the ROARING 20’S
SOCIAL AND POLITICAL
TURMOIL
POLITICAL CONSERVATISM
Homework: Read Ch 27 and complete
Reading Notes per NBG
For each section (27.2-27.4), make a t-chart
Contributed to peace
and prosperity
•
Did not contribute to
peace and prosperity
Americans cheer the return of the
AEF
To what kind of an America were
the doughboys returning?
all the negative stuff
chapter 1
TENSIONS IN AMERICAN SOCIETY
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Economic Uncertainty
Labor Unrest
Racism
Red-Scare
Nativism
Prohibition's lawlessness
Reaction to War
Economics
• Economic downturn
– no wartime production
– vets returning for jobs
• Agricultural
Overproduction
• Competition for jobs
– women are displaced
– Blacks face mounting
racism in north
– calls to restrict
immigration
• Farm prices fall
– remain low throughout
the 20’s,
– collapse 1929
Labor Unrest
• 1919 – 3,600 strikes
• Limited success
• Most strikes face rigid opposition from
owners, government, public opinion
• Labor unions=revolutionary radicalism
• Union membership falls from 5 to 3.4 million
• Owners counter with “American Plan” and
welfare capitalism
“AMERICAN PLAN”
• Every working man has freedom of choice
in accepting employment and should not
be forced to join any organization. He has
a right to negotiate himself with his
employer
• BUT, employers could require “yellow-dog”
contracts as a condition for employment.
“Welfare Capitalism”
• To increase worker loyalty, some
employers provided
– medical care
– housing
– recreation
– schools
– also:
» restrictions on behavior
» spies
• “social department”
• eligibility for $5 day
Agriculture
Mechanization + …
Increasing Farm Acreage = …
Overproduction
• supply v. demand ---------- prices fall.
Oklahoma-newly cultivated
marginal lands
• 1920. (typical farm = 166 acres)
– Only 4 percent had electricity,
– 1 percent owned trucks
– 3 percent had acquired tractors to replace or
supplement horse and mule power.
– 25 percent had automobiles, and
– 37 percent enjoyed telephones.
The Great Migration
• Impoverished African-American sharecroppers,
oppressed by the Jim Crow laws of the South flock to
industrial jobs in northern cities.
estimate: More than 1,000,000 move during the 1920’s
The Great Migration
WWI Veterans
"Our second emancipation will be the outcome of this war.“
It was not to be.
• Black casualties 14%
compared to whites 6%
• 10 of 70 lynchings in
in 1919 were black vets
• 25 anti-black riots 1919
RACISM IS NOT CONFINED TO THE
SOUTH
RED SCARE 1919-1920
anti-communist panic
• Anarchists blow up the front of the
attorney general’s house along with dozen
of other bombings
• Reaction to sometimes violent labor
strikes
• Fear of Bolshevism
RED SCARE 1919-1920
• Bolshevism
– based on theories of
Karl Marx
– anti-capitalist
– advocated violence
– anti-religious
• A. Mitchell Palmer
– Wilson’s attorney
general
– arrests 1,000s
– deported 800
•
Git!: (1919) Depicting Uncle Sam
kicking the International Workers
of the World out of America
Palmer Raid on IWW offices
In for a trimming…
He’ll set the clock back 1,000 years
• J. Edgar Hoover (future director of the FBI)
deports Emma Goldman along with 240
others on the U.S.S. Buford
Wall Street Bombing 1920
• 30 dead
• 200 injured
• $2million in
damages
–
including J.P. Morgan’s
office
Sacco and Vanzetti Trial
• See page 331 in text. Did Sacco and
Vanzetti receive a fair trial?
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
The police did not use a lineup to identify the suspects. Instead, they
placed Sacco and Vanzetti in the middle of the room and had them pose like
bandits
The defense produced 17 witnesses who provided alibis for Sacco and
Vanzetti on the day of the murder. One was an official of the Italian
Consulate, who remembered that Sacco’s passport picture was too large to
be used.
On the day of the arrest, Sacco was carrying a loaded .32 Colt automatic
rifle and had more than 20 loose shotgun shells in his pocket. Vanzetti was
carrying a .38 Harrington & Richardson rifle and three shotgun shells
Sacco and Vanzetti lied about their whereabouts the day of the murder.
They lied because they though they were going to be labeled “radical
aliens” and be deported.
The prosecution’s eyewitness provided faulty testimony. One man claimed
that Vanzetti had shouted to him in “unmistakably clear English” although
Vanzetti spoke broken English.
On the day of the arrest, Sacco and Vanzetti were preparing to hide
anarchist literature in order to help suspected subversives.
One witness to the murder provided an accurate description of Sacco
including details such as the length of his hair and the size of his hands.
A fellow inmate, Celestino Madeiros wrote a note confessing to the murder.
Judge Thayer refused to allow it as testimony. However, in 1925, Madeiros
could not give any accurate report of the crime or the crime scene
Harry Ripley, the jury foremen was an ex-police officer who hated radicals.
When his friend suggested that Sacco and Vanzetti might be innocent,
Ripley reportedly responded, “They ought to hang anyway.”
A gun expert suggested that one of the bullets had been shot from Sacco’s
FEAR OF IMMIGRANTS
• “Immigrants bring their radical
revolutionary politics!”
• “They don’t speak English!’
• “They are soldiers of the pope!”
• They will destroy our white, protestant,
male-dominated, superior culture!!”
• “They cause deadly diseases!”
– Anxiety over the Influenza Epidemic
• 675,000 deaths in 1918
National Origins Act 1924
• Emergency Quota Act 1921 –(1st restriction on
European Immigration)
– Limits immigrants to 3% of immigrant
population in 1910
• National Origins Act 1924
– Limits immigrants to 2% of immigrant
population in 1890
(Chinese Exclusion Act 1882)
Backlash Against Immigrants
• Fear of Bolshevism
• Ethnocentrism
• Economic competition
• “America: white, protestant, male-dominated”
• Resurgence of nativism
– Ku Klux Klan, again
1924, KKK claimed to have
3,000,000 members
Equal Opportunity Haters
• anti-Black
• anti-Catholic
• anti-Jewish
• anti-foreigner
• anti-communist
• anti-bootlegger
• anti-divorce
• anti-urban
• anti-modern
KKK Decline
• Horrific rape scandal discredits Klan
leader in Indiana
• Extensive corruption discovered
• Steep decline in 1925
– less than 15,000 members
• NAACP continues its
activities in the North
• Jim Crow continues in
the South
• Marcus Garvey
– “Back-to-Africa”
movement
– UNIA
Eugenics
• Social Darwinism expanded
• Pseudo-science funded by Carnegie and
Rockefeller, among others.
• Sought a “scientific” explanation for poverty and
inequality
• “The poor were genetically inferior”
• Rationalization for the status quo
• Sterilization laws enacted in 18 states
• Admired and adopted by Adolph Hitler
• Progressivism distorted?
Prohibition
• Volstead Act puts the
18th Amendment into
effect.
• Pits rural v. urban
immigrant v. native
• Widely ignored
• Bootleggers make $$$
• Encourages
lawlessness
• wets v. drys
• "The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered
considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive
of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing
laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the
dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with
this." Albert Einstein: "My First Impression of the U.S.A.", 1921
Religious Backlash
– Fundamentalists, believing in the literal truth
of the Bible were offended by the glorification
of science and the modernizing trends of
urbanization.
• 4-Square Gospel
• Scopes “Monkey” Trial
Political Reaction Following The War and the Era
of Progressive Reforms
• Conservative trend back to small government
• Return of Isolationism, ideally,
but not practically
• “Return To Normalcy”