The dominant social and political issues of the 1920s expressed sharp
divisions in U.S. society between the young and the old, religious modernists
and religious fundamentalists, prohibitionists and anti-prohibitionists, and
nativists and the foreign-born. Because of the steady flow in previous decades
of people from rural to urban areas in search of jobs, by 1920 most people lived
in urban areas, then defined as places with more than 2,500 residents.
Religion, Science, and Politics
Divisions among Protestants reflected the tensions in society between the
traditional values of rural areas and the modernizing forces of the cities.
Modernism A range of influences, including the changing role of women,
the Social Gospel movement, and scientific knowledge, caused large numbers
of Protestants to define their faith in new ways. Modernists took a historical
and critical view of certain passages in the Bible and believed they could accept
Darwin’s theory of evolution without abandoning their religious faith.
Fundamentalism Protestant preachers, mostly in rural areas, condemned
the modernists and taught that every word in the Bible was true literally. A key
fundamentalist doctrine was that creationism (the belief that God had created
the universe in seven days, as stated in the Bible) explained the origin of all life.
Fundamentalists blamed modernists for causing a decline in morals.
TOPIC 7.8 1920S: CULTURAL AND POLITICAL CONTROVERSIES
505Revivalists on the Radio Ever since the Great Awakening of the early
1700s, religious revivals periodically swept through America. Revivalists of
the 1920s preached a fundamentalist message but did so for the first time
making full use of the new tool of mass communication, the radio. One leading
radio evangelist was Billy Sunday, who drew large crowds as he attacked
drinking, gambling, and dancing. Another was Aimee Semple McPherson,
who condemned the twin evils of communism and jazz music from her pulpit
in Los Angeles.
Fundamentalism and Science
More than any other single event, a much-publicized trial in Tennessee focused
the debate between religious fundamentalists in the rural South and modernists
of the northern cities. Tennessee, like several other southern states, outlawed
the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution in public schools. To challenge the
constitutionality of these laws, the American Civil Liberties Union persuaded a
Tennessee biology teacher, John Scopes, to teach the theory of evolution to his
high school class. For doing so, Scopes was arrested and tried in 1925.
The Trial The entire nation followed the Scopes trial both in newspapers
and by radio. Defending Scopes was a famous lawyer from Chicago, Clarence
Darrow. Representing the fundamentalists was three-time Democratic
candidate for president William Jennings Bryan, who testified as an expert on
the Bible. The courtroom clash between Darrow and Bryan dramatized that
the debate on evolution symbolized a battle between two opposing views of
the world.
Aftermath As expected, Scopes was convicted, but the conviction was later
overturned on a technicality. Laws banning the teaching of evolution remained
on the books for years, although they were rarely enforced. The northern
press asserted that Darrow and the modernists had thoroughly discredited
fundamentalism. However, to this day, questions about the relationship
between religion and public schools remain controversial and unresolved.
Prohibition
Another controversy that helped define the 1920s concerned people’s conflicting
attitudes toward the 18th Amendment. Wartime concerns to conserve grain
and maintain a sober workforce moved Congress to pass this amendment,
which strictly prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages,
including liquors, wines, and beers. It was ratified in 1919. The adoption of the
Prohibition amendment and a federal law enforcing it (the Volstead Act, 1919)
were the culmination of many decades of crusading by temperance forces.
Defying the Law Prohibition did not stop people from drinking alcohol
either in public places or at home. Especially in the cities, it became fashionable
to defy the law by going to clubs or bars known as speakeasies, where bootleg
(smuggled) liquor was sold. City police and judges were paid to look the other
way. Even elected officials such as President Harding served alcoholic drinks to
506 UNITED STATES HISTORY: AP® EDITIONguests. Liquors, beers, and wines were readily available from bootleggers who
smuggled them from Canada or made them in their garages or basements.
Rival groups of gangsters, including a Chicago gang headed by Al Capone,
fought for control of the lucrative bootlegging trade. Organized crime became
big business. The millions made from the sale of illegal booze allowed the gangs
to expand other illegal activities: prostitution, gambling, and narcotics.
