The Roaring Twenties
The 1920s opened with a “red scare” that began in 1919 and led to the arrest of thousands
of radicals, the lynching of a few, and the deportation of several hundred others. This
campaign by Woodrow Wilson’s Justice Department and local police helped to sustain a
rising spirit of antiradicalism and nativism inspired by the crush of “the new immigrants’
from southern and eastern Europe, who began crowding into American cities once again
after the interruption caused by WW I. At the same time, the trend toward increasing
urbanization of the native-born American population resumed, spurred by the widespread
ownership of automobiles for the first time. Individuals from declining rural America
migrated into cities, and cities spread out into the surrounding rural areas. The old
problem of the clash between the special needs of town and country reappeared. Yet this
split between rural and urban life should not be exaggerated because small towns had
their radicals and immigrants, and a majority of people in cities were from the country or
had close ties to it.
The clash between the traditional and the modern was not just a new version of an old
conflict but one that seemed too many country people or city-dwellers to be apocalyptic:
Freudianism, Bolshevism, evolutionism, and innumerable other new ideas and
movements seemed to be in league to destroy traditional life and values.
The pace of change was extraordinary: the nation’s gross national product grew by 40
percent between 1920 and 1930; over ten million households began listening to radios for
the first time; movie theaters sold 100 million tickets each week by 1929; the rate of
graduation from high school zoomed: those attending college reached one million by
1930. As for family farming, it declined dramatically because agribusiness made it
possible for small independents to compete. By 1930, only 21 percent of the population
made its living from the land. The work week had dropped from 60 to 48 hours and for
the first time, the masses considered play as important as work.
From 1920 to 1925, dress hemlines raced upward from the ankles to the knees, girls and
young women wore makeup, dresses were loose and skimpy, and social barriers were
falling. The business of America had become business. Paper wealth in the stock market
was booming. People by the millions were buying cars, radios and other goods at a pace
that outraced their incomes, thanks to the availability of easy credit, or “the installment
plan.” Better living through chemistry meant more junk and canned food to increase
leisure time. Pesticides were being used widely for the first time to increase production
and make prettier produce. The pace of modern life led to some excessive, irrational
pursuits, and short-lived fads. Speed and daring captivated everyone. Aviators were
treated like royalty by heads of state every time they flew across continents or large
bodies of water or set new altitude records. Aficionados of souped-up cars were obsessed
with breaking the land speed record every week. People were fascinated with the deathdefying adventures of North Pole explorer Richard E. Byrd, flyer Charles Lindbergh, and
desert traveler T.E. Lawrence.
With war no longer a preoccupation-at least in the western world-the arts and invention
flourished. Never before, and not since, has there been a decade populated by as many
giants in the arts, sciences and commerce. In writing, there were the likes of –
 Willa Cather
 Agatha Cristie
 Arthur Conan Doyle
 John Dos Passos
 Theodore Dreiser
 William Faulkner
 Edna Ferber
 F. Scott Fitzgerald
 E.M./ Forster
 Robert Frost
 Ernest Hemingway
 Langston Hughes
 Aldous Huxley
 James Joyce
 Franz Kafka
 D.H. Lawrence
 Sinclair Lewis
 Thomas Mann
 H.L. Mencken
 Edna St. Vincent Millay
 Dorothy Parker
 Marcel Proust
 Carl Sandburg
 George Bernard Shaw
 H.G. Wells
 Virginia Woolf
 William Butler Yeats…..just for starters!
In the world of stage Josephine Baker
 George Ballanchine
 John Barrymore
 Irving Berlin
 Isodora Duncan
 Oscar Hammerstein
 Al Jolson
 Jerome Kern
 The Mark Brothers
 Eugene O’Neill
 Anna Pavlova
 Will Rogers

Florenz Ziegfeld…to name a few!
Architecture was undergoing revolutionary change that would dictate the century’s
dominant style-the concrete, steel and glass look of the sleek, flat, and functional
“International Style.”
 Le Corbusier
 Walter Gropius
 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
 Frank Lloyd Wright
In the visual arts in New York, Paris, London and elsewhere Art Deco
 Cubism
 Dadaism
 Surrealism
 Ansel Adams
 Thomas Hart Benton
 Salvador Dali
 Juan Gris
 Edward Hopper
 Henri Matisse
 Georgia O’Keeffe
 Pablo Picasso
 Diego Rivera
 Alfred Stieglitz…as well as many others.
The revolution in jazz was complemented by a revolution in traditional conservatory
music Louis Armstrong
 Bix Beiderbecke
 Duke Ellington
 George Gershwin
 Bessie Smith…and others.
Thinkers were daring to question fundamental tenets of human motivation and reinterpret
reality Sigmund Freud
 Carl Jung
 Karl Barth
 John Dewey
 Bertrand Russell
 Alfred North Whitehead
In the sciences, visionaries such as Robert Goddard
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Edwin Hubble
Niels Bohr
Albert Einstein
Enrico Fermi
Harvey Cushing…were all advancing science.
While artists, inventors and thinkers were changing the world, brazen free-thinking social
reformers were causing status-quo old-timers bewilderment. Marcus Garvey and W.E.B.
Dubois were advocating black protest. Labor leader John L. Lewis was battling business.
Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett were socking sensibilities with their open talk
about birth-control clinics and contraceptives. Mahatma Gandhi was working to bring the
sun down on the British Empire. Aldo Leopold was raising consciousness about nature.
Meanwhile, the country tried to live without liquor from 1919 to 1933, which only
seemed to increase drinking, make criminals of many citizens, and made the cities
hostage to new crime syndicates that controlled the supply of illegal liquor. Prohibition
was in part an aspect of the clash between “dry” moral fundamentalists in the country and
“wet” moderns in the city. The decade neared its end with dramatic events: a Catholic
nominee for the presidency was rejected in an anti-Catholic landslide in 1928;
unregulated speculation in the stock market led to a crash in 1929; and the country
plunged into a depression in which people went hungry in the cities while farmers plowed
under their crops.
