The Road to Prohibition
• Temperance movement: 1825 to 1930
• Late 19th century,
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five states had full prohibition
many other states had local options
Scandinavia had prohibition
England regulated pub hours
Who Backed Prohibition
• Evangelical Protestants
• Perfectionists
– 1792 to 1832: yearly alcohol per person 2 to 7 gallons.
• Southern Power Structure
• Employers
– Fear of workplace unrest
– Workplace safety
• Middle class Reformers
• Feminists
Prohibition Forces
• Woman’s Christian Temperance Union
• Anti-Saloon League,
– By 1915, every state had local option laws
– Saloons illegal in ¾ of the area of the nation
• The War
– Lever Act
• Congress adopts 18th amendment, December 1917
• 36th state ratified June 1919
• The Volstead Act
– ½ of 1-pecent alcohol was allowed
Enforcement Issues
• The Federal Prohibition Bureau
– desperately underfunded,
– 1/12th of its staff dismissed for corruption
• state enforcement officials reluctant to help the
Feds.
– The police chief of Levansworth Kansas
– Senator Jim Reed of Kansas
• Unprotected Canadian Border
– only 5% of the alcohol smuggled ever confiscated
Catching the Bootleggers
• 1921 and 1922:
– 3,500 civil cases
– 65,000 criminal cases
• 1925: 172,000 stills were smashed.
• Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith
– 5,000 arrests
– seized more than $15 million dollars worth of
alcohol
Repealing the Law
• Wikersham Commission
• Repeal amendment submitted early 1933
• March 1933, Volstead amended
– 3.2% alcohol allowed
• December 1933: last State ratifies repeal
amendment
Prohibition Legacy
• Prohibition and an animosity towards the law
• Prohibition and civil liberties
– 1925: Supreme Court case regarding automobile
searches
• Organized Crime
– Johnny Torrio and Alphonse Capone
• 1920-1924: 200 gang killings in Chicago
– Dion O’Bannion Gang
– St. Valentines Day Massacre
– Torrio and Capone annual earnings: $70-mil
Nativism
• 1920 census: 105 million people in the US.
– ½ descended from 1790 census families
– ½ had imigrated after 1790
• New Immigrants
– South, Central and Eastern Europe
• Catholics and Jews
– Less educated
– More impoverished
– Different Cultures
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Immigration
• Immigration by Nation: 1900-1910
– 2 million Italians
– 2 million Slavic peoples
– almost 2-million from Russia
• Of 105 million Americans,
– 14 million foreign born
• 8 million from Eastern and Southern and Central Europe.
• Popular fear that the “melting pot” was no longer
melting
• Intellectuals hawking pseudo-scientific
racial hierarchies
• Madison Grant
– The Passing of the Great race (1916)
• Fear of Catholics
• Fear of Jews
Congress Restricts Immigration
• Congress and the Literacy Tests
– Passes in 1917
• 1921: Emergency Quota Act
• 1924: National Origins Acts
– Congressman Albert Johnson
– Coolidge: “America must be kept American.”
– Canadian and Mexican Immigration unaffected:
• 1920s: 1-mil Canadians and 1/2 –mil Mexicans enter the US
• Immigration 1924 to 1947: 2,718,000
Sacco and Vanzetti
• April 1920: Robbery and Murder in South
Braintree, Mass.
– Suspects:
• Nicola Sacco, a shoemaker
• Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fish peddler
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Judge Webster Thayer’s outward dislike of radicals
Felix Frankfurter and The Atlantic Monthly
Governor’s Comission
Sacco and Vanetti executed August 23, 1927
Scopes Trial
• Rise of Fudamentalism
– Billy Sunday
– Aimee Semple McPherson
– Charles Dawin: Origin of Species (1859)
• Tennessee State Law on teaching evolution
– ACLU says they will defend violators
– John Scopes arrested in Dayton, TN
– William Jennings Bryan v Clarence Darrow
• H. L. Mencken of The American Mercury and The Baltimore
Sun
Rise and Fall of the KKK
• 1915: William J. Simmons and the revival
of the Ku Klux Klan, Stone Mountain, GA.
• By 1925, Klan claims 4 million members
• Targets:
– Blacks, Catholics, Jews, Bootleggers, adulterers
• The KKK’s modern organization
• KKK Political Control
• D. C. Stephenson and the Fall of the KKK
Racial Reaction
• Marcus Garvey
– Black pride and black unity.
– Build a strong independent economic base in America.
