APUSH 1920s

Election of 1920

• Candidates: Warren G. Harding (R) and James M. Cox (D)

• Harding: 61% popular vote, 404 electoral votes

• Cox: 35% popular vote, 127 electoral votes 

Election of 1924

• Candidates: Calvin Coolidge (R) and John W. Davis (D)

• Coolidge: 54% popular vote, 382 electoral votes

• Davis: 29% popular vote, 136 electoral votes

Election of 1928

• Candidates: Herbert Hoover (R) and Alfred Smith (D)

• Hoover: 58% popular vote, 444 electoral votes

• Smith: 41% popular vote, 81 electoral votes

What did Harding campaign?

• “Return to Normalcy”

• Meaning a return to peace, stability, and isolation after WW1

How was the environment of the 1920s pro-business?

1. Federal government took a general attitude of laissez-faire, meaning minimal regulation and support for business

2. Secretary of Treasury Andrew Mellon reduced taxes from 1921-1926

3. Congress repealed excess profits tax, abolished gift tax, reduced excise taxes, surtax, income, and estate taxes

4. Supreme Court knocked down anti-child labor laws

5. Union membership declined by 30% from 1920 to 1930

6. Fordney McCumber Tariff Law (1922) raised tariff rates

7. Hawley-Smoot Tariff (1930) raised tariff rates

Adkins v Children’s Hospital (1923)

• Reversed Muller v Oregon (Limited women’s working hours)

• This case voided a minimum wage for women workers in the District of Colombia

• There were fewer protections, which favored companies 

Esch-Cummings Transportation Act of 1920

• Allowed for private consolidation of railroads and a promise for the Interstate Commerce Commission to respect their profits 

• Showed the government’s favoritism towards big businesses

Harlem Renaissance

• A flourishing of African American artists, writers, intellectuals, and social leaders in the 1920s, centered in the neighborhoods of Harlem, NYC

• Expressed black life in a way almost never seen in volume alone

• Education included social sciences (anthropology, sociology, etc)

What was the most famous product of the Harlem Renaissance?

• Jazz

• “Unique Americans musical form, developed in New Orleans and other parts of the South before WW1. Jazz musicians developed an ensemble improvisational style”

• Jazz followed the routes of the Great Migration from the South to northern and midwestern cities

How did women’s roles change in the 1920s?

• Women did more work outside of the home, but the percentage was low 20s

• White-collar female workers were in most demand

Examples of sexism that women faced

• In many states, a wife’s earnings were not her own

• Divorce laws favored men

• Often not allowed to serve on juries

• Usually held responsible for illegitimate births

• Social norms discouraged female political participation (voting)

What problems did farmers face in the 1920s?

• Overproduction from mechanization and over planting caused falling crop prices and deflation

• Farm exports fell

• However, commercial farmers did fairly well

• The Great Depression started with farmers

• Synthesis: Populists 

McNary-Haugen Farm Relief Bill

• An attempt to use the government as a buyer and seller of farm products to help the farmer against price swings

• Vetoed twice by Coolidge, who opposed government intervention in the economy

Quota of 1921

Immigration limited to 3% of each nationality based in the 1910 census

Quota of 1924 (National Origins Act)

• Reduced by 2% based on census of 1890 (before the “new” immigrants)

• Especially severely limited immigration from southern and eastern Europe

Quota of 1927

• Number for all Asians & Eastern/Southern Europeans had been limited to 150,000; all Japanese barred

• Japanese were too successful in CA/West Coast

Prosperity in the 1920s

• Real wages increased 21%, but corporate dividends went up 2/3

• Richest 5% of Americans increased their wealth from ¼ to 1/3

• Wealthiest 1% of Americans controlled 19% of all wealth

• Some economists suggested than income of $200-$4000 was needed to live fairly well, but many made less than that

• The number of millionaires increased 400%

“The Man Nobody Knows” (1925)

• Depicted Christ as “the founder of modern business”

• Refers to the 12 disciples, which were used to create the world’s foremost organization

How did big business grow?

• Advertising

• Mergers

• Technology

• Mangers

• Sale of stock 

What did Coolidge do to taxes?

• Lowered taxes across the board, especially corporate income taxes and personal income taxes

• “The business of America is business. The man who builds a factory builds a temple”

Teapot Dome

• Interior Secretary Albert Fall accepted $300,000 in bribes for leasing oil reserves on public land in Teapot Dome, Wyoming

• Part of a larger pattern of corruption that marred Harding’s presidency

• Became the first cabinet officer in US history to serve a prison sentence

How was Harding’s Administration corrupt?

• Teapot Dome

• Tom Miller, the Alien Property Custodian Manager, convicted of taking bribes

• Jess Smith, an aide to Att. Gen Daugherty = corrupt & committed suicide

• Charles Forbes, director of the Veterans Bureau = corrupt & went to prison

• Charles Cramer, an aide to Charles Forbes, committed suicide

• Att. Gen. Daugherty was the first Attorney General to be charged with corruption and put on trial (he barely avoided conviction)

What was the Red Scare?

