Cambridge ICGSE History
Depth Study: The USA, 1919-41
How far did US society change in the 1920s?
The Revolutionary Spirit of 1919
“The most extraordinary
phenomenon of the present
time … is the unprecedented
revolt of the rank and file…. The
common man … losing faith in
the old leadership, has
experienced a new access of
self-confidence, or at least a
new recklessness, a readiness to
take chances on his own
account … authority cannot any
longer be imposed from above;
it comes automatically from
below.”
—The Nation (25 October 1919)
Solidarity (30 June 1917)
The American ruling class saw
radical ideas as foreign to the
US, conflating reactionary and
xenophobic feelings in the
public’s imagination.
The Seattle General Strike
To win higher wages, 100,000
workers brought the city of
Seattle, Washington to a halt.
The General Strike Committee
set up 35 neighborhood milk
stations, prepared and served
30,000 meals per day, and
organized an unarmed Labor
War Veteran’s Guard to keep
the peace. Firemen stayed on
the job, and laundry workers
continued to wash hospital
laundry. During the five days
of the strike, the city was quiet
and orderly with a lower crime
rate than before the strike.
The Post Intelligencer (6 February 1919)
After the strike, police raided the
Socialist Party headquarters and
arrested 39 members of the
Industrial Workers of the World
(IWW).
“The so-called sympathetic Seattle strike
was an attempted revolution. That there
was no violence does not alter the fact….
The intent, openly and covertly announced,
was for the overthrow of the industrial
system; here first, then everywhere…. True,
there were no flashing guns, no bombs, no
killings. Revolution, I repeat, doesn’t need
violence. The general strike, as practiced in
Seattle, is of itself the weapon of revolution,
all the more dangerous because quiet. To
succeed, it must suspend everything; stop
the entire life stream of a community….
That is to say, it puts the government out of
operation. And that is all there is to revolt—
no matter how achieved.”
—Ole Hanson, Mayor of Seattle
Ole Hanson
An Attentat (Propaganda of the Deed)
Attorney General A. Mitchell
Palmer’s House after the bomb
explosion (2 June 1919).
From April to June 1919,
anarchists carried out a
series of bombings and
attempted bombings.
“The powers that be make no secret
of their will to stop, here in America,
the world-wide spread of revolution.
The powers that be must reckon
that they will have to accept the
fight they have provoked.
A time when the social question's
solution can be delayed no longer;
class war is on…. There will be
bloodshed; we will not dodge; there
will have to be murder: we will kill,
because it is necessary; there will
have to be destruction; we will
destroy to rid the world of your
tyrannical institutions. ”
—The Anarchist Fighters
The Steel Strike (September 1919)
More than 350,000 workers in
the steel mills of western
Pennsylvania, who worked 12hour days, 6-days a week,
went out on strike, defying US
President Woodrow Wilson
and American Federation of
Labor President Samuel. The
police beat and arrested
strikers; the Department of
Justice deported strikers;
federal troops protected the
steel mills. Owners of the steel
corporations brought in
30,000 Black strikebreakers.
Striking Chicago Steelworkers (1919)
The steel corporations also
employed spies to stir up
hatred between Serbian and
Italian strikers. After 10 weeks,
the strikers called off the strike
in defeat.
The Murder of Wesley Everest
In Centralia, Washington, on 11 November
1919, members of the American Legion
attacked the IWW, the anti-war union that
had been organizing the local lumber
industry workers. The Legion marched with
to the IWW hall armed with rubber hoses
and gas pipes. A gun battle broke out in
which 3 American Legion members were
killed. Wesley Everest, an IWW member,
lumberjack, and war veteran, killed a
fourth Legion member, attempting to
escape the gun battle. Everest was
tortured and jailed. That night, vigilantes
broke into the jail. The vigilantes cut off
Everest’s genitals, hanged him from a
bridge, and riddled his body with bullets.
Wesley Everest
No one was arrested for
the murder of Wesley
Everest, but 7 members
of the IWW were
sentenced to 25 to 40
years in prison for the
deaths of the American
Legion members.
Preventing Mass Rebellion
In 1919, 120,000 textile workers
went on strike in New England;
30,000 silk workers went on strike
in New Jersey; the police went on
strike in Boston; cigarmakers,
shirtmakers, carpenters, bakers,
teamsters, and barbers went on
strike in New York; 5,000 workers
at International Harvesters in
Chicago went on strike. These
strikes were beaten down by
force. The IWW was destroyed.
