1920s America and the Great Depression

Flashcards defining key vocabulary terms, court cases, legislation, and historical figures from the 1920s consumer boom, social movements, and the start of the Great Depression based on the lecture text.

Calvin Coolidge

The US President who succeeded Warren G. Harding in 1923 and famously declared that the chief business of the American people is business.

Fordlandia

An effort by Henry Ford to build a town in the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest to secure a steady rubber supply for car tires while enforcing American social standards on local workers.

Installment Buying Plans

New credit mechanisms popular in the 1920s that allowed consumers to purchase proliferation of consumer goods by paying in regular installments.

Charles Lindbergh

The aviator who became a major celebrity in 1927 after completing the first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean.

André Siegfried

A French visitor who commented in 1928 that a new mass civilization had emerged in America where citizens considered their standard of living a sacred acquisition.

Factories in the Field

A term for giant California agribusiness operations during the 1920s where crops were grown, processed, packaged, and shipped from a single centralized structure.

Bruce Barton

An advertising executive who wrote a 1925 bestseller portraying Jesus Christ as the greatest advertiser of his day and a go-getting business leader.

Arsène Pujo

The Louisiana congressman who headed congressional hearings in 1912 and 1914 that exposed the stock price manipulation of a Wall Street money trust.

Welfare Capitalism

A socially conscious business strategy adopted by employers in the 1920s that offered employees private pensions, sports programs, and benefits to deter union growth.

American Plan

A workplace campaign embraced by employers in the 1920s that advocated for open shops free of both government regulation and labor unions.

Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)

A proposed constitutional amendment promoted by Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party aimed at eliminating all legal distinctions on account of sex.

Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921

A maternalist reform act that provided federal funds for infant and child health programs before its repeal by Congress in 1929.

Flapper

A 1920s symbol of female cultural rebellion represented by young single women with bobbed hair and short skirts who openly drank and smoked in public.

Torches of Freedom

An advertising phrase utilized to market cigarettes to women as symbols of female independence and personal liberation.

Adkins v. Children's Hospital

A 1923 Supreme Court decision that invalidated a minimum wage law for women in Washington D.C., ruling that voting rights granted women equal workplace freedom to men.

Olmstead v. United States

A 1928 Supreme Court decision that permitted government wiretapping, notable for Justice Louis Brandeis's dissenting opinion asserting the right to be let alone.

Albert Fall

Secretary of the Interior under Harding who became the first cabinet member convicted of a felony after accepting nearly $500,000 in bribes during the Teapot Dome scandal.

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)

An organization established in 1920, evolving from the Civil Liberties Bureau, to defend the rights of Americans to free speech and dissent.

The Lost Generation

A term for American writers and artists, including Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who lived in Europe due to disillusionment with WWI and domestic cultural repression.

Scopes Trial

A celebrated 1925 Tennessee trial of teacher John Scopes for teaching Darwinism, highlighting the cultural clash between religious fundamentalism and modern secular science.

Johnson-Reed Act

A 1924 law that established permanent national-origins immigration quotas prioritizing Northern and Western Europeans while barring entry to non-white Asians.

Illegal Alien

A new legal category established by the 1924 immigration law, which introduced the Border Patrol to police land borders against unauthorized immigration.

Indian Citizenship Act of 1924

Federal legislation that conferred full US citizenship on all Native Americans residing within the United States.

Bhagat Singh Thind

An Indian-born WWI veteran whose petition for naturalized citizenship was rejected in 1923 when the Supreme Court ruled that white is a common speech concept rather than a scientific one.

Black Tuesday

October 29, 1929, the day the US stock market crashed and erased over $10,000,000,000 in market value within five hours, marking the beginning of the Great Depression.