Politics of the Roaring Twenties:
Economic:
 a superficial prosperity ensued
 increased production of consumer goods
 buying on credit
 increased standard of living and consumer spending
Societal/Social:
 a perceived threat of communism
 fear and distrust of immigrants
 fear of the labor movement and faith in business
 strikes and labor unrest
Governmental:
 election of pro-business presidents Harding and Coolidge
 isolationist philosophy
 immigration quotas
 tariffs on imports to discourage foreign business competition
 corruption in Harding’s administration
Technology/Industry
 growth of automobile industry
 introduction of airlines as transportation
 widespread use of electricity
 advertising gains popularity
Ku Klux Klan:
Supporter’s view: This organization provides a defense against the mongrelization of
America in its opposition to blacks, Catholics, Jews, and foreigners. It promotes
traditional values, such as patriotism, Christianity, and community responsibility.
Opponent’s view: Religious and racially bigoted, the KKK taps into the worst aspects of
intolerance and hate and promotes vigilantism.
The 19th century Klan was originally organized as a social club by Confederate veterans
in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1866. They derived the name from a Greek word that means
circle; Klan was added for the sake of alliteration and the KKK emerged. The
organization quickly became a vehicle for Southern white underground resistance to
Radical Reconstruction. Klan members sought the restoration of white supremacy
through intimidation and violence aimed at the newly enfranchised black freedmen. A
similar organization, the Knights of the White Camellia, began in Louisiana in 1867.
In the summer of 1868, the Klan was structured into the Invisible Empire of the South at
a convention in Nashville, Tennessee attended by delegates from former Confederate
states. The group was presided over by a grand wizard (Confederate cavalry general
Nathan Bedford Forrest is believed to have been the first grand wizard) and a descending
hierarchy of grand dragons, grand titans, and grand cyclopes. Dressed in robes and sheets
designed to frighten superstitious blacks and to prevent identification by the occupying
federal troops, Klansmen whipped and killed freedmen and their white supporters in
nighttime raids.
The 19th century Klan reached its peak in 1868 and 1870. A potent force, it was largely
responsible for the restoration of white rule in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia.
But Forrest ordered it disbanded in 1869, largely as a result of the group’s excessive
violence. Local branches remained active for a time, however, prompting Congress to
pass the Force Act in 1870 and the Ku Klux Klan Act in 1871.
These bills authorized the president to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, suppress
disturbances by force, and impose heavy penalties upon terrorist organizations. President
Grant was lax in utilizing this authority, although he did sent federal troops to some
areas, suspend habeas corpus in nine South Carolina counties, and appoint commissioners
who arrested hundreds of Southerners for conspiracy. In United States v. Harris in 1882,
the Supreme Court declared the Ku Klux Klan unconstitutional, but by that time the Klan
had practically disappeared.
It disappeared because its original objectives had been largely achieved during the 1870s.
The 20th century Klan had its roots more directly in the American nativist tradition. It was
organized in 1915 near Atlanta, Georgia by Colonel William J. Simmons, a preacher and
promoter of fraternal orders who had been inspired by Thomas Dixon’s book The
Clansman (1905) and D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation (1915). The new
organization remained small until Edward Y. Clarke and Mrs. Elizabeth Tyler brought to
it their talents as publicity agents and fund raisers. The revived Klan was fueled partly by
patriotism and partly by a romantic nostalgia for the old south, but, more importantly; it
expressed the defensive reaction of white Protestants in small-town America who felt
threatened by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and by the large-scale immigration of
the previous decades that had changed the ethnic character of American society.
This second Klan peaked in the 1920s, when its membership exceeded 4,000,000
nationally, and profits rolled in from the sale of its memberships, regalia, costumes,
publications, and rituals. A burning cross became the symbol of the new organization,
and white-robed Klansmen participated in marches, parades, and nighttime cross
burnings all over the country. To the old Klan’s hostility to blacks the new Klan which
was strong in the Midwest as well as in the South added bias against Roman Catholics,
Jews, foreigners, and organized labor. The Klan enjoyed a last spurt of growth in 1928,
when Alfred E. Smith, a Catholic, received the Democratic presidential nomination.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s the Klan’s membership dropped drastically,
and the last remnants of the organization temporarily disbanded in 1944. For the next 20
years the Klan was quiet, but it had a resurgence in some Southern states during the
1960s as civil-rights workers attempted to force Southern communities’ compliance with
the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There were numerous instances of bombings, whippings,
and shootings in Southern communities, carried out in secret but apparently the work of
Klansmen. President Lyndon B. Johnson publicly denounced the organization in a
nationwide television address announcing the arrest of four Klansmen in connection with
the slaying of a civil-rights worker, a white woman, in Alabama.
The Klan was unable to stem the growth of a new racial tolerance in the South in the
years that followed. Though the organization continued some of its activities into the late
20th century, cases of Klan violence became more isolated, and its membership had
declined to a few thousand. The Klan became a chronically fragmented group made up of
several separate and competing groups, some of which occasionally entered into alliances
with neo-Nazi and other right-wing extremist groups.
Immigration:
Supporter’s view: Ethnic and racial diversity has been a source of American strength in
the past and continues to vitalize the nation.
Opponent’s view: Represents an undermining of the dominant white culture and a
compromising of traditional American values.
The second half of the 19th century in the United States was characterized by urbanization
and the creation of the modern industrial states. The great captains of industry, often selfmade men, amassed wealth on a scale unimagined in the past. These business empires,
though created by individuals such as Carnegie and Rockefeller, were built by the labor
of the millions of immigrants who arrived during this period.
Like the titans of industry, political bosses of the Gilded Age pursued the American
Dream by taking advantage of the opportunities available to them. These men also cut
corners and gained wealth by means that are illegal today, but as was often the case with
their business contemporaries, they were not breaking the law. Moreover, urban political
bosses, unlike their industrialist counterparts, were sensitive to the needs of their
immigrant constituents and provided them with financial aid, services, jobs, and
sympathy.
