the “new era,” 1920s -...

Chapter 22

THE “NEW ERA,” 1920S

THE NEW ECONOMY

I. Return to normalcy

A. The election of 1920 pitted Democratic candidate James Cox against Republican Warren G. Harding-

-Harding

wins easily

B. Harding's election puts an end to two decades of progressive reform and ushers in an era of conservatism.

My Countrymen: Harding’s inauguration

…We have seen a world passion spend its fury, but we contemplate our Republic unshaken, and hold our civilization secure. Liberty--liberty within the law--and civilization are inseparable, and though both were threatened we find them now secure…

The recorded progress of our Republic, materially and spiritually, in itself proves the wisdom of the inherited policy of noninvolvement in Old World affairs. Confident of our ability to work out our own destiny, and jealously guarding our right to do so, we seek no part in directing the destinies of the Old World. We do not mean to be entangled.

Our supreme task is the resumption of our onward, normal way. Reconstruction, readjustment, restoration all these must follow. I would like to hasten them. If it will lighten the spirit and add to the resolution with which we take up the task, let me repeat for our Nation, we shall give no people just cause to make war upon us; we hold no national prejudices; we entertain no spirit of revenge; we do not hate; we do not covet; we dream of no conquest, nor boast of armed prowess…

The forward course of the business cycle is unmistakable. Peoples are turning from destruction to production. Industry has sensed the changed order and our own people are turning to resume their normal, onward way. The call is for productive America to go on.

C. American Isolationism

1. After World War I, America turned inward, away from the world, and started a policy of “isolationism.”

2. Americans denounced “radical” foreign ideas and “un-American” lifestyles.

IV. The Roaring Economy

A. Prosperity took off in the “Roaring 20s,” despite a short recession in 1920-21

B. It was helped by the tax policies of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, which favored the rapid expansion of capital investment.

C. Prosperity led to:1. Advertisements were used to help convince people to spend their disposable income on their products.2. New (and dangerous) buying techniques were introduced…they bought (1) on the installment plan and (2) on credit. Both increased consumer debt.

D. The auto industry became one of the fastest growing sectors of the economy.

1. People like Henry Ford and Ransom E. Olds (i.e. Oldsmobile) developed the infant auto industry.

2. Henry Ford perfected the assembly-line production.

3. His famous Rouge River Plant was producing a finished automobile every ten seconds.

4. Eventually, cars like the Ford Model T became cheap and easy to own.

5. By 1929, 26 million motor vehicles were registered in the US, or 1 car per 4.9 Americans.

6. The automobile industry created 6 million new jobs and took over the railroad as king of transportation.

7. New roads, like the Lincoln Highway, were constructed, the gasoline industry boomed, and America’s standard of living rose greatly.

E. People started supporting professional sports in their leisure time, like home run hero Babe Ruth and boxers like

Jack Dempsey.

F. In 1927 Charles Lindbergh became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean in his Spirit of St. Louis, going from New York to Paris.

1. The bungled 1932 investigation of his son’s kidnapping will lead to the FBI taking the lead in all kidnappings in the future.

THE NEW CULTURE

G. The Radio Revolution

1. In the 1890s, Marconi invented wireless telegraphy.

2. By 1920, the first voice-carrying radio station began broadcasting when KDKA (in Pittsburgh) announced Harding’s landslide victory.

H. Hollywood

1. Thomas Edison helped invent the moving picture, but in 1903, the real birth of the movie came with The Great Train Robbery.

2. The first full-length feature was D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, which stunned viewers visually.

3. The first “talkie” or movie

with sound was The Jazz

Singer with Al Jolson.

4. Hollywood, California, quickly became a hot spot for movie production.

V. The Dynamic Decade

A. For the first time, more Americans lived in urban areas, not the rural countryside.

B. Upton Sinclair was the first to coin the term white collar when describing office workers in 1919

C. The birth-control movement was led by fiery Margaret Sanger, and the National Women’s Party began in 1923 to campaign for an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.

The New Culture

Changing Ideas of Motherhood “Companionate Marriages”

Birth Control

The “Flapper”: Image and Reality

D. Young people who embraced modern life were called “flappers.”

1. They danced new dances like the risqué “Charleston” and dressed more provocatively.

The King & Carter Jazzing Orchestra photographed in Houston, Texas, January 1921.

2. Jazz was the music of flappers and mainstream America.

“When You're Smiling”, 1929.

