CHAPTER
21
A Turbulent Decade
The Twenties
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A Turbulent Decade
THE TWENTIES
I. Cars and Planes: The Promise of the
Twenties
II. Cultural Unrest
III.Radical Violence and Civil Rights
IV.The New Woman
V. Ensuring Peace: Diplomacy in the
Twenties
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Cars and Planes:
The Promise of the Twenties
A. The Car Culture
B. On the Road
C. Welfare Capitalism and Consumer
Culture
D. The Age of Flight: Charles A. Lindbergh
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The Car Culture
How did cars transform urban and rural
lifestyles?
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On the Road
What messages did the architecture of
roadside gas stations convey?
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Welfare Capitalism and Consumer Culture
How did welfare capitalism promise to help
industrialists run their factories more
efficiently?
How did a mass popular culture emerge in
the twenties?
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Envisioning Evidence
SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT IN ACTION
• In 1920s, scientists used tests to determine
which jobs were best for which ethnic
groups (social Darwinism).
• Central Tube Company created a chart to
determine which ethnicities to place in which
positions.
Envisioning Evidence
SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT IN ACTION
Envisioning Evidence
SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT IN ACTION
Notes on Central Tube Company’s chart:
• American whites at the top
• Irish near top in spite of anti-Irish sentiment
• American blacks suitable for only unskilled jobs
• Jews at bottom
What kind of job could you have gotten in this
factory?
The Age of Flight: Charles A. Lindbergh
Why did Americans celebrate Lindbergh’s
solo flight to Paris?
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Cultural Unrest
A. The Lost Generation
B. Prohibition
C. The First Red Scare and Immigration
Restrictions
D. Fundamentalism
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The Lost Generation
What critique did the Lost Generation offer
of American society?
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Prohibition
Why did Americans eventually conclude that
national prohibition was a failed experiment?
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Prohibition
Eighteenth Amendment (1919) –
Constitutional amendment that banned the
sale, manufacture, and transportation of
intoxicating liquors
Twenty-First Amendment (1933) –
Constitutional amendment that repealed the
Eighteenth Amendment
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The First Red Scare and
Immigration Restrictions
Why did the nation enact strict immigration
restrictions in the twenties?
What competing visions over radicalism
emerged during the Sacco-Vanzetti trial?
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The First Red Scare and
Immigration Restrictions
Immigration Act of 1924 – Law that
allowed unrestricted immigration from the
Western Hemisphere, curtailed all Asian
immigration, and used quotas to control how
many immigrants emigrated from individual
European nations
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The First Red Scare and
Immigration Restrictions
First Red Scare (1919–1920) – Period
when the Justice Department arrested and
deported alien anarchists and Communists
suspected of trying to destroy American
democracy and capitalism
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Fundamentalism
Why did Fundamentalists object to teaching
evolution in public schools?
What cultural and religious tensions were
exposed during the Scopes Trial?
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Fundamentalism
Fundamentalism – An evangelical Christian
theology that viewed the Bible as an
authentic, literal recounting of historical
events and the absolute moral word of God
Modernism – A liberal Christian theology
embraced in many urban areas that
emphasized the ongoing revelation of divine
truth
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Racial Violence and Civil Rights
A. Lynching, Racial Rioting, and the Ku Klux
Klan
B. Marcus Garvey
C. The Harlem Renaissance
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Lynching, Racial Rioting,
and the Ku Klux Klan
What does this souvenir postcard reveal
about the ritual of lynching?
Why did membership in the Ku Klux Klan
surge in the twenties?
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Marcus Garvey
Why did Garvey elicit such strong emotions
among both followers and critics?
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Marcus Garvey
Universal Negro Improvement
Association (UNIA) – Organization founded
by Marcus Garvey to spread his message of
racial pride, economic self-sufficiency, and
returning to Africa
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Competing Visions
DEBATING GARVEYISM
Garvey argued that an
independent Negro
nation in Africa could
solve the problem of
racial violence in the
United States.