Political Discord and Repeal Most Republicans publicly supported
the “noble experiment” of Prohibition (although in private, many politicians
drank). Democrats were divided on the issue, with southerners supporting
it and northern city politicians calling for repeal. Supporters of the 18th
Amendment pointed to declines in alcoholism and alcohol-related deaths.
However, support weakened in the face of growing public resentment and
clear evidence of increased criminal activity. With the coming of the Great
Depression, economic arguments for repeal were added to the others. In 1933,
the 21st Amendment, which repealed the 18th Amendment, was ratified, and
millions celebrated the new year by toasting the end of Prohibition.
Opposition to Immigration
The world war had interrupted the flow of immigrants to the United States,
but as soon as the war ended, immigration shot upward. More than a million
foreigners entered the country between 1919 and 1921. Like the immigrants
of the prewar period, the new arrivals were mainly Catholics and Jews from
eastern and southern Europe. Once again, nativist prejudices of native-born
Protestants were aroused. Workers feared competition for jobs. Isolationists
wanted minimal contact with Europe and feared that immigrants might foment
revolution. In response to public demands for restrictive legislation, Congress
acted quickly.
Quota Laws Congress passed two laws that severely limited immigration
by setting quotas based on nationality. The first quota act of 1921 limited
immigration to 3 percent of the number of foreign-born persons from a given
nation counted in the 1910 Census (a maximum of 357,000). To reduce the
number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, Congress passed a
second quota act in 1924 that set quotas of 2 percent based on the Census of
1890 (before the arrival of most of the “new” immigrants). Although there were
quotas for all European and Asian nationalities, the law chiefly restricted those
groups considered “undesirable” by the nativists. By 1927, the quotas for all
Asians and eastern and southern Europeans had been limited to 150,000, with
all Japanese immigrants barred. With these acts, the traditional United States
policy of unlimited immigration ended.
Canadians and Latin Americans were exempt from restrictions. Almost
500,000 Mexicans migrated legally to the Southwest during the 1920s.
Case of Sacco and Vanzetti Although liberal American artists and
intellectuals were few in number, they loudly protested against racist and
nativist prejudices. They rallied to the support of two Italian immigrants,
TOPIC 7.8 1920S: CULTURAL AND POLITICAL CONTROVERSIES
507Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who in 1921 had been convicted in
a Massachusetts court of committing robbery and murder. Liberals protested
that the two men had not received a fair trial and that they had been accused,
convicted, and sentenced to die simply because they were poor Italians and
anarchists (who rejected all government). After six years of appeals and
national and international debates over the conduct of their trial, Sacco and
Vanzetti were executed in 1927.
Nearly 30,000 Klan members gathered for a rally in Chicago around 1920.
Source: Library of Congress.
Ku Klux Klan
The most extreme expression of nativism in the 1920s was the resurgence of
the Ku Klux Klan. Unlike the original Klan of the 1860s and 1870s, the new
Klan founded in 1915 was as strong in the Midwest as in the South. The Klan
attracted new members because of the popular silent film Birth of a Nation,
which portrayed the KKK during Reconstruction as the heroes, and the White
backlash to the race riots of 1919. The new Klan used modern advertising
techniques to grow to 5 million members by 1925. It drew most of its support
from lower-middle-class White Protestants in small cities and towns. This
revival of the KKK directed hostility not only against African Americans but
also against Catholics, Jews, foreigners, and suspected Communists.
Tactics The Klan employed various methods for terrorizing and
intimidating anyone targeted as “un-American.” Dressed in white hoods to
disguise their identity, Klan members would burn crosses and apply vigilante
justice, punishing their victims with whips, tar and feathers, and lynching.
The overwhelming number of those killed were African American men. In its
heyday in the early 1920s, the Klan developed strong political influence. In
Indiana and Texas, its support became crucial for candidates hoping to win
elections to state and local offices.