The United States has always been a nation of immigrants. Millions of men and women
from the 17th century to the present were motivated to immigrate to America by the
promise of economic opportunity and/or freedom from religious or political persecution.
Concern over an open-door policy for immigrants existed from the beginning of the
republic. Nativism was a potent political force in the antebellum period, and nativist
concerns were still in place following the Civil War. An influx of Chinese immigrants to
the West Coast resulted in the passage of a series of immigration restriction laws in the
1880s. The same decade saw the beginnings of a new wave of European immigration that
would bring 15 million newcomers to America by 1910.
This “new immigration” was based in eastern and southern Europe, and its immigrants
brought languages, customs, and religious beliefs that were different from those of
native-born Americans. The majority settled in the large cities of the Northeast and the
Middle Atlantic States, where they worked in factories and settled near their countrymen
in ethnic neighborhoods.
Unfortunately, these newcomers arrived in America at a time when the ideas of social
Darwinism were in vogue, and theories on a hierarchy of racial superiority were being
proposed both here and in Europe. In the new racial scheme, nationality and religion were
considered racial characteristics-and not all Caucasians were “white.” At the top of this
hierarchy of race were the Anglo-Saxons of northern Europe; at the bottom were those of
African descent. In between were the other, less desirable “races,” such as the Italians,
the Jews, the Chinese, and the Arabs. Thus, for much of the first half of the 20th century,
the “new immigrants” and their children were caught in a trap of xenophobia and racism.
In the late 19th century, in both Europe and the United States, social scientists and
intellectuals developed theories proclaiming the racial superiority of Caucasians, in
particular the Nordic “races” of northern Europe. These theories purported to be based on
science and were given credence by the apparent domination of the world by the Great
Powers, which, after 1898, included the United States. The most significant of these
writers in the United States was Madison Grant. As founder of the New York Zoological
Society, Grant believed the foundation of our national and cultural life lay in racial
purity. He was appalled by the mixing of European races under way in America. His
book The Passage of the Great Race (1916) warned that the ruling race of the Western
world had begun to wane because of a “Fatuous belief” that environment could alter
heredity. Using Darwin and Mendelian genetics to support his argument, Grant said flatly
that different races do not blend, that mixing “gives us a race reverting to the more
ancient and lower type.”
Images of immigrants and ethnic groups based on stereotyping were common in the
Gilded Age and Progressive Era and helped set the stage for the restrictive movements
that succeeded in immigration acts in 1917, 1921, and 1924. One of the most effective
creators of stereotypical images was Thomas Nast, perhaps best known as the nemesis of
“boss” Tweed and the creator of the American visual image of Santa Claus. His cartoon
attacks on both the newly enfranchised African American and the Irish, however,
produced stereotypes that outlived their creator.
Perhaps the most interesting of these individuals is the social reformer Jacob Riis, himself
an immigrant, whose book How the Other Half Lives exposed the horrific conditions
under which the New Immigrants lived. Although Riis was considered a champion of the
immigrant, the text of his book clearly indicates an acceptance of the common racial and
ethnic stereotypes of the period. Margaret Sanger, the founder of the birth control
movement in the United States, fought tirelessly for women’s reproductive rights.
Initially a radical who associated with socialism and the IWW, Sanger came to accept the
concept of “racial suicide” and eugenics. She supported birth control for the poor and
desired to protect families from the economic and emotional burdens of unwanted
children and the agony of amateur abortions. David Saville Muzzey was perhaps the most
popular author of secondary U.S. history textbooks of the first half of the 20th century.
His texts were constantly being revised and were used as late as the 1950s. An excerpt
from the 1911 edition reflects the feelings of many Americans toward New Immigrants
during the Progressive Era. He wrote, “Besides these serious political and industrial
questions that face our country at the beginning of the new century, there are other
problems growing out of our relations to inferior races. We have assumed the government
of about 8 million Oriental and Latin-American people in the Philippines and Porto Rico
with the responsibility for the orderly conduct of 2 million more in Cuba. What we have
done for these people has already been briefly described, but what great demands they are
going to make on our purse and our patience we do not yet know. It is clear that their
education in democracy, their defense and development, must be very important concerns
for us, influencing our politics considerably. Within our borders we have a race problem
more serious than that of any other nation in the world. The Negroes form about half the
population of our Southern states. Since their emancipation fifty years ago they have
made considerable progress; but still they are, as a race, far, perhaps centuries, behind the
whites in civilization…
Finally, a third phase of the race problem which confronts the United States at the
opening of the new century is immigration. It is only within recent years that immigration
has been a race problem. Before 1880 over 4/5 of all the immigrants to the United States
were from Canada and the northern countries of Europe, which were allied to us in blood,
language, customs, religion, and political ideas. They were a most welcome addition to
our population, especially in the development of the great farm lands of the West. They
assimilated rapidly with our people, cherished our free institutions, and in the second
generation became the most American of Americans. But since 1880 a steady change has
been going on in the character of our immigration. The Germans, Irish, Swedes, and
English are being replaced by the Hungarians, Poles, Russians, Italians, and other people
of southern and eastern Europe. Each year brings a million of them-more than the total
number of colonists that came to this country between the settlement of Jamestown and
the American Revolution. Moreover, they no longer came impelled by the desire to build
up new homes in the new land, but are brought over by agents of steamship companies
and large corporations and set to work in great gangs under “padrones,” or bosses. Their
low standards of living tend to reduce wages, and their congestion in the slums of the
great cities makes breeding places for disease and offers the unscrupulous politician
cheap votes with which to debauch the city government.
