Teen Culture of the 1920's

The Twenties... the jazz age... Flaming Youth... these labels evoke excitement and change, fabulous wealth and wild parties, the romance of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. They conjure up images of fashionable young men and women dancing the Charleston and drinking bathtub gin, living in the careless leisure of the moment. This was the decade when the young came into their own- when everyone wanted to be young.

But it was a decade of dramatic contrasts too. The liberal ideas of psychoanalist Sigmund Freud disturbed the moral and religious conservatism of many citizens; the peace after World War I was marred by a racial prejudice; the "noble experiment" of Prohibition agaisnt the sale of alcoholism beverages, which began as a triumph for the reformers, led countless Americans to defy the law openly; and the economic boom turned into bust. Teens were both participants in and symbols of these struggles.

Leopold and Loeb

Three of the decade's most famous teens were involved in one of it's most sensational trials. Nathan Leopold, age nineteen, and his friend Richard Loeb, age eighteen, were arrested in 1924 for the brutal muder of fourteen- year-old Bobby Franks, son of a wealthy Chicago businessman. Leopold and Loeb, who were also wealthy and priviledged, as well as phenomenally intelligent, had graduated from prestigious universities, and Leopold, who was in law school, was already a recognized ornithologist At first the police and the public could not believe in their guilt, much less understand their motivation, but when evidence agaisnt them grew, they both confessed. Their motivation was to commit the perfect crime and they had chosen Bobby at random to be their victim. Persuaded by their reading of Friederich Nietzsche's theories about "superman," they planned and executed their crime believing the body would never be discovered and that they would get away with it and never be found guilty. They were, in fact, cuaght within ten days of the murder.

Into the scene of the public outcry over the "thrill killers" stepped America's most famous defense attorney Clarence Darrow, who was determined to see to it that the boys received a fair trial but also wished to test the death penalty in Illinois. He mounted an eloquent defense of Leopold and Loeb, pleading them guilty and emotionally handicapped but not insane. Using the theories of Sigmund Freud, Darrow asserted that, despite their wealth, the boys had not been happy children and that their fantasy lives had blurred their grasp of reality. He raised the issues of their homosexual attachment to each other (women were barred from the courtroom during this phase of the trial) and their earlier minor criminal acts. The trial lasted a month, during which it dominated the public media with the spectacle of two thrill-seeking teens, or two guilty but pathetic teens, depending on one's viewpoint. In his summation, Darrow stated that executing them would be a barbaric act, not fit for a civilized nation. The judge (darrow's guirlty plea had avoided a jury trial) sentenced each of the boys to life immprisonment for murder, plus ninety-nine years for kidnapping. The boys' youth was a deciding factor in the judge's desicion. Richard Loeb died in prison a few years later when he was stabbed by an inmate. Nathan Leopold lived many years in prison, but he was eventually paroled; he died at the age of sixty-six.

The excitement and daring of flight focused public attention on the men and women who flew the planes; their exotic expertise, their freedom from earth, their casual acceptance of the daily risk of death made them romantic and heroic figures especially to teen boys. During the Twenties, one famous flyer was humiliated by his peers yet became a prophet for American airpower. The other became the greatest symbol of American bravery and know-how in the decade, caprturing the popular imagination as no twetieth-century hero had before.

At age nineteen Billy Mitchell left college and enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army. He was assigned to the aviation section of the Signal corps in 1915 and took flying lessons on his own time. By 1918 he was commanding hundreds of U.S. and French planes during World War I in Europe, bombing enemy targets aggressively and winning a promotion to brigadier general for his military success. Afterward, in Washington, D.C., as assistant chief of the Air Service, he began to advocate an independent U.S. Air Force. His superiors in the Army and Navy found him insubordinate and, sending him off to San Antonio demoted to colonel, hoped to silence his critism of the military hierarchy.

They did not reckon with his determination; he continued to write and speak his views. after a navy dirigible crashed in September 1925, Mitchell publicly accused the Navy and the War Department of incompetency, negligence, and "official stupidity." The military response was a court-martial in which Mitchell was tried by thirteen officers, none of whom had ever flown. Despite defense testimony by famous aviators, Mitchell was found guilty of conduct that "brought discredit on the military service" and suspended from rank and duty for five years. He resigned from the service early in 1926.

In the twenties, Mitchell predicted that the airplane would surpass the battleship as an instrument of war; he predicted that Alaska would become strategically important; and he predicted that the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor was vulnerable to enemy attack. Most significant of all, he predicted the importance of an indepedent air Force. All these predictions came true, but Mitchell did not live to see them. He died in 1936, before World War II proved him right.

Charles Lindbergh, in contrast was showered with an outpouring of love and admiration by the American public. Like many teens who fell in love with airplanes, Lindbergh left college to learn to fly and soon bought his own Curtis Jenny. He tried barnstorming and wing-walking and became an air-mail pilot in 1926. The shy twenty-five-year-old, nicknamed "Lucky Lindy" after surviving a parachute accident, began seeking financial backers to make a run at the $25,000 Orteig prize offered to the aviator making the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris. Several other, more experienced pilots had died trying, but Lindbergh persisted and finally persuaded the Saint Louis Globe-Democrat newspaper, along with some businessmen, to fund his flight. Moreover, he volunteered to fly solo.

Lindbergh chose a modified monoplane built by Ryan Aircraft Company; his backers named it The Spirit of St. Louis. The wings were lenghtened, and a huge fuel tank was installed, leaving nor room for a windscreen. To save weight, Lindbergh had a wicker chair installed instead of a regular pilot's seat, and he refused to carry a radio. He took off in the rain from New York's Roosevelt field on May 29, 1927, a little before 8 a.m.; at 10:22 p.m. on May 21, at Le Bourget Airport outside paris, his little plane landed safely, after thrity-three and a half hours of continuous flying and a constant struggle to stay awake.

Paris went wild. More than 100,000 people, who had waited into the night at the airport with alternating optimism and despair, rushed his plane and carried Lindbergh out of the cockpit onto their shoulders. Many more thousands, hearing of his success, headed for the airport, creating the largest traffic jam in French history. When they arrived, they surrounded the small building where the exhausted Lindbergh was recovering. When he returned to America, he was unprepared for even greater public excitement that surrounded him. Letters, telegrams, parades, pleas from the press for interviews and films- all trappings of sudden and incredible fame- invaded his private life. He had gone literally overnight from an obscure Minnesota mail pilot to an international hero, a symbol of hope and success for millions. With crime, speakeasies, wild flappers, and dissolute college boys dominating the media, America's image needed a lift, and Lindbergh provided it. He seemed, with his Midwestern modesty, his shy youthfulness, and his famously tousled hair, to represent all that was innocent and good about America.

One of the most visible results of the economic boom of the early Twenties was the emergence of the suburbs. As automobiles became more affordable and building materials cheaper, the number of single-family dwellings outside the central urban areas increased dramatically. One estimate suggests that more than twice as many new houses were begun every year between 1922 and 1929 than at any other comparable previous time (West 1996, 101).