The Socialist Party fell apart. The
economy improved for just
enough people to prevent mass
rebellion.
Massachusetts Governor
Calvin Coolidge (later US President)
inspects the militia during the
Boston Police Strike (1919).
A Crusade for Conformity
• In Washington, DC, a ’crowd
burst into cheering and hand
clapping’ when an irate citizen
shot a critic of a patriotic
pageant.
• In Indiana, a jury took two
minutes to acquit a citizen for
killing a man who had said,
‘To hell with the United States.’
• In Connecticut, a salesman for
a clothing store was sent to
prison for calling Lenin ‘one of
the brainiest’ men in the
world.
• The nation’s most powerful
evangelist, Billy Sunday said,
“If I had my way with those
ornery wild-eyed socialists, I
would stand them up before a
firing squad.”
• Senator McKellar of Tennessee
advocated the establishment
of a penal colony on Guam for
political prisoners.
• The New York State legislature
expelled its five Socialist
members despite the legal
status of the Socialist party.
“The Red Scare” and “The Palmer Raids”
Beginning in December 1919,
Attorney General A. Mitchell
Palmer conducted mass arrests
of aliens (immigrants who were
not citizens). Department of
Justice agents broke into
private homes and union halls
without warrants and rounded
up thousands of suspected
radical aliens, including Emma
Goldman and Alexander
Berkman. The arrested aliens
were held in seclusion for long
periods of time, brought into
secret hearings, and ordered
deported.
Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman
“We must purify the sources of
America’s population and keep
it pure. I am myself an
American and I love to preach
my doctrine … undiluted
Americanism.”
—Attorney General Palmer
Andrea Salsedo
In the spring of 1920, Andrea
Salsedo, an Italian typesetter and
anarchist suspected of being
involved in the 1919 bombings,
was arrested in New York by FBI
agents. The suspect was held for
eight weeks in the FBI offices on
the fourteenth floor of the Park
Row Building and was not allowed
to contact family or friends or
lawyers. Then his crushed body
was found on the pavement
below the building and the FBI
said he had committed suicide by
jumping from the fourteenth floor
window.
Andrea Salsedo
In Boston, Nicola Sacco and
Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two
Italian friends of Salsedo,
heard of their friend’s death
and began carrying guns to
protect themselves.
Sacco and Vanzetti
On 5 May 1920, in Massachusetts,
Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested,
charged with a payroll robbery and
with the murder of the payroll
guards. Sacco and Vanzetti were
convicted more for being anarchists
and foreigners than from the
evidence. Judge Webster Thayer,
who presided, declared that he
wanted to get “those anarchist
bastards.” They spent seven years in
jail while appeals went on, and while
all over the country and the world,
people became involved in their
case. On 23 August 1927, Sacco and
Vanzetti were electrocuted.
Sacco (right) and Vanzetti (left)
Woody Guthrie’s “The
Flood and the Storm”
historically contextualized
the execution of Sacco
and Vanzetti.
Woody Guthrie’s “The Flood and the Storm”
• The year now is Nineteen and
Twenty, kind friends, and the
great world’s war we have won.
• Old Kaiser Bill, we have beat him
once again in the smoke of the
canon and the gun.
• Old Von Hindenburg and his
Royal German Army, they are
tramps in tatters and in rags.
• Uncle Sammy has tied every
nation in this world in his long,
old leather moneybags.
• Wilson caught a trip and a train
into Paris, meeting Lloyd George
and Mister Clemenceau.
• They said to Mister Wilson,
“We’ve staked off our claims.
There is nothing else for you.”
• “I plowed more lands, I built
bigger factories, and I stopped
Hindenburg in his tracks.
• You thank the Yanks by claiming
all the lands, but you still owe
your money to my bank.”
• “Keep sending your ships across
these waters. We’ll borrow all the
money you can lend.
• We must buy new clothes, new
plows and factories, and we need
golden dollars for to spend.”
• Every dollar in the world, well, it
rolled and it rolled and it rolled
into Uncle Sammy’s door.
• A few got richer and richer and
richer, but the poor folks kept
but getting poor.
• Well, the workers in the world
did fight a revolution to chase
out the gamblers from their
land.
• Farmers and peasants and
workers in the city fought
together on their five-year plans.
• The soul and the spirit of the
workers’ revolution spread
across every nation in this world
• From Italy to China to Europe
and to India, and the blood of
the workers it did spill.
