APUSH Period 7 Reading Notes

Chapter 20: THE PROGRESSIVES

Section 1: The Progressive Impulse

Progressives believed that society was capable of improvement and that continued advancement was the nation’s destiny

The Muckrakers and the Social Gospel

• Muckrakers: Crusading journalists who began to direct public attention toward social, economic, and political injustices.

  • First targeted trusts and railroad companies

• Charles Francis Adams Jr. uncovered corruption among railroad barons

• Ida Tarbell produced a study on the Standard Oil Trust

• Lincoln Steffens portrayed machine government and boss rule in cities

• Social Justice: A movement that seeks justice for whole groups or societies rather than individuals

• Social Gospel: The effort to make faith a tool of social reform; the movement was chiefly concerned with redeeming the nation’s cities

  • Salvation Army

  • In His Steps - Charles Sheldon

The Settlement House Movement

• Urban reformers believed crowded immigrant neighborhoods were distressful

• Settlement Houses: Helped immigrant families adapt to the language and customs of America

  • Jane Addams: Hull House became a model for many others

The Allure of Expertise

• Progressives put high value on knowledge and expertise

  • Believed scientific thinking was important to apply to other subjects

• Thorstein Veblen proposed a new economic system in which power would reside in the hands of highly trained engineers.

The Professions

• Need for managers, technicians, accountants, workers, etc.

• Increase in demand for professional services led to increase in the idea of professionalism

  • Those performing these services became the “new middle class”

• American Medical Association (AMA): national, professional society

  • Called for strict, scientific standards for admission to the practice of medicine

  • State governments responded by passing laws requiring the licensing of all physicians

• Professional bar associations and law schools

• Schools of business administration and national organizations

  • National Association of Manufacturers and U.S. Chamber of Commerce

• National Farm Bureau Federation: network of agricultural organizations designed to spread scientific farming methods

• Ethics of professionalism aimed to remove the untrained and incompetent

Women and Professions

• Most women were excluded from professional careers, but some got professional careers anyways

• Settlement houses, social work, teaching, and nursing

  • Nursing was primarily a women’s field after the Civil War

Section 2: Women and Reform

The “New Woman”

• Women have less children, and children spend most of their time at school

  • Women began looking for more activities outside of the house

• Single women were the most prominent reformers

• “Boston marriage”: Lesbian relationships between reformers in secrecy

The Clubwomen

• Women’s Clubs

  • Began largely as cultural organizations to provide middle and upper-class women with an outlet for their intellectual energies

  • General Federation of Women’s Clubs

• Pushed the government to inspect workplaces, regulate food and drug industries, reform policies toward Indian tribes, apply new standards to urban housing, and outlaw manufacture and sale of alcohol

• Social Security System: provided pensions to widowed or abandoned mothers with small children

• Creation of Children’s Bureau: directed to develop policies to protect children

• Allied with other women’s groups like the Women’s Trade Union League

  • Held public meetings on behalf of female workers, raised money to support strikes, marched on picket lines, and bailed striking women out of jail

• Most Clubs excluded African Americans

  • National Association of Colored Women

  • Concerns on lynching and segregation

Woman Suffrage

• Expansion of natural rights to women

  • Antisuffrage movement dominated by men occurred in response and was supported by many women

  • Suffrage seemed like a radical demand

• National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA)

  • Led by Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt

• Would give temperance supporters a political voice

• Also argued maternal influence would curb belligerence of men

• Nineteenth Amendment (1920) guaranteed voting rights to women

• Alice Paul: Head of the National Women’s Party

  • Wanted a constitutional amendment that would provide full, legal protection for their rights and prohibit all discrimination on the basis of gender.

Section 3: The Assault on the Parties

Early Attacks

• Greenbackism and Populism were early efforts to break the hammerlock with which Republicans and Democrats controlled public life

• Printed ballots only allowed for the party candidates to be elected, and political bosses monitored them closely

• New secret ballots allowed for anyone to be elected without the supervision of political bosses

Municipal Reform

• Progressive belief that party rule impact was damaging cities the most

  • Muckrakers were a powerful voice for this idea

• Nonpartisan commissions were elected in replacement of mayors in many cities

• In some cities, city managers were hired to take charge of the city government

  • They were often professional business managers or engineers

• Some cities just made the election of mayors nonpartisan

Statehouse Progressivism

• The 17th Amendment transferred the right to elect U.S. senators from the state legislatures to ordinary voters

• Initiative: Allowed reformers to bypass state legislatures by submitting new legislation directly to the voters in general elections

• Referendum: Provided a method by which actions of legislature could be put to the electorate for approval.