A new standard of living was now possible for middle- and working-class families. Vacuum cleaners, good quality plumbing, and Frigidaire refrigerators, which now could make ice cubes, all became accepted parts of middle-class family life, along with fresh fruits and vegetables at local markets, provided by train and by truck on the rapidly improving road system. Even more desirable for many were the new processed foods: bread already baked and sliced (about 12 cents a loaf), milk in bottles (`7 cents), canned soups, frozen vegatbles, peanut butter and breakfast cereals- Kellog's Corn Flakes, Kellogg's Rice Krispies, and Post Grape- Nuts. Life expectancy increased with these haelthful foods, and the women who entered the workforce appreciated their convenience. Not all foods were healthful, however; teens could enjoy some of the junk food they still eat today: Butterfinger candy bars, Milky Way bars, and Wrigle's gum.

The new home appliance that affected the way in which Americans lived in the Twenties most was the radio. Experiments had for years been developing the technology of radio, but most historians place the beginning of the radio age in America in November of 1920, when Pittsburgh entrepreneur Frank Conrad broadcast the election returns from his new radio station KDKA. By 1924 there were five million radios in American homes (West 1996, 89) with the number growing yearly; it had become a national obsession. Those who could afford them bought elegant, wood-encased radios, but many tuned in on homemade crystal sets with headphones, which could be afforded even by poor families in isolated regions of the country. Teens in Oregon could make their own radios and listen to the same music and sports events as those in New York. Alone, with friends, or with their whole families gathered around their sets in the evenings, they cheered on their favorite boxer and heard the latest tunes. Among farm families in Wisconsin and Illinois, individual radio ownership lagged behind that of city dwellers, but listening to the national broadcasts was a pleasurable and unifying community activity.

Radio homogenized American popular culture as had no phenomenon before, but the racial stereotyping that seems to permeate American life dominated early radio as well. In 1929 NBC began airing a fifteen-minute comedy show about two Chicago black men who were always in some kind of trouble; soon Amos n' Andy was a national phenomenon that was heard throught the country and in rural communities by adults, teens, and children alike, even in department stores and restaurants. Well into the thirties and forties, despite protests by black Americans, 7 p.m. was Amos n' Andy time in millions of homes.

Like the radio, the daily comic pages were a remarkable unifying force in American life in the twenties, shared by all family members at all socioeconomic levels throught the country. Begun around the turn of the century and carried-thanks to syndication-by all the popular newspapers, several strips reflected even more than radio the remarkable social changes that marked the decade. Some, the gag strips, focused on a single joke in the last of four panels; others offered more serious narrative lines that continued for days or weeks.

A typical late 1920's comic page in, for example, The New York American or the San Francisco Examiner carried several of the most popular gag strips and story strips. "Barney Google," with his "googly" eyes, was the poor little guy everyone picked on; he invented the term "heebie- jeebies" and later renamed up with hillbilly buddy, Snuffy Smith. "Mutt and Jeff," the tall guy and the short guy, often appeared with recognizable people from the news. "Bringing up Father" followed the bumbling Jiggs, a newly minted millionaire who just wanted to enjoy his humble Irish roots, while his domineering wife, Maggie, a stylish flapper, tried to make him more genteel. "Krazy Kat," hopelessly in love with Ignatz the Mouse, every day got beaned with a brick for his troubles, even when Offissa Pup put Ignatz in jail. This strip, drawn by George Herriman until his death in 1944, was a remarkable comic strip and highly respected even today for its word play and surreal settings.

Just as the radio soon had its soap operas-daily fifteen-minute family dramas sponsored by soap companies- the comic strips had their more serious side. "Little Orphan Annie" first appeared in 1924, with her pouf of red hair, her blank eyes, and her dog, Sandy; she took up residence with her millionaire friend Daddy Warbucks (who had gotten rich by selling arms) and met slumlords and crooks head on in her street-tough optimism. "Gasoline Alley" reflected the craze for cars in small-town life and the problems they bought. When the publisher complained that the strip might not appeal to women as much as men, artist Frank King commanded, in 1921, to "Get a baby in there fast!" The bachelor character Walt Wallet soon found a baby on his doorstep (Harvey 1995, 49). The baby was named Skeezix, and as he grew, the other characters aged- an innovative touch that is still unusual in the comic-strip world. Both "Little Orphan Annie" and "Gasoline Alley" achieved phenomenal popularity and continued into the last decade of the century.

The strips also recognized women's new freedom to vote, smoke in public, abandon their corsets and stays, shorten their skirts, and go to work. "Tillie the Tailor," which first appeared in 1921, was about a lovely flapper who longed for a handsome escort but was constantly courted by homely Mac; "Winnie Winkle," with her bobbed hair and fashionable outfits, frequently had to cope with her pesky little brother, Perry. "Betty Boop" began life in the movie cartoons but quickly moved to the comic-strip page where she played a sweet, silly, sexy movie star.

The first of the few comic-strips in the century to recognize teens as a seperate group was "Harold Teen," first drawn in 1919 by Carl Ed (pronounced "Eed" according to Goulart in the Encyclopedia of American Comics 1990, 172). Although teen life- in the twenties as in the fifties- seemed impertinent, dissolute, or wild in the reality of the front page, in the fantasy of the comic page it was sweet and innocent. Harold and his friends may have dressed and talked in the latest jazz-age fashion, but they hung out at the soda fountain instead of the speakeasy and worried mostly about dates and money, very much as "Archie" and his pals did in the fifties and still do today.

The configuration of families and the expectations Americans had of them were changing. Whereas, at least in the popular side of the family, the father had been the undisputed head of the family and his authority unchallenged, popular magazine articles and books were now beginning to extol virtues of a loving family, in which the father shared his power with others. Sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd confirmed such changes in their classic study of Muncie, Indiana, Middletown (1929). In one of their surveys, they asked teens to rank the most desirable trait in a father was "Spending time with his children, reading, talking, playing with them, etc." (Lynd and Lynd 1929, 524). Second was "Respecting his children's opinions." In contrast, a mother's most desirable trait, by a considerable margin, was "Being a good cook and housekeeper," and second was "Always having time to read, go on picnics or play with her children."

In another survey, the Lynds asked teens to rank sources of disagreement with their parents. Both girls and boys ranked "the hour you get in at night" and the "the number of times you go out on school nights" as the two most troublesome family issues. "The use of the automobile" was ranked fifth by boys and fourth by girls. "Your spending money" also ranked high for both genders. Items that were not on the Lynds' list but were added by the teens were even more revealing: smoking, drinking, dancing, riding in cars to other towns, and, for girls, "petting parties." Obviously, the new freedom was making itself felt in family tensions for many middle- and working class teens. At the same time that families were seeking to become more intimate loving, and accepting of each other, teens were finding opportunities and incentives to move away from their parents and family and affirm their independence with their peers.

This decade saw a major change in the number of teens in the workplace. In earlier decades, work was clearly valued more than school, in both rural and urban cities; teens were encouraged to work first and go to school later, if at all. Families needed the income their older (and sometimes their younger) children could provide. Urban children sought the validation and excitement, as well as the spending money, that work offered; rural teens as part of land ownership and management when they grew older.

During the twenties, however, the situation changed. in 1920, according to Elliot West, more than 51% of males aged between ten and fifteen were employed. By the end of the decade, these numbers had decreased dramatically, and the number of young people attending school rose just as dramatically. As West points out, such figures may not be reliable, since the employement of the oyung is difficult to document (1996, 119), but the trend is clear.

