Republican White House, 1921-1933

• When Warren G. Harding took the oath to become the 29th president of the US, he promised stability and prosperity via a “return to normalcy”

  • To deliver on his promises, he signed legislation to restore a high protective tariff and dismantled the last wartime controls over industry

  • Harding’s presidency would go down in history as among the most corrupt

    • Harding’s administration suffered a tremendous setback when several officials conspired to lease government land in Wyoming to oil companies in exchange for cash → the Teapot Dome scandal

  • When Harding died suddenly of a heart attack, Vice President Calvin Coolidge ascended to the highest office in the land

    • Coolidge was not afraid of supporting business interests and wealthy Americans by lowering taxes or maintaining high tariff rates but refused to take actions in defense of workers or consumers against American business

• The vestiges of America’s involvement in World War I and its propaganda and suspicions of anything less than “100 percent American” pushed Congress to address fears of immigration and foreign populations

• During the 1920s, the labor movement suffered a sharp decline in memberships

  • Workers lost not only bargaining power but also the support of courts, politicians, and, in large measure, the American public

• While Coolidge supported business, other Americans continued their activism

  • The 1920s, for instance, represented a time of great activism among American women, who had won the vote with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920

    • Concerned about squalor, poverty, and domestic violence, women had already lent their efforts to prohibition, which went into effect under the Eighteenth Amendment in January 1920

    • Some activists advocated protective legislation for women and children, while Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party called for the elimination of all legal distinctions “on account of sex” through the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which was introduced but defeated in Congress

• National politics in the 1920s were dominated by the Republican Party, which held not only the presidency but both houses of Congress as well

Culture of Consumption

• The consumer change had resulted from the industrial expansion of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

  • With the discovery of new energy sources and manufacturing technologies, industrial output flooded the market with a range of consumer products such as ready-to-wear clothing, convenience foods, and home appliances

  • By the end of the nineteenth century, output had risen so dramatically that many contemporaries feared supply had outpaced demand and that the nation would soon face the devastating financial consequences of overproduction

  • American businessmen attempted to avoid this catastrophe by developing new merchandising and marketing strategies that transformed distribution and stimulated a new culture of consumer desire

• The department store stood at the center of this early consumer revolution

  • By the 1880s, several large dry-goods houses blossomed into modern retail department stores

• The joy of buying infected a growing number of Americans in the early twentieth century as the rise of mail-order catalogs, mass-circulation magazines, and national branding further stoked consumer desire

• The automobile industry also fostered a new culture of consumption by promoting the use of credit

  • Henry Ford’s assembly line, which advanced production strategies practiced within countless industries, brought automobiles within the reach of middle-income Americans and further drove the spirit of consumerism

Culture of Escape

• Whether through the automobile, Hollywood’s latest films, jazz records produced on Tin Pan Alley, or the hours spent listening to radio broadcasts of Jack Dempsey’s prizefights, the public wrapped itself in popular culture

• As the automobile became more popular and more reliable, more people traveled more frequently and attempted greater distances

  • In order to serve and capture the growing number of drivers, Americans erected gas stations, diners, motels, and billboards along the roadside

• The United States dominated the global film industry

  • In 1918, Universal, Paramount, Columbia, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) were all founded by or led by Jewish executives

    • Aware of their social status as outsiders, these immigrants (or sons of immigrants) purposefully produced films that portrayed American values of opportunity, democracy, and freedom

  • Americans fell in love with the movies

• As Americans went to the movies more and more, at home they had the radio

  • Radio stations brought entertainment directly into the living room through the sale of advertisements and sponsorships

  • Radio exposed Americans to a broad array of music

• The 1920s also witnessed the maturation of professional sports, and perhaps no sports figure left a bigger mark than Babe Ruth

  • After an era of destruction and doubt brought about by World War I, Americans craved heroes who seemed to defy convention and break boundaries

“The New Woman”

• The rising emphasis on spending and accumulation nurtured a national ethos of materialism and individual pleasure

• These impulses were embodied in the figure of the flapper, whose bobbed hair, short skirts, makeup, cigarettes, and carefree spirit captured the attention of American novelists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis

  • Rejecting the old Victorian values of desexualized modesty and self-restraint, young “flappers” seized opportunities for the public coed pleasures offered by new commercial leisure institutions

• There was a profound and keenly felt cultural shift that, for many women, meant increased opportunity to work outside the home

• Meanwhile, especially in urban centers such as New York, the gay community flourished

“The New Negro”

• The iniquities of Jim Crow segregation, the barbarities of America’s lynching epidemic, and the depravities of 1919’s Red Summer weighed heavily upon Black Americans as they entered the 1920s

