Key Concepts & Terms<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n
- \r\n \t
- \u201cReturn to Normalcy\u201d<\/strong> - Campaign slogan of Warren G. Harding\u2019s 1920 campaign for president that expressed the desire to limit the size of government and become more isolationist after World War I.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nOn a sunny day in early March 1921, Warren G. Harding took the oath to become the twenty-ninth president of the United States. He had won a landslide election by promising a \u201creturn to normalcy<\/strong>.\u201d \u201cOur supreme task is the resumption of our onward, normal way,\u201d he declared in his inaugural address. While campaigning, he said, \u201cAmerica\u2019s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration.\u201d The nation still reeled from the shock of World War I, the explosion of racial violence and political repression in 1919, and, a lingering \u201cRed Scare\u201d sparked by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.\r\n\r\nMore than 115,000 American soldiers had lost their lives in barely a year of fighting in Europe. Then, between 1918 and 1920, nearly seven hundred thousand Americans died in a flu epidemic that hit nearly 20 percent of the American population. Waves of labor strikes, meanwhile, hit soon after the war. Radicals bellowed. Anarchists and others sent more than thirty bombs through the mail on May 1, 1919. After wartime controls fell, the economy tanked and national unemployment hit 20 percent. Farmers\u2019 bankruptcy rates, already egregious, now skyrocketed. Harding could hardly deliver the peace that he promised, but his message nevertheless resonated among a populace wracked by instability.\r\n\r\nThe 1920s, of course, would be anything but \u201cnormal.\u201d The decade so reshaped American life that it came to be called by many names: the New Era, the Jazz Age, the Age of the Flapper, the Prosperity Decade, and, most commonly, the Roaring Twenties. The mass production and consumption of automobiles, household appliances, film, and radio fueled a new economy and new standards of living. New mass entertainment introduced talking films and jazz while sexual and social restraints loosened. But at the same time, many Americans turned their back on political and economic reform, denounced America\u2019s shifting demographics, stifled immigration, retreated toward \u201cold-time religion,\u201d and revived the Ku Klux Klan with millions of new members. On the other hand, many Americans fought harder than ever for equal rights and cultural observers noted the appearance of \u201cthe New Woman\u201d and \u201cthe New Negro.\u201d Old immigrant communities that had predated new immigration quotas, meanwhile, clung to their cultures and their native faiths. The 1920s were a decade of conflict and tension. But whatever it was, it was not \u201cnormalcy.\u201d\r\n
\r\n Check for Understanding<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- What were the major tensions and contradictions of the 1920s?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
II. Republican White House, 1921-1933<\/h1>\r\n
\r\n Key Concepts & Terms<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- Russian Revolution<\/strong> - The overthrow of the Russian monarchy and the placement of Bolsheviks (socialists) in power.<\/li>\r\n \t
- Teapot Dome Scandal<\/strong> - A major example of corruption during the Harding administration connected to the leasing of oil reserves.<\/li>\r\n \t
- 19th Amendment <\/strong> - Ratified in 1920. Enabled women to vote in every state in the U.S.<\/li>\r\n \t
- 18th Amendment\/Prohibition <\/strong> - Ratified in 1919, began the era of Prohibition by making the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcohol illegal.<\/li>\r\n \t
- Equal Rights Amendment<\/strong> - First proposed in 1923, demanded \u2018Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the U.S. or any state on account of sex\u2019. Debatable whether the amendment was ratified in 2020.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nTo deliver on his promises of stability and prosperity, Harding signed legislation to restore a high protective tariff and dismantled the last wartime controls over industry. Meanwhile, the vestiges of America\u2019s involvement in World War I and its propaganda and suspicions of anything less than \u201c100 percent American\u201d pushed Congress to address fears of immigration and foreign populations. A sour postwar economy led elites to raise the specter of the Russian Revolution<\/strong> and sideline not just the various American socialist and anarchist organizations but nearly all union activism. During the 1920s, the labor movement suffered a sharp decline in memberships. Workers lost not only bargaining power but also the support of courts, politicians, and, in large measure, the American public.[footnote]David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865\u20131925 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nHarding\u2019s presidency would go down in history as among the most corrupt. Many of Harding\u2019s cabinet appointees, however, were individuals of true stature that answered to various American constituencies. For instance, Henry C. Wallace, the vocal editor of Wallace\u2019s Farmer<\/em> and a well-known proponent of scientific farming, was made secretary of agriculture. Herbert Hoover, the popular head and administrator of the wartime Food Administration and a self-made millionaire, was made secretary of commerce. To satisfy business interests, the conservative businessman Andrew Mellon became secretary of the treasury. Mostly, however, it was the appointing of friends and close supporters, dubbed \u201cthe Ohio gang,\u201d that led to trouble.[footnote]William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914\u20131932 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nHarding\u2019s administration suffered a tremendous setback when several officials conspired to lease government land in Wyoming to oil companies in exchange for cash. Known as the Teapot Dome scandal<\/strong> (named after the nearby rock formation that resembled a teapot), interior secretary Albert Fall and navy secretary Edwin Denby resigned and Fall was convicted and sent to jail. Harding took vacation in the summer of 1923 so that he could think deeply on how to deal \u201cwith my God-damned friends\u201d\u2014it was his friends, and not his enemies, that kept him up walking the halls at nights. But then, in August 1923, Harding died suddenly of a heart attack and Vice President Calvin Coolidge ascended to the highest office in the land.[footnote]Robert K. Murray, The Harding Era: Warren G. Harding and His Administration (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969). [\/footnote]\r\n\r\nThe son of a shopkeeper, Coolidge climbed the Republican ranks from city councilman to governor of Massachusetts. As president, Coolidge sought to remove the stain of scandal but otherwise continued Harding\u2019s economic approach, refusing to take actions in defense of workers or consumers against American business. \u201cThe chief business of the American people,\u201d the new president stated, \u201cis business.\u201d One observer called Coolidge\u2019s policy \u201cactive inactivity,\u201d but Coolidge was not afraid of supporting business interests and wealthy Americans by lowering taxes or maintaining high tariff rates. Congress, for instance, had already begun to reduce taxes on the wealthy from wartime levels of 66 percent to 20 percent, which Coolidge championed.[footnote]Leuchtenburg, Perils of Prosperity.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nWhile Coolidge supported business, other Americans continued their activism. The 1920s, for instance, represented a time of great activism among American women, who had won the vote with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Female voters, like their male counterparts, pursued many interests. Concerned about squalor, poverty, and domestic violence, women had already lent their efforts to prohibition, which went into effect under the Eighteenth Amendment in January 1920. After that point, alcohol could no longer be manufactured or sold. Other reformers urged government action to ameliorate high mortality rates among infants and children, provide federal aid for education, and ensure peace and disarmament. Some activists advocated protective legislation for women and children, while Alice Paul and the National Woman\u2019s Party called for the elimination of all legal distinctions \u201con account of sex\u201d through the proposed Equal Rights Amendment<\/strong> (ERA<\/strong>), which was introduced but defeated in Congress.[footnote]Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). [\/footnote]\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_215\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"921\"]
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/americanyawp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/229\/2025\/04\/22.2-300x169.jpg\")
During the 1920s, the National Woman\u2019s Party fought for the rights of women beyond that of suffrage, which they had secured through the 19th Amendment<\/strong> in 1920. They organized private events, like the tea party pictured here, and public campaigning, such as the introduction of the Equal Rights Amendment to Congress, as they continued the struggle for equality. Library of Congress.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nNational politics in the 1920s were dominated by the Republican Party, which held not only the presidency but both houses of Congress as well. Coolidge decided not to seek a second term in 1928. A man of few words, \u201cSilent Cal\u201d publicized his decision by handing a scrap of paper to a reporter that simply read: \u201cI do not choose to run for president in 1928.\u201d\u00a0That year\u2019s race became a contest between the Democratic governor of New York, Al Smith, whose Catholic faith and immigrant background aroused nativist suspicions and whose connections to Tammany Hall and anti-Prohibition politics offended reformers, and the Republican candidate, Herbert Hoover, whose all-American, Midwestern, Protestant background and managerial prowess during World War I endeared him to American voters.[footnote]Allan J. Lichtman, Prejudice and the Old Politics: The Presidential Election of 1928 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1979). [\/footnote]\u00a0Hoover focused on economic growth and prosperity. He had served as secretary of commerce under Harding and Coolidge and claimed credit for the sustained growth seen during the 1920s. \u201cWe in America to-day are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land,\u201d he said when he launched his 1928 presidential campaign.\u201d Given a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, and we shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.\u201d[footnote]\u201cHoover Accepts the Republican Nomination,\u201d Sacramento Bee, August 11, 1928.[\/footnote] Despite Hoover\u2019s claims\u2013which, after the onset of the Great Depression the following year, would seem farcical\u2013much of the election centered on Smith\u2019s religion and his opposition to Prohibition. Many Protestant ministers preached against Smith and warned that he would be enthralled to the pope. Hoover won in a landslide. While Smith won handily in the nation\u2019s largest cities, portending future political trends, he lost most of the rest of the country. Even several solidly Democratic southern states pulled the lever for a Republican for the first time since Reconstruction.[footnote]Allan J. Lichtman, Prejudice and the Old Politics: The Presidential Election of 1928 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\n Check for Understanding<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- What were the priorities of the Harding and Coolidge administrations?<\/li>\r\n \t