• This spirit split the wind to Boston,
Massachusetts with Coolidge on
the governor’s chair.
• The troopers and soldiers, the
guards and spies fought the
workers that brought the spirit
there.
• Sacco and Vanzetti had preached
to the workers. They were carried
up to Old Judge Thayer.
• They were charged with killing the
payroll guards, and they died in
the Charlestown chair.
• Sacco had come from the
mountains of Italy, had a wife and
children three.
• Vanzetti sold fish on the streets of
North Plymouth, was a writer of
workers’ poetry.
• Well, the world shook harder on
the night they died than ’twas
shaken by that great world’s war.
• More millions did march for
Sacco and Vanzetti than did
march for the great warlords.
• More millions did pray, more
millions, they did sing, more
millions, they did weep and cry
• This August night in Nineteen
and Twenty-Seven when
strapped there in that chair they
did die.
• More millions saw the light, more
millions joined the fight, more
millions from shore unto shore
• Than ever did fight for the rich
man’s hire or dress in the
warrior’s uniform.
• Well, the peasants, the farmers,
the towns and the cities, and the
hills and the valleys, they did ring.
• Hindenburg and Wilson, and
Harding, Hoover, Coolidge never
heard this many voices sing.
• The zigzag lightning, the rumbles
of the thunder, and the singing of
the clouds blowing by,
• The flood and the storm for Sacco
and Vanzetti caused the rich man
to pull his hair and cry.
Ending the “Dangerous and Turbulent”
Flood of Immigrants
Between 1900 and 1920, 14
million immigrants had come
to the US. In 1921 and 1924,
the US Congress passed laws
setting immigration quotas
favoring Anglo-Saxons,
severely limiting the coming
of Jews, Latins, and Slavs, and
keeping out Asians and Blacks.
Effect of 1921/1924 Immigration Laws
Germany: 51,227
England/Northern Ireland: 34,007
Irish Free State: 28,567
Italy: 3,845
Russia: 2,248
Lithuania: 124
African Countries: 100 each
Bulgaria: 100
China: 100
Palestine: 100
The “American Plan”
As the radical left was destroyed,
the American Federation of Labor
(AFL) lost its appeal to business as
a safe alternative to socialism;
between 1920 and 1930,
membership in the AFL dropped
from 5 million to less than 3
million. The National Association
of Manufacturers mobilized a
movement for its “American Plan”
that would replace “union shops”
with “open shops.” Workers were
forced to sign “yellow dog”
contracts; court injunctions made
strikes and picketing almost
impossible.
Corporations established
company unions as part of an
effort to create a sense of
team loyalty with the help of
newly-introduced personnel
managers, a product of the
business schools of the
decade. Between 1919 and
1924, 117 colleges opened
business schools dedicated to
scientific management and
business administration.
A New Kind of Hero
The Saturday Evening Post told the
new urban-industrial middle class
that sustaining order demanded
administrative heroes, such as the
wartime administrator of food
supplies Herbert Hoover, said to
have given the country “clean,
efficient action” at “incredibly low
cost.” In the Saturday Evening Post,
Hoover was praised “as a machine
of a man, with no waste words or
motion, who was organizing a
machine of men, … [to] take over
existing organizations and run them
with a minimum of human friction
and a maximum of practical results.”
The Purity Crusade and Prohibition
The Purity Crusade was a movement of evangelical Protestants in
the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Purity Crusaders sought to
defend public morals by spreading Protestant Christianity; by legally
enforcing the observance of the Sabbath; by separating the home
from public life so as to shield innocent children from the corruption
of outsiders; by controlling sexuality, including the prohibition of
abortion, the avoidance of masturbation, the replacement of
midwives by doctors, and the elimination of prostitution; by
criminalizing drugs and alcohol; by segregating the races and
religions; and by instilling loyalty to the nation. Temperance
movement supporters within the Purity Crusade successfully lobbied
for the ratification of the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution
(enabled by the Volstead Act), effectively prohibiting alcoholic
beverages in the US. Prohibition began 17 January 1920 and ended
15 December 1933, when the 21st Amendment repealing
Prohibition went into effect.
Prohibition gained widespread
approval in some states, particularly
the rural areas in the Midwest,
although in urban states it was not
popular. Levels of alcohol
consumption fell by about 30
percent in the early 1920s. Every year
during prohibition, federal agents
seized thousands of illegal
distilleries, confiscated hundreds of
thousands of gallons of illegal spirits,
and arrested tens of thousands of
offenders. Despite the work of these
agents, however, prohibition proved
impossible to enforce effectively.
