1. Goodwin, Susan and Becky Bradley. "1960-1969."American Cultural History.Lone Star College-Kingwood Library. Last modified July 2010.http://wwwappskc.lonestar.edu/popculture/decade60.html. 2. Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America (New York: HarperOne, 2011)
The 21st
century in the United States shows that culture is constantly changing and the
change is influenced by previous decades. While reading Eddie Huang’s story in
his memoir FreshOfftheBoat, I noticed many similarities between
American cultures in the 21st century and the other decades we
learned in this course. The attitude today toward immigration, religion,
politics, economics, and education are all influenced by previous decades.
Immigration in
relation to economics is probably the main topic in FreshOfftheBoat.
I saw a parallel between the immigration era of the Gilded Age and in the last
decades of the 20th century. During the Gilded Age, America
experienced an era of rapid economic growth as American wages became much
higher than in Europe. Because of the economic opportunities in rapid
industrialized, urbanized, and thriving cities, America encountered a “stream
of immigration… more arrived everyday.”[1]
In the late 20th century and beginning of the 21st
century, the United States experienced a similar trend in immigration as the
Gilded Age. During the last decade of the 20th century after the
collapse of Eastern European Communism and the Soviet Union, the United States
became the world’s sole superpower. During this time, The United states
possessed the world’s most productive economy. The country also dominated
global trade and banking, and the economy grew rapidly due to a sharp fall in
interest rates, price of oil, and the growth of the new computer technologies.[2] Because
of this thriving trend in economics, the Huang family along with many other
families left their homes and came to America. In the memoir, Eddie explained,
“Mom made sure I was aware of money and how important it is… if you asked her
why we came to America, she’d tell you straight up: cold hard cash.”[3] A
solid example of this would be when Eddie’s father went to Orlando to pursue
the restaurant business. Like Chicago for the Everleigh sisters, the Huangs
knew “the rush was real in the those cities…enabled and empowered by new
money.”[4]
Eddie Huang (circled) and his family
The revolutionary
ways of thinking in the 1960s, which created the dramatic change in American
culture and more specifically in education, had a lasting impact. In the 1960s,
college students began to use education to stimulate and form their own ideals,
and the traditional sense of a college education began to disintegrate.The attitude was set by figures like
Andy Weil where “Andy was reluctant to go with the flow…he could see that
having any more of the insights might convince him Harvard was a waste of
time”.[5] This
attitude among college students clearly stuck and now demonstrations of
political activism, anti-war movements, and civil rights movements is a big
part of the culture on college campuses. When Eddie and his friends were denied
the opportunity to debate about the legalization of marijuana in college, he
expressed, “we gave up on doing it their way, we wanted to get free.”[6]
Eventually, Eddie left his first college, but unlike many of the young
college-age men and women in the 1960s who simply just “dropped out”, Eddie
still sought after a degree. Unlike previous decades, today, a college education
is more of a necessity. Since the recession, jobs became scarcer and most employers
will only hire college graduates with degrees. Thus, American universities
began to see a boom in applicants in the past decade.
Even though I am a decade younger than
Eddie, most things seemed to have remained the same. For example in politics, the main issues that divided the
US political landscape when Eddie grew up are the same issues that continue to
divide this country today. Some of the main ones are global warming, gun
control, music file sharing, drug sentencing guidelines, abortion, the recession,
and “the war on terror”[7].
Another example would be the Internet, which revolutionized how we live our
lives. An example from Fresh off the Boat
is when Karmaloop, an online retail store, “had more buying power than any
physical store.”[8]
Americans began relying on the Internet for shopping, information, and
communication, and still continues today.
[1]Karen Abbot, Sin in the Second City: Madams,
Ministers, Playboys and the Battle for America's Soul (New York:
Random House, 2007), Prologue xxiii.
[2]S. Mintz, and S. McNeal.
Digital History, " Overview of the 1970-2000 Era." Accessed April 28,
2014. http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/era.cfm?eraID=19&smtid=1.
[3]Eddie Huang. Fresh
off the Boat: A Memoir. (New York, Spiegel & Grau, 2013), 38.
[5]Don Lattin, The Harvard
Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil
Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America (New
York: HarperOne, 2011), 59.
The 1960s was the age of youth, a period when long-held
values and norms of behavior seemed to break down when the 70 million children
from the post-war baby boom became teenagers.[1]
The decade resulted in revolutionary ways of thinking that created dramatic
change in American culture. The changes affected education, values, lifestyles,
laws, entertainment, and attitudes toward sexuality.
