The 1920’s: “Benjamin Franklins filled/folded just for the thrill...stock markets crash/now I’m

just a bill.”

History 244

Thematic questions

• Who benefitted and who suffered from the new consumer society in the 1920’s?

• What was the relationship between government and business during the 1920’s?

• In what ways did civil liberties gain new importance/how did they challenge the meaning of freedom?

• What was fundamentalism? Pluralism?• What caused the Great Depression?• http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/mmh/clash/default.htm

The Prosperous Decade

• The automobile as the backbone of prosperity.• Luxury goods became attainable for most

Americans.• Advertising and marketing professionals find

ways to entice Americans to participate in society increasingly framed around consumer freedom.

• More time and income spent on leisure.

Household Appliances, 1900-1930

Limitations

• Increased production often means increased inequality of distribution.

• 1% of banks control half the nation’s financial resources.

• Beginnings of widespread deindustrialization in New England.

• In 1929, about 40% of population still lives in poverty.

Plight of the Farmers

• 1920’s are the first time in US history the number of farms/farmers decline.

• Mechanization, use of fertilizer, insecticides mean that production continues to rise when government subsidies from WWI end.

• Millions migrate to expanding areas such as Southern California.

Business

• Business uses public relations experts to manipulate opinion.

• Use language of Americanism and “industrial freedom” to discredit labor.

• Embrace the open shop, argue for little government regulation or collective bargaining, link socialism to labor radicalism.

Equal Rights Amendment

• Achievement of suffrage breaks bonds of female activists.

• One conception of women’s freedom: motherhood, another based on ind. autonomy.

• Alice Paul/NWP proposes to eliminate legal distinctions on account of sex with ERA.

• National Women’s Party supports ERA, League of Women Voters, Women’s Trade Union League do not.

Women’s Freedom

• Sexual freedom/female liberation now means individual autonomy or personal rebellion.

• Marketing of goods to women enhances the pursuit of personal pleasure through consumer goods.

• “new freedom” of the flapper applies to young, single, white women, and ends with marriage.

“Politicians All Move for Money”

• Lobbyists want lower income taxes for business and people, maintain tariffs, support against unions.

• Harding and Coolidge appoint pro-businessmen from Federal Reserve Board and Federal Trade Commission.

• Supreme Court remains staunchly conservative (Muller v. Oregon).

The Fall Guy

• Administration of Warren Harding one of the most corrupt in American history.

• The most famous scandal involved the leasing of government oil reserves to businessmen at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, by Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall, who was paid $500,000 for his services.

Election of 1924

• Coolidge replaced Harding, wins re-election by beating Democrat John W. Davis.

• Robert La Follette wins 1/6th of popular vote running on a Progressive Party Platform that calls for higher taxes on wealth, public ownership of railroads, farm relief, and a ban on child labor.

Ms. Foreign Affairs

• Retreat from Wilsonian internationalism.• Washington Naval Arms Conference of 1922.• Foreign policy conducted as much through

private sector as through government.• New York bankers made huge loans to

European and Latin American governments. • When American economic interests seemed

threatened, the government sent in the troops (Nicaragua).

Civil Liberties

• WWI and postwar repression • Reformers now encouraged open and

democratic debate and in the 1920s the idea of civil liberties and legal protections for freedom of speech against the government began to emerge.

Civil Liberties, part II

• ACLU, founded in 1920.• In 1919, the Court upheld the constitutionality of

the Espionage Act and the conviction of Charles T. Schenck.

• Also in 1919, the Court also upheld the conviction of Jacob Abrams. In a minority dissent, Justices Holmes and Brandeis lay the basis for future defenses of free speech as necessary in the “great marketplace of ideas” later on that decade was formed.

Culture Wars

• Evangelical Protestants felt threatened by an apparent decline in traditional values.

• Convinced of literal truth of Bible as basis for Christian doctrine, launch campaigns to get rid of modernists.

• Billy Sunday• Depicted in the press as a movement of backward

bigots.• Fundamentalism flowered both in rural and urban

areas, and it succeeded, through Prohibition, in reducing alcohol consumption in many places.

Monkey Business

• John Scopes arrested for teaching evolution to students in violation of TN law.

• ACLU sees law as challenge to individual thought and self expression, not to mention dangers of mixing church and state.

• Trial pits well known defense lawyer Clarence Darrow against Bible “expert” William Jennings Bryan.

Ku Klux Redux

• Rises again in mid 19-teens through early 1920’s; American freedoms should be limited according to religion and ethnicity that had become widespread in WWI.

• By the mid-1920s, the group claimed more than 3 million members, almost all white and native-born Protestants, many of whom were in the North and West.

“Klan Day” at the Races

Restricting Immigration

• Fears of immigrant-based political radicalism now outweighed demands for cheap labor, which employers found in African-Americans who had left the South.

• 1921 Emergency Quota Act, 1924 Immigration Act: redraw the boundaries of citizenship, create the category of “illegal alien.”

Pluralism and Liberty

• “Cultural pluralism” described society that gloried in diversity rather than suppress it.

• Important contributors: Horace Kallen, Franz Boas, and Ruth Benedict.

• Most pluralistic vision comes from immigrants who assert value of cultural diversity, toleration and difference as crucial to American freedom.

• Court strikes down Americanization laws.

The Harlem Renaissance

• Harlem in New York became a center of African-American life, attracting migrants from the South and the West Indies.

• While whites visited jazz clubs and speakeasies, Harlem was a place of poverty and low-wage work created and reinforced by housing discrimination.

Part II

Harlem also contained a dynamic black cultural community with connections to New York’s artistic mainstream. In art, the term “New Negro” meant rejecting established stereotypes and a search for black values to replace them.

Election of 1928

• Coolidge declines to run again, Hoover wins the Republican nomination.

• He faced Democrat Alfred E. Smith, the first Catholic presidential nominee of a major party.

• Smith’s Catholicism became the primary campaign issue.

The Great Depression

• On October 29th, the Stock Market crashes, causing a financial panic.

• Signals of impending disaster: Southern California and Florida real estate; unequal distribution of income and persistent depression in farming areas reduced American purchasing power; auto and household consumer good sales stagnated after 1926.

The Bubble Bursts

• The crash was so severe it destroyed many investment companies, wiping out thousands of investors and squelching consumer confidence.

• Around 26,000 businesses failed in 1930, and those that survived cut back on employment and investment.

• Failure of gold financial system to meet the crisis.

Great Depression II

• Stocks momentarily rebounded but soon resumed their precipitous decline.

• By 1932, the economy hit rock bottom, with GNP down by a third, prices down by 40 percent, and more than 11 million workers—25 percent of the labor force—unemployed.

• Also damaged was the public image of big business and Wall Street.

Great Depression, part III

• The Bonus Army marches on Washington. . • Hoover maintained his commitment to

“associational action,” strongly opposed direct federal economic intervention, and business also opposed federal aid to unemployed.

• New measures: Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Federal Home Loan Bank System.