1920s

Vocabulary 

  • Traditionalist - people who had deep respect for long held cultural and religious values. 

  • Modernist - people who embraced new ideas, styles, and social trends. 

  • Flapper - (modernist) daring, young women who broke with the past by wearing short hair and skirts. 

  • 18th Amendment - prohibition (banning alcohol).

  • Volstead Act - law to enforce the 18th Amendment.

  • Speakeasy - secret drinking clubs where you must “speak easy” and order names of drinks without saying the actual alcohol name. 

  • Bootlegger - someone who illegally transports alcohol to sell; traditionally in their boot or on their leg. 

  • Scopes Trial - trial over the teaching of evolution in schools. 

  • Harlem Renaissance - (in New York City) rebirth of African American culture in Harlem; African American musicians, artists, and writers settled in Harlem. 

  • Installment buying - buying on credit. You could buy a product for a small down payment, take it home and then make monthly payments with interest. 

  • Prosperity - state of growth, with rising profits and full employment. 

  • Boom - (prosperity) a time of great economic activity and growth. 

  • Buying on margin (credit) - buy a stock for a 10% down payment from a broker. 

Prohibition 

  • At first, prohibition did seem to deliver its expected benefits. Consumption declined.

  • The Volstead Act, which was passed to enforce prohibition, did not adequately fund the prohibition bureau. Little could be done to stop drinking.

  • Opposition to prohibition centered in large cities, where speakeasies opened to serve alcohol illegally. 

  • Violence increased as bootleggers, like the famous gangster Al Capone, tried to control the production and distribution of alcohol.

New Youth Culture 

  • Young people spent more time outside the home and developed their own culture resolving around school, music, sports, dating, etc. 

  • Flappers wore short dresses and makeup and cut their hair short. They acted differently too. 

  • Young people rebelled against their parents because they did not respect them for the terrible waste of life that they had allowed during WW1. 

  • Most adults considered youth behavior reckless and immoral and tried to prevent their behavior through censorship and legislation. 

Evolution

  • Traditionalists saw science and religion as conflicting, especially over the issue of evolution.

  • Many modernists embraced the concepts of natural selection and evolution and wanted those theories taught in schools.

  • Tennessee passed a law banning the teaching of evolution. This set the stage for the famous Scopes “Monkey” Trial. 

  • John Scopes was arrested for teaching evolution in Dayton, Tennessee. During the trial, a famous lawyer named Clarence Darrow defended Scopes. William Jennings Bryan, a well-known politician, argued against Scopes. Scopes was found guilty. 

  • Traditional fundamentalists won the Scopes Trial but lost in their crusade against the teaching of evolution in schools. 

Buying Credit

  • Many people bought refrigerators, cars, etc. with money that they did not have. 

Stock Market

  • People could buy stocks on margin which was like installment buying. 

  • In the 1920s more people invested in the stock market than ever before. 

Economic Prosperity

  • People’s income increased by 35% on average. 

  • Created leisure time. 

Consumerism

  • Due to the growth of mass production techniques during the 20s, there was in increase in advertising. 

Mass Media - Radio and Music

  • Was the first form of mass media.

  • Contributed to the world wide diffusion of pop-culture: helps unify the nation. 

Silent Movies

  • 1927 is the first “talkies” - sound in movies.

  • Charlie Chaplin , the Little Tramp, was one of the most famous stars in motion-picture history. 

Airplanes 

  • 1903: The Wright brothers flew the first motorized plane. (first ones to get it on film).

  • 1927: Charles Lindberg - first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean. 

  • Ortega Prize of 1927.

  • Amelia Earhart tries to fly around the world.

Sports: 

  • Became more mainstream because of radio. 

  • Stadiums - more time 

  • Babe Ruth. 

Cars

  • Ford makes Model T in only Black.

The Automobile Alters Society

  • After WW1 prices of cars dropped.

  • Created factory jobs in the Midwest. 

  • They were now affordable to the middle class.

  • Increased auto use by the average family led to lifestyle changes.

  • More people traveled for pleasure.

  • People began to commute to work (lived in Suburbs)

  • Women and teens had more independence. 

What is Women’s Suffrage?

