SOCIAL SCIENCE NOTES
Section One:
Large human life lost: World War 1, Spanish flu, and labor unrest.
1919: Daily life is affected by labor unrest.
1919: Wilson’s weaknesses revealed following racial violence outbreaks and political bombings.
Pressure on Wilson to respond to tensions with Germany
“The world must be made safe for democracy.”
Fourteen Points: self-determination (independence) for small nations, freedom of the seas, free trade, and an end to the secret alliances and shadowy diplomacy that many blamed for the outbreak and rapid escalation of World War I and a “general association of nations”
Wilson made the establishment of the League of Nations his top priority
Treaty of Versailles dimly reflected American 14 points because of resentment toward Wilson and the U.S.'s relatively smaller losses in the war.
On June 28, 1919, the Versailles Peace Treaty was signed by the Allied powers and Germany, officially ending World War I
Many saw the League of Nations as “a dangerous incursion on American sovereignty and an unwelcome restraint of American power.”
Wilson’s stroke negatively impacted the already badly frayed negotiations with congressional leaders over the fate of the treaty and the League.
retreat to isolationism, moored in deep-rooted traditions and popular sensibilities strengthened by intense American disillusionment with World War I.
By the end of the year 1919, 3,600 strikes, involving more than 4 million workers had convulsed the nation.
the conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the radical International Workers of the World (IWW), popularly known as the “Wobblies,” had united, underscoring a worrying trend for business leaders and elected officials
Unions felt that workers’ wartime sacrifices had earned them a share of the dividends of peace.
Higher wages, shorter hours, right to bargain with employers.
“There is no right to strike against the public safety, by anybody, anywhere, anytime.”26 This decisive moment made the famously taciturn Republican’s political career, helping to launch him to the White House.
Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer:
exposing and extinguishing all forms of subversive radicalism.
Red Scare: overarching fear of communism.
While some Americans were inspired by the Russian Revolution and celebrated its success, many others feared that Bolshevism would find purchase in America and backed the government’s campaign against radicalism
Espionage Act 1917: (Sedition Act 1918): proscribed a broad range of speech and protest critical of the government, the military, or the war effort
. Federal agents and local police arrested nearly two thousand suspected subversives, searched the offices of various organizations, and forced dozens of radical publications to shutter their operations.
With President Wilson sidelined by his stroke, Palmer was able to exercise an extraordinary level of power.
Schenck v. United States: Sedition Act overruled by protections on free speech
Holmes found that statements targeting conscription so acutely undermined the nation’s national defense that they posed “a clear and present danger,” which Congress could lawfully suppress without violating the First Amendment.37
Sacco and Vanzetti were indeed anarchists, but little concrete evidence tied them to the crime, and the crime itself did not readily suggest a political motive. During their trial, the prosecution focused on the men’s status as foreign-born immigrants and avowed radical political ideology
Put to death in 1927
The Great Migration: From 1915 to 1920, more than one million African Americans moved to northern cities.
The Eighteenth Amendment, which prohibited the manufacture, sale, and transport of alcoholic beverages, took effect on January 17, 1920
August 18, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment enfranchised women in all forty-eight states. The triumph of the suffrage movement, however, did not translate into high voter turnout among women or significantly alter the contours of the existing political system
Warren G. Harding won the 1920 election
promoted pro-business policies and limited government and oversaw a period of economic prosperity for many after 1924 election.
Farmers and agricultural workers struggled economically even as other sectors of the economy boomed
The 1924 Dawes Plan attempted to stabilize the global economy and German debt through a complex system of loans and reparations payments that relied on American credit.
Section Two:
Henry Ford made the automobile accessible to the middle class.
Model T unveiled in 1908.
Assembly line system to optimize production.
This repetitive, low-skill work alienated workers and made them feel invisible.
Automobile manufacturing spurred demand for steel, rubber, glass, and oil and provided a boom to the cities where these industries were based. Ford’s assembly line transformed American manufacturing
vertical integration: by which a corporation seeks total control over every resource necessary to manufacture their final product.
