The Roaring 20s

An era of prosperity,

Republican power,

and conflict

Republican Power
President

Harding Elected 1920 Legacy of Scandals Teapot Dome Died in office

President Coolidge
The business of America is business.
Fordney-

McCumber Tariff Smoot-Hawley Tariff No help for farmers Foreign Policy

Woodrow Wilson was gravely ill following a stroke Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer,
wanted to take a shot at the presidency - he used fears of both immigrants and communism to his advantage Labor violence led to fears of revolution

RED SCARE

Palmerhad J. Edgar Hoover round up suspected radicals, many of which were deported (Palmer Raids)

Red Scare 1919-1920

State legislatures passed laws outlawing the advocacy of violence to secure social change refused to seat 5 socialists in the NY legislature Conservative businessmen used the hysteria to ruin unions open shop v closed shop Sacco & Vanzetti - Killed a paymaster and his guard tied to the scene by circumstantial evidence received the death sentence many objections finally executed

Red Scare 1919-1920

Reaction to Bolshevik Revolution small Communist party in US Blamed for strikes Billy Sunday Id fill the jails so full of them that their feet would stick out the window A. Mitchell Palmer Attorney General led a nation-wide crusade against them: led raids against 6,000 suspected Reds 1919 249 sent back to Russia

For immigrants the point of origin had shifted to S & E Europe and new religions appeared: Jewish, Orthodox, Catholic N. European immigrants of early 19c. feared this shift and felt it would undermine Protestant values this fear was known as NATIVISM many wanted Congress to restrict immigration, leading to a quota system that favoured N. areas of Europe fear of immigrants (from SE Europe) led to a sentiment known as the Red Scare (fear of communism, postBolshevik Revolution) basic communism advocates a international revolution by the proletariat/workers - fears that this ideology could find its way into the U.S.

20s

Disillusioned by war and peace Americans

Denounced radical foreign ideas Condemned unAmerican lifestyles Shunned diplomatic commitments to foreign nations Restricted immigration

Antiforeigner & Anti-redism directed at Bolsheviks All-union closed shop considered Soviet sponsored used to break the Unions Sacco & Vanzetti Case

A Society in Conflict

Anti-immigrant
National Origins Act Discrimination

Sacco-Vanzetti Trial
Italian immigrants murdered a paymaster & guard Controversial trial (judge was prejudiced & circumstantial evidence) Condemned to death Executed over protests from liberals

Great increase In power

The Ku Klux Klan

Anti-Pacifists

Anti-black Anti-immigrant Anti-Semitic Anti-Catholic

Anti-womens suffrage
Anti-birth control

Anti-bootleggers

Fundamentalist religion

National Origins Act 1921 1924

The 1921 Emergency Quota Act: restricted immigration to 3% of foreign-born persons of each nationality resident in the United States in 1910. There were three goals: Nativists wanted to stop immigration To reduce the overall number of unskilled immigrants. To keep the status quo distribution of ethnicity, by allocating quotas in proportion to the actual population.

National Origins Act of 1924: limited the number of immigrants from any country to 2% of the number of people from that country who were already living in the US in 1890. It excluded Japanese. The
law was aimed at further restricting the Southern and Eastern Europeans (particularly Jewish immigrants) who were immigrating in large numbers starting in the 1890s. Northern Europeans Superior to Southern & Eastern Europeans

Polish Immigration
2 million Polish immigrants, many forced off farms for mechanized farming (1870end of WWI) Polish immigrants learned about America from

Agents for US Railroads & Steamship lines Letters from friends and relatives we eat every day, better than on Easter in Poland Polish American businessmen

Cultural pluralism

Cultural pluralism is a term used when smaller

groups within a larger society maintain their unique cultural identities, and whose values and practices are accepted by the wider culture.

The idea of cultural pluralism in America has its roots in the transcendentalist movement and was developed by pragmatist philosophers such as William James and John Dewey, and later thinkers such as Horace Kallen and Randolph Bourne.

Immigrants should be able to retain their traditional cultures rather than blend into a single melting pot.

