The 1920’s
Roaring, Soaring, and Clinging.
The Boom
• After the turmoil that
immediately followed WWI,
many Americans began to
experience prosperity on a
level previously
unimaginable.
• The economy quickly took
off, production increased
dramatically, and stock
prices soared.
• In this period, many
Americans experienced a
dramatic increase in their
earnings, and as a result,
their standard of living.
New Production Techniques
• As you learned earlier, the
use of research and
scientific management from
people like Henry Ford,
made it possible to produce
goods faster than ever
before.
• New technology, mass
production techniques such
as interchangeable parts,
and the assembly line
changed industry
tremendously
• For example: It once took 12
hours to manufacture a
Model T Ford. In the 1920’s
it took 90 minutes.
Rising Wages and Better
Hours
• Through the innovation of Henry Ford*, and the efforts of
Organized Labor Unions, many industrial workers experienced a
great increase in wages.
• Labor Unions had been fighting for better hours for years, but
with little success.
• Henry Ford believed that by increasing his workers pay, and
giving them Saturday and Sunday off, he would increase his
productivity, and also create new customers in his own workers.*
• Some, but by no means most, other industrialists followed suit,
and decreased their work weeks.
*Incidentally, Ford himself despised organized labor and fought
unionization in his company by any means he could, even hiring
strike breakers to violently thwart Unions.
A Consumer Revolution
• The 1920’s was period in
which new technology and
widespread availability of
electricity brought new
affordable goods to millions.
• Goods such as the electric
washing machine, vacuum
cleaner, radio, electric iron,
and refrigerator became
available to large numbers of
people.
• With their new increased
wages, many people began
to buy more than ever
before.
Advertisement
• In the 1920’s, psychological
research was being used to
determine how best to get
more buyers for a product.
• Advertisers used glamorous
images to appeal to people’s
desires.
• Many people became
convinced that they could
better themselves and their
status if they only had the
right product.
Installment Buying and Buying
on Credit
• In the 1920’s, large numbers of Americans
began buying products on credit through
installment buying.
• This meant that consumers without ready
cash, could make a down payment, and then
pay the rest of the debt in monthly
installments.
• In this way, people could purchase goods that
they never would have been able to afford
other wise.
The Stock Market
• The 1920’s was a tremendous bull market* for investors. A bull
market is when the price of stocks rise.
• With all of the new goods to be sold, and new purchasing power
for consumers, businesses were growing, and investors wanted
to cash in on that success. This demand for stock, increased the
value of shares. Many people made huge fortunes investing.
• Like other goods, stocks could be bought on credit, buy buying
on margin. This is when a person a person paid as little as 10%
for the stock, which he or she purchased from a broker. The
buyer then paid the broker the rest of the cost over a period of
months.
• If the cost of the price rose, there was no problem paying the
broker back. If it fell, the broker would keep the stock, which was
collateral.
• * A Bear Market is a period of lowered stock prices
Speculation
• Many people were willing to take great risks to make
money, and engaged in speculation, or risky
purchases of stock with no clear assurance of return.
• Many people in the 1920’s would hear a rumor about
a hot new stock, and buy that stock on margin in
hopes of big returns.
• One way clever businessmen found to make quick
money was to purchase a lot of stock, and then let
word “slip” about the new big thing. People would
then rush to buy, and the businessmen would sell
and make big profits.
• Despite the dangers, speculation was one factor that
led to the boom of the 1920’s
Urban Growth, New Cars, and
New Suburbs
• As you learned earlier, cities grew rapidly in the
industrial revolution, and they continued to grow in
the 1920’s, especially as farmers struggled and
moved to cities, along with African Americans who
took part in the Great Migration.
• As millions of Americans purchased cars, first the
Model T, and then those of other companies. In 1919,
10% of Americans owned cars. By 1927, 56% did.
• The car made it possible for some Americans to
purchase homes in communities outside major cities,
and then commute to work by driving. These new
communities were called Suburbs.
Cities, Cars, and Suburbs
The Harding Years
• In the 1920’s the Federal Government was dominated by the
Republican Party.
• Warren G. Harding of Ohio was elected president in 1920 under
the promise of returning America to “normalcy”, or away from the
problems of the War years and their aftermath. He was
Conservative in his politics, and wanted to un-do much of the
progressive policies of the Roosevelt and Wilson presidencies.
• Harding was a social man, who was well liked, but his
understanding of government was somewhat limited. He took a
policy of delegating authority and relied upon trusted
subordinates to make decisions.