• Direct Primary election: an attempt to remove the selection of candidates from the bosses and give it to the people

  • In the South: it was an effort to limit black voting

• Recall: Gave voters the right to remove a public official from a special election, which could be called after a sufficient number of citizens had signed a petition

• Robert M. La Fallete: governor of Wisconsin

  • Most celebrated state-level reformer

  • Helped turn his state into a “laboratory of progressivism”

  • Regulated railroads and utilities where he addressed abuses of power

  • Passed laws to provide compensation for those injured on the job

  • Made graduated taxes on inherited fortunes

  • Nearly doubled state levies on railroads and other corporate interests

Parties and Interest Groups

• Reforms led to a decline in party influence

• Voter turnout significantly decreased

  • Party bosses had less power due to the new secret ballots

• Interest Groups: Other power centers replacing a portion of Democrat and Republican power

  • Social workers, settlement house movements, women’s clubs, etc.

• Many new, professional organizations were made

Section 4: Sources of Progressive Reform

Labor, the Machine, and Reform

• New laws on child labor, workmen’s compensation, and working hours were being made

• Tammany Hall

  • Led by Charles Francis Murphy

  • Was a famous political machine

  • Sometimes used its political power on behalf of legislation to improve working conditions, protect child laborers, and eliminate worst abuses of the industrial economy

• Fire swept through the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, causing many, mostly women, to die

  • Management locked all of the emergency exits, causing many to be trapped inside

  • Tammany Democrats Robert F. Wagner and Alfred E. Smith passed a series of labor laws imposing strict regulations on factory owners and established effective mechanisms for reinforcement as a result of the fire

Western Progressives

• Western Progressive leaders: Hiram Johnson, George Norris, and William Borah

• Most growth in the west was a result of federally funded dams, water projects, and other infrastructure

  • Resulted from conflicts over water sources in the West.

African Americans and Reform

• To African Americans, the progressive era produced significant challenges to existing racial norms

• Before the Progressive Era:

  • Booker T. Washington encouraged black men and women to work for immediate self-improvement rather than long-range social change

• During the Progressive Era:

  • W.E.B. Du Bois led a new approach that challenged Washington’s philosophy

    • Was also one of the first African Americans to receive a degree from Harvard

  • The Souls of Black Folk - Du Bois

    • Launched an open attack on the philosophy of Washington, accusing him of encouraging white efforts to sustain segregation and limit aspirations of his race

  • Du Bois encouraged talented blacks to accept nothing less than a full university education and aspire to the professions.

    • Launched the Niagara Movement

    • Joined with sympathetic white progressives to form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

  • Ida B. Wells-Barnett worked with the National Association of Colored Women and Women’s Convention of the National Baptist Church to try expose lynching and challenge segregation

Section 5: Crusades for Social Order and Reform

The Temperance Crusade

• Many progressives were against the consumption of alcohol

• Drawbacks of alcohol:

  • Violence and murder within urban families

  • Ineffective work on the job

• The Temperance movement arose with new strength

• Temperance advocates formed the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), which was led by Frances Ward

  • Largest women’s organization in American history to that point

• The Anti-Saloon League began to press for the legal abolition of saloons as a step toward eradicating drinking altogether

  • Demand grew to the complete prohibition of the sale and manufacture of alcoholic beverages

• Many states started passing prohibition laws

• The 18th Amendment prohibited the sale and manufacture of alcoholic beverages

Immigration Restriction

• Pressure to close off immigration

• Eugenics began as the science of altering the reproductive process of plants and animals to produce new hybrids and breeds

  • The science grew to be the belief that human inequalities were hereditary and that immigration was contributing to the multiplication of the “unfit”

  • Led to nativist ideals gaining strength

The Dream of Socialism

• Socialism gained strength

  • The Socialist Party of America, led by Eugene V. Debs, was supported by Germans, Jews, and Protestant Farmers in the South and Midwest

• Some supported Marxism, but others just wanted to keep small-scaled private enterprises while nationalizing major industries

• Some believed in working for reform politically, while others wanted to get it militarily

• The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)

  • Was a radical labor union that wanted reform through military action

  • Known to opponents as the “Wobblies”

  • Led by William “Big Bill” Haywood

  • Advocated a single union for all workers and was one of the few labor organizations to champion the cause of unskilled workers

  • Was believed to have been responsible for dynamiting railroad lines and power stations and committing other acts of terror

  • It was an extreme radical part of the socialist party, and was not representative of Socialism; most socialists had more moderate ideals

• Socialism declined due to a wave of anti-radicalism that spawned from WWI

Decentralization and Regulation

• Other People’s Money - Louis D. Brandeis

  • “curse of bigness”

  • Insisted that the government must regulate competition in such a way as to ensure that large combinations did not emerge

• Others believed that the government should not fight corporate growth but instead should guard against abuses of power by large institutions

  • This ideology was supported by Theodore Roosevelt, who was the most powerful symbol of the reform impulse at the national level

Section 6: Theodore Roosevelt and the Modern Presidency

The Accidental President

• Leon Czolgosz shot President McKinley in the stomach, leading to his death

  • Theodore Roosevelt took his place

• Roosevelt promoted cautious, moderate change, and he believed that reform was a tool not used to remake American society but rather a tool to protect American society from more radical changes

