AP United States History - Terms and People – Unit 11, Chapter 31 (13th Ed.)
HONOR PLEDGE: I strive to uphold the vision of the North Penn School District, which is to inspire each student to reach his or her highest potential and
become a responsible citizen. Therefore, on my honor, I pledge that I have neither given nor received unauthorized assistance on this work.
American Life in the “Roaring Twenties”: 1919 – 1929
Before studying Chapter 31, read over these “Themes”:
Theme: A disillusioned America turned away from idealism and reform after World War I and toward isolationism in foreign
affairs, domestic social conservatism and the pleasures of prosperity.
Theme: New technologies, mass-marketing techniques, and new forms of entertainment fostered rapid cultural change
along with a focus on consumer goods. But the accompanying changes in moral values and uncertainty about the future
produced cultural anxiety as well as sharp intellectual critiques of American life.
After studying Chapter 31 in your textbook, you should be able to:
1. Analyze the movement toward social conservatism following World War I, leading to cultural conflicts over
such issues as prohibition and evolution.
2. Discuss the rise of mass-consumption economy, led by Henry Ford and the automobile industry.
3. Describe the cultural revolution brought about by radio, films, and changing sexual standards.
4. Explain how new ideas and values were reflected and promoted in the American literary renaissance.
5. Explain how the era’s cultural changes affected women and African-Americans
Know the following people and terms. Consider the historical significance of each term or person. Also
note the dates of the event if that is pertinent.
A. People
A. Mitchell Palmer
+John Dewey
John T. Scopes
+William Jennings Bryan
Clarence Darrow
Andrew Mellon
Bruce Barton
+Henry Ford
Frederick W. Taylor
+Wilber and Orville Wright
Charles Lindbergh
+Margaret Sanger
Sigmund Freud
Marcus Garvey
H.L. Mencken
F. Scott Fitzgerald
+Ernest Hemingway
Sinclair Lewis
+Louis Armstrong
+Babe Ruth
+William Faulkner
B. Terms:
nativist
progressive education
buying on margin
Red Scare
Sacco and Vanzetti
Ku Klux Klan
AP United States History - Terms and People – Unit 11, Chapter 31 (13th Ed.)
HONOR PLEDGE: I strive to uphold the vision of the North Penn School District, which is to inspire each student to reach his or her highest potential and
become a responsible citizen. Therefore, on my honor, I pledge that I have neither given nor received unauthorized assistance on this work.
Emergency Quota Act of 1921
Immigration Act (includes National Origins Act and Asian Exclusion Act) of 1924
Eighteenth Amendment
Volstead Act
Prohibition
*Nineteenth Amendment
Fundamentalism
Modernists
“flappers” (see article on page 4)
United Negro Improvement Association
Indian Citizenship Act of 1924
“lost generation” (see short explanation on page 3)
Florida land boom
The Great Gatsby
+=One of the 100 Most Influential Americans of All Time, as ranked by The Atlantic. Go to Webpage to see all 100.
*=A 100 Milestone Document from the National Archive. Go to Webpage to link to these documents.
C. Sample Essay: Using what you have previously learned and what you read in Chapter 32, you should
be able to answer an essay such as this one: Do you think the 1920’s were a decade of anxiety and
intolerance or of hedonism and liberation? Could it be both? Cite specific examples to support your position.
D. Voices from the past: “The chief business of the American people is business.”
President Calvin Coolidge, Speech in Washington, D C, 17 Jan. 1925, commonly misquoted
as “The business of America is business.”
E. Reading a graph I: Can you explain the sudden drop in the graph in 1921, and the rise in 1933.
 Reading a graph II: Look at the “Population Density and Distribution” graph on textbook page A50.