The causes for the shift are multiple and complex. The economic boom in the cities caused by technological and manufacturing advances put a number of young people out of work. Young boys who once carried messages, for example, were replaced by cheaper, more efficient telephone. As crop prices fell, rural teens sensed economic opportunity slipping away from them and migrated in larger numbers to the cities. In Southern states, where employement of the young was always high relative to the rest of the country, young people still worked hard in the textile, tobacco, and farming industries, but in the Western states, a flood of immigrant, especially form Mexico and the Philippines, worked the large fruit and vegetable farms, where they accepted extremely low wages for their back-breaking labor. Many second-generation Mexican-American teen women in California found employement in canneries and clothing factories, or as seasonal farm laborers or domestic workers. Althouugh many aspired to clerical positions, their ethnic appearance and background usually denied them those opportunities (Ruiz 1992, 65). African-American youths suffered from discrimination as well, finding all but the most menial jobs closed to them and good schooling often completely unavaliable. In contrast, America's middle- and working- class white American teens were entering school rapidly accelerating numbers. In "Middletown," the Lynds found that employement in factories for young men in their late teens was high relative to their population; maangement preffered the quicker reflexes of the young to run the increasingly complicated machinery. A few teens took part-time jobs, and a small number left school at the legal age of fourteen for a variety of reasons, only a few of which concerned work. The importance of work, nevertheless, had been eclipsed by the importance of school in the lives of teens in "Middletown" as well as in most other parts of the country.

Some of the most dramatic and long-lasting changes of the decade were made in the schools. Reforms in the politics of child labor, in sociological theories of the family and in the concept of adolescence coalesced around reform of school, especially the secondary, or high, school. At this crucial time, while young people were still theoretically under the control of their parents and other adult figures but were also beginning to take part in some aspects of adulthood, such as working and driving a car, serious preparation for American life became the concern of states and local communities. Ironically, one of the results of these attempts to guide youth carefully into adulthood was the increasing involment of teens in their own social sphere, where adults were neither invited nor welcomed. This isolation was felt even more in college, where teens' isolation from their homes and families became not only social but physical, and where the peer culture dominated choices and values almost completely.

High School

Changes in the high school curriculum and social structure came with remarkable swiftness. By 1925 most nof the courses and most of the structure of the high school day, as it has come to be most familiar, were in place in both North and South were mostly taught in poorly equipped schools with inferior equipment and old textbooks, despite the amenities avaliable in white schools because of the economic boom.

Students' days were spent going from class to class, sitting in bolted-down seats in neat rows, being quiet and listening to the teacher, and giving back textbook information- snatching as today, a few minutes of social chaos in the hallways during the change of classes. They took English, math, foreign languages, history, geography, and sciences in newly equipped laboratories. Teachers tended to rely on textbooks for information and expected students by and large, to give back the text on tests. Most students took several achievement tests during their four years; the new emphasis on testing was part of the effort being made to standardize schooling and provide a basic education for all (although it raised more questions than it answered; see West 1996, 128-32).

However students were also offered a range of options never before avaliable in high schools. Vocational training for boys became an important addition to the curriculum during this decade; shop classes for metal work. auto mechanics, drafting, and office skills were edging aside more academic subjects in the competition for public dollars and support. It was important to prepare boys for jobs rather than college, especially among middle classes where high school attendance was at an all time high. Girls now took courses in home economics, where they learned about balanced meals, well- made clothing, and child care. They learned to be intelligent consumers; boys learned to make the goods consumed. In Middletown, the Lynds found that many parents worried that vocational courses were robbing their children of their college preparation , but the trend was nationwide.

Another national trend that characterized the decade was teaching american history and civics. History therefore in the schools had been a broader subject, including European and ancient history as well as American. As more immigrant families spread across the nation, the need to assert the character of America as a unifying force made many believe the need for America-focused courses was urgent, especially courses that extolled citizenship and democracy. Americanization became the duty of both primary and high schools, especially when immigrant children lived in their communities, a situation especially acute in Western border states during the wave of immigration from Mexico during the 1920s. Many such students were forbidden to speak their native language in school; they were simply "immersed" in English and expected to learn it, and then learn their subjects in it, without any bilingual or English-as-a-second-language training. Immigrant teens sometimes found themselves assigned to a first-grade classroom with six and sven-year olds. Textbooks embedded messages about American hygene, food, housing, clothing, and family structure into the language lessons, and teachers Americanized the names of their immigrant students. In an effort to acculturate Native Americans more quickly, teens and children were sometimes taken from their reservation schools and sent to boarding schools to learn American language, culture, and the religion of Christianity (west 1996, 134-40). Many of these attempts were well-intended. Reformers wished to open up more economic opportunities to such minorites, and occassionally they were successful. Just as often, however the youth who underwent forcible acculturation felt more different, more isolated than before, and they turned inward to their own people and folkways for comfort and support.

During the Twenties, for the first time, school became the center of teen social life. The number of curriculum-related clubs began to decline as the number of social organizations and activities increased. Athletics, especially football became the dominant unifying force for high school students; boosting the team was the duty of all students in all grades, and the athletes themselves were the stars of school life. The school mascot- whether Green Dragons, Bearcats, or something else-was the rallying symbol for all extracurricular activities. The school year was designed primarily around games and practice times. The Lynds found that, in "Middletown," even the tradition of "Chapel," the term for school convocations left over from a more religious structure, became on occasion "Pep Chapel" (1929, 217). Segregation was still a force against the apparent unity, however. In the Lynd's "Middletown," Negro students were allowed "under protest" in the schools, but any school with a Negro in its basketball team could not play in the YMCA building where tournaments were held. (479).

Such purely social clubs as there were took the form of fraternaties and sororities, which schools often tried to outlaw because of their exclusive membership policies, their secrecy, and rumors of hazing. In any event, school itself had become the center of life for most teens, especially white middle- and upper-class teens. In previous generations, school was a place to go when teens were not working. In the Twenties, as the Lynds found, home became the place to go when a teen was not at high school. (211).

College

College attendance shot up during the Twenties. By the end of the decade, according to the U.S. Bureau of Education, 12% of young people aged nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, were in school full-time (Fass 1977, 407). Many different kinds of colleges were avaliable, from the elite Eastern single-gender schools, to Midewestern coeducational residential colleges, to junior colleges and Negro colleges. The dynamic African-American Mary Mcleod Bethune worked especially hard on behalf of Negro girls in Daytona, Florida; she was able to raise many dollars for her efforts, which culminated in the establishment of Bethune-Cookman College in 1925, a coeducational four-year college still active in Daytona Beach. The Lynds noticed that students from "Middletown" tended to choose colleges close to home, but the opportunities, especially for women, to experience new environments were opening up rapidly. No longer were they avaliable only to the previleged few.

Once there, students experienced the freedom- and the difficulty- of an environment controlled largely by their peers rather than by adult authorizaties. Those who had gone to study and achieve academic success fell into the minority; most students, according to Paula Fass, spent less than half their time on studies or intellectual pursuits (1977, 173). Instead they enjoyed athletic and social activities and studied only when absolutely necessary to pass- and they encouraged others, especially freshmen, to do the same.

Football became a national craze, and huge stadiums came to dominate many campuses; game weekends topped the student's social calendar.