18th Amendment

Prohibition Volstead Act

Gangsters

Al Capone

PROHIBITION - on manuf. and sale of alcohol adopted in 1919 - 18th AMENDMENT an outgrowth of the long-time temperance movement
in WWI, temperance became a patriotic movement - drunkenness caused low productivity & inefficiency, and alcohol was needed to treat the wounded

a difficult law to enforce... organized crime, speakeasies, bootleggers were on the rise Al Capone virtually controlled Chicago in this period Prohibition finally ended in 1933 w/ the 21st Amendment forced organized crime to pursue other interests

Prohibition Experiment
Eighteenth Amendment Prohibition, could not sell produce or transport alcohol enforced by the Volstead Act 1919 to enforce prohibition Popular in South & West Not popular in urban areas ( eastern cities) Immigrants accustomed to alcohol, returning soldiers from France, youth, bar hunts

Prohibition the Noble Experiment

Speakeasies Rumrunners Canada, West Indies bathtub gin home made alcohol Less alcohol was consumed but many drank in defiance of the law Only 2,500 enforcement agents had been hired to enforce the law

Gangster's
Chicago- violence rival gangs 500 killed Al Capone Bootlegging, prostitution, gambling & narcotics Forced merchants to pay protection money Controlled labor unions Ransom & murder of Charles Lindberghs son 1932

High school education

John Dewey Columbia University Promoted learning by doing Progressive education education for life Science eliminates the affliction of the hookworm Improved nutrition and medical practices increased life to 59 by 1929 (1901=50)

Scopes Monkey
Evolution vs. Creationism

Trial

Science vs. Religion

Famous Lawyers

Dayton, Tennessee

John Scopes High School Biology teacher

Scopes Trial monkey trial

Dayton, Tennessee 1925 John T. Scopes charged for teaching evolution which was against the law in Tenn. (found guilty because he did) Fundamentalists (bible to be taken literally) vs. Darwinists (Modernists) Prosecution - William Jennings Bryan Defense Clarence Darrow in his cross-examination of Bryan he forced Bryan to admit that not all things in the bible could be taken literally Becomes symbolic of the conflict between progressive urban residents and country fundamentalists

Consumer Economy

Advertising & Credit purchases

Age of Prosperity

Economic expansion Rapid expansion of capital Mass Production Assembly Line ( increased worker productivity) Age of the Automobile

Ailing Agriculture

an agri. depression in early 1920's contributed to this urban migration U.S. farmers lost agri. markets in postwar Europe at same time agri. efficiency increased so more food produced (more food = lower prices) and fewer labourers needed Farming was no longer as prosperous, and bankers called in their loans (farms repossessed) American farmers enter the Depression in advance of the rest of society

20s

Bruce Barton

Bruce Barton Wrote The Man Nobody Knows, and expressed great admiration for Jesus Christ, Barton focuses
on Jesus' success as an executive and his ability to not only pick men, but to recognize the hidden qualities in each of those men. Jesus chose as his disciples; smalltown businessmen, a collection of fishermen and one tax collector, who was among the most hated group in the community.

Celebrities
Babe Ruth &Ty Cobb
Charles Lindbergh
The Spirit of St. Louis

Jack Dempsey

Automobile
Assembly-line & mass production Detroit becomes the motorcar capital Frederic W. Taylor (Taylorism) Father of Scientific management (industrial efficiency) Henry Ford Model T cost $260 - using mass production & assembly-line production (made it possible for the average American to buy a car) you could only buy in Black

Gasoline Age

Auto created supporting industries Rubber, glass, fabrics - highway building Petroleum California, Texas, Oklahoma oil rigs, gas stations, motels etc. Hurt the RR industry / Installment-plan buying Markets for fresh fruits farm produce truck farming Led to freedom and equality vacations Social change: Consolidation of schools commuters spread of suburbs decline in population of less attractive states Morals of youth dropped necking in autos

Flight

Orville and Wilbur Wright at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina December 17, 1903:12 Second 120 foot flight Barnstorming at public gatherings became popular Airplane - Used in WWI Charles A. Lindbergh first transcontinental flight 1927 in the Spirit of St. Louis immediate hero: wholesome youthfulness vs. cynicism of jazz age Gives rise to another major industry aviation

Culture of the Roaring 20s

Radio KDKA Pittsburgh GE, Westinghouse,& RCA form NBC

Silent Movies Charlie Chaplin Talkies FIRST:The Jazz Singer Starring Al Jolson Mary Pickford Americas Sweetheart

Radio
Guglielmo Marconi (Italian) invented wireless transmission 1890s KDKA Pittsburgh 1920 First radio station Radio programming: standardized speech and developed common interests Sports programs become popular People would gather around the radio in the community as there may be only one in the neighborhood

Hollywood and the Movies

Edison credited with inventing the movie projector 1903 First story sequence The Great Train Robbery first narrative movie 12 minutes long People attended regularly at nickelodeons 1915 Birth of a Nation DW Griffith First full-length move glorified the KKK & defamed blacks & Carpetbaggers

