(dramatic sting)
Every once in a while, there are moments
in history that reshape the world we live in.
2020 is one of those moments
when our world comes to a standstill.
(letters trilling)
But ever wonder what happens after a global pandemic?
(lips smacking) (man panting)
(woman moans)
First thing I wanna do
when the pandemic is over is open mouth kiss everybody.
I mean, open mouth kiss every consenting adult.
Just wanna make sure that's clear.
The post pandemic world,
people are just so full of (screams).
(people screaming)
Like, you know, from being cooped up for like,
a year and a half, and we're just gonna wanna let that out.
Bet your bottom dollar people are gonna go nutso.
Definitely a lotta babies outta wedlock.
These guys that have been out of the game
for a while are a little bit itchy.
I'll tell you that.
A lotta booze, a lotta parties, and a lotta orgies,
so mask-off orgies.
(whimsical music)
Will the post-pandemic future be full
of wild debauchery?
(intense electronic music)
Sometimes a clue to the future
can be found in the past.
(lively 1920s music)
The 1920s are an amazing moment in terms of world history,
I would say culturally, as much as anything else.
The high, wide, and handsome 1920s brought
undreamed of prosperity.
It's exciting.
It's exuberant.
It's youthful.
(cork popping)
(flash popping)
For some people, it was a big party.
People have a sense of abandon and freedom.
They feel that now they can try anything and do anything.
(cars roaring)
There was this really strong pull towards the new,
and the modern, and the fashionable.
It really is a time of incredible prosperity.
(lively music) (people shouting)
For the Wall Street guys,
it's unprecedented in terms of the wealth,
in terms of what's happening in this country.
The pace of change is so incredibly fast.
People felt that they were living in the future.
This is the history of the roaring 20s
in 501 kisses,
1000 drag queens,
and two and a quarter billion beers.
(lively music) (gun firing)
(percussive sounds) (upbeat music)
(rocket whooshing)
(upbeat music) (radio murmuring)
(upbeat music)
(old-timey violin music)
What number best sums up a moment in time?
In the middle of the 1920s,
George Taylor discovers it's the number 15.
George is a young college economist.
When he's not studying his spreadsheets,
he likes to play pool and chess.
Rack 'em up!
And he also has an unusual academic interest
in women's legs.
He's writing his PhD thesis on the hosiery industry.
His father was the manager of a hosiery factory,
so he's very interested in stockings.
As part of his studies, he's measuring
the height of women's skirts from the ground,
and over the course of the 1920s,
he's noticed hemlines have been on the rise.
Would you look at that!
From below the ankle, then to the calf,
and finally above the knee.
By 1927, they will be a full 15 inches off the ground.
Amazing!
And being an economist,
George puts two and two together.
He notices that the rise in hemlines matches the rise
of the Dow Jones index.
That's not a coincidence!
He calls his theory, the hemline index.
Super-genius!
The hemline index is an economic index that ties
the rise of the economy to the rise of the hemlines.
So as the economy goes from slower to faster,
the hemline rises accordingly up the leg
of the skirt-wearing lady.
(lively 1920s music)
(calendar clicking)
In August, 1921,
the Dow Jones Industrial index stands on a low of 63 points.
Come on!
By September, 1929, it rises
to a high of 381 points.
That's a whopping 600% increase.
Good gravy!
In the same period,
the number of advertisements for hosiery
in Vogue Magazine nearly doubles.
I love you.
And the amount of flesh on display increases
by a staggering 800%.
Fabulous!
(lively 1920s music)
Apart from the hemline, women were also wearing
less clothes, so in 1913, you were wearing
nearly 20 yards of fabric.
By 1925, you're wearing about seven yards of fabric,
and these lighter, freer clothes are a reflection
of the new lifestyle they're leading.
(lively 1920s music)
It made it much easier for them to partake
in all of these leisure activities that were new
and trendy in the 1920s.
They could go bicycle riding.
They could go golfing.
They could do these things that would have been difficult
to do with the old fashions,
and they could dance.
♪ Gimme that string, gimme that string ♪
♪ Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme that string ♪
While women are liberating their hemlines,
and dancing the Charleston,
(filmstrip clicking)
a Hollywood director is filming his daughter,
Mildred Unger, 2000 feet in the air.
There she is dancing the Charleston on the wings
of the plane, without, as far as you can see,
any kind of safety mechanism at all.
It's absolutely extraordinary to watch.
(whimsical music)
What's going on? (laughing)
Oh, she's on top of the plane.
Is she on top of the plane?
