The “Roaring”Twenties
1919-1929
Chapter 13
A Booming Economy
Chapter 13 section 1
Automobiles
• At first cars were for rich people
• 1908 Henry Ford introduced the Model T
– Cost $850
• Ford opened a new plant into Detroit and began using the
assembly line to make cars
– Before assembly line it took 12 hours to create a Model T
– After assembly line it took 90 minutes to make a Model T
– Ford’s Assembly Line, one car every 10 seconds
• 1930 ~ 30 million cars in US
• Prices began to fall for Model T’s
– Down to $290 by 1927
– 1927 56% of Americans owned a car
–
http://www.nytimes.com/video/automobiles/collectibles/1194817121762/ford-s-model-t-at-100.html
• Ford believed in keeping his workers happy
– Paid his workers $5 a day
• More than double what others paid
– He reduced the workday from 9 hours to 8 hours
and gave workers Saturday and Sunday off
• Hoped that workers would buy cars
The Gasoline Age
• Auto Industry employed 6
million by 1930
– Supporting industries
millions more
– Steel, glass, asphalt, rubber,
wood, insurance, road
construction, motor hotels
(motels)
– All this produced jobs, and
wealth
• Gas/Oil became huge
business
– Hurt the RaildRoad industry
• Cars gave freedom
– A new youth movement began
• “a house of prostitution on wheels”
• Suburbs grew
• People could live farther from their jobs
• Deaths increased
– By 1951 one million dead from cars
The Consumer Revolution
• New affordable goods became
available to the public
– Washing machines, vacuum
cleaners, radios, refrigerators
• Advertising became big
business to sell all the goods
– Magazine and newspaper ads
– Played on people’s wants and
fears, not needs
–
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6mBpArf6oM
• People began buying all this stuff on credit
– Good and bad news, why?
The Bull Market
• People began to heavily invest in the stock
market during the 1920’s
– Bull Market = market rising
• People began to buy stock on margin
– Buying on credit
– 10% down
– People ignored dangers
**Buying stock on margin means using leverage to
maximize your gain when prices rise.
Leverage is simply using borrowed money to increase
your profit**
Cities, Suburbs, and Country
• Cities populations rose during the
1920’s
– People migrated out of rural areas to
cities
– Immigrants went to cities
• Skyscrapers began to dominate cities
– Electric elevators and steel allowed this
to happen
City
1910
1930
New York
4,766,883
6,930,446
Chicago
2,185,283
3,376,478
Los Angeles
319,198
1,238,048
Detroit
465,766
1,568,662
• Suburbs grew as cars became more popular
– Suburbs tended to draw the middle and upper
classes (For example: Coral Gables is a suburb of
Miami)
– Cities started a slow decline towards poverty
• Farmers did not feel the benefits of the
“roaring twenties”
– Agriculture prices were dropping, thus farmers
were becoming more poor
The Business of Government
Chapter 13 Section 2
The Republican “Old Guard” Returns
•
1921 Warren G. Harding inaugurated as President
– Promised a “return to normalcy”
•
What does that mean?
– Tried to appoint the “best minds” to his cabinet
•
•
Some good, some bad
Andrew Mellon became Secretary of the Treasury
– Under Secretary of Treasury Andrew Mellon, Gov’t spending and taxes were reduced from
1921-1926
– 1921, $1 million income = $663,000 income tax
– 1926, $1 million income = $200,000 income tax
– Tax burden shifted from rich to middle class
•
“Old Guard” Republicans returned and began to move away from Progressive Era
– Big business/ laissez-faire government
•
Anti-trust laws practically ignored during Harding's administration
Tariffs
• 1922 Harding signed the Fordney-McCumber Tariff, raised tariffs up
to 38.5%
– Up from 27%
• High tariffs hurt Europe, who was trying to recover from WWI
• Europe then raised their tariffs
– Bad for U.S.
– All good for Germany!
*Remember: A tariff is a tax on imports or
exports (an international trade tariff)
The Stench of Scandal
• Harding Administration had many scandals
– 1923 Director Charles R. Forbes stole ~$200 million from the Veterans Bureau
– Teapot Dome Scandal
• 1921 naval oil reserves located at Teapot Dome, Wyoming
• Albert B. Fall, Secretary of the Interior, convinced the Secretary of the Navy to transfer
these reserves to his control
• Fall then leased these reserves to private companies, receiving bribes in the process
• 1923 news about scandal leaked
• 1929 Fall sentenced to 1 yr in prison
– Scandal shook public confidence in the government
• 1923 President Harding died of pneumonia in San Fran while on a
speaking tour
• His presidency is remembered as most corrupt since Grant
“Silent Cal” Coolidge
• Calvin Coolidge was sworn in by
his father in the middle of the
night
– Very different than Harding
• Honest, moral, shy, quiet
• “The man who builds a factory
builds a temple”
• “The chief business of the
American people is business”
• Believed in the status-quo (the
existing state of affairs, esp.
