Chapter 24: The Jazz Age: Redefining the Nation, 1919-1929

24.2 Transformation and Backlash

Many Americans disagreed on the meaning of a “good life” in the 1920s, and how to achieve it. Reactions to social change were often met with religious fervor filled with the rejection of cultural diversity and equality

Nativism

Many immigrants coming into America were Southern and Eastern Europeans, and the change of culture, language, customs, etc. was triggering for native-born Americans
This created Nativism, prioritizing White Americans with older family trees over more recent immigrants
Nativists created a sense of fear around immigrants, using the anarchist assassinations of the Spanish prime minister in 1897, the Italian King in 1900, and President William McKinley in 1901 as proof that they were dangerous
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian immigrants who were accused of being part of a robbery and murder in Braintree, Massachusetts with no direct evidence linking them to the crime, but because they were immigrants and supported the destruction of capitalism through violence, they were put on trial
* They were found guilty and their radical views were used as evidence on July 14, 1921
* Both men were executed on August 23, 1927
The verdict started protests between Italians and other immigrants
Upton Sinclair used the Sacco and Vanzetti trial in his documentary novel, Boston which he considered to be a gross miscarriage of justice
Near the execution, Workers of the World called for a three-day nationwide walkout, leading to the Great Colorado Coal Strike of 1927
* Protests happened in Tokyo, Buenos Aires, and London
Felix Frankfurter, Harvard Law School professor and US Supreme Court Judge wrote for The Atlantic six years after the trial, “By systematic exploitation of the defendants’ alien blood, their imperfect knowledge of English, their unpopular social views, and their opposition to the war, the District Attorney invoked against them a riot of political passion and patriotic sentiment; and the trial judge connived at -- one had almost written, in cooperated in -- the process.”
The Emergency Immigration act of 1921 imposed numerical immigration to preserve American homogeneity
  * Restricted annual immigration to 3% of any given country as counted in the 1910 census
    * New York Congressmen Florello LaGuardia and Emanuel Celler spoke out against the act, but there was minimal action in Congress
    * Labor unions and the Ku Klux Klan supported the bill, when President Coolidge signed into the law, he declared, “America must be kept American”

The Ku Klux Klan

D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation provides a white-centric view of the Reconstruction Era and influenced the sense that America had a threat from within its borders
* The film depicts white southerners made helpless by northern carpetbaggers who empower freed Black people to violate White men and women
* Heros in this film were the Ku Klux Klan who “saved” the South
After viewing the film, President Wilson regarded it as “Like writing history with lighting, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true”
The Ku Klux Klan resurged after this film, months after the release, the second Klan was established in Stone Mountain, Georgia under William Simmons
* They advocated for Protestantism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, and stricter immigration policies, which gained support from Nativists
The Klan included women who participated in reform activities such as distributing Bibles in public schools
They more openly denounced Catholics and Jews
Had 6 million members in the south
Southern states combated the Klan through anti-masking legislation
  * Influential people such as Reinhold Niebuhr, a prominent protestant minister, who denounced the group’s Protestant zealism and anti-Catholicism helped make the KKK less popular
  * The Jewish organization, the Anti-Defamation League amplified Jewish discontent
  * NAACP worked to ban The Birth of a Nation and educate the public on lynchings
The Depression eventually put an end to the Klan

Faith, Fundamentalism, and Science

The rapid growth of urban areas created discontent over rapid cultural change in rural areas
By the 1920s, all standard textbooks in the US contained Darwin’s theory of evolution
* Tenessee passed the Butler Act, making it illegal to teach theory that went against the Bible
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said that this infringed on the freedom of speech, and enlisted John Scopes who taught evolution in Tennesee classrooms
The ACLU was a part of the Scopes Monkey Trial
  * William Jennings Bryan argued for the prosecution, and in his own time spread secularism and the declining role of religion in education across the country, offering $100 to anyone who would admit they descended from an ape
  * Clarence Darrow led the defense team and was an outspoken agnostic
  * Scopes was found guilty in the first trial for teaching about evolution and fined $100
    * Darrow called Bryan an expert witness on the Bible. Because Bryan had literal interpretations of the Bible, Darrow asked him questions ridiculing this belief, resulting in those who supported teaching about evolution seeing Bryan as idiotic, while rural Americans considered this an attack on the Bible and their faith
Billy Sunday gained fame as a baseball player and as an Evangelist with major camp meetings around the country, very influential
* Bryan attempted to bring him into the Scopes trial, but Sunday declined
Aimee Semple McPherson was a Pentecostal preacher residing in Los Angeles, breaking social norms by wearing makeup and tight clothing. She blended Hollywood and Christianity