• In Tulsa, Oklahoma, Black Americans had built up the Greenwood District with commerce and prosperity

  • On the evening of May 31, 1921, spurred by a false claim of sexual assault levied against a young Black man–nineteen-year-old Dick Rowland had likely either tripped over a young white elevator operator’s foot or tripped and brushed the woman’s shoulder with his hand–a white mob mobilized, armed themselves, and destroyed the prosperous neighborhood

  • Mobs burned over 1,000 homes and killed as many as several hundred Black Tulsans

  • Known as the Tulsa Massacre

• The relentlessness of racial violence awoke a new generation of Black Americans to new alternatives

  • The Great Migration had pulled enormous numbers of Black southerners northward, and, just as cultural limits loosened across the nation, the 1920s represented a period of self-reflection among African Americans, especially those in northern cities

• Alain Locke did not coin the term New Negro, but he did much to popularize it

  • In the 1925 book The New Negro, Locke produced an anthology that was of African Americans, rather than only about them

• The Harlem Renaissance was manifested in theater, art, and music

  • For the first time, Broadway presented Black actors in serious roles

  • In music, jazz rocketed in popularity

  • In art, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Aaron Douglas, and Palmer Hayden showcased Black cultural heritage and captured the population’s current experience. In music, jazz rocketed in popularity. Eager to hear “real jazz,” whites journeyed to Harlem’s

  • The explosion of African American self-expression also found multiple outlets in politics

    • the 1910s and 1920s, perhaps no one so attracted disaffected Black activists as Marcus Garvey

      • Garvey was a Jamaican publisher and labor organizer who arrived in New York City in 1916 and built the largest Black nationalist organization in the world, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)

      • Inspired by Pan-Africanism and Booker T. Washington’s model of industrial education, and critical of what he saw as Du Bois’s elitist strategies in service of Black elites, Garvey sought to promote racial pride, encourage Black economic independence, and root out racial oppression in Africa and the Diaspora

      • Headquartered in Harlem, the UNIA published a newspaper, Negro World, and organized elaborate parades in which members, known as Garveyites, dressed in ornate, militaristic regalia and marched down city streets

Culture War

• For all of its cultural ferment, however, the 1920s were also a difficult time for radicals and immigrants and anything “modern”

  • Many Americans expressed anxieties about the changes that had remade the United States and, seeking scapegoats, many middle-class white Americans pointed to Eastern European and Latin American immigrants and African Americans

  • In 1921, Congress passed the Emergency Immigration Act as a stopgap immigration measure and then, three years later, permanently established country-of-origin quotas through the National Origins Act

    • The number of immigrants annually admitted to the United States from each nation was restricted to 2 percent of the population who had come from that country and resided in the United States in 1890

Fundamentalist Christianity

• In addition to alarms over immigration and the growing presence of Catholicism and Judaism, a new core of Christian fundamentalists was very much concerned about relaxed sexual mores and increased social freedoms, especially as found in city centers

  • Christian Fundamentalism arose most directly from a doctrinal dispute among Protestant leaders

    • These Modernists, influenced by the biblical scholarship of nineteenth-century German academics, argued that Christian doctrines about the miraculous might be best understood metaphorically

Rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan

• Suspicions of immigrants, Catholics, and modernists contributed to a string of reactionary organizations

  • None so captured the imaginations of the country as the reborn Ku Klux Klan (KKK), a white supremacist organization that expanded beyond its Reconstruction Era anti-Black politics to now claim to protect American values and the American way of life from Black people, feminists (and other radicals), immigrants, Catholics, Jews, atheists, bootleggers, and a host of other imagined moral enemies

• Two events in 1915 are widely credited with inspiring the rebirth of the Klan: the lynching of Leo Frank and the release of The Birth of a Nation, a popular and groundbreaking film that valorized the Reconstruction Era Klan as a protector of feminine virtue and white racial purity

• Contrary to its perception of as a primarily southern and lower-class phenomenon, the second Klan had a national reach composed largely of middle-class people

• In many states and localities, the Klan dominated politics to such a level that one could not be elected without the support of the KKK

  • Despite the breadth of its political activism, the Klan is today remembered largely as a violent vigilante group

    • Members of the Klan and affiliated organizations often carried out acts of lynching and “nightriding”—the physical harassment of bootleggers, union activists, civil rights workers, or any others deemed “immoral” under the cover of night or their hoods and robes

      • Klan violence was extensive enough in Oklahoma that Governor John C. Walton placed the entire state under martial law in 1923