• Roosevelt did not promote the destruction of trusts, but he did make efforts to break up combinations

  • Ordered the Justice Department to invoke the Sherman Antitrust Act against the Northern Securities Company

  • Made many antitrust suits during his presidency, but he made no serious commitment to reverse economic concentration

• Strike by the United Mine Workers

  • Roosevelt protected the workers, leading to higher wages and lower hours for them

The “Square Deal”

• The Square Deal: Roosevelt’s domestic program, which reflected his three major goals: conservation of natural resources, corporate law, and consumer protection

• Roosevelt won the Election of 1904

• The Hepburn Railroad Regulation Act of 1906 sought to restore some regulatory authority to the government by giving the Interstate Commerce Commission power to oversee railroad rates

• The Pure Food and Drug Act restricted the sale of dangerous or ineffective medicines

• The Jungle - Upton Sinclair

  • Included appalling descriptions of conditions in the meatpacking industry

• The Meat Inspection Act helped eliminate many diseases once transmitted in impure meat

• Made the 8-hour workday, more compensation for victims of industrial accidents, inheritance and income taxes, and regulation of the stock market

Roosevelt and the Environment

• Roosevelt restricted private development on millions of undeveloped acres in the West

• Roosevelt was the first president to take part in the struggling conservation movement

• Conservationists promoted policies that protected land for carefully managed development

• The National Reclamation Act used funds raised by the sale of public lands in the west for the construction of dams, reservoirs, and canals; projects that would “reclaim” arid lands for cultivation and later provide cheap electric power

• Roosevelt also supported the naturalists, who were committed to protecting the natural beauty of the land and health of its wildlife

  • Roosevelt spent four days camping in the Sierras with John Muir, the nation’s leading preservationist and founder of the Sierra Club.

  • Also aided the National Park System, protecting land from exploitation and development

• Hetch Hetchy Valley

  • Protected by naturalists, but people living nearby in San Francisco wanted a dam to be built there

  • San Francisco suffered a devastating earthquake and fire, causing for more support for building the dam

  • Gifford Pinchot, the first director of the U.S. Forest Service, approved for the dam’s construction

  • The fight helped mobilize a new coalition of people committed to the preservation of wilderness

Panic and Retirement

• Despite Roosevelt’s reforms, the government still had little control over the industrial economy

• Panic of 1907

  • Conservatives blamed Roosevelt’s economic policies for the recession

  • Roosevelt acted quickly to reassure business leaders that he would not interfere with their recovery efforts

• J.P. Morgan constructed a pool of assets of several important New York banks to prop up shaky financial institutions

  • Roosevelt reluctantly agreed to let Morgan make a purchase by U.S. Steel of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company

  • The panic soon subsided as a result

• Roosevelt did not run for a third term.

Section 7: The Troubled Succession

William Howard Taft assumed presidency in the Election of 1908 due to seeming acceptable to almost anyone

Taft and the Progressives

• Payne-Aldriff Tariff: a Progressive tariff during Taft’s administration that barely reduced tariff rates

• Taft was very disappointing to the Progressives

  • Replaced Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, James R Garfield, a conservationist, with Richard A Ballinger, a conservative corporate lawyer

• Louis Glavis charged Ballinger with having once connived to turn over valuable public coal lands in Alaska to a private syndicate for personal profit

  • Resulted in Taft becoming popular with neither the Progressives nor the Conservatives

The Return of Roosevelt

• Due to Taft’s presidency, Roosevelt became inspired to run for president again

• “New Nationalism”: A set of principles which argued that social justice was possible only through a strong federal government whose executive acted as the “steward of the public welfare”

  • Supported graduated income and inheritance taxes, workers’ compensation for industrial accidents, regulation of the labor of women and children, tariff revision, and firmer regulation of corporations.

Spreading Insurgency

• Progressives took over the direct primary elections and Democrats took over the general election

• Two events changed Roosevelt’s mind, causing him to run for president

  • The deal he made with JP Morgan during the Panic of 1807 turned out to be unconstitutional, enraging Roosevelt by the implication that he acted improperly

  • Robert La Follette, a Progressive leader running for president, had his daughter suffer through a bad illness, causing him to go into a nervous breakdown during a speech

Roosevelt vs. Taft

• Roosevelt and Taft were fighting for the Republican nomination

  • Roosevelt won primaries, but Taft was favored by most party leaders who controlled the nominating process

  • Taft won, but Roosevelt led his supporters out of the convention to leave the party and form a new party

• Bull Moose Party: New Progressive party launched by Roosevelt

  • Hopeless cause due to most supporters not wanting to leave the Republican Party

  • Was also considerably weak compared to the Democrat party candidate, Woodrow Wilson

Section 8: Woodrow Wilson and the New Freedom

Woodrow Wilson

• Woodrow Wilson: Progressive leader and democratic candidate for presidency; used to be a professor at Princeton