Where is Children's Services?
That's my number one question.
Oh, wow.
I wanna do this so badly.
Whose mother let her go on a plane?
That's what I wanna know.
And how did this conversation go?
Like, "Hey, listen, this like, your kid?
Oh, come here, we have a great idea." (chuckles)
Wow.
(whimsical music)
It shows kind of the craziness of the period.
She's 10 years old, and she's 2000 feet in the air,
and she's dancing on the wing of an airplane.
You don't see that every day.
What it speaks to in the 1920s is this real appetite
for spectacle.
(filmstrip clicking)
So what was it about the 20s
that made them roar?
And could what happened then happened again?
(filmstrip clicking)
It turns out that the 1920s and the 2020s are linked
by two doctors, separated by 101 years, and 7,218 miles.
(percussive sting)
It's December 31st, 2019.
In the city of Wuhan China,
a young medical doctor named Li Wenliang notices
a worrying rise in the incidence of a SARS-like illness.
He sends a message to his colleagues.
Those first seven cases are an alarm bell
for what will become the worldwide coronavirus pandemic.
(drums beating)
(numbers clicking)
101 years earlier, on the other side of the world,
another doctor has also noticed
something out of the ordinary.
(suspenseful music)
It's January, 1918.
Dr. Loring Miner is a large, gruff man
with a handlebar mustache, and an affinity for alcohol.
His practice extends over hundreds of square miles
across the Kansas prairie.
Sorry about that.
On his rounds, he notices a worrying rise
in the number of people suffering from flu-like symptoms.
Their skin turns blue and purple from the lack of oxygen,
and they have a fever of 104 degrees Fahrenheit.
Young men are dying, and this is right next
to one of the main Army bases
where young Americans are being trained up,
ready to be sent to Europe to help
in the fight against the Germans.
(guns firing)
At the nearby Camp Funston, a soldier reports
to the medics with similar symptoms.
A week later, there are another 100 cases,
and by the end of the month, 500.
It's the first outbreak of what history will come to know
as the Spanish flu pandemic.
This is a time almost for the first time
in American history where young Americans are being sent
abroad in large numbers, and the fact is that
they're carrying a deadly virus.
(explosions)
During World War I,
10 million soldiers are killed.
No one knows exactly how many die from the flu pandemic,
but estimates suggest that one third
of the world's population is infected,
and up to 100 million people lose their lives.
World War I affected the entire nation,
and so to the Spanish flu.
It didn't spare families, and it is spread quickly,
and it was frightening.
People wore masks.
Movie theaters and restaurants shut down,
and there was a lot of separating of people,
and there was a real shutdown of the culture.
In North America, there are three waves
of the pandemic between spring 1918 and the summer of 1919,
when it finally fizzles out.
(lively music)
So how does a global catastrophe on this scale end
in a decade-long party?
History shows us that following times of sacrifice,
we like to indulge.
We just got out of World War I,
going over the hump of the Spanish flu,
so that's setting the stage for some wild, wild partying.
(lively music)
And who better to kick off the party,
than the regiment that sacrificed 1,400 lives,
more than any other us regimen on the Western front?
The 369th Infantry Regiment is an African-American unit
recruited largely from Harlem.
When they set out for the war in 1917,
they were refused permission to join in the farewell parade
of New York's National Guard, known as the Rainbow Division.
In the words of the National Guard's commander,
black is not a color in the rainbow.
(somber music)
The notion was that African-American men were cowardly,
that they could not fight.
They would be afraid to fight white people, basically.
And then wherever they went, they encountered racism
from American troops.
To deal with it, the United States said,
"You know, let's just them send overseas."
So they were like, some of the first troops to go overseas,
and then the U.S. Army didn't know what to do with them,
so they put them with the French.
When they reach the Western front,
they will spend 191 days on the line,
and are awarded 171 Croix de Guerre,
the French medal for heroism.
The unit becomes the most decorated
of all serving American regiments.
So great is their reputation in combat,
the Germans give them their nickname, the Hellfighters.
They were fierce fighters.
They were injured, they were stabbed,
they were bayoneted, but they fought,
and fought against this whole regiment
until they made them retreat.
(triumphant music)
(percussive flash)
When they return, they are given pride of place
in the New York City Victory Parade.
An estimated 5 million people lined Manhattan's Fifth Avenue
from 23rd Street to 143rd.
3000 surviving Hellfighters march as heroes
in close formation with regimental band leader,
James Reese Europe, who's the first black American officer
to have led troops into combat.
James Reese Europe was the foremost musician
of that period.