The 1950s, a decade that would become synonymous with
unquestioning conformity, had seen the rise of the other-directed character-all
those middle class, upwardly mobile businessmen and consumers who focused on
other people’s opinion on them. By the early 1960s, however, more and more
Americans were starting to follow an inner voice. There was a new kind of
empathic individualism, a nonconformist mentality that would soon see full
flowering in the psychedelic drug culture.[2]
This trend is similar to the 1920s; a time of dramatic changes characterized by
prosperity, new ideas, and personal freedom caused profound social change and
cultural conflict that created “The Flapper”.[3]
But instead of being categorized as the roaring 20s with skin-clad flappers,
the 60s is categorized as the age of counterculture with bell-bottom, long hair
wearing hippies.
Representatives like Weil and Huston Smith found inspiration
in works like John Dewy, an education reformer who developed “naturalistic
theism”, which sought to reconcile religion in the scientific worldview and
British writer Gerald Heard who claimed “evolution was not over, humanity was
on the cusp of a breakthrough in consciousness”[4]
These ideals led to the reform of mainly religion, politics, and education. The
new view on religion is less organized and people were encouraged to “look
within, find god within yourself…do your own thing”.[5]
Politics became a topic of debate where hippies like Leary formed thoughts of
“you could destroy both capitalism and socialism in one month with that sort of
thing”.[6]
However, education underwent the most change.
The young college-age men and women “dropped out” to separate
themselves from the conventional college education, for example, Andrew Weil. “Andy
was reluctant to go with the flow…he could see that having any more of the
insights might convince him Harvard was a waste of time”.[7]
College students began to think the education they obtained was not stimulating
enough and began forming their own ideals. Thus, many
college‐age men and women became political activists and
were the driving force behind the civil rights and antiwar movements.
For example, Berkeley
in 1964 to cover the free speech movement-the campus protests at the university
of California that kicked off a decade of unrest at schools across the nation.[8]
The counterculture ideas of the 1960s exhibited behaviors that
went against the norms of behavior, and psychedelic drugs were certainly a
factor that caused the manifestation of these ideals. “The idea was to
create a transcendental community whose members would fully experience life and
go beyond ego trips and social games”.[9]
After Leary discovered psychedelic mushrooms which the Aztecs called “the flesh
of the gods”,[10] and
claimed, “I learned more about psychology from these mushrooms than I did in
graduate school. These drugs can revolutionize the way we conceptualize
ourselves”.[11]
The drugs perpetuated a change in social arrangements as well. For example,
“The unorthodox scene inside the Kenwood Ave home…was an early warning sign of
a counterculture movement that would soon sweep across the nation… sexual
roles, living arrangements, and family structures were about to undergo rapid
revolutionary changes”.[12]
But what is most interesting is that Leary, Weil, Smith, and
others were genuinely trying to use psychedelic drugs to help society, which
sounds ridiculous to us because these drugs are seen as extremely harmful
today. But back then, these scholars who experimented with these drugs at
Harvard University believed “this could be of great benefit to society, curing
people of alcoholism or helping reduce the recidivism rate among criminals”.[13]
The research at the time looked promising and was even used to help alcoholics;
“it was the research that briefly brought bill Wilson, a cofounder of
alcoholics anonymous into the early psychedelic scene”.[14]
In my opinion, perhaps the biggest downfall of Leary, Weil
and Smith’s mission is mass media. At this time, most homes had television and
the news platforms were trusted for accurate news. The media brought to light
the problems surrounding psychedelic drugs by reporting headlines like “the
drugs has grown an alarming problem at UCLA and UC Berkeley... hundreds were
showing up in hospital emergency rooms, suffering from panic attacks and
psychotic reactions”, and also “young runaways from across the country was
victimized by a variety of sexual and chemical predators”.[15]
By the time Nixon announced that Leary was “the most dangerous man in America”[16]
during his war on drugs campaign, the public support toward the benefits of
psychedelic drugs began to shift.
protester in 1960
Protester Today
I think the most prevalent similarity between the 1960s to
today would be the debate on drugs specifically the legalization of marijuana.