508 UNITED STATES HISTORY: AP® EDITIONDecline At first, the majority of native-born White Americans appeared
to tolerate the Klan because it vowed to uphold high standards of Christian
morality and drive out bootleggers, gamblers, and adulterers. Beginning in
1923, however, investigative reports in the northern press revealed that fraud
and corruption in the KKK were rife. In 1925, the leader of Indiana’s Klan,
Grand Dragon David Stephenson, was convicted of murder. After that, the
Klan’s influence and membership declined rapidly. Nevertheless, it and other
White nationalist groups continued to exist and advocate for White supremacy
into the 21st century.
Arts and Literature
Scorning religion as hypocritical and bitterly condemning the sacrifices of
wartime as fraud perpetrated by money interests were two dominant themes
of the leading writers of the postwar decade. This disillusionment caused the
writer Gertrude Stein to call these writers a “lost generation.” The novels
of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Sinclair Lewis; the poems
of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot; and the plays of Eugene O’Neill expressed
disillusionment with the ideals of an earlier time and with the materialism of
a business-oriented culture. Fitzgerald and O’Neill took to a life of drinking,
while Eliot and Hemingway expressed their unhappiness by moving into exile
in Europe.
Painters such as Edward Hopper were inspired by the architecture of
American cities to explore loneliness and isolation of urban life. Regional
artists such as Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton celebrated the rural
people and scenes of the heartland of America.
Musical theater changed in the 1920s with the Broadway premiere of
Show Boat. It proved a radical departure in musical storytelling with a serious
treatment of prejudice and race. Jewish immigrants played a major role in the
development of the American musical theatre during this era. For example,
composer George Gershwin, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, blended
jazz and classical music in his symphonic Rhapsody in Blue and the folk opera
Porgy and Bess.
Women, Family, and Education
Ratification of the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote, but it did not
change either women’s lives or U.S. politics as much as reformers had hoped.
Voting patterns in the election of 1920 showed that women did not vote as a
bloc but usually shared the party preferences of their husbands or fathers.
Women at Home The traditional separation of labor between men and
women continued into the 1920s. Most middle-class women expected to spend
their lives as homemakers and mothers. The introduction into the home of
such labor-saving devices as the washing machine and vacuum cleaner eased
but did not substantially change the daily routines of the homemaker.
TOPIC 7.8 1920S: CULTURAL AND POLITICAL CONTROVERSIES
509Women in the Labor Force Participation of women in the workforce
remained about the same as before the war. Employed women usually lived in
the cities; were limited to certain categories of jobs as clerks, nurses, teachers,
and domestics; and received lower wages than men.
Revolution in Morals Probably the most significant change in the lives
of young men and women of the 1920s was their revolt against sexual taboos.
Some were influenced by the writings of the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund
Freud, who stressed the role of sexual repression in mental illness. Others,
who perhaps had never heard of Freud, took to premarital sex as if it were—
like radio and jazz music—one of the inventions of the modern age. Movies,
novels, automobiles, and new dance steps (the foxtrot and the Charleston) also
encouraged greater promiscuity. The use of contraceptives for birth control
was still against the law in almost every state. Even so, because of the work of
Margaret Sanger and other advocates of birth control, it achieved growing
acceptance in the 1920s.
A special fashion that set young people apart from older generations was
the flapper look. Influenced by movie actresses as well as their own desires
for independence, young women shocked their elders by wearing dresses
hemmed at the knee (instead of the ankle), “bobbing” (cutting short) their
hair, smoking cigarettes, and driving cars. High school and college graduates
also took office jobs until they married. Then, as married women, they were
expected to abandon the flapper look, quit their jobs, and settle down as wives
and mothers.
Divorce As a result of women’s suffrage, state lawmakers were now forced
to listen to feminists, who demanded changes in the divorce laws to permit
women to escape abusive and incompatible husbands. Liberalized divorce
laws were one reason that one in six marriages ended in divorce by 1930—a
significant increase over the one-in-eight ratio of 1920.
Education Widespread belief in the value of education, together with
economic prosperity, stimulated more state governments to enact compulsory
school laws. Universal high school education became the new American goal.
By the end of the 1920s, the proportion of high school graduates had doubled
to over 25 percent of school-age young adults.