- What fears drove Hoover\u2019s landslide election in 1928?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
III. The Culture of Consumption<\/h1>\r\n
\r\n Key Concepts & Terms<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- Marketing<\/strong> - The beginning of mass media advertising to appeal to consumers in newspapers, magazines, radio, and other means.<\/li>\r\n \t
- Department Stores<\/strong> - Chains like Macys, Sears and Roebuck, and J.C. Penney, first offered one stop shopping for clothing, household goods, furniture and more.<\/li>\r\n \t
- Model-T<\/strong> - First mass produced automobile, introduced in 1908, revolutionized cars by making them more affordable and therefore widespread.<\/li>\r\n \t
- Mass Media<\/strong> - Radio magazines, and newspapers that were available nationally.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\u201cChange is in the very air Americans breathe, and consumer changes are the very bricks out of which we are building our new kind of civilization,\u201d announced marketing <\/strong>expert and home economist Christine Frederick in her influential 1929 monograph, Selling Mrs. Consumer<\/em>. The book, which was based on one of the earliest surveys of American buying habits, advised manufacturers and advertisers how to capture the purchasing power of women, who, according to Frederick, accounted for 90 percent of household expenditures. Aside from granting advertisers insight into the psychology of the \u201caverage\u201d consumer, Frederick\u2019s text captured the tremendous social and economic transformations that had been wrought over the course of her lifetime.[footnote]Christine Frederick, Selling Mrs. Consumer, (New York: Business Bourse, 1929), 29.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nIndeed, the America of Frederick\u2019s birth looked very different from the one she confronted in 1929. The consumer change she studied had resulted from the industrial expansion of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With the discovery of new energy sources and manufacturing technologies, industrial output flooded the market with a range of consumer products such as ready-to-wear clothing, convenience foods, and home appliances. By the end of the nineteenth century, output had risen so dramatically that many contemporaries feared supply had outpaced demand and that the nation would soon face the devastating financial consequences of overproduction. American businessmen attempted to avoid this catastrophe by developing new merchandising and marketing<\/strong> strategies that transformed distribution and stimulated a new culture of consumer desire.[footnote]T. J. Jackson Lears, \u201cFrom Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880\u20131930,\u201d in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880\u20131980, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 1\u201338.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nThe department store stood at the center of this early consumer revolution. By the 1880s, several large dry-goods houses blossomed into modern retail department stores<\/strong>. These emporiums concentrated a broad array of goods under a single roof, allowing customers to purchase shirtwaists and gloves alongside toy trains and washbasins. To attract customers, department stores relied on more than variety. They also employed innovations in service (such as access to restaurants, writing rooms, and babysitting) and spectacle (such as elaborately decorated store windows, fashion shows, and interior merchandise displays). Marshall Field & Co. was among the most successful of these ventures. Located on State Street in Chicago, the company pioneered many of these strategies, including establishing a tearoom that provided refreshment to the well-heeled female shoppers who composed the store\u2019s clientele. Reflecting on the success of Field\u2019s marketing techniques, Thomas W. Goodspeed, an early trustee of the University of Chicago, wrote, \u201cPerhaps the most notable of Mr. Field\u2019s innovations was that he made a store in which it was a joy to buy.\u201d[footnote]Thomas W. Goodspeed, \u201cMarshall Field,\u201d University of Chicago Magazine, Vol. III (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), 48.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_216\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"936\"]
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/americanyawp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/229\/2025\/04\/22.3-300x169.jpg\")
In the 1920s Americans across the country bought magazines like Photoplay in order to get more information about the stars of their new favorite entertainment media: the movies. Advertisers took advantage of this broad audience to promote a wide range of goods and services to both men and women. Archive.org.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe joy of buying infected a growing number of Americans in the early twentieth century as the rise of mail-order catalogs, mass-circulation magazines, and national branding further stoked consumer desire. The automobile industry also fostered the new culture of consumption by promoting the use of credit. By 1927, more than 60 percent of American automobiles were sold on credit, and installment purchasing was made available for nearly every other large consumer purchase. Spurred by access to easy credit, consumer expenditures for household appliances, for example, grew by more than 120 percent between 1919 and 1929. Henry Ford\u2019s assembly line, which advanced production strategies practiced within countless industries, brought automobiles within the reach of middle-income Americans and further drove the spirit of consumerism. By 1925, Ford\u2019s factories were turning out a Model-T<\/strong> every ten seconds. The number of registered cars ballooned from just over nine million in 1920 to nearly twenty-seven million by the decade\u2019s end. Americans owned more cars than Great Britain, Germany, France, and Italy combined. In the late 1920s, 80 percent of the world\u2019s cars drove on American roads.\r\n\r\n Check for Understanding<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- What did department stores offer that was unique at the time?<\/li>\r\n \t
- What is the connection between the use of credit and increased consumerism?<\/li>\r\n \t
- How did automobiles, specifically the Model-T, represent the new era of consumption?<\/li>\r\n \t
- How is the culture of consumption related to job creation?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
IV. Culture of Escape<\/h1>\r\n
\r\n Key Concepts & Terms<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- Nickelodeons<\/strong> - A type of motion-picture theatre that shows short films where customers paid one nickel for entrance.<\/li>\r\n \t
- Jazz <\/strong> - An American musical genre that grew out of Black communities. The genre was known for its energy and improvisation that appealed to dancers.<\/li>\r\n \t
- Coney Island <\/strong> - An entertainment area in the New York City neighborhood of Brooklyn that was a popular place for immigrants and working-class people to enjoy an amusement park, boardwalk, and more.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nAs transformative as steam and iron had been in the previous century, gasoline and electricity\u2014embodied most dramatically for many Americans in automobiles, film, and radio\u2014propelled not only consumption but also the famed popular culture in the 1920s. \u201cWe wish to escape,\u201d wrote Edgar Burroughs, author of the Tarzan series, \u201c. . . the restrictions of manmade laws, and the inhibitions that society has placed upon us.\u201d Burroughs authored a new Tarzan story nearly every year from 1914 until 1939. \u201cWe would each like to be Tarzan,\u201d he said. \u201cAt least I would; I admit it.\u201d Like many Americans in the 1920s, Burroughs sought to challenge and escape the constraints of a society that seemed more industrialized with each passing day.[footnote]LeRoy Ashby, With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture Since 1830 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 177.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nJust like Burroughs, Americans escaped with great speed. Whether through the automobile, Hollywood\u2019s latest films, jazz<\/strong> records produced on Tin Pan Alley, or the hours spent listening to radio broadcasts of Jack Dempsey\u2019s prizefights, the public wrapped itself in popular culture. One observer estimated that Americans belted out the silly musical hit \u201cYes, We Have No Bananas\u201d more than \u201cThe Star Spangled Banner\u201d and all the hymns in all the hymnals combined.[footnote]Ibid., 183[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nAs the automobile became more popular and more reliable, more people traveled more frequently and attempted greater distances. Women increasingly drove themselves to their own activities as well as those of their children. Vacationing Americans sped to Florida to escape northern winters. Young men and women fled the supervision of courtship, exchanging the staid parlor couch for sexual exploration in the backseat of a sedan. In order to serve and capture the growing number of drivers, Americans erected gas stations, diners, motels, and billboards along the roadside. Automobiles themselves became objects of entertainment: nearly one hundred thousand people gathered to watch drivers compete for the $50,000 prize of the Indianapolis 500.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_217\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"918\"]
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/americanyawp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/229\/2025\/04\/22.4-300x169.jpg\")