– Harlem, 1917: Universal Negro Improvement
Association
• Negro Factories Corporation
– operated a chain of grocery stores, a laundry, a publishing house
and a restaurant.
• The Negro World
• The Black Star Line
– By 1920, Garvey had 2 million UNIA members in 800
chapters on 4 continents.
Opposition to Garvey
• NAACP and W. E. B. DuBois
– “Garvey Must Go”
• J. Edgar Hoover and the Justice Department
– Infiltrated the UNIA
• Convicted of Mail Fraud in 1923
• Given the maximum fine and sentence
• Deported after release from prison
Equal Rights
• Alice Paul and the NWP
– 1923: An Equal Rights Amendment
– Opposition from Jane Addams and Florence
Kelly
Modern Culture
• Film
– Charlie Chaplin
– Talkies
• Film Scandals
– Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle
– Virginia Rappe
• Will Hays and the Hays Commission
– Seven-foot kisses
The Auto Industry
• Henry Ford and the Model T
– 1909: 1,708 produced / sold for $950.
– 1911: 4,000 workers making 35,000 cars a year,
now selling now for $700.
– 1914: Model T made every 93 seconds, selling
for less than $500
– 1921: Ford made 1,250,000 cars, one every
minute.
– 1926: Ford earned $264,000 per day.
Car Culture
• The car became indispensable
• Auto style
– Alfred Sloan and General Motors
– 1925 Chevy K Model
• Ford Market Share
– 54% in 1925
– 45% in 1926
• Ford’s Model A
– Debuted in 1927
– 1.3 mil ad campaign
Buy it On Time
• By later 1920s, 15% of purchases were
made “on time.”
• This represent $6-billion in sales
Captains of Consciousness
• Old models stigmatized
• Spending
• Commodities enhanced one’s status:
– Post cereal improved your complexion
– Listerine fought bad breath
– Conover electric dishwashers saved hands.
Consumer Education over
Academic Education
• For every 70 cents spent on academic
education, $1.00 spent on consumer
education.
• Advertising in 1927: 1.5 billion
• Advertising designed to “transcend
tribalism”
Bruce Barton
• Founder of Barton, Batton, Durstein and
Osborne (BBDO)
– Lucky Strikes
• “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.”
• 1926: The Man Nobody Knew
– Joins piety with consumerism
An Empire of the Air
• Radio Background
– Sarnoff and the Titanic
– KDKA
• 1924: 500 radio stations.
• Radio Sales
– 1922: $60,000,000
– 1929: $842,548,000
Amos ‘n’ Andy
• Henry Selinger of WGN
• Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll
– January 1926: Sam ‘n’ Henry
• The “Chainless Chain”
– 1927: Amos ‘n’ Andy
Prosperity
• Electricity replaces gas
– 1925: 80% of homes with electricty had electric irons,
37% had vacuum cleaners, and 25% had washing
machines
• Per capita income:
– 1921: 641
– 1929: 847
• Industrial output grew 1/3 between 1919 and 1928
Flight of the Lone Eagle
• Aviation Legislation
– 1925: The Kelly Act
– 1926: The Air Commerce Act
• Aviation Firsts
– 1925: Carl Rogers
– 1926: Richard Byrd and Floyd Bennett
• New York to Paris
– The Raymond Orteig Prize
– May 20-21: 33 hours and 29 minutes
The Lost Generation
• Gertrude Stein
– disillusionment
– rebellion
– alienation
• F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Amory Blaine, This
Side of Paradise
Ezra Pound on War
• Excerpt from “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly”
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Daring as never before, wastage as
never before
Young blood and high blood
fair cheeks and fine bodies;
fortitude as never before
frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.
e. e. cummings
•
Buffalo Bill’s
• defunct
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who used to
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ride a watersmooth-silver
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stallion
• and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
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Jesus
• he was a handsome man
More Lost Generation
• Ernest Hemingway
– The Sun also Rises
• F. Scott Fitzgerald
– The Great Gatsby
The Sage of Baltimore
• Henry Louis Mencken
– Columnist: The Baltimore Sun
– Editor: The American Mercury
• HLM on Puritanism: “The haunting fear that
someone, somewhere, may be having a good
time.”
• HLM on Conscience: “The inner voice which ans
us that someone may be watching.”
Middletown
• Robert and Helen Lynd
– Muncie, IN
Harlem Renaissance
• James Weldon Johnson
– Negro America: What Now
• Claude McKay
– The Liberator
– Harlem Shadows
– Home to Harlem
• Langston Hughes
So…
• What Were the 1920s?