Five Point Speech

It’s the roaring twenties, the time of everyone’s life. Amid the raging parties and Gatsbyesque lifestyles was the tumultuous over turn of the fundamentalist Klu Klux Klan, the desertion of the disenchanted, the rise of consumerism, the creation of the “Flapper”, and the idea of professional women.  This decade was a melting pot of ideas that clashed against each other ideals, but more than that these five points in the twenties fed the creation of each other. One could not have happened without the other and the society of the 21^st century would not be what it is without the nascent of these five points.

The Klu Klux Klan – a long standing congregation of fundamentalists most well known for their fight to cleanse America of ‘alien’ groups they saw as racially impure. African Americans were a target in the first part of their history, but when the Klan came back in the twenties they began to boycott not only blacks, but also Catholic, Jewish and other minority groups. The Klan is seen as a blight on history, but look at them in the context of being able to change with the time period. The Klan remains a practicing group in the US and that shows resilience and a form of flexibility to bend to the time period. This flexibility and resilience can also be attributed to consumerism. Besides creating a wide spread cultural phenomena of buying for pleasure, Consumerism also helped widen the gap between ideals, which helped create the disenchanted. I think it is important to note the uninvolved and darker sides of American society because it was those groups that helped push for a betterment of society as a whole. These artists helped the United States to maintain a form of individualism in the world of consumerism. And in its own right, Consumerism created a cultural norm that still exists well into the twenty-first century.

To end on a more positive note the twenties introduced the “Flapper” – a woman who lost the rigidity of the Victorian ideals and fell into loose morals, wore seductive clothing and makeup. For the first time the women were starting to gain a social standing without a man on their arm. And if a lady had enough ambition she could find herself in a profession. There began to be the occasional success story of a woman doctor or woman lawyer. These two types of women were important to American history because this would be one of the first steps towards equality of genders. These are two separate, important parts because they allowed any woman to become what she wanted. There was not just the “Flappers” or professional women, it was a wide variety and some who even balanced both. But the important take away from this is that even when surrounded by conflict and disruption American culture and mindset kept pushing to better its self.