We are alive today to the dangers of unrestricted immigration. Our laws are framed both
to protect American labor against the cheap contract gang labor of the imported
immigrants, and to insure sound citizenship in our republic. The convict, the pauper, the
anarchist, the lunatic, the diseased, and the destitute are no longer allowed to enter our
ports. A head tax of $4.00 on each immigrant (included by the steamship company in his
passage money) goes to make up a fund to pay the expenses of deporting the unfit; while
a fine of $100 against a steamship line that brings in a diseased immigrant makes the
health inspectors on the ocean liners more painstaking in the discharge of their duties.”
It is interesting to compare the economic and political climates of the 1920s and 1950s.
Immigration restrictions were enacted during both decades. The Emergency Quota Act of
1921 created the quota system. In the 1950s, the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952
reinforced restrictions on immigration and established a system for screening out
communists and deporting suspected subversives. Labor conflicts and anti-communist
sentiments influenced the political climate in both the 20s and the 50s.
Harlem Renaissance: (Jazz)
Supporter’s view: Modern, lively, improvisational, and fun.
Opponent’s view: Undisciplined, vulgar, and leading to increased sexuality, particularly
among the young and African-Americans.
The Harlem Renaissance was a time of heightened creativity in African-American
literature, art, and music. Poets, novelists, painters, sculptors, and musicians flocked to
Harlem, a district in New York City. Many arrived with barely a dime in their pockets,
without a job, and with nowhere to stay, “but filled with hope.” In the 1920s, Harlem was
a place where “almost everything seemed possible.”
The atmosphere of optimism and artistic vitality was tied in part to social and economic
conditions in the years following WW I. After the war, a deepening sense of unity grew
among African-Americans shared in a limited way in the economic prosperity of the
1920s. For the first time in American history, a number of African-Americans had a
surplus of money and energy. And a significant few, especially in Harlem, began to
channel these resources into promoting African-American culture.
Changing white attitudes were awakening hope in African-Americans that they might
finally achieve equality in American society. In the 1920s, African-American life and
culture suddenly became fashionable. Some white Americans were discarding their old
stereotypes of African-Americans and were beginning to regard them instead as symbols
of a natural life free of social restraints. Many whites, following the fashionable thinking
of the time, began to reason that in order to be fully human; one had to regain the
“primitive simplicity” of African-American people.
Most African-Americans found this new stereotype as offensive as the old one. But some
also recognized that they could use it to their advantage. As literary critic Benjamin
Brawley commented, “We have a tremendous opportunity to boost the NAACP, letters,
and art, and anything else that calls attention to our development along higher lines.”
African-American artists were treated in Harlem with overwhelming encouragement and
support. Blues singers like Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters attracted huge crowds. Often,
thousands of people could be found “stompin’ at the Savoy,” a club where jazz great
Fletcher Henderson performed with his orchestra. Wealthy Harlem hostesses vied with
mid-town Manhattan socialites for the brightest new stars in Harlem. It was not unusual
to find editor’s from New York’s largest publishing houses discussing projects with
African-American literary greats like Langston Hughes and Zora Hurston at these parties.
In addition, African-American artists seemed to be attracting financial patronage-a
previously unheard-of phenomenon in the American art scene.
But the strongest encouragement to African-American artists came from within the
African-American community. The Crisis, the month magazine of the NAACP, and the
Urban League’s Opportunity acted as the voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Most of the
poets and other writers and intellectuals of the Renaissance were first published in these
two periodicals. Dubois, the force behind The Crisis, and Johnson, editor of Opportunity,
both considered it of prime importance to nurture and promote the movement. It was the
new African-American hope for equal rights. The voices and visions of Harlem’s artists
expressed the emerging African-American consciousness. Poets such as Langston
Hughes and Claude McKay and authors such as Jean Toomer sought to present an
authentic portrayal of the African-American experience. Often this reality was grim.
Arna Bontemps, a prominent port and essayist in the Harlem Renaissance, described the
magic of the time: “In some places the autumn of 1924 may have been an unremarkable
season. In Harlem it was like a foretaste of paradise. A blue haze descended at night and
with it strings of fairy lights on the broad avenues.” But the magic did not last. By the
early 1930s, the Depression had affected Harlem. Poets were abandoned by wealthy
patrons. Novelists were unable to get new contracts from publishers. An air of
disillusionment swept the previously exuberant area. Many of the older, influential
figures of the Harlem Renaissance died. Writers who had become prominent in the
movement began to rethink their approaches to their art. They realized that it had failed to
change the lives of most African-Americans. Some, like critic Alain Locke, who had
helped shape the movement in its early days, felt that the African-American artist had
been exploited by the white fad for African-American culture, by the marketplace, and by
African-American political causes. In an obituary for the movement in 1931, Locke
wrote, “Let us rejoice and be exceedingly glad,” that the Harlem Renaissance has ended.
In his essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Langston Hughes summed up
the effects of the Harlem Renaissance: “We 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….If colored people are pleased we
are glad. If they are not their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We will build our temples
for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within
ourselves.”
Increased Consumerism:
Supporter’s view: Promotes material progress, a growth in the middle class, and higher
living standards for all.
Opponent’s view: Results in waste, economic dangers (overproduction, surpluses, credit
buying), and self-indulgence.
The mass production of goods, advertising in magazines such as Time, Reader’s Digest,
and The Saturday Evening Post, and the mass media created pressure for people to
consume. The creation of a shaky credit policy that was based on a perpetually rising
economy gave people the means to purchase what they couldn’t afford and helped create
the house of cards that came crashing down with the stock market at the end of the
decade.
The 1920s were an era that favored big business. Life was good for the rich. They made
up just 0.1 percent of the population and had yearly incomes of more than $100,000.
From 1920-1929, manufacturing output rose more than 60%, the gross national product
(total of goods and services) rose 5% a year, industrial output per worker grew 33%, and
per capita income grew 30% with virtually no inflation. The causes of this economic
boom were many. The destruction of European economies during WW I left the U.S. as
the only major industrial nation. Technology allowed for expansion, particularly in the
auto industry; 1.5 million cars sold in 1920 and 5 million in 1929. This was the result of
Ford’s assembly line methods which made cars affordable. The radio and motion picture
industry grew also as a result of technological innovations. Readily available energy
sources such as coal and oil brought down prices. And the scientific management
techniques promoted by Frederick Taylor were widely adapted by industry to improve
efficiency. Conversely, much of the population had to scrape to get by. Many earned so
little that everyone in the family, including children, had to work. Nearly 80% of all
families had no savings.