regarding social or political issues)
• Coolidge worked to lower taxes, pay the
national debt, give businesses incentive, and
cut government spending
• 6 straight years of huge economic growth
under Coolidge
Frustrated Farmers and Minorities
• Farmers did great during WWI
– Hurt bad after war ended
• Technology helped/hurt farmers
– Tractors allowed farmers to farm more land, with less hired help, faster
– Increased farm products, thus dropping prices
– Farmers did not benefit from the booming economy
– Blacks and other minorities also continued to suffer
– Coolidge did not feel it was the governments role to try to create an ideal
society
America Seeks Benefits with out Burdens
•
•
1921 US signed separate peace treaty with Central Powers (The treaty laid the
foundations for a U.S.-German cooperation not under the strict supervision of the
League of Nations)
1921-1922 Washington Naval Disarmament Conference
– US, England, Japan agreed to slow naval construction
– Hoped it would help avoid future wars
•
1928 Kellogg-Briand (bree AHN) Pact between US and France
– 62 nations signed
– Only defensive wars allowed
– Not enforceable
•
America unrealistic and isolationist in 1920’s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jo87Q1Y48ws
A Three-Way Race for the White House in 1924
• Republicans nominated Coolidge
– “Keep Cool and Keep Coolidge”
• Democrats nominated John W.
Davis
• Progressives nominated Robert
M. Follette
• Coolidge won with 382 electoral
votes
• John received 136 and Robert
received 13 electoral votes
Foreign-Policy Flounderings
• War debt became a huge issue
– America went from a debtor nation to a creditor nation
• The Allies owed USA $10 billion and US wanted to get
paid
• England and France said the debts should be forgiven
since they lost millions of men and US didn’t, and since
all the money borrowed was spent on US goods
– They also complained that the high US tariffs made it
impossible to make the money they needed to pay US back
Unraveling the Debt Knot
• Allies debts to US forced them to seek high reparations from Germany
– Wanted to use reparations to pay US
– German inflation got out of control
• 1924 Dawes Plan adopted
– Rescheduled German reparations
– Allowed US loans to Germany
• Europe was mad b/c we didn’t cancel debt
•
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKASMBsk1Kg
US loans to
Germany
Allies pay war
debt to US
German
payments to
Allies
Social and Cultural Tensions
Chapter 13 section 3
Traditionalism vs. Modernism
• 1920 census revealed more Americans lived in
cities than in rural area
• People in urban areas tended to believe in
modernism
– A more open mind to social change and scientific
discoveries
• People in rural areas tended to be more
traditionalist
– Traditional views on science, religion, and culture
Education
• Education made big strides in 1920’s
– More prevalent in the North
• South didn’t have time for “book learning”
– More states made high school mandatory
– 1920’s more than ¼ of Americans were
graduating high school
Monkey Business in Tennessee
• Many Americans were fundamentalists in the
1920’s
• Bible is literal
• Major clash between Creation and Evolution
in schools
• Three states outlawed teaching evolution
– Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas
• Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925, Tennessee
– High School biology teacher John Scopes put on trial for
teaching evolution
– William Jennings Bryan a prosecutor
– Clarence Darrow the defense attorney
– Massive media attention
– Scopes found guilty, fined $100
• The trail made Fundamentalists look silly as most other
Christians were reconciling evolution and creation
•
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofM99LFZhxo
Stemming the Foreign Flood
• 1920-1921 800,000 immigrants came to US
– Most from South and Eastern Europe
• Emergency Quota Act, 1921
– 3% of nationality could immigrate, based on nationality’s
population in US in 1910
• Immigration Act of 1924
– Lowered to 2%
– Stopped all Japanese immigration
– Canadians and Latin Americans exempt
• Mexicans still faced discrimination
• Immigration basically came to a stop in America
KKK
• KKK re-emerged in 1920’s
– Anti-anything not “American”
• US born Protestant from Anglo-Saxon blood were
Americans (W.A.S.P- White Anglo Saxon Protestant)
– Mid 1920’s 5 million members
– What does this say about USA in the 1920’s?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQJX8v0sC3Q
The Prohibition “Experiment”
• 18th Amendment in 1919
• Volstead Act passed to enforce
the amendment
• Not a popular law
• Hard to enforce a law that the
majority of people don’t want
to follow
• “Speakeasies” formed
– Underground bars
– Lots of hard liquor
• Bootleggers began making
their own liquor
– Some could kill you
The Golden Age of Gangsterism
• Prohibition gave birth to organized
crime
– Chicago, 1920’s
• Al Capone
–
–
–
–
Alcohol distributor
War with rival gangs
Bribed police, juries, judges
St. Valentines Day Massacre, 1929
» 7 members of rival gang killed
• Gangsters moved into other businesses
– Prostitution, gambling, drugs
• Merchants paid “protection” money
• By 1930 $12-18 billion a year income
for Mob
– Way more than the Federal Govt
A New Mass Culture
Chapter 13 Section 4
Leisure Time
• 1850 people worked 70 hours per week
– 1910: 55 hours per week
– 1930: 45 hours per weeks
Hollywood’s Filmland Fantasies
• Silent films
• Charlie Chaplin
• One of the first full length films was
D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation
(1915)
• Hollywood became movie capital of the
world
• Mickey Mouse- First appeared in 1928!