What did the 1920 census show had happened for the first time in American history? _______________
Did this trend continue? _________ What % of the population lived in urban areas in 2000? ________
F. Interpreting Political Cartoons: Using the cartoon to the left,
answer the following questions:
1. What is the title? ____________________________
2. Who is the “man” in the top hat? ________________________
3. What does he represent? _____________________________
4. What is he doing to the people? _______________________
_________________________________________________
5. What “event” is this cartoon portraying? ___________________
The Soviet Ark
AP United States History - Terms and People – Unit 11, Chapter 31 (13th Ed.)
HONOR PLEDGE: I strive to uphold the vision of the North Penn School District, which is to inspire each student to reach his or her highest potential and
become a responsible citizen. Therefore, on my honor, I pledge that I have neither given nor received unauthorized assistance on this work.
G. What is the “lost generation”? Read the following to find out:
Seeking the bohemian lifestyle and rejecting the values of American conformity and
materialism, a number of intellectuals, poets, artists and writers fled to France in the post World
War I years. Paris was the center of it all.
American poet Gertrude Stein actually coined the expression "lost generation." Speaking to
Ernest Hemingway, she said, "You are all a lost generation." The term stuck and the mystique
surrounding these individuals continues to fascinate us.
Full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, and in doing so
created some of the finest American literature to date.
There were many literary artists involved in the groups known as the Lost Generation. The
three best known are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. Others usually
included among the list are: Sherwood Anderson, Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Ford Maddox Ford and
Zelda Fitzgerald.
Ernest Hemingway was the Lost Generation's leader in the adaptation of the naturalistic
technique in the novel. Hemingway volunteered to fight with the Italians in World War I and his
Midwestern American ignorance was shattered during the resounding defeat of the Italians by the
Central Powers at Caporetto. Newspapers of the time reported Hemingway, with dozens of pieces
of shrapnel in his legs, had heroically carried another man out. That episode even made the
newsreels in America. These war time experiences laid the groundwork of his novel, A Farewell to
Arms (1929). Another of his books, The Sun Also Rises (1926) was a naturalistic and shocking
expression of post-war disillusionment.
John Dos Passos had also seen the brutality of the war and questioned the meaning of
contemporary life. His novel Manhattan Transfer reveals the extent of his pessimism as he
indicated the hopeless futility of life in an American city. In 1927 he joined with other artists such
as Upton Sinclair, Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ben Shahn, Floyd Dell in the campaign
against the proposed execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. This included the writing
of Facing the Chair: Sacco and Vanzetti (1927).
F. Scott Fitzgerald is remembered as the portrayer of the spirit of the Jazz age. Though not
strictly speaking an expatriate, he roamed Europe and visited North Africa, but returned to the US
occasionally. Fitzgerald had at least two addresses in Paris between 1928 and 1930. He fulfilled
the role of chronicler of the prohibition era.
His first novel, This Side of Paradise, became a best-seller. But when first published, The
Great Gatsby, on the other hand, sold only 25,000 copies. The free spirited Fitzgerald, certain it
would be a big hit, blew the publisher's advance money leasing a villa in Cannes. In the end, he
owed his publishers, Scribners, money. Fitzgerald's Gatsby is the story of a somewhat refined and
wealthy bootlegger whose morality is contrasted with the hypocritical attitude of most of his
acquaintances. Many literary critics consider The Great Gatsby his best work.
The impact of the war on the group of writers in the Lost Generation is aptly demonstrated
by a passage from Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night (1933):
"This land here cost twenty lives a foot that summer...See that little stream--we
could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk it--a whole empire
walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire
walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody
rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation."
The Lost Generation writers all gained prominence in 20th century literature. Their
innovations challenged assumptions about writing and expression, and paved the way for
subsequent generations of writers.
G. What was the significance of “the flapper”? Joshua Zeitz says they were quite “modern”. 
AP United States History - Terms and People – Unit 11, Chapter 31 (13th Ed.)
HONOR PLEDGE: I strive to uphold the vision of the North Penn School District, which is to inspire each student to reach his or her highest potential and
become a responsible citizen. Therefore, on my honor, I pledge that I have neither given nor received unauthorized assistance on this work.
Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern
In researching my new book on the 1920s flapper, that notorious character type who bobbed her hair,
smoked cigarettes, drank gin, sported short skirts, and passed her evenings in steamy jazz clubs, where she
danced in a shockingly immodest fashion with a revolving cast of male suitors—I was surprised to discover how
familiar America’s Jazz Age seems to the modern eye.
In late 1924 the husband-and-wife sociologist team of Robert and Helen Lynd embarked on a yearlong
study of a “typical” American city. What they found could easily describe the typical American suburb in 2006.
Teenagers were in the thrall of fashion and celebrity. Young girls fought with their mothers over the length of
their skirts and the amount of makeup applied to their faces. Boys argued with their fathers over the use of the
family car.
Public culture in the 1920s was suffused with sexual imagery, as ordinary Midwesterners rushed to buy
up real-life glossies like True Confessions, Telling Tales, True Story, and Flapper Experiences, which ran stories
with such lurid headlines as indolent kisses and the primitive lover (“She wanted a caveman husband”).
Advertisements featuring scantily dressed Egyptian women guaranteed the “beauty secret of Cleopatra hidden
in every cake” of Palmolive soap. Popular songs of the era included “Hot Lips,” “I Need Lovin’,” and “Burning
Kisses.”
In effect, the 1920s heralded America’s entry into the modern era. It was the first decade when the nation
came under the full influence of advertising, consumer culture, movies, and radio. In a new world that was
defined more by the city than the farm, Americans responded with enthusiasm to the promise of abundance and
leisure. Their new watchword was fun; their new goal, fulfillment; their new obsession, sex.
If fun was the watchword of the younger generation, so was choice. Living in a world increasingly dominated by
magazine ads for makeup, furniture, and clothing, many Americans began applying the idea of the free market
in surprising contexts. A news item dated August 1923 brilliantly captured the tensions that the country’s new
consumer dogma could inspire.
“This little city of Somerset [Pennsylvania] has been somersaulted into a style class war,” reported The
New York Times, “with the bobbed hair, lip-stick flappers arrayed on one side and their sisters of long tresses
and silk-less stockings on the other.” When the local high school PTA convened to endorse a new dress code
that would bar silk stockings, short skirts, bobbed hair, and sleeveless dresses, the flapper contingent defiantly
broke into the meeting and chanted:
I can show my shoulders,
I can show my knees,
I’m a free-born American,
And can show what I please.
These young, self-styled flappers weren’t just trying to have fun; they were asserting their right to make
personal choices. If the flapper was the envy of teenage girls everywhere, to others she was a scourge of good
character and morals. “Concern —and consternation—about the flapper are general,” observed a popular
newspaper columnist of the day. “She disports herself flagrantly in the public eye, and there is no keeping her
out of grown-up company or conversation. Roughly, the world is divided into those who delight in her, those who
fear her and those who try pathetically to take her as a matter of course.”
The U.S. Secretary of Labor decried the “flippancy of the cigarette-smoking, cocktail-drinking flapper.” A
Harvard psychologist reported that flappers possessed the “lowest degree of intelligence” and posed “a
hopeless problem for educators.” In 1929 the Florida legislature even considered banning use of the term
flapper, so infamous was her character.
In effect, the flapper was a magnet for both abuse and adulation because she incarnated the tensions of
her age. No one better understood the social revolution that was afoot than Bruce Bliven of The New Republic.
In 1925 Bliven informed his readers that “women have highly resolved that they are just as good as men and
intend to be treated so. They don’t mean to have any more unwanted children. They do not intend to be
debarred from any profession or occupation which they choose to enter…. If they should elect to go naked
nothing is more certain than that naked they will go, while from the sidelines to which he has been relegated
mere man is vouchsafed permission only to pipe a feeble Hurrah!”
To which Bliven concluded: “Hurrah!”
Joshua Zeitz is the author of Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern.
