Chapter 20 - Key Terms

US History - Final

Sacco-Vanzetti Case

A case held during the 1920s in which two Italian American anarchists were found guilty and executed for a crime in which there was very little evidence linking them to the particular crime.

Equal Rights Amendment

An amendment to guarantee equal rights for women, introduced in 1923 but not passed by Congress until 1972; it failed to be ratified by the states

Flappers

Young women of the 1920s whose rebellion against prewar standards of femininity included wearing shorter dresses, bobbing their hair, dancing to jazz music, driving cars, smoking cigarettes, and indulging in illegal drinking and gambling.

Adkins v. Children’s Hospital

1923 Supreme Court case that reversed Muller v. Oregon, the 1908 case that permitted states to set maximum hours to protect working women; justices ruled in Adkins that women no longer deserved special treatment because they could vote.

Olmstead v. United States

1928 Supreme Court decision that allowed the federal government’s use of wiretapping without a warrant to prosecute suspected criminals.

Teapot Dome

Harding administration scandal in which Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall profited from secret leasing to private oil companies of government oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and Elk Hills, California.

Lost Generation

A group of writers and artists who came of age during World War I. Disillusioned with American values and culture, many moved to Europe during the 1920s.

American Civil Liberties Union

Organization founded during World War I to protest the suppression of freedom of expression in wartime; played a major role in court cases that achieved judicial recognition of Americans’ civil liberties.

Schenck v. United States

1919 U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the wartime Espionage and Sedition Acts; in the opinion he wrote for the case, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes set the now familiar “clear and present danger” standard.

Fundamentalism

Anti-modernist Protestant movement started in the early twentieth century that proclaimed the literal truth of the Bible; the name came from The Fundamentals, published by conservative leaders.

Scopes Trial

1925 trial of John Scopes, Tennessee teacher accused of violating state law prohibiting teaching of the theory of evolution; it became a nationally celebrated confrontation between religious fundamentalism and civil liberties.

“Illegal Alien”

A new category established by the Immigration Act of 1924 that referred to immigrants crossing U.S. borders in excess of the new immigration quotas.

Indian Citizenship Act

1924 act that conferred American citizenship to all non-citizen Indians born within U.S. territorial boundaries.

Harlem Renaissance

African American literary and artistic movement of the 1920s centered in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood

Wickersham Commission

Established by Herbert Hoover in 1929, the commission was the first large-scale federal study of the problem of crime.

Great Depression

Worst economic depression in American history; it was spurred by the stock market crash of 1929 and lasted until World War II

Stock Market Crash

Also known as Black Tuesday, a stock market panic in 1929 that resulted in the loss of more than $10 billion in market value (worth approximately ten times more today); one among many causes of the Great Depression.

Smoot-Hawley Tariff

1930 act that raised tariffs to an unprecedented level and worsened the Great Depression by raising prices and discouraging foreign trade.

Reconstruction Finance Corporation

Federal program established in 1932 under President Herbert Hoover to loan money to banks and other institutions to help them avert bankruptcy.