African American Cultural Renaissance
By 1930, almost 20 percent of African Americans lived in the North, as
migration from the South continued. In the North, African Americans
still faced discrimination in housing and jobs, but they found at least some
improvement in their earnings and material standard of living. The largest
African American community developed in the Harlem section of New York
City. With a population of almost 200,000 by 1930, Harlem became famous
in the 1920s for its concentration of talented actors, artists, musicians, and
510 UNITED STATES HISTORY: AP® EDITIONwriters. Because of their artistic achievements, this period is known as the
“Harlem Renaissance.”
Poets and Musicians The leading Harlem poets included Countee
Cullen, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and Claude McKay.
Commenting on African American heritage, their poems expressed a range of
emotions, from bitterness and resentment to joy and hope.
African American jazz musicians such as Duke Ellington and Louis
Armstrong were so popular among people of all races that the 1920s is often
called the Jazz Age. Other great performers included blues singer Bessie
Smith and the multitalented singer and actor Paul Robeson. While these
artists sometimes performed before integrated audiences in Harlem, they
often found themselves and their audiences segregated in much of the rest
of the nation.
Marcus Garvey In 1916, the United Negro Improvement Association
(UNIA) was brought to Harlem from Jamaica by a charismatic immigrant,
Marcus Garvey. Garvey advocated individual and racial pride for African
Americans and developed political ideas of Black nationalism. Building on
W. E. B. Du Bois’s pride in Black culture, Garvey established an organization for
Black separatism, economic self-sufficiency, and a back-to-Africa movement.
Garvey’s sale of stock in the Black Star Steamship line led to federal charges of
fraud. In 1925, he was tried, convicted, and jailed. Later, he was deported to
Jamaica, and his movement collapsed.
W. E. B. Du Bois and other African American leaders disagreed with
Garvey’s back-to-Africa idea but endorsed his emphasis on racial pride and
self-respect. In the 1960s, Garvey’s thinking helped to inspire a later generation
to embrace the cause of Black pride and nationalism.
Republican Majority
Through the 1920s, three Republican presidents would control the executive
branch. Congress was also solidly Republican through a decade in which U.S.
business boomed.
The great leader of the progressive wing of the Republican Party, Theodore
Roosevelt, died in 1919. This loss, combined with public disillusionment
over the war, allowed the return of the old-guard (conservative) Republicans.
Unlike the Republicans of the Gilded Age, however, Republican leadership
in the 1920s did not preach laissez-faire economics. Instead, Republicans
accepted the idea of limited government regulation as an aid to stabilizing
business. The regulatory commissions established in the Progressive Era were
now administered by appointees who were more sympathetic to business
than to the general public. The prevailing idea of the Republican Party was
that the nation would benefit if business and the pursuit of profits took the
lead in developing the economy.
TOPIC 7.8 1920S: CULTURAL AND POLITICAL CONTROVERSIES
511The Presidency of Warren Harding
Warren Harding had been a newspaper publisher in Ohio before entering
politics. He was handsome and well liked among the Republican political
cronies with whom he regularly played poker. His abilities as a leader, however,
were less than presidential. When the Republican National Convention of 1920
deadlocked, the party bosses decided “in a smoke-filled room” to deliver the
nomination to Harding as a compromise choice.
A Few Good Choices Harding recognized his limitations and hoped
to make up for them by appointing able men to his cabinet. He appointed
the former presidential candidate and Supreme Court justice Charles
Evans Hughes to be secretary of state, the greatly admired former mining
engineer and Food Administration leader Herbert Hoover to be secretary of
commerce, and the Pittsburgh industrialist and millionaire Andrew Mellon
to be secretary of the treasury. When the Chief Justice’s seat on the Supreme
Court became vacant, Harding filled it by appointing former President
William Howard Taft.
Domestic Policy Harding did little more than sign into law the measures
adopted by the Republican Congress. He approved (1) a reduction in the income
tax, (2) an increase in tariff rates under the Fordney-McCumber Tariff Act of
1922, and (3) the establishment of the Bureau of the Budget, with procedures
for all government expenditures to be placed in a single budget for Congress to
review and vote on.