• The New Freedom: Wilson’s program that supported a progressive agenda

  • Wilson believed that big business was wrong and inefficient, and he wanted to destroy monopoly

• Wilson won the Election of 1912

The Scholar as President

• Wilson exerted firm control over his cabinet and delegated real authority only to those who were loyal to him

• Edward M. House

  • Wilson’s most powerful advisor

  • Held no office and only claim to authority was his personal intimacy with the president

• Wilson made a substantial lowering of the protective tariff

  • Progressives believed that the Underwood-Simmons Tariff provided cuts significant enough to introduce real competition into American markets and thus to help break the power of trusts

  • Graduated income tax was established to make up for lost revenue from establishment of the tariff; the Sixteenth Amendment permitted the graduated income tax

• The Federal Reserve Act: Created 12 regional banks, each to be owned and controlled by the individual banks of their district. Those banks would hold a certain percentage of the assets of their member banks in reserve; they would use those reserves to support loans to private banks at a discounted rate that the Federal Reserve system would set; they would issue new, standardized paper bills called Federal Reserve notes that would become the nation’s basic medium of trade and would be backed by the government. Most importantly, they would be able to shift funds quickly to troubled areas to meet increased demands for credit or to protect imperiled banks Supervising and regulating the entire system was a national Federal Reserve Board, whose members were appointed by the president.

  • In short, the Federal Reserve Act created a national currency and a monetary system that could respond effectively to the stresses in the banking system and create a stable financial system.

• The Federal Trade Commission Act created a regulatory agency that would help businesses determine in advance whether their actions would be acceptable to the government. The agency would also be able to launch prosecutions against “unfair trade practices” and would have wide power to investigate corporate behavior

• The Clayton Antitrust Bill proposed stronger measures to break up trusts; was later greatly weakened by conservative assaults

Retreat and Advance

• Wilson was against women suffrage and was for segregation

• Louis Brandeis: First Jew and most advanced progressive to serve in the Supreme Court

• Keating-Owen Act: prohibited shipment of goods produced by child labor across state-lines; Supreme Court struck it down

• Smith-Lever Act: offered matching federal grants to support agricultural extension education

Chapter 21: AMERICA AND THE GREAT WAR

Section 1: The “Big Stick”: America and the World, 1901 - 1917

Roosevelt and “Civilization”

• Roosevelt believed in “civilized” and “uncivilized” nations

  • “Civilized Nations”: predominantly white and industrial; had the right and duty to intervene in affairs of “backward nations” to preserve order and stability

  • “Uncivilized Nations”: Generally nonwhite, suppliers of raw materials and markets

Protecting the “Open Door” in Asia

• Treaty of Portsmouth

  • Japanese surprise attack on Russian Fleet at Port Arthur

  • Roosevelt wanted neither Japan nor Russia to have power there

  • Roosevelt negotiated a secret agreement with the Japanese to ensure that the U.S could continue to trade freely in the region

• Japan and U.S. relations slowly fell apart, Japan began to exclude American trade from Japan’s territories

  • Roosevelt sent new American navy, “The Great White Fleet”, on an unprecedented journey around the world that included a call on Japan

The Iron-Fisted Neighbor

• Roosevelt Corollary: The U.S. had the right not only to oppose European intervention in the West but also to intervene in domestic affairs of its neighbors if those neighbors proved unable to maintain order and national sovereignty on their own

• America used naval power to pressure German navy to stop bombarding a Venezuelan port

• America also helped the Dominican Republic after a revolution on leaving the new government in debt

The Panama Canal

• Panama Canal: The canal finished in 1914 that linked the Atlantic and Pacific by creating a channel through Central America

• John Hay: Roosevelt’s secretary of state

  • Arranged an agreement with Tomas Herran to give the U.S. a “Canal Zone” in Columbia in return for a $10 million fee and annual rent for $250,000

  • Deal was not accepted by Columbia

• Phillipe Bunau-Vanilla: chief engineer of the French canal project

  • Helped organize and finance a revolution in Panama

  • Roosevelt recognized Panama as an independent nation

  • Canal was allowed as gratitude for help with revolting against the previous government

Taft and “Dollar Diplomacy”

• Dollar Diplomacy: Foreign policies, especially those of the Taft administration in Latin America, that privileged American economic interests.

  • Mainly in the Caribbean

Diplomacy and Morality

• U.S. established a military government in the Dominican Republic, made the new Haitian constitution, bought a colony from Denmark and named it the Virgin Islands, and signed a treaty with Nicaragua to allow for American intervention

• Porfirio Diaz: Mexican dictator that permitted American businesses but establish an enormous economic presence in Mexico

• Francisco Madero: Overthrew Porfirio Diaz and promised democratic reform and seemed hostile to American businesses in Mexico

• Victoriano Huerta: Quietly encouraged by the U.S. to depose Madero, murdered Madero, and ruled Mexico

  • Wilson announced that he would never recognize Huerta’s “government of butchers”

  • Made a full military dictatorship

• Venustiano Carranza: Leader of the Mexican constitutionalists

  • Carranza Faction captured Mexico City and forced Huerta to flee the country

  • Carranza refused to accept American guidelines for the creation of a new government

• Pancho Villa: Carranza’s lieutenant, Wilson originally looked at him to overthrow Carranza, but when Villa’s military position deteriorated, Wilson abandoned him.

