CHAPTERS 15 & 16
THE JAZZ AGE
Sacco and Vanzetti
Anarchism – the Sacco and
Vanzetti Trial
• Ferdinando Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti
were anarchists who were convicted of
murdering two men during a 1920 armed
robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts.
• Anarchism is the belief that all organization or
government is oppressive.
• After a controversial trial and a series of
appeals, the two Italian immigrants were
executed on August 23, 1927
• There is a highly politicized dispute over their
guilt or innocence.
The Trial
• Vanzetti claimed that he had been selling fish at the time
of the Braintree robbery. Sacco claimed that he had
been in Boston applying for a passport at the Italian
consulate
• The presiding judge was Webster Thayer. A few weeks
earlier he had given a speech condemning Bolshevism
and anarchism. He supported the suppression of radical
speech
• A crucial piece of evidence was a cap that was left at the
scene of the crime. It was supposedly Sacco’s, but
when he tried it on, it was obviously too small. Thayer
told the jury to ignore this.
• Most people believed that the trial was about race and
immigrations rather than guilt and innocence.
KKK
• The KKK was almost
out of business by the
1900’s. Fear of
immigrants brought
new recruits.
• The “new” KKK
expanded their
hatred.
New KKK
• Where the old KKK was
primarily about segregation.
The New KKK pointed their
hatred at Jews, Catholics,
foreigners, anything seen as
different and unAmerican.
• Before, the KKK was seen as
being made up of lower class
white trash.
• The hired a public relations
firm to advertise the New KKK
and make it acceptable for
middle class people to join.
They were successful.
National Origins Act
• The National Origins Act was passed by
Congress in response to fears of
immigration.
• The Act placed specific quotas on the
number of each nationality or race or
religion that could come to the US.
• Mexicans were specifically excluded from
the quotas to due political pressure by
southwestern politicians.
Immigrations Acts of 1921-24 & 29
• A series of acts limiting immigration were
passed in the 1920’s.
• These acts were in response to the
immigration surge of the late 19th and early
20th century and in response to the Red
Scare.
• People feared two things with continued
immigration: miscegnation and
bolshevism.
Eugenics
• Another response to the immigration surge
and changed race relations was an
interest in Eugenics.
• Eugenics is considered to be the “science”
of selective breeding. The idea was that
some kind of “pure” race could be
attained.
• Many, many people believed this idea.
Flappers
•
•
•
Flapper was a term applied to a "new
breed" of young women who wore
short skirts, bobbed their hair, listened
to jazz, and flaunted their disdain for
what was then considered acceptable
behavior.
Flappers were seen as brash for
wearing excessive makeup, drinking,
treating sex in a casual manner,
smoking, driving automobiles and
otherwise flouting social and sexual
norms.
Flappers had their origins in the period
of liberalism, social and political
turbulence and increased transatlantic
cultural exchange that followed the
end of the First World War, as well as
the export of American jazz culture to
Europe.
Margaret Mead
• A woman that served as a role model for
the new women of the 20’s was Margaret
Mead.
• Her book “Coming of Age in Samoa”
examined sexual ideas in foreign countries
and shed new light on American attitudes
toward sex.
• Mead was a champion of broadened
sexual mores within traditional religious life
Fundamentalism
• The 1920’s saw the rise of fundamentalist
religions.
• Fundamentalism is the belief that every
word of the Bible is absolute fact and
should be followed as such.
• Fundamentalism grew out of Americans
fear of the changing roles of women,
negroes, young people and materialistic
society.
Billy Sunday
• Billy Sunday was a
leading fundamentalist
preacher.
• He was an exprofessional baseball
player that found he could
make more money
preaching.
• His revivals attracted
100’s of thousands of
people.
• He was a leader in the
Prohibition Movement.
Aimee Semple McPherson
• Aimee Semple McPherson
was a Los Angeles, California
evangelist and media celebrity
in the 1920s and 1930s.
• She founded the Foursquare
Church.