By capitalizing on the economies of scale afforded by mass production, Ford was able to drastically cut prices
Higher wages in the auto industry allowed workers to participate in the growing consumer economy.
Welfare capitalism involved a number of strategies, including increased benefits for workers, company unions, and sponsored social and recreational activities.
Absence of a social welfare system left workers with no safety net (foreshadowing much)
Companies also sponsored a range of leisure and recreational activities meant to boost worker morale
Growth of leisure time and entertainment
Ford set up a Sociological Department that enforced a code of conduct for his vast workforce
As car ownership exploded, the need for a national highway system became apparent
6% hard surfaced roads in 1908, by 1927 more than 24%.
Cars allowed more and more Americans to commute to work in urban centers while living in the rapidly expanding suburbs.
car ownership was relatively evenly distributed
A spike in deaths resulting from car accidents was a grim consequence of the growing ubiquity of cars. In 1924, 23,600 people died, and an additional 700,000 were injured in automobile crashes
By 1920, 34.7% of homes were wired for electricity, more than double the percentage recorded in 1912
Many homes added additional wiring to take advantage of the flood of new household appliances mass-produced in the 1920s
Small electric motors powered a slew of newly designed dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, mixers, sewing machines, and refrigerators. Toasters, electric kettles, and hair curlers that utilized resistance coils also surged in popularity after World War I
Electric lighting meant factories could run around the clock and deploy the type of sophisticated machinery used by Ford in his cathedrallike factories. Illumination greatly improved safety conditions, and machines led productivity to skyrocket
In 1920, 1.6 percent of farm dwellings had electricity, compared to forty-seven percent of urban dwellings.
A decade later, eighty-five percent of urban dwellings were electrified, while farm dwellings lagged far behind at ten percent
Paradoxically, as the historian Ruth Cowan has pointed out, time-saving gadgets and automobiles may have actually increased the burden of domestic work for many women as they were now expected to do more tasks themselves and drive to run errands like grocery shopping
Advertising exploded in the 1920s, reaching nearly 3 billion dollars by 1929
Incorporating insights from the new field of psychology, corporations played not only to people’s hopes, but also to their insecurities
Advertisements dramatized the risk of embarrassment and the social cost of inattention to one’s personal hygiene
Corporations also deployed more sophisticated marketing techniques to establish and maintain a brand identity that stood out.
Conventional economic theory, echoed by Henry Ford in his 1926 memoir, held that businesses could neither control, nor force popular demand. Admen and salesmen laughed at this quaint orthodoxy
Planned obsolescence was a strategy pioneered by a consortium of international lightbulb manufacturers who colluded in 1924 to adopt as an industry standard a bulb with a greatly reduced lifespan
To help move the Model A, Ford established the Universal Credit Corporation, which allowed customers to buy the newest model Fords on an installment plan. He was late to the game, as buying on credit had been a staple of the auto industry since 1919.
Within two years, half of all American automobile sales utilized consumer credit plans popularly known as installment buying, and by 1926 the total reached three-fourths.
Installment buying led to more aggressive sales techniques and the deployment of unsavory debt collection tactics if customers failed to make their monthly payments
The Broadcasting Revolution In 1920, wireless radio was a small and niche industry in the United States. In less than a decade, it would explode into a billion-dollar global industry dominated by American corporations
The first true radio station began as a hobby of Dr. Frank Conrad, an electrical engineer who began to broadcast free musical entertainment programs twice a week using a microphone rigged up to a phone transmitter
By 1925, there were 2.5 million radios in the United States. By the end of the decade, almost all American households had a wireless radio, which often served as the focal point of their living room or parlors.
The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) fulfilled President Wilson’s desire that the United States should dominate wireless communication globally following the war.
Using the poorly written and badly out-of-date Radio Act of 1912, Hoover, for a time, was able to rely on the cooperation of radio stations and their voluntary submission to decisions he made in his capacity as radio’s regulatory “umpire.”
Federal Radio Act of 1927. “The ether is a public medium and its use must be for the public benefit,”
As more educated and middle-class Americans flocked to the movies, grand air-conditioned auditoriums arose in cities across the nation. “Movie palaces”
The immersive experience offered an escape from the daily grind, especially for women
Increasingly ambitious productions made movies much more expensive to make.