  • Shot 16 American mining engineers in retaliation of what he considered an American betrayal

• John J. Pershing: Sent to capture Villa, but failed due to retaliation by Carranza

• Wilson recognized the Carranza regime

Section 2: The Road to War

The Collapse of the European Peace

• Triple Entente: Alliance before WWI between Britain, France, and Russia

• Triple Alliance: Alliance before WWI between Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Italy

• Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist

  • Russia mobilized armies along border with Austria-Hungary to protect Serbia as an ally

  • Germans declared war on France and Russia, and Britain declared war on Germany

• Central Powers: Alliance during WWI between Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire

• Allies: Alliance during WWI between Russia, Britain, France, and Serbia; Italy and Japan later joined

Wilson’s Neutrality

• Most Americans supported Britain

• British blockaded Germany; America accepted to not trade there

  • U.S. now exclusively traded with the Allies

• Germans resorted to U-boat warfare

  • Sunk the British passenger ship, Lusitania, without warning, also killing American passengers on that ship

• Announced that the Allies armed merchant ships to sink U-boats

  • Germany attacked the Sussex, also killing American passengers

• Due to Lusitania and Sussex, Wilson demanded Germany to abandon its “unlawful tactics”; German government relented

Preparedness vs. Pacifism

• Wilson first denounced the idea of American military buildup as needless and provocative

  • Later on, however, he endorsed an ambitious proposal by American military leaders for a large and rapid increase in the nation’s armed forces

• Wilson’s reelection campaign: “He kept us out of war.”

• Election of 1916: Woodrow Wilson vs. Charles Evans Hughes

  • Wilson won

Intervention

• Zimmerman Telegram: The communication intercepted in early 1917 from the German foreign secretary to the German ambassador in Mexico outlining a deal to draw the Mexicans into the war against the U.S.

• Wilson declared war against Germany due to U-boat warfare and the Zimmerman Telegram

  • Opposition to the war would not be tolerated

Section 3: “Over There”

Mobilizing the Military

• American help drastically turned the war

• Bolshevik Revolution: Russian revolution that established a new communist government led by V.I. Lenin; Russia left the war

• Selective Service Act: Law that created a national draft to provide men to fight in WWI

• The Ninety Second and Ninety Third were composed entirely of African American soldiers

The Yanks are Coming

• John J. Pershing led the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF)

• Second Battle of the Marne: American divisions helped push German army back roughly to its original position.

• Meuse-Argonne Offensive: The war’s final Allied push

• Trench warfare was very common

• Harlem Hell Fighters: Completely composed of black soldiers and made a major part in the war’s final offensives

The New Technology of Warfare

• Tanks, flamethrowers, poisonous mustard gas, and planes

• Faster machine guns and motorized vehicles required supplies; frequent stops for supplies

Organizing the Economy for War

• Established Council of National Defense and Civilian Advisory Commission

• War Industries Board: Created to coordinate government purchases of military supplies

• National War Labor Board established to serve as the final mediator of labor disputes

The Search for Social Unity

• Most conspicuous official effort to support the war was a vast propaganda campaign orchestrated by the Committee on Public Information (CPI) under the direction of the progressive journalist George Creel

  • Portrayed savagery of the Germans

• The Espionage Act gave the government tools with which to combat spying, sabotage, or obstruction of the war effort

• The Sabotage Act and Sedition Act expanded the meaning of the Espionage Act to make illegal any public expression of opposition to the war

• The Socialist Party and the IWW were the most targeted

  • Eugene V. Debs, leader of the Socialist Party, was sent to 10 years in prison along with other socialist leaders

• German Americans were persecuted

Section 4: The Search for a New World Order

The Fourteen Points

• The Fourteen Points: President Wilson’s list of principles for which he believed the nation should be fighting for during WWI.

  • Adjusting postwar boundaries and establishing new nations to replace the defunct Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires.

  • Governing international conduct in the future

  • Proposal for a League of Nations that would help implement these new principles and territorial adjustments and resolve future controversies

The Paris Peace Conference

• Principle Figures:

  • America: Wilson

  • Great Britain: David Lloyd George

  • France: Georges Clemenceau

  • Italy: Vittorio Orlando

The Ratification Battle

• Henry Cabot Lodge prevented the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles in America

Section 5: A Society in Turmoil

The Unstable Economy

• Mass inflation killing consumer market

• Unprecedented strike wave

• Public opinion hostile to strikers

The Demands of African Americans

• The Great Migration: The movement of nearly ½ million black people from the rural South to industrial cities in the North during WWI

• Southern lynchings increased

  • Animosity towards blacks grew

  • Even blacks attacked other blacks

• Claude McKay: One of the major figures of what would become known as the Harlem Renaissance, wrote If we Must Die that was against racially-motivated attacks

• Marcus Garvey: Encouraged black people to reject assimilation into white society and develop pride in their own race and culture; founded UNIA

The Red Scare

• The Red Scare: A period of intense, popular fear and government repression of real/imagined leftist radicalism; usually associated with years following WWI

• Palmer Raids: Led by A. Mitchell Palmer, these police actions targeted alleged radical centers throughout the country, often using extralegal means

• Two Italian Immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Venzetti were sentenced to death despite weak evidence for murder.