• McPherson has been noted as
a pioneer in the use of modern
media, especially radio, which
she drew upon through the
growing appeal of popular
entertainment in North
America.
Scopes Trial
• Scopes Monkey Trial occurred in 1925.
• A high school biology teacher John Scopes was accused of violating
the a Tennessee law which made it unlawful to teach evolution.
• Scopes was found guilty, but the verdict was overturned on a
technicality and he was never brought back to trial.
• The trial drew intense national publicity, as national reporters flocked
to the small town of Dayton, to cover the big-name lawyers
representing each side.
• William Jennings Bryan, three time presidential candidate for the
Democrats, argued for the prosecution
• Clarence Darrow, the famed defense attorney, spoke for Scopes.
• The trial saw modernists, who said religion was consistent with
evolution, against fundamentalists who said the word of God as
revealed in the Bible trumped all human knowledge.
Prohibition
• The 18th Amendment prohibited the
making or selling of alcohol in the United
States.
• This was a result of the reforms of the late
nineteenth century and was aimed
primarily at immigrants in the cities.
• The leadership of the prohibition
movement was located in rural areas.
The
Volstead Act
• The Volstead Act was passed in 1919 was the
enforcement legislation of the Prohibition.
• This act expanded the “police powers” of
government to control private behaviors
previously thought to be outside of governmental
interference.
• Police powers are the powers of government
that are used to punish or control behavior.
The Result of Prohibition
• The primary result of Prohibition was to make
organized crime in the United States a profitable
business.
• The idea behind Prohibition was to lessen the
use of alcohol. The opposite happened.
• People used as much or more alcohol after the
18th amendment. The lure of illegality aided this.
• Crime soared in America as a result of the 18th
Amendment and is the primary image that most
Americans have of the 1920’s.
The Mafia
• The Mafia or Cosa Nostra was
a Sicilian import that had spent
the majority of its American
existence in a 12 square block
of Little Italy in New York.
• Prohibition made bootlegging
or the making of illegal alcohol
very profitable.
• Gangsters opened illegal bars
called speakeasies and
created huge organized crime
organizations.
• One of the most famous was
created in Chicago by Al
Capone
End of Prohibition
• The roaring 20’s saw the prohibition of
alcohol and the rise of crime.
• By the time of the Great Depression, the
American people had had enough of
government engaging in social
experiments such as prohibition.
• The 21st Amendment ended Prohibition in
1933.
19th Amendment
• Women’s Suffrage or
the right to vote was
attained with the 19th
Amendment in 1920.
• This was the result of
over a century of work
by women’s rights
activists.
Lucky Lindy
• Charles Augustus Lindbergh
"Lucky Lindy" and "The Lone
Eagle“ was the first pilot to fly
across the Atlantic alone.
• Lindbergh, then a U.S. Air Mail
pilot, emerged from virtual
obscurity to almost
instantaneous world fame as
the result of his solo non-stop
flight from New York's Long
Island to Le Bourget Field in
Paris, France, a distance of
nearly 3,600 miles in the
single-seat, single-engine
monoplane Spirit of St. Louis.
Radio
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Radio dominated the Twenties, with roughly 3 million Americans owning
radios by 1923.
Most listeners still used crystal sets with earphones to receive news and
bulletins, advertising and music.
Later radios were developed that were large pieces of furniture that were
present in most homes.
Radio networks like ABC, NBC, CBS and RKO
featured music broadcast live, news, serials and religious programs.
The programs that were the biggest to come out of the 1920’s were soap
operas (One Life to Live and As the World Turns) ,comedies like Ma and Pa
Kettle and serials like the Green Hornet, Superman and the Shadow.
Baseball and Boxing became huge events and became the most important
sporting events in America because of radio particulary with the arrival of
baseball star Babe Ruth and Boxing champion Jack Dempsey.
Football was also popular particularly with the arrival of the first great
football celebrity, Red Grange.
