US History II--Unit 2: The Roaring 20s (The Jazz Age)
Enduring Understandings:
1. Unregulated industry and laissez-faire capitalism result in the exploitation of the environment, raw
materials, and workers. Workers attempt to protect themselves by forming unions.
2. Often, it is not the rising income of average workers that drive economic booms, but speculative
investment and easy credit permitted by government oversight and compliance.
3. Urban population centers, modern communications and transportation, allow for the spatial
interaction required for the development of mass markets and mass popular culture.
4. Identity is how we define ourselves and “others”. Identities claim territory at different scales, and
differences in identity can result in conflict.
5. Cities are centers of higher education, art, and business, and usually have multi-ethnic/multi-racial
populations. Increased spatial interaction fosters changing values, viewpoints, culture, and identities
that often clash with the traditional morals/values and identities often found in rural populations.
Essential Questions:
1. Should government play an active role in the economy?
2. What does it mean to be an American?
Roaring Twenties Questions
Use text pp. 590-601
1. Which president, elected in 1920, called for a “return to normalcy”? What did this mean?
2. Who became president in 1923? Complete the following quote, “ The chief business of America….” What does
it mean? What were Republican business policies throughout the 1920s?
Use text pp. 426-432
3. Describe conditions of average workers that resulted from industrialization and laissez-faire capitalism.
4. What are labor unions, and what purpose do they serve? What is the AFL? Explain the following: collective
bargaining, strikes, scabs, yellow-dog contracts. Why didn’t business owners want unions to form?
5. Explain socialism. Who was Eugene V. Debs? What was the IWW (Wobblies)?
Use Text pp. 591, 593, 595
6. What was the “Red Scare” in the US in 1919 and the early 1920s? Why did it happen? Who was J. Edgar
Hoover? How were communist beliefs in opposition to the idea of laissez-faire?
7. What was the main focus of worker anger after WWI? Why did labor unions come to be associated with
communism and socialism?
Use Text pp. 592, 593, 598-599
8. List and explain the concerns of the Ku Klux Klan. How did this reflect the idea of “America for Americans”?
9. Why did immigration into the US drop so severely in 1921? How did the quota system discriminate?
10. How are the following connected to identity: “Red Scare”; “America for Americans”; the KKK; quota system
Use text pp. 601-605, 465, & 626-627
11. One measure of American prosperity during the 1920s involved the ownership, production, and convenience
of the automobile. What was the increase in car ownership in the 1920s? What was the cost of the Model T?
List 6 changes caused by the automobile that visually impacted the landscape in the 1920s.
How did the automobile bring freedom and independence in the 1920s? What is urban sprawl?
12. Another measure of prosperity during the 1920s involved increased access to air travel by American
consumers. Explain a couple of ways that airplanes increase spatial interaction and the speed of culture change.
Who was Charles Lindbergh? What made him famous in 1927?
13. Another measure of American prosperity during the 1920s involved ownership of electrical household
conveniences. List 5 of the most important conveniences, and their prices in 1928.
14. Consumerism in the 1920s was fueled by two important factors… the growth of modern advertising, and the
availability of easy credit. Explain the effects of these two factors.
15. Explain why the prosperity of the 1920s was considered to be a “superficial” prosperity?
Use text pp. 612-623
16. Describe the morals and values of people in rural communities in the 1920s. What was the role of religion?
Why don’t rural areas experience the same level of cultural and social change as urban areas?
Give some statistics that describe how America was becoming increasingly urbanized in the 1920s.
17. How did the presence of immigrants impact the thinking of people in the cities? Why were cities such an
important factor in the spread of new ideas? (Think about spatial interaction.) Define cosmopolitan.
Why would rural people fear and distrust city life, and feel that cities were filled with strangers?
18. What are fundamentalists? What are secular thinkers? How did these identities clash in the Scopes Trial?
19. What was Prohibition and which Amendment launched it in 1920? How was Prohibition connected to rural,
Christian people? How was Prohibition generally accepted in American cities?
Identify: speakeasies, bootleggers What did Prohibition do for the growth of organized crime?
20. What is woman suffrage? When and which Amendment in the US? What is a flapper? Describe flapper
fashion. How did the traditional roles and identity of women begin to change in the 1920s?
Use text pp. 624-629
21. How does education foster social, and cultural change? Where do colleges/universities tend to locate?
22. How did growing mass media shape a mass popular culture and identity? What three forms of mass media
dominated the 1920s? Who wrote some of the most popular literature during the 1920s? Give some examples.
What culture/identity themes did they write about?
Use text pp. 630-637
23. What was the Great Migration? By the late 1920s, what percentage of African Americans lived in cities?
24. What does the NAACP stand for? Who was WEB Du Bois, and what were his goals? How were the struggles
of the NAACP examples of identity clash?
25. What was the Harlem Renaissance? How did it relate to the concept of identity? How did the Great Migration
contribute to the cultural change associated with cities? (Bring in the idea of spatial interaction) Give examples.
26. Identify: Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, “Duke” Ellington, the Jazz Age