DBQ QUESTION
How were the literary and artistic movements of the 1920's critical of contemporary American life?
DOCUMENT A
Lament for the Dark Peoples
I was a red man one time,
But the white men came.
I was a black man, too,
But the white man came.
They drove me out of the forest.
They took me away from the jungles.
I lost my trees.
I lost my silver moons.
Now they've caged me
In the circus of civilization.
Now I herd with the many--
Caged in the circus of civilization.
SOURCE: Langston Hughes, 1924.
DOCUMENT B
Incident
Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.
Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, "Nigger."
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.
SOURCE: Countee Cullen , 1924.
DOCUMENT C
Tenebris
There is a tree, by day,
That, at night,
Has a shadow,
A hand huge and black,
With fingers long and black.
All through the dark,
Against the white man's house,
In the little wind,
The black hand plucks and plucks
At the bricks.
The bricks are the color of blood and very small.
Is it a black hand,
Or is it a shadow?
SOURCE: Angelina W. Grimke, 1925.
DOCUMENT D
"Yes, love scenes have made me more receptive to love. I was going with a fellow whom I liked as a playmate, so to speak; he was a little younger than me and he liked me a great deal. We went to see a movie-Billie Dove in it. I can't recall the name, but Antonio Moreno was the lead, and there were some lovely scenes which just got me all hot 'n' bothered............Another thing not exactly on the subject but important, I began smoking after watching Dolores Costello. I believe it was, smoke, which hasn't added much joy to my parents' lives."
SOURCE: A journal entry of a girl of 22, college senior, native white parents. (1920's)
DOCUMENT E
"None of the Victorian mothers-and most of the mothers were Victorian-had any idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to be kissed. Amory saw girls doing things that even in his memory would have been impossible; eating three o'clock, after dancing in impossible cafes, talking of every side of life with an air half of earnestness, half of mockery, yet with a furtive excitement that Amory considered stood for a real moral let-down. But he never realized how widespread it was until he saw the cities between New York and Chicago as one vast intrigue."
SOURCE: F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, 1920.
DOCUMENT F
"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clear up the mess they had made...."
SOURCE: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, 1925.
DOCUMENT G
"He was married five years, had three children, lost most of the fifty thousand dollars his father had left him, the balance of the estate going to his mother, hardened into a rather unattractive mould under domestic unhappiness with a rich wife; and when he had made up his mind to leave his wife she left him and went off with a miniature-painter. As he had been thinking about leaving his wife and had not done it because it would be too cruel to deprive her of himself......"
SOURCE: Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, 1926.
DOCUMENT H
" Accompanying it was an Americanization Movement, with evening classes in English and history and economics, and daily articles in the newspapers, so that newly arrived foreigners might learn that the true-blue and one hundred per cent. American way of settling labor-troubles was for workmen to trust and love their employers.
The League was more than generous in approving other organizations which agreed with its aims. It helped the Y.M. C.A. to raise a two-hundred-thousand-dollar fund for a new building. Babbitt, Vergil Gunch, Sidney Finkelstein, and even Charles McKelvey told the spectators at movie theaters how great an influence for manly Christianity the ``good old Y.'' had been in their own lives; and the hoar and mighty Colonel Rutherford Snow, owner of the Advocate-Times, was photographed clasping the hand of Sheldon Smeeth of the Y.M.C.A. It is true that afterward, when Smeeth lisped, ``You must come to one of our prayer-meetings,'' the ferocious Colonel bellowed, ``What the hell would I do that for? I've got a bar of my own,'' but this did not appear in the public prints."
SOURCE: Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt, 1922.
DOCUMENT I
"There is nothing inspiring in seeing an extremely tired pretty girl in a worn bathrobe, dingy white stockings in rolls about scruffing felt slippers, her eyes half shut, her arms hung over her partner's shoulders, drag aching feet that seemed glued to the floor in one short, agonizing step after another, dancing to the sounds of what they call jazz..."
SOURCE: Social commentary from "The New York World", 1923.
DOCUMENT J
SOURCE: "Sacco and Vanzetti" (1927), Ben Shahn 1931-1932.