G. September 11, 2001 (9/11) was not the first time New York City was attacked. Read on 
AP United States History - Terms and People – Unit 11, Chapter 31 (13th Ed.)
HONOR PLEDGE: I strive to uphold the vision of the North Penn School District, which is to inspire each student to reach his or her highest potential and
become a responsible citizen. Therefore, on my honor, I pledge that I have neither given nor received unauthorized assistance on this work.
Previous Terror on Wall Street -- A Look at a 1920 Bombing
By Daniel Gross, Special to TheStreet.com
09/20/2001 03:33 PM EDT
Last week, two hijacked planes pierced the heart of New York's financial world, but inspired an
outpouring of heroic and patriotic responses. To many observers, the events recalled the 1993 World Trade
Center bombing or the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
To this history-minded financial journalist, the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers and the reaction to it
calls to mind a September 1920 tragedy that took place just across the street from TheStreet.com's headquarters.
Until last week, that event stood as the deadliest terror attack in New York City's long history.
On Thursday, Sept. 16, 1920, a simple wagon, pulled by an old, dark bay horse, made its way through a
crowded Wall Street. At about noon, it came to a stop about 100 feet west of the corner of Wall and Broad
streets, the section of Lower Manhattan cobblestone that had recently emerged, in the words of the author John
Brooks, as "the precise center, geographical as well as metaphorical, of financial America and even of the
financial world."
'The Corner'
To the south stood 23 Wall St. Known simply as "The Corner," the fortress like structure housed J.P.
Morgan & Co. [founded by financier J. P. Morgan], the world's most powerful financial institution. That address
was the professional home to the men who ruled over huge swaths of the global economy: J.P. Morgan Jr. and
Thomas Lamont, the financial architect of the Paris Peace Conference.
As historian Ron Chernow puts it, "The House of Morgan spoke to foreign governments as the official
voice of the American capital markets." To the north stood the U.S. Assay Office, where workers were moving
some $900 million in gold bars. Next to it stood the U.S. Sub-Treasury, the building now known as Federal Hall,
fronted by its statue of George Washington. Around the corner stood the New York Stock Exchange.
As the bells of Trinity Church gently tolled noon, the driver released the reins and fled. Within seconds,
the wagon delivered its lethal cargo: hundreds of pounds of explosives. Shrapnel -- bits of iron made from
window sash weights -- tore through flesh, concrete, stone and glass. Windows shattered throughout a half-mile
radius, showering glass missiles onto busy streets. Awnings 12 floors above street level caught fire. Joseph P.
Kennedy, then a young stockbroker, was thrown to the ground by the concussive force. Pillars of brown smoke
and greenish flames engulfed the ancient, narrow lanes.
G. Weston, an Associated Press reporter, witnessed the blast, calling it “an unexpected, death-dealing
bolt, which in a twinkling turned into a shamble the busiest corner of America's financial center." He hid in a
doorway. "Almost in front of the steps leading up to the Morgan bank was the mutilated body of a man. Other
bodies, most of them silent in death, lay nearby. As I gazed horrorstruck at the sight, one of these forms, halfnaked and seared with burns, started to rise. It struggled, then toppled and fell lifeless to the gutter."
The Destruction
Wall Street ran red with blood. A single horse leg was splayed across the steps of one building. A
woman's head, still wearing a hat, was stuck to the wall of another. A fatally wounded messenger pleaded for
someone to deliver his securities. Thirty people were killed instantly: messengers, stenographers, clerks and
brokers. Thomas Joyce, the chief Morgan clerk, died at his desk. Three hundred more were injured, among them
Junius Morgan, Jack Morgan's son.
A bell rang out on the floor of the exchange, which halted trading -- the first time trading had ever been
halted by violence. Within minutes, 1,700 New York City policemen and 75 Red Cross nurses, many of them
World War I veterans, rushed to the scene by horse, car, subway and foot. Troops from the 22nd Infantry,
garrisoned on Governor's Island, marched through Lower Manhattan, rifles and bayonets at the ready. Mayor
John Hylan rushed from his office to supervise. A 17-year-old office boy, James Saul, loaded injured people into
a car that he commandeered, and he ferried more than 30 casualties to Broad Street Hospital.