• A wild and reactionary fear of foreigners, radicals, and “radical ideas

• 1919-1920

Why did the Red Scare happen?

• Russia became communists

• The US cut diplomatic ties with Russia

• Ties with Russia resumed because of Nazi Germany (prior to WW2)

• Workers went on strike around the nation from 1919-1920

What was the Red Summer (1919)?

• An outbreak of deadly racial violence / white supremacy across America

• Bombs were mailed to famous Americans

  • Sent by Anarchists, which increased xenophobic feelings of the period

• America was under “attack”

• Race riots occurred in 2 dozen cities

• Returning Black veterans demanded equality after WWI, but faced white backlash over jobs and housing

Socialism

Control of major means of production by people through state

Communism

Formation of society with a strong government; production eventually controlled by people, but only after a long adjustment period

Anarchism

• Believed government was the problem; it needed to be removed or altered

• Some were violent and believed in immediate revolution

• Some had killed royalty and even a US president (McKinley)

• Typically Italian, operating in Northern cities, particularly Boston

• Ideal society could be built once government is done way with

Palmer Raids 

• 1919-1920

• A bomb blew up part of the US Att. Gen. house

• The Att. Gen. arrested, deported, and violated the rights of hundreds, if not thousands, of people

• Att. Gen A. Mitchell Palmer used the incident to fan public fears

• In 1919, Palmer’s agents stormed the headquarters of a radical organization, capturing thousands of aliens who had committed no crimes but held anarchist or revolutionary beliefs 

Tulsa Race Massacre (1921)

• False reports of an alleged rape helped incite white mobs who resented growing black prosperity

• Anger focused on the 8000 residents of Greenwood (“The Black Wall Street”)

• The mob — helped by Guardsmen, who arrested blacks who resisted — burned 35 blocks of Greenwood and killed several dozen people

• Took a decade for black residents to rebuild Greenwood

• One of the worst incidents of racial violence in U.S. history; erased from many records for decades

What happened to labor unions post-WW1?

• Workers’ expectations rose as the war economy brought higher pay and better working conditions

• When workers tried to maintain these standards, employers cut wage rates and rooted out unions, prompting massive confrontations 

• In 1919, more than 4 million wage laborers went on strike

• Business leaders in rising industries resisted unions and created more nonunionized jobs

• Anti-labor decisions by the Supreme Court were an additional key factor in unions’ decline 

• Labor unions fell from 5.1 mil in 1920 to 3.6 mil in 1929

Coronado Coal Company v United Mine Workers

The court ruled that a striking union could be penalized for illegal restraint of trade

Welfare Capitalism

• A system of labor relations that stressed management’s responsibility for employees’ well-being

• Welfare capitalism replaced unions in the 1920s

How was welfare capitalism pioneered before WW1?

• Henry Ford offered a profit-sharing plan to employees who met the standards of its Social Department, which investigated to ensure that workers’ private lives met the company’s moral standards

• General Electric and US Steel provided health insurance and old-age pensions

• Chicago’s Western Electric Company built athletic facilities and selectively offered paid vacations

Sacco and Vanzetti

• Nicola Sacco was a shoemaker and Bartolomeo Vanzetti was a fish peddler

• Were Italian aliens and self-proclaimed anarchists who evaded the draft 

• In May 1920, during the height of the Red Scare, they were arrested for the murder of 2 men during a robbery of a shoe company in Massachusetts

• Convicted and sat in jail for 6 years

• In 1927, Judge Webster Thayer denied a motion for a new trial and sentenced them to death

• Case was biased by prosecutors’ emphasis on their ties to radical groups 

Sheppard-Towner Federal Maternity and Infancy Act (1921)

• First federally funded health-care legislation that provided federal funds for medical clinics, prenatal education programs, and visiting nurses

• Opponents warned the act would lead to socialized medicine

• Improved healthcare for the poor and significantly lowered infant mortality rates

• Marked the first time Congress designated federal funds for the states to encourage them to administer a social welfare program

Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF)

• Organization founded by women activists in 1919

• Its members denounced imperialism, stressed the human suffering caused by militarism, and proposed social justice measures

• Came under attack during the Red Scare because it included socialist women 

• Women proved to be effective lobbyists, but they had difficulty gaining access to positions inside the Republican and Democratic parties

• Politicians in both parties began to take women’s votes for granted

• Many congressmen supported the Sheppard-Towner Act because they feared the voting power of women 

Associated State

• A system of voluntary business cooperation with the government

• The Commerce Department helped create 2000 trade associations representing companies in almost every major industry, giving corporate leaders greater policymaking power

• Hooper hoped that through the associated state, he could achieve what progressives had sought through government regulations

How did Republicans drop progressive initiatives of the prewar years?

