A Booming Economy
Efficiency and Power: The spread of scientific management made businesses more efficient; the amount of electricity produced in this decade doubled, facilitating economic growth and the broader use of goods which mechanized aspects of housekeeping (blenders, electric ovens, vaccuum cleaners, etc.)
Automotive Industry: The automotive industry drove the economy. 1.9 million cars sold in 1920 to 5 million a year by 1929, with 26 million cars in use. It stimulated other industries which used its products.
Other Booming Industries: Chemistry, Avionics, radio and motion pictures.
Radio and Film: 732 radio stations by 1927. Federal Radio Commission is created. (Later it becomes the Federal Communications Commission in 1934).
20,000 movie theatres sold 100 million tickets a week.
Corporate Consolidation: A shift from monopolies to oligopolies , where a handful of companies controlled an industry, instead of just one. Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors controlled 84% of the Auto Industry; 41 companies fought for the other 16% (down from 108 companies).
The Open Shop: Companies tried to force workers to accept the policy of hiring non-union workers. ( The Union Shop was a place where only union members could be hired.)
Welfare Capitalism: Some companies pushed welfare policies--health insurance, pensions, cafeterias, etc--in order to try and fight the rise of unions. Only about
5% of the workforce, however.
Union Decline: Unions shrank from 5.1 to 3.6 million (1920

1929) due to pressure but also due to ethnic tensions and failure to unionize blacks and women.
Wage Problems: Also, companies failed to increase wages, while still increasing productivity, thus threatening to undercut the nation's prosperity by wiping out ability of people to BUY the overproduced goods. By 1929, 71% of workers earned less than was necessary for a decent standard of living. Growing reliance on credit staved off the problem in the short term by creating a LONG term problem.
Sick Industries: Coal mining, textiles, garments, and railroads had too much production, shrinking demand, low returns, and management-labor conflicts.
Farming also suffered the same problem of too much production relative to demand due to technological improvements. By 1930, only 57% of farmers owned their own land, the lowest level ever. By 1930, farmers made only 1/4th the national per capita income.
Republican Ascendency
Warren G. Harding (1920-3): A well meaning man who surrounded himself with corrupt cronies. Harding does get credit for negotiating a new peace treaty
(due to rejection of Versailles) and for working towards a more peaceful future

through disarmnament treaties. He also supported the Budget and Accounting
Act of 1921 , which created the modern budgeting process for the Federal
Government. He died early of a heart attack in 1923.
Working for Business: Harding oriented his policies towards promoting the interests of business. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover pushed businesses to modernize and expand their international trade. Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon pushed for lower taxes on the Rich, believing their prosperity would make others richer by 'trickling down'.
This proved rather mistaken. High tariffs were instituted to protect
American business in 1922. However, this made it hard for foreign nations to pay us the money they owed us by locking them out of US markets. Harding also cut down government regulation of business. His
Supreme Court appointments proceeded to gut the Progressive era regulations put on businesses.
Corruption By the Cartload: His administration was heavily corrupt.
His Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall , leased petroleum reserves on public lands set aside for conservation, in return for cash, bonds, and cattle in the Teapot Dome Scandal . He became the first cabinet officer ever to go to jail. The Attorney General's staff took bribes.
Calvin Coolidge (1923-8): Traumatized by the loss of his son and naturally inclined to laissez faire and anti-union measures, Coolidge basically sat around and did very little for five years. Coolidge endorsed the growth of big business and planned to leave it to do what it did best--make money. Labor, meanwhile, got to be kicked and sent to the corner.
Public Finance: Spending was cut so as to create a surplus, used to pay down the debt.
Farmers: 1/2 of farmers grew 90% of crops and prospered; the other half mostly worked for the top half. Efforts were made to raise farm prices to help all farmers out. Two big schemes: Controlling foreign marketing of crops and Hoover's farm coops.
Cities and Suburbs
Urban Growth: People fled the rural South and Appalachia to move to the northern cities. (and Southern Cities too).
Great Migration: Black flight to the North sped up in the 1920s. Blacks got stuck living in ghettos under poor living conditions with high rents. At the same time, the northern black communities became strong centers of Black identity and culture. 1870-1890: 80,000 blacks moved north. 1890-1910: 200,000 moved north. By 1910, 850,000 blacks lived in northern cities. Grew to 1.4 million by
1920, 2.3 million by 1930. 2 million more moved by 1945.
Barrios: Like many immigrants before them, Hispanic immigrants to the city also formed their own insular communities, where Hispanic culture flourished despite poverty. Like Blacks, Hispanics struggled to protect their rights through organizations such as the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) .

