes.
There was a kind of communal exercise here,
and 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 the 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.
(upbeat music)
- 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 reached to their ankles
to flesh flashed everywhere.
And a lot of '20s culture
is about the fun of smashing prohibitions.
- [Peter] The more daring women of the day
were known as flappers and vamps.
- Sure I remember flappers.
They were all over the place.
They were older than me, but you know, you look at,
when you look at the flappers
through the eyes of a young guy, wow, whoa.
- 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.
- [Peter] 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, being loose with talk, using profanity,
this sifted down from the cities, from New York and Chicago.
And this finally had a unwanted place
in our rural community.
Here was a girl who'd come home from,
she'd been working in Chicago.
She comes home with short dresses on.
Well, 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 the future generation is gonna bring.
- This company was founded on a respect for God
and a sense of righteousness
and keeping with the Sabbath day.
And people brought their children up
on the discipline and on reading 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 and so on.
- [Peter] 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 forces 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 Scopes 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 'em up and down the streets.
- Read your Bible was everywhere in town,
posted up 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 never saw the same people twice.
You go to the same place next,
the next day, there'd be some other people
from some other parts of the United States there.
But it was a lot of hoopla.
I enjoyed it.
- The Scopes trial became emblematic.
Everybody had to make up their mind.
People who've never been to Tennessee,
couldn't even find Tennessee,
had to think about this question,
do I believe in modern science?
- [Peter] At times, it seemed that the whole world
had converged on Dayton.
- The aisles 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 'em with a 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 in 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 the automobiles, electricity, radio.
And at the same time, they want it to remain 1850,
and they know they cannot have both.
And this creates 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 Ku Klux Klan.
(ominous music)
- [Peter] Ku Klux Klan membership
soared to four million in the 1920s.
- Almost everybody that was a good citizen of 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 who came from somewhere else.
Going to people's houses, and calling them out,
and insulting them, and whipping them,
and things of that kind.
This was not just particular to the South or to the Alabama.
It was nationwide.
- [Peter] The clan was actively recruiting
in many northern states.
- My father was asked
if he would like to join the Ku Klux Klan.
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 see 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.
- [Peter] 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.
- The men there out in the crowd
had their robes and hood on too.
And then the leaders said,
"Take all these niggers out and hang 'em."
- [Peter] His two friends were lynched.
James Cameron barely escaped with his life.
- They put a rope around my neck
and they throw 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."
- [Peter] 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 bitter resistance.
- [Announcer] Then the Manassa Mauler lashed out
in his old ferocious style, every punch deadly cunning.
- [Peter] In a decade fraught with so many changes,
people in the 1920 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 Ruth.
(crowd cheers)
- 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 him.
- 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 head from Scranton to the Yankee Stadium.
It was 35 cents to see the Babe, Lou Gehrig,
all the Yankee players.
- Babe Ruth was a hero.
Lou Gehrig was always my hero.
It seems like everybody back then was a hero.
We'd write to get autographs.
They graciously sent us pictures,
three-cent postage stamp to get your picture back.
A really nice time to live.
It felt good to be an American.
(engine whirs)
- [Peter] The public's fascination
with flying in the 1920 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 a thousand 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.
- [Peter] 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 six-foot-two 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 framed minutes of silence,
praying for him.
Everybody in the company was praying for him.
- [Peter] 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.
- 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 Paris.
- [Peter] 100,000 Parisians were there
to welcome the shy young pilot.
Lucky Lindy emerged from his plane
carrying only a razor and a 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 the 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 him.
- He was a hero.
He was a nice guy.
He was new.
He was young.
He was kind of gawky, but that was what they wanted.
- [Peter] The parade for Lindbergh down Broadway
was the biggest national celebration
since the end of World War I.
- Everybody became Lindbergh.
They became the person that he was and represented.
It was great.
He 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.
- [Peter] 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 centuries 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.
- Admiral Byrd was gonna select,
I forget how many Boy Scouts to go to the pole.
Now, I was about 12 at that time,
and I was nominated as one of the guys to go.
Now, this was a big thing.
It was in all the papers.
When I came home, I says, "Ma, what do you think?
"I'm gonna 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.
Imagine that.
There were 120 men connected with the Byrd expedition.
- [Peter] 20-year-old Harvard student, Norman Vaughan
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.
- [Peter] 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.
- [Norman] 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 forced landing.
(somber music)
- [Peter] 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 see.
- [Peter] 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.
- [Peter] 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 29, 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 pageboys 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.
- At three o'clock, the bell rang, and that was it.
(bell rings)
- [Peter] 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 fell.
- [Peter] The '20s bubble had burst,
and with it, the decade's optimism.
- People lost every penny that they had.
Nobody had any pensions.
There was no Medicare and 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.
- The 29th, I lost $1 million.
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 as different from the '20s as night is from day,
starting over was not gonna 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.
(dramatic music)