Chapter 23 - The Twenties 1920-1929

23.1: Postwar Prosperity and Its Price

• In America's manufacturing industry, which technological innovation allowed industrial output to be improved without expanding workforce, the prosperity of the 1920s rested on what historians called the second industrial revolution.

• Individual entrepreneurs such as John D. Rockefeller in oil and Andrew Carnegie in steel were successful in the late nineteenth century.

• Most business leaders have suffered from the wartime gains of organized labour, and sympathies with trade union members from government agencies like the National War Labor Board

• No other development matched the effect on American way of working, living and playing by the post-war automotive explosion.

  • The automotive industry was the clearest example of the increase in consumer sustainability

• Furthermore, cars encouraged urban and suburban growth.

  • The 1920 U.S. census was the first in American history to show that the proportion of the urban population outweighs that of the rural population.

  

23.2: The States, the Economy, and Business

• Harding was the product of Marion, Ohio, a town with a native machine politics.
• Officials of the Republican Party had argued that Senator Harding, the compromise, was to be kept out of public eye at the 1920 election as much as possible.
• Herbert Hoover, who dominated the Harding and Coolidge Cabinets as Commerce Secretary before becoming President himself in 1929, was the leading Republican figure in its new era.
• Rejecting the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations did not mean disengaging the rest of the world.
  • From World War I the USA emerged as the world's most powerful economic power.
• In the 1920s, Charles Evans Hughes, State Secretary, and other leaders of the Republic pursued policies to expand America's economic activities abroad.
• There were huge pockets of the country lagging behind in prosperity and progress.
  • Real income advances and improvements in living standards for workers and farmers have at best been uneven

23.3: The New Mass Culture

• The early film industry, based in NYC and a few other major cities, had regularly made film for millions of Americans, in particular immigrants and the working class.

• In the autumn of 1920 Westinghouse Manager Harry P. Davis realized that the local Pittsburgh press had drawn attention to amateur radio from an employee's garage

• In the post-war years a new type of journal, the tabloid became popular.

  • This was the first style of tabloid to be developed in the New York Daily News that Joseph M. Patterson created in 1919.

• The growing importance of consumer goods in American lives was reflected and encouraged by a thriving publishing industry.

  • Earlier, publicity had been limited mainly to staid journals and magazines and offered only basic product information.

• The phonographer became a popular medium for entertainment in the 1920s, just like radio and cinema.

  • The early phonographs used wax cylinder recordings and replays, originally marketed in the 1890s.

• In the 1920s, the popularity and profitability of spectator sports were unprecedented.

  • As radio, journals, magazines and news agencies thoroughly document their achievement, athletes alongside movie stars set the stage for a new celebration culture

• The elite figures in a new culture of celebrity defined by the mass media became film stars, radio personalities, sports heroes and popular musicians.

  • They were the model of the new age for success

  

23.4: Modernity and Traditionalism

• In order to implement the 18th Amendment, the Volstead Act of 1919 created a federal ban body.
  • Yet, with only around 1500 police officers throughout the country, the office was severely under-employed.
• The Immigration Act was approved by Congress in 1921, and maximum new immigrants were established each year by 357,000.
  • Annual immigration from every European country is limited to three per cent of their indigenous population during the 1910 U.S. Census
• If the immigration restriction was the most significant legislative expression of resurgent nativism, its most effective mass movement would be a revived Ku Klux Klan
• The original Klan was established as a White Race Terror against Newly Liberated Slaves in the Reconstruction South
  • In the 1870s, it was dead.
• The growth of religious fundamentalism was parallel to political nativism in the 1920's.
  • In many Eastern Protestant churches, communities were less focused than progressive social and reform activity in the wider community on religious practice and cultivation.

23.5: Promises Postponed

• In 1920, the Association reorganized itself as the Women's Women's League of Voters.

  • It was the historic mainstream of the electorate, those who believed women's votes would bring a nourishing sensitivity to American politics, and a vision of reform.

• In particular, the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921 set up the first federally financed healthcare program, providing the corresponding funds for states to set up prenatal and child health centers, was the greatest, if limited, victory for female reformers.

• While restriction on immigration sharply diminished the flow of newcomers from Europe, Mexicans also dramatically flooded the United States during the 1920s.

  • After 1911 the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution, when violence from a political perspective and economic hardship were a source of incentives to cross the border to El Norte, Mexican immigration, not included in the immigration law of 1921 and 1924, had substantially increased

• The Big Migration Initiated by the First World War, the 1920s had shown no signs of leaving and African communities were growing fast in the northern cities.

  • New York City Harlem was by far the largest and most influential of these communities.

• This faith was one of the common denominators of the Harlem Renaissance figures.

• In the 1920s many intellectuals were troubled by war, prohibition, increasing corporate power and deep currents of cultural intolerance.

  • Some of them were so alienated from the US that they went abroad.

• The 1928 presidential election was a national referendum about the new era of the Republic.

  • It also revealed the importance of ethnic and cultural differences in the definition of US politics.