AP United States History - Terms and People – Unit 11, Chapter 31 (13th Ed.)
HONOR PLEDGE: I strive to uphold the vision of the North Penn School District, which is to inspire each student to reach his or her highest potential and
become a responsible citizen. Therefore, on my honor, I pledge that I have neither given nor received unauthorized assistance on this work.
Order was quickly restored, as bodies were laid out on the sidewalk and covered with white sheets.
Undaunted by the unprecedented act, the NYSE governors met at 3:30 p.m. and decided to open for business the
next morning.
Before night fell, the search was on for the culprits. William J. Flynn, the dashing head of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation who had been involved in the antiradical Palmer Raids, arrived in New York.
Eyewitnesses had reported seeing an Italian man fleeing from the scene; another saw an "East Side peddler."
Suspicion naturally centered on anarchists, who had been behind an unsuccessful campaign of letter
bombs that targeted Jack Morgan. A message was found in a nearby mailbox reading: "Free the political
prisoners. Or it will be sure death for all of you. American Anarchist Fighters." (The previous day, anarchists
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti had been indicted for bank robbery and murder.)
The next morning, Wall Street employees went back to work amid heightened security. They were
defiant, patriotic and "determined to show the world that business will proceed as usual despite bombs," as the
Sun and New York Herald put it. Volume on the stock exchange was relatively high, and the prices of many
stocks rose.
At noon Friday, Sept. 17, led by the Sons of the American Revolution, thousands of New Yorkers rallied
in front of the boarded-up windows of 23 Wall St. They sang America the Beautiful and listened to a patriotic
speech from World War I hero Brig. Gen. William J. Nicholson.
During the next several weeks, the New York City police fanned out. Hundreds of detectives interviewed
every horse-handler and stable hand in the region in a vain effort to track down the owner of the horse and
wagon. Carlo Tresca, a well-known anarchist, was hauled in for questioning. Police also detained Edward
Fischer, a well-born eccentric and former New York City tennis champion. The mentally imbalanced Fischer had
mailed postcards from Toronto to friends in New York, in which he had apparently predicted the bombings. He
was ultimately sent to Bellevue Hospital. Nobody ever credibly claimed responsibility for the attack. And no one
was ever charged in the deadly bombing, which resulted in 39 casualties and about $2 million in property
damage. The Wall Street bombing was the worst terrorist attack in America until the April 19, 1995 bombing of
the Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, killing 168 people [this tragedy still remains the worst
domestic terrorist attack in U.S. history – see textbook page 992 for details].
The Damage
The potential for damage was far greater than the human and financial tolls indicate. The bombing came
at a time when wealth still resided in stock and bond certificates and in precious metals. A large percentage of the
nation's gold reserves and paper wealth could have been incinerated in the explosion.
But the potential for psychological and structural damage was greater. In the fall of 1920, modern Wall
Street was just emerging into public consciousness. With the popularity of Liberty Bonds during World War I,
the nation for the first time had a large group of middle-class individual investors. During World War I, New
York had eclipsed London as the world's financial capital.
The bombing -- and the overwhelming popular response to it -- helped to humanize Wall Street. As
Brooks wrote, "Selling paper for money -- the basic business of Wall Street -- had graduated from a mere way of
making a living into a defiance of the country's enemies, a moral act."
J.P. Morgan & Co. no longer exists as an independent entity, but 23 Wall St. still stands. The corner
occupies much the same place in the popular imagination today as it did 80 years ago. Next time you're in Lower
Manhattan, walk past 23 Wall and check out the facade. The lower portions still bear the scars: pockmarks and
moonlike craters that stand as palpable 81-year-old evidence. Touch them and recall that this was once ground
zero, a scene of mayhem, pain, anger and destruction -- and that it opened for business the next day.