Radio ushered in the age of Mass Media or the presence of media in every
event.
Harlem Renaissance
• The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural
movement that spanned the 1920s and 1930s.
At the time, it was known as the "New Negro
Movement", named after the 1925 anthology by
Alain Locke.
• Historians disagree as to when the Harlem
Renaissance began and ended. The Harlem
Renaissance is unofficially recognized to have
spanned from about 1919 until the early or mid
1930s. Many of its ideas lived on much longer.
The Harlem Renaissance
• The Harlem Renaissance was a result of
black culture finding the freedom of
northern cities following the Great
Migration.
• Writers, musicians, dancers, artists and
designers made up the Harlem
Renaissance.
• This was the most important artistic
movement in US history.
Langston Hughes
• James Mercer Langston
Hughes was an
American novelist,
playwright, short story
writer, and columnist.
• He was one of the
earliest innovators of the
new literary art form jazz
poetry.
• Hughes is one of the
most famous of the
Harlem Renaissance
writers.
Jazz
• Jazz is a style of music that originated at
the beginning of the 20th century in New
• Jazz is set off from other musical styles in
its emphasis on improvisation
• It is the only truly American art form.
• The word "jazz" (in early years also
spelled "jass") began as a West Coast
slang term and was first used to refer to
music in Chicago in about 1915.
Louis Armstrong
• The along with Duke Ellington,
Louis Armstrong is the most
important musical figure of the
20th century.
• A trumpeter from New Orleans,
Armstrong singlehandedly
created most of the modern
forms of jazz creation.
• He ranks ahead of Hendrix, the
Beatles or any other more well
known musician in his
influence.
Duke Ellington
• If Armstrong is the most
important instrumentalist
of the 20th century, Duke
Ellington is the most
important composer.
• Ellington created a big
band version of jazz that
incorporated all the
innovations of earlier
small groups and added
his own voice.
• Ellington is the most
important American
composer in history
Bessie Smith
• While Jazz was becoming
more popular in among white
audiences, the blues, a more
rural music stayed popular
mainly among black
audiences.
• Certain performers are
remembered from this period,
Tampa Red, Ma Rainey and
Bessie Smith.
• Smith is particulary noteworthy
in that she was called “the
voice of soul” for her emotional
delivery.
Civil Rights in the 1920’s
• Most African Americans were members of the
Republican party in the early 20th century. This
was due to the influence of Lincoln.
• The NAACP became particularly active in the
1920’s.
• Their biggest success was the blocking of the
Supreme Court nomination of John J. Parker, a
noted racist.
• The organization supported the Dyer Act, which
would have made lynching illegal. The bill was
not passed, but the publicity helped to lessen the
number of lynchings.
Oscar DePriest
• In 1928, Oscar
dePriest was elected
to Congress from
Chicago.
• He was the first
African American to
be elected Congress.
Black Nationalism
• Black Nationalism also arose during the 1920’s.
• This movement was led by Marcus Garvey and
his “Back to Africa Movement” or Garveyism.
• Garveyism would eventually inspire others,
ranging from the Nation of Islam, to the Rastafari
movement
• The intention of the movement was for those of
African ancestry to "redeem" Africa and for the
European colonial powers to leave it.
Marcus Garvey
CHAPTER 16
The Politics of the 1920’s
• The Presidents of the 1920’s stand as a
testament to the idea that the American
people would elect Satan if the economy is
good.
• The election of Harding, Coolidge and
Hoover was a result of everyone else being
too busy making money to run the country.
• These zeros were elected on platforms that
praised motherhood, racism, conformity and
wealth.
Warren G. Harding
•
•
•
Usually seen as tied for Grant as
conducting the most corrupt
administration in American History.
He appointed outright thieves to
office and kept his mistresses in the
closets in the White House
(literally). The thieves were known
as the Ohio Gang and the
mistresses were called secretaries.
Even as a blind hog finds an acorn,
Harding did some good by accident.