And after seven miles,
they reach Harlem at last, and James commands
the regimental band to stop playing marching music,
and instead, they burst into jazz.
(lively jazz music)
Jazz music encompasses the roaring 20s
more than any other music genre.
It is the soundtrack.
(lively jazz music)
It sets the mood for the whole decade,
and it spreads all around the world.
Jazz music is the tightest (bleep).
(trumpet playing)
It can be so spiritual, and it can be like so elemental.
It can be ridiculous at times.
(scatting a tune)
I love me a good trumpet.
(trumpet playing)
It's like whiskey,
(liquid pouring)
smooth whiskey.
(ice clinking)
When you listen to jazz, it's like a mysterious man comes
up to you with a bouquet of flowers,
and then your mom magically appears,
and tells you she's proud of you,
and then your boss says that you're his boss now,
and you can wear a power suit.
That's what jazz feels like.
It's just a wild ride from start to finish.
(lively 1920s music)
The thing that makes jazz so amazing, first of all,
it's the freedom, the improvisational nature of it.
(trumpet playing jazz)
It's also something people had not heard before.
It was a new music.
It was a new way of thinking about what music could do.
(lively jazz music)
It's music for an urban jungle.
(lively jazz music)
It's got that kind of planning dissonance, in a sense,
that feels very modern.
It's not easy, it's not harmonic, it's not soothing.
It's jangling, and jarring, and exciting, and sexy.
(squeaking sting) (lively jazz music)
The birth of jazz coincides
with the first great migration, where waves
of African-Americans left the South,
and headed to the urban centers of the North.
A million African-Americans came north from 1914 to 1919,
and that changed the whole dynamic of what cities would be,
like Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, New York,
where large populations grow.
There were a lot of challenges that came with this,
the tremendous overcrowding,
and underemployment, and poverty,
but an upside that happened as this flowering of the arts,
and jazz music was really influential.
(scatting with jazz music)
It's very much an African-American art form,
but it's something that is totally embraced
by the young, white urban population.
(lively jazz music)
People thought that they were edgy, and attractive,
and interesting, and so jazz music drove
social integration in a way that hadn't been seen before,
(lively jazz music)
but it also seeded a lot of anxiety.
A secret organization,
the Ku Klux Klan, spread it poisonous influence
throughout a large part of the country.
The 20s were a time when people came together,
but the 20s were a time when the KU Klux Klan was rising up,
and becoming really influential,
especially in the first part of the decade.
By 1924, it is spread to maybe 2 million members,
and people were overtly part of the Klan,
and that was a real demonstrable example
of a group trying to go backwards in time.
(somber marching music)
(typewriter clicking and dinging)
There are even a lot of efforts to suppress freedoms,
and there's this real trend in the 1920s
where people seem to think that they could legislate
their way to a moral, just, peaceful, innocent world.
January, 1920,
new legislation is passed,
and the 18th amendment is enshrined in the constitution,
banning the manufacturer and sale of intoxicating liquor.
Prohibition is a movement that happens
in the United States,
and it's actually started much earlier.
Remember, our roots in this country are puritanical.
A lot of the early settlers really think
that drink is wicked.
Drink is the devil's brew.
To pass a certain public house,
a tavern of unsavory repute.
(lapping drinks)
I mortgaged my home, and my family too.
It was really born out of a sense that drinking was
the source of all kinds of social evils.
So if the drink were eradicated, then there would be
less trouble, there'd be less violence,
and it was really seen as sort of a moral imperative.
Prohibition,
America's unique attempt to legislate morality
in an age that wasn't really interested in it.
(alcohol splashing)
It's the beginning of prohibition,
and America officially goes dry, but unofficially-
When prohibition is passed,
they hope it's going to improve society, improve behavior,
make people harder-working, and more virtuous.
The problem is no one wants to practice it.
Everybody still wants to drink.
(whimsical music)
People didn't stop drinking.
They just started supporting illegal, illicit activities
that would get them drink.
(1920s piano music)
The 1920s is the age of the speakeasy,
where alcohol is plentiful for those who know the password,
and there are plenty who do.
[Speakeasy Keeper] Come right on in,
and name your poison.
All you really needed to open
your own speakeasy was a couple of bottles of liquor,
and a room to have it in,
and that's exactly what it was like.
One of the statistics about the twenties is that
for every bar that closes, three speakeasies open.
So that tells you something about the number of people
that are going, the success of these kinds of places.
(paper tearing) (numbers trilling)
By the end of the 1920s, New York boasts
32,000 speakeasies.