Clara Bow, who epitomized the free-spirited “flapper” ideal.
Hollywood movies promoted a glittering vision of America as a land of glamor, romance, and affluence.
Mass media spurred the growth of amateur and professional sports
Women athletes also challenged prevailing ideas about gender. On August 6, 1926, Gertrude Ederle, a twenty-year-old New Yorker and Olympic gold medalist, became the first woman to swim across the English Channel.
In 1927, Babe Ruth helped the New York Yankees win the World Series and hammered sixty home runs
College football emerged as a hugely popular and lucrative sport
SECTION THREE:
Lynds published their groundbreaking research in 1929 as Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture
a growing wealth gap produced starkly divergent lifestyles and opportunities for the city’s working-class and middle-class citizens
Ku Klux Klan (KKK), a white supremacist vigilante organization that mixed vicious anti-Semitism and anti-Catholic bigotry with anti-Black racism.
The original KKK had formed in the aftermath of the Civil War as Confederate veterans mobilized to deny African Americans economic, social, and political equality as full citizens
A series of scandals and internal conflicts within the KKK leadership led to the Klan’s decline in the late 1920s, its dramatic rise in the first half of the decade signaled the potency of its multifaceted agenda
Ozawa v. United States: The court declared that physical traits, like skin color and hair color, were unreliable in establishing a person’s race and instead decided it better to apply a somewhat flexible geographic and pseudo-scientific definition that named “a white person” as “a member of the Caucasian race.”
United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind: The court, clearly frustrated by the impossibility of pinning down the mercurial role race had assumed within various academic discourses, reverted to a base interpretation of whiteness.
America had experienced mass immigration on an unprecedented scale. From 1901 to 1920, 14.1 million immigrants arrived on American shores
Anti-semitism rampant, and even limits the number of jewish students admitted to some Ivy League universities.
Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, Southern and Eastern European countries received only sixteen percent of the assigned quotas while the total number of immigrants admitted annually from any nation was reduced to 155,000
The Passing of the Great Race: Grant insisted that the physical and character traits of “inferior races” were hereditary and immutable. In his view, nature, not nurture, determined the worth and destiny of an individual and, by extension, entire nations and races.
Other scholars supplied dubious statistical evidence to bolster Grant’s pseudoscientific racism
. Eugenics perverted evolutionary biology and channeled the philosophy of Social Darwinism to assert that human society could be divided into superior and inferior races and that moral character traits and poverty were hereditary
Buck v. Bell: upheld the constitutionality of Virginia’s sterilization law, with the chilling rejoinder: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which made it illegal for whites to marry anyone classified as “non-white.”
a new generation of women broke free from many of the traditional Victorian gender norms
Flapper style also encompassed certain activities—drinking, smoking, wearing cosmetics, and frequenting jazz clubs—that alarmed cultural conservatives
One in six marriages in the 1920s ended in divorce
Revolt of Modern Youth. The book argued for “companionate marriage,” in which husband and wife entered into a preliminary partnership to assure their compatibility
As more women worked outside of the home, they were less financially dependent on men
By 1930, just over one in four American women over the age of sixteen (25.3 percent) worked outside of the home, up from one in five (20.6 percent) at the beginning of the twentieth century
Despite technological innovations, rural women continued to endure great hardship
Bohemians included feminists, anarchists, socialists, and communist revolutionaries, avant-garde painters, sculptors, writers, and many other men and women who rejected the Victorian era’s dominant social norms in favor of a nonconformist lifestyle that celebrated individual self-expression.