Much campus social life, at large and small schools was controlled by fraternities and sororities. Being chosen by a good fraternity (one with the most socially accepted adept, wealthy boys, for example) was a formidable hurdle for many freshmen; to get in meant that you would find a ready- made group of friends and comrades. their rituals and symbols allied the new student with long standing traditions, giving him an identity in the chaos of college life. Getting in was getting easier if one had good looks, an easy-going personality, stylish clothes, and a car. It was also easier if one was white and a Gentile, although several national Jewish fraternities were already in place and black fraternities, however were often prevented from joining a college's interfraternity organization (Fass 1977, 152-53).

For girls, the sorority provided the same haven along with the same rites of passage, as well as an informal but rigorious education in becoming a women by Twenties standards. One researcher estimated there were between fifteen and twenty sororities on the campus of every coeducational college during the decade; at Indiana University, 220 girls lived in dormitories, while 600 girls lived in seventeen sorority houses (Rothman 1978, 181). Sororities were also restricted in their membership;they sought out girls with good families, manners, and style. Once chosen, a girl was taught by her comrades how to wear her hair, dress, play bridge, smoke, and dance- all of which aimed to make her a good companion for fraternity boy and, ulitmately, a good wife. "The college age is the mating age and many fine relationships ripen into love and marriage follows," said one women dean (1978, 182). Another commented that the spirit of the sorority was "more important than any oher influence in determining the moral character of our colleges" (183). Indeed, this was true, in that girls in sororities usually learned how to encourage a boy's sexual advances just so far and no farther.

The image of the college student in the Twenties was created in large measure by F. Scott Fitzgerald's best-selling first novel, published in 1920: This Side of The Paradise. Popular with young readers throughout the decade, the semiautobiographical account of Fitzgerald's first years in college describes cutting classes, shoplifting, joyriding in cars, sleeping on the beach, petting, and getting drunk, as well as falling exquisitely and painfully in love, learning poetry, talking about life with friends, and experiencing the deepest loyalties and betrayals. Its portrayals of languishing students and wild flappers shocked many adults, as Fitzgerald probably wanted, but if they were an exaggeration, they also had a degree of truth that appealed to many teens of the decade, who were experiencing freedoms never before avaliable to the young and reveling in the excitement of The Jazz Age.

The "Flapper" or "Sheba"

The sweeping skirts, elaborate hats, and tight-waisted blouses of the fashionable ladies of the first two decades disappeared quickly early in The Twenties. As they entered the workplace, smoked and drank in public, and danced the Charleston to jazz music, women refused to be bound any longer by any thight underwear or binding dresses. The popular press called them "flappers," a word some said came from their fashion of wearing unfastened galoshes which "flapped" when they walked, or from the idea of young birds flapping their wings. The origin of the term is still mysterious, but it certainly referred to a fashionable teenage girl with a certain look; if she was an especially beautiful and sexy flapper, she was a "sheba."

Her clothes revealed her new freedom and sexuality. Necklines were lowered and softened even on daytime dresses and blouses, sleeves disappeared for evening, waistlines dropped to an easy slimness around the hips, skirts shortened even for evening to reveal the ankles and calves, stockings were rolled down to reveal bare knees. Favored fabrics for the popular short, loose dress were floating and sheer, occasionally with heavy beading on evening dresses, which were sometimes completely backless and softly draped. Tight cloche (or bell-shaped) hats, ropes of long beads, low-heeled pumps with a shaped Cuban heel completed the look. Many women and girls dieted to achieve the boyish, flat-chested, slim-hipped body required by the clothes. Winter coats also lost their waists, their length and bulky fabric creating a kind of "tubular" look. According to fashion scholar Alison Lurie, "Thousands of women entered the second decade of the twentieth century shaped like hourglasses, and came out of it shaped like rolls of carpet" (Lurie 1981, 73). On the other hand, the one-piece bathing suit, a very revealing garment, appeared for the first time. Only the daring wore it at first, but it promised more freedom for women in physical sports. Daring active women also tired bloomers or knickers for sporting occasions.

An even more dramatic change took place in hairstyles. Instead of long hair, worn down for day or piled high in the evening, girls began to "bob" their hair, cutting it short and straight across the back and sometimes plastering it into curls very close to the head or with a single curl in the middle of the day, who deliberately shocked their parents by going to the beauty parlor to get the new style. Some girls even cut their hair in the more exaggerated Eton style, very much like a boy's with a shaved neckline in back and hair falling over the face in front. The new styles required more trips to the hairdresser, and the number of beauty parlors increased; in New Yok City between 1922 and 1927, the number grew from 750 to 3,500 (Rothman1978, 186).

Women and girls also wore cosmetics than ever before. In earlier decades, a "painted" women was automatically an immoral one. During the twenties, mascaraded lashes, face powder, rouge, and red lipstick appeared on most women and girls who wanted to appear fashionable. They often plucked their eyebrows into high arch, like the film stars of the decade, and used lipstick to shape their lips into "beestung" look- tiny and pouting.

Such artifice, like bobbed hair, caused many arguments between teens and their parents, and how girls appeared at high school became a source of contention. Paula Fass quotes a seventeen-year-old girl who complained that just a little rouge and a slightly shorter skirt made her parents think she was "indicent" when she was really a "nice girl" and wearing the same things her friends wore (Fass 1977, 284). One "Middletown" teen boy warned his mother that his younger sister did not wear silk stockings to high school instead of fashionable lisle ones she had to been made to wear, none of the boys would pay attention to her (Lynd and Lynd 1929, 1963). For their part, parents worried about the expense of the new emphasis on fashion, and some schools tried to enforce dress codes. In one Ohio high school, a girls social club instituted their own regulations: no sheer fabrics, silk stockings, makeup, or "transparent sweaters worn without waists" (i.e. without a camisole under them) (Fass 1977, 216). Obviously, some girls were indeed wearing those things to school.

Many have commented on the combination of boyishness and sex appeal in the flapper style. Certainly it did flaunt the combination of youth and sex in a way never before seen in girls and women. Lurie, however, asserts that the style was less boyish than childlike; the dropped-waist blouses and Mary Jane shoes with their round toes and straps over the arch that were stylish in the Twenties had been worn by children in earlier decades. Was the young flapper displaying her sexuality and at the same time keeping real sexual activity at bay by looking like a child? This same question would be asked about the model Twiggy in the sixties and again in the Nineties about the model Kate Moss.

The "Sheik"

Rudolph Valentino's exotic appearance and manner in the 1921 movie "The Sheik" became the ideal for fashionable young men in the Twenties, and, like young women, men adopted styles that enhanced their youth. Beards and mustaches disappeared; shoulders and waists became alimmer and clothes were tightened through the middle; and collars softened and were worn open. Boys still wore knickers into their early teens, but when they chose long pants, the fit was looser. The new popularity of golf and tennis caused many young men to adopt the distinctive styles of sport clothing whether they played the sports or not. Loose white flannel sleeveless V-necked sweaters worn over open-collared shirts with cuffs turned up, and wing-tip shoes were a kind of uniform for the elegant young men of the days. Hair was trimmed short and often parted in the middle. The racoon fur coat, big, and bulky, was fashionable wear for college boys who could afford it.