That's one illegal bar for every 390 people,
or three times as many as legal bars today,
and that's only the ones we know about.
The number that go under the radar is
probably double that again, upwards of 100,000.
You don't see that every day.
Another revealing statistic is
how many policemen were able to amass large savings,
even when their salaries were quite modest.
(lively jazz music) (knocking on door)
[Speakeasy Keeper] What's the password?
Stinky food.
In Boston,
there are four operational speakeasies on the same street
as the Boston Police Department.
I dunno, Captain,
everybody seems drunk in this neighborhood.
And in 1927, the prosecution
of a San Francisco hotel clerk,
accused of selling liquor, has to be abandoned.
Maybe he could be innocent and guilty.
When nine members of the jury are caught
drinking the evidence.
(drinker laughing) (alcohol pouring)
Honestly, if alcohol was banned,
if I learned anything in the pandemic,
that I can't go a week without it,
I would just make it myself.
(slurping) Yeah!
Maybe I'd just make my own moonshine,
just in my basement or something,
like how people were doing sourdough bread
during the pandemic, just start making my own booze.
I'll ferment everything.
I'd ferment alcohol in my bathtub and just bathe in it.
(water splashing and pouring)
Boys in prison have figured it out.
They're making they own the hooch
in these toilet balls out here.
(liquid pouring)
I'm sure I am just as creative as your average inmate,
so (chuckling) I can definitely work something out.
If alcohol was banned, I would still find a way to get it,
as long as it was safe.
Just wanna make sure I don't get like,
moonshine that blinds me.
(slurping)
Between 1920 and 1929,
up to 9 million gallons of pure alcohol were consumed.
That's the equivalent of two
and a quarter billion standard-size beers.
(lively jazz music)
But booze is only part of the story.
The speakeasy is where Americans come to drink,
listen to music, and to dance,
but to dance, you also need a partner,
and what the number 18 did for jazz and black musicians,
the number 19 will do for women.
(percussive trilling)
August, 1920, the 19th amendment
to the United States Constitution is ratified.
The ladies appeared at the polls
on election day by the hundreds of thousands.
They had won their right to vote.
It's the culmination
of a decades-long struggle,
finally granting women the right to vote.
For so many years, American men did not want
women to vote.
For instance, Woodrow Wilson was against women voting
in 1913, but by 1918, after having gone through World War I,
he had a whole different attitude.
He said, "You know, women have sacrificed.
They've created a whole mobilization
to help the war effort."
During the war, women go to work while men are away.
The fact that they get the vote very quickly
after the war is a reflection, I think,
of the contribution they've made to society in that time.
But their suffrage was not experienced the same way.
While white women had much more opportunities to vote,
African-American women did not.
Women in other minorities did not.
Many women had to wait for decades more to be given
their right to vote, but for the first time,
women become equal participants
in American society, equal citizens.
The 19th amendment gives the vote
to 26 million women.
In the next decade, The number of women
in the workplace will rise from 8.3 to 11 million.
Corset sales will decline by two thirds, and the number
of women buying cigarettes will more than double.
For the first time, they can go out into the world,
and in the 1920s, you see
so many amazing female role models, from movie stars,
to anthropologists, to writers, to doctors.
This is a time when women really understand,
and properly begin to live the idea
that they don't just have to be wives and mothers.
(triumphant music)
(filmstrip clicking)
For one young woman,
it proves to be a particularly dramatic shift,
which in her case is marked by the number one.
Her best friend calls her pie-face,
because she likes apple pie.
She's an unfashionable, wannabe dancer and actress.
I got an idea!
She escapes the Midwest,
and comes to the Big Apple
in pursuit of a dream, and expensive clothes.
(lively 1920s music)
She ends up dancing in the Ziegfeld Follies,
which is scantily clad ladies doing high kicks on stage.
It was a pretty established route to go
into the movies from.
You're fired!
Oh, booger.
When she's fired from the stage,
her best friend decides she's in need of a make-over.
(whimsical music)
She's very down in the dumps.
She loses a job.
She doesn't get a job she hoped for,
and her friend takes her off to have a haircut.
Come on in.
But instead of a woman's hairdresser,
their destination is a barber shop.
A little here, a little there.
The barber shortens her bangs
in a line above her eyebrows.
Terrific!
He shapes the sides into points
at her cheekbones, and at the nape of her neck,
he uses a number one razor.
Voilà!
It's the world's first shingle bob.
That's great!