  • RIght of Women to vote - 19 Amendment. 

  • Alice Paul - hunger strike 

Great Migration

  • One million Blacks migrated from the south to the north between 1914-1920

  • Worked in northern industries and other areas.

Impact of Great Migration

  • Massive arts movement in the North - communication.

  • Claude McKay.

  • Langston Hughes.

  • Paul S. 

  • Bettsie Smith.

  • Louis Armstrong “Satchmo.”

  • Duke Ellington.

  • Alice Walker.

  • Toni Morrison.

  • Spike Lee. 

Sacco and Vanzetti Trial

  • A hotly protested criminal trial, held from 1920 to 1927, in which Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Venzetti were convicted of robbing and murdering two men and sentenced to death; many people believed that the trial was unfair and that that the defendants were persecuted because they were anarchists, no because they were guilty. 

  • Fuller appointed Abbott Lawrence Lowell, then president of Harvard University, to investigate whether the men deserved clemency, or leniency of their sentence. 

  • To counter the prosecution, defense attorney Fred Moore argued that the presented evidence failed to clearly tie his clients to the murders.

  • When the jury returned a guilty verdict, many people questioned the decision. 

  • The Sacco and Vanzetti trial raised fundamental questions about America’s founding ideals of equality and rights under the law. 

Emerging Economic Tensions

  • World War 1 created great economic prosperity in the United States. 

  • However, the government was ill-prepared to convert to a postwar economy.

  • The employment crisis deepened when the army discharged nearly 4 million soldiers, giving each only $60 and a one-way ticket home. 

  • At the end of the decade, the US economy exhibited the longer-term effects of demobilization.

  • The combination of high inflation and rising unemployment led to a severe recession - a decline in economic activity and prosperity. 

  • The robbery-murder involving Sacco and Vanzetti was one of many violent incidents that occured in a growing crime wave. 

Rising Labor Tensions

  • Working-class communities would struggle to preserve the labor gains they had achieved. During the war, the federal government encouraged business and labor to cooperate. 

  • After World War 1, American workers struggled to preserve the labor gains they had achieved. During the war, the federal government encouraged business and labor to cooperate. 

  • However, the government stepped aside at the end of the war, and the struggle between business and labor over wages and working conditions resumed in earnest. 

  • Working-class Americans reacted to deteriorating labor conditions in several ways. Many workers joined unions for the first time. 

  • In 1919, unions staged over 3,600 strikes across the country, creating the greatest wave of labor unrest in US history. 

  • As striking persisted, middle-class Americans began to view unionism as a threat to their way of life. 

  • The diminishing power of unions had a negative effect on workers. 

Growing Political Tensions

  • Many Americans saw the bomb scare as another indication that radicalism was threatening public order. 

  • Red Scare - lasting from 1919 to 1920, a campaign launched by US attorney general Mitchell Palmer and implemented by Justice Department attorney H. Edgar Hoover to arrest communists and other radicals who promoted the overthrow of the US government; revived during the Cold War by Senator Joseph McCarthy during a period of anticommunism lasting from 1950 to 1957.

  • Palmer and his assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, conducted raids on homes, businesses, and meeting places of people they thought to be subversives.

  • Palmer’s tactics disregarded civil liberties, or basic rights guaranteed by law. 

  • Yet the fear of radicalism overshadowed some Americans’ concerns about civil liberties abuses. 

  • Still, the campaign crippled US radical movements. 

Increasing Social Tensions

  • However, some native-born Americans in this troubled period viewed many immigrants - especially those who were poor and spoke little English - with suspicion. 

  • This growing wave of immigrants triggered a resurgence of nativism, along with calls for immigration restriction. 

  • Congress responded to anti-immigrant pressure by passing the Emergency Immigration Act of 1921.

  • Three years later, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924.

  • Anti-immigrant sentiment helped revive the Ku Klux Klan. 

  • The revived Ku Klux Klan portrayed itself as a defender of American values.

  • The Klan grew in the early 1920s to between 3 and 4 million members, and amassed considerable political power throughout the country. 

  • The views of nativists and the Klan did not go unchallenged. In 1920, a group of pacifists and social activists founded the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to protect freedom of speech.