The image of the sheik with his flapper was popularized in drawings by John Held, Jr. His amusing caricatures, some of which appeared on the cover of Life magazine, caught the flavor of the fashion that distiguished the Jazz Age. A 1925 cartoon of young people at a fraternity party captured exactly what was so appealing, and so disturbing, to many about the new style of dress and the behavior that went with it (Mizener 1972, 51). In it, several stylish young couples in evening dress are sitting on the stairs of a fraternity house, openly kissing and embracing while the girls' short skirts creep well above their open knees and the tops of their stockings became clearly visible, yet the girls and boys look completely relaxed and became clearly visible, yet the girls and boys look completely relaxed and innocent. The cartoon is titled, perhaps ironically, "The Dance-Mad Younger Set." Though none of the young people are dancing, the energy of the drawing lets us imagine the uninhibited jazz that provided the accompanienment to their easygoing embraces.

The Twenties, with its explosion of youth culture, saw an accompanienying explosion of slang. As in every decade, it iddentified those who were part of that culture and excluded those who were not. The sheer number of slang expressions associated with American teen life, and their originality and exuberance, would not be matched again until the Fifties and Sixties. One of the charms of "The Harold Teen" comic strip was its dialogue; it provided an easy lessong in the teens vernacular. The decade even saw the publication of slang dictionaries to translate the latest wordplay for the unintiated.

A good-looking regular guy was a sheik or a jazzbo; if he dresses especially well, he was Brooksey (from Brooks Brothers clothes). If he especially liked women, he was a lounge lizard, and he probably liked to pet or neck. He would never be a four-flusher (cheat) or leave a girl to hoof it (walk) home. A good looking girl was a sheba. She might also be the berries, to flirt with her when she was not interested, she might say, "Applesuace!" or "Sou's your anchovie."

One of the worst insults was to call someone "wet"; it meant completely dull, unfashionable, boring. Hooch was only one of a multitude of words for alcohol, and as always there were many words for getting drunk: pie-eyed, ossified, oiled, crocked, polluted, and so on. An unnattractive girl was a dumdora, oil can, flat tire, or pickle; an unattractive man was a grummy ostrich, parlor hound, or porcupine. Money might be jack or shekels. Something really good was swell, and something really funny was a hoot.

With economic good times came more money avaliable for having fun especially for teens in towns and cities; rural teens, dependent on the family farm income, had a harder time, but by the end of the decade they too found ways to enjoy movies and dancing. For younger teens in places like "Middletown," traditional forms of leisure were still part of their lives. They enjoyed school sports, community events, church activities, and reading books and magazines. Older teens, with access to automobiles and perhaps the independence avaliable on a college campus, savored their new freedom and privacy by abandoning the kinds of group socializing that characterized teen life in earlier decades for the date and the possibility of sexual experimentation it offered.

The Car

The rapid growth of the automobile industry and the phenomenal rise in automobile ownership during the Twenties offered visible proof of the economic boom being enjoyed by the country. It revolutionized the family budget and the family time. In the Lynds' famous Middletown, some residents said they preferred a car to indoor plumbing; others said they would give up food and new clothes before they would give up their automobiles (1929, 255-56). Weekends and free time were spent driving, instead of walking or visiting nearby neighbors or relatives. Real vacations became possible as families piled into the car to visit towns that had been inaccessible to them. In rural areas, the car did not so much change the basic pattern of life as expand it. Maintaining a network of friends and relatives was still the most important element of social interaction; the automobile made it possible to visit those farther away.

The freedom experienced by teens in their cars was unprecedented, and it frightened adults. Families learned that their teen children would rather go driving or do something else with their friends than join the family in the car, and no longer did parents become easily or quickly acquinted with their children's friends, which raised a whole new set of moral problems. Courtship moved from the living room to the car; in "Middletown" in 1924, the "sex crimes" committed by nineteen girls in juvenile court took place in automobiles (Lynd and Lynd 1929, 258). The Lynds offer a revealing anecdote about a Sunday School teacher who was giving a lesson on temptation to a group of working-class boys and girls in their late teens: "Can you think of any temptation we have today that Jesus didn't have?" a boy's quick response was, "Speed!" Speeding and car stealing were on the increase in "Middletown," a manifestation of the "motor insanity" that dominated the Twenties (1929, 258).

Teens who went to college found that having or not having a car made considerable difference in one's social life. Fraternities especially sought young men who had cars; sorority girls listed a car among the most desirable traits in a date. Fass's important sociological study of college students in the Twenties, The Damned and the Beautiful, explores the issues on campuses throught student newspapers; one of the most pervasive from Princeton to UCLA was conflict over cars. Students either had cars or wanted them, and in assertions of their personal liberty they often used them to escape the controlled environment of the campus. Administrators tried various prohibitions and bans on them, partly because of traffic jams and parking problems but mostly because in their eyes cars encouraged immortality (Fass 1977, 485). To many, the automobile represented all the changes in teen moral values- smoking, drinking, sexual experimentation, rejection of the family in favor of peers- that emerged in the Twenties.

The decade of the Twenties marked the first time the term "date" was used in its popular sense: an occasion where a boy asked a girl to join him for an afternoon's or evening's outing, for which he generally paid. It was not group activity, and it was not courtship, but something different from both. More important, it was created and maintained by teens themselves, especially middle-class girls, who viewed it as important to popularity and ultimetely marriage but who, by the Twenties, needed more than holding hands in the parental sitting room. The date was, by its very nature, away from home, away from chaperonage, yet the girl was also protected to some degree by rituals sorrounding it.

The automobile and the telephone made the system possible, not to mention spending money. The boy was to initiate the encounter and to provide the funds and the transportation, to dress appropriately, and to be courteous and considerate. He was not to offer sexual advances too quickly, although he should give the girl the sense that he finds her attractive. The girl was to dress as attractive as possible, to be pleasant and amenable to the boy and his friends, to make conversation, to dance well, and to take responsibility for limiting sexual behavior. "The date, as a bargain, was unromantic but affectionate. In dating, style mattered a great deal. Performance was far more important than the unmediated expression of feelings" (Modell 1989, 96).

For high school teens, datingbehavior was somewhat constrained by the proximity to home; college teens had the freedom of fraternity house, where they could drink, smoke, talk freely, and engage in sexual behavior with fewer constraints. The "petting party" was the most notorious arena for testing sexual feelings and resposes. During the decade necking came to refer to ardent and prolonged kissing, while petting described many kinds of erotic activity, but usually referred to caresses and fondling below the neck. At petting parties, where couples engaged in these activites with other couples nearby, the group nature of the event provided automatic limits on how far to go. Although girls and boys might feel pressure to engage in petting, the parties allowed them to experiment in relative safety. Data on sexual behavior among teens in the decade is almost nonexistent, since taboos on adults speaking frankly to the young about such matters were still largely operative, but popular evidence suggests that most teens petted to some degree. The old nation of "nice girls don't" had apperantly disappeared. Rosalind, the perfect flapper in Fitzgerald's This Side Of Paradise, responds to a suitor who thought she was "won" because he kissed her:

"Those days are over. I have to be won all over again every time you see me... There used to be two kinds of kisses: First when girls were kissed and deserted; second, when they were engaged. Now there's a thirs kind, where the man is kissed and deserted. If Mr. Jones of the ninetiesbragged he'd kissed a girl, every one knew he was through with her. If Mr. Jones of 1919 brags the same every one knows it's because he can't kiss her any more. Given a decent start any girl can beat a man nowadays. (1920, 181).

