APUSH 30

Chapter 30

Scientific Management

Scientific Management

A system of industrial management created and promoted in the early twentieth century by Frederick W. Taylor, emphasizing stopwatch efficiency to improve factory performance. The system gained immense popularity across the United States and Europe.

Fordism

A system of assembly-line manufacturing and mass production named after Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company and developer of the Model T car.

United Negro Improvement Association

A black nationalist organization founded in 1914 by the Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey in order to promote resettlement of African Americans to their “African homeland” and to stimulate a vigorous separate black economy within the United States.

Bolshevik Revolution

The second stage of the Russian Revolution in November 1917 when Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik party seized power and established a communist state. The first stage had occurred the previous February when more moderate revolutionaries overthrew the Russian czar.

red scare

A period of intense anticommunism. The “Palmer raids” of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer resulted in about six thousand deportations of people suspected of “subversive” activities.

criminal syndicalism laws

Passed by many states during the red scare, these nefarious laws outlawed the mere advocacy of violence to secure social change. Stump speakers for the International Workers of the World, or IWW, were special targets.

American plan

A business-oriented approach to worker relations popular among firms in the 1920s to defeat unionization. Managers sought to strengthen their communication with workers and to offer benefits like pensions and insurance. They insisted on an “open shop” in contrast to the mandatory union membership through the “closed shop” that many labor activists had demanded in the strike wave after World War I.

Immigration Act of 1924

Also known as the “National Origins Act,” this law established quotas for immigration to the United States. Immigration from southern and eastern Europe was sharply curtailed, while immigrants from Asia were shut out altogether.

Indian Citizenship Act of 1924

Signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge, the act granted citizenship to all American Indians born in U.S. territory. The act, however, went short of extending the franchise to Indians, a milestone that would only be reached in 1962.

Eighteenth Amendment

This constitutional amendment prohibited the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages, ushering in the era known as prohibition.

Volstead Act

A federal act enforcing the Eighteenth Amendment, which prohibited the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages.

racketeers

People who obtain money illegally by fraud, bootlegging, gambling, or threats of violence. Racketeers invaded the ranks of labor during the 1920s, a decade when gambling and gangsterism were prevalent in American life.

Bible Belt

The region of the American South, extending roughly from North Carolina west to Oklahoma and Texas, where Protestant Fundamentalism and belief in literal interpretation of the Bible were traditionally strongest.

Scopes Trial

A court case that took place during the summer of 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, over the issue of whether evolution could be taught in public schools. Pitting Christian fundamentalists against modernists, the trial eventually produced mixed results for fundamentalists, who won the case but were ridiculed by the national press.

Fundamentalism

A Protestant Christian movement emphasizing the literal truth of the Bible and opposing religious modernism, which sought to reconcile religion and science. It was especially strong in the Baptist Church and the Church of Christ, first organized in 1906.

modernism

In response to the demanding conditions of modern life, this artistic and cultural movement revolted against comfortable Victorian standards and accepted chance, change, contingency, uncertainty, and fragmentation. Originating among avant-garde artists and intellectuals around the turn of the twentieth century, modernism blossomed into a full-fledged cultural movement in art, music, literature, and architecture.

“Lost Generation”

A creative circle of expatriate American artists and writers, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein, who found shelter and inspiration in post–World War I Europe.

Harlem Renaissance

A creative outpouring among African American writers, jazz musicians, and social thinkers, centered around Harlem in the 1920s, that celebrated black culture and advocated for a “New Negro” in American social, political, and intellectual life.

Bureau of the Budget

An agency created in 1921 to oversee the federal budget and keep federal government spending within specified guidelines, imposing a process for fiscal discipline. Superseded by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in 1970.

Adkins v. Children’s Hospital

A landmark Supreme Court decision reversing the ruling in Muller v. Oregon, which had declared women to be deserving of special protection in the workplace.

Nine-Power Treaty

Agreement coming out of the Washington “Disarmament” Conference of 1921–1922 that pledged Britain, France, Italy, Japan, the United States, China, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Belgium to abide by the Open Door policy in China. The Five-Power Naval Treaty on ship ratios and the Four-Power Treaty to preserve the status quo in the Pacific also came out of the conference.

Kellogg-Briand Pact

A sentimental triumph of the 1920s peace movement, this 1928 pact linked sixty-two nations in the supposed “outlawry of war.”

Fordney-McCumber Tariff Law

A comprehensive bill passed to protect domestic production from foreign competitors. As a direct result, many European nations were spurred to increase their own trade barriers.

Teapot Dome scandal

A tawdry affair involving the illegal lease of priceless naval oil reserves in Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and Elk Hills, California. The scandal, which implicated President Harding’s secretary of the interior, was one of several that gave his administration a reputation for corruption.

McNary-Haugen Bill

A farm-relief bill that was championed throughout the 1920s and aimed to keep agricultural prices high by authorizing the government to buy up surpluses and sell them abroad. Congress twice passed the bill, but President Calvin Coolidge vetoed it in 1927 and 1928.

Dawes Plan

An arrangement negotiated in 1924 to reschedule German reparations payments. It stabilized the German currency and opened the way for further American private loans to Germany.

Agricultural Marketing Act

This act established the Federal Farm Board, a lending bureau for hard-pressed farmers. The act also aimed to help farmers help themselves through new producers’ cooperatives. As the depression worsened in 1930, the Board tried to bolster falling prices by buying up surpluses, but it was unable to cope with the flood of farm produce to market.

Hawley-Smoot Tariff

The highest protective tariff in the peacetime history of the United States, passed as a result of good old-fashioned horse trading. To the outside world, it smacked of ugly economic warfare.

Black Tuesday

The dark, panicky day of October 29, 1929, when over 16,410,000 shares of stock were sold on Wall Street. It was a trigger that helped bring on the Great Depression.

Hoovervilles

Grim shantytowns where impoverished victims of the Great Depression slept under newspapers and in makeshift tents. Their visibility (and sarcastic name) tarnished the reputation of the Hoover administration.

Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC)

A government lending agency established under the Hoover administration in order to assist insurance companies, banks, agricultural organizations, railroads, and local governments. It was a precursor to later agencies that grew out of the New Deal and symbolized a recognition by the Republicans that some federal action was required to address the Great Depression.

Norris-La Guardia Anti-Injunction Act

This law banned “yellow-dog,” or antiunion, work contracts and forbade federal courts from issuing injunctions to quash strikes and boycotts. It was an early piece of labor-friendly federal legislation.

Bonus Expeditionary Force (BEF)

Informally known as the Bonus Army, this rag-tag group of twenty thousand veterans marched on Washington to demand immediate payment of bonuses earned during World War I. General Douglas MacArthur dispersed the veterans with tear gas and bayonets.

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.

Bartolomeo Vanzetti

(1888-1927) See Nicola Sacco.

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) See Horace Kallen

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. Lindberge

(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.

Herbert Hoover

(1874-1964) A Quaker-humanitarian tapped to head the Food Administration during World War I. During the 1920s, he became the secretary of commerce, promoting economic modernization and responsible leadership by business to hold off further expansion of government power. Elected to the presidency in 1928 as a Republican, he soon faced the crisis of the Great Depression, which he tried to combat with the same voluntary efforts and restrained government action that had been his hallmark over the previous decade. He lost the election of 1932 to Democrat Franklin Roosevelt, who advocated a more activist role for the federal government.