While incomes rose for many Americans in the 1920s, it did not rise for everyone.
Industries such as textile and steel manufacturing made very little profit. Mining and
farming actually suffered losses. Farmers were deeply in debt because they had borrowed
money to buy land and machinery so they could produce more crops during WW I. When
European agriculture bounced back after the war, the demand for U.S. crops fell, as did
prices. Before long there were U.S. farm surpluses. Many American farmers could not
make their loan and mortgage payments. They lost their purchasing power, their
equipment, and their farms. As one South Dakota state senator remarked, “There’s a
saying: Depressions are farm led and farm fed.”
Prohibition:
Supporter’s view: Alcoholism destroys families and weakens the fabric of society.
Prohibiting the buying, selling, and transporting of liquor reduces crime.
Opponent’s view: This attempt to legislate morality actually allows criminals to
flourish. It represents an attempt to restrict personal liberty and causes more problems
than it cures.
The temperance movement can be viewed as simultaneously traditional and modern,
making it difficult to position Prohibition in the cultural clash between old and new. In
one sense, the temperance movement was traditional for it sprung from Protestant
religious activism, an emphasis on family and morality, and an effort to mandate
behavioral standards for the American populous. Prohibitionists believed that they were
prioritizing the good of the community over the good of the individual. Prohibition also
was associated with conservative anti-immigrant attitudes as well, for many
Prohibitionists believed that the massive influx of immigrants from eastern and southern
Europe was embedding a culture of drink in America.
Yet temperance was also a modern movement, especially when headed by the
bureaucratic Anti-Saloon League because it embodied many of the new and
“progressive” values of the time. These modern characteristics included bureaucratic
organization, use of experts, scientific investigation, and the idea of using the authority of
the government to create order and well-being in a society. The League also profited
from an excellent understanding of modern politics.
But what once had been viewed as a forward-looking movement of social progress came
to be viewed in the 1920s as a misguided, backwards, and puritanical blunder, bent on
repressing peoples’ freedoms and corrupting the laws of the land. Progressive
Prohibitionists claimed that modernity meant alcohol must be eliminated from society.
Yet, as it turned out, modernity undermined prohibition.
There were, of course, groups of Americans who opposed Prohibition from the outset, but
the size and fervor of the anti-Prohibition movement grew over the course of the 1920s
and ultimately-and surprisingly-resulted in the repeal of the Prohibition amendment.
Opposition to Prohibition began as a largely ethnic and working class phenomenon, but
large segments of the middle-class withdrew their support in the 1920s. People opposed
Prohibition for many reasons. One widespread concern was the lack of enforcement;
Prohibition presented thorny legalistic and enforcement problems. The law was widely
flouted by many, especially young adults in urban areas. This caused many Americanseven some who agreed with the temperance goals-to fear that Prohibition had brought not
the law-abiding, sober society promised by Prohibitionists but instead a dangerous loss of
respect for law and order in the country. Sensational images of speakeasies, bootleggers,
gangsters, and rampant corruption abounded.
A number of wealthy and prominent Americans formed the Association against the
Prohibition Amendment (AAPA). The AAPA was most troubled by what it viewed as
national government paternalism and maintained that Prohibition was a harsh statute that
threatened Americans’ liberties and took away the right of local governments to
determine the drink question for themselves. Although the AAPA led the movement to
repeal the Prohibition amendment, other organizations were influential as well, especially
the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform.
Another reason for opposition to Prohibition was that Americans’ moral standards were
changing rapidly during the 1920s, serving to undermine adherence to Prohibition.
Modern values that emphasized youth and self-fulfillment challenged the traditional,
Victorian principles of the middle class. The “consumer culture” was flourishing.
Moreover, attitudes toward women were changing during this period, and it became more
acceptable for women to drink-and to drink socially with men. The 1920s was the era, for
certain segments of Americans, of cocktail parties, jazz clubs, and fast automobiles. The
issue of drink-whether to chose to be Wet or Dry-signified an important cultural divide
during this period? One’s stance on alcohol was significant; it became a symbol for an
individual’s broader character and morality. Modern values often included a more open
attitude toward moderate alcohol consumption.
Finally, Prohibition was often associated with racist and anti-immigrant attitudes and
even the KKK. The Dry vs. Wet battle was epitomized in the controversy surrounding the
1928 presidential candidacy of Al Smith, the Catholic governor of New York who
opposed Prohibition.
In 1933, the states ratified the Twenty-first Amendment to the Constitution, repealing
Prohibition. With repeal, the cultural and political conflicts that had presided during the
era of a well-intentioned but impractical law subsided, and Americans turned their
attention to the crisis of the Great Depression and the hope promised by the New Deal.
One lasting legacy of Prohibition was the rise of organized crime whose best example
was Al Capone. By age 26, Al Capone headed a criminal empire in Chicago, which he
controlled through the use of bribes and violence. From 1925 to 1931, Capone
bootlegged whiskey from Canada, operated illegal breweries in Chicago, and ran a
network of 10,000 speakeasies. In 1917, the “Big Fellow,” as he liked to be called, was
worth an estimated $100 million. The end came quickly for Capone, though. In 1931, the
gangster chief was arrested for tax evasion and went to jail. That was the only crime of
which authorities were ever able to convict him. Capone was later released from jail, but
he died several years later at age 48. After Prohibition was repealed, syndicates like his
turned to drugs and prostitution for which they already had an organization.
Enduring understanding: If people don’t support a law, you can’t effectively enforce it.
Fundamentalism:
Supporter’s view: Promoting a solid trust in the Bible as being literally inspired by
God, it provides a consistent answer to the evils of society.
