Cover Slide
The American
Pageant
Chapter 31
American Life in the
Roaring ‘20s
Adapted from: Ms. Susan M. Pojer
Horace Greeley HS
Chappaqua, NY
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
The Roaring 20’s
An era of prosperity,
Republican power,
and conflict
Seeing Red
• After WWI, America turned inward
– started a policy of “isolationism.”
– Americans denounced “radical” foreign
ideas & “un-American” lifestyles.
• The “Red Scare” (1919-20)
– Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer
(“Fighting Quaker”) used a series of raids
to round up and arrest about 6,000
suspected Communists.
Seeing Red
• The Red Scare
– Cut back free speech for a period
• hysteria caused many people to want to eliminate any
Communists & their ideas
– Sacco and Vanzetti Trial (Italians):
• 1921, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were
convicted of murdering a Massachusetts paymaster and
his guard.
• = Italians, atheists, anarchists, & draft dodgers
– courts may have been prejudiced against them.
• anti-foreignism (or “nativism”) = high.
• Liberals & radicals rallied around the two men,
• ****but they were executed.
The Rise of Nativism: The New Klan
• Birth of a Nation, 1915
• movie glorifying Reconstruction-era KKK,
• group of southerners gathered to revive the
racist organization
• The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s
• Harassed Catholics & Jews as well as blacks
• Appealed to both rural & urban people
• succeeded in electing hundreds of Klansmen
to public office
• Had over 3 million members
• Including women who pursued a political
agenda that combined racism, nativism
and equal rights for Protestant women
• After 1925 the Klan declined rapidly.
– Due to internal problems, not because of
racism
Great increase The
In power
Ku Klux Klan
Anti-black
Anti-immigrant
Anti-Semitic
Anti-Catholic
Anti-women’s suffrage
Anti-bootleggers
Ku Klux Klan Politics and Violence in the 1920s
• Unlike the Reconstruction-era Klan, the Klan of the 1920s was
geographically dispersed, achieving substantial strength in the
West and Midwest. Although the Klan is often thought of as a
rural movement, some of its strongest “klaverns” were in such
cities as Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Detroit. The
organization's violence included vigilante acts, but small Klan
riots also erupted in many communities where ethnic tensions
led to confrontations between Klansmen and their opponents.
Ku Klux Klan Women Parade in Washington, D.C.
• The Ku Klux Klan was so well integrated into the daily life of
some white Protestants that one woman from rural Indiana
remembered her time in the KKK in the 1920s as “just a
celebration…a way of growing up.” Perhaps as many as
500,000 women joined the Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK)
in the 1920s, including these women who paraded down
Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., in 1928.
The Rise of Nativism:
Immigration Restriction
• What is nativism?
• Antiforeign sentiment in the US
that fueled a drive against
immigration. In the 1920s many
native-born white Protestants
reacted with bitter animosity to
the more than 23 million
immigrants who had come to
America during the previous 40
yrs.
The Rise of Nativism:
Immigration Restriction
• Nativist animosity fueled a new drive against immigration
• Chinese had been excluded in 1882
• TR negotiated the “gentlemen’s agreement” to limit Japanese
immigration in 1908
• But it wasn’t until after WWI and heightened suspicion of
“hyphenated” Americans that there were limits on Europeans.
• 1921: Congress passed a bill based on a quota system
that limited the number of immigrants entering the
U.S.
• Only 3% were allowed from each national group
as represented by the 1910 census
• Wilson refused to sign it, but it was reintroduced
under Harding and enacted
The Rise of Nativism:
Immigration Restriction
• 1924: the National Origins Act
• Reduced immigration even further (2% of
each nationality’s representation in the 1890
census)
• After 1927 the law set a cap of 150,000
immigrants per year
• Japanese
• immigrants were excluded entirely
The Rise of Nativism:
Immigration Restriction
• Puerto Ricans:
• After the Jones Act of 1917 ( conferred US citizenship on Puerto
Ricans) they were allowed to go to and from the the mainland
w/o restriction.
• They set up communities (colonias) in East Harlem and the
Greenpoint section of NYCity
• When hard times hit in the 30s the flow of P. Ricans stopped
temporarily
• Mexicans
• Loophole in the law allowed unrestricted immigration from
countries in the Western Hemisphere
• Over 1 million Mexicans enter the US from 1900-1930
• Nativists & organized labor lobbied Congress to close a loophole
in the immigration law that allowed Mexican immigrants to enter
America.