Millions of Americans, particularly in
urban areas, were simply not
prepared to obey the law.
Prohibition Agents
Dispose of Spirits
Illegal stills (distilleries)
sprang up all over the US
as people made their own
illegal whisky (moonshine).
Most Americans had no
need for their own still.
They simply went to their
favorite speakeasy.
Crime and Corruption
Speakeasies were well supplied by
bootleggers (suppliers of illegal alcohol)
who made vast fortunes. Chicago gangster
boss Al Capone made around $60 million a
year from his speakeasies. By 1925 there
were more speakeasies in American cities
than there had been saloons in 1919.
Prohibition led to massive corruption.
Many of the law enforcement officers were
themselves involved with the liquor trade.
Big breweries stayed in business
throughout the prohibition era by bribing
local government officials, prohibition
agents, and the police. Even when arrests
were made, it was difficult to get
convictions because of corrupt judges.
Al Capone (c. 1935)
Clive Weed, “The National
Gesture,” Judge (12 June 1926)
Classes Mix at the Speakeasy
In the larger cities nightclubs sold bootleg
liquor and featured jazz entertainment as
the Purity Crusade, which had gained
momentum in the decades before 1920,
seemed entirely forgotten.
Jazz
Musician
Milton
Mezzrow
“It struck me funny
how the top and
bottom crusts in
society were always
getting together
during the Prohibition
era. In this swanky club
which was run by the
notorious Purple Gang,
Detroit’s bluebloods
used to congregate—
the Grosse Point mob
on the slumming kick,
rubbing elbows with
Louis the Wop’s mob.”
—Milton Mezzrow
The End of Prohibition
Prohibition had made the US lawless, the police corrupt, and the
gangsters rich and powerful. By the end of the 1920s, “The Noble
Experiment” had failed. When the Wall Street Crash was followed by
the Great Depression, economic arguments were presented for
ending prohibition. Legalizing alcohol would create jobs, raise tax
revenue, and free up resources tied up in the impossible task of
enforcing prohibition. Prohibition was repealed in December 1933.
Al Capone’s Soup Kitchen (1931)
“Universal Newspaper Newsreel” (1933)
The Interchurch World Movement
President Woodrow Wilson exhorted Americans to bring America’s
Purity Crusade to a climax by purging evil and darkness from the
entire world. During 1919 and 1920, Protestant churches planned to
fulfill Wilson’s exhortations through an Interchurch World Movement
that would fill every nation in the world with missionaries. Protestant
leader Tyler Dennett proclaimed: “Our business is to establish a
civilization that is Christian in spirit and in passion in Borneo as much
as in Boston.” Barely two years later, these words sounded hollow.
Protestants appeared disillusioned and confused as they entered the
1920s. Suddenly, they faced a world that refused to be redeemed,
and the great financial drive to mobilize resources for the missionary
effort failed. Students, who earlier had rushed to volunteer for
missionary duty, decided to stay home. Demoralized, Protestants
suffered another shattering experience when their own respectable
middle-class church people refused to uphold the Eighteenth
Amendment and keep America free from the influence of alcohol.
Hope and Disillusionment
As the American geographic
frontier closed in the 1890s, an
industrial frontier opened.
Optimistic social scientists
promised that industrialism would
destroy all irrational historical
cultures and liberate the
individual. Abandoning biblical
fundamentalism, liberal
Protestants accepted the idea of
evolution, which was identified
with progress and the final
triumph of Protestantism. The
American war effort in WWI was to
liberate all people, representing an
American internationalism.
Their optimism shattered by
World War I, older social
scientists abandoned
internationalism for isolation,
giving up the hope that the
entire world could be
brought into industrial
rationality but continuing to
hope that this could be the
future of the US. Many
younger poets and novelists
of the 1920s—the “lost
generation”—were even
more bitterly disillusioned,
giving up hope even for
America’s future.
The Great Gatsby (1925)
The hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, James Gatz, leaves
the closing agricultural frontier of North Dakota for the industrial
frontier of New York City, described as a “valley of ashes.” In this
frontier of ugliness and decadence, Gatsby
must restore Daisy, a girl whom he loved
before he went to the war, to her original
virginity. He must persuade her of the
unreality of her marriage to another man
while he was away and of the unreality of
her motherhood. But instead of a rational
and predictable world, Gatsby is caught up
by circumstance; an automobile accident
sets a chain of events in motion in which a
man kills Gatsby because he mistakenly
believes Gatsby was the driver of the car
The Great Gatsby
that killed his wife.