Listen to the song until Louis takes a solo on his trumpet. Is the melody he’s playing planned out in advance or improvised? Explain.

Is improvisation important in current music? (rock, rap, country, hip-hop, etc)

“Louis Armstrong was the epitome of jazz and always will be.” Duke Ellington

E. The Harlem Renaissance was personified by writers such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Countee Cullen

F. Literature

1. Many of the new writers, though, hailed from different backgrounds (not Protestant New Englanders).

2. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby, both of which captured the society of the “Jazz Age,” including an odd mix of glamour and cruelty.

3. Ernest Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises, and A Farewell to Arms, and became a voice for the “Lost Generation”—the young folks who’d been ruined by the disillusionment of WWI.

4. Sinclair Lewis disparaged small-town America in his Main Streetand Babbitt.

5. Nighthawk by Edward Hopper

New York Movie

Realism

6. Art Deco-stepped forms and sweeping curves

7. The champion of skyscrapers, the Empire State Building, debuted in 1931.

A CONFLICT OF CULTURES

A. “Red Scare” of 1919-20

1. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer used a series of raids to round up and arrest about 6,000 suspected Communists.

2. In December of 1919, 249 alleged alien radicals were deported.

3. The Red Scare severely cut back free speech for a period

4. Some states made it illegal to merely advocate the violent overthrow of government for social change.

B. Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted of murdering a Massachusetts paymaster and his guard.

1. The two accused were Italians, atheists, anarchists, and draft dodgers; and the courts may have been prejudiced against them.a. In this time period, anti-foreignism (“nativism”) was high.b. Liberals and radicals rallied around the two men, but they were executed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sacvan.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sacvan.jpg

Ben Shahn created this poster to protest the execution of BartolomeoVanzetti and Nicolo Sacco who were electrocuted in 1927. He chose as the text a statement Vanzetti made to a reporter shortly before their deaths.

C. The Rise of the Second KKK1. The new Ku Klux Klan was

against: Foreigners Catholics Blacks Jews Pacifists Communists Revolutionaries Bootleggers Evolutionists Birth control

-It was pro-White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) and anti-everything else.

Birth of a Nation

2. At its peak in the 1920s, it had 5 million members, mostly from the South, but it also featured a reign of hooded terror.

3. The new KKK employed the same tactics of fear, lynchings, and intimidation as the old KKK.

4. It was stopped not by the exposure of its horrible racism, but by its money fraud. (it was a pyramid scheme)

D. Stemming the Flood of Immigration

1. In 1921 Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, in which newcomers from Europe were restricted during any year to a quota, which was set at 3% of the people of their nationalitywho lived in the U.S. in 1910.

2. This supported the 1917 law that kept “undesirables” out of the country and imposed a literacy test on all immigrants.

3. A replacement law was found in the National Origins Act of 1924, which cut the quota down to 2% and the origins base was shifted to that of 1890, when few southeastern Europeans lived in America.

4. This act also slammed the door against Japanese immigrants.

5. By 1931, for the first time in history, more people left America than came here.

Journal

Analyze the reasons for the rise of nativism in American society from 1900 to 1930.

Provide 2 pieces of evidence to support your claim.

10 5 0

10 minutes

E. A “Dry” Country

1. The 18th Amendment (enforced with the Volstead Act) prohibited the sale of alcohol.

2. Many thoughtProhibition was here to stay especially in the Midwest and the South.

3. It was almost impossibleto enforce.

Who protested Prohibition?

4. Prohibition was particularly supported by women (remember the Women’s Christian Temperance Union?)

a. Positive results: bank savings increased and absenteeism on the job went down.

b. Negative results: the increase in gangs that competed to distribute liquor.

5. Many cities saw gang wars in the 1920s, Chicago, Detroit, New York, etc.

6. Captured criminals were rare, and convictions even rarer, since gangsters often provided false alibis for each other.

Moonshine still recently confiscated by the Internal Revenue Bureau. loc.gov

a. The most infamous of these gangsters was “Scarface” Al Capone, and his St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Capone was finally caught for tax evasion.

III. Fundamentalist

vs.

Modernist Christians

A. Urban as well as rural Americans flocked to fundamentalist and evangelical churches in the 1920s that believed in a traditional and literal interpretation of the Bible.

B. “Liberal” Protestants sought to reconcile faith and science.1. Harry Emerson Fosdick’s influential 1922 sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?,” called for an open-minded, intellectual, and tolerant “Christian fellowship.”