Harding did surprise many people, particularly his conservative allies, by
pardoning and releasing from federal prison Socialist leader Eugene Debs.
Debs had been convicted of violating the Espionage Act during World War I.
While imprisoned, Debs received 920,000 votes in the 1920 presidential
election. Harding’s decision to pardon Debs was prompted by the president’s
generous spirit.
Scandals and Death Harding’s postwar presidency was marked by
scandals and corruption similar to those that had occurred under an earlier
postwar president, Ulysses S. Grant. Having appointed some excellent officials,
Harding also selected a number of incompetent and dishonest men to fill
important positions, including Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall and
Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty. In 1924, Congress discovered that
Fall had accepted bribes for granting oil leases near Teapot Dome, Wyoming.
Daugherty also took bribes for agreeing not to prosecute certain criminal
suspects.
However, in August 1923, shortly before these scandals were uncovered
publicly, Harding died of a heart attack in California after traveling to Alaska.
He was never implicated in any of the scandals.
The Presidency of Calvin Coolidge
Harding’s vice president and successor, Calvin Coolidge, had won popularity
in 1919 as the Massachusetts governor who broke the Boston police strike.
512 UNITED STATES HISTORY: AP® EDITIONHe was a man of few words who richly deserved the nickname “Silent Cal.”
Coolidge once explained why silence was good politics. “If you don’t say
anything,” he said, “you won’t be called on to repeat it.” Also unanswerable was
the president’s sage comment “When more and more people are thrown out of
work, unemployment results.” Coolidge summarized both his presidency and
his era in the phrase “The business of America is business.”
The Election of 1924 After less than a year in office, Coolidge was the
overwhelming choice of the Republican Party as their presidential nominee
in 1924. The Democrats nominated a conservative lawyer from West Virginia,
John W. Davis, and tried to make an issue of the Teapot Dome scandal.
Unhappy with conservative dominance of both parties, liberals formed a
new Progressive Party led by its presidential candidate, Robert La Follette of
Wisconsin. Coolidge won the election easily, but the Progressive ticket did
extremely well for a third party in a conservative era. La Follette received nearly
5 million votes, chiefly from discontented farmers and laborers.
Vetoes and Inaction Coolidge believed in limited government that
stood aside while business conducted its own affairs. Little was accomplished
in the White House except keeping a close watch on the budget. Cutting
spending to the bone, Coolidge vetoed even the acts of the Republican
majority in Congress. He would not allow bonuses for World War I veterans
and vetoed a bill (the McNary-Haugen Bill of 1928) to help farmers as crop
prices fell.
Hoover, Smith, and the Election of 1928
Coolidge declined to run for the presidency a second time. The Republicans
therefore turned to an able leader with a spotless reputation, self-made
millionaire and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. Hoover had served
three presidents (Wilson, Harding, and Coolidge) in administrative roles but
had never before campaigned for elective office. Nevertheless, in 1928, he was
made the Republican nominee for president.
Hoover’s Democratic opponent was the governor of New York, Alfred E.
Smith. As a Roman Catholic and an opponent of Prohibition, Smith appealed
to many immigrant voters in the cities. Many Protestants, however, were openly
prejudiced against Smith.
Republicans boasted of “Coolidge prosperity,” which Hoover promised
to extend. He even suggested that poverty would soon be ended altogether.
Hoover won in a landslide and even took a large number of the electoral votes in
the South. In several southern states—including Texas, Florida, and Virginia—
the taste of prosperity and general dislike for Smith’s religion outweighed the
voters’ usual allegiance to the Democratic Party.
Hoover’s dreams to end poverty quickly proved bitterly ironic. The
prosperity of the 1920s turned into a deep economic depression starting in the
fall of 1929. Topic 7.9 explores its causes and its chilling impact on the lives of
all classes of Americans.
TOPIC 7.8 1920S: CULTURAL AND POLITICAL CONTROVERSIES
513HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES: HOW CONSERVATIVE WERE THE 1920S?