Du Bois attacked
Garvey as misguided
and inept and accused
him of accepting white
rule in the U.S.
How did Garvey and Du Bois link the U.S. Civil
Rights Movement to international politics?
The Harlem Renaissance
Harlem Renaissance – An outpouring of
African American artistic expression in the
1920s and 1930s
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The Harlem Renaissance
In these poems how do responses to racism
vary?
What competing views arose over the
purpose of art during the Harlem
Renaissance?
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Claude McKay
“If We Must Die” (1919)
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, 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 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!
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Countee Cullen
“Incident” (1924)
Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.
Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.”
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.
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Langston Hughes
“I, Too, Sing America”
(1925)
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.
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The New Woman
A. Women in the Twenties
B. Margaret Sanger and the Fight for Birth
Control
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Women in the Twenties
What strategies did women develop to
improve their lives in the twenties?
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Images as History
ADVERTISING THE NEW WOMAN
How did the popular media define “the new woman”?
Images as History
ADVERTISING THE NEW WOMAN
The new woman
appeared liberated
from the confines
of the home.
Her silhouette more
closely resembled
the body of an
adolescent.
The maid indicates
that the ideal woman
was rich as well as
thin.
Her sleek body, like
that of the car being
advertised, served
mostly as a
commodity or
decorative object.
Margaret Sanger and the
Fight for Birth Control
What arguments did Sanger make to
support her campaign for legal
contraception?
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Ensuring Peace:
Diplomacy in the Twenties
A. Disarmament
B. Wartime Debts
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Disarmament
How did Harding’s foreign policy visions
differ from Wilson’s?
What benefits and drawbacks did the
Washington Conference agreements offer
the United States?
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Disarmament
Washington Conference (1921–1922) –
Meeting of world powers that resulted in
agreements that limited naval arms,
reaffirmed America’s Open Door policy that
kept Chinese trade open to all, and secured
pledges of cooperation among the world’s
leading military powers
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Disarmament
Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928) – Treaty that
renounced aggressive war as an instrument
of national policy
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Wartime Debts
Which nations received the greatest financial aid
from the United States during and after World War I?
How did lingering financial issues from World War I
shape relations between the United States and
Europe?
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Choices and Consequences
PREVENTING WAR IN EUROPE
• Some Europeans wanted the United
States to play a peacekeeping role in
Europe.
• After the United States declined to join the
League of Nations, France invited the
United States to sign a bilateral
nonaggression treaty.
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Choices and Consequences
PREVENTING WAR IN EUROPE
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Choices and Consequences
PREVENTING WAR IN EUROPE
Choices Regarding the Role of the United
States in Peacekeeping
Adopt a
noninterventionist policy
Agree to a
bilateral
nonaggression
treaty with
France
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Reject bilateral
treaties and
join the
League of
Nations
Negotiate a
multilateral
nonaggression
pact
Choices and Consequences
PREVENTING WAR IN EUROPE
Decision and Consequences
• U.S. Secretary of State Kellogg and French Foreign
Minister Aristide Briand devised a multinational
nonaggression pact.
• Eventually 62 nations signed the Kellogg-Briand pact.
• The treaty made President Coolidge popular with both
non-interventionists and internationalists.
Did the Kellogg-Briand Pact represent a new path
in American foreign policy?
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Choices and Consequences
PREVENTING WAR IN EUROPE
Continuing Controversies
• What value did the Kellogg-Briand Pact
have?
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Chapter Review Questions
1. What features and controversies characterized America’s
transformation into a car culture in the 1920s? How did lifestyles
and labor relations also change during the decade?
2. Compare the various manifestations of cultural conflict in the
twenties. What similar impulses motivated Americans to enact
prohibition, immigration restrictions, and laws prohibiting the
teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution? How did these various
reforms affect American society?
3. Why were the Harlem Renaissance and Marcus Garvey
controversial?
4. Were the 1920s a time of political, economic, and social liberation
for women? What traditional concerns or ideas remained intact?
5. How did the United States fashion a new role for itself in world
affairs in the twenties?
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