W1 –Writing Prompt
• Construct a thesis statement and outline
• The cultural tensions of the early 1920’s were
not new issues, but unresolved ones from the
past century.
• Try the home remedies
• Ding darling cartoon
• http://ddr.lib.drake.edu/cdm/singleitem/colle
ction/ddarling/id/2868/rec/1
• You cant make a monkey out of me
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1Ek2BDu
47g
Warm Up
1. Who were famous American authors
of the 1920’s?
What were the subjects of their works?
2. Why did prohibition fail?
The Roaring 20s
The 1920’s: ‘The New Era’
• New social mores
• New forms of business & social
organization
• New consumer oriented culture
• New gov’t approaches to
industrialization & agriculture
Opposing forces of the 20s
City vs. Rural/small town
Wet vs. Dry
vs. Science
Anglo vs. foreign
Fundamentalism
Young vs. Old
Prohibition
• 18th Amendment –prohibited the manufacture, sale &
transport of ‘intoxicating liquors’
– Did not define term or outline penalties
– Consumption never outlawed
– Gov’t projected 300 mil. a
year in taxes & fines
• Volstead Act, passed Oct. 1919
– Went into effect Jan. 1, 1920
– Vetoed by Woodrow Wilson
• New gov’t agencies formed
– ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & explosives)
– Bureau of Prohibition
– Expanded the powers of the Treasury Dept. –expansion of
the Bureau of Revenue (IRS)
Red Scare
• Russian Revolution of 1917 -Socialism seen as a real threat
• Spring of 1919, series of bombings & threats (Wall Street,
federal officials)
• Mitchell Palmer, Attorney General
– “Committed to 100% Americanism”
– institutes ‘Palmer Raids’
– 6,000 arrested, few prosecuted, 500 non-citizens deported
• Sacco & Vanzetti –convicted of MA armored car murder in
1920, executed in 1927
– Circumstantial evidence
– Formation of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
– Oliver Wendell Holmes & Louis Brandeis lead Supreme Court in
protecting 1st Amendment rights
Republicans in the White
House
•
•
•
•
1921 -1933
Isolationist; refusal to join League of Nations
Little gov’t intervention of business
Gov’t as an agent of economic change thru farm subsidies & tax
relief
• Democratic Party fragmented (ethnically, religiously, regionally)
Warren G. Harding
•
•
•
•
Return to ‘Normalcy’
‘Ohio Gang’
‘A friend to everyone’
Tea Pot Dome Scandal
– Albert Fall, Sec. of the Interior
– Bribery for oil licenses on
federal land in WY & CA
– Rivaled Watergate in scope &
malfeasance
• Advocated for racial equality
Calvin Coolidge
• ‘Silent Cal’
• Puritanical nature
• Commerce Secretary
Herbert Hoover promoted
‘associationalism’ to help
businesses
• Kellogg-Briand Pact, 1928
– International that war would
not be used to settle disputes
• Treasury Sec. Andrew
Mellon
– Paid off WWI debt
– Reduced inheritance, income
& corporate taxes by half
Was the 1920s a ‘New Era’ or a return
to “Normalcy”?
Food for thought….
• “A union cannot strike against the
public safety”
• “The man who builds a factory builds a
temple. The man who works there
worships”
• “[WWI] has not created differences,
but has revealed and emphasized
them”
• People don’t buy things to have things,
they buy hope…of what merchandise
will do for them”
• Consider the
quotations;
which side of
the argument
do you agree
with? Why?
