Seeing Red

• Fear of Russia swept across the country

• ”Red Scare” - 1919-1920 - nationwide crusade against people whose “Americanism”
  was suspect

  • Led by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer

• 1919-1920, some states passed criminal syndicalism laws

  • made it illegal to advocate the use of violence to obtain social change – limits 1st Amendment

  • Striking employees were viewed as Un-American

    • Unionizing was terrifying to those afraid of socialism - main component is collective bargaining

  • American plan - employees were not required to join unions

• Antiredism and antiforeignism were reflected in the criminal case of Sacco and Vanzetti

  • Convicted in 1921 of murder

  • Given a trial, the jury and judge were prejudiced against the men because they were Italians, atheists, anarchists, and draft dodgers

    • Accidental draft dodging was common in the day - many men didn’t really realize they were supposed to sign up

  • Despite criticism from liberals and radicals all over the world, the men were executed in 1927

Hooded Hoodlums of the KKK

• Ku Klux Klan (Knights of the Invisible Empire) grew in the early 1920s

• Growing intolerance and prejudice of the American public

  • Most popular in Midwest and the South

  • Antiforeign, anti-Catholic, anti-black, anti-Jewish, antipacifist, anti-Communist, anti-internationalist, antievolutionist, antibootlegger, antigambling, antiadultery, and anti-birth control

  • Pro-Anglo-Saxon, pro-"native" American, and pro-Protestant.

    • WASP = White Anglo-Saxon Protestant

• Fell apart in the late 1920s after it was discovered that Klan official were embezzling money

Stemming the Foreign Blood

• Isolationism spread in America during the 1920s

• Emergency Quota Act of 1921 - a quota on the number of European immigrants who could come to America each year; it was set at 3% of the people of their nationality who had been living in the United States in 1910.

  • Not many immigrants were actually coming in from Britain

• The Immigration Act of 1924 replaced the Quota Act of 1921, cutting quotas for foreigners from 3% to 2%

  • Japanese were banned from coming to America

  • Canadians and Latin Americans were exempt from the act, - close proximity made it easy to attract when needed and send them home when they weren’t

• The quota system significantly reduced immigration

• Ended the era of unrestricted immigration to the United States

The Prohibition Experiment

• 18th Amendment, 1919, banned alcohol

• Enforced by the Volstead Act

• Popular in the South - white southerners wanted to keep stimulants out of the hands of blacks & West, where alcohol was associated with crime and corruption

• Difficult to be enforced; the Federal government had a weak track record of enforcing laws that controlled personal lives

• "Speakeasies" replaced saloons.

• Prohibition caused bank savings to increase and absenteeism in industry to decrease.

The Golden Age of Gangsterism

• Violent wars broke out in the big cities between rival gangs - sought control of the illegal booze market

• Chicago, "Scarface" Al Capone - 6 years of gang warfare - generated millions of dollars

  • Eventually tried and convicted of income-tax evasion and sent to prison for 11 years

• Gangsters began to move into other profitable and illicit activities: prostitution, gambling, narcotics, and kidnapping for ransom

• After the son of Charles A. Lindbergh was kidnapped for ransom and then murdered, Congress passed the Lindbergh Law in 1932, making interstate abduction in certain circumstances a death-penalty offense

  • The baby was killed less than a mile from Lindbergh’s house

Monkey Business in Tennessee

• 1920 - states started to put a larger focus on education

  • This was due to our isolationist policies

• Prof. John Dewey - "learning by doing" & believed that "education for life" should be a primary goal of the teacher

• Science and healthcare also improved during the 1920s

• Fundamentalists, old-time religionists, claimed teaching of Darwinism evolution was destroying faith in God and the Bible, while contributing to the moral breakdown of youth

• 1925, John T. Scopes indicted in TN for teaching evolution.

  • At the "Monkey Trial," Scopes was defended by Clarence Darrow, while former presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan prosecuted him. Scopes was found guilty and fined $100.

  • This was due to Fundamentalists being in charge of education

  • Charles Darwin was brought on stand to defend Scopes

The Mass Consumption Economy

• WWI and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon's tax policies brought prosperity to the mid-1920s

  • Reduced taxes on the wealthy and lowered interest rates

  • People who survived the war (manly men) went home and bought stuff

• Bruce Barton founded advertising

  • Introduced demographics into the advertising business

• Sports became a big business in the consumer economy

  • Baseball and basketball were major sports on the radio

• Buying on credit was another new feature of the economy

• Prosperity thus led to increased personal debt, and the economy became increasingly vulnerable to disruptions of the credit structure

Putting America on Rubber Tires

• Cars were invented earlier but were not widely used until the 1920s came around