Her name is Louise Brooks,
and it's not long after she steps
off the barber's swivel chair that she will see
her name in lights in Hollywood.
Thank you very much!
The independence of the 1920s is kind of encapsulated
by this one haircut that Louise Brooks has,
and she becomes the archetypal flapper.
She also becomes one
of the biggest Hollywood stars of the silent movie era,
inspiring a whole generation of young female imitators.
At one point it's said that in New York alone,
2000 women a day are getting the shingle.
All over America in the 20s, girls are getting
their hair shingled or shorn.
They have them with a marcel wave.
Ironically, of course, they're quite hard to maintain.
You have to go to the hairdresser more often,
and it's part of the explosion in the cosmetics
and beauty industry that happens in the 1920s as well.
Women are suddenly the object of marketing then.
(lively 1920s music)
In 1920, there are
only 5,000 hairdressing salons in the United States.
Just four years later, there are 21,000.
At the start of the decade, makeup was for women
of doubtful reputation, and there was no such thing
as getting a facial at a beauty salon.
But by the end of the decade,
there are 18,000 salons nationwide,
offering 1,300 brands and shades of face powder.
Woo!
350 rouges.
Terrific!
And a hundred red lipsticks.
Fabulous!
Female beauty has become
a $52 million industry.
(commenter laughing)
Free at last, she not only dressed freely,
but was lavished with makeup, chewed gum,
and even smoked in public.
And the one place these coiffed
and confident young women can go to is the speakeasy.
Yes, I know, knock three times,
and tell them you're friends with Charlie.
Speakeasies are a place where,
almost for the first time,
women are able to go and have a drink.
I think the fact that you get music and dancing
quite often in a speakeasy makes it a place
that's very attractive to women.
And part of what happened
in speakeasies was dating.
Dating was new in the United States.
They can now go out without a chaperone.
They can go on dates with fellas. (chuckles)
They can neck, they can flirt, and it doesn't destroy
their reputations, because in some ways,
the best way to say it is everybody's doing it.
(lively 1920s music)
Only 14% of women born before 1900 said
they had premarital sex before the age of 25.
By the 1920s, that number has more than doubled to 34%.
In the course of the decade, the birth rate actually drops
by 20%, which may be explained by the fact
that during the same period, condom sales double.
(lively 1920s music)
But how many times do you have to kiss a boy to change
the course of history?
For Lottie Gee, that number proves to be 501.
It's 1921. (lively 1920s music)
A new show opens on Broadway called Shuffle Along.
It's the first Broadway musical with a book, music,
dance, and cast created wholly by African-Americans,
including Noble Sissle, a veteran of the Harlem Hellfighters
who, with Eubie Blake, wrote the music.
Shuffle Along was the music sensation of 1921,
and it never should have made it to Broadway,
but it changed Broadway.
It's essentially
your old-fashioned, boy-meets-girl, musical romance,
only in this case, it's portraying black romance
on par with white, which is a gamble.
Before this period, the notion of a black love scene
on stage is considered anathema to white audiences.
They cannot stand the idea
of black people loving each other.
So Sissle and Blake, of course,
write a number of love scenes into this,
'cause it's about black life,
and black culture, black joy.
We love each other, but they're terrified
that the audience is going to stampede out.
Ladies and gentlemen.
It's May 23rd, 1921,
opening night at the Daly's 63rd Street Theater.
Onstage in the limelight, the young lovers,
Lottie Gee and Roger Matthews are about to sing
their duet, Love Will Find a Way.
Backstage, the composer,
Noble Sissle can hardly bear to watch.
He stands by the stage door, one foot inside the theater,
the other on the street pointing north toward Harlem,
afraid that if the song bombs, they'll be run out of town.
The song is received in silence,
until suddenly, Sissle hears wild applause break out,
and an encore is called for.
Shuffle Along will run for another 501 performances,
becoming one of the longest-running musical shows
of the decade.
Shuffle Along is a phenomenon.
It creates a desire to see African-American music,
and culture, and it leads people to go up to Harlem
who've never been before.
Harlem at night has been a symbol
the world over for jazz and cabaret life.
It's at a time when, as Langston Hughes famously puts it,
the Negro was in Vogue,
(lively jazz music)
and suddenly what they are creating is seen as valuable,
and important, and part of American life.
It's seen as integral to it for the first time.
(lively jazz music)
Harlem becomes
the cultural Mecca of Manhattan,
♪ That's how it is ♪
and the underground subculture comes out of the closet,
dressed in sequined gowns, and white tuxedos.
