Posted on 11/19/2015 3:32:46 PM PST by sparklite2
From the 20’s onward we were pushed to the left. That wasn’t “freed up” social norms. That was the start of making women unhappy with their roles as wives and mother’s. FDR was a champ at socialism.
Funny how the twenties went left with virtually wall to wall republican federal governance, spiking capitalism, and the emergence on nationality enhancing movies, radio, and auto travel.
AAMOF literature of the time was uniformly critical of dominant culture. Sinclair Lewis and the ‘lost generation’ in Europe weren’t writing paeans to society at large. HL Mencken railed against a zeitgeist that refused to move.
Socially, the 20’s were a push leftward. Socialists are patient and they take baby steps.
The decade began with the Palmer Raids, which were caused by radicalism in the form of mail bombs, bombs at Wall Street, and communist union agitation. This was a society under stress from the left, an unsuitable environment for moving the needle toward socialism. Eugene Debs ran for office a few times ... from his prison cell.
Just watched the feature film “The Flapper” (1920) last night, starring Olive Thomas. Probably not what most people would envision, as most nowadays would associate the term flapper to the wilder days of the late-1920s. This conveyed a much different world. Seems to be quite a big cultural gap between 1920 and 1929.
As for the 1930s, it’s always interested me that as the politics went far left, the culture retrenched and became a bit more conservative. Maybe it was just due to the economic hard times, or a sort of recognition that things had gone too far in the 1920s, and an instinctive inclination that folks were now paying for it. Add a certain nostalgia for the pre-WW1 era, which always tended to strike a lot of people as the demarcation point for when history started going nuts.
Hadn’t seen that movie. I’ll look for it. One of my favorites, though a bit silly, period movies of the twenties is Thoroughly Modern Milly.
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