In the 1920s, popular culture, like consumer goods, was mass-produced and mass-consumed. The proliferation of movies, radios, music, and sports meant that Americans found plenty to do, and in doing the same things, they helped create a national culture.[[LP Photo: P23.07 Duke Ellington Leads His Jazz Band/ROA_04224_23_P07.JPG]]

Nothing offered escapist delights like the movies. Hollywood, California, discovered the successful formula of combining opulence, sex, and adventure. Admission was cheap, and by 1929 the movies were drawing more than 80 million people in a single week. Hollywood created “movie stars,” glamorous beings whose every move was tracked by fan magazines. Rudolph Valentino, described as “catnip to women,” and Clara Bow, the “It Girl” (everyone knew what it was), became household names. Most loved of all was the comic Charlie Chaplin, whose famous character, the wistful Little Tramp, showed an endearing inability to cope with the rules and complexities of modern life.

Americans also found heroes in sports. Baseball solidified its place as the national pastime in the 1920s. It remained essentially a game played by and for the working class. In George Herman “Babe” Ruth, baseball had the most cherished free spirit of the time. The rowdy escapades of the “Sultan of Swat” demonstrated that sports offered a way to break out of the ordinariness of everyday life. By “his sheer exuberance,” one sportswriter declared, Ruth “has lightened the cares of the world.”

The public also fell in love with a young boxer from the grim mining districts of Colorado. As a teenager, Jack Dempsey had made his living hanging around saloons betting he could beat anyone in the house. When he took the heavyweight crown just after World War I, he was revered as the people’s champ, a stand-in for the average American who felt increasingly confined by bureaucracy and machine-made culture. In Philadelphia in 1926, a crowd of 125,000 fans saw challenger Gene Tunney pummel and defeat the people’s champ.

Football, essentially a college sport, held greater sway with the upper classes. The most famous coach, Knute Rockne of Notre Dame, celebrated football for its life lessons of hard work and teamwork. Let the professors make learning as exciting as football, Rockne advised, and the problem of getting young people to learn would disappear. But in keeping with the times, football moved toward a more commercial spectacle. Harold “Red” Grange, “the Galloping Ghost,” led the way by going from stardom at the University of Illinois to the Chicago Bears in the new professional football league.

The decade’s hero worship reached its zenith in the celebration of Charles Lindbergh, a young pilot who set out on May 20, 1927, to become the first person to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic. Newspapers tagged Lindbergh “the Lone Eagle”—the perfect hero for an age that celebrated individual accomplishment. “Charles Lindbergh,” one journalist proclaimed, “is the stuff out of which have been made the pioneers that opened up the wilderness. His are the qualities which we, as a people, must nourish.” Lindbergh realized, however, that technical and organizational complexity was fast reducing chances for solitary achievement. Consequently, he titled his book about the flight We (1927) to include the machine that had made it all possible.

Another machine—the radio—became crucial to mass culture in the 1920s. The nation’s first licensed radio station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, began broadcasting in 1920, and soon American airwaves buzzed with news, sermons, soap operas, sports, comedy, and music. Because they could now reach prospective customers in their own homes, advertisers bankrolled radio’s rapid growth. Between 1922 and 1929, the number of radio stations in the United States increased from 30 to 606. In just seven years, homes with radios jumped from 60,000 to a staggering 10.25 million.