Side view of a Ford sedan with four passengers and a woman getting in on the driver\u2019s side, ca.1923. Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-54096.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nMeanwhile, the United States dominated the global film industry. By 1930, as moviemaking became more expensive, a handful of film companies took control of the industry. Immigrants, mostly of Jewish heritage from central and Eastern Europe, originally \u201cinvented Hollywood\u201d because most turn-of-the-century middle- and upper-class Americans viewed cinema as lower-class entertainment. After their parents emigrated from Poland in 1876, Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack Warner (who were, according to family lore, given the name when an Ellis Island official could not understand their surname) founded Warner Bros. In 1918, Universal, Paramount, Columbia, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) were all founded by or led by Jewish executives. Aware of their social status as outsiders, these immigrants (or sons of immigrants) purposefully produced films that portrayed American values of opportunity, democracy, and freedom.\r\n\r\nNot content with distributing thirty-minute films in nickelodeons<\/strong>, film moguls produced longer, higher-quality films and showed them in palatial theaters that attracted those who had previously shunned the film industry. But as filmmakers captured the middle and upper classes, they maintained working-class moviegoers by blending traditional and modern values. Cecil B. DeMille\u2019s 1923 epic The Ten Commandments<\/em> depicted orgiastic revelry, for instance, while still managing to celebrate a biblical story. But what good was a silver screen in a dingy theater? Moguls and entrepreneurs soon constructed picture palaces. Samuel Rothafel\u2019s Roxy Theater in New York held more than six thousand patrons who could be escorted by a uniformed usher past gardens and statues to their cushioned seat. In order to show The Jazz Singer<\/em> (1927), the first movie with synchronized words and pictures, the Warners spent half a million to equip two theaters. \u201cSound is a passing fancy,\u201d one MGM producer told his wife, but Warner Bros.\u2019 assets, which increased from just $5,000,000 in 1925 to $230,000,000 in 1930, tell a different story.[footnote]Ibid., 216.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nAmericans fell in love with the movies. Whether it was the surroundings, the sound, or the production budgets, weekly movie attendance skyrocketed from sixteen million in 1912 to forty million in the early 1920s. Hungarian immigrant William Fox, founder of Fox Film Corporation, declared that \u201cthe motion picture is a distinctly American institution\u201d because \u201cthe rich rub elbows with the poor\u201d in movie theaters. With no seating restriction, the one-price admission was accessible for nearly all Americans (African Americans, however, were either excluded or segregated). Women represented more than 60 percent of moviegoers, packing theaters to see Mary Pickford, nicknamed \u201cAmerica\u2019s Sweetheart,\u201d who was earning one million dollars a year by 1920 through a combination of film and endorsements contracts. Pickford and other female stars popularized the \u201cflapper,\u201d a woman who favored short skirts, makeup, and cigarettes.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_218\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"548\"]![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/americanyawp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/229\/2025\/04\/22.5-220x300.jpg\")
Mary Pickford\u2019s film personas led the glamorous and lavish lifestyle that female movie-goers of the 1920s desired so much. Mary Pickford, 1920. Library of Congress.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nAs Americans went to the movies more and more, at home they had the radio. Italian scientist Guglielmo Marconi transmitted the first transatlantic wireless (radio) message in 1901, but radios in the home did not become available until around 1920, when they boomed across the country. Around half of American homes contained a radio by 1930. Radio stations brought entertainment directly into the living room through the sale of advertisements and sponsorships, from The Maxwell House Hour<\/em> to the Lucky Strike Orchestra<\/em>. Soap companies sponsored daytime dramas so frequently that an entire genre\u2014\u201csoap operas\u201d\u2014was born, providing housewives with audio adventures that stood in stark contrast to common chores. Though radio stations were often under the control of corporations like the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) or the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), radio programs were less constrained by traditional boundaries in order to capture as wide an audience as possible, spreading popular culture on a national level.\r\n\r\nRadio exposed Americans to a broad array of music. Jazz, a uniquely American musical style popularized by the African-American community in New Orleans, spread primarily through radio stations and records. The New York Times<\/em> had ridiculed jazz as \u201csavage\u201d because of its racial heritage, but the music represented cultural independence to others. As Harlem-based musician William Dixon put it, \u201cIt did seem, to a little boy, that . . . white people really owned everything. But that wasn\u2019t entirely true. They didn\u2019t own the music that I played.\u201d The fast-paced and spontaneity-laced tunes invited the listener to dance along. \u201cWhen a good orchestra plays a \u2018rag,\u2019\u201d dance instructor Vernon Castle recalled, \u201cone has simply got to move.\u201d Jazz became a national sensation, played and heard by both white and Black Americans. Jewish Lithuanian-born singer Al Jolson\u2014whose biography inspired The Jazz Singer<\/em> and who played the film\u2019s titular character\u2014became the most popular singer in America.[footnote]Ibid., 210.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nThe 1920s also witnessed the maturation of professional sports. Play-by-play radio broadcasts of major collegiate and professional sporting events marked a new era for sports, despite the institutionalization of racial segregation in most. Suddenly, Jack Dempsey\u2019s left crosses and right uppercuts could almost be felt in homes across the United States. Dempsey, who held the heavyweight championship for most of the decade, drew million-dollar gates and inaugurated \u201cDempseymania\u201d in newspapers across the country. Red Grange, who carried the football with a similar recklessness, helped popularize professional football, which was then in the shadow of the college game. Grange left the University of Illinois before graduating to join the Chicago Bears in 1925. \u201cThere had never been such evidence of public interest since our professional league began,\u201d recalled Bears owner George Halas of Grange\u2019s arrival.[footnote]Ibid., 181.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nPerhaps no sports figure left a bigger mark than did Babe Ruth. Born George Herman Ruth, the \u201cSultan of Swat\u201d grew up in an orphanage in Baltimore\u2019s slums. Ruth\u2019s emergence onto the national scene was much needed, as the baseball world had been rocked by the so-called Black Sox Scandal in which eight players allegedly agreed to throw the 1919 World Series. Ruth hit fifty-four home runs in 1920, which was more than any other team combined. Baseball writers called Ruth a superman, and more Americans could recognize Ruth than they could then-president Warren G. Harding.\r\n\r\nAfter an era of destruction and doubt brought about by World War I, Americans craved heroes who seemed to defy convention and break boundaries. Dempsey, Grange, and Ruth dominated their respective sports, but only Charles Lindbergh conquered the sky. On May 21, 1927, Lindbergh concluded the first ever nonstop solo flight from New York to Paris. Armed with only a few sandwiches, some bottles of water, paper maps, and a flashlight, Lindbergh successfully navigated over the Atlantic Ocean in thirty-three hours. Some historians have dubbed Lindbergh the \u201chero of the decade,\u201d not only for his transatlantic journey but because he helped to restore the faith of many Americans in individual effort and technological advancement. In a world so recently devastated by machine guns, submarines, and chemical weapons, Lindbergh\u2019s flight demonstrated that technology could inspire and accomplish great things. Outlook Magazine<\/em> called Lindbergh \u201cthe heir of all that we like to think is best in America.\u201d[footnote]John W. Ward, \u201cThe Meaning of Lindbergh\u2019s Flight,\u201d in Studies in American Culture: Dominant Ideas and Images, ed. Joseph J. Kwiat and Mary C. Turpie (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1960), 33.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nThe decade\u2019s popular culture seemed to revolve around escape. Coney Island<\/strong> in New York marked new amusements for young and old. Americans drove their sedans to massive theaters to enjoy major motion pictures. Radio towers broadcasted the bold new sound of jazz, the adventures of soap operas, and the feats of amazing athletes. Dempsey and Grange seemed bigger, stronger, and faster than any who dared to challenge them. Babe Ruth smashed home runs out of ball parks across the country. And Lindbergh escaped the earth\u2019s gravity and crossed an entire ocean. Neither Dempsey nor Ruth nor Lindbergh made Americans forget the horrors of World War I and the chaos that followed, but they made it seem as if the future would be that much brighter.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_219\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"485\"]![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/americanyawp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/229\/2025\/04\/22.6-237x300.jpg\")
Babe Ruth\u2019s incredible talent accelerated the popularity of baseball, cementing it as America\u2019s pastime. Ruth\u2019s propensity to shatter records made him a national hero. Library of Congress.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n\r\n Check for Understanding<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- How did automobiles offer Americans a chance at \u201cescape\u201d?<\/li>\r\n \t
- How did automobiles and mass media help to unite the country?<\/li>\r\n \t
- In what ways did films represent escapism and the American Dream?<\/li>\r\n \t
- How did the majority culture react to the popularization of jazz music?<\/li>\r\n \t
- In what ways did Mary Pickford, Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, and Charles Lindbergh represent the culture of celebrity?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
V. \"The New Woman\"<\/h1>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_220\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"440\"]
