Boom to Bust

Narrator: 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.

[glass shatters against the wall]

In the first month of the new decade,

the 18th Amendement became the law of the land

and the sale and consumption of alcohol was now illegal.

Craig Mitchell: There was Prohibition,

but hardly enough.

Nobody paid any attention to it.

Female: You went to peoples' homes

and they served dreadful things called Orange Blossoms,

which was gin and orange juice.

Revolting.

And bad gin, at that.

Narrator: Liquor was now sold behind closed doors

in places called speakeasies.

Proprietors took the risks and reaped the profits.

Male: It was good money.

I was 15 years-old. I was riding around in a Nash convertible.

We had four speakeasies:

One by the Daily News, one by the Daily Mirror.

We had a peephole. You let 'em in.

Okay, the guy had to explain who he was and 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, they were never raided by.

The cops were a big part of the business, too.

People wanted to drink.

It was a great game.

Narrator: It became a dangerous game for the high stakes players.

Battles between rival games 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.

Narrator: 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.

Narrator: The "roar" in the Roaring Twenties 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 1920s.

Narrator: At the dawn of the 1920s, America was clearly entering a new era.

An era defined by 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 ascendency and her aspirations.

Male: The skyscraper was an example of the new form

achieving a kind of thrilling scale, a nobility.

More people worked there than live in the average small town in America.

Narrator: 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.

Female: The 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 force, a magnet.

Narrator: 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.

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, "Come on down to Wall Street.

"The street are paved with gold."

Narrator: It seemed that way too.

On Park and Fifth Avenue is 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.

Craig Mitchell: 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.

Frances L. Lobe: In those days you had lots of help.

You had a cook, you had a kitchen maid,

and a luandress.

And then you had a parlor maid,

a chamber maid,

and mother's maid.

How many does that make?

Six, but I think there were eight actually.

Terribly nice people.

Male: 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.

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 in parlors for 50-60 people.

Always after dinner there would be entertainment by guests.

George Gershwin was there with his orchestrator Bill Dailey.

They got up and played on two pianos.

Mother always two grand pianos in the big room downstairs.

Narrator: Gershwin who wrote Rhapsody in Blue and other anthems of the decades

was profoundly influenced by the new music he had heard of called jazz.

The capitol 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.

Performs such as Louis Armstrong,

Bessie Smith,

and a dapper, young man named Edward Kennedy Ellington.

His friends simply called him "Duke."

Male: 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.

Female: I was young 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 night club.

Of course the music was wonderful.

Narrator: 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.

Male: 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 black folk.

I don't think black folks run around saying,

"We gonna have us a renaissance" or something like that,

but it was a holiday of the spirit.

Female: 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.

Male: Harlem was the end of the line, the promise land,

the place where all our fantasies came true.

If I had to choose between heaven or Harlem

Harlem of course would win.

Every time.

Narrator: While Harlem seemed a promise land for black Americans,

New York's lower east side was for European immigrants their gateway to the American dream.

Female: 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 $9-$10 a week, working a six day week,

and he would tell me how he was able to buy lunch everyday 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.

Female: 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.

Female: Nothing was like being in New York.

Just the magic of everything.

The world, full of things to be explored.

That time was one of adventure and your life as having a shape to it.

Sort of a thread, like a narrative, a story.

A feeling that anything may unfold.

Narrator: The decade's startling changes would soon spread

from American cities to envelope the entire nation.

Far from the speakeasies of the dance holes and the night clubs,

there was another America in the 1920s.

Here people still lived as their parents and grandparents had

and they liked it that way.

Male: In the early 1920s, this was a quiet, easy life.

Neighbors would come over for what we called "front porch visits"

and that's where there would be discussion, maybe a little gossip.

Narrator: Throughout the 1920s, new technologies 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.

Male: You can't understand this century without understanding the effect,

the impact of science and technology.

My father's generation that really saw amazing changes.

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.

Totally changed the kind of space we live in, really.

Narrator: 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 one billion dollars

on the construction of highways, bridges and tunnels,

the beginnings of a national infrastructure which knit the country together.

Female: My father took my mother and me in the car

for the first rid 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 is 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.

Narrator: Roadways were soon dotted with a new phenomenon.

Roadside advertising.

Female: They were big and colorful

and beautiful, I thought.

Narrator: 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 innovation 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: But first we'd like to ask you to let us know if this broadcast is reaching you.

Narrator: From its scratchy beginnings in 1920 as a mere hobby

radio would become a nation wide phenomenon as important as the car.

Young radio enthusiast, Elbert 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.

Man: One of the gentlemen was reading the election returns.

He got sick, so for about 35 or 45 minutes

I read election returns.

Nobody had any comprehension of the significance of what was going on.

Don't forget, there were only a couple 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,

laughing at the same jokes.

It was a kind of communal exercise here,

and very much a strengthening of your notion of what it was to be an American.

Narrator: Along with, and sometimes propelled by the

great technological leap in the 1920s, social patters in place

for decades also began to shift.

No where 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 new found 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.

Female: 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 no women who's

dresses reach to their ankles

to flesh, flesh everywhere.

And a lot of 20s culture is about the fun of smashing prohibitions.

Narrator: The more daring women of the day were known

as flappers and vamps.

Male: Sure I remember flappers.

They were all over the place.

They were older than me, but when you look

at the flappers from the eyes of a young guy - wow!

