APUSH Chapter 30: The Roaring Twenties

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.

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 (UNIA)

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.

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.

American plan

A business-oriented approach to worker relations popular among firms in the 1920s to defeat unionization.

Immigration Act of 1924

Also known as the 'National Origins Act,' this law established quotas for immigration to the United States.

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.

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.

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.

Fundamentalism

A Protestant Christian movement emphasizing the literal truth of the Bible and opposing religious modernism.

modernism

An artistic and cultural movement that revolted against comfortable Victorian standards and accepted chance, change, contingency, uncertainty, and fragmentation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.