A look at life in the 1920s

Phog Allen had coached a conference championship team the previous semester; graduates had walked down the Hill as part of commencement for the first time in the spring; and the first student union was being planned along Jayhawk Boulevard. Meanwhile, Duke Ellington was creating big-band jazz in Broadway nightclubs, Charlie Chaplin was making motion picture history, and Amelia Earhart had recently earned her international pilot’s license.

The atmosphere of the 1920s at KU, in Kansas, and around the country included excitement, shifting expectations, and the promise of new possibilities. Along with expanded opportunity in some areas, the period also involved restrictions such as Prohibition and the realities of systemic discrimination and racial oppression. The contrast of prosperity and struggle as well as the thrill of liberation alongside resistance to change, led to a sometimes-turbulent decade of cultural transformation. A look into the roaring twenties at KU reflects the spirit and challenges of the time. 

Notes from the Office of the Registrar list 3,788 students on the Lawrence campus and 105 at the medical school in Kansas City in 1924 – compared to about 28,000 across five campuses today.  

KU did not charge tuition in 1924; however, students did incur fees and had to cover supplies and living expenses. The 1924 KU undergraduate catalog lists average room rent at nearby boarding houses at $10 a month. These off-campus living options were regulated by a university senate committee on health and housing that approved rooming houses for men or women.  

Although young women of the 1920s enjoyed increasing freedom and independence in some ways, they were subject to paternalistic housing rules. For a boarding house to get on the approved housing list for women, for example, specific “house customs” had to be adhered to, including a 10:30 p.m. weeknight curfew, extended to 11 p.m. on Friday and Saturday nights, with no social engagements allowed on school nights, except Friday evenings.  

In the 1920s the demand for women’s housing at the university had been increasing. The first residence hall at KU, Corbin Hall, opened to female students in the fall of 1923 and held 124 women. Named after Alberta Corbin, a KU alumna from the class of 1893 and acting Dean of Women from 1918-1921., Corbin was a professor in the German department as well as an activist for women’s rights who spoke alongside Susan B. Anthony in the fight for women’s suffrage.  

Students of the 1920s also lived in fraternities, sororities, or dormitories, and could live or take part in cooperative houses where they helped with cooking and cleaning in exchange for affordable meals. 

A campus union was established for the first time in the 1920s with the cornerstone to the Kansas Memorial Union laid in 1926. The union cafeteria opened in 1927, offering a place for students to purchase meals on campus as well as a spot to gather and socialize. In 1928, editor and civil rights advocate Marcet Haldeman-Julius wrote about segregation practices in the Union dining room, where Black students were restricted to eating in a particular section, noting that some students and faculty were refusing to eat at the cafeteria in protest of this discrimination. Urging change, Haldeman-Julius described Watson Library as a place where students of various races, nationalities, and genders sat next to each other at long tables to read: “It was incidentally another perfect example of the fashion in which young people behave when fairness and justice are expected of them.” 

Life on a budget was part of the student experience in the 1920s, with shared resources provided at the library enabling free access to many assigned materials. Information provided to incoming students in 1924 estimated that, overall, a student’s expenses, including books and supplies as well as room and board, should total $40-$80 a month. It went on to advise that “less than $40 is likely to cause injury to health or morale” and “more than $80 is fairly certain to interfere with the real aims of college life.”  

To help meet expenses, many of the students of the 1920s worked a variety of jobs on and around campus. The 1924 catalog states that about half the student body was self-supporting, working as stenographers, clerks, salesman, barbers, cooks, waiters, dishwashers, ushers, and musicians, as well as furnace tenders, dairymen, “chore boys,” and more. The undergraduate catalog emphasizes that working students were regarded with “the highest respect by the student body and faculty. In fact, the leaders of the campus usually belong to that group.”

The week Watson Library opened, the University Daily Kansan reported plans for the Men’s Frosh Mixer, an affair with “refreshments, a snappy program, and speeches by some of the big men of the Hill.” Phog Allen provided the central address, and boxing coach Tommy Dixon entertained the students with a boxing exhibition, while Bob Roberts, cheerleader, gave instruction on “university yells.” The men were treated to a “watermelon feed” after the program, which was organized by the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). Together with the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), the “Ys” were an important part of campus life in the 1920s, supporting new student orientation, and keeping housing and employment lists.  