Suburbs: Suburbs grew twice as fast as the cities did.
Automobiles created the modern, spread-out suburb. New roads were created to link city and suburb and new businesses exploited the mobility of the auto-mobile, such as the drive-in movie and the drive-in restaurant.
The Jazz Age
Hard to Define : It was the maturation of cultural trends which began in the
1910s, such as the flapper. But it also reflected Post-War 'return to normalcy' and the idea that 'the business of America is Business'.
Reaction to WWI : Many new artists in this period were shaped by the experience of World War I, the so called 'Lost Generation', from Hemingway to
JRR Tolkein. America was not so hard hit as Europe in this respect, but many creators tried to make sense of a world that lost its meaning in bloody death in
Europe.
Freud : Freud's ideas inspired many to dig beneath the surface and try to explore the subconscious mind and motivations.
Small Town Life : Many American writers turned to small town life to try to understand America. Sinclair Lewis--Main Street (1920) shows a feminist trying to bring some culture to a small town. Sociologists studied small town life also, such as Middletown (1929), a study of Muncie, IN.
Harlem Renaissance
Urban Culture: In the cities, black culture flourished.
20s Prosperity: The Prosperity of the Twenties enabled some blacks to flourish enough to create an environment hospitable to the development of art; white patronage also helped.
Race Capital: Harlem emerged as the cultural capital of the northern
Black communities.
Art and Music: Poetry and music were the heart of the Harlem
Renaissance. Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay,
Zora Hurston, and Langston Hughes.
Depression: The Depression ultimately crushed it.
New Black Leadership: Urban migration led to new black leaders.
A.
Phillip Randolph: Writer for The Messenger in Harlem. He urged blacks to vote for socialists and to join unions. He founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925, serving as its president, winning it a good deal in the depression and eventually helped to organize the March on Washington in 1963. (In 1941, he used the threat of such a march to pressure an end to defense jobs boycotting blacks)
Marcus Garvey: From Jamaica.
One of the leaders of Pan-
Africanism, which hoped to create a free state for Blacks in Africa.
(Along with WEB DuBois). Garvey was a great grandstander and propagandist, but he basically built his movement on a basis of financial scamming and showmanship. He created the Universal
Negro Improvement Association (1919-27, 30 branches in US