Opponent’s view: Led by self-promoting evangelists who prey on people’s prejudices
and superstitions, this outmoded, anti-scientific world view hinders society’s progress.
Fundamentalism can be found in most religions. It is frequently characterized by the
following:
 Almost invariably, fundamentalist movements are led by authoritarian males who
consider themselves to be superior to others and, within religious groups, have an
overwhelming commitment to subjugate women and to dominate their fellow
believers.
 Although fundamentalists usually believe that the past is better than the present,
they retain certain self-beneficial aspects of both their historic religious beliefs
and of the modern world.
 Fundamentalists draw clear distinctions between themselves, as true believers,
and others, convinced that they are right and that anyone who contradicts them is
ignorant and possibly evil.
 Fundamentalists are militant in fighting against any challenge to their beliefs.
They are often angry and sometimes resort to verbal or even physical abuse
against those who interfere with the implementation of their agenda.
 Fundamentalists tend to make their self-definition increasingly narrow and
restricted, to isolate themselves, to demagogue emotional issues, and to view
change, cooperation, negotiation, and other efforts to resolve differences as signs
of weakness.
To summarize, there are three words that characterize this brand of fundamentalism:
rigidity, domination, and exclusion. It is not considered main-stream.
Evolution:
Supporter’s view: As scientific knowledge grows, this theory helps provide an
explanation of the development of life on earth. It is also consistent with progress.
Opponent’s view: A threat to religious belief and thus to American society by denying
the truth of Genesis, evolutionism is a rejection of traditional values.
The Scopes trial of 1925 reflected the numerous cultural clashes occurring across
America at the time. But, even more than Prohibition and the rise of the second KKK,
“the trial of the century” has endured in the American culture. One reason is that the trial
(and its appeal) did not decide the key issues at stake: 1) whether so-called urban values
associated with science and modernism was the main basis of American culture, and 2)
whether academic freedom should give way to the right of the state legislature to
determine what the state’s children learned in school. The debates over fundamentalism
and modernism and over who controls the content taught in public schools continued
throughout the rest of the 20th century. The trial, along with other cultural clashes in the
1920s, was a good indication that Americans had begun in a more intense manner than
ever before-even during the Revolutionary War period-to debate the basic values of their
civilization. In large measure because of the cultural issues involved and the fact that the
trial did not resolve them, some of the historical facts have given way to legend.
The Scopes trial occurred within a rather complex context of political, legal, and cultural
events. The First World War had focused Americans on the notion of “Americanism”; the
First Red Scare (1919-1920) and the ongoing Sacco and Vanzetti affair (1920-1927)
continued the debates over the place of “radical” ideas in American society and gave rise
in 1920 to the founding of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which was
dedicated to promoting the Bill of Rights. Fundamentalists, moreover, were attacking
modern forces that, to them, undermined the Protestant beliefs upon which they believed
the United States had been founded.
There were other forces at work, of course. The trial happened in Dayton, Tennessee,
because of a confluence of fortuitous events and enterprising individuals. First, the
Tennessee legislature, influenced by fundamentalists, enacted the statute forbidding the
teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution as fact to Tennessee school children. (The law
did not forbid the teaching of evolution, per se.) Second, the American Civil Liberties
Union placed ads in Tennessee papers announcing that it would aid any individual
willing to challenge the new law as unconstitutional. Then, George W. Rappleyea, a
transplanted New Yorker who managed areas mines for Northern business interests in
Dayton, saw one of the ACLU ads and had an idea, He called a meeting in Dayton’s
drugstore in which he, area prosecuting attorneys, John Scopes (a substitute teacher), and
a handful of others discussed the new law and how the town might take advantage of it.
By the end of the meeting, Scopes had agreed to be the object of a test case. While most
in the group opposed the new law, the main force in their decision to go forward was not
legal or even cultural but rather economic: the trial, they hoped, would put Dayton on the
map and increase its economic fortunes, which had been decreasing since the smelter had
been shut down. Thus, civic leaders chose to take advantage of the cultural clashes to
boost the fortunes of the city of Dayton.
The ACLU agreed to join the Dayton trial. Initially against the ACLU’s desires, Clarence
Darrow joined the defense team, which consisted of local and ACLU lawyers.
Approaching 70 years of age, Darrow had the previous year made headlines with his
impassioned (and successful) plea to the judge to spare the lives of two young
defendants, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, in an infamous murder trial in Chicago.
Then William Jennings Bryan offered his services to the prosecution team. A proponent
of anti-evolution laws, if not the specific Tennessee law, Bryan had been an American
cultural figure since the Gilded Age: several times a presidential candidate; a tireless
supporter of a variety of Progressive era causes; Secretary of State under President
Woodrow Wilson (a position he resigned in protest over Wilson’s policies towards
Mexico); a huckster for Florida real estate; and, always, a proponent of the
fundamentalist point of view. With the addition of Darrow and Bryan, the hopes of
Dayton’s civic leaders for a circus-atmosphere that would garner lots of media attention
were met.
The so-called “monkey trial” attracted a lot of media attention across the U.S. and
Europe. Satirist H.L. Mencken discovered that Dayton was not the backwater Southern
village he had expected and that the natives were extraordinarily friendly to their cultural
foes. Reviews of international coverage of the trial were especially poignant, for most of
the media in Europe could not understand why the Americans were spending so much
time on an issue that Europeans had decided long ago in favor of modernism.
In the end, the trial decided nothing, but instead, had been the opening battle in what was
to be a long conflict between fundamentalists and modernists.
Popular conceptions of the trail as the triumph of science in an epic battle with religion
have been shaped by journalists, artists, and historians. Six years after the trial, the
popular-culture chronicler, Frederick Lewis Allen, maintained that while
Fundamentalism had won the battle (because Scopes was found guilty of breaking the
law against teaching evolution); it had clearly won the war against modernism. In the
1950s, two playwrights wrote a play, Inherit the Wind, which despite the authors’ protests
that it not be considered as “history,” became the major medium through which
Americans “remembered” the trial. The play, whose real target was the intolerance of the
Red Scare-McCarthy movement of the late 1940s and 1950s, emphasized the victory of
reason and modernism over fundamentalism and religion; at least three film adaptations
have continued that view of the story.