  • Same thing with many other inventions like lightbulbs

• Automobile industry started an industrial revolution in the 1920s

• Created new industrial system based on assembly-line methods and mass-production techniques

• Detroit became the motorcar capital of the world

• Henry Ford, father of the moving assembly line (Fordism), created the Model T

• By 1930, more than 20 million Model Ts were being driven in the country

The Advent of the Gasoline Age

• Automobile industry exploded, creating millions of jobs and related support industries

• America's standard of living rose

• The petroleum business grew, while the railroad industry was hard hit by the competition of automobiles

• Automobile freed up women from their dependence on men, and it allowed suburbs to spread out

• Responsible for millions of deaths, but it brought more convenience, pleasure, and excitement into peoples' lives

Humans Develop Wings

• Gasoline engines led to the invention of the airplane.

  • Dec. 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright made their first flight, lasting 12 seconds and 120 feet

• After the success of airplanes in WWI, private companies began to operate passenger airlines with airmail contracts

• Charles A. Lindberg became the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927

  • His flight energized the new aviation industry.

The Radio Revolution

• Guglielmo Marconi invented wireless telegraphy (the telegraph) in the 1890s

• In 1920s, the first voice-carrying radio broadcast were transmitted - first ever in Pittsburgh

  • Automobiles drew Americans away from the home, but the radio brought them back

  • Radio made significant educational and cultural contributions

Hollywood’s Film and Fantasies

• Motion picture, which had been partially developed by Thomas A. Edison, began in the 1890s

• True birth of motion picture came in 1903 with the release of the first story sequence: The Great Train Robbery

• Hollywood became the movie capital of the world.

  • Not many people living in this area before it was coined as movie capital of the world - area chosen simply because weather was nice

• Nickelodeons were theaters where one could watch a movie for only a nickel

• Motion picture was used extensively in WWI as anti-German propaganda

• The spread of motion picture led to increased assimilation of immigrants

The Dynamic Decade

• By the 1920s, most Americans had moved from rural areas to urban areas

  • Also includes suburbs - popularized due to availability of cars

• Margaret Sanger led a birth-control movement

• Alice Paul formed National Women's Party in 1923 to campaign for an ERA to the Constitution

  • ERA = Equal Rights Amendment

• Fundamentalists lost ground to the Modernists who believed that God was a "good guy" and the universe was a friendly place

• Flappers: young women who expressed their disdain for traditional behavior by wearing short skirts, drinking, driving cars, and smoking

• Dr. Freud argued that sexual repression was responsible for a variety of emotional problems

• Jazz thrived in the 1920s

  • Assisted by places like supper clubs, which hired jazz musicians to play music

• Racial pride grew in the northern black communities.

  • Marcus Garvey founded the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) to promote the resettlement of blacks in Africa.

  • The UNIA also sponsored stores and other businesses to keep blacks' dollars in black pockets

Cultural Liberation

• In the decade after WWI, a new generation of writers emerged (Lost Generation)

  • Referred to as lost generation because of both WWI deaths, and people being left behind in terms of public info

• Modernism: philosophical movement during the 1920s; questioned of social conventions

• H.L. Mencken attacked marriage, patriotism, democracy, and prohibition in his monthly American Mercury.

• F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote This Side of Paradise in 1920 and The Great Gatsby in 1925.

• Ernest Hemingway was among the writers most affected by the war - Responded to propaganda and the overblown appeal to patriotism - wrote of disillusioned, spiritually numb American expatriates in Europe in The Sun Also Rises (1926).

  • Title was a double entendre - Sun stood for both Japan and for son (like a child)

• Sinclair Lewis wrote Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922).

• Sherwood Anderson wrote Winesburg, Ohio (1919).

• Harlem Renaissance: a black cultural movement that grew out of Harlem

• Architecture also bcame popular as materialism and functionalism became popular.

Wall Street’s Big Bull Market

• In the 1920s, stock market became increasingly popular to the average citizen

• The Fed gov’t did little to manage the national debt after WWI

• 1921, the Republican Congress created the Bureau of the Budget to help the president submit an annual budget to Congress - designed to prevent haphazardly extravagant appropriations

• Treasury Secretary Mellon's belief was that taxes forced the rich to invest in tax-exempt securities rather than in factories; this hurt business.

  • Helped create a series of tax reductions from 1921-1926 to help rich people

    • No real budget before 1921

  • Congress also eliminated the gift tax, reduced excise taxes, the surtax, the income tax, and estate taxes.

  • Policies shifted the tax burden from the wealthy to the middle-income groups

  • Reduced the national debt by $10 billion