A Farewell to Arms (1929)
Ernest Hemingway had been
physically wounded in Italy during
the war. In contrast to the industrial
frontier’s promise of progressive
linear time, the war had forced him
to confront death, the possibility of
the cyclical nature of time, the cycle
of birth inevitably followed by death.
In Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to
Arms, when the hero, Frederick
Henry, deserts the insanity of the war
and takes refuge in Switzerland with
Catherine, the nurse he has loved,
they live happily through the winter.
But spring brings the birth and death
of a child and Catherine.
A Farewell to Arms
U.S.A. Trilogy (1930, 1932, 1936)
For John Dos Passos, the insanity of
the armies continued into the
insanity of the corporations of the
1920s. Americans had believed that
armies could operate rationally and
bring liberation, They had believed
much the same about corporations.
In reality, Dos Passos writes in his
novel Three Soldiers, “men seemed
to have shrunk in stature before the
vastness of the mechanical
contrivances they had invented—
men had become antlike.” Dos
Passos best expressed the “lost
generation’s” horror of organization
in his massive USA.
Having lost faith in the
urban-industrial frontier of
his Progressive fathers, Dos
Passos had no space to flee
to escape these fathers.
U.S.A. Trilogy
In USA, Dos Passos wrote, “The transcontinental passenger thinks
contracts, profits, vacation trips, mighty continent between
Atlantic and Pacific, power, wires humming, dollars, cities jammed,
hills empty, the Indian trail leading into the wagon road, the
macadam pike, the concrete skyway, transcontinental planes,
history, the billion dollar speed up. And in the bumpy air over the
desert ranges toward Las Vegas sickens and vomits into the carton
container the steak and mushrooms he ate in New York.” The son
of this corrupt father stands as a solitary vagabond on a highway
beneath the plane. Trying to hitch a ride, he is a dropout who
“went to school, books said opportunity, ads promised speed, own
your own home, shine bigger than your neighbor, the radio
crooner whispered, girls, ghosts of platinum girls coaxed from the
screen, millions in winnings were chalked upon the board, in the
offices, pay checks for hands willing to work; the cleared desk of
an executive with three telephones on it—he waits with swimming
head, needs knot his belly, idle hands numb, beside the speeding
traffic.”
Sensual Music
The conservative middle
class could not stop young
people from listening and
dancing to sensual music.
African rhythms began to
influence white popular
music in the 1890s.
Ragtime was a musical
style in which the piano
captured the patterns of
the African drum. As the
audience for this music
grew, the lyrics of songs
began to change; they
became much more
explicitly sexual.
Sheet music sold widely and dance
crazes swept through cities in the
years immediately before WWI. In the
1920s, blues and jazz were even more
sensual and consequently threatening.
“How Jazz Was Born” (1948)
The Jazz Age
Many newspapers and
magazines agreed to try to
halt the spreading influence
of jazz through a conspiracy
of silence, only reporting
that it was a dying fad.
When this proved
ineffective, conservative
authorities tried to have the
music repressed. By 1929,
many cities, including New
York, Philadelphia,
Cleveland, Detroit, and
Kansas City, had regulations
prohibiting jazz from public
dance halls.
The attempt to prohibit jazz only
increased its appeal to the young,
who were in self-conscious rebellion
against their parents and were
searching for other ways of
experiencing the rhythm of life.
“Hot Feet” (1929)
The Appeal of Jazz
For the first time in American
history, whites seemed to
express an appreciation for
Black culture but continued
to stereotype Blacks. They
ascribed a primitiveness to
Black culture and demanded
that Blacks function as Christlike salvation figures. In a
world where traditional
idealism had vanished, where
traditional religion seemed
bankrupt, Black primitivism,
outside of white culture,
offered a new spiritual
meaning, a new salvation.
Young white musicians saw in jazz a
symbolic alternative to the
bureaucratic prison of their fathers.
Jazz had a structure that offered an
opportunity to improvise and was a
way out of chaos into a new world
of meaning.
Eddie Condon
Hoagy Carmichael
Eddie Condon, who taught himself
to play jazz by ear, reported his
father’s reaction: “You are terrible
and you can’t read music.” Condon’s
reply to his father was, “What’s that
got to do with being a musician?”
Louis Armstrong
“Don’t Forget to Mess Around”
(16 June 1926)
Hoagy Carmichael smoked
marijuana and listened to
jazz. He described what it
felt like: “My body got light.