–
–
–
•
Budget and Accounting Act of 1921
He personally supported anti
lynching legislation, but he couldn’t
get it passed.
Sponsored the Fordney / McCumber
Tariff, lowered taxes and social
spending.
That’s about it.
A Return to Normalcy
• People were tired of the war and tired of all the reforms
of the Progressive Era and just wanted to make money
and sleep late.
• Harding was the perfect man for this. He was very
handsome (which appealed to the female vote- sorry, but
it was true)
• He wasn’t very smart. To his credit, he knew this. He
didn’t try to pretend he knew how to run the country.
• He is most famous for the quote “Americans want to
return to normalcy (no such word, think of it as an early
20th century version of “strategery)
Harding Administration Scandals
•
•
•
•
•
Now for the bad stuff
Charles Forbes runs the Veterans
Bureau. He not only runs it, but
uses it as his personal bank.
Along with looting the Bureau’s
funds, he also required bribes to
award contracts, this process being
so open as to having its’ own
government bid document printed
at government expense.
The fraud in the disable veterans
department was so extensive that it
is estimated that up to 50% of
wounded veterans did not receive
pensions because the budgets were
taken up with administrative
expenses.
Forbes later went to prison, being
the only bright spot in a dismal
administration, but was later
appointed CEO of Nabisco Co.
Harry Daugherty
•
•
•
•
•
Harry Daugherty was attorney
general of the United States.
In this capacity he accepted
bribes and let it be known that
prisoners could be released by
bribing him.
He was indicted for fraud. He
was placed in the odd position
of being charge of prosecuting
himself.
He fixed this by simply refusing
to do so and returning a bill of
insufficient cause and
dismissing the charges against
himself.
What is most amazing is that
the majority of the
administration saw no problem
in this.
Teapot Dome
•
•
•
•
•
•
Albert Fall was a genius in much
they way that Al Capone was a
successful businessman.
He was in charge of the Defense
Departments oil reserves as
Secretary of the Interior.
He used the oil fields as his
personal property and leased the
fields to oil companies.
He also sold the naval oil reserves
to the oil companies and gave the
money to his wife.
This came to be known as Teapot
Dome Scandal and resulted in his
conviction of corruption and spent
a year in prison, the first cabinet
officer to do so.
The reason the sentence was so
light was that most of the White
House staff was in on it along the
judge that heard the case.
Jess Smith
• During the years of Prohibition, when
alcohol was against the law, the
President regularly had parties in the
White House featuring bootleg alcohol.
• Jess Smith, one of Harding’s closest
advisors sold government jobs. He at
least had the decency to commit
suicide when he was caught.
Warren G. Harding
There is very little evidence
that Harding himself
benefited from this
corruption and was actually,
like Grant, exploited by his
friends.
Harding took a trip to Alaska
to avoid the publicity and
died of a heart attack in San
Francisco.
There were rumors of his
death being a result of
jealous women, jealous
husbands or a product of
organized crime.
I prefer the idea that God had
simply had enough of this
foolishness.
Calvin Coolidge
• Silent Cal, just about as exciting as toothpaste. A
tightwad and a firm believer in Laissez Faire. He
believed that government should not only stop
expanding, but rather, he wanted to shrink it.
• Cal spent most of his presidency sleeping, literally.
He took a nap every day and only worked four hours
a day. He said that he had to have at least ten hours
of sleep every night to “stay alert”. Nobody can
quite figure out what he needed to stay alert for.
• He was Harding’s vice-president but ran on his own
in 1924 and won easily. The country was prosperous
(he had nothing to do with this, but like all
presidents, he got credit).
Silent Cal
•
•
•
Coolidge was a small town man
and remained as such until his
death (when he died, Dorothy
Parker asked “How could they
tell?”)
When told that the British were
having trouble making their war
loan payments and wanted
extensions, he refused and
when asked why he said “they
borrowed the money didn’t
they?”
When he was mayor of Boston
he used the military to break a
police strike and believed to the
end of his life that America was
still the small town society he
grew up in.