Refuting the Red Scare

• Palmer’s career was destroyed due to his raids during the Red Scare

• J. Edgar Hoover: Palmer’s assistant, his career was also destroyed

• National Civil Liberties Bureau (renamed to American Civil Liberties Union) committed to protecting civil liberties

• Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis defended unpopular speech

The Retreat from Idealism

• The Nineteenth Amendment led to a new era of Progressivism

• Election of 1920:

  • Democratic candidates: James M. Cox and Franklin D. Roosevelt

  • Republican candidate: Warren Gamaliel Harding

  • Harding won on the platform to return to “normalcy”

Chapter 22: THE NEW ERA

Section 1: The New Economy

Technology, Organization, and Economic Growth

• Massive Inflation

• Automobiles, Radio, Airplanes (not completely commercialized yet), telephones, first analog computer, genetic research

• Industries dependent on large-scale mass production typically consolidated more than other industries

Workers in an Age of Capital

• Welfare Capitalism: A corporate strategy for discouraging labor unrest by improving working conditions, hours, wages, and other elements of workers’ lives

  • System collapsed during the Great Depression

• American Plan: A euphemism for the open shop; the crusade for this became a pretext for a harsh campaign of union-busting

  • Open shop: where no worker could be required to join a union

Women and Minorities in the Workforce

• “Pink-collar” jobs: low-paying service occupations

• A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was one of the few important unions dominated and led by African Americans

• Many of the Issei (Japanese immigrants) and Nisei (their American-born children) enjoyed significant economic success

  • California passed laws to make it more difficult for them to buy land

Agricultural Technology and the Plight of the Farmer

• Tractors, sophisticated combines and harvesters, hybrid corn, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides

• Decline in food prices and farmer’s incomes

• Parity: A complicated formula for setting an adequate price for farm goods and ensuring that farmers would earn back at least their production costs no matter the fluctuations of national or world agricultural markets

• McNary-Haugen Bill: Required the government to support prices at parity for grain, cotton, tobacco, and rice

  • Coolidge vetoed it twice

Section 2: The New Culture

Consumerism and Communications

• Consumerism rises along with advertisement

• Newspapers developed into national chains

• The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson greatly enhanced film’s appeal

• National Broadcasting Company

• Radio Act: created a Federal Radio Commission to regulate the public airwaves used by private companies

  • Later became the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)

Women in the New Era

• Most employed women were still nonprofessional, lower-class workers

• John B. Watson and other behavioralists challenged the idea that women had an instinctive capacity for motherhood.

• “Companionate marriages” elevated the importance of compatibility and love between partners

• Margaret Sanger: pioneer of the American birth control movement

• Flappers: Modern women whose liberated lifestyle found expression in dress, hairstyle, speech, and behavior

• National Women’s Party, under leadership of Alice Paul, attempted to fight dependence on men through pursuit of the Equal Rights Amendment

• League of Women voters organized

• Sheppard-Towner Act: provided federal funds to states to establish prenatal and child healthcare programs

  • Congress terminated the program

The Disenchanted

• Disenchantment with war led to disenchantment with the US

• Lost Generation: Author Gertrude Stein used this term to describe the young Americans emerging from WWI

• Harlem Renaissance: Term used to describe the flourishing artistic life by a new generation of black intellectuals in NY who focused on the richness of their own racial heritage

  • Langston Hughes was a leading writer of the Harlem Renaissance

Section 3: A Conflict of Cultures

Prohibition

• Prohibition was not working well

• It was easy to sell illegal alcohol

• Wets vs Drys: wets won and repealed the 18th Amendment

Nativism and the Klan

• National Origins Act: Law that banned immigration from East Asia entirely and reduced the quota for European immigrants; the result was an immigration system that greatly favored northwestern Europeans

• KKK revived through more nativism

  • Feared anyone who posed a challenge to traditional values

Religious Fundamentalism

• Fundamentalists: mostly rural men and women fighting to preserve traditional faith and to maintain the centrality of religion in American life

  • Extremely strict interpretation of the Bible

• Billy Sunday: leading Evangelical Fundamentalist

• Scopes trial: case that attracted intense national attention to the debate over whether to teach evolution or creationism in schools

The Democrats’ Ordeal

• Democrat party contained many interest groups

• Urban Democrats supported Alfred E. Smith; Rural Democrats supported William McAdoo

