Life through the decades..the 20'st century

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Damnata
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Introduction to the 1920's

They called it the Jazz Age, but it was crazier than any of the razzmatazz that Jelly Roll Morton or Bix Beiderbecke produced. By 1929, when the bloated stock exchange on Wall Street so spectacularly crashed, the world had already turned itself upside down and inside out several times over. In the United States, Prohibition had created more drunks and more gangsters than legal drinking ever did. In Europe, the peace treaties of 1919 had soured international relations as bitterly as any war. In the Soviet Union, millions of new communists died so that the old order could be ploughed under. In Germany, people decorated their rooms with bank notes - it was cheaper than using wallpaper. And all over the world, victims of colonial power began to hope that the time was drawing nearer when their countries would be free and they could sweep aside their European masters.

After the horror and slaughter of World War I, few believed life could return to pre-war normality. As the decade unfolded, the General Strike, birth control, the Charleston, the radio, and Rudolph Valentino made sure it couldn't. As the decade continued, people became accustomed to the names of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Hirohito, and others who were to come to a full terrifying significance in the Thirties.

In the arts, Isadora Duncan unchained the spirit of dance, but strangled to death on her own scarf in a tragic car accident. Surrealism and Dadaism flourished by rejecting established principles, and James Joyce became famous by rejecting established punctuation. Evelyn Waugh amused many, D H Lawrence shocked some. It was the era of George Gershwin and Irving Berlin, Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schonberg, the lively flapper and the naughty "New Woman", Oxford bags and raccoon coats, and it was the only time in history when it was smart to play the ukelele.

Across the world, sporting heroes included cricketer Jack Hobbs, tennis player Suzanne Lenglen, footballer Dixie Dean, baseball player Babe Ruth, and Malcolm Campbell, holder of world records on land and water. George Mallory and Andrew Irvine trudged their way to within 800 feet (245 metres) of the summit of Everest, without the aid of oxygen, and may well have reached the top, but were never seen again.
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Albert Einstein won the Nobel prize for Physics. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon opened up Tutankhamen's tomb to disturb the boy pharaoh who had lain in peace for thousands of years. Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic in The Spirit of St Louis. The first "talkies" thrilled millions of movie-goers. But it wasn't all progress. In Tennessee, a biology teacher was prosecuted for teaching the theory of evolution. The Ku Klux Klan burnt their torches and lynched the innocent in the Deep South. The United States legally, but wrongly, executed Sacco and Vanzetti. Leopold and Loeb gained their longed-for brief notoriety by strangling a 14-year-old boy.

There was death on the streets - in Ireland, where Republicans fought the Free Starters and the Black and Tans fought both; in Germany where Freikorps and Spartacists warmed the weapons that the Nazis were soon to use more efficiently; in civil wars that stretched from Mexico to China; and in a beer warehouse in Chicago on St Valentine's Day in 1929.
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Movers and shakers in the 1920's

World War I swept the old order aside. Empires were destroyed, royal houses tottered and fell. The Tsar was dead, the Kaiser was in permanent exile, the Hapsburgs had made their final bow. A new breed of politicians moved into the spotlight: Lenin, Ataturk, Mussolini. They were men with visions that would change the world, not just their own corner of it. Not for them some democratic tinkling with the existing system. They believed in the imposition of the new, and they brought to the Twenties hope and horror in equal amounts.

The battles between their rival ideologies were fought on the streets, in putsch and counter-putsch. Lenin lived just long enough to see the Bolshevik state resist foreign invasion and survive civil war. He was spared the experience of Stalin in full flow. In Italy, Mussolini marched to Rome and power. In France and Britain, whiskered old gentlemen with win collars enjoyed a late summer in office.

It was still too early for some of the key players of the future to take centre stage. They waited in the wings, with varying degrees of patience. But they were not merely understudies. When their time came, they would rewrite not just their own roles, but the entire drama.
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Haves and have-nots in the 1920's

For dukes and counts and grandees, the writing was already on the wall in the Twenties. Good breeding was no longer synonymous with a healthy bank balance. American millionaires were infiltrating the finest families in the Western world by means of their well-heeled daughters. And if his lordship couldn't obtain a young heiress, then he had to sell an old master.

For the masses, the decline of the aristocrat and the rise of the parvenu made little difference. They were still crammed into overcrowded tenements or dingy back-to-back houses. They smoked cheap tobacco, ate adulterated food and prayed to keep their jobs.

Rich and poor occasionally met, sometimes clashed, but the social structure and the social calendar remained largely unchallenged. There were the hunting, shooting and fishing seasons, presentations at Court, elegant balls and 12-course banquets. The finest houses in any city were still the private homes of titled individuals, not the offices of public corporations.

The shock waves of the Bolshevik Revolution were beginning to recede. Apoplectic colonels still wrote letters to the Times recommending ways of 'countering the red menace', but the threat of world revolution never materialized.

And so, although the writing was on the wall, the dance went on...