• Herbert Hoover, Secretary of Commerce, worked with business
leaders to advance Progressive.
• Andrew Mellon worked to reduce the income tax that had been
established by the 16th Amendment, and reduce the taxes
imposed on corporations and businesses. He cut the budget
from a wartime high of $18 billion to $3 billion.
Harding Continued
• Many of these subordinates were his close friends from Ohio,
known derisively as “the Ohio Gang”.
• Corruption and scandal plagued Harding’s subordinates
especially in the Veterans Bureau. His Attorney General
resigned when it was alleged that he took bribes from
bootleggers.
• The Teapot Dome Scandal involved Secretary of the Interior
Albert Fall, who arranged the transfer of oil reserves in Wyoming
from the Navy Dept., to the Interior Dept.
• Instead of holding onto the reserves for the Navy, he leased
them to private oil companies for “loans”, which of course, were
bribes.
• While corruption was rampant in Harding’s administration, he
himself was not personally involved, and when he died of a
Heart Attack in 1923, he was extremely popular.*
*Harding was known to be a womanizer, and some speculated his
wife poisoned him! There is speculation that he belonged to the
KKK, though this is largely ignored by professional historians.
Warren G. Harding
Calvin Coolidge
• Coolidge seceded Harding and eliminated much of
the corruption.
• Coolidge kept the policies of Sec. of Treasury Mellon
in place. He believed in limited government, and
thought that business should be left alone to operate
freely, and his FCC appointments reflected this.
• Coolidge lowered taxes again, and reduced spending
even further.
• The U.S. economy boomed during this time period,
and Coolidge’s “laissez faire” policies received much
of the credit.
Coolidge Continued
• “Silent Cal”, as he was
called, did not have much
sympathy for farmers, and
opposed measures to aid
them when farm prices fell.
• He also signed the National
Origins Act that restricted
immigration for people of
Eastern and Southern
European heritage and
Asians.
• Coolidge also vetoed a
bonus for WWI Veterans, but
was overridden by
Congress.
Foreign Policy in the 1920’s
In the 1920’s Several attempts we made to
make the world more peaceful. The U.S.
was of course involved, but the record is
mixed:
1.
2.
3.
4.
The League of Nations was formed, but the Senate did not
agree to join.
The World Court was was formed, and Harding agreed to join,
but was blocked by the Senate.
The Washington Naval Conference sought to limit the build
up of warships. The agreed to this.
The Kellogg-Briand Pact renounced war as a legitimate way
to settle disputes. This was largely a symbolic measure, and
was obviously ignored.
War Debt
• The U.S. government and U.S. banks had financed WWI, and
with the war over, the U.S. demanded that debt be paid,
especially by Britain and France.
• To pay the U.S., the British and French demanded the
reparations from Germany be paid.
• Germany, who experienced hyper-inflation during this time
because they were printing more money to pay the reparations,
had trouble paying.
• The U.S. then passed the Dawes Act, that loaned money to
Germany.
• Of course the money loaned to Germany, was sent to Britain
and France, which they promptly sent to America.
1920’s Culture : The Clash of Old
and New
• The decade of the 1920’s was a time of great change for
America.
• As you know, the economy surged as people used installment
buying to purchase new consumer products.
• Stock prices soared, and many people became rich quickly.
• People in industrial jobs and office jobs saw an increase in their
wages, and a decrease in the number of hours they worked, and
the number of work days, from 55 hours a week to 45, and from
six days a week, to five.
• At the same time, many people in rural and small town America
did not see the prosperity of the 1920’s. In fact, as you have
learned, times got tougher for them than before the decade, due
to growing debt and decreased farm prices. They worked from
dawn to dusk, often times seven days a week, just as they
always had.
• Unlike their urban counterparts, these Americans longed for a
return to the “good old days”.
Prohibition
• There had been a temperance movement in America going back
as far as the early 1800’s (Temperance means choosing not to
drink alcohol).
• Women especially worked to ban alcohol production, sale, and
consumption, because they thought it was the root of many of
the social problems in America.
• In 1919, the Temperance Movement succeeded in convincing
states to ratify the 18th Amendment, which forbade the
manufacture, distribution, and sale of alcohol in the U.S.
• The Volstead Act was then passed to enforce the Amendment.
• People that were in favor of the 18th Amendment were called
“drys”, and people that were against it were called “wets”.
• Prohibition went into effect in January 1920, and would be in
place until 1933.
Problems with Prohibition
• While Prohibition was a noble idea, it was largely favored by
people in rural areas, and mostly Protestant Christians.