  • Compromised on John W. Davis as the Democrat candidate

• Next Democrat candidate, Al Smith, secured party nomination

  • Smith lost to Herbert Hoover

Section 4: Republican Government

The Harding Administration

• Warren G. Harding: Elected president in 1920; generally remembered as ill-suited for the office

• Washington Conference of 1921: an attempt to prevent a destabilizing naval armaments race among the US, Britain, and Japan

• Five-Power Pact: Established limits for total naval tonnage and a ratio of armaments among the signatories

• Teapot Dome Scandal: Rich naval oil reserves in Wyoming and part of a national scandal during the Harding administration

  • Bribery

• Harding died in office

The Coolidge Administration

• Calvin Coolidge succeeded Harding

  • Believed that the government should interfere as little as possible

• Dawes Plan: 1924 agreement in which American banks would provide loans to Germany that would then be used to pay war reparations to Britain and France

Government and Business

• Hoover believed in voluntarism and associationism: a concept that envisioned the creation of national organizations of businessmen in particular organizations

• Hoover’s presidency led to the Great Depression

Chapter 23: THE GREAT DEPRESSION

Section 1: The Coming of the Depression

The Great Crash

• Black Tuesday: October 29, 1929, the day the US stock market crashed, marking the beginning of the Great Depression

• The Great Depression: The major economic downturn of the 1930s that ended with American entrance into WWII

Causes of the Depression

• Lack of diversification in the US economy

  • Economy mainly focused on construction and automobiles which eventually declined

• Maldistribution of purchasing power

  • Resulted in weakness in consumer demand

• Credit structure of the economy

  • Farmers deeply in debt, small banks in constant trouble, large banks investing in the stock market and making unwise loans

• America’s position in international trade

  • European demand for American goods declining due to European economic destabilization from WWI

• The international debt structure

  • Allies not able to pay back debts

  • Germany and Austria unable to pay off reparations

Progress of the Depression

1. Mass bankruptcy

2. Money supply shrinks

3. Decline in purchasing power

4. Increasing deflation

5. Reduction of prices, less production, and more lay-offs

6. Mass unemployment

Section 2: The American People in Hard Times

Unemployment and Relief

• Public relief systems unable to meet heavy new demands

  • Private charities met the same fate

• Depression hit rural areas the hardest

  • Decline in farm income and large loss of land

  • Dust Bowl: The area of the Great Plains where a severe drought hit, killing all of the crops in the region

• Many farmers left their homes in search of work

• Okies: Families from the Dust Bowl (though not all came from Oklahoma) travelling to California in search of jobs

African Americans and the Depression

• African Americans were one of the groups most devastated by the Great Depression

  • Many left their farmland either by choice or by a landlord that didn’t find sharecropping profitable anymore

• Many African Americans went to Northern cities for slightly better conditions

• Scottsboro case: (1931) 9 Black teenagers were falsely accused of raping 2 white women in Alabama. Despite weak evidence, all-white juries convicted them, sparking national outrage

  • (1932) Supreme Court overturned the convictions, but the last of the defendants didn’t leave prison until 1950

  • The International Labor Defense, an organization associated with the Communist Party, came to the aid of the accused and publicized the case

Hispanics and Asians in Depression America

• Hispanics:

  • Chicanos: Mexican Americans

  • Mexican unemployment rose quickly to levels far higher than those for whites

• Asian Americans:

  • Educated Asians found it difficult or impossible to move into mainstream professions.

Women and Families in the Great Depression

• The economic crisis strengthened the belief that a woman’s proper place was in the home

  • (1932-1937) illegal for more than 1 member of a family to hold a federal civil service job

  • Belief did not stop women from doing so; more women working for wages

  • Professional opportunities for women declined

• Black women suffered massive unemployment

• The depression led to the mass erosion of family units

  • Divorce was expensive —> Lower divorce rate

  • Most fathers just deserted their families

Section 3: The Depression and American Culture

Depression Values

• Many people responded to hard times by redoubling their commitment to familiar ideas and goals

• How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie: A self-help manual preaching individual initiative, one of the best-selling books of the decade

• The most popular cultural products of the 1930s were the radio and the movies

Radio

• Almost every American family had a radio in the 1930s

• Radio was often a community experience

• The staple of broadcasting was escapist

  • Escapism: entertainment designed to distract Americans from financial woes

  • Amos ‘n’ Andy was a comedy with a demeaning picture of urban blacks

  • Adventures such as Superman, Dick Tracy, and The Lone Ranger

• Radio brought a new kind of comedy to a wide audience

  • Jack Benny, George Burns, and Gracie Allen used comedy in their broadcasts

• Radio dramas also became popular

• Radio provided Americans with their first direct access to important public events

  • Broadcasted the World Series, the Academy Awards, and political conventions

  • Hindenburg: German dirigible that crashed in flames in Lakehurst, New Jersey in 19937, broadcasted live over radio.

