I. New Directions
A. The 1920s brought great changes for women. For example, the
Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified that year.
The amendment gave women the right to vote nationally.
B. Although the majority of married women remained at home as mothers and homemakers, an increasing number of women joined the workforce in the 1920s. Most women occupied traditionally female jobs, such as teaching and clerical work, but an increasing number of women attended college, embarked on traditionally male careers, and continued to work after marriage.
C. The flapper – with heavy makeup, short skirts, and a short boyish haircut – symbolized the new, freer women of the 1920s.
II. Entertainment
A. Labor-saving devices gave people more leisure time in the 1920s, allowing them to enjoy entertainment such as tabloid-style newspapers, largecirculation magazines, phonograph records, radios and movies.
B. During the 1920s, the motion-picture industry in Hollywood became one of the country’s leading businesses.
C. Radio brought entertainment right into people’s homes, including news, concerts, sporting events, and comedies. When businesses realized that radio offered a tremendous opportunity to advertise their products to a wide audience, they started to finance radio programs. This was the beginning of commercials.
D. Radio broadcasts of sporting events were very popular in the
1920s. Sports figures such as Babe Ruth became larger-than-life heroes.
E. Americans took up new activities that turned into fads. Such fads included the Chinese board game mah-jongg, crossword puzzles, flag-pole sitting contests, and dance marathons.
III. The Jazz Age
A. During the 1920s, Americans danced to a new type of music called jazz. Jazz grew out of African American work songs and African music and

became one of America’s most distinctive art forms. Interest in jazz spread through radio and phonograph records.
B. In the 1920s, an African American section of New York City called
Harlem experienced a burst of cultural creativity called the Harlem Renaissance.
Many African American writers in Harlem wrote novels, short stories, and poems about the African American experience.
C. While the Harlem Renaissance peaked, another group of writers questioned American ideals. Disillusioned with American society, these writers, called expatriates, moved to Paris for inspiration. They included F. Scott
Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.
D. Some American artists chose to stay home and write about life in
America. Sinclair Lewis presented a critical view of American culture in books such as Babbitt and Main Street. Sherwood Anderson explored small-town life in the Midwest in Winseburg, Ohio.
IV. Prohibition
A. The temperance movement – the campaign against the alcohol use
– began in the 1800s but it did not achieve its goal until 1919. That is when the
Eighteenth Amendment was ratified. It banned the transportation, manufacture, and sale of liquor in the United States.
B. Prohibition succeeded in the South and Midwest, but it had little support in cities.
C. Continued demand for alcohol led to widespread lawbreaking. For example, some people made alcoholic beverages in their homes, and illegal bars and clubs, served alcohol. These clubs, called speakeasies, were hidden from view and could be entered only by saying a password.
D. The Prohibition laws were hard to enforce because there were too few government agents to do so. BY the early 1920s, many eastern states stopped trying to enforce the law.
E. Prohibition contributed to the rise of organized crime. Realizing that making and selling alcohol illegally could make a great deal of money, gangsters took over the business. They used the millions of dollars they made to buy influence in government, business, and labor unions.

F. Over time, Prohibition was viewed as a failure. In 1933 the
Twenty-first Amendment repealed the Eighteenth Amendment, which had instituted Prohibition.
V. Nativism
A. The anxieties that many native-born Americans felt about rapid changes in society spurred an upsurge in nativism, or the belief that native-born
Americans were better than foreigners.
B. There was a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan at this time.
1. The new Klan targeted Catholics, Jews, and immigrants in addition to African Americans.
2. In the 1920s, the new Klan spread beyond the South, gaining power in areas of the country such as Indiana and Oregon, as well as in some large cities. The Klan used scare tactics, pressure, whippings, and lynching to get its way.
3. The power and influence of the Klan began to decrease in the late 1920s, as the result of internal power struggles and scandals.
Membership shrank and politicians who had supported the Klan were voted out of office.
C. The fears that had prompted the Red Scare in the early 1920s continued throughout the decade. Many people feared foreigners or though they would take away American jobs. This anti-immigrant prejudice was directed primarily at southern and eastern European and Asians. As a result, Congress passed the National Origins Act in 1924. It set a quota on the number of immigrants from each country that could enter the United States. The quotas favored immigrants from northern and western Europe, which most white, native-born Americans identified with at the time. The law excluded Japanese immigrants completely. An earlier law had already excluded the Chinese.
VI. The Scopes Trial
A. Religion in society provided another source of conflict. In 1925 the states of Tennessee passed a law making it illegal to teach evolution. Christian fundamentalists saw evolution as a challenge to their values and religious beliefs.
A high school teacher named John Scopes deliberately broke the law so he could challenge its legality in court.
B. The nation followed daily developments of the Scopes Trial in the summer of 1925. Two famous lawyers, William Jennings Bryan and Clarence
Darrow, faced each other. Bryan was a strong opponent of evolution. Darrow had defended many radicals.

C. Scopes was convicted of breaking the law and paid a small fine.
But the fundamentalists lost the larger battle, as the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the conviction. Other states decided not to prosecute similar cases.
VII. The Election of 1928
A. In 1927 Calvin Coolidge shocked the nation by announcing that he would not seek a second term as president. The Republican Party nominated
Herbert Hoover. Hoover had made millions of dollars in private business and thought government-business cooperation was very important.
B. The Democratic Party chose Alfred E. Smith as their candidate.
Unlike Hoover, Smith was a son of immigrants and a champion of the poor and the working class.
C. Prejudice played a role in some Americans’ lack of acceptance of
Smith. They found his heavy New York accent jarring. As the first Roman-
Catholic nominee for president, he was also the target of anti-Catholic feeling.
D. Hoover won the election by a landslide due to the prosperity of the
1920s and prejudice against Smith.