• Many Americans who lived in the cities opposed Prohibition.
Many of those people were the sons of Irish, German, Polish, or
Italian immigrants, or immigrants themselves. To these people,
alcohol was a common part of their culture.
• Of course their were many people in the cities, especially
Progressive Activists, who were “dry”, and there were many
people in the rural areas who enjoyed alcohol, or were wet.
• Regardless of what part of the country people lived in, many
people still wanted to drink, and the new laws would not stop
them.
Bootleggers
• To provide people with alcohol, many people engaged
“bootlegging”, or the illegal selling of alcohol.
• Many of the people involved in bootlegging were former beer
brewers or liquor distillers who saw the opportunity to continue
their business tax free. Other people operated homemade
distilleries and breweries.
• Some of the people involved in bootlegging were organized
criminals who ventured out from their normal activities and
rackets (gambling, prostitution, loan sharking, etc.) to join in the
potential for making large amounts of tax free money.
• The most famous organized crime figure of the Prohibition era
was Al Capone, who controlled many of the Chicago Rackets.
• His men battled other gangsters for control of Chicago’s
bootlegging. Similar battles took place in cities across the
country, including Cincinnati and especially, Newport Kentucky.
• In the South, bootleggers used “Hot Rod” cars to avoid the
police as they ran illegal booze from place to place. These cars
would eventually pave the way for the birth of NASCAR.
Speakeasies
• During the Prohibition Era, the illegal bars
developed across the country where people
could go to get a drink and socialize.
• These places were called “Speakeasies”.
• Some speakeasies were just basement
hangouts with a few stools and a rickety bar.
• Others were located in luxurious hotels, or
fancy buildings and their operators scarcely
attempted to hide them.
• Often times speakeasies also offered
gambling and other vices.
Images of Prohibition
Gangsters and Bootleggers
Film In the 1920’s
• In the 1920’s the film industry took off in America like never
before.
• While motion pictures had been somewhat popular in the early
1900’s, during the 1920’s, Hollywood was producing 800 feature
films a year.
• Between 60 to 100 million Americans attended the movies every
week.
• In 1927 The Jazz Singer, the first talking film in history was
produced.
• Stars such as Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas
Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Buster Keaton, and Clara Bow helped
influence how people dressed, talked, and acted.
Film Stars of the 1920’s
Jazz
• One of the most influential styles of music that became popular
in the 1920’s was Jazz.
• Jazz was developed in the early 1900’s by African Americans in
New Orleans, Louisiana. The music was a blend of Rag Time,
Blues, and traditional African rhythms, with some European
musical traditions and instruments.
• When African Americans moved North, they brought Jazz with
them, and it became hugely popular with both white and black
audiences in cities like New York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia,
and Kansas City.
• As Jazz became popular, it became trendy for white audiences
to go to Jazz Clubs, or to have Jazz bands play at their homes
for parties.
• Jazz spawned popular new forms of dancing, including the
Charleston, the Black Bottom, and the Shag.
• Famous Jazz performers of the 1920’s included Louis
Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, and Bessie
Smith.
Jazz Images
Changes For African Americans
• As you know, many African Americans moved North during the
Great Migration.
• Many African Americans gained a college education during this
time, and began to enter professions such as medicine, law,
business, and industry.
• Black communities developed in Northern cities where their
culture flourished.
• While race riots were not uncommon, and discrimination faced
them in their jobs and careers, many African American people
worked to better their lives and joined groups such as the
NAACP.
• One African American, Marcus Garvey, founded the Universal
Negro Improvement Association, which argued that blacks
should work for a separation of their society from white society.
Garvey believed that blacks should support their own
businesses and communities, and be proud of their heritage.
• This movement was called the “Back to Africa” movement.
Marcus Garvey
Harlem Renaissance
• In the 1920’s African Americans, especially in New York cities
Harlem area, began to show increased pride in their heritage
while voicing outrage at discrimination.
• The term, “New Negro”, came to describe African Americans of
this time, who challenged the status quo.
• Many authors, intellectuals, and other artists expressed these
sentiments in books, poems, and in Jazz music.
• Writers such as Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and many
others contributed to this period, which came to be known as the
Harlem Renaissance, or the intellectual and cultural growth
and renewal of the African American community in the 1920’s.
Claude McKay- If We Must Die
If we must die—let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die—oh, let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common foe;
Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Langston Hughes- A Negro
Speaks of Rivers
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I danced in the Nile when I was old
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
“”
from "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (1920),
in The Weary Blues (1926) r
Sports
• In the 1920’s the sports world entered a golden age.
