USA rest

Why is the subject "tricky"?

"Société" vs. National Prohibition Act (politics) vs. stock market crash (economics): you need basic knowledge in all THREE fields, not only society

Prohibition: date trap

Volstead Act veto override October 28, 1919, but enforcement ("mise en œuvre") starts January 17, 1920

Crash: date trap

Black Thursday October 24 (-11% intraday per course) BUT the sell-off starts in September; downward trend from September 3; -3/4% on Sept 5, 30 and October 3

Regions to know

New England / Mid-Atlantic / "South" (actually South-East) / Midwest (Upper Midwest = Ohio valley to Great Lakes and Great Plains) / Rockies / South-West (inland, mostly desert) / Pacific Coast (California + Northwest)

First year with a majority urban population

1920: 51% urban (54 million); 56% in 1930 (64 million)

Fastest urbanizing region

The South: Atlanta, Birmingham, Memphis, Houston grew faster than older centers

Fastest growing city of the 1920s

Miami

Western hubs

Denver, Portland, Seattle (regional economic hubs) and Californian cities

Los Angeles in the 1920s

Grew by 115%; fifth-largest city in 1930, over 1.2 million people

New York

Remained the biggest metropolis; older Northeast and upper Midwest cities grew most in absolute terms

Skyscrapers 1929

Close to 400 taller than 20 stories; Chrysler building (1930) and Empire State Building (1931) inaugurated after

Western skylines

Cleveland, Kansas City, San Francisco

1920s in cities: ethnic segregation

High point of social and ethnic segregation; African-Americans in ghettoes everywhere

Immigrant enclaves

Jewish Lower East Side (NYC), Italian South Philadelphia, Canadian French Village in Fall River (Massachusetts), Chinatown in San Francisco

Ethnic enclaves: role

Community support; hostility and exploitation radicalized immigrants (e.g. Jewish immigrants in NYC unions, clothing industry)

Perth Amboy 1923

Italian immigrants organized a counter-demonstration against the KKK; interethnic, interracial coalition of 6,000 (Jewish and Black workers) routed the city police and beat KKK marchers

First Hispanic barrios

1920s; anti-immigrant laws did not block immigration from Latin America

Puerto Ricans in New York

Fifty thousand settled, mostly in East (Spanish) Harlem, low-paying jobs

Mexican migrants

Entered the Southwest as migrant farm laborers, often in cities in the off-season; others joined industrial and construction jobs

Hispanic discrimination in the Southwest

Almost as much as Chinese and Japanese; Los Angeles had separate schools for Mexicans; little municipal investment in barrios

La Orden de Hijos de America

Order of the Sons of America, organized in San Antonio in 1921 against inequities in schools and the jury system

LULAC

League of United Latin American Citizens; launched 1929 with help from the Order; civil rights for all Hispanic-Americans

Native Americans in 1920

Low point of post-Columbian history: ≈250,000 on 50 million acres (mostly desert), having lost 2/3 of their land since the Dawes Act of 1887

Dawes Act

1887; "allotment" policy promoting dispossession

Native American conditions

Tuberculosis, children forced into boarding schools erasing their culture, poverty, undernutrition; yet 4.5 children per family; 300,000 by 1930

Native American citizenship

1924; partly an incentive to leave the tribe and become "normal" Americans

Albert Fall

Harding's corrupt Secretary of the Interior; 1921-1923 laws to steal tribes' rights over oil and gas deposits

Hubert Work

Fall's successor from 1923; more sympathetic to Native American protests

Native American reform organizations

Society for American Indians, National Council of American Indians, American Indian Defense Association (bulletin American Indian Life)

John Collier

Executive secretary of the American Indian Defense Association; later Roosevelt's first Secretary for Indian Affairs (course wording)

Committee of 100

Body of experts gathered by Work; report contrasted Indian poverty with general prosperity

Meriam report

1928; led to the appointment in 1929 of reformist Charles Rhoads, who overhauled the Bureau of Indian Affairs, stopped forced boarding-school enrollment, launched health programs

End of allotment policy

Maintained in principle during the 1920s; abandoned only in 1934

Industrial geography: four main areas

1) Northeast/North-central; 2) Southeast; 3) Gulf of Mexico; 4) California

Industrial area 1

Northeastern/North-central, New York to Great Lakes and Ohio; most large industrial towns: steel, automobiles, coal, oil, heavy industry; by far the most important

Industrial area 2

Southeast: textile factories in the Appalachian mountains; in crisis most of the period

Industrial area 3

Gulf of Mexico: oil, chemicals; growing but relatively small

Industrial area 4

California: movies, small manufacture, some heavy industry; small and growing