In the 60s marijuana was “seen at the time as the dangerous drug everyone was
suppose to worry about”[17]
but now some scientists and scholars are trying to push the potential health
benefits of marijuana. It is interesting how the most dangerous drug of the 60s
is now a big topic of debate that the mass media is narrating. Is the 1960s
counterculture making its comeback? It certainly seems like it with the
popularity of yoga, which was introduced when “Smith stood alongside a desk and
chalkboard, writing mysterious words like yoga”.[18]
Also, Leary’s idea that “you could destroy both capitalism and socialism in one
month with that sort of thing”. [19]
Seem to be the platform for many young protestors at events like Occupy Wall
Street.
[1]Goodwin, Susan and Becky Bradley.
"1960-1969."American
Cultural History.Lone Star College-Kingwood Library. Last modified July 2010.http://wwwappskc.lonestar.edu/popculture/decade60.html.
[2]Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston
Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for
America (New York: HarperOne, 2011), 26.
[3]Joshua Zeitz, Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style,
Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, (New York: Three Rivers
Press).
The 1920s were a time of dramatic
changes characterized by prosperity, new ideas, and personal freedom that
caused profound social change and cultural conflict. Known as the “roaring
twenties” Americans reacted to the depression of World War I, and the culture
became somewhat of a giant party with the rise of consumer culture, the incline
of mass entertainment.America’s
population began shifting from rural areas to more urban ones and the growing
affordability of the automobile made people more mobile than ever. Although the
decade was known as the era of “revolution in morals and manners”[1], under the
surface conservative values still flourished as the nation saw the revival of
the Ku Klux Klan, the end of its open immigration policy, and the controversy
over evolution. The economic boom of the era was short lived, but the social
changes were lasting.
America’s cultural change is most
apparent in the prescience of The Flapper. During this time, “growing up in an
urban environment that afforded Americans opportunities for anonymity and
leisure, born in the era of mass reproduction, the flapper experimented openly
with sex and with style”.[2]
The Flapper’s actions directly defied the rules of her mother’s Victorian
generation. Victorians were appalled by their daughter’s lack of restraint,
daughters like Zelda Sayre. Zelda was the perfect example of a Flapper. She was
“commonly acknowledged as something of a wild child”[3]
as she would boldly assert her right to dance, drink, smoke, date, and
“habitually rouged her cheeks and stenciled her eyes with mascara, giving her
friends’ parents great cause for concern”.[4]
Sexual mores, gender roles, hairstyles, and dress all changed profoundly in the
1920s due to the Flapper. Millions of girls wanted to be Zelda, it was the age
of the Flapper.
The Flapper did not appear out of
think air, she was a product. “She belonged to the first
generations of Americans who were raised on advertisements and amusements
rather than religion and restraint”.[5]
There were many new amusements that were to blame for this cultural change.
First, there was jazz music where the new generation was thought to be “spoiled
by jazz music”[6] and dance halls.
Second, it was new innovations in technology when “the first sign of trouble
came when Americans fell in love with the bicycle” in the 1890s.[7]
Technological innovation became more and more advanced with first the telephone,
which came into wider use in the first decades of the new century and second
came the automobile. The mass production of automobiles and telephones caused
the end of the Victorian Era’s courtship system and culture as more and more
young adults obtained freedom.
Freedom is not only perpetuated by
technological advancements and mobility but also from urbanization and economic
forces. Many young women flooded to cities for employment where they were free
from the surveillance of their Victorian parents. For the first time ever, more
than 50 percent of Americans lived in cities than in the countryside. The mass
entry of women into the workforce due to industrialization and urbanization
meant, “Real money could buy real freedom”.[8]
This then caused for a demand of entertainment and leisure activities for the
newly freed young adults. Places like movie theaters and amusement parts like
Coney Island became big attractions for social gathering. This then meant, “The
apostles of good living were no longer ministers and schoolmasters, but advertising
executives who saturated American Newspapers, magazines, movie theaters, and
radio stations with a new gospel of indulgence”.[9]
The advertisements of this new leisure culture, as perpetuated by the new era
couple Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, meant men and women were ushered in a
culture where sex became more prominent.
Even though there were a lot of
liberal changes in the twenties, many felt insecure about these [10]
The Klan were known to “ruthlessly patrolled back roads in search of teenagers
embroiled in wild petting parties or improper embraces… flogged errant husbands
and wives, and tarred and feathered drunks”.[11]
Although the Klan’s actions were extreme, they represented the fair amount of
Americans that did not accept the cultural revolution of the 1920s. But is even
more interesting is that the 1920s flapper got the most criticism not from
Christian moralists or spokesmen for the older generation, not from politically
conservative men, but from feminists. To them, the New Women like Lois Long and
Zelda, struck many veteran feminists as apolitical who are only interested in
romantic and sexual frivolities and not “important issues like suffrage,
occupational health and safety, income equality, and legal rights”. To many the
new culture was “misguided at best”.[12]
changes. Groups
like the infamous Ku Klux Klan, which made a brief resurgence in the 1920s,
felt “a profound sense of unease over social change and modernization”.