• Boxing produced huge stars like Jack Dempsey and Gene
Tuney, who fought in front of over one hundred thousand fans.
• Football produced Harold “Red” Grange of the University of
Illinois, and Knute Rockne coached legendary Notre Dame
teams.
• Most famously, baseball, which had been a hugely popular
spectator sport even before the 1920, got even bigger with the
star slugger George Herman “Babe” Ruth, perhaps the biggest
sports celebrity in history. Jimmy Foxx was another huge star.
• Millions of people flocked to see athletic contests, followed on
the radio, and most importantly, read dramatic articles in
newspapers.
• As you might have expected, these athletes were so
enormously popular that advertisers used them to appeal to
consumers.
1920’s Sports Icons
Charles Lindbergh
• In May 1927, Charles Lindbergh, a young
American pilot, flew from Long Island, New
York, to Paris, France in his single engine
plane, The Spirit of St. Louis.
• The trip lasted 33 hours.
• He was the first person to fly solo, non-stop
across the Atlantic Ocean.
• As a result of his trip, he became a world
wide celebrity, and a national hero.
Charles Lindbergh
Changes for Women
• In the 1920’s, things began to seriously change for
women.
• The 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote,
which they exercised for the first time in the 1920’s.
• Many women began to enter the workforce in office
jobs, especially as secretaries, telephone operators,
and stenographers.
• Even for women who didn’t work out of the home,
new consumer products such as the the electric
vacuum, the electric iron, and the washing machine
made house work easier, which increased time to
pursue other interests.
The New Woman
• In the 1920’s, some women began to challenge conventional
morals and traditions.
• Many young women began to put on more make-up, wear their
hair short in a “bob” cut, and wear short skirts and dresses, and
sometimes even galoshes, or black boots with a buckle. These
women were called “Flappers”.
• As much attention as these women drew with their clothes, the
most remarkable thing about these women were their attitudes
and actions.
• Many flappers drank alcohol, smoked cigarettes, and had
permissive attitudes regarding sex.
• While there were actually few true flappers, many of their styles
and attitudes influenced other women on a smaller scale.
Flappers
Rural Reaction
• Many people in rural areas rejected the fastpaced, care-free life of the 1920’s, and
wished for a return to simpler times.
• During this time period, many Americans felt
like their traditional beliefs, especially their
Christian morals, were being undermined.
• These people believed very much that the
Bible and everything in it was the literal truth,
and that all of the fundamentals in it could be
used to answer all of life’s questions. This
belief is called fundamentalism.
Scopes Trial
• In 1925, Tennessee passed a law making it a crime to teach
evolution to school children.
• The A.C.L.U. convinced John Scopes to challenge the law, and
teach evolution in his biology class in Dayton, Tennessee. He
did, and was arrested.
• Clarence Darrow, a famous attorney defended Scopes, and
argued against William Jennings Bryan, who served as an
expert for the prosecution.
• The case became national news, and was referred to as the
“Monkey Trial”.
• Scopes was convicted and forced to pay a $100 fine, but the
real significance of the case was the conflict growing between
the old traditional Christian Values and the new values of
modernism and science.
Fights Against Immigration
• Many Protestant Americans resented the millions of immigrants
that came to the U.S. from other parts of the world, especially
people of the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Jewish
faiths.
• The people who held anti-immigrant beliefs were called
Nativists.
• The National Origins Act of 1924 set up a quota for immigrants
coming to America.
• The number of immigrants coming to America could not exceed
2% of the number of people of that nationality living in America
in 1890. The year 1890 was picked because few people from
Southern and Eastern Europe, or Asia had been in America prior
to that year.
• The law also continued to exclude most Asians, who had been
previously excluded by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1892.
Return of the Ku Klux Klan
• For many Americans, newly arrived immigrants of different
faiths, and the new sense of pride in African Americans in the
1920’s was a threat to their traditional, Protestant beliefs.
• In 1915 a new Ku Klux Klan was formed in Stone Mountain,
Georgia.
• This new Klan branched out from simply being anti-black, and
aimed their hate and terrorism at Catholics, Jews, and
immigrants, as well as blacks.
• The new Klan was a powerful political force in many areas of the
country, even in parts of the North and West.
• In fact, the Klan came to dominate state politics in Indiana,
where even the Governor of the state was a member.
• At its height, the new Klan had around 5 million members.
• Political corruption, and the efforts of the NAACP and the Jewish
Anti-Defamation league eventually led to a decline of the Klan
once again.
Rebirth of the Klan