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This \u201cnew breed\u201d of women \u2013 known as the flapper \u2013 went against the gender proscriptions of the era, bobbing their hair, wearing short dresses, listening to jazz, and flouting social and sexual norms. While liberating in many ways, these behaviors also reinforced stereotypes of female carelessness and obsessive consumerism that would continue throughout the twentieth century. Library of Congress.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n\r\n Key Concepts & Terms<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- Flapper<\/strong> - A subculture of women in the 1920s who shunned Victorian norms by wearing short dresses, bobbed hair, drinking alcohol and dancing in jazz clubs.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nThe rising emphasis on spending and accumulation nurtured a national ethos of materialism and individual pleasure. These impulses were embodied in the figure of the flapper<\/strong>, whose bobbed hair, short skirts, makeup, cigarettes, and carefree spirit captured the attention of American novelists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis. Rejecting the old Victorian values of desexualized modesty and self-restraint, young \u201cflappers<\/strong>\u201d seized opportunities for the public coed pleasures offered by new commercial leisure institutions, such as dance halls, cabarets, and nickelodeons, not to mention the illicit blind tigers and speakeasies spawned by Prohibition. So doing, young American women had helped usher in a new morality that permitted women greater independence, freedom of movement, and access to the delights of urban living. In the words of psychologist G. Stanley Hall, \u201cShe was out to see the world and, incidentally, be seen of it.\u201d\r\n\r\nSuch sentiments were repeated in an oft-cited advertisement in a 1930 edition of the Chicago Tribune<\/em>: \u201cToday\u2019s woman gets what she wants. The vote. Slim sheaths of silk to replace voluminous petticoats. Glassware in sapphire blue or glowing amber. The right to a career. Soap to match her bathroom\u2019s color scheme.\u201d As with so much else in the 1920s, however, sex and gender were in many ways a study in contradictions. It was the decade of the \u201cNew Woman,\u201d and one in which only 10 percent of married women\u2014although nearly half of unmarried women\u2014worked outside the home.[footnote]See Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 113.[\/footnote] It was a decade in which new technologies decreased time requirements for household chores, and one in which standards of cleanliness and order in the home rose to often impossible standards. It was a decade in which women finally could exercise their right to vote, and one in which the often thinly bound women\u2019s coalitions that had won that victory splintered into various causes. Finally, it was a decade in which images such as the \u201cflapper\u201d gave women new modes of representing femininity, and one in which such representations were often inaccessible to women of certain races, ages, and socioeconomic classes.\r\n\r\nWomen undoubtedly gained much in the 1920s. There was a profound and keenly felt cultural shift that, for many women, meant increased opportunity to work outside the home. The number of professional women, for example, significantly rose in the decade. But limits still existed, even for professional women. Occupations such as law and medicine remained overwhelmingly male: most female professionals were in feminized professions such as teaching and nursing. And even within these fields, it was difficult for women to rise to leadership positions.\r\n\r\nFurther, it is crucial not to overgeneralize the experience of all women based on the experiences of a much-commented-upon subset of the population. A woman\u2019s race, class, ethnicity, and marital status all had an impact on both the likelihood that she worked outside the home and the types of opportunities that were available to her. While there were exceptions, for many minority women, work outside the home was not a cultural statement but rather a financial necessity (or both), and physically demanding, low-paying domestic service work continued to be the most common job type. Young, working-class white women were joining the workforce more frequently, too, but often in order to help support their struggling mothers and fathers.\r\n\r\nFor young, middle-class, white women\u2014those most likely to fit the image of the carefree flapper\u2014the most common workplace was the office. These predominantly single women increasingly became clerks, jobs that had been primarily male earlier in the century. But here, too, there was a clear ceiling. While entry-level clerk jobs became increasingly feminized, jobs at a higher, more lucrative level remained dominated by men. Further, rather than changing the culture of the workplace, the entrance of women into lower-level jobs primarily changed the coding of the jobs themselves. Such positions simply became \u201cwomen\u2019s work.\u201d\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_221\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"928\"]
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The frivolity, decadence, and obliviousness of the 1920s was embodied in the image of the flapper, the stereotyped carefree and indulgent woman of the Roaring Twenties depicted by Russell Patterson\u2019s drawing. Library of Congress.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nFinally, as these same women grew older and married, social changes became even subtler. Married women were, for the most part, expected to remain in the domestic sphere. And while new patterns of consumption gave them more power and, arguably, more autonomy, new household technologies and philosophies of marriage and child-rearing increased expectations, further tying these women to the home\u2014a paradox that becomes clear in advertisements such as the one in the Chicago Tribune<\/em>. Of course, the number of women in the workplace cannot exclusively measure changes in sex and gender norms. Attitudes towards sex, for example, continued to change in the 1920s as well, a process that had begun decades before. This, too, had significantly different impacts on different social groups. But for many women\u2014particularly young, college-educated white women\u2014an attempt to rebel against what they saw as a repressive Victorian notion of sexuality led to an increase in premarital sexual activity strong enough that it became, in the words of one historian, \u201calmost a matter of conformity.\u201d[footnote]Cott, Grounding of Modern Feminism, 150.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nMeanwhile, especially in urban centers such as New York, the gay community flourished. While gay males had to contend with the increased policing of their daily lives, especially later in the decade, they generally lived more openly in such cities than they would be able to for many decades following World War II.[footnote]George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890\u20131940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994).[\/footnote] At the same time, for many lesbians in the decade, the increased sexualization of women brought new scrutiny to same-sex female relationships previously dismissed as harmless.[footnote]Cott, Grounding of Modern Feminism, 160.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nUltimately, the most enduring symbol of the changing notions of gender in the 1920s remains the flapper. And indeed, that image was a \u201cnew\u201d available representation of womanhood in the 1920s. But it is just that: a<\/em> representation of womanhood of the 1920s. There were many women in the decade of differing races, classes, ethnicities, and experiences, just as there were many men with different experiences. For some women, the 1920s were a time of reorganization, new representations, and new opportunities. For others, it was a decade of confusion, contradiction, new pressures, and struggles new and old.\r\n\r\n Check for Understanding<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- How did the \u201cNew Woman\u201d and the flapper expand socially accepted behavior? What restrictions remained on women?<\/li>\r\n \t
- How did automobiles help to create opportunities for freedom for young flappers?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
VI. \"The New Negro\"<\/h1>\r\n
\r\n Key Concepts & Terms<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- Black Wall Street<\/strong> - The Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma that was known for its Black owned businesses and great prosperity. This district, and the areas that surrounded it, were destroyed in the Tulsa Massacre by white mobs under the false claim of sexual assault by a Black man against a white woman.<\/li>\r\n \t
- The Great Migration <\/strong> - The movement of ~6 million Black people out of the rural South to more urban areas in the Northwest, Midwest, and West between 1910 and 1970 that was driven by families seeking safety from lynching and Jim Crow as well as economic opportunities.<\/li>\r\n \t
- The Harlem Renaissance <\/strong> - A period of artistic and cultural expression between the 1920s and 1940s when Black writers, artists, musicians redefined Black culture by highlighting Black freedom and pride.<\/li>\r\n \t
- Universal Negro Improvement Association <\/strong> - A Black nationalist organization created by Marcus Garvey that promoted racial pride, Black economic independence, and sought an end to racial oppression in Africa and the Diaspora.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nThe iniquities of Jim Crow segregation, the barbarities of America\u2019s lynching epidemic, and the depravities of 1919\u2019s Red Summer weighed heavily upon Black Americans as they entered the 1920s. The injustices and the violence continued. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, Black Americans had built up the Greenwood District with commerce and prosperity. Booker T. Washington called it the \u201cBlack Wall Street<\/strong>.\u201d On the evening of May 31, 1921, spurred by a false claim of sexual assault levied against a young Black man\u2013nineteen-year-old Dick Rowland had likely either tripped over a young white elevator operator\u2019s foot or tripped and brushed the woman\u2019s shoulder with his hand\u2013a white mob mobilized, armed themselves, and destroyed the prosperous neighborhood. Over thirty square blocks were destroyed. Mobs burned over 1,000 homes and killed as many as several hundred Black Tulsans. Survivors recalled the mob using heavy machine guns, and others reported planes circling overhead, firing rifles and dropping firebombs. When order was finally restored the next day, the bodies of the victims were buried in mass graves. Thousands of survivors were left homeless.\r\n\r\nThe relentlessness of racial violence awoke a new generation of Black Americans to new alternatives. The Great Migration<\/strong> had pulled enormous numbers of Black southerners northward, and, just as cultural limits loosened across the nation, the 1920s represented a period of self-reflection among African Americans, especially those in northern cities. New York City was a popular destination of Black Americans during the Great Migration. The city\u2019s Black population grew 257 percent, from 91,709 in 1910 to 327,706 by 1930 (the white population grew only 20 percent).[footnote]Mark R. Schneider, \u201cWe Return Fighting\u201d: The Civil Rights Movement in the Jazz Age (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002), 21. [\/footnote] Moreover, by 1930, some 98,620 foreign-born Black people had migrated to the United States. Nearly half made their home in Manhattan\u2019s Harlem district.[footnote]Philip Kasinitz, Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 25.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nHarlem originally lay between Fifth Avenue and Eighth Avenue and 130th Street to 145th Street. By 1930, the district had expanded to 155th Street and was home to 164,000 people, mostly African Americans. Continuous relocation to \u201cthe greatest Negro City in the world\u201d exacerbated problems with crime, health, housing, and unemployment.[footnote]James Weldon Johnson, \u201cHarlem: The Culture Capital,\u201d in Alain Locke, The New Negro: An Interpretation (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925), 301.