Lois Long at Work
The social changes brought by the
1920s did not disappear. I can see many similarities between the culture then
and now in our generation. For example, a survey of a high school students in
the 1920s revealed the five most frequent sources of disagreement between
teenagers and their parents which were “the number of times you go out on
school nights during the week, the hour you get in at night, grades at school,
your spending money, and the use of the automobile”.[13]
If the same survey were conducted today, the results would be the same. I know
those were some of the issues my parents and I fought over in high school. Also,
characters similar to Lois Long are still prevalent today. In the 1920s, Lois
Long was hired by The New Yorker to
write a regular column on New York nightlife. “Essentially, Long would be the
magazine’s resident flapper journalist… she continued her long nights of
drinking, dining, and dancing and regaled her captive readers with weekly tales
of her adventures on the town”.[14]
Lois Long’s career is identical to that of 21st century icon Carrie
Bradshaw, a character on the hit series “Sex and the City”. Carrie also had a
hit weekly column for a newspaper where she wrote about her and her best
girlfriend’s adventures of sex, dating, society, and all New York has to offer.
People might not be familiar with the name Lois Long, but they will certainly
know Carrie Bradshaw. And finally, lets not forget about the emergence of “the
celebrity”. In the 1920s, the Fitzgeralds came to age in a country that was
increasingly in the thrall of celebrity where sensational murder trials, sports
legends, and movie stars. Today, “the celebrity” like Brad and Angelina Jolie
enjoy similar coverage as that of the Fitzgeralds.
Lois Long said about the roaring
20s: “Tomorrow we may die, so let’s get drunk and make love”. Today, we like to
paraphrase this idea with the popular saying: “You Only Live Once - that’s the
motto YOLO”.
[1]S.
Mintz, and S. McNeal. Digital History, "Overview of the 1920s."
Accessed April 7, 2014.
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/era.cfm?eraID=13&smtid=1.
[2]Joshua Zeitz, Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the
Women Who Made America Modern, (New York: Three Rivers Press), 8.
“Imagine yourself,”
Bell wrote about Chicago during the Progressive Era, “the screeching of
dope-filled and half drunken women; the throngs of young men going like mad
into these house of horror, where the air is reeking with the fumes of dope and
tobacco and millions of germs.”[1]
Can you imagine living in a place like this? The reformers of the Progressive
Era sure couldn’t and they were willing to do anything to get rid of such an
infectious place.
Parts
two and three of SinintheSecondCity, delved deep into the Progressive era when a wide range of
economic, political, social, and moral reforms took place. In the Progressive
era, there were efforts to outlaw just about anything that could be considered
detrimental to society like the sale of alcohol, regulating child labor,
restricting immigration, and so on.[2]Sin in the Second City focus on the
local level, where many Progressives rallied to eliminate red-light districts
because prostitution was described as something that lured men “into awful sin
and death perhaps”.[3] The
reformers argued that prostitution perpetuated sin and death in many ways, but
the two arguments that stood out were health issues and also protecting the
sanctity of marriage. During the Progressive Era, there were many innovations in
science that helped address health hazards. “The study of social hygiene was
advancing rapidly; recently, a scientist had developed a test to detect Treponema pallidum, the bacterium that
cased syphilis”.[4] The advances
in science during that time made detecting health risks easier which in turn
brought to light the sexual health issues prostitution created. These facts
helped reformers’ case that prostitution was a serious problem where “men must
understand that harlots were responsible for more that 25 percent of surgical
operations on good women, for the blindness of hundreds of babies”.[5]
This is when health and living standards were addressed during that time and
how the business of prostitution can lead to many health risks for the city.
The
sanctity of marriage was also a factor for debate in the Progressive Era. At
the time, women began to have a voice as they rallied for equality in not only
voting, but for divorce, access to higher education, birth control, and so on.