• The Federal Trade Commission failed to enforce antitrust laws

• The Supreme Court, now headed by President Taft, refused to break up the US Steel Corporation, despite evidence of its near monopoly status

Dollar Diplomacy

• Policy emphasizing the connection between America’s economic and political interests overseas

• Business would gain from diplomatic efforts, while the strengthened American economic presence overseas would give added leverage to American diplomacy

Prohibition 

• The ban on the manufacturing of alcohol through the 18th Amendment 

• Was repealed in 1933

• Since many breweries were German-American owned, Americans thought it was unpatriotic to drink beer

Speakeasies

• Illegal drinking sites

• Patrons flocked to speakeasies, which flourished in almost every Chicago neighborhood

• Many Americans streamed South as Mexico regulated liquor and kept it legal, which led to the rise of booming vice towns such as Tijuana and Mexicali

• By 1928, American investors who built a $10 million resort, racetrack, and casino in Tijuana became known as border barons

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)

An organization formed during the Red Scare to protect free speech rights

Scopes Trial (1925)

• Trial of John Scopes, a biology teacher in Tennessee, for violating his state’s ban on teaching evolution

• Created a nationwide frenzy and came to be seen as a showdown between urban and rural values

• Prohibitionists sought to mandate school curricula based on the biblical account of creation

Examples of Immigration Policies 

• “America must be kept American” - Pres Coolidge

• Congress banned Chinese immigration in 1882

• Nativists claimed there were too many European arrivals, some who undermined Protestantism and important anarchism, socialism, and other radical doctrines

• National Origins Act (1924)

• Quota of 1929

Ku Klux Klan (KKK)

• Secret society that first undertook violence against African Americans in the South after the Civil War

• Reborn in 1915 to fight the perceived threats posed by African Americans, immigrants, radicals, feminists, Catholics, Jews

• Mainstream appeal was illustrated by Pres. Wilson’s public praise for “Birth of a Nation”

• Klan declined nationally after 1925, when they were robbed a potent issue by the passage of the anti-immigration bill

Leo Frank

A Jewish factory supervisor in Georgia who was lynched due to a false accusation for the rape and murder of a 13 year old girl

Alfred Smith

• First presidential candidate to reflect the aspirations of the urban working class

• Grandson of Irish peasants

• Governor of NY

• Offended many small-town and rural Americans with his heavy NY accent and brown derby hat, which highlighted his ethnic working-class origins

• Great handicap was his religion (Catholicism)

• Many southern Protestants voted for Hoover because they refused to vote for a Catholic

Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)

• A Harlem-based group, led by Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey, that mobilized African American workers and championed black separatism

• Garvey urged followers to move to Africa, arguing that people of African descent would never be treated justly in white-run countries

• Solicited funds for the Black Star steamship company, which Garvey created as an enterprise that would foster trade with the West Indies and carry American blacks to Africa

• Garvey was imprisoned in 1925 and without his leadership, the movement collapsed 

• Supported Pan-Africanism

Pan-Africanism

The idea that people of African descent, in all parts of the world, have a common heritage and destiny and should cooperate in political action

Ideas that contributed to Pan-Africanism

• Black men’s military service in Europe during WW1

• Pan-African Congress that sought representation at the Versailles treaty table

• Protests against US occupation of Haiti

• Modernist experiments in literature and the arts

Lost Generation

• Referred to young artists and writers who had suffered through WW1 and felt alienated from America’s mass culture society in the 1920s

• Some black and white Americans left for Europe ~ some to escape racism, others to escape the materialistic onslaught which troubled them

Examples of economic shocks after WW1

• Rampant inflation: Prices jumped by 1/3 in 1919 alone 

• After that, a 2 year recession raised unemployment to 10%

• Between 1922 and 1929, national per capita rose by 24%

Examples of consumer culture

• Radios

• Automobiles

• Hollywood Movies

How did consumer culture create friction?

• Wives resented husbands who spent all extra cash at the ballpark

• Generational conflicts emerged, especially when wage-earning children challenged the expectation that their pay should go “all to mother”

• Many poor and affluent families stretched their incomes through consumer credit

Consumer Credit

New forms of borrowing, such as auto loans and installment plans, that flourished in the 1920s, but helped trigger the Great Depression

Automobile Industry / Cars 

• Car sales played a major role in the decade’s economic boom

• Automobiles were a showpiece of modern consumer capitalism that revolutionized American life 

• In 1929, Americans spent $2.58 billion on automobiles

• Stimulated steel, petroleum, chemical, rubber, glass production

• Created 3.7 million jobs

• Highway construction became a billion-dollar-a-year enterprise

• Cars were expensive and most of them bought on credit

  • Created risks for both buyers and the whole economy

  • Borrowers who could not pay off car loans lost their entire investment in the vehicle; if they defaulted, banks were left holding unpaid loans

• Infrastructure of gas stations, motels, and drive-in restaurants soon catered to drivers

Flapper 

• A young woman who defied conventional standards of conduct by wearing short skirts and makeup, freely spending the money she earned on the latest fashions, dancing to jazz, and flaunting her liberated lifestyle 

• Represented a tiny minority of women, but due to movies & advertising, they became influential symbols of women’s sexual and social emancipation 

• Jazz stars helped popularize the style among working class African Americans 

Soft Power

The exercise of popular cultural influence abroad, as American radio and movies became popular around the world in the 1920s, transmitting American cultural ideals overseas

What were the underlying causes of the Great Depression?

• Overproduction

• Speculation

• Unequal wealth distribution

• Weak banking systems