• 1927 the first “talkie” came out
– The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson
• Movies became dominate form of
entertainment
• 60 to 100 million people per week
• Movies helped create an American
culture
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XefGvxVKrZk (chaplin)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIaj7FNHnjQ (jazz singer)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6c_WgxTsMo (mickey)
The Radio Revolution
• 1890, wireless telegraph
• Once voice carrying radio was perfected radio became big
business
– Programs, commercials, news
• Radio changed society
– Politics, sports, music
• Phonographs allowed people to listen to songs at will
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q96gqa2Ds9w
Humans Develop Wings
• Orville and Wilbur Wright
– Kitty Hawk, North Carolina
– December 17, 1903
– Flew for 12 seconds
• After WWI the air industry grew
– Flying circuses
– 1920 airmail began
• Charles A. Lindbergh, 1927, Spirit of St. Louis
– First solo flight across Atlantic, NY to Paris
• Took 33 hours
• Huge celebrity after flight and American hero
• Aviation industry took off
– Passenger airlines
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSvA9oz9LA4
The Dynamic Decade
•
•
•
•
1920’s was a time of great change in US
Women found more work
Margaret Sanger began fighting for contraceptives
Sex became less taboo
– Advertisers figured out sex sells
•
The “flapper” was born
•
Sexually liberated women beholden to no one man
– Women began to wear shorter skirts, bobbed their hair, and wore one piece bathing suits
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3svvCj4yhYc
Late 19th Century
1920s
The Dances
- The Shimmy
- The Charleston
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcemYjTdvZ8 (shimmy)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJC21zzkwoE (charleston)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQSY-2VtBvg (charleston)
Cultural Liberation
• After WWI a new generation
of writers appeared in US
• Know as the “Lost Generation”
• Name was given by Gertrude
Stein
• American poet living in Paris
• Lost faith in mankind after WWI
• F. Scott Fitzgerald
– 1920 This Side of Paradise
– 1925 The Great Gatsby
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XycaPM2a4CI
• Ernest Hemingway
– Part of the “Lost Generation”
– WWI vet
– 1926 The Sun Also Rises
– 1929 A Farewell to Arms
– 1961 killed himself
The Harlem Renaissance
Chapter 13 Section 5
Moving on Up, to the East Side
• African-Americans migrated North during WWI
– “Great Migration”
• Found work in major industrial cities
– Detroit, Pittsburg
• ~200,000 moved to Harlem, NY
– Became the epicenter for a flowering of AfricanAmerican culture
All that Jazz
•
•
•
•
Some call the 1920’s the “Jazz Age”
Jazz music was created by African Americans
Moved north during the Great Migration
Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDrzKBF6gDU (louis)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpVCqXRlXx4 (bessie)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDQpZT3GhDg (duke)
Marcus Garvey
• Marcus Garvey
– Jamaican immigrant to Harlem in 1916
– Preached Black pride and nationalism and started the “Back to
Africa” movement
• Believed in the separation of the races
– Founded the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)
• Mid 1920s it has 2.5 million members
– Arrested for mail fraud and deported to Jamaica
– Inspiration for the Nation of Islam and the Black Power
movement in the 1960s
Literature
• The Harlem Renaissance was not just music,
but also Literature
– Poems, stories, books, journalists, essays
• Writers explored the pains and joys of being
Black
• 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 accurséd lot.
If we must die, O 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!
O, kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
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!
THE NEGRO SPEAKS OF RIVERS
By Langston Hughes
I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and
older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. 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.
I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
1922
Legacy of the Harlem Renaissance
• It gave a voice to African American culture and
changed the way Blacks and Whites viewed
African American culture (yes..rap/hip hop
was inspired by the Harlem Renaissance!)