By the 1930s, the 1920s seemed to be a unique decade. It looked like a period
of social fun and booming business wedged between the calamities of military
conflict (World War I) and economic crisis (the Great Depression).
Conservative Ideas In his popular history Only Yesterday (1931),
Frederick Lewis Allen gave support to the ideas of the leading social critics
of the 1920s, H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis. He portrayed the period as
one of narrow-minded materialism in which the middle class abandoned
Progressive reforms, embraced conservative Republican policies, and either
supported or condoned nativism, racism, and fundamentalism. Historian
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. generally accepted this view of the twenties, seeing it
within the framework of his cyclical view of history. He argued that the politics
of the decade represented a conservative reaction to the liberal reforms of the
Progressive Era.
Dissenting Views Revisionist historians of the 1950s questioned whether
the 1920s truly broke with the Progressive past. They argued that the period
continued earlier protest movements such as Populism. Richard Hofstadter
and other “consensus” writers distinguished between two middle classes: a new
urban group with modern values and an older middle class with traditional
values. William Leuchtenburg in The Perils of Prosperity (1958) portrayed the
traditionalists as threatened by cultural pluralism and modern ideas.
Local Power A third assessment took a more positive view of the
traditionalists. Some historians, including Alan Brinkley in the 1980s, argued
that people in the “old” middle class, including fundamentalists and nativists,
were understandably trying to protect their own economic and social self-
interests. At the same time, they were seeking to preserve individual and
community freedom in face of the modernist movement toward centralized
bureaucratic and national control. This effort to maintain local control and
independence from big government is seen as continuing from the 1920s to
the present.
Importance of Materialism Given the extreme and deeply felt differences
between the modernists and the traditionalists, some historians have
wondered why there was not more conflict in the twenties. One explanation
is the importance of the consumer culture. Some historians have shown how
the influence of growing materialism and prosperity caused people to accept
increased corporate and bureaucratic control of their lives. Others have placed
varying emphasis on the ways in which material affluence, consumer goods,
advertising, and a homogeneous mass culture redefined U.S. social and political
values. In one way, by focusing on materialism and consumption, historians
have returned to the views of Mencken, Lewis, and Allen.
Support an Argument Explain two perspectives on the conservatism of the 1920s.
514 UNITED STATES HISTORY: AP® EDITIONREFLECT ON THE LEARNING OBJECTIVES
1. Explain two causes for the reduction of international migration to the
United States during the 1920s.
2. Explain the effects of two developments in popular culture in America
during the 1920s.
KEY TERMS BY THEME
Conflict over Religion (ARC)
modernism
fundamentalism
revivalists
Billy Sunday
Aimee Semple McPherson
Scopes trial
Clarence Darrow
Conflict over Prohibition (ARC)
Volstead Act (1919)
Al Capone
organized crime
21st Amendment
Conflict over Immigration (MIG)
quota laws
Sacco and Vanzetti
Ku Klux Klan
Birth of a Nation
African Americans
foreigners
suspected Communists
Literature and the Arts (ARC)
Gertrude Stein
“lost generation”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ernest Hemingway
Sinclair Lewis
Ezra Pound
T. S. Eliot
Eugene O’Neill
Edward Hopper
regional artists
Grant Wood
George Gershwin
Cultural Changes (ARC)
morals
Sigmund Freud
Margaret Sanger
fashion
high school education
consumer culture
Frederick Lewis Allen
Only Yesterday
African American Identity (SOC)
migration from the South
“Harlem Renaissance”
Countee Cullen
Langston Hughes
James Weldon Johnson
Claude McKay
Duke Ellington
Louis Armstrong
Bessie Smith
Paul Robeson
Back-to-Africa movement
Marcus Garvey
Black pride
1920s Politics (PCE)
Warren Harding
Charles Evans Hughes
Andrew Mellon
Fordney-McCumber Tariff Act
Bureau of the Budget
Harry M. Daugherty
Albert B. Fall
Teapot Dome
Calvin Coolidge
Herbert Hoover
Alfred E. Smith