Fass comments that there were still "two kinds of women" in college in the Twenties, but the difference was no longer between "sexual and nonsexual" women but between "sexual women who lived by the rules and those who did not" (1977, 264). According to John Modell, the same was true for high school teens (1989, 87). The "rules" apparently meant that beyond petting, or perhaps even before petting, one should feel some serious affection for one's partner. If sexual intercourse took place, it was nearly always between engaged couples. Evidently, despite the new freedoms and the openly sexy behavior and frank talk among Jazz Age teens, the incidence of premarital sex did not increase and remained mostly a preparation for marriage. In fact, dating and physical intimacy of any degree were still, for both sexes, aimed at finding a marriage partner. Amory Blaine, Fitzgerald's alter ego in This Side of Paradise, experiences many sexual thrills in the course of the novel, most of which involve kissing, but when he meets Rosalind, they fall deeply in love and within weeks are discussing marriage, although his lack of money and position soon causes her to send him away. Many parents were disturbed by their teens' apparently lax ad openly sexual behaviors, calling them dangerous and immoral. Indeed they were by parental standards, but teens themselves denied that they were promiscous. For young immigrant or second-generation teens, the changing patterns of dating and sexual behavior caused an especially high degree of friction at home. In cultures where chaperones were essential, the freedom of young men and women to datem and to find time alone was severely restricted. When a Mexican-American girl, aged sixteen or seventeen, walked home from school with a boy, her mother slapped her for such openly rebellious behavior (Ruiz 1992, 73). In cities, it was easier for these teens to escape such supervision and still live at home, but in small towns, some took more drastic steps and moved away from home or married at age fifteen or sixteen (1992, 74). The screen images of sexy Latin men and women were moneymakers in Hollywood but very disturbing to the parents of such teens, who worried that their girls would become flappers in appearance and behavior.

For many during the decade, the implications of the term "flaming youth" were summed up in the sexual escapades of a women like Fitzgerald's Rosalind, who, as Fitzgerald describes her, is "quite unprincipled; her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez faire others. She loves shocking stories." She has an "eternally kissable mouth, small, slightly sensual, and utterly disturbing" (1920, 171). John Held's cartoons kept this image in the public eye; his cover of a 1926 issue of Life shows a young flapper sprawled fetchingly in a couch , legs askew, reading Sigmung Freud and Havelocks Ellis. The title "Sweet Sixteen." On the other hand, popular journalist Samuel Crowther in 1926 stated that the most important characteristic of the flapper was her independence: "She is no clinging vine ... (she has) awakened to the fact that the 'superior sex' stuff is all bunk. The flapper is to-day our most important national institution" (quoted in Colbert, 1997, 352).

During the Twenties, the spectator sports of baseball and boxing remained popular with Americans across the country. Thanks to radio, their excitement could be shared by adults, teens, and children alike, providing rallying points of national identity and larger-than-life heroes to cheer to victory.

Football was still a sport played only in wealthier high schools and colleges but it was becoming popular across the country as fans followed their college teams to victory. Being a teen football star was becoming a ticket to national fame. The big Eastern colleges built huge stadiums to hold the thousands who attended their games, and smaller schools tried to do the same, sometimes with disastrious financial consequences if they did not produce winning teams. The need to recruit winning players grew from this period in the history of the sport.

Sports in which more young Americans themselves could participate, such as tennis and golf, rose dramatially in popularity during the decade. Americans demanded and got more golf courses, tennis courts, and swimming pools than ever before, cosmetics that promoted rather than prevented a tan were introduced.

The most famous teen of the decade in sports was Gertrude Ederle. At seventeen she won three medals in swimming in the 1924 Olympic games. Her goal, however, was to swim the English Channel in record time and to be the first women to do so. In August 1926, she entered the water at Cap Gris-Nez, France, and began the thirty-five-mile crossing in cold wind and rough seas. After tweve hours her trainer tried to persuade her to stop but she continued. When she arrived at the beach in Kingsdown, England, she had made the swim in fourteen hours and thirty-one minutes, the best time a man or women had ever achieved in a channel swim. She had, in fact, never to be acomplished. America welcomed her with a huge parade and the demand for many public appearances. Although she lost her hearing as a result of her difficult swim, her feat inspired young men and women everywhere. She spent much of her life encouraging people to learn to swim and donating her time and money to charitable causes connected with swimming.

Edelre's superb physical strength and attractiveness, as well as her determination, offered an alternative to the image of idle teens smoking and dancing the Charleston in speakesies. Sport has always been connected with youthfulness and beauty, but in the Twenties the connection became even more important as an antidote to the media's attention to flaming youth. Health resorts, which had previously been places to rest and "take the waters," became places to play active sports and get a tan. The Scout movements encouraged young people to be outdoors; communities erected centers for teens to play various sports. Physical health, with its implication of accompanying moral health, became an ideal for many, and the image of the teenager glowing with robust, wholesome strength appealed to many who rejected the flapper style.

This was the Jazz age, when jazz music and dance steps swept the country. The distinctive rythms and harmonies of jazz had roots in black slave culture, but as it found its way into white culture-or as white culture took it over-styles of orchestration, the use of blues notes and harmonies, and the emergence of skilled solo performers created a complex range of jazz music. "Jelly Roll" Morton and his Red Hot Peppers band popularized the New Orleans style of jazz in the late Twenties, while Luis Armstrong thrilled listeners with his trumpet solos and his original ideas about melody and improvisation. Many regard Armstrong as the finest jazz musician of them all. The great Negro singer Bessie Smith sang the blues in the late Twenties. like no other during her short career, which peaked in the late Twenties. New York, which glowed with musicals featuring jazz during this period, offered George Gershwin's Lady Be Good in 1924 and in 1926 famous all-Negro musical Shuffle Along, which played to such packed houses, of black and white fans alike, that at one point the street outside the theater had to be made one way. It toured successfully coast to coast. One of its featured performers was a sixteen-year-old chorus girl, Josephine Baker, who often stole the show by doing "crazy things"- "just mugging, crossing her eyes, tripping, getting out of step and catching up, doing all the steps the rest were diong, but funnier" (Steanrs and Stearns 1994, 134). She was so popular that she made $125 a week, an amazing salary for a twenties chorus girl.

Most middle-America teens listened to the songs that came from Tin Pan Alley, the New York City district where white popular music was published. The comic strip "Barney Google" inspired a little ditty: "Who's the most important man the country ever knew? Barney Google, with his goo-goo-googly eyes!" Rudolph Valentino's famous movie inspired "I'm the Sheik of Araby...your love belongs to me." "Sweet Giorgia Brown" and "Bye Bye Blackbird" were popular tunes, and teens and adults did the Charleston to "Ain't She Sweet?" The mood of the decade was summed up by "Ain't we got Fun!" and, ironically, one of the most popular songs of the mid-1929 was "Happy Days Are Here Again." Hoagy Carmicheal's famous love ballad was "Star Dust," which was composed in 1929, became one of the most recorded songs in popular music history.

Late in 1923, twenty-five-year-old Geaorge Gershwin, already famous as a Broadway composer, was asked by orchestra leader Paul Whiteman,, who called himself the King of Jazz to create a new piece of music for his band. He wanted an experiment, something that could be performed like a symphony but which was rooted in jazz sounds. The composer said later that he was inspired by the rythm of train wheels clicking on a track and by the whole sweep of American life of the Twenties-its pace and love of city life. In a single month he composed Rhapsody in Blue, which was first performed on February 12, 1924. From its opening bars with the famous clarinet solo, to its romantic theme, it was a spectacular hit-a remarkable blend of symphonic form with jazz and blues which has become the signature of American music.

