1920s Pop Culture
Radio
- Popular culture in the 1920's was characterized by innovation in film, visual art and architecture, radio, music, dance, fashion, literature, and intellectual movements.
- Radio in the 1920's "knitted the nation together." It started as local stations, but as technology improved, national stations became more and more popular.
- These national programs were sponsored by manufacturers and distributors of brand-name products.
- Stations broadcasted everything from news and music to politics and news.
- "Amos 'n' Andy" was a popular comedy program of the time.
Pop Heroes
- The great popularity of movies in the 1920s gave rise to a new kind of celebrity—the movie star.
- One of the brightest stars of the 1920s was Charlie Chaplin, a comedian whose signature character was a tramp in a derby hat and ragged clothes.
- Rudolph Valentino, a dashing leading man of romantic films, was such a big star that his unexpected death in 1926 drew tens of thousands of women to the funeral home where his body lay.
- Charles Lindbergh was a daredevil pilot who practiced his skills as an airline pilot, a dangerous, life-threatening job at the time.
- Lindbergh heard about a $25,000 prize for the first aviator to fly a nonstop transatlantic flight, or a flight across the Atlantic Ocean, and wanted to win.
- He rejected the idea that he needed a large plane with many engines, and developed a very light single-engine craft with room for only one pilot.
- On May 21, 1927, Lindbergh succeeded by touching down in Paris, France after a thirty-three-and-a-half-hour flight from New York.
- Lindbergh earned the name “Lucky Lindy” and became the most beloved American hero of the time.
Emelia Earhart
- A little over a year after Lindbergh’s flight, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, returning to the U.S. as a hero.
- She went on to set numerous speed and distance records as a pilot.
- In 1937 she was most of the way through a record-breaking flight around the world when she disappeared over the Pacific Ocean.