[\/footnote] Nevertheless, it brought together a mass of Black people energized by race pride, military service in World War I, the urban environment, and, for many, ideas of Pan-Africanism or Garveyism (discussed shortly). James Weldon Johnson called Harlem \u201cthe Culture Capital.\u201d[footnote]Ibid.[\/footnote] The area\u2019s cultural ferment produced the Harlem Renaissance<\/strong> and fostered what was then termed the New Negro Movement.\r\n\r\nAlain Locke did not coin the term New Negro<\/em>, but he did much to popularize it. In the 1925 book The New Negro<\/em>, Locke proclaimed that the generation of subservience was no more\u2014\u201cwe are achieving something like a spiritual emancipation.\u201d Bringing together writings by men and women, young and old, Black and white, Locke produced an anthology that was of<\/em> African Americans, rather than only about <\/em>them. The book joined many others. Popular Harlem Renaissance writers published some twenty-six novels, ten volumes of poetry, and countless short stories between 1922 and 1935.[footnote]Joan Marter, ed., The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, Volume 1 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 448.[\/footnote] Alongside the well-known Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, female writers like Jessie Redmon Fauset and Zora Neale Hurston published nearly one third of these novels. While themes varied, the literature frequently explored and countered pervading stereotypes and forms of American racial prejudice.\r\n\r\nThe Harlem Renaissance was manifested in theater, art, and music. For the first time, Broadway presented Black actors in serious roles. The 1924 production Dixie to Broadway<\/em> was the first all-Black show with mainstream showings.[footnote]James F. Wilson, Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality inJames F. Wilson, Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 116. [\/footnote] In art, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Aaron Douglas, and Palmer Hayden showcased Black cultural heritage and captured the population\u2019s current experience. In music, jazz rocketed in popularity. Eager to hear \u201creal jazz,\u201d whites journeyed to Harlem\u2019s Cotton Club and Smalls. Next to Greenwich Village, Harlem\u2019s nightclubs and speakeasies (venues where alcohol was publicly consumed) presented a place where sexual freedom and gay life thrived. Unfortunately, while headliners like Duke Ellington were hired to entertain at Harlem\u2019s venues, the surrounding Black community was usually excluded. Furthermore, Black performers were often restricted from restroom use and relegated to service door entry. As the Renaissance faded to a close, several Harlem Renaissance artists went on to produce important works indicating that this movement was but one component in African American\u2019s long history of cultural and intellectual achievements.[footnote]Cary D. Wintz and Paul Finkelman, Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, Vol. 2 (New York: Routledge, 2004), 910\u2013911.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_222\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"520\"]
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Garveyism, criticized as too radical, nevertheless formed a substantial following and was a major stimulus for later Black nationalistic movements. Photograph of Marcus Garvey, August 5, 1924. Library of Congress.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe explosion of African American self-expression found multiple outlets in politics. In the 1910s and 1920s, perhaps no one so attracted disaffected Black activists as Marcus Garvey. Garvey was a Jamaican publisher and labor organizer who arrived in New York City in 1916. Within just a few years of his arrival, he built the largest Black nationalist organization in the world, the Universal Negro Improvement Association <\/strong>(UNIA<\/strong>).[footnote]For Garvey, see Colin Grant, Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Judith Stein, The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1986); and Ula Yvette Taylor, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).[\/footnote] Inspired by Pan-Africanism and Booker T. Washington\u2019s model of industrial education, and critical of what he saw as Du Bois\u2019s elitist strategies in service of Black elites, Garvey sought to promote racial pride, encourage Black economic independence, and root out racial oppression in Africa and the Diaspora.[footnote]Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (London: Verso, 1998).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nHeadquartered in Harlem, the UNIA<\/strong> published a newspaper, Negro World<\/em>, and organized elaborate parades in which members, known as Garveyites, dressed in ornate, militaristic regalia and marched down city streets. The organization criticized the slow pace of the judicial focus of the NAACP as well as its acceptance of memberships and funds from whites. \u201cFor the Negro to depend on the ballot and his industrial progress alone,\u201d Garvey opined, \u201cwill be hopeless as it does not help him when he is lynched, burned, jim-crowed, and segregated.\u201d In 1919, the UNIA announced plans to develop a shipping company called the Black Star Line as part of a plan that pushed for Black Americans to reject the political system and to \u201creturn to Africa\u201d instead. Most of the investments came in the form of shares purchased by UNIA members, many of whom heard Garvey give rousing speeches across the country about the importance of establishing commercial ventures between African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, and Africans.[footnote]Grant, Negro with a Hat; Stein, World of Marcus Garvey; Taylor, Veiled Garvey.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nGarvey\u2019s detractors disparaged these public displays and poorly managed business ventures, and they criticized Garvey for peddling empty gestures in place of measures that addressed the material concerns of African Americans. NAACP leaders depicted Garvey\u2019s plan as one that simply said, \u201cGive up! Surrender! The struggle is useless.\u201d Enflamed by his aggressive attacks on other Black activists and his radical ideas of racial independence, many African American and Afro-Caribbean leaders worked with government officials and launched the \u201cGarvey Must Go\u201d campaign, which culminated in his 1922 indictment and 1925 imprisonment and subsequent deportation for \u201cusing the mails for fraudulent purposes.\u201d The UNIA never recovered its popularity or financial support, even after Garvey\u2019s pardon in 1927, but his movement made a lasting impact on Black consciousness in the United States and abroad. He inspired the likes of Malcolm X, whose parents were Garveyites, and Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana. Garvey\u2019s message, perhaps best captured by his rallying cry, \u201cUp, you mighty race,\u201d resonated with African Americans who found in Garveyism a dignity not granted them in their everyday lives. In that sense, it was all too typical of the Harlem Renaissance.[footnote]Grant, Negro with a Hat; Stein, World of Marcus Garvey; Taylor, Veiled Garvey.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\n Check for Understanding<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- How did the Black community redefine themselves through art and politics in the 1920s?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
VII. Culture War<\/h1>\r\n
\r\n Key Concepts & Terms<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- Sacco and Vanzetti<\/strong> - Italian immigrants and anarchists who were controversially convicted of murder. Anti-immigrant and anti-anarchist bias was believed to have heavily influenced the jury.<\/li>\r\n \t
- National Origins Act of 1924 <\/strong> - Also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, a federal law that restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and completely banned immigration from Asia. Created U.S. Border Patrol for the first time.<\/li>\r\n \t
- Nativism <\/strong> - The policy of discriminating against immigrants and favoring native-born Americans.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nFor all of its cultural ferment, however, the 1920s were also a difficult time for radicals and immigrants and anything \u201cmodern.\u201d Fear of foreign radicals led to the executions of Nicola Sacco<\/strong> and Bartolomeo Vanzetti<\/strong>, two Italian anarchists, in 1927. In May 1920, the two had been arrested for robbery and murder connected with an incident at a Massachusetts factory. Their guilty verdicts were appealed for years as the evidence surrounding their convictions was slim. For instance, while one eyewitness claimed that Vanzetti drove the getaway car, accounts of others described a different person altogether. Nevertheless, despite worldwide lobbying by radicals and a respectable movement among middle-class Italian organizations in the United States, the two men were executed on August 23, 1927. Vanzetti conceivably provided the most succinct reason for his death, saying, \u201cThis is what I say . . . . I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian.\u201d[footnote]Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti (New York: Viking, 1928), 272. [\/footnote]\r\n\r\nMany Americans expressed anxieties about the changes that had remade the United States and, seeking scapegoats, many middle-class white Americans pointed to Eastern European and Latin American immigrants (Asian immigration had already been almost completely prohibited), African Americans who now pushed harder for civil rights, and, after migrating out of the American South to northern cities as a part of the Great Migration, the mass exodus that carried nearly half a million Black Southerners out of the South between 1910 and 1920. Protestants, meanwhile, continued to denounce the Roman Catholic Church and charged that American Catholics gave their allegiance to the pope and not to their country.\r\n\r\nIn 1921, Congress passed the Emergency Immigration Act as a stopgap immigration measure and then, three years later, permanently established country-of-origin quotas through the National Origins Act<\/strong>. The number of immigrants annually admitted to the United States from each nation was restricted to 2 percent of the population who had come from that country and resided in the United States in 1890. (By pushing back three decades, past the recent waves of \u201cnew\u201d immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia, the law made it extremely difficult for immigrants outside northern Europe to legally enter the United States.) The act also explicitly excluded all Asians, although, to satisfy southern and western growers, it temporarily omitted restrictions on Mexican immigrants. The Sacco and Vanzetti trial and sweeping immigration restrictions pointed to a rampant nativism<\/strong>. A great number of Americans worried about a burgeoning America that did not resemble the one of times past. Many writers perceived that the country was now riven by a culture war.\r\n
\r\n Check for Understanding<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- In what ways did mainstream culture use Eastern European and Latin American immigrants as scapegoats in the 1920s?<\/li>\r\n \t