Popular Dances

The dance craze that began before 1920 intensified during the Jazz Age. From the "animaldances" of the previous decade, teens turned to the shimmy, the toddle, the black bottom, or the varsity drag when they went dancing-all of them more athletic than earlier dances, and all accompanied by the rythm jazz. Adults were often appalled at the wild grappling and groping that characterized many of them, especially when dances like the tango required close body contact between the dancers, but the young refused the disciplined ballroom style of their parents.

The Charleston is the dance most associated with the twenties. Supposedly originating in Charleston, South Carolina, with its tradition of slave culture and free-wheeling dock and trade areas, it seems the epitome of Jazz Age freedom. A difficult dance to perform, it requires that both partners stay on the balls of their feet at their ankles, kicking high in back from the knees, and constantly "toddling" or bouncing with their upper bodies to the beat. It could not be done by a girl in a long skirt; the short Charleston "flare dress" characteristic of flapper styles was almost a requirement (it sold for under $2 in department stores), as were sheer stockings and low-heeled pumps which showed off the legs as they kicked out. A flapper's bare knees were emphasized by the Charleston's move of bending the knees and opening and closing them in time to the music. Its suggestion of sexual license probably accounted for some of its popularity, but the Charleston's sense of fun and freedom invited anyone with enough energy to try it. Charleston contests were held weekly in many parts of the country.

In high schools, dancing was the favortie activity of many teen girls, and dances were the dominant social activity for girls and boys together. Formal dresses for girls became a significant part of their clothing budget, even in families with little money to spare. On college campuses, jazz ruled, and unninhibited dancing marked every fraternity party, often to the despair of the administration. The famous american choreographer agnes de Mille remembers a friend of her father's describing a dance at a Cornell fraternity house: "the guests, growing impatientof champagne, broke all the light bulbs on the floor and danced for the rest of the evening in the dark on crushed glass and the rolling bodies of their brothers and their dates" (deMille 1980, 19). Fass emphasizes that dancing itself was not what distinguished the young from their elders, but the particular kind of dancing. She quotes a poem from a school paper:

"Jazz and the bunch jazz with you

Dance and you're by yourself,

The mob thinks it's jake

To shimmy and shake,

For the old-fashioned stuff's on the shelf." (Fass 1977, 303)

Even rural youths were not immune to or protected from the dance craze of the Twenties. They still attended barn dances but now in some communities jazz was played and the Charleston was danced, along with the traditonal polkas and square dances. Public dance halls with Negro bands also began to appear in rural areas; they often served liquor and had chaperones. Teens went there to dance the latest dances and to meet other groups. Going there was a way for rural teens to rebel but also a new way to find a potential marriage partner.

By 1920 those who were teen had grown up with nickelodeons, and movies were already par of their lives. In the Twenties, however, movies took over the popular imagination in was that thrilled young and old alike, but worried some as well. Movie attendance rose dramatically across America; most people across all socioeconomic group saw at least one movie a week. One national study of teens in 1922 showed that 40% went at least twice a week and 45% more than once each week (Fuller 1996, 184-85). "Middletown," population 35,000 in 1920, had nine theaters, all of which operated year round seven days a week. High school students attended frequently, sometimes with their families but increasingly with peers and on dates.

The great silent screen stars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were at the height of popularity when the decade began, making as much as a million dollars a year, but soon other stars equaled or eclipsed them. In 1921 Rudolph Valentino played in The Sheik, a film treatment of a popular novel by Edith M. Hull in which the dark and dangerous sheik carries off the heroine, who escapes him only to be recaptured and to succumb finally and enthusiastically to his irresistable charms. Valentino's flashing eyes and flaring nostrils, his bare chest and pomaded hair made him the screen's sexiest leading man for the next few years. At his public appearances women would scream and faint, or beg for kisses. When he died unexpectedly in 1926, the line of people waiting outside his funeral service stretched for many blocks and women wept openly. His legend as a screen lover continued for many years, bolstered by the periodic visits of a mysterious women in black to his grave.

Charlie Chaplin had already established his popularity by the twenties, especially with his character of the "little tramp," the little man with the tight jacket, baggy pants, and derby hat. Chaplin's physical clowning and his expressive face made him a great favorite with all moviegoers. In 1925 he made one of his greatest films, The Gold Rush, its scene of the tramp eating his shoes with great finesse and grace, is one of the classic moments in all of film.

In 1922 a seventeen-year-old beauty named Clara Bow won a magazine contest to be named "the most beautiful girl in the world." By 1927 her film career was at its height when she starred in It, a film adaptation of Elinor Glyn's novel exploring sex appeal-does a girl have "it" or does she not? Bow's portrayal of a flapper who cuts the neckline of her dress away to make herself attaractive to her boss cuased her to be known as the "It Girl" for years afterward, although her popularity faded with the coming of talking pictures.

The screen's quissential flapper was Joan Crawford. An expert at dancing the Charleston, she made movie history by dancing on tables in the wild party scene in the 1928 silent film Our Dancing Daughters, a film still considered a perfect evocation of the age despite its melodramatic plot. Unlike Clara Bow, Crawford enjoyed a long film career even after talking pictures eliminated the silents.

The new sexual frankness of movies was an important part of their appeal for teens. For the first time, teens were sitting in a darkened theaters, perhaps with dates, while the screens filled with flirtation, touching, and intense kisses and embraces between beautiful and sophisticated people. Girls watched and women closely and learned to imitate their way of moving, of gazing at a man, of closing their eyes when they kissed, of fending off ungazing caresses. Boys wondered if they could learn to kiss like that, to be as virile, brave, attractive, and handsome as Valentino or Fairbanks. A teacher in "Middletown" feared that movies were making teens too aware of sex, too sophisticated; a judge opined that movies were a major cause of delinquency among teens (Lynd and Lynd 1929, 267-68).

Fashion and appearancewere as important as behavior when teens looked to the movies as models. They plastered their walls at home and their lockers at school with pictures of the movie stars they loved so they could see them all the time. Girls examined themselves in the mirror for the flaws they could never see in their screen favorites; they mimicked the hairdos, dress, makeup, and ways of wlaking and sitting that they saw in films. Boys too used the movies to learn about the right table manners, clothes, and style of behaviorin nightclubs, even though most of them would never enter the kind of nightclub they saw in the movies. A new kind of consumerism was the result; teens used their money to buy cosmetics and clothes in unprecedented numbers. The fan magazine Photoplay deliberately targeted young people aged from eighteen to thirty as the most avid moviegoers and fans and created its advertising to appeal to that group; knowing that they had only small amounts of spending money, the magazine concentrated its ads on small ticket items, especially cosmetics (Fuller 1996, 162-64). Mexican-Americangirls in the barrios wanted to "Follow the Stars" and use Max Factor cosmetics (Ruiz 1992, 71-72). Farm youths too saw on the screen, although less often than their urban counterparts, standards of consumtion they could only hope for.