Every note that Louis
[Armstrong] hit was
perfection. I ran to the
piano. They swang into
‘Royal Garden Blues.’ I has
never heard the tune before
but somehow I knew every
note. I couldn’t miss. I was
floating in a strong deepblue whirlpool of jazz. It
wasn’t the marijuana. It was
the music. The music took
me and had me and it made
me right.”
To participate in jazz was to
live more fully. Music that
expressed an immediate
experience of sorrow and
joy, of disharmony or
harmony with the universe,
was religious music. Unlike
most white religion, jazz
presented worship as a
pleasurable activity and a
release from tension. Even
the white musician Paul
Whiteman, who presented
a commercialized and
extremely restrained and
prettified jazz to white
audiences, sensed some of
this meaning.
“Jazz is at once a revolt and a
release. This cheerfulness of despair
is deep in America. That is the thing
expressed by the wail, that longing,
that pain behind all the surface
clamor and rhythm and energy of
jazz.”—Paul Whiteman
Paul Whiteman’s Saxophone Sextet (c. 1922)
The Roaring Twenties
The 1920s in the US are often called the
Roaring Twenties, suggesting a time of
riotous fun, because the entertainment
industry blossomed.
A Group of Radio Listeners (c. 1925)
Radio: Almost everyone
in the US listened to
radio. Most household
had their own set.
People who could not
afford to buy one
outright could purchase
one on installments. In
1921, there was only
one licensed radio
station in America. By
the end of 1922 there
were 508. By 1929, the
NBC radio network was
making $150 million a
year.
In Hollywood, California, a major film industry developed. New stars
like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton made audiences roar with
laughter, while Douglas Fairbanks thrilled them in daring adventure
films. The cinema quickly discovered the selling power of sex. The
first cinema stars to be sold on sex appeal were Theda Bara and
Clara Bow. Male stars, too, such as Rudolph Valentino, were
presented as sex symbols. Until 1927 all movies were silent. The first
“talkie” is considered to be Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer. During the
1920s movies became a multi-billion dollar business, and it is
estimated that a
hundred million
cinema tickets
were sold each
week by the end
of the decade.
Theda Bara
Clara Bow
Rudolph Valentino
Baseball, boxing,
and football
became popular
and lucrative
entertainments in
the 1920s.
Jack Dempsey
Jim Thorpe
Babe Ruth
The motor car carried their owners to and from
their entertainments and to an increasing range
of sporting events, beach holidays, shopping
trips, picnics in the country, or simply on visits to
family and friends.
Premarital Sex and Divorce
The divorce rate of the middle class
had increased steadily from 1890 to
1920; it would double in the 1920s.
A Postcard Depicts the Loosening Morals
of the 1920s
“None of the mothers had any idea how
casually their daughters were accustomed to
be kissed.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald
The urban middle class had
stopped chaperoning its
daughters after 1900, and
there was a tremendous
decline in the pattern of
premarital virginity by
1920. It was clear that by
1910 a new code of
permissiveness was being
elaborated by the young.
Soon unchaperoned, sexual
intimacy became
acceptable within the
context of an affectionate
relationship that might
result in marriage.
The Flapper
The flappers were independent, adventurous young women. They
wore short dresses and make-up. They smoked in public. Flappers
were described as “expensive and about nineteen” having “a jitney
body and a limousine mind.”
Flapper Magazine Flappers (1922)
Howard University Flappers (1920)
The American Birth Control League
Despite this sexual revolution, birth
rates significantly declined. Margaret
Sanger brought the growing interest in
contraception into the open with the
publication of her magazine The
Woman Rebel, dedicated to the
liberation of “women enslaved by the
machine, by wage slavery, by bourgeois
morality, by customs, laws, and
superstitions,” and advocating “the
prevention of conception” by imparting
adequate knowledge to its middle class
readers. By 1921, her efforts were
achieving respectability in the American
Birth Control League, supported
financially by younger wealthy women.
Sanger violated the law
by starting birth-control
clinics for lower-class
women: “Mothers! Can
you afford a large family?
Do you want more
children? If not why do
you have them?”
Margaret Sanger
The Nineteenth Amendment
Women had finally, after
long agitation, won the
right to vote in 1920
with the passage of the
Nineteenth Amendment,
but voting was still a
middle-class and upper
class activity. Women’s
Studies pioneer Eleanor
Flexner said the effect of
female suffrage was that
“women have shown the
same tendency to divide
along orthodox party
lines as male voters.”