Hollywood

Movie industry is launched in Hollywood California Early pictures showcased nudity & vampires (vamps) Early 1920s public outcries force Will H. Hays to clean up the movie industry WWI anti-German propaganda hang the Kaiser films 1927 The Jazz Singer first talkie Movies and radio lead to the standardization of the American people

20s

Marcus Garvey (Jamaican born immigrant) established the Universal Negro Improvement Association
believed in Black pride, self-confidence & self reliance (including black businesses) advocated racial segregation b/c of Black superiority Garvey believed Blacks should return to Africa

he purchased a ship to start the Black Star line attracted many investments: gov't charged him with w/mail fraud & put him in prison he was found guilty and eventually deported to Jamaica, but his organization continued to exist

The 20s is The Jazz Age

The Flappers
make up cigarettes short skirts

Writers
F. Scott Fitzgerald Ernest Hemingway

Musicians
Louis Armstrong Duke Ellington

20s Black Americans in

this period continued to live in poverty sharecropping kept Blacks in de facto slavery 1915 - boll weevil wiped out the cotton crop white landowners went bankrupt & forced blacks off their land

Dynamic Decade

Margaret Sanger led birth-control movement (use of contraceptives) National Womens Party 1923 led by Alice Paul - Equal Rights Amendment Religion - Fundamentalists lost ground to modernists Sexual allure used in advertising Flappers young women of the age, symbolic of rebelliousness Dr. Sigmund Freud psychologist- healthy to demand sexual gratification if not, led to emotional problems Teenagers pioneered the sexual revolution of the 20s kissing, necking & petting became commonplace Music Jazz Blacks like - WC Handy, Jelly Roll Morton, Joe King Oliver and Peter Whitemans all-white band

20s

1920's also brought about great changes for women... 1920 - 19th Amendment gave them the federal vote after 1920, social circumstances changed too as more women worked outside the home and more women went to college and clamoured to join the professions women didn't want to sacrifice wartime gains amounted to a social revolt characterized by the FLAPPER/ "new woman"
(bobbed hair, short dresses, smoked in public...)

Cultural Liberation

H. L. Mencken acidic wit editor of American Mercury assailed marriage, patriotism, democracy, prohibition, Puritans, & middle-class Americans F. Scott Fitzgerald This Side of Paradise bible for flappers: The Great Gatsby Theodore Dreiser An American Tragedy

Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises & A Farwell to Arms Sherwood Anderson small town US Winesburg, Ohio Sinclair Lewis Main Street & Babbitt critic of Am. Commercial culture for which he received the Nobel Prize for literature William Faulkner: South The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying

Cultural Liberation
Ezra Pound Poet T. S. Eliot - poet The Waste Land which chronicles the disillusion felt by the expatriates awarded the Nobel Prize Eugene ONeill dramatist Strange Interlude

Architecture

Frank Lloyd Wright

Cultural Liberation
lost generation of writers- disillusioned after WWI Many move outside the US Expatriates who lived in Paris Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein Black expatriates were Josephine Baker (dancer & singer) Langston Hughes, Richard Wright

Wall Streets Big Bull Market

Real estate speculation Florida destroyed by a hurricane Stock Market long boom Buying on margin small down payment 10% of total value of stocks Consumer debt skyrocketed ($1billion $24 billion) Bureau of the Budget Secretary of Treasury Andrew Mellon reduces the national debt but places more of the tax burden on the middle class

Harlem Renaissance

Harlem NY 100,000 blacks vibrant creative culture writing, music, art in celebration of the lifestyle and society of Blacks Langston Hughes (quote) Zora Neale Hurston, 1937 Their Eyes Were Watching God Wallace Thurman, novel The Blacker and the Berry - discrimination Claude McKay, Poet and novelist member of Communist Party Countee Cullen, poet Alain Locke and others Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton was an American ragtime and early jazz pianist, bandleader and composer.

The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain: Langston Hughes The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too. The tom-tom cries, and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves.

Harlem Renaissance
Joe "King" Oliver
Jelly Roll Morton
Alain LeRoy Locke writer philosopher, educator, and patron of the arts. He is best known for his writings on and about the Harlem Renaissance. He is unofficially called the "Father of the Harlem Renaissance".

a jazz cornet player and bandleader.

W.C. Handy, father of the Blues

Blacks moved north to take advantage of booming wartime industry (= Great Migration) - Black ghettoes began to form, i.e. Harlem within these ghettoes a distinct Black culture flourished But both blacks and whites wanted cultural interchange restricted

20s

1920's collectively known as the "Roaring 20's", or the "Jazz Age" in sum, a period of great change in American Society modern America is born at this time for first time the census reflected an urban society people had moved into cities to enjoy a higher standard of living