1. Evolutionists were also clashing against creationists, and the prime example of this was the Scopes “Monkey Trial.”

2. John T. Scopes, a high school teacher, was charged with illegally teaching evolution.

D. Monkey Business in Tennessee

3. Fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan was made to sound foolish during the trial by Modernist attorney Clarence Darrow.

4. The trial proved to be inconclusive but illustrated the rift between the new and old.

VI. The Politics of Boom and BustA. Three conservative presidents (Harding,

Coolidge, and Hoover) encouraged a warm relationship between business and government (Laissez-faire, high tariffs, and reduced regulation)

B. Labor membership shrank by 30% from 1920 to 1930.C. Harding--1921-1923-- ("I am a

man of limited talents from a small town") delegated much of his responsibility to

subordinates and friends

1. Harding Administration Scandals

a. Scandal rocked the Harding administration in 1923 when Charles R. Forbes embezzled over $200 million from the Veterans’ Bureau.b. The Teapot Dome Scandal was the most shocking of all.

1. Albert Fall (Secretary of the Interior) leased land in Teapot Dome, Wyoming and California, to oilmen Harry Sinclair and Edward Doheny, but not until Fall had received “loans” (actually bribes) from them.

2. President Harding, largely unaware of any corruption in his administration, died in San Francisco on August 2, 1923 and his VP, Coolidge, took office.

3. “Silent Cal” Coolidge was an upright person, was not touched by the Harding scandals.

D. Coolidge--1923-1929--("The business of America is business") was the least active president in history, taking daily afternoon naps and proposing no new legislation

1. By the 1920’s the American economy was transformed, industry and commerce, rather than agriculture, now provided the backbone of the American economy.

2. As Commerce Secretary, Hoover was in the middle of the economic transformation, leading to the impression, that Herbert Hoover was everywhere.

E. The Election of 19281. The presidential election of 1928 was one of the

most significant in American history. It brought to light the political consequences of the nation's great demographic transformation.

2. The Presidential candidates in the election of 1928 represented the transformation underway in American politics.a. Herbert Hoover (1874-1964) was a representative of the middle class, born into an Iowa Quaker family. b. Supporting business and Prohibition, Hoover was the Republican candidate for President in 1928. His campaign slogan promised

"A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.”

3. Alfred E. Smith (1873-1944)

a. Hoover's Democratic opponent. b. His background and character were

worlds away from that of the genteel Hoover.

c. Born into a lower-class, Catholic family, Smith grew up in the New York City tenements known as Hell's Kitchen and was a self-made man.

d. Voters identified Smith with big-city political machines.

e. He was also an avowed "wet" who called for the repeal of Prohibition.

Hoover: 444 to Smith: 87

4. Prohibition and religion--namely, Smith's Catholicism--dominated the campaign.

a. In the end, Hoover won by a large margin, although Democrats carried the cities.

b. Before Al Smith ran for president, even East Coast cities had been largely Republican, the nation was on the verge of a major political transformation.

VII. Wall Street’s Bull Market

A. There was much over-speculation in the 1920s, especially on Florida home properties and even during times of prosperity banks were failing each year.

a. The whole system was built on fragile credit.

B. There was a new influx of investment from regular people, in 1929, 3 million Americans or 10% of households owned stocks.

1. The prosperity of the 1920s was setting up the crash that would lead to the poverty and suffering of the 1930s.

In 1929, Yale University economist Irving Fisher

stated confidently: "The nation is marching

along a permanently high plateau of

prosperity."

—Herbert Hoover, speech accepting the Republican nomination, Palo Alto, California.

We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poor-house is vanishing from among us. We have not yet reached the goal, but given a change to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, and we shall soon with he help of God be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation. There is no guarantee against poverty equal to a job for every man. That is the primary purpose of the economic policies we advocate. August 11, 1928

C. The Great Crash Ends the Golden Twenties

1. Hoover confidently predicted an end to poverty soon, but on October 29, 1929, a devastating stock market crash caused by over-speculation and overly high stock prices built only upon non-existent credit struck the nation.

2. Every day RCA went up in price. It never paid a dividend

... But it kept going up. -

Reuben L. Cain, stock salesman.

Source: Source: Robert Sobel, RCA (Stein

and Day, New York, 1986). Prices 1924-

1929 adjusted to account for 1924

reverse split and 1929 split.

Crowds gathering around Wall Street, 1929.