One of the things that Harlem is known for
in the twenties is not just the great music,
and the sort of great nightlife.
It's also a place where gender
and sexual roles can be transgressed,
and played with a little bit.
(filmstrip clicking) (smoky jazz music)
The Stonewall riot in 1969 is often considered
the beginning of the gay rights movement,
but more than 50 years earlier,
Harlem's famous drag balls are part of a flourishing,
highly visible LGBTQ nightlife.
(whimsical music)
It's February 26th, 1926,
the biggest night of Harry Walter's life.
Outside, two feet of snow blankets the ground.
Ladies and gentlemen.
But inside, the heat is on
at the Renaissance Ballroom and Casino in Harlem
for the 58th Annual Hamilton Lodge Ball.
1000 of New York's finest, dressed in tuxedos,
and gorgeous ball gowns crowd the dance floor,
and as midnight strikes,
it's time for the grand parade in front of the judges.
And the rest costume is-
First prize goes to Harry,
best dressed drag queen of them all.
Thank you very much.
What's really interesting about these drag balls,
these fairy balls, is that they weren't just
for an underground subculture.
They were for everyone.
They're reported about in the popular media,
and the popular press.
(lively jazz music)
A lot of the attendees are straight,
and they're just going to be part of this world.
There's nothing strange in it.
Drag shows, drag balls, parties that happen
in queer spaces and queer parties are like,
just the best parties.
Glitz and glam, it's always a party.
Lots of sequins, lots of bright lights,
lot of Whitney Houston covers.
There's just so much flair, and color,
and people are voguing.
The swag of it all, like, there's a level of confidence
that it takes, I don't have it.
I don't do well with eyeshadow.
I'm envious of drag queens in balls.
I wanna look as good as they do, like (bleep).
(wolf whistle)
In the 1920s, the LGBTQ community was much more open
than many of us might realize.
People describe going to Harlem, and going into a bar,
or a speakeasy, and seeing a table where you've got
two black boys, two white boys,
and they're all dressed as women,
and up on the dance floor are two girls,
dressed in tuxedos, dancing together.
Identity is fluid, gender is fluid,
and it feels quite modern.
That isn't to say that there was
widespread acceptance everywhere.
Although they were allowed to exist,
they were also really complicated,
and problematic for a mainstream culture as well.
Gene Malin is six feet tall and 200 pounds,
and one of new York's most famous female impersonators
who wins prizes for wearing costumes made up entirely
of pink and gold feathers.
One night, he wanders into a Greenwich cafe
in full drag wig and makeup.
(patron laughing)
Four rough birds begin to heckle him,
and as he shimmies by their table,
they throw a pitcher of water on him.
What's the matter with you?
Gene barely bats a false eyelash
before fighting back.
(banging)
Three of them he beats to a pulp.
(banging and grunting)
The fights spills out onto the street,
and the fourth heckler is only saved from Malin
by two passing taxi drivers.
What the hell you doing over there?
Afterwards, Malin had tears in his eyes.
When asked why, he pointed out that during the fight,
he had ripped his gowns.
(Malin sobbing) (lively jazz music)
Gene Malin is exactly 12 pounds heavier
than boxing champion, Jack Dempsey,
but unlike Malin's punch,
Dempsey's right hook will be heard right across America.
(loud punching)
After a great deal of pre-fight ballyhoo,
the two men met at historic Boyle's Thirty Acres
in New Jersey.
It's called the fight of the century,
Dempsey versus George Carpentier
for the world heavyweight title.
80,000 people filled every inch
of Boyle's Thirty Acres.
But these spectators are only a fraction
of what will be the largest audience so far in history,
because this is the first sporting event ever broadcast
to a mass audience on the radio.
(triumphant music)
It's the top and Jack Dempsey is flying
against Georges Carpentier, a truly great fighter.
Round four (indistinct) freshman,
who's virtually helpless in the hands of Dempsey,
but Carpentier rises again with fighting hard.
It's estimated that commentary
of Dempsey's fourth round knockout punch is heard
by more than 300,000 people in 61 cities
across Atlantic America.
(triumphant music)
Radio, originally a feeble means
of communication, grew from this small shack,
the first commercial station in America
to a gigantic proportion.
One of the great technological and cultural developments
of the 1920s is the radio.
People use it for listening to news.
They listen to music.
They listen most of all to sporting events.
(upbeat music)
Radio transformed sport, because it allowed people
to experience games in real time as they were happening,
so you didn't have to read about them
in the paper the next day.