White Supremacy
Nativism
Ku Klux Klan
• Supported by middle class
Progressives
• 1921 Emergency
Immigration Act
• 1924 Johnson-Reed Act
(National Origins Act)
• 1915 Leo Frank killing
• DW Griffith’s movie Birth of a
Nation –KKK are heroes
•
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXlWwY
NCO8&list=PLNgFBoxEAByjimMCyn3T1K7aOXfhG
qCHL&index=2
• Chicago Race Riots of 1919
– NAACP encourages “fighting
back’
• By 1925 -4 mil. members
• Rise is lynchings in the South
• ‘Klaverns’ in Chicago, Detroit,
Oregon, Colorado
Fundamentalis
m
• Protestant Christian
sects
• Return to the
‘fundamentals of
Christianity’
– Trinity
– Literal translation of
the Bible
• Anti-Darwin
• Billy Sunday
AP PARTS
Scopes Trial
• 1924 Dayton, TN
• John Scopes in violation of TN’s Butler Act teacher
evolution in his Biology class
• Clarence Darrow of ACLU reps. Scopes
• William Jennings Bryan ‘assists’ TN prosecution
• Trial broadcasted nationally by radio
• Scopes loses, but Darrow gets Bryan to admit under
oath that the Bible is not literal truth
Technology & Economic
Growth
• 60% increase in manufacturing output
– Debilitation of European industry in WWI
– Automobile & tangential business
• Combustion engines, gasoline, suburban housing
–
–
–
–
Advent of radio
Transportation: Commercial aircraft & diesel/electric trains
Synthetic materials: nylon, bakelite, asbestos
Early genetic research –plant hybridization
• Consolidation of US Steel & General Motors
• Short recession in 1923-24 due to fall in farm prices
-35 mil more acres farmed due to technology b/w
1917 & 1923
– Farmers get McNary-Haugen Bill =farm subsidies to
promote parity w/ world market prices
Big Businesses, Part Deux
• Union membership will fall –AFL will shut out
minorities, immigrants, women (unskilled
labor) side with business
• Modern administrative systems for large
corporations and their subsidiaries
• ‘Welfare Capitalism’
– Ford Motor Co.
– pensions, shorter work days, paid vacations
Demographic Changes
•
•
•
•
B/w 1920 – 1929 middle class will increase in size
1/3 of all Americans live at subsistence or in poverty
50% of working class see no increase to their wages
Minorities & women loses place in workforce after
WWI ends
– ‘Pink collar jobs’ –women work in secretarial & retail
– Few female professionals outside of teaching, nursing,
social work
– Great Migration African-Americans relegated to garbage
collection, domestic servants, cooks
Modern Life
• Changing roles in society
• ‘Respectability’ was the Victorian value; replaced by emotional/physical
‘fulfillment’
• Changes in Spirituality
– Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick argues against Fundamentalism –be ‘spiritual
for modern life’; God & science co-exist
– Many Americans use Sunday for entertainment & commerce, no longer
Sabbath day
• Companionate marriages
– Marriage the culmination of romantic love
– Support husband’s social life
– Birth control for middle class families
• Domesticity not tied only to motherhood
– Psychologist John B. Watson
– Motherhood not instinctive, taught behavior that should rely on ‘expert’
input
• Rise of Youth Culture
– Adolescence is no longer a short period of physical change into adulthood
– Now extended period of training & preparation for adulthood
New Culture
• Growing mass consumption
–
–
–
–
Appliances
Cigarettes (men and women)
Cosmetics & grooming; Fashions
Cars for middle & working classes
• Impact: growing suburbs, family vacations, independent youth
culture
• Advertising directed to specific demographic groups
• Mass circulation magazines
• Entertainment
– Radio
– Movies, by 1927 ‘talkies’
Artistic Movements
• ‘Lost Generation’
–
–
–
–
HL Menken
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Sinclair Lewis
Earnest Hemingway
• ‘Harlem Renaissance’
– Langston Hughes
– Zora Neal Houston
• Jazz
– Louis Armstrong
– Duke Ellington
• Broadway Musical Theater
– Irving Berlin
– George & Ira Gershwin
– Rodgers & Hart
DBQ Relay
• PROMPT: Historians have argued that
the1920’s were an age of extreme
contradiction. Many Americans were looking
boldly ahead, but just as many were gazing
backward, to cherished memories of a fabled
national innocence.
• Using the documents and your knowledge of
the time period which of these forces had the
greatest success?
Welcome!
Please help yourself to a
cup of ‘hooch’ and
a jazz age snack
AP PARTS
Essential Question
Was the 1920’s an era of cultural
tensions or a period of innovation?