In 1927-1928, film took two enormous leaps forward. Al Jolson had made film called The Jazz Singer as a silent movie. It concerns a Jewish boy whose father expects him to be a cantor but who wants to more than anything to sing jazz. His father rejects him but his mother loves and supports him while he becomes a big star in New York, often performing in the black-face minstrel style that had been popular for years in traveling shows throught the country. The director of the film wanted to add sound to the musical numbers only, but Jolson, already a popular personality and singer, wanted to try adding some dialogue. He ad-libbed some lines before he began to sing in one scene and again in a later scene in a short, teasing conversation with his mother in the film. The director kept the scenes, and when the film opened, audiences were thrilled. For the first time, they spoke heard and actor's voice coming from the screen at the same time he spoke.

Some predicted talking pictures, or "talkies," would never last. Even Charlie Chaplin is supposed to have said, The movies need talknig like Beethoven's music needs lyrics" (Wallenchinsky, 1995, 414). Within a year, however, hundreds of theaters had converted to sound, despite the initial expense, and audiences were eager to attend. Film stars like Clara Bow who turned out to have unattractive voices found their careers at an end; acting styles adjusted to accomodate more dialogue and more realism. Chaplin was eventually able to revive his career with a different kind of film. The era of the silent film had ended.

The other major development in American film, wich coincided with talkies, was the advent of the movie cartoon and the success of Walt Disney. During the mid-Twenties, silent cartoons were popular, and Disney had made various kinds of cartoon shorts, even combining cartoons with live actors in his Alice in Cartoonland series. In 1928 his studio needed a financial boost. He had already created the appealing character of an energetic mouse (first naming him Mortimer and then, as the story goes, at his wife's suggestion, renaming him Mickey) and put him into two silent cartoons. Disney needed more, and unlike some producers, he was sure that talking pictures were here to stay. He decided to set a Mickey cartoon to music nd began work on Steamboat Willie, in which the mouse plays wild music on various instruments, even on the animals around him. After some false tries and a huge investment in money, Disney, always a perfectionist, had the cartoon he wanted, in which the sound perfectly coordinated with the screen action. It premiered in New York City on November 18, 1928, with great success (Jackson 1993, 16), and Mickey Mouse was on his way to becoming an American icon, a figure popular throughout the world and the centerpiece of the twentieth0century phenomenon that has become Walt Disney.

The Term "flaming youth" came from a 1923 novel of that title by Warner Fabian (Fass 1977, 453), but the writer most associated with the Jazz Age for intellectual and popular readers alike, was F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald had virtually created the popular image of flaming youth with This Side of Paradise in 1920, a book which now seems mannered but still captures the extreme emotions and confusion felt by many in their late teens as they confront the world's inadequecies and hypocrisis, as well as their own. In 1925 Fitzgerald wrote what was to be his finest novel: The Great Gatsby. He captured in Daisy Buchanan the wealth, leisure, and carelesness of the upper classes in the mid-Twenties, and in Gatsby himself the bewlderment of a man who wants to be part of that life and cannot-a feeling Fitzgerald knew only too well, and one which was probably familiar to many who saw the economic boom but could experience it only in movies.

In Harlem, a quiet revolution in literature was occuring. While whites ventured north occasionally to the Cotton Club for its jazz music and dancing, many blacks were moving into Harlem permanently-it was nearly all black by 1925-and experiencing a new sense of pride in African-American culture which has come to be called the Harlem Reinaissance. Among them was the young Langston Hughes, who went to Columbia to study in 1921, at age nineteen, partly to be near the excitement of Harlem. He left school two years later and went on an extended personal voyage to Africa and Europe; a famous story about him says that he threw all his books into sea when he set out, so that he would not be influenced by anything except what he and heard. When he returned, he became one of America's foremost poets, essayists, and critics.

Most middle-class Americans preferred other kinds of books. Sinclair Lewis produced two best-sellers during the decade; in 1921, readers loved Main Street, the story of small-town American life. His second best-selling novel, which focused on religious revivalism in the Midwest, was based on the phenomenal career of Aimee Semple McPherson. The stylish McPherson had attracted thousands of followers since 1921 to her spectacular revivals in Los Angeles, but in 1925 she disappeared under mysterious circumtances. She later claimed dramatically that she had been kidnapped, but evidently she had been engaging in a tryst with a lover. Lewis's 1928 fictionalization of these events, Elmer Gantry, shocked and fascinated many with its frank revelations of the business side of religion.

Books at this time, were taking a back seat to magazines for most middle-class Americans. The Satuday Evening Post was read by millions of men, women, and youth, and The Ladie's Home Journal and McCall's were read by wmen and girls nationwide.College students were also reading the same magazines, incluing Life, which was a humor magazine then, but also tried to adopt H.L. Mencken's sophisticated cynicism by reading his American Mercury magazine, which aimed barbs at the American "booboisie."

When the Lynds investigated magazine reading in "Middletown," they got a surprise. Between 3,500 and 4,000 issues per month of varous "sex adveture" magazins circulated throught this small Midwestern town (1929, 241-42). Despite the apperant religious, political, and moral conservatism of the population, readers across the age and socioeconomic groups were evidently finding some salacious thrills in "sex aventure" magazines like True Story or Telling Tales. The stories, usually written in the first person, describe events such as a mother's advice to her daughter on her wedding night or a women's struggle with a rival for he man's affections. The endings were invariably moral, but they aimed to represent "life" to young people who might have no other way of finding out about it (1929, 241). Movie Magazines, aso very popular, described to girl readers how the stars worked and played, and fed their desre for glamour and adventure. Boys were more likely to turn to Whiz Bang for sexual thrills and various magazines for excitement and adventure.

School reading for high school students was not nearly as exciting. Despite some appeals from researchers to include more modern literature- such as The Virginian or Ramona - in clasrooms to attract young people to read more, teachers tended to remain with the old standbys that they knew well from their own school days. Geaorge Eliot's Silas Marner, Charles Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities, William Shakespeare's Julius Ceaser, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson's The Idylls of the King were standard fare and were taught "intensively"-many weeks given to the laborious discussion of a single book (Nilsen and Donelson 1993, 558).

Left to themselves, however, boys and girls preffered other books. Both continued to enjoy series books in great numbers, many of thempublished by Edward Stratemeyer and his syndicate. The Rover Boys remained poular well into the Twenties, while girls' series books still tended to lag behind boys' in numbers produced. In 1927 Stratemeyer began his most popular series ye-which became probably the most popular boy's series in the world-the Hardy Boys. Frank ad Joe Hardy began their adventures in The Tower Treasure, written by anonymous autthor under Stratemeyer's invented name "Franklin W. Dixon," and contiued rapidly with two more books in the same year, The House on the Cliff and The Secret of the Old Mill. Stratemeyer had the formula for success, and when he died in 1930, the books were continued without a break. They have been transformed into comic boks, detective handbooks, two television series, and even coloring books for younger teens.

Librarians continued their periodic assaults on this kind of "junk reading" for teens. Mary E. S. Roots in early 1929 published a list of books which she thought ought not to circulate in a public library; it included series books like the Bobbsey Twins and Tom Swift and novels by Horatio Alger and Oliver Optic-all great favorites of teen readers across the country (West 1988, 28-29). Her list prompted some to defend this readin,but many lirarians supported Root's elitist veiwpoint- situation that suggests that some adult readers were completely out of touch with the young, despite their desire to encouage more readin among teens.