APUSH Chapter 30 People

A. Mitchell Palmer

(1872-1936) A zealous prosecutor and anti-red, Palmer served as attorney general during the post-World War I "red scare," when thousands of foreign nationals were deported because of suspected subversive activities.

Nicola Sacco

(1891-1927) Along with Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian anarchists convicted in 1921 of the murder of a paymaster and a security guard at a Massachusetts shoe factory. Despite a worldwide public outcry, they were electrocuted in 1927.

Horace Kallen

(1882-1974) Along with Randolph Bourne, early-twentieth-century commentators who wrote against the grain of "one-hundred-percent" Americanism, celebrating ethnic diversity and cultural pluralism. Their essays left behind an important legacy for later writers on pluralism and civil rights.

Randolph Bourne

(1886-1918) He led the cultural pluralists with Horace Kallen; he had a weaving basket theory that America would be a blanket made with threads of all races and ethnicities

Al Capone

(1899-1947) A notorious Chicago bootlegger and gangster during prohibition, Capone evaded conviction for murder but served most of an eleven-year sentence for tax evasion.

John T. Scopes

(1900-1970) Tennessee high-school biology teacher who was prosecuted in 1925 for teaching the theory of evolution. Former presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan joined the prosecution. The talented Clarence Darrow served as defense attorney.

Frederick W. Taylor

(1856-1915) A prominent inventor and engineer who developed "scientific management," a system of shop-floor organization that stressed efficient, highly supervised labor management and production methods. His methods revolutionized manufacturing across the industrialized world.

Henry Ford

(1863-1947) The "Father of the Traffic Jam," Ford developed the Model T Ford and pioneered its assembly-line production. As founder of the Ford Motor Company, he became one of the wealthiest men in the world.

Charles A. Lindbergh

(1902-1974) An American aviator who made history as the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic. An instant international hero, Lindbergh's reputation was later tarnished by anti-Semitic views he voiced during World War II.

Margaret Sanger

(1879-1966) A nurse and prominent birth-control activist who founded the American Birth Control League in 1921, which eventually became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. In 1916, she established the first birth-control clinic in the United States and endured the first of many arrests for illegally distributing information about contraception.

Sigmund Freud

(1856-1939) An Austrian physician who led the way in developing the field of psychoanalysis. One of the most influential minds of the twentieth century, Freud was known for his argument that sexual repression was responsible for a variety of nervous and emotional ills.

H. L. Mencken

(1880-1956) The "Sage of Baltimore," he established himself as the nation's leading critic and literary stylist in the early twentieth century. Championing liberal, modernist causes, he led the assault on William Jennings Bryan's Fundamentalist crusade at the Scopes "Monkey Trial."

F. Scott Fitzgerald

(1896-1940) Minnesota-born and Princeton-educated novelist who captured the glamour and spiritual emptiness of the 1920s jazz age in novels such as This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby.

Ernest Hemingway

(1899-1961) Novelist and author of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. Former newspaper correspondent and wartime ambulance driver, he became an international celebrity for his searing war novels, clipped prose, and personal exploits.

T. S. Eliot

(1888-1965) Harvard-educated poet who became one of the twentieth century's most influential practitioners of "high modernism." His poetic masterpieces included The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land.

William Faulkner

(1897-1962) Mississippi novelist who explored the South's collective memory of racism and conservatism in his fictional chronicle of "Yoknapatawpha" County. His many modernist novels inspired a twentieth-century southern literary renaissance.

Langston Hughes

(1902-1967) African American poet and leading literary voice of the Harlem Renaissance. His modernist poems incorporated colloquial black speech and gave poetic expression to the twentieth-century African American condition.

Warren G. Harding

(1865-1923) Twenty-ninth president of the United States, from 1921 to his death in office in 1923. He began his career as a newspaper publisher before getting elected to the Ohio senate, where he served from 1899 to 1903. He then served as lieutenant governor of Ohio (1903-1905) and as a U.S. senator (1915-1921) before winning the presidency. His time in office was beset with scandals, many of them the result of the disloyalty of scheming friends.

Albert B. Fall

(1861-1944) A scheming conservationist who served as secretary of the interior under Warren G. Harding. Fall was one of the key players in the notorious Teapot Dome scandal.

Calvin Coolidge

(1872-1933) Vice president "Silent Cal" Coolidge became thirtieth president of the United States when Warren G. Harding died in office. A friend of business over labor, he served during the boom years from 1923 to 1929.

John W. Davis

(1873-1955) The unsuccessful Democratic candidate for president in 1924. The wealthy, Wall Street-connected Davis was no less conservative than his opponent, Calvin Coolidge.

Alfred E. ("Al") Smith

(1873-1944) Colorful New York governor who was the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for president in 1928. His Catholicism and "wet" stance on prohibition made him a controversial figure, even in the traditionally loyal Democratic South. Although Smith lost the electoral vote to a Hoover landslide, his appeal to urban voters foreshadowed the northern urban and southern coalition that would gain Franklin Roosevelt the White House in 1932.