- How did scapegoating impact immigration legislation?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
VIII. Fundamentalist Christianity<\/h1>\r\n
\r\n Key Concepts & Terms<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- The Fundamentals<\/em><\/strong> - A series of essays that served as a foundational document of Christian fundamentalism that argued that the Bible is literally and exactly true.<\/li>\r\n \t
- Scopes Trial <\/strong> - A highly public trial where a high school teacher was accused of violating state law by teaching Darwin\u2019s theory of evolution. Brought questions of religious freedom and the science of evolution to the public.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nIn addition to alarms over immigration and the growing presence of Catholicism and Judaism, a new core of Christian fundamentalists were very much concerned about relaxed sexual mores and increased social freedoms, especially as found in city centers. Although never a centralized group, most fundamentalists lashed out against what they saw as a sagging public morality, a world in which Protestantism seemed challenged by Catholicism, women exercised ever greater sexual freedoms, public amusements encouraged selfish and empty pleasures, and critics mocked Prohibition through bootlegging and speakeasies.\r\n\r\nChristian Fundamentalism arose most directly from a doctrinal dispute among Protestant leaders. Liberal theologians sought to intertwine religion with science and secular culture. These Modernists, influenced by the biblical scholarship of nineteenth-century German academics, argued that Christian doctrines about the miraculous might be best understood metaphorically. The Church, they said, needed to adapt itself to the world. According to the Baptist pastor Harry Emerson Fosdick, the \u201ccoming of Christ\u201d might occur \u201cslowly . . . but surely, [as] His will and principles [are] worked out by God\u2019s grace in human life and institutions.\u201d[footnote]Harry Emerson Fosdick, \u201cShall the Fundamentalists Win?\u201d Christian Work 102 (June 10, 1922): 716\u2013722. [\/footnote] The social gospel, which encouraged Christians to build the Kingdom of God on earth by working against social and economic inequality, was very much tied to liberal theology.\r\n\r\nDuring the 1910s, funding from oil barons Lyman and Milton Stewart enabled the evangelist A. C. Dixon to commission some ninety essays to combat religious liberalism. The collection, known as The Fundamentals<\/strong><\/em>, became the foundational documents of Christian fundamentalism, from which the movement\u2019s name is drawn. Contributors agreed that Christian faith rested on literal truths, that Jesus, for instance, would physically return to earth at the end of time to redeem the righteous and damn the wicked. Some of the essays put forth that human endeavor would not build the Kingdom of God, while others covered such subjects as the virgin birth and biblical inerrancy. American fundamentalists spanned Protestant denominations and borrowed from diverse philosophies and theologies, most notably the holiness movement, the larger revivalism of the nineteenth century, and new dispensationalist theology (in which history proceeded, and would end, through \u201cdispensations\u201d by God). They did, however, all agree that modernism was the enemy and the Bible was the inerrant word of God. It was a fluid movement often without clear boundaries, but it featured many prominent clergymen, including the well-established and extremely vocal John Roach Straton (New York), J. Frank Norris (Texas), and William Bell Riley (Minnesota).[footnote]George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nOn March 21, 1925, in a tiny courtroom in Dayton, Tennessee, fundamentalists gathered to tackle the issues of creation and evolution. A young biology teacher, John T. Scopes, was being tried for teaching his students evolutionary theory in violation of the Butler Act, a state law preventing evolutionary theory or any theory that denied \u201cthe Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible\u201d from being taught in publicly funded Tennessee classrooms. Seeing the act as a threat to personal liberty, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) immediately sought a volunteer for a \u201ctest\u201d case, hoping that the conviction and subsequent appeals would lead to a day in the Supreme Court, testing the constitutionality of the law. It was then that Scopes, a part-time teacher and coach, stepped up and voluntarily admitted to teaching evolution (Scopes\u2019s violation of the law was never in question). Thus the stage was set for the pivotal courtroom showdown\u2014\u201cthe trial of the century\u201d\u2014between the champions and opponents of evolution that marked a key moment in an enduring American \u201cculture war.\u201d[footnote]Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial<\/strong> and America\u2019s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nThe case became a public spectacle. Clarence Darrow, an agnostic attorney and a keen liberal mind from Chicago, volunteered to aid the defense and came up against William Jennings Bryan. Bryan, the \u201cGreat Commoner,\u201d was the three-time presidential candidate who in his younger days had led the political crusade against corporate greed. He had done so then with a firm belief in the righteousness of his cause, and now he defended biblical literalism in similar terms. The theory of evolution, Bryan said, with its emphasis on the survival of the fittest, \u201cwould eliminate love and carry man back to a struggle of tooth and claw.\u201d[footnote]Leslie H. Allen, ed., Bryan and Darrow at Dayton: The Record and Documents of the \u201cBible-Evolution\u201d Trial (New York: Arthur Lee, 1925).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_223\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"912\"]
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/americanyawp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/229\/2025\/04\/22.10-300x169.jpg\")
During the Scopes Trial, Clarence Darrow (right) savaged the idea of a literal interpretation of the Bible. \u201cDudley Field Malone, Dr. John R. Neal, and Clarence Darrow in Chicago, Illinois.\u201d The Clarence Darrow Digital Collection, University of Minnesota.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nNewspapermen and spectators flooded the small town of Dayton. Across the nation, Americans tuned their radios to the national broadcasts of a trial that dealt with questions of religious liberty, academic freedom, parental rights, and the moral responsibility of education. For six days in July, the men and women of America were captivated as Bryan presented his argument on the morally corrupting influence of evolutionary theory (and pointed out that Darrow made a similar argument about the corruptive potential of education during his defense of the famed killers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb a year before). Darrow eloquently fought for academic freedom.[footnote]Larson, Summer for the Gods[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nAt the request of the defense, Bryan took the stand as an \u201cexpert witness\u201d on the Bible. At his age, he was no match for Darrow\u2019s famous skills as a trial lawyer and his answers came across as blundering and incoherent, particularly as he was not in fact a literal believer in all<\/em> of the Genesis account (believing\u2014as many anti-evolutionists did\u2014that the meaning of the word day<\/em> in the book of Genesis could be taken as allegory) and only hesitantly admitted as much, not wishing to alienate his fundamentalist followers. Additionally, Darrow posed a series of unanswerable questions: Was the \u201cgreat fish\u201d that swallowed the prophet Jonah created for that specific purpose? What precisely happened astronomically when God made the sun stand still? Bryan, of course, could cite only his faith in miracles. Tied into logical contradictions, Bryan\u2019s testimony was a public relations disaster, although his statements were expunged from the record the next day and no further experts were allowed\u2014Scopes\u2019s guilt being established, the jury delivered a guilty verdict in minutes. The case was later thrown out on a technicality. But few cared about the verdict. Darrow had, in many ways, at least to his defenders, already won: the fundamentalists seemed to have taken a beating in the national limelight. Journalist and satirist H. L. Mencken characterized the \u201ccircus in Tennessee\u201d as an embarrassment for fundamentalism, and modernists remembered the \u201cMonkey Trial\u201d as a smashing victory. If fundamentalists retreated from the public sphere, they did not disappear entirely. Instead, they went local, built a vibrant subculture, and emerged many decades later stronger than ever.[footnote]Ibid.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\n Check for Understanding<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- What was the rise in Christian Fundamentalism a reaction to?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
IX. Rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)<\/h1>\r\n
\r\n Key Concepts & Terms<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- Birth of a Nation<\/em><\/strong> - A popular and groundbreaking film that glorified the Reconstruction Era Ku Klux Klan as a protector of feminine virtue and white racial purity. Responsible for the resurgence of the KKK in the 1910s and 1920s.<\/li>\r\n \t
- Benjamin F. Stapleton <\/strong> - Mayor of Denver, Colorado, from 1923 to 1931 and from 1935 to 1947. He also served as the Democratic Colorado State Auditor from 1933 to 1935 and was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_224\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"943\"]
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/americanyawp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/229\/2025\/04\/22.11-300x169.jpg\")