Suffragettes Marching (1920)
“There is no hope even that woman,
with her right to vote, will ever purify
politics…. If voting changed anything,
they’d make it illegal.”—Emma Goldman
The Ku Klux Klan
After the US Civil War (1861-65), scattered groups of whites in the
South called themselves the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, but these
local groups were not able to create a widespread organization. In
Georgia in 1915 after the release of The Birth of a Nation, a film
glorifying the Klan praised by President Wilson, a cohesive and
interlocking Klan was established that would become a national
organization as strong in much of the Midwest as it was in the
South. It was dedicated to carrying its anti-Black crusade to the
North and to placing the same kinds of restraints on Catholics and
Jews. By 1924, the Ku Klux Klan had 4.5 million members.
Left: A KKK
march in
Washington,
DC (1925);
Right: KKK
horsemen in
New Jersey
(c. 1920)
The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill
Lynching, when a mob hangs a person for an alleged offense
without a legal trial, was not infrequent in the US. While lynching
was not confined to Blacks, lynching victims were disproportionately
Black. Beginning in 1921, the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People sponsored anti-lynching legislation
such as the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill and numerous other proposals to
make lynching a federal crime, providing fines and imprisonment for
persons convicted of lynching in federal courts
and fines and penalties against states, counties,
and towns which failed to use reasonable efforts
to protect citizens from mob violence. While the
legislation passed in the House of Representatives
in 1922, it was killed in the Senate. Southern
Senators claimed a federal ban on lynching was
“unconstitutional” and “a
A Lynching in Mannford,
Oklahoma (c. 1921)
violation of states’ rights.”
The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921
The single worst incident of racial
violence in US history occurred in
Tulsa, Oklahoma on 31 May and 1
June, 1921. The Greenwood
District of Tulsa, 35 city blocks
housing the wealthiest Black
community in the United States
known as “the Black Wall Street,”
was burned to the ground: 1,256
residences were destroyed by fire
leaving 10,000 Blacks homeless. At
the time, the official death toll was
less than 40, but an investigation
published in 2001 found evidence
that as many as 300 Blacks were
murdered during the riot.
The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921
Racism in the United States
In colonial Virginia in 1676, opponents of the
governor and the wealthy planters, led by
Nathaniel Bacon, offered freedom to both
white indentured servants and to Black
slaves who were prepared to help seize
control of the colony. The motives of the
rebels in Bacon’s Rebellion were mixed—one
of their demands was for war to seize more
land from the Indians. But their actions
showed how poor whites and Africans could
unite against the landowners. The response
of the colonial landowners was to push
through measures which divided the two
groups. The Virginian House of Burgesses
sought to strengthen the racial barrier
between English servants and African slaves.
The Burning of Jamestown
(1676)
In other words, the planters recognized that far from white and
Black automatically hating each other, there was a likelihood of
some whites establishing close relations with the slaves—and the
colonial authorities sought to stamp this out. It was now that racism
began to develop as an ideology in America. The ruling class
recognized racism as a means to maintain their position. As the
American colonies developed into a capitalist nation state, the
ideology of racism became the central hegemonic strategy by
which the ruling class of the United States maintains its position.
Racism divides the ruled. Racial divisions mask the underlying class
divisions in US society. Racism unites whites across class divides.
Racism, rather than being dysfunctional, supports the hegemonic
status quo, preserving the ruling class. This means that, despite
efforts to overcome racial divisions, racism remains prominent in
the contemporary United States. Attempting to end racism in the
United States would involve a direct, counterhegemonic attack on
the logic of the capitalist nation state. Thus, Blacks or whites who
dare to cross the color boundary are threats to be eliminated.
Paul Robeson
Paul Robeson became world famous in the 1920s, and he traded his
cachet to mobilize progressives in support of civil rights for Blacks,
economic rights for workers, and human rights for all oppressed
peoples. Born in 1898, Robeson was the son of a former Black slave.
He graduated from Columbia Law School in 1923, but racism
prevented him from practicing law. He was a professional football
player, a professional concert and
recording artist, a professional film
and stage actor. He spoke and
wrote more than twenty languages.
Because of his political activism, he
was blacklisted; a mob tried to kill
him in 1949; the US Government
revoked his passport in 1950; and
the CIA attempted to assassinate
him in 1961.