At the end of the century, two historians, Edward J. Larson and Paul K. Conkin, placed
the controversies into broader and more conceptually-sound contexts and corrected some
misunderstandings about the 1925 trial. From them, we know that the various positions of
the combatants in Dayton in 1925 were more complex that the legend proclaimed and
that the trial encouraged Fundamentalists to try other avenues through which to promote
their points of view. A flurry of activity occurred in the 1960s, with Tennessee rescinding
its law, but with other states adding restrictions on the teaching of evolution. The U.S.
Supreme Court struck down Arkansas’s law. In several states during the 1990s’
Fundamentalists have taken two tactics in the war: They have opened more private,
religious-based schools and have lobbied to force biology teachers to include “creation
science” in the curriculum. Given these legacies, surely Scopes is in fact the trial of the
century.
What is the difference between science and religion?
Definitions: science/religion
What is biblical literalism? What part did it play in the Scopes Trail?
What do biblical historians (Bart D. Ehrman; Chairman of the Department of Religious
Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) say about biblical literalism?
Why is this still and issue? Dover, PA case.
What are the implications for science? Why is it a state standard?
Eugenics:
From the final decades of the 19th century, there was much concern in Europe and
America that in compassionate, civilized human society, biological inferior individuals
were being prevented from perishing. The natural course of evolution-the survival of only
the fittest-was thus being hampered. The bad situation, it was claimed, was being made
worse by the better and the better-off having fewer and fewer children. The human
species, in short, was not evolving any more. Darwin himself expressed such concerns in
The Descent of Man, and his cousin Francis Galton proposed the concept of “eugenics,” a
practice that involved discouraging the inferior specimens of humanity from reproducing
(negative eugenics) and encouraging the superior specimens to breed more prolifically
(positive eugenics). The ultimate example of a eugenic society, of course, was Hitler’s
Germany. The interest died out only after WW II, because of revelations about Nazi
atrocities.
1. Humans were subject to natural selection, but many biologists thought that in civilized
societies the improvements in medical care and charity and welfare schemes prevented
the extinction of unfavorable varieties. The least fit were breeding more and the most fit
were breeding less. Darwin himself agreed that evolution was being interfered with in
civilized societies but could not advocate the cessation of aid to the weak. Why?
2. Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, a celebrated Victorian scientist, thought that it was
possible to improve the human species by adopting good breeding practices. Talent and
character argued Galton, were hereditary-social factors, but generally, talent ran in
families. The basis of inheritance was still unclear, although Galton had his own theory.
He proposed his concept of eugenics in 1883: he defined it as “the science which deals
with all the influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race.” His aim was not to
unify society but “to represent each class…by its best specimens.” The marriage of
people of inferior health or unacceptable moral qualities should be banned. But it was far
more important to encourage the marriage of intellectually and culturally worthy people.
The point of Galton’s eugenics was not to redesign society but to give a helping hand to
evolution. As he put it himself, “What nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man
may do providently, quickly, and kindly.” What about that?
Support for eugenics rose after the Boer (South African) War of 1899 to 1902. During
recruitment for the war, it was found that the physical qualities of the average
Englishman were dangerously poor. There was much social and political concern over
“degeneration” of the race. Many wondered whether such deterioration could be
prevented by regulating marriage and reproduction. WW I was seen as a major national
and racial disaster-the best youths were killed.
3. During these years, genetics matured as a scientific field. Political conservatives were
very keen on eugenics, but leftists (e.g. social biologists and geneticists) were also
interested. Everyone agreed that the best environment could not make up for the effects
of bad genes. Socially responsible eugenics could improve human species in a few
decades, some leftist biologists claimed. Some others advocated the artificial
insemination of women with the sperm of men of intellectual and cultural eminence. In
1939, twenty-three prominent geneticists issued the so-called “Geneticists’ Manifesto”
demanding measures to improve the genetic quality of the human species. In the United
States, eugenic anxieties about the racial quality of emigrants from southern and eastern
Europe led to the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act. Quotas were instituted to reduce
emigration from Russia, Poland, Italy, and the Balkans. In Britain, the well-known writer
and moderate socialist H.G. Wells called for the sterilization of “failures.” In America
during the Great Depression, the mentally “defective” were regularly sterilized. By 1940,
thirty American states had passed sterilization laws. America was not alone: all the
Scandinavian countries, Turkey, and Japan had all passed similar laws.
4. In Germany, there was a high level of interest in Darwinism from 1860 on. Darwin’s
greatest champion was the zoologist Ernst Haeckel. In the early years, German leftists
supported Darwinism because it seemed to support progressive change and could be used
to oppose religious orthodoxy. But totalitarians supporting a strong state and national
unity also tended to support Darwin. By the 1890s, German Darwinism was allied with
hard-line conservatives and was used to support racist, imperialist, and anti-social
agendas. The economic devastation and political turmoil after WW I stimulated a new
interest in eugenics.
Nazi Germany had the harshest eugenics laws ever enacted. There was a massive
program for the sterilization of the “unfit”-especially the mentally ill or the mentally
subnormal. The marriage of Jews and Germans was prohibited-such unions were
considered to be harmful to “racial hygiene.” Germany initiated the Lebensborn project
in which German women-whether married or not-were encouraged to bear the children of
SS officers as they were considered the best males possible. Much of this was supported
by “Darwinian” rhetoric of selection and survival of the fittest. BUT there was no straight
line from the Origin of Species to the Holocaust.
In the 1930s, virtually everyone found something of what they needed in Darwinism and
its eugenic version. The larger social and political conditions determined who would get
to enforce what in the name of Darwin. Hitler’s political context enabled him to institute
a eugenics program that was never seriously considered in Britain, where an interest in
eugenics was quite high but the political situation totally different.