This photo by popular news photographers Underwood and Underwood shows a gathering of a reported three hundred Ku Klux Klansmen just outside Washington DC to initiate a new group of men into their order. The proximity of the photographer to his subjects for one of the Klan\u2019s notorious night-time rituals suggests that this was yet another of the Klan\u2019s numerous publicity stunts. Underwood and Underwood, \u201cKlan assembles Short Distance from U.S. Capitol,\u201d (ca. 1920\u2019s). Library of Congress.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nSuspicions of immigrants, Catholics, and modernists contributed to a string of reactionary organizations. None so captured the imaginations of the country as the reborn Ku Klux Klan (KKK), a white supremacist organization that expanded beyond its Reconstruction Era anti-Black politics to now claim to protect American values and the American way of life from Black people, feminists (and other radicals), immigrants, Catholics, Jews, atheists, bootleggers, and a host of other imagined moral enemies.\r\n\r\nTwo events in 1915 are widely credited with inspiring the rebirth of the Klan: the lynching of Leo Frank and the release of The Birth of a Nation<\/strong><\/em>, a popular and groundbreaking film that valorized the Reconstruction Era Klan as a protector of feminine virtue and white racial purity. Taking advantage of this sudden surge of popularity, Colonel William Joseph Simmons organized what is often called the \u201csecond\u201d Ku Klux Klan in Georgia in late 1915. This new Klan, modeled after other fraternal organizations with elaborate rituals and a hierarchy, remained largely confined to Georgia and Alabama until 1920, when Simmons began a professional recruiting effort that resulted in individual chapters being formed across the country and membership rising to an estimated five million.[footnote]Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nPartly in response to the migration of Black southerners to northern cities during World War I, the KKK expanded above the Mason-Dixon Line. Membership soared in Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, and Portland, while Klan-endorsed mayoral candidates won in Indianapolis, Denver, and Atlanta.[footnote]Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915\u20131930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.[\/footnote] The Klan often recruited through fraternal organizations such as the Freemasons and through various Protestant churches. In many areas, local Klansmen visited churches of which they approved and bestowed a gift of money on the presiding minister, often during services. The Klan also enticed people to join through large picnics, parades, rallies, and ceremonies. The Klan established a women\u2019s auxiliary in 1923 headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas. The Women of the Ku Klux Klan mirrored the KKK in practice and ideology and soon had chapters in all forty-eight states, often attracting women who were already part of the Prohibition movement, the defense of which was a centerpiece of Klan activism.[footnote]MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry. [\/footnote]\r\n\r\nContrary to its perception of as a primarily southern and lower-class phenomenon, the second Klan had a national reach composed largely of middle-class people. Sociologist Rory McVeigh surveyed the KKK newspaper Imperial Night-Hawk<\/em> for the years 1923 and 1924, at the organization\u2019s peak, and found the largest number of Klan-related activities to have occurred in Texas, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, and Georgia. The Klan was even present in Canada, where it was a powerful force within Saskatchewan\u2019s Conservative Party. In many states and localities, the Klan dominated politics to such a level that one could not be elected without the support of the KKK. For example, in 1924, the Klan supported William Lee Cazort for governor of Arkansas, leading his opponent in the Democratic Party primary, Thomas Terral, to seek honorary membership through a Louisiana klavern so as not to be tagged as the anti-Klan candidate. In 1922, Texans elected Earle B. Mayfield, an avowed Klansman who ran openly as that year\u2019s \u201cklandidate,\u201d to the U.S. Senate. At its peak the Klan claimed between four and five million members.[footnote]George Brown Tindall, The Emergence of the New South: 1913\u20131945 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1967).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nDespite the breadth of its political activism, the Klan is today remembered largely as a violent vigilante group\u2014and not without reason. Members of the Klan and affiliated organizations often carried out acts of lynching and \u201cnightriding\u201d\u2014the physical harassment of bootleggers, union activists, civil rights workers, or any others deemed \u201cimmoral\u201d (such as suspected adulterers) under the cover of darkness or while wearing their hoods and robes. In fact, Klan violence was extensive enough in Oklahoma that Governor John C. Walton placed the entire state under martial law in 1923. Witnesses testifying before the military court disclosed accounts of Klan violence ranging from the flogging of clandestine brewers to the disfiguring of a prominent Black Tulsan for registering African Americans to vote. In Houston, Texas, the Klan maintained an extensive system of surveillance that included tapping telephone lines and putting spies in the local post office in order to root out \u201cundesirables.\u201d A mob organized and led by Klan members in Aiken, South Carolina, lynched Bertha Lowman and her two brothers in 1926, but no one was ever prosecuted: the sheriff, deputies, city attorney, and state representative all belonged to the Klan.[footnote]MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry; Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nThe Klan dwindled in the face of scandal and diminished energy over the last years of the 1920s. By 1930, the Klan only had about thirty thousand members and it was largely spent as a national force, only to appear again as a much diminished force during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.\r\n\r\n Check for Understanding<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n- \r\n \t
- What are examples of the KKK\u2019s involvement with both vigilantism and mainstream politics?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
X. Conclusion<\/h1>\r\nIn his inauguration speech in 1929, Herbert Hoover told Americans that the Republican Party had brought prosperity. Even ignoring stubbornly large rates of poverty and unparalleled levels of inequality, he could not see the weaknesses behind the decade\u2019s economy. Even as the new culture of consumption promoted new freedoms, it also promoted new insecurities. An economy built on credit exposed the nation to tremendous risk. Flailing European economies, high tariffs, wealth inequality, a construction bubble, and an ever-more flooded consumer market loomed dangerously until the Roaring Twenties ground to a halt. In a moment the nation\u2019s glitz and glamour seemed to give way to decay and despair. For farmers, racial minorities, unionized workers, and other populations that did not share in 1920s prosperity, the veneer of a Jazz Age and a booming economy had always been a fiction. But for them, as for millions of Americans, the end of an era was close. The Great Depression loomed.","rendered":"
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/americanyawp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/229\/2025\/04\/22.1-300x150.jpg\")
\u201cWomen competing in low hurdle race, Washington, D.C.,\u201d ca. 1920s. Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-65429)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n I. Introduction<\/h1>\n
\n\n Key Concepts & Terms<\/p>\n<\/header>\n
\n- \n
- \u201cReturn to Normalcy\u201d<\/strong> – Campaign slogan of Warren G. Harding\u2019s 1920 campaign for president that expressed the desire to limit the size of government and become more isolationist after World War I.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
On a sunny day in early March 1921, Warren G. Harding took the oath to become the twenty-ninth president of the United States. He had won a landslide election by promising a \u201creturn to normalcy<\/strong>.\u201d \u201cOur supreme task is the resumption of our onward, normal way,\u201d he declared in his inaugural address. While campaigning, he said, \u201cAmerica\u2019s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration.\u201d The nation still reeled from the shock of World War I, the explosion of racial violence and political repression in 1919, and, a lingering \u201cRed Scare\u201d sparked by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.<\/p>\n
More than 115,000 American soldiers had lost their lives in barely a year of fighting in Europe. Then, between 1918 and 1920, nearly seven hundred thousand Americans died in a flu epidemic that hit nearly 20 percent of the American population. Waves of labor strikes, meanwhile, hit soon after the war. Radicals bellowed. Anarchists and others sent more than thirty bombs through the mail on May 1, 1919. After wartime controls fell, the economy tanked and national unemployment hit 20 percent. Farmers\u2019 bankruptcy rates, already egregious, now skyrocketed. Harding could hardly deliver the peace that he promised, but his message nevertheless resonated among a populace wracked by instability.<\/p>\n
The 1920s, of course, would be anything but \u201cnormal.\u201d The decade so reshaped American life that it came to be called by many names: the New Era, the Jazz Age, the Age of the Flapper, the Prosperity Decade, and, most commonly, the Roaring Twenties. The mass production and consumption of automobiles, household appliances, film, and radio fueled a new economy and new standards of living. New mass entertainment introduced talking films and jazz while sexual and social restraints loosened. But at the same time, many Americans turned their back on political and economic reform, denounced America\u2019s shifting demographics, stifled immigration, retreated toward \u201cold-time religion,\u201d and revived the Ku Klux Klan with millions of new members. On the other hand, many Americans fought harder than ever for equal rights and cultural observers noted the appearance of \u201cthe New Woman\u201d and \u201cthe New Negro.\u201d Old immigrant communities that had predated new immigration quotas, meanwhile, clung to their cultures and their native faiths. The 1920s were a decade of conflict and tension. But whatever it was, it was not \u201cnormalcy.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\n Check for Understanding<\/p>\n<\/header>\n
\n- \n
- What were the major tensions and contradictions of the 1920s?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
II. Republican White House, 1921-1933<\/h1>\n
\n\n Key Concepts & Terms<\/p>\n<\/header>\n
\n- \n
- Russian Revolution<\/strong> – The overthrow of the Russian monarchy and the placement of Bolsheviks (socialists) in power.<\/li>\n
- Teapot Dome Scandal<\/strong> – A major example of corruption during the Harding administration connected to the leasing of oil reserves.<\/li>\n
- 19th Amendment <\/strong> – Ratified in 1920. Enabled women to vote in every state in the U.S.<\/li>\n
- 18th Amendment\/Prohibition <\/strong> – Ratified in 1919, began the era of Prohibition by making the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcohol illegal.<\/li>\n
- Equal Rights Amendment<\/strong> – First proposed in 1923, demanded \u2018Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the U.S. or any state on account of sex\u2019. Debatable whether the amendment was ratified in 2020.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
To deliver on his promises of stability and prosperity, Harding signed legislation to restore a high protective tariff and dismantled the last wartime controls over industry. Meanwhile, the vestiges of America\u2019s involvement in World War I and its propaganda and suspicions of anything less than \u201c100 percent American\u201d pushed Congress to address fears of immigration and foreign populations. A sour postwar economy led elites to raise the specter of the Russian Revolution<\/strong> and sideline not just the various American socialist and anarchist organizations but nearly all union activism. During the 1920s, the labor movement suffered a sharp decline in memberships. Workers lost not only bargaining power but also the support of courts, politicians, and, in large measure, the American public.[1]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n