The same week the Dean of Women, Agnes Husband, spoke to women students about the rules of sorority rush with apparent emphasis on the importance of each Greek group not speaking negatively about another organization. Dean Husband encouraged the women to attend convocation, a formal welcoming event with faculty, and a joint picnic co-hosted by the Women’s Student Government and YWCA, with one article about the picnic declaring “all of the women are urged by the manager of the affair to wear bright colored dresses.”   

Fashion was an important part of the era, with the pages of the University Daily Kansan dotted with ads for clothing shops and dry cleaners, urging students to look their best by investing in stylish, quality pieces including silk frocks in the popular straight-line silhouette and the newest and smartest coats and hats declaring “college men demand style” with suits that “pass the style test for wide-awake dressers.”  

The 1920s were an era of musical and artistic expansion and experimentation including the Harlem Renaissance and explosion of jazz and other new forms of music. Musical scores were part of the library collections since the earliest days of KU, with Watson Library’s collections including music books, periodicals, and scores. The jazz scene and other important 1920s contributions are preserved today in the KU Sound Archive, available by appointment at KU Libraries’ Gorton Music and Dance Library. 

The decade was also a time when KU Band expanded. Marching band director Joseph C. McCanles, a KU alum known as “Mac,” helped make the band’s presence at sporting events a tradition in the 1920s. In fact, by 1924, Phog Allen said “the band comes next to the team,” crediting the band’s enthusiastic support with contributing to Jayhawk basketball victories. It was also during this time period that fans at sporting events began to hear the KU Band play one of its most beloved pieces, “I’m a Jayhawk,” written by KU alum George Bowles.  

Since its beginnings, the band had been open only to males, and the movement toward female liberation in the 1920s did not change that. Black students also seem to have been completely excluded from chorus and band. Nicholas L. Gerren broke the color line in the early 1930s to become the first African American student member of the KU orchestra and Little Symphony. Baton twirler Saralena Sherman became the first woman band member in 1939, but only men were allowed as musicians in marching band until 1943 when women donned band uniforms and performed alongside male colleagues for the first time.

In 1924 Cora Downs earned her doctorate degree. She was the first woman in KU history to earn a PhD. One of KU’s most outstanding scientists, she served the university as a faculty member in microbiology until her retirement in 1963, also contributing to government projects that aided efforts during World War II. 

The 1920s were also the decade that saw one of the first Black women inducted into the KU chapter of national honor society Phi Beta Kappa with Zatella R. Turner earning a bachelor’s degree in 1929, followed by a master’s degree in English in 1932. Turner was a member of KU’s Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, the first African American Greek letter organization at KU. After graduation she went on to become a nationally recognized Shakespearean scholar and faculty member at Texas Southern University and Virgina State College. The University Archives at Kenneth Spencer Research Library help preserve university history, holding a diverse set of collections, including Turner’s papers as part of the Kansas Collection. 

The 1920s were literally electric, as new forms of technology evolved. On the KU campus and across the nation this included the beginnings of radio broadcasts. Construction of a radio tower behind Marvin Hall was completed by 1924 and KFKU was on the air. 

Watson Library namesake and longtime librarian Carrie Watson was included in the first university radio broadcast, an event that reminded her of the first transcontinental phone call on campus, which she had also participated in eight years earlier:

Like the Foxtrot or Charleston dances that were so emblematic of the period, the 1920s were a blend of slow and quick strides and directional changes that invited the campus and nation to step to a whole new beat. One hundred years later, Watson Library remains a place of resources and communal discovery that generations of Jayhawks share. 

[Source notes: For a look into campus life in the 1920s, see University Archives historical issues of the University Daily Kansan and “University of Kansas Annual Catalogue, 1924-1925” for a range of information provided to students; University Archives also hold the personal papers of Zatella R. Turner, Cora Downs, and Carrie Watson; see Marcet Haldeman-Julius’s article in “Haldeman-Julius Monthly,” January 1928; for KU music history see “Music Men (and Ultimately Women)” by Brian Drake; for union construction timeline, photos and more see the KU History Home Page; “African American Jayhawks Make a Difference!" n.d. The Kansas Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Libraries, University of Kansas Libraries.]