5. Older champions of eugenics did not necessarily change their views after WW II. But
younger scientists, horrified by revelations about Nazi Germany, recoiled from anything
related to eugenics. Eugenics never went through a process of scientific testing and
rejection-it was rejected for political and moral reasons.
Women:
The earliest images of the changing roles for women appeared in the press in the 1890s.
The fashion symbol known as the “Gibson girl,” taking her name from artist Charles
Dana Gibson, revealed women’s changing appearance. Discarding heavy corsets,
petticoats, and frills, the Gibson girl sported a shirtwaist (blouse) and long skirt, which
better enabled her to play tennis or ride a bicycle. She appeared confident, capable,
athletic, and flirtatious. The image did not clearly convey class origins; she could be from
the working class or elite society. And while this particular series of drawings depicted
white women, the style was indicative of changes in roles of women of color as well,
Replacing the Gibson girl by 1913, the “flapper” became the visual icon of the twentieth
century’s new woman. Thin, flat-chested, and boyish-looking, the flapper exposed more
flesh, reveled in dancing, drinking, and smoking, and otherwise defied old-fashioned
norms. She took leads from such stars as the theater’s “it” girl, Clara Bow, and the
Harlem Renaissance’s blues diva Bessie Smith.
Changing demographic patterns contributed to the emergence of the new woman. Single
urban women, known as “women adrift,” lived outside their parents’ homes in workingclass areas of town. Black and white women as well as new immigrants from Eastern and
Southern Europe rented rooms in such communities and posed what many commentators
viewed as a social problem,. Earning their own wages and less subject to parental
supervision, working-class women’s work and leisure activities gained public attention
and expanded the parameters of women’s space. Beginning in the late 19th century,
changes among working-class women filtered into middle-class society, via cabarets and
other types of performances, so that by the 1910s and 1920s, young middle-class women
were wearing styles and engaging in behaviors objectionable to their parents’ generation.
Part of the paradox of the new women was that she flouted conventions while adhering to
new standards of conformity within a rising peer culture.
Women adrift and “working girls” were among the pioneers of women’s growing public
visibility and changing gender norms. The category “working girls” applied mainly to
young women, usually single, engaged in wage labor. Through the 1930s, more women
worked as domestic servants than at any other job, showing how that tradition was not
immediately overturned and that many women continued to engage in conventional
“women’s work”: housework. Domestic and sex work left women vulnerable to
employees and customers, as did semiskilled and unskilled industrial work in factories
and sweatshops. Although the labor movement thrived in the early 20th century, by 1920
a small fraction of women in the workforce had union jobs, but rarely did the movement
take up issues of concern to working women or allow them leadership roles. Such
outspoken labor leaders as Emma Goldman and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn were exceptions
among women, challenging assumptions about gender with their passionate politics and
fiery speeches. Wage labor profoundly shaped women’s identities during a period of
industrialization, urbanization, and commercialization, and although women entered new
arenas, they faced obstacles of many sorts.
Lacking power in the workplace, working-class women were nonetheless empowered by
earning an income. Wages gave daughters more independence at home, enabling some to
live apart form their parents. The urban industrial work system, along with growing
secondary school attendance, contributed to the formation of a youth and peer culture that
loosened young women’s allegiances to their families. Created by capitalist
entrepreneurs, commercialized forms of recreation-dance halls, nickelodeons, and
amusement parks-attracted working girls after long hours of drudgery and fostered their
awareness of social customs and conventions different from those of their parents’
generation.
Fewer in numbers than working-class girls, some women succeeded at making inroads
into careers and education that previously excluded women. Offering better pay and
working conditions, white-collar jobs in clerical, sales, and telephone work went almost
exclusively to native-born, unmarried white women from the middle class. Women’s
Christian Temperance Union began attending some of the more progressive colleges in
the mid-nineteenth century, but only in the twentieth century did women’s college
enrollment approach parity with men. Women predominated in such helping professions
as teaching, social work, and nursing. These jobs built on assumptions about women’s
special attributes, yet gave them access to the world beyond their homes. Women sought
such professions for a number of reasons. African American women, for instance, used
these jobs to contribute to the uplift of their communities. Likewise, work in settlement
houses attracted middle-class women into poorer neighborhoods, where they placed their
privilege and skills at the service of the urban poor. Poor women often resented
Protestant reformers’ condescension and unsolicited advice.
The image of a new woman was usually single, but married women also played a
significant role in transforming gender roles. As in other aspects of society, women’s
organizations took on a national scope in the late 19th century. Such organizations as the
Women’s’ Christian Temperance Union and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs
consolidated into national organizations and achieved greater prominence for women,
especially married, middle-class women, in public activities. Women’s clubs, volunteer
work, and women’s suffrage activism were not new in the early 20th century, but they
were more visible to the public and more widespread. Reformers, educated women, and
working girls together as individuals and groups forged new ground for women. But their
visions of womanhood were often at odds.
Political:
Republican Government: Three conservative presidents (Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover)
encouraged a warm relationship between business and government.
1. Harding: 1921-1923:
 Said of himself, “I am a man of limited talents from a small town.”
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He delegated much of his responsibility to subordinates and friends with whom he
partied regularly.
Teapot Dome Scandal: Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall was jailed for a year
for accepting bribes to provide oil leases in Wyoming and California to wealthy
businessmen.
Harding seemed to be largely unaware of the extensive corruption that was
riddling his administration. He died in August, 1923 while on a trip to the West.
2. Coolidge: 1923-1929:
 Said, “The business of America is business” and was the least active president in
history, taking daily naps and proposing no new legislation.
3. Hoover: 1919-1933:
 He was much more progressive than his predecessors and actively ran the
Department of Commerce in the 1920s.
 His major goal for government in the 1920s was to help business and industry to
operate with maximum efficiency and productivity.