Harding\u2019s presidency would go down in history as among the most corrupt. Many of Harding\u2019s cabinet appointees, however, were individuals of true stature that answered to various American constituencies. For instance, Henry C. Wallace, the vocal editor of Wallace\u2019s Farmer<\/em> and a well-known proponent of scientific farming, was made secretary of agriculture. Herbert Hoover, the popular head and administrator of the wartime Food Administration and a self-made millionaire, was made secretary of commerce. To satisfy business interests, the conservative businessman Andrew Mellon became secretary of the treasury. Mostly, however, it was the appointing of friends and close supporters, dubbed \u201cthe Ohio gang,\u201d that led to trouble.[2]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n
Harding\u2019s administration suffered a tremendous setback when several officials conspired to lease government land in Wyoming to oil companies in exchange for cash. Known as the Teapot Dome scandal<\/strong> (named after the nearby rock formation that resembled a teapot), interior secretary Albert Fall and navy secretary Edwin Denby resigned and Fall was convicted and sent to jail. Harding took vacation in the summer of 1923 so that he could think deeply on how to deal \u201cwith my God-damned friends\u201d\u2014it was his friends, and not his enemies, that kept him up walking the halls at nights. But then, in August 1923, Harding died suddenly of a heart attack and Vice President Calvin Coolidge ascended to the highest office in the land.[3]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n
The son of a shopkeeper, Coolidge climbed the Republican ranks from city councilman to governor of Massachusetts. As president, Coolidge sought to remove the stain of scandal but otherwise continued Harding\u2019s economic approach, refusing to take actions in defense of workers or consumers against American business. \u201cThe chief business of the American people,\u201d the new president stated, \u201cis business.\u201d One observer called Coolidge\u2019s policy \u201cactive inactivity,\u201d but Coolidge was not afraid of supporting business interests and wealthy Americans by lowering taxes or maintaining high tariff rates. Congress, for instance, had already begun to reduce taxes on the wealthy from wartime levels of 66 percent to 20 percent, which Coolidge championed.[4]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n
While Coolidge supported business, other Americans continued their activism. The 1920s, for instance, represented a time of great activism among American women, who had won the vote with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Female voters, like their male counterparts, pursued many interests. Concerned about squalor, poverty, and domestic violence, women had already lent their efforts to prohibition, which went into effect under the Eighteenth Amendment in January 1920. After that point, alcohol could no longer be manufactured or sold. Other reformers urged government action to ameliorate high mortality rates among infants and children, provide federal aid for education, and ensure peace and disarmament. Some activists advocated protective legislation for women and children, while Alice Paul and the National Woman\u2019s Party called for the elimination of all legal distinctions \u201con account of sex\u201d through the proposed Equal Rights Amendment<\/strong> (ERA<\/strong>), which was introduced but defeated in Congress.[5]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
During the 1920s, the National Woman\u2019s Party fought for the rights of women beyond that of suffrage, which they had secured through the 19th Amendment<\/strong> in 1920. They organized private events, like the tea party pictured here, and public campaigning, such as the introduction of the Equal Rights Amendment to Congress, as they continued the struggle for equality. Library of Congress.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n National politics in the 1920s were dominated by the Republican Party, which held not only the presidency but both houses of Congress as well. Coolidge decided not to seek a second term in 1928. A man of few words, \u201cSilent Cal\u201d publicized his decision by handing a scrap of paper to a reporter that simply read: \u201cI do not choose to run for president in 1928.\u201d\u00a0That year\u2019s race became a contest between the Democratic governor of New York, Al Smith, whose Catholic faith and immigrant background aroused nativist suspicions and whose connections to Tammany Hall and anti-Prohibition politics offended reformers, and the Republican candidate, Herbert Hoover, whose all-American, Midwestern, Protestant background and managerial prowess during World War I endeared him to American voters.[6]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0Hoover focused on economic growth and prosperity. He had served as secretary of commerce under Harding and Coolidge and claimed credit for the sustained growth seen during the 1920s. \u201cWe in America to-day are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land,\u201d he said when he launched his 1928 presidential campaign.\u201d Given a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, and we shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.\u201d[7]<\/sup><\/a> Despite Hoover\u2019s claims\u2013which, after the onset of the Great Depression the following year, would seem farcical\u2013much of the election centered on Smith\u2019s religion and his opposition to Prohibition. Many Protestant ministers preached against Smith and warned that he would be enthralled to the pope. Hoover won in a landslide. While Smith won handily in the nation\u2019s largest cities, portending future political trends, he lost most of the rest of the country. Even several solidly Democratic southern states pulled the lever for a Republican for the first time since Reconstruction.
- Teapot Dome Scandal<\/strong> – A major example of corruption during the Harding administration connected to the leasing of oil reserves.<\/li>\n
- Russian Revolution<\/strong> – The overthrow of the Russian monarchy and the placement of Bolsheviks (socialists) in power.<\/li>\n
- What were the major tensions and contradictions of the 1920s?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
- \u201cReturn to Normalcy\u201d<\/strong> – Campaign slogan of Warren G. Harding\u2019s 1920 campaign for president that expressed the desire to limit the size of government and become more isolationist after World War I.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
- Benjamin F. Stapleton <\/strong> - Mayor of Denver, Colorado, from 1923 to 1931 and from 1935 to 1947. He also served as the Democratic Colorado State Auditor from 1933 to 1935 and was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_224\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"943\"]
- Birth of a Nation<\/em><\/strong> - A popular and groundbreaking film that glorified the Reconstruction Era Ku Klux Klan as a protector of feminine virtue and white racial purity. Responsible for the resurgence of the KKK in the 1910s and 1920s.<\/li>\r\n \t
- Scopes Trial <\/strong> - A highly public trial where a high school teacher was accused of violating state law by teaching Darwin\u2019s theory of evolution. Brought questions of religious freedom and the science of evolution to the public.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nIn addition to alarms over immigration and the growing presence of Catholicism and Judaism, a new core of Christian fundamentalists were very much concerned about relaxed sexual mores and increased social freedoms, especially as found in city centers. Although never a centralized group, most fundamentalists lashed out against what they saw as a sagging public morality, a world in which Protestantism seemed challenged by Catholicism, women exercised ever greater sexual freedoms, public amusements encouraged selfish and empty pleasures, and critics mocked Prohibition through bootlegging and speakeasies.\r\n\r\nChristian Fundamentalism arose most directly from a doctrinal dispute among Protestant leaders. Liberal theologians sought to intertwine religion with science and secular culture. These Modernists, influenced by the biblical scholarship of nineteenth-century German academics, argued that Christian doctrines about the miraculous might be best understood metaphorically. The Church, they said, needed to adapt itself to the world. According to the Baptist pastor Harry Emerson Fosdick, the \u201ccoming of Christ\u201d might occur \u201cslowly . . . but surely, [as] His will and principles [are] worked out by God\u2019s grace in human life and institutions.\u201d[footnote]Harry Emerson Fosdick, \u201cShall the Fundamentalists Win?\u201d Christian Work 102 (June 10, 1922): 716\u2013722. [\/footnote] The social gospel, which encouraged Christians to build the Kingdom of God on earth by working against social and economic inequality, was very much tied to liberal theology.\r\n\r\nDuring the 1910s, funding from oil barons Lyman and Milton Stewart enabled the evangelist A. C. Dixon to commission some ninety essays to combat religious liberalism. The collection, known as The Fundamentals<\/strong><\/em>, became the foundational documents of Christian fundamentalism, from which the movement\u2019s name is drawn. Contributors agreed that Christian faith rested on literal truths, that Jesus, for instance, would physically return to earth at the end of time to redeem the righteous and damn the wicked. Some of the essays put forth that human endeavor would not build the Kingdom of God, while others covered such subjects as the virgin birth and biblical inerrancy. American fundamentalists spanned Protestant denominations and borrowed from diverse philosophies and theologies, most notably the holiness movement, the larger revivalism of the nineteenth century, and new dispensationalist theology (in which history proceeded, and would end, through \u201cdispensations\u201d by God). They did, however, all agree that modernism was the enemy and the Bible was the inerrant word of God. It was a fluid movement often without clear boundaries, but it featured many prominent clergymen, including the well-established and extremely vocal John Roach Straton (New York), J. Frank Norris (Texas), and William Bell Riley (Minnesota).[footnote]George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nOn March 21, 1925, in a tiny courtroom in Dayton, Tennessee, fundamentalists gathered to tackle the issues of creation and evolution. A young biology teacher, John T. Scopes, was being tried for teaching his students evolutionary theory in violation of the Butler Act, a state law preventing evolutionary theory or any theory that denied \u201cthe Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible\u201d from being taught in publicly funded Tennessee classrooms. Seeing the act as a threat to personal liberty, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) immediately sought a volunteer for a \u201ctest\u201d case, hoping that the conviction and subsequent appeals would lead to a day in the Supreme Court, testing the constitutionality of the law. It was then that Scopes, a part-time teