Topic 7.8: 1920's: Cultural & Political Contreversies

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