cities, half a million members). Created a weekly newspaper, The
Negro World. Created the Black Star Line, 1919, with an all-
Black ownership. All three ships were lost at sea. Its failure led to him being jailed on charges of mail fraud. He was eventually deported to Jamaica.
Jazz: Developed around New Orleans in the early 1900s, it boomed in popularity in the 1920s. It was rooted in older forms of Black music--African music, spirituals, ragtime, etc, and made common use of the instruments used in marching bands and dance band music at the turn of the century: brass, reeds, and drums, using the Western 12-tone scale. Jazz was most noted for its use of improvisation. It began as club music, but as the music industry grew, it became a popular form of recorded music as well and would influence other genres and be played by whites as well as blacks.
Radio: Radio boomed, coming under federal control and becoming a common form of entertainment. Radio networks arose, providing entertainment and news content for stations. Radio helped to create mass culture
Silent Movies: This was an era of booming movie production, silent at first, then later talkies. They mixed traditional values of courage, honesty, generosity and responsibility with a frank treatment of sex and alcohol. Movies were meant for all classes. In 1927, Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer was one of the first Talkies, ushering in a new generation of movies.
Professional Sports: This was an age of high popularity for boxing and flourishing leagues for major sports. Most professional sports were segregated
(such as the Negro National League), but boxing was semi-integrated and would grow more so during the 1930s.
Urban/Rural Conflict
Nativism: After the Red Scare, Americans increasingly favored restricting immigration.
National Origins Act of 1924 restricted immigration quotas to 2% of the size of each national origin as measured in the 1890 census. It trumpeted a goal of preserving 'racial purity'. In 1929, immigration was restricted to 150,000 a year, and Japanese immigration blocked entirely. Ironically, it didn't apply to the Phillipines or Mexico, and many flocked to the US.
The Klan: The twenties saw a revival in the North and South of the Klu Klux
Klan as Anti-Catholic / Anti-Jew / Anti-Immigrant. They were seen as emblematic of corrupt urban culture and a threat to Protestantism. Founded in
Georgia in 1915. While anti-Black in the South, it focused its main attack on
Catholics, Jews, and Immigrants. 2-4 million members. In many ways, it functioned as a fraternal order, providing aid and mutual assistance in addition to organizing MASS HATE. The Klan attacked Al Smith's candidacy in 1928; it went into decline as scandals of sex and finance undercut its leaders and as politicians launched counter-attacks on it.
Prohibition: Imposed as a wartime measure, it was the triumph of evangelicals and women over the entertainments of the urban immigrants. Immigrants saw it as anti-Catholic bigotry.

Failure: Prohibition was a giant failure; it simply drove drinking underground and gave it a forbidden allure. Speakeasies arose to supply tainted liquor in every city and major town. Now, everyone ended up drinking badly made, contaminated liquor and poisoning themselves.
Organized Crime: Furthermore, organized crime catapulted to new heights off the money from rum running and speakeasies.
Some Success: It did, in fact, reduce alcohol consumption. But this came at a heavy social cost.
Post-Repeal: Prohibition destroyed most of the small American breweries; only the giant companies survived. This tended to retard American beer.
Fundamentalism: American Fundamentalists were rising in this period, along with the development of the Pentacostal denominations. They backed Prohibition and attacked the immorality of the cities. Not all were socially conservative;
William Jennings Bryan was a fundamentalist but also a liberal reformer. It tended towards social conservatism and fear of urban corruption, however.
The Scopes Trial: Dayton, Tennessee. Teacher John Scopes was tried for teaching evolution in contradiction of state law; the whole thing had been rigged up as a test case. Famous lawyer Clarence Darrow took on
William Jennings Bryan. (Ironically, the state had banned teaching evolution in the Butler act, yet approved a textbook (Civic Biology, which endorsed White supremacy and eugenics) which taught evolution. Scopes himself was a coach who had simply substituted once in a biology class).
Scopes was found guilty, fined 100 dollars; Bryan offered to pay it. (The conviction was overturned on appeal on a technicality)
Diplomacy: 1921-9
Washington Naval Conference:
Five Powers Pact: Limited further building of ships. Britain and US in lead / Japan in middle / France and Italy at lowest
Four Power Pact: US, France, Britain, Japan agreed to respect each other's colonies and lands
Nine Powers Pact: Keep the Open Door in China
World Court: US tried to join World Court, but Senate shot it down.
Kellog-Briand Pact (1928): 64 signatories to 'ban all war forever'. Mostly pointless
Nicaragua: 1926-1933.
US takes over, defeating Agosto Sandina.
War Debt: Heavy war debts and reparations damaged Europe's economy; the US gradually came around to negotiating new payment plans and forgiving debts.
The Election of 1928
Al Smith: Catholic governor of New York, Progressive Reformer, enemy of the
Klu Klux Klan and Prohibition. Smith was very flashy in his Catholicism, enflaming his enemies.

Herbert Hoover: A former mining engineer who headed relief efforts during
WWI. He became Secretary of Commerce under Harding and Coolidge. His goal there was to promote international free trade to build prosperity.
The Result: Hoover won, 22.4 million to 15 million, 444 to 87 electoral votes