The Prohibition “Experiment”
• The 18th Amendment (and later, the Volstead Act)
prohibited:
– the sale of alcohol
– law never was effectively enforced because so many
people violated it.
– Amendment = especially popular in the Midwest &
the South.
– supported by women & the Women’s Christian
Temperance Union
– posed problems from countries that produced
alcohol and tried to ship it to the U.S. (illegally, of
course).
The Golden Age of
Gangsterism
• Prohibition led to the rise of gangs
– competed to distribute liquor
• Gang wars of Chicago
– ~500 people = murdered
– captured criminals = rare
– Convictions = even rarer
– gangsters often provided false alibis for
each other
The Golden Age of
Gangsterism
• most infamous of these gangsters = “Scarface” Al Capone
– St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
– caught for tax evasion
• Gangs moved into other activities as well:
– prostitution, gambling, and narcotics
– by 1930, their annual profit = whopping $12-18 billion.
• In 1932, gangsters kidnapped the baby son of Charles Lindbergh
– shocking the nation
– led Congress to the so-called Lindbergh Law
• allowed the death penalty to certain cases of
interstate abduction.
Monkey Business in
Tennessee
• Education reforms:
– Led by John Dewey
• professor at Columbia University
• “learning by doing”
• believed that “education for life” should
be the primary goal of school.
– Now, schools were no longer prisons.
– States also began to implement minimum
ages for teens to stay in school.
Monkey Business in
Tennessee
• Evolutionists clash with creationists
• the Scopes “Monkey Trial,”
– John T. Scopes
• high school teacher of Dayton, Tennessee,
• Charged with teaching evolution.
– William Jennings Bryan
• = among those who were against him
• one-time “boy orator” was made to sound foolish
& childish by expert attorney Clarence Darrow, &
5 days after the end of the trial, Bryan died.
– trial illustrated the rift between the new and old.
Legislating Values: The
Scopes Trial
• Evolution a
religious
controversy
• John T. Scopes
• Clarence Darrow
• Williams
Jennings Bryan
Darrow legal staff
Scopes “Monkey” Trial
Evolution vs. Creationism
Science vs. Religion
Famous Lawyers
Dayton, Tennessee
John Scopes
High School Biology teacher
The Mass-Consumption
Economy
• Prosperity took off in the “Roaring 20s”
– despite the recession of 1920-21
– helped by the tax policies of Treasury
Secretary Andrew Mellons
• favored the rapid expansion of capital investment.
• Henry Ford perfected the assembly-line
– His famous Rouge River Plant produced an automobile
every 10 seconds.
• automobile =
– more freedom, more luxury, & more privacy.
Consumer Economy
The Automobile Culture
• A-U-T-O
• Mass production
– Assembly line
• Auto production
• Car ownership &
suburbs
• AAA
• Young Americans
The Mass-Consumption
Economy
• A new medium arose as well: advertising,
– used persuasion, ploy, seduction, & sex
appeal to sell merchandise.
• new (and dangerous) buying
techniques…they bought
– (1) on the installment plan
– (2) on credit
– Both ways were capable of plunging an
unexpecting consumer into debt.
Selling Mrs. Consumer (p. 664)
• No other image captures the
spirit of the consumer culture of
the 1920s more emphatically
than the Ford Model T. With the
Ford Company in the lead,
automobiles revolutionized
Americans’ patterns of spending
money and spending leisure—
with the help fo the rapidly
expanding advertising industry.
This 1924 ad in the Ladies’ Home
Journal, reflects advertisers’
sense of he growing importance
of the role of the “
modern”housewife as the
family’s purchasing agent.