(crowd cheering)
Baseball, boxing, and horse racing,
you sat by your radio, you could hear the Yankees play,
even if you didn't go to the game in person.
The great sportsmen of the 1920s become household names,
because radio brings them into everybody's household.
Babe Ruth, Babe Ruth was the biggest celebrity,
the most famous person in America,
more so than the president.
Break it now, with only two games left.
(upbeat music) (bat knocking)
(crowd cheering)
He did interviews, and he was in the movies,
and so he had this multidimensional presence in media,
and it was just really exciting, and we couldn't have had
celebrities like this before without all the technologies
that brought them into our homes.
(whimsical music)
(calendar clicking)
In 1921, the year
the first sporting event was broadcast,
there are only five radio stations across the U.S.
By the end of the decade, there are 606.
The ensuing program is and all-star-
Annual radio sales increased from 60 million
to $843 million, and by the end of the decade,
20 million households have a radio receiver.
That's nearly 40% of all American families.
(lively music)
This is the era of innovation,
and it's not just radio that's transforming lives.
The 1920s sees extraordinary technological advances,
which benefit people's lives.
In the house, we have all sorts of domestic appliances
which we never had before,
the vacuum cleaner, the dishwasher, the toaster,
but also you have the transformation
from a coal-based economy and a steam based economy
into a petrol and oil-based economy, and this means cars.
The 20th century has raced
again to a new era, the era of the Tin Lizzy, the Model T.
Henry Ford had 10,000 dealerships in this country,
and there were 13 million cars on the road,
incredible mobility happening.
It is Henry Ford's own invention
that is placing a nation behind the wheels of adventure.
Two generations ago, you might've never really left
the county where you were born,
and with an automobile, your range increased tremendously.
Now the whole family could get away
from the noise and the heat of the city.
The idea that you could buy a car,
which would then let you drive around the entire country
independently becomes something to aspire towards,
and that really transformed American society,
because it brings with it a network of roads, motels,
and petrol stations, and people can get into cities to work.
It transformed every single aspect of American society.
Technology will not only transform
day to day life, it will make the most unlikely
of dreams come true.
(plane engine roaring)
When Bessie Coleman is six years old in 1898,
no one has yet flown in an airplane.
The 10th child of a Cherokee father
and African-American mother from Waxahachie, Texas,
she walks four miles each day to
and from her one-room, segregated school,
and works in the cotton fields at harvest time.
After the great war, she can only afford one semester
at college, but then she hears the stories
of Air Force pilots returning from France,
and her dream is born.
As a Young girl, she decides she wants to learn to fly.
But she can't get flying lessons in the United States
to get qualified as a pilot,
'cause she's a person of color.
So she decides to learn French at night school,
and then travels to Paris to learn to fly.
Bon jour.
Where she earns her pilot's license in 1921,
two years before Amelia Earhart.
When she returns to the states,
she becomes a barnstorming stunt flier.
She wows crowds across America, and becomes
an instant media sensation, and her favorite stunts?
The loop-di-loop, and the highly dangerous figure eight.
I'm flying! (airplane buzzing)
Bessie Coleman is the first American woman
of African-American and Native American descent both
to have a pilot's license, and to actually fly,
and perform as a stunt pilot in America.
It's absolutely extraordinary.
(airplane running) (lighthearted music)
There was a notion in the 20s that Bessie caught onto
that she could become who she wanted to be.
To have this sense of incredible freedom of possibility,
whether you're a woman or man, black or white,
and Bessie Coleman is the epitome of,
"I'm gonna fly into my dream."
Bessie Coleman is the pioneer
of what will become a brand new industry,
commercial air travel.
(lively music)
The first international passenger flights
from Key West, Florida to Havana, Cuba take off in 1920.
In 1926, the total number of airline passengers
in the United States is less than 6,000.
But by the end of the decade,
that number leaps for 173,000.
(numbers trilling)
Air travel makes anything possible.
Think about it this way.
In 1903, the Wright brothers made their first flight.
In 1969, we land on the moon.
Within literally 66 years, we went from flying
to flying to space.
Traveling in air in the 1920s gave us that feeling
that nothing's impossible, you know, the sky's the limit.
That's why we say that.
(triumphant music)
♪ Let's make lots of money ♪
The 1920s is the decade
where the sky does seem limitless,
as the number of shares traded
on the New York stock exchange grows
from 200 million to over a billion.
♪ It is knocking at your door ♪
American society in the 20s is propelled
by this huge sense of optimism.
Business is gonna be the answer to all our problems.
Salesmen are the kind of angels of American society,
and people are making so much money
on things like stocks and shares.