Herbert Hoover
• Herbert Hoover was
probably the unluckiest
President since James
Buchanan.
• A devout Quaker and an
Engineer, he rose from
poverty, worked his way
through Stanford and
became a wealthy
mining engineer.
Hoover
• He was a wonderful executive and
administrator. He had handled the
relief efforts in Europe following the
war and during the war he had been
head of the War Industries Board. He
then became Secretary of Commerce.
His reputation for hard work, honesty
and intelligence was impeccable.
Hoover
• The problem was that he possessed a good
intellect, poor instincts and bad ideals.
• He bought completely into the Republican
laissez faire, market economy, social
Darwinist view.
• When the bubble of prosperity burst in 1929
he refused to give up the Republican
platform and ignored the poverty and
starvation at the gates of the White House.
• A truly tragic figure and absolutely
representative of America in the 20’s.
Hoover
• The Crash of 29 destroyed his presidency and to a large extent,
Hoover himself.
• As criticism of him grew stronger, he became more stubborn.
• He was criticized for eating 7 course meals while people
starved but responded by saying that as president he had to
set an example of optimism.
• He truly believed this stuff.
• His wife had different opinions and as the Depression
deepened they simply stopped talking. She also required that
all the butlers in the White house be exactly 5’5” tall.
• The Hoovers lived in a world that changed on them and they
couldn’t change.
Prosperity
•
•
•
•
•
The First World War was an economic
boon. The United States benefited from
the war in a number of ways.
American goods and armaments more
fully developed what was already a
strong economy.
The production of armaments in a
country not previously dedicated to arms
production allowed industry to diversify
and to teach industry that they could
quickly change production methods
quickly on a national scale.
the war experience made what was
produced in American industry more
diverse.
the production of the first wave of the
industrial revolution was aimed at what
was known as heavy industry, the second
wave spawned by the war was for
consumer goods.
Mass Production
• The biggest factor in
America’s prosperity was
the perfection of the
assembly line in
American factories.
• On an assembly line, the
job of making something
is divided up into smaller
and smaller tasks. This
allows employers to pay
lower wages for unskilled
labor.
Henry Ford
• Henry Ford perfected the
American car and made it
affordable to most Americans.
• He did this by perfecting the
assembly line and creating the
Model T Ford also called the
“tin lizzy”.
• By the 1920’s, automobiles
had been around a long time,
but they were expensive.
• Ford made it possible for most
Americans to own a car and
thus literally changed America.
Union Troubles
•
•
•
The unions had agreed not to strike during
the war. The end of the war and war time
shortages combined to create inflation.
The unions struck for higher wages to
offset higher prices. Employers used hired
thugs and federal troops to break the
strikes.
The general prosperity of the 1920’s made it
possible for people to ignore these abuses.
Welfare Capitalism
• Welfare capitalism in the United States refers to the
policies of large companies that developed internal
welfare systems for their employees.
• It was promoted by business leaders during the 1920’s
because of widespread economic insecurity, social
reform activism, and labor unrest.
• It was based on the idea that Americans should look not
to the government or to labor unions but to the
workplace benefits provided by private-sector employers
for protection against the fluctuations of the market
economy.
• Companies employed these types of welfare policies to
encourage worker loyalty, productivity and dedication
and to discourage the formation of unions.
Open Shop
• An open shop is a place of employment
where you are not required to join or
financially support a union as a condition
of being hired or working.
• Open shop is also known as merit shop
Isolationism
A national policy of not having political or
economic relations with other countries.
• Isolationism was the official foreign policy
of the US after WWI.
Supply Side Economics
• Supply side economics focuses on tax relief and
aid to manufacturers and the upper classes. The
profits they create would then “trickle” down to
the lower classes.
• The idea is that since these groups create a
large number of jobs and make the stock market
profitable, then they should be considered first in
the economic policy.
• This ignores the idea that 90% of America’s
GNP is related to small businesses.