“Ol’ Man River”
•There’s an old man called the Mississippi; that’s
the old man I don’t like to be! What does he care
if the world’s got troubles? What does he care if
the land ain’t free?
•Ol’ Man River, that Ol’ Man River, he must know
somethin’, but don’t say nothin’; he just keeps
rollin’, he keeps on rollin’ along.
•He don’t plant ‘taters, he don’t plant cotton, and
them that plants ‘em is soon forgotten. But Ol’
Man River, he just keeps rollin’ along.
•You and me, we sweat and strain, body all achin’
and racked with pain. “Tote that barge!” “Lift that
bale!” You show a little grit and you’ll land in jail.
•I keep laughin’ instead of cryin’; I must keep
fightin’ until I’m dying. But Old Man River, he just
keeps rollin' along.
•That’s the old man
that I’d like to be.
•Get a little drunk
and you’ll land in jail.
•I get weary and sick
of trying. I’m tired of
living and scared of
dying.
Show
Boat
Film
Poster
(1936)
The Harlem Renaissance
Black creativity exploded in
the 1920s as talented
Blacks from across the
country came into New
York to participate in the
Harlem Renaissance. Young
composers, novelists,
playwrights, and poets
flowered in an environment
of Black pride established
by an older generation of
intellectuals. The two
generations agreed on the
need for militancy, but they
disagreed on the form of
that militancy.
If we must die—let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While around us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot…
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
—Claude McKay, “If We Must Die”
Arthur Holitscher, Clara Zetkin & Claude McKay
While sociologist and historian
W.E.B. DuBois advocated economic
radicalism, the older generation of
Blacks affirmed strongly their
commitment to Victorian sexual
morality and to Christianity. The
Black establishment of the 1920s,
accepting the white definition of art
as something created by an
exceptional artist, dismissed Blues
and Jazz as worthless, holding
popular music in contempt. On the
other hand, white patrons demanded
an uncomplicated biological
primitivism. Against these currents,
the younger generation of Black
artists struggled to define their
sense of a Black cultural tradition.
W. E. B. DuBois
“I did not feel the rhythms
of the primitive surging
through me, and so I could
not live and write as though
I did. I was Chicago and
Kansas City and Broadway
and Harlem. And I was not
what she wanted me to be.”
—Langston Hughes
Countee Cullen lamented in poetry.
Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen
wrote novels characterized by
tortured soul-searching.
Jean Toomer’s
Cane
Nella Larsen’s
Quicksand
I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,…
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!
—”Yet Do I Marvel”
Countee Cullen reading poetry to children.
Langston Hughes cautioned the Black writer
must reject the implicit motivation “I want
to be white.” Believing Black culture sprang
from the masses, he embraced the Blues for
inspiration: “To these the Negro artist can
give his racial individuality, his heritage of
rhythm and warmth, and his incongruous
humor that so often, as in the Blues,
becomes ironic laughter mixed with tears.”
Prevented from
bringing jazz on
campus, Sterling
Brown, a professor of
English at Howard
University reminded
the respectable Black
middle class of the
reality of existence
for most Black
people in America:
O Ma Rainey
Li’l an’ low,
Sing us ‘bout de hard luck
Roun’ our do’:
Sing us ‘bout de lonesome road
We mus’ go….
Langston Hughes
Sterling Brown
—”Ma Rainey”
Marcus Garvey
Marcus Garvey founded the
Universal Negro Improvement
Association in 1914. Garvey
believed it was impossible for
Blacks to be equal in white
America. He preached Black
pride, racial separation, and a
return to Africa, which held the
only hope for Black unity and
survival. In the meantime, he
told Blacks to support each
other by dealing only with Black
businesses: UNIA organized
groceries, laundries, restaurants,
a printing plant, a hotel, and
the Black Star Steamship Line.
The US government deported
Garvey in 1926. His nationalist
movement collapsed with the
coming of the Great Depression as
Blacks, last hired and first fired,
struggled for physical survival.
Marcus Garvey (1924)
Revision Questions
• What were the “Roaring Twenties”?
• How did film and other media develop in the 1920s?
• How far did the roles of women change during the 1920s?
• How widespread was intolerance in US society?
• What restrictions were placed on immigration?
• What was “The Red Scare”?
• How and why did religious intolerance spread?
• Why was there discrimination against Black Americans?
• What was the influence of the Ku Klux Klan?
• Why was Prohibition introduced and then later repealed?
• How did Prohibition contribute to the rise of gangsterism in the
1920s?