3. Losses, even blue-chip securities, were unbelievable as by the end of 1929, stockholders had lost over $40 billion on paper, (more than the cost of WWI)

4. By the end of 1930, 4 million Americans were jobless, and two years later, that number shot up to 12 million.

5. Over 5,000 banks collapsed in the first three years of the Great Depression.

6. Bank runs became more common

A run on a NY Bank, 1931.

VIII. Causes of the Great Depression

A. The Great Depression might have been caused by an overabundance of farm products and factory products.

B. The nation’s capacity to produce goods had clearly outrun its capacity to consume or pay for them.

C. By 1930, the depression was a national crisis, and hard-working workers had nowhere to work, thus, people turned bitter and also turned on Hoover.

D. Villages of shanties and ragged shacks were called Hoovervilles and were inhabited by the people who had lost their jobs. They popped up everywhere.

Above Hoovervilleoutside of NYC

Right Hoovervilleoutside of Seattle 1932

E. Hoover unfairly received the brunt of the blame for the Great Depression, but he also did not pass measures that could have made the depression less severe than it could have been.

1. Critics noted that he could feed millions in Belgium (after WWI) but not millions at home in America.

F. Hoover Battles the Great Depression

1. Hoover voted to provide $2.25 billion to start projects to alleviate the suffering of the depression.

a. The Hoover Dam of the Colorado River was one such project.

Boulder, Hoover, and Grand Coulee dams were federally financed.

2. Early in 1932, Congress, responding to Hoover’s appeal, established the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), which became a government-lending bank. a. This was a large step for Hoover away from laissez faire policies and toward policies the Democrats (FDR) would later employ.

3. However, giant corporations were the ones that benefited most from this, and the RFC was another one of the targets of Hoover’s critics.

G. March of the Bonus Army

1. Many veterans, whom had not been paid their compensation for WWI, marched to Washington, D.C. to demand their bonus.

2. The “Bonus Army” erected unsanitary camps and shacks in vacant lots, creating health hazards and annoyance.

Children in one of the Bonus Army Camps

3. Riots followed after troops came in to intervene (after Congress tried to pass a bonus bill but failed), and people died.4. Hoover falsely charged that the force was led by riffraff and Reds (communists), and the American opinion turned even more against him.

IX. American Isolation

A. In September 1931, Japan, alleging provocation, invaded Manchuria.

B. People were stunned, as this was a flagrant violation of the League of Nations covenant, and a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, was arranged.

C. Secretary of State Henry Stimson did indicate that the U.S. probably would not interfere with a League of Nations embargo on Japan, but he was later restrained from taking action. 1. Since the U.S. took no effective action, the Japanese bombed Shanghai in 1932, and even then, outraged Americans didn’t do much to change the Japanese minds.2. The U.S.’s lackluster actions support the notion that America’s isolationist policy was well entrenched.

D. Hoover Pioneers the Good Neighbor Policy

1. Hoover was deeply interested in relations south of the border, and during his term, U.S. relations with Latin America and the Caribbean improved greatly.

2. Since the U.S. had less money to spend, it was unable to dominate Latin America as much, and later, Franklin D. Roosevelt would build upon these policies.

African American Impact

W.E.B. Du Bois- emphasized the necessity for higher

education in order to develop the leadership capacity among

the most able 10 percent of black Americans, whom he

dubbed "The Talented Tenth."

vs. Marcus Garvey

Describe and account for the rise of nativism in American society from 1900 to 1930.

The “New Era”

© 2012, The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All Rights Reserved.100

Sterret Operating Service, General Motors show in Washington Auditorium

(Library of Congress)

Charles Lindbergh(Library of Congress)

The New Economy


Farm Tenancy, 1910-1930

The New Culture


Breaking Down Rural Isolation: The Expansion of Travel Horizons in Oregon, Illinois

The New Culture


Woman in Red Cross nurse's uniform (Library of Congress)

A stylized flapper(The Palma Collection/

Getty Images)

A Conflict of Cultures

Prohibition Failure of Prohibition

Alcohol and Organized Crime


Anti-Saloon League at Washington, D.C., Dec. 8, 1921(Library of Congress)



Total Immigration, 1920-1960



Sources of Immigration, 1920-1960

Republican Government

Government and Business Andrew Mellon

Hoover’s “Associationalism”


Herbert Hoover(Library of Congress)

the “new era,” 1920s -...

Documents