• 1920's collectively known as the "Roaring 20's",
or the "Jazz Age"
• Period of great change in American Society modern America is born at this time
• For first time the census revealed for the 1st time
in US history city people outnumbered rural
people
Section I: BusinessGovernment
Partnership of the 1920s
•
•
•
•
•
Politics in the Republican “New Era”
The Economy
The Heyday of Big Business
Economic Expansion Abroad
Foreign Policy in the 1920s
Politics in the Republican
“New Era”
• Election of 1920
– Harding and Normalcy
• Government-Business Cooperation
– Andrew W. Mellon’s tax cut
– Republican-dominated FTC
– The Department of Commerce
• Harding’s Death
– Bad associations
Politics in the Republican
“New Era”
• “Silent Cal”
• Election of 1924
– Democrats couldn’t agree
– Decline in voter turnout
Politics in the Republican
“New Era”
• Women in Politics
– Sheppard-Towner Federal Maternity &
Infancy Act
• Americans didn’t want…
The Economy
• In the immediate postwar years:
– Federal efforts to halt inflation produced
the recession of 1920-1921
• This was the sharpest short-term
downturn the US had ever faced
• 1922
– GDP
– Per capita
The Economy
• The federal government was soon recording a
budget surplus
• Why was there so much of an increase of
output?
• The spending power of many Americans
increased…BUT
• Which industries didn’t prosper?
The Heyday of Big Business
• Background
– Henry Ford
• Corporate Consolidation and the Managerial
Revolution
– Oligopolies
– Large-scale corporate organizations w/
bureaucratic structures of authority
replaced family-run enterprises.
The Heyday of Big Business
• Working class earns higher wages
– And better standard of living
• Unions begin to lose strength
– “Welfare capitalism”
•
•
•
•
•
•
1920's also brought about
great changes for women...
1920 - 19th Amendment gave
them the federal vote
after 1920, social
circumstances changed too
as more women worked
outside the home
and more women went to
college and clamoured to join
the professions
women didn't want to
sacrifice wartime gains amounted to a social revolt
characterized by the
FLAPPER/ "new woman"
– (bobbed hair, short
dresses, smoked in
public...)
The Economy
• The federal government was soon recording a
budget surplus
• Why was there so much of an increase of
output?
• The spending power of many Americans
increased…BUT
• Which industries didn’t prosper?
Farmers
• an agri. depression in early
1920's contributed to this
urban migration
• U.S. farmers lost agri.
markets in postwar Europe
• at same time agri. efficiency
increased so more food
produced (more food =
lower prices) and fewer
labourers needed
• so farming was no longer as
prosperous, and bankers
called in their loans (farms
repossessed)
• so American farmers enter
the Depression in advance
of the rest of society
African Americans
• African Americans in this
period continued to live
in poverty
• sharecropping kept them
in de facto slavery
• 1915 - boll weevil wiped
out the cotton crop
• white landowners went
bankrupt & forced blacks
off their land
• African Americans moved
north to take advantage
of booming wartime
industry (= Great
Migration) - Black
ghettoes began to form,
i.e. Harlem
• within these ghettoes a
distinct Black culture
flourished
• But both blacks and
whites wanted cultural
interchange restricted
Economic Expansion Abroad
• The US was the most productive country in the world
• American companies seek investment opportunities
abroad
• Why did American companies invested internationally
during the 1920s?
• The U.S. became the world’s largest creditor nation
• European countries had difficulty repaying their war
debts to U.S.
• The Dawes Plan of 1924
Foreign Policy in the 1920s
• Isolationism or not?
– Latin America
• 1921 Washington Naval Arms Conference
• Kellogg-Briand Pact
• A balancing act
A New National Culture
Section II:
•A Consumer Culture
•The Automobile Culture
•Mass Media and New Patterns of Leisure
A Consumer Culture
• Sharing similar daily
experiences
• Mass culture wasn’t
universal
• How did Americans
afford the new
consumer goods?
– Installment plan
• Electric appliances
• Advertising Industry
Mass Media and New Patterns
of Leisure: Moving Pictures
• Background
– The Great Train
Robbery
• By the end of World
War I
• Hooray for Hollywood!
Mass Media and New Patterns
of Leisure: Moving Pictures
• Clara Bow, the “It Girl,”
& other “flappers”
• Talkies
– The Jazz Singer
(1927)
• The Statistics…
•
•
•
•
•
•
1920's also brought about
great changes for women...
1920 - 19th Amendment gave
them the federal vote
after 1920, social
circumstances changed too
as more women worked
outside the home
and more women went to
college and clamoured to join
the professions
women didn't want to
sacrifice wartime gains amounted to a social revolt
characterized by the
FLAPPER/ "new woman"
– (bobbed hair, short
dresses, smoked in
public...)
Mass Media and New Patterns
of Leisure: Jazz music
• What is it?
• Where did it come
from?
• The Jazz Age
• “Jelly Roll” Morton,
Louis Armstrong, Bessie
Smith, & Duke
Ellington.
• Phonograph
• As a form of Expression
“Jelly Roll”
Morton
Bessie
Smith
Louis Armstrong
Duke
Ellington
The 20’s is The Jazz Age
The Flappers
make up
cigarettes
short skirts
Writers
Musicians
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ernest Hemingway
Louis Armstrong
Duke Ellington
Mass Media and New Patterns of
Leisure: Journalism and the Radio
• Magazines
• Tabloid Newspapers
• Radio
– Amos ‘n’ Andy
Mass Media and New Patterns
of Leisure: Leisure and Sports
• More time = More
Leisure
• Baseball
• Charles Lindbergh
Celebrities
Babe Ruth &Ty Cobb
Charles Lindbergh
The Spirit of St. Louis
Jack Dempsey
Section III: Dissenting Values
and
Cultural Conflict
The Rise of Nativism
Legislating Values: The Scopes Trial
and Prohibition
Intellectual Crosscurrents
Cultural Clash in the Election of 1928
The Rise of Nativism
• Background
– City v. rural communities
• 1920 census:
• Mass media
• New Technology
• Urban residents’ concerns
• A SIMPLIFIED URBAN-RURAL DICHOTOMY
MISREPRESENTS THE COMPLEXITY OF THE
DECADE'S CULTURAL AND ETHNIC CONFLICTS
Map 23.1 The Shift from Rural to Urban Population, 1920–1930 (p. 681)
•
Despite the increasingly urban tone of modern America after 1920, regional
patterns of population growth and decline were far from uniform Cities in the
South and West grew most dramatically as southern farmers moved to more
promising areas with familiar climates. An important factor in the growth of
northern cities such as New York and Chicago, was the migration of southern
blacks set in motion by World War I.
Patrolling the Texas Border (p. 685)
• These Border Patrol officers in Laredo, Texas, in 1926 were
deputized to stop illegal immigration from Mexico. Their
guns, military uniforms and stern expressions did not
present a warm welcome to immigrants arriving from south
of the border.
Legislating Values
• Tensions erupt over religion
– Modernists v. Fundamentalists
Legislating Values: Prohibition
• Passage of the XVIII
Amendment
– Decline of drinking
– Noncompliance
• Speakeasies
• Repealing the XVIII
Amendment
– Wets
– Drys
• Passage of the XXI
Amendment
18th
Amendment
Gangsters
Al Capone
Prohibition
Volstead Act
Intellectual Crosscurrents
•
•
•
•
•
Dissenters & Disillusionment
"The Lost Generation“
The modernist movement
Literature of the 1920s
An End to the Renaissance
Intellectual Crosscurrents: The
Harlem Renaissance
• What was the Harlem Renaissance
– “New Negro”
• Vitality of the Harlem Renaissance was shortlived
• Significance
Intellectual Crosscurrents:
Marcus Garvey and the UNIA
• Who was Marcus
Garvey?
– Back to Africa
• What was the UNIA?
• What happened to the
Black Star Line
Company?
Cultural Clash in the Election
of 1928
•
•
•
•
•
•
The 1924 Democratic National Convention
Democrat Alfred E. Smith
Republican Herbert Hoover
Democrats lose the election…but:
The Claim of Prosperity
Despite cultural conflicts & workplace issues,
as Hoover began his presidency in 1929,
Americans were generally optimistic &
expected prosperity & progress to continue.
Map 23.3 Presidential Election of
1928 (p. 692)
Chapter 23:
Modern Times
(The 1920s)
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Map 23.1 The Shift from Rural to Urban Population, 1920–1930 (p. 681)
Map 23.2 Ku Klux Klan Politics and Violence in the 1920s (p. 685)
Map 23.3 Presidential Election of 1928 (p. 692)
Figure 23.1 American Immigration after World War I (p. 684)
Selling Mrs. Consumer (p. 664)
The Amazing Talking Machine (p. 674)
All That Jazz (p. 677)
Lucky Lindy (p. 683)
Patrolling the Texas Border (p. 685)
Ku Klux Klan Women Parade in Washington, D.C. (p. 687)
Figure 23.1 American Immigration after World War I (p. 684)
The Amazing Talking Machine (p. 674)
All That Jazz (p. 677)
Lucky Lindy (p. 683)