♪ Let's make lots of money ♪
♪ That's what they all said ♪
The stock market is soaring like never before,
and people don't really understand,
but the stock market is like a horse race.
It's a gamble, and so at a certain point,
your horse is not gonna win.
They can't believe that something that's been going
so well for a decade could tumble off a cliff,
just like that.
One man who does believe it is
an investor on Wall Street.
After making a bundle in the bull market,
the story goes that he decides to get
his Oxford brogues polished up.
Tobacco's doing good.
But when the shoe shine boy begins to give him
stock tips, it's not so much a light bulb moment.
It's an alarm bell. (alarm ringing)
He realizes that if a shoe shiner has an opinion on stocks,
they are becoming dangerously popular,
and it's time to get out.
He does exactly that, returns to his office,
unloads his stocks, and withdraws from the market.
His name is Joe Kennedy, father of the future President JFK.
He's one of the few lucky ones to save his fortune.
The New York stock exchange was in a turmoil.
Frantic investors had scrambled to unload
their securities at any price.
(words trilling)
On October 24th, 1929,
newspaper headlines announced the end of the roaring 20s.
The line can't always go up on the graph,
and when it came down,
it came down fast, and it came down hard.
The great bubble had burst of the 1920s.
It goes down in history as Black Thursday,
when the Dow Jones index falls by 11%.
On Black Monday, it loses another 12.82%.
On Black Tuesday, yet another 11.7, 3% disappears,
which represents $14 billion in losses,
the equivalent of $213 billion today,
and the slide will continue until July 8th, 1932,
when the index bottoms out after losing
a whopping 89.2% of its value.
A feeling of apprehension,
even fear replaces the unchecked optimism
Americans once felt.
That's the end of the 20s.
We have the great crash,
and we're leading to the great depression.
Millions and millions of people were out of work.
They didn't understand why.
Common terms, food, clothing,
shelter take on a new importance.
They were shacks where people had to live,
and they had to have food lines, and soup lines,
and soup kitchens to feed them,
because they were going hungry.
By 1933, nearly half
of America's banks have failed, and unemployment approaches
15 million people, or 30% of the workforce.
And just as the hemline provided an index of growth
in better times, the rise of the shoe shine is an index
of the great depression.
(upbeat music)
Before the crash, the New York Times reported
there were only a handful of shoe shines
on the streets of New York.
By 1932, the New York Police Department reports
there are now more than 7,000 desperately trying to earn
a living on the streets.
In a single block on West 43rd Street,
the newspaper now counts 19 shoe shines plying their trade.
Nice job, here you go.
(coin clinking)
In better times, the going rate was a dime
with a nickel tip,
and now they're happy if they get a single nickel.
Sorry, that's all I got.
And before, the shoeshine boy used to be
under the age of 17.
Now it's common to see men over 70.
No one was unscathed by the effects
of the Great Depression.
The culture changed, entertainment industries changed,
fashions changed, music changed,
and it didn't all happen overnight,
but you can see the beginnings of the end.
At the start of the 1930s,
prohibition is repealed.
Bars and nightclubs are once more regulated.
The LGBTQ community is pushed underground.
Hollywood is censured,
and women's skirt lengths plunge downward.
The roaring 20s have come to an inauspicious end.
(dramatic music)
(intense electronic music)
So we move into the 2020s,
will we see history repeat itself?
Will this be the decade of the roaring 20s, 2.0?
Will the 2020s be like 1920s?
Absolutely.
The idea of unbridled prosperity, pandemics,
racial strife, all these elements are back in play,
and so it makes you feel like there's a cycle.
History shows us that following war,
we always want peace.
Black lives matter!
Following sacrifice in solitude,
we always want celebration and indulgence.
(glasses clinking)
Maybe we'll get our own version of the 1920s,
a hundred years later.
The young taking center stage,
the sense of freedom and excitement, a sense of modernity,
I think we can expect all those things
in the decade to come.
I think we're gonna party like it's 1920, literally,
just now we're gonna see it on social media.
(lively 1920s music)
Hopefully we're heading towards a roaring twenties.
I have my flapper dresses ready, like, I really do.
(laughing)
Smog all the time, and floods, and typhoons,
and wealth inequality is gonna get worse,
but that's going to make people want to party more
when we can, so those are going to be nuts.
Billionaires are trying to leave the Earth right now.
(chuckles) When the richest people on the planet are trying
to get off of it, it's probably not a good sign.
If we're not heading into another roaring 20s,
I will shave my head.