“Lost Generation” to describe the group of American writers and artists who came of age during World War I and haunted the cafes and wine bars of Montparnasse
the Lost Generation enjoyed enormous influence in their native land thanks to American literary publications like Vanity Fair
Georgia O’Keeffe pioneered an American school of expressionism as she rendered traditional subjects like flowers and landscapes in an evocative style that combined the abstract and the familiar to great effect
the Harlem Renaissance boldly demanded that the arbiters of culture take notice of the contributions of African Americans to the artistic, scholarly, and literary traditions of their own nation and to the wider world
Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and the Jamaican-born Claude McKay, grappled with racial prejudice, racial violence, and Black identity in compelling prose
The father of the New Negro Movement was the philosopher and Howard University professor Alaine Locke
1925 collection of poems, essays, and fiction entitled The New Negro
Sigmund Freud: father of psychoanalysis
Freud’s theories of the subconscious mind and human desires inspired many of the era’s best-known novels, plays, and movies
Leopold and Loeb trial generated helped bring discussions of psychological topics, such as childhood trauma and the nature of criminality
Scopes Trial: Public school teacher arrested for teaching evolution.
underlying conflict between secular modernists and religious traditionalists
Aimee Semple McPherson. “Sister Aimee,” as she was known to her legion of followers, was one of the most successful evangelists of the era.
Prohibition in America lasted thirteen years, five months, and nine days—and was in place for the entire decade of the Roaring
c bootlegger, the popular term for those who handled the wholesale procurement and transport of alcohol
. The average urban drinker was far more likely to obtain their fix at one of the numerous clandestine saloons, known as speakeasies
In 1929, a New York investigation identified 373 nightclubs and speakeasies operating within the city
wealthy gangsters became celebrated folkheroes, even as they spread violence.
Al Capone
SECTION FOUR:
Dry Democrats also tended to be white, native-born Protestants and overlapped extensively, but not perfectly, with the party’s anti-evolution and pro-KKK factions
Smith’s drubbing in the 1928 election revealed the continued potency of blatant and soft anti-Catholic bigotry in American politics
The Great Mississippi Flood extended nearly one thousand miles from Cairo, Illinois, to New Orleans, Louisiana, and cut a swath of devastation fifty to 150 feet wide
Hoover’s relief operation was marred by racial discrimination and Jim Crow segregation. Near Vicksburg, Mississippi, African-American families were relegated to crowded camps with fewer tents, blankets, and beds than the far better-equipped neighboring camps for white refugees
Hoover felt the federal bureaucracy must not be allowed to grow too large or too powerful
Hoover signed the Agricultural Marketing Act into law, fulfilling a campaign promise to tackle the intractable issue of agricultural surpluses
Buying on margin, which allowed investors to borrow against future profits in order to purchase large amounts of stock with very little money up front
In the 1920s, there was very little government regulation of the stock market, and a number of ethically dubious practices such as insider trading (which is now illegal) were commonplace
Black Tuesday, October 29. Over a five-hour span, billions in stock value evaporated as the panic accelerated
“In a time of economic crisis,” the historian Eric Rauchway observed, “even a short pause in purchasing could slow or even stop the nation’s assembly lines.”
by 1929 the market became glutted as supply outstripped demand and sales flattened.
Crop prices, which had never recovered from the postwar slump, continued to drop despite the best efforts and millions spent
The overwhelming demand for relief rapidly depleted the state coffers and forced hundreds to default on their debt payments
left banks dangerously undercapitalized and overleveraged
collective panic led to bank runs
crash slowed the free flow of American overseas loans to a trickle and threatened to plunge the global economy into chaos
Smoot-Hawley Tariff: a targeted measure designed to protect industries in their rural home districts, namely beet sugar and wool, from foreign competition.
Many Americans lost their homes and struggled to find their next meal
During the New Deal, lawmakers adopted unemployment insurance, social security pensions, and government welfare programs in response to the Great Depression’s abject demonstration of the glaring inadequacy of private charity or welfare capitalism
Particularly hard for black and immigrant communities.
The sprawling shanty-towns that sprang up in New York’s Central Park and in dozens of other cities and towns were dubbed “Hoovervilles.”
The president’s reputation followed the same downward slope as the economy
Scenes of government troops brutalizing veterans lent traction to portrayals of Hoover as an unfeeling brute who was indifferent to the struggles of everyday Americans
Hoover was swept out of office in a humiliating loss to the Democratic candidate, Franklin Roosevelt.
Marked end of roaring twenties