The Movies

• Movie attendance dropped significantly, but it became more appealing with implementations of sound and color.

• Will Hays: Hollywood’s resilient censor that ensured that most movies carried no sensational or controversial messages.

• Serious films that portrayed the problems of the Great Depression: King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread and John Ford’s adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath.

• Gangster movies portrayed a dark, gritty, violent world: Little Caesar and The Public Enemy

• Frank Capra: Italian-born director whose films presented social messages; films included Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

• Gold Diggers of 1933 and It Happened One Night diverted audiences from their troubles and indulge fantasies about easy wealth

• Disney produced Snow White, The Wizard of Oz, and Gone with the Wind, leading children’s entertainment

Literature and Journalism

• Life Magazine: Popular photographic journal with the largest readership of any publication in the US other than Reader’s Digest

• John Dos Passos’ USA trilogy attacked what he considered the materialistic madness of American culture

• Richard Wright’s Native Son: The story of a young African American man broken by racial oppression

• Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts: The story of an advice columnist overwhelmed by the sadness he encounters

• Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited: A harsh portrait of the lives of coal miners

• James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan: The tale of a lost, hardened working-class youth

• John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath: Best-known depiction of Depression-era life, about migrants from the Dust Bowl who encounter an unending string of calamities and failures. Offers a critique of the exploitative features of agrarian life in the West, as well as a tribute to the fortitude of the community the characters represent.

The Popular Front and the Left

• American Communist Party (CPUSA) gained credibility

• Popular Front: Broad coalition of antifascist groups on the left; communism was its driving force

  • Josef Stalin: The Soviet Party leader

  • Stalin and the CPUSA softened their attitude towards president FDR hoping he would become an ally against Fascism in Germany

• Spanish Civil War: (1936-1939) war between Spain’s liberal republican government and conservative forces of General Francisco Franco

  • Abraham Lincoln Brigade: A group of around 3000 young Americans who traveled to Spain to join a fight against the fascist side

  • The brigade lost to the fascists under Franco

• CPUSA under strict supervision by the Soviet Union

• Socialist Party of America got support from some rural farmers

  • Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) made by HL Mitchell did not successfully gather support along with the party itself.

• Antiradicalism remained a powerful force

  • Congressional committees chaired by Hamilton Fish of NY and Martin Dies of TX investigated communist influence wherever they could find or imagine it

• Pare Lorentz made 2 powerful documentaries: The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River that celebrated New Deal Programs but also criticized capitalism

  • Other New Deal-sponsored artists represented the harshness of poverty and the human cost of social neglect

  • New Deal photographers: Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Arthur Rothstein, Russel Lee, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, etc.

Section 4: The Ordeal of Herbert Hoover

The Hoover Program

• Hoover tried to help the Depression through voluntary cooperation, but the deterioration of economic conditions destroyed that idea

• Hoover tried government spending, but what he spent was not nearly enough

• Agricultural Marketing Act: First major government program to help farmers maintain prices and would make a federally sponsored Farm Board

• Hawley-Smoot Tariff: Increased protection on 75 farm products

• These acts were ultimately unsuccessful

• Hoovervilles: Shantytowns unemployed people established on the outskirts of cities

• Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC): A government agency to provide to troubled banks, railroads, and other businesses

  • Money only went to large banks and corporations so it mainly failed to have a major impact on the Great Depression

Popular Protest

• Farmers’ Holiday Association: Endorsed the withholding of farm products from the market; eventually dissolved in failure

• Bonus Expeditionary Force/“Bonus Army”: Group of >20,000 WWI veterans who marched into Washington demanding payment of owed money from the government

  • Congress voted down their proposal, and Hoover kicked them out using the army and police. Army was led by General Douglas MacArthur.

Hoover and the World Crisis

• More belligerent governments in Europe and Japan

• Hoover announced the policy that America would grant diplomatic recognition to any sitting government in the Latin American region without questioning the means it had used to obtain power

  • Repudiated the Roosevelt Corollary by refusing to permit American intervention when several Latin American countries defaulted on debt obligations

• Hoover refused to cancel all war debts despite advice from economists

• Fascism: An ideology that rejected democratic forms of government in favor of concentrated state power under a dictator

• Benito Mussolini: Fascist dictator of Italy

• National Socialist/Nazi Party: Fascist party led by Adolf Hitler that was growing in power in Germanny

• Japanese concerned with increasing Soviet Power and Chinese Leader Chiang Kai-Shek on expanding his power in Manchuria

  • “Mukden Incident”: Railroad explosion in Southern Manchuria, served as the pretext for a Japanese invasion of northern Manchuria

The Election of 1932

• Republican Party nominated Hoover again, Democratic Party nominated Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)

  • FDR won by a landslide

The “Interregnum”

• Interregnum: The period between the election and inauguration, lasted 4 months

• Hoover tried to convince FDR to keep all his domestic and foreign policies but he refused