*For clarification, “native-born” in this context, and in the context of previous chapters means someone whose parents were likely white immigrants and who are first or second-generation Americans, this term is not referring to indigenous people who are actually native-born to America

24.3 A New Generation

A New Morality

Rebellious Americans embraced a “New Morality”
* Women adopted dress and mannerisms of a “flapper”, a female stereotype of a girl who only wants to party
* The male equivalent was a “shelk”
During this time, Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood and introduced birth control, giving women choice in family planning
* This contributed to change in sexual behaviors for teenagers and young adults
Jazz music was born from this age, spreading from African American clubs in New Orleans and Chicago into New York

The “New Woman”

Women’s liberation during this time included social expressions such as dance, fashion, and women’s clubs
In 1921 Congress passed the Promotion of the Welfare and Hygiene of Maternity and Infancy Act, also known as the Sheppard-Towner Act, putting $1.25 Million into baby clinics and educational programs as well as nursing, reducing the rate of infant mortality
In 1923 Alice Paul drafted and promoted the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), promising to end all sex-discrimination
After the passage of the 19th Amendment, the Progressive movement lost steam, the ERA was passed 50 years later in 1972, and by the end of the 1920s, funding for the Sheppard-Towner Act lapsed
Women were still facing financial discrimination in the workplace

The Harlem Renaissance and The New Negro

The 1920s still continued the Great Migration to the North, escaping the Jim Crow laws in the South
* The North was not free of discrimination
Harlem, a neighborhood in New York, became a center for Afro-centric art, music, poetry, and politics
Urban African Americans rediscovered culture and rejected any part of American culture
  * Claude McKay’s poem, “If We Must Die” called African American people to fight back in wake of the Red Summer riots of 1919
  * Langston Hughes invoked sacrifice and the just cause of civil rights in “The Colored Soldier”
  * Zora Neale Hurston celebrated the life and dialect of rural Black people in “Their Eyes Were Watching God”
“Negro Nationalism” referred to a political ideology celebrating African American national identity, and that African American people had a distinct heritage, inspiring pride and a sense of community
  * The earliest adopter of this identity was W. E. B. Du Bois, his concept of negro nationalism encouraged African American people to work together in support of collective interests, the elevation of Black literature, and cultural expression, and embracing Africa as the continent of the true homeland of ethnic Africans
  * Marcus Garvey was a Jamaican immigrant and promoted a “Back to Africa movement, founding the Black Star Steamship Line and the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)
    * The UNIA reversed the color hierarchy of White supremacy, making light skin inferior, which made Du Bois, a lightskin African American, low on Garvey’s social order
  * Garvey was imprisoned for mail fraud and deported, but encouraged Malcolm X and the Black Power movement of the 1960s

Prohibition

The creation of Moonshine after Prohibition was a representation of disrespect for law and order
* Progressives gave rise to bootlegging, the organized crime of trafficking liquor
There was a divide between the Southern Democratic “dries” who favored the Amendment and Northern Republican “wets'“ who hated abstinence
All politicians, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, etc. supported the Amendment but lacked financial backing
“Scarface” Al Capone ran a bootlegging operation known as the Chicago Outfit or the Chicago Mafia
* His operation was earning him $100 Million dollars through bootlegging, prostitution, gambling, loan sharking, and murder
* Capone was imprisoned for eleven years for tax evasion

The Lost Generation

Young people were faced with WWI, fundamentalism, and the Red Scare, American fear of Communist infiltrators
This was called the Lost Generation, writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Edith Wharton, and John Dos Passos expressed hopelessness and despair by criticizing the middle-class society
Hemingway worked as an ambulance driver in Italy during WWI, and his experiences with tragedy stuck with him
Sinclair Lewis satirized American middle-class life as pleasure-seeking and mindless