The Roaring Twenties

The 1920's was known as the Jazz Age and it was a decade where people lived with prosperity and were very carefree. The 20's had started off well ad then its ended badly as the Great Depression had started when the banks went bankrupt. The 20's was the decade of change. Many Americans had cars, telephones and radios for the first time ever.

There were two very big events that happened in 1920 that kick started the decade of change. In August, on the 18th, the Nineteenth Amendment passed the right for the women to vote (bit late mind you, New Zealand had already done it in 1893) and then on November 2nd, the first commercially licensed radio broadcast had been made and heard across Pittsburgh.

Musical styles were also changing a lot in the 1920's. 1922 came around and Louis Armstrong started to improvise and to add personal variations with his trumpet, using a style that we know as Jazz. Then in 1925, flappers found a new dance craze known as the Charleston- I'll get into this more soon.

1927-1929 motion picture started to come into style. Up until 1927, the pictures had been silent picture and no sound had been shown across to the audience. The Jazz Singer was the first big, successful talking, moving picture. Mickey Mouse appeared in Steamboat Willie in 1928 and the Popeye can around in 1929 and was in the comic strip Thimble Theatre.

These were a few of the good things that had happened during the 10 years of the roaring twenties but there were a lot of bad things that had happened as well. These things had made their mark in history and some are still talked about today.

In 1921, a revival of the Ku Klux Klan-KKK- the white supremacist group had made a come back and were targeting the Catholics, blacks and Jews with their terrorism. The stock markets crashed in 1929, and the resulted in the Great Depression. A law was passed, abolishing the manufacture, sale, transportation and consuming of alcohol. the gangsters then saw this as a way for them to earn a lot of money, as people needed alcohol. The prohibition was what lead to  growth in organised crime, speakeasies, saloons etc.

In the play, Fat Sam's Grand Slam is a speakeasy.  A speakeasy is a place that illegally sells liquor to people. This is the reason the Fat Sam's is disguised as Becker's Book Emporium so the Fat Sam doesn't get caught. This is also one of the reasons that Dandy Dan and Fat Sam always seem to have fights and want to kill each other SO MUCH.

Flappers-as mentioned before- are a generation of women who wore short skirts, bobbed their hair, listened to jazz and flaunted their dislike of what was considered 'acceptable behaviour. They were dancers that danced in speakeasies and in saloons and other things like that.