They were convinced that it was their duty and responsibility to purify
American society.[6] Perhaps
their biggest concern is marriage and divorce. For example Grace Cunnings Shaw
Kennedy, the wife of a well-known wealthy man who was a regular at the
Everleigh Club, “would be filing for divorce soon”[7]
after her husband admitted to many affair and rendezvous with prostitutes. Mr.
Shaw Kennedy’s indiscretions cased a number of Mrs. Shaw Kennedy’s friends to
avoid their house, causing many strains on many relationships. Because of
situations like this, women reformers in the Progressive Era spoke out against
the negative effect prostitution have on traditional marriages, the family, and
most importantly the children affected by an unconventional family. Therefore,
divorce was also a hot topic in reforms.
Another
reform Progressives sought to eliminate was the corruption of government. For
example, “the first ward, the heart of Chicago’s culture and commerce, was
still run by the most crooked alderman. The police department still favored segregating
the Levee district rather than wiping it out altogether”.[8]
This to reformers was odd because even though there were many arrests of white
slave owners for disorderly conduct, there was still not an urgency to crack
down on the law. This is in part because of the corruption in government
because many government officials at the time made deals with leaders of red
light districts for their own political and financial gain.
A portrait of Mona Marshall
Perhaps
the biggest win for Progressive reformers was the Mona Marshall’s case. “The
battle against the Levee was a ball of kinetic energy that had been waiting for
a push. The Mona Marshall case was it; she could do for the Levee district what
The Jungle had done for the Union Stock Yards”. This was made possible by the
Progressive Era’s muckraking journalists who often called attention to the
exploitation of child labor, corruption in city governments, and the corruption
of the prostitution business was no different.[9]
“Newspapers, from the venerable Tribune to William Randolph Hearst’s
sensationalistic Chicago American, devoted about half a million pages to the
war on white slavery after Mona Marshall told her story. Suddenly there were
hundreds just like her”.[10]
This shows the power of the press and the contribution of the muckrakers during
this time and how they themselves were Progressive reformers.
Another
important push of the Progressive Era is to Americanize immigrants or restrict
immigration all together.[11]
“In November 1907, the United States government, concerned about immigration in
general and its relationship to prostitution in particular, formed a commission
to study how people came to America and what happened to them once they
arrived”.[12]
Immigrants at the time were viewed as the main problem in the city’s
overpopulation and the advancement of while slavery. They were seen as
“mongrels, all of them, pulling America’s identity in dangerous directions
leaving her misshapen and newly strange”. Therefore, the federal immigration
Act of 1907 was implemented and agents began infiltrating red-light districts,
forbade importing women into the country for the purposes of prostitution, and
mandated he deportation of any woman or girl found prostitution herself within
three years of arriving to America.[13]
This made what use to be typical business in the Levee district now a felony.
This shows the influence of mass immigration and the relationship to
prostitution.
Mina (Left) and Ada Everleigh
Even
though prostitution in the text, especially in parts two and three, was mostly
shown as negative, Abbott still portrays the Everleigh sisters as heroines as
Ada and Minna were not vicious criminals like William McNamara, who “lured
girls and raped them, often several times, before selling them to brothels”.
The sisters made prostitution into a decent business and kept doctors to take
care of the harlots, paid the harlots well, and had strict rules against
violence, drugs and theft. Perhaps Abbott portrayed the sisters in such a
positive way to help the audience consider why prostitution was acceptable
during that time and it’s role in society and that prostitution can be like any
other business.
All
in all, Sin in the Second City accurately depicted the Progressive Era that
transformed American society in the 20th century, including mass
communication with newspapers and muckraking journalists, innovations in
science that helped health and living standards, the role of women in society, and
brought to light the role of government.
[1]Karen
Abbot, Sin in the Second City:
Madams, Ministers, Playboys and the Battle for America's Soul (New
York: Random House, 2007), 103.
[2]S.
Mintz, and S. McNeal. Digital History, "Overview of the Progressive
Era." Accessed March 31, 2014. http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/era.cfm?eraID=11&smtid=1.
[6]S.
Mintz, and S. McNeal. Digital History, "Overview of the Progressive
Era." Accessed March 31, 2014. http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/era.cfm?eraID=11&smtid=1.
[9]S.
Mintz, and S. McNeal. Digital History, "Overview of the Progressive
Era." Accessed March 31, 2014. http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/era.cfm?eraID=11&smtid=1.
[11]S.
Mintz, and S. McNeal. Digital History, "Overview of the Progressive
Era." Accessed March 31, 2014. http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/era.cfm?eraID=11&smtid=1.