Female: 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.

Narrator: 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.

Male: Smoking, or drinking, being loose with talk, using profanity.

This sifted down from the cities.

From New York and Chicago.

And this finally had an unwanted place in my rural community.

Here was a girl who come home from - she'd been working

in Chicago - she's coming 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 future generation was going to bring.

This country was founded on respect for God

and a sense of righteousness, and keeping

with the Sabbath Day, and people brought

their children up on the discipline and reading the scripture

and all of those things were part of the things that bound us together in America.

The people were solid.

We were church-going, and very little crime, and so on.

Narrator: 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 round the world.

Here in Dayton, Tennessee in the summer of 1925

one of the centuries most famous court room 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.

Male: People would bring in trained chimpanzees

dressed in suites 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 walked maybe 100 yards this way

and you'd have a street preacher.

I didn't know what he was preaching about.

You never saw the same people twice.

You go to the same place the next day

there'd be some other people from some other part of the United States there.

But it was a lot of hoopla.

I enjoyed it.

Scopes Trial became emblematic.

Everybody had to make up their mind.

People who'd never been to Tennessee, couldn't even find Tennessee,

had to think about this question.

Do I believe in modern science?

Narrator: At times it seemed that the whole world

had converged on Dayton.

Male: 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 them with a stick.

Narrator: When all the Hoopla ended

John T. Scopes was found guilty and fined 100 dollars

a ruling later overturned on technicality.

What Scopes represented and what the rest of the world came to witness

was a colossal clash of ideals.

The cool reason of science seemed to threaten

the deep and dividing 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, an 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 the people really wanted both the benefits of the future

and the familiar comforts of the past.

Male: They want the fruits modernity.

They want it automated, 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 toward people who seem to be different.

It goes into intolerance and into the Ku Klux Klan.

Narrator: Ku Klux Klan membership soared to four million

in the 1920s.

Male: 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.

It created a great deal of 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 elsewhere.

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 Alabama.

It was nation wide.

Narrator: The Klan was actively recruiting in many Northern states.

Female: 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.'

Male: Those white people who catered to us, and were in sympathy to us,

they caught hell too.

Narrator: 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.

Male: Many of them out in the crowd and the robes and the hood on too

and then the leader said 'Take all these niggers out and hang them.'

Narrator: His two friends were lynched.

James Cameron barely escaped with his life.

Male: 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.'

Narrator: 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 thousand strong

down the streets of the nation's capitol.

Clearly the forces of 20s modernity had stirred

bitter resistance.

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.

Female: In our family we were never baseball oriented

but I would've had to be deaf not to have heard about Babe Ruth.

Narrator: 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.

Male: 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 went

from Scranton to the Yankee Stadium.

It was 35 cents to see the Babe and all the Yankee players.

Babe Ruth was a hero.

[indecipherable]

Seems like everyone back then was a hero.

We'd write to get autographs.

They'd graciously send us pictures.

If we sent postage stamps, you got your picture back.

It was a very nice time to live.

It felt good to be an American.

Narrator: 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.

Female: 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.

Narrator: 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 foot 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.

Female: In Yankee stadium they had three minutes of silence praying for him.

Everybody in the country was praying for him.

Narrator: 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.

Male: 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.

Narrator: 100 thousand 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.

Female: When Lindbergh came back it was as though

he walked on the water.

The public couldn't get enough of him.

He was a big star.

There wasn't a woman in America that wasn't crazy about him.

Male: He was a hero.

He was a nice guy, he was new, he was young,

he was kind of quirky, but that was what they wanted.

Narrator: The parade for Lindbergh down Broadway

was the biggest national celebration

since the end of World War I.

Male: 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.

Narrator: After Lindbergh's triumph there remained

only one continent for the air plane to conquer - Antarctica.

The frozen and forbidden 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 going to select

I forget how many Boy Scouts

to go to the pole.

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 came home and I said 'Mom, what do you think?

I'm going to go to the North Pole with Admiral Byrd!'

She said 'You can't go.'

I said 'Why?'

She said 'You'll catch a death of cold.'

I never went.

My cousin went instead.

There were 120 men connected with the Byrd expedition.

Narrator: 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.

Male: We stepped on land that had never been seen or touched before

and that just excited me beyond words.

Absolutely a new frontier.

Narrator: 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.

Male: 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.

Narrator: 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.

American's and their airplane had reached the ends of the Earth.

By the end of the 1920s

anything seemed possible.

Male: The most extraordinary thing about the decade

of the 20s was a pandemic air of optimism,

of 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.'

Narrator: 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 American's 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.

Male: The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker,

everybody, oddly enough, was in the stock market.

One of our chofers 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 and doing very well.

Narrator: 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.

Male: 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 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 streets outside of the Exchange.

At 3:00 the bell rang and that was it.

Narrator: More than 30 billion dollars in paper value

simply vanished that day as the stock market crashed.

Female: The famous word, the crash.

Over night it was like bombs fell.

Narrator: The 20s bubble had burst, and with it

the decade's optimism.

Male: People lost every penny that they had.

Nobody had any pensions.

There was no Medicare, Medicaid, social security.

If people lost their money, that was it.

They were down and out.

Female: 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.

Male: In '29 I lost a million dollars.

What do you do?

Same story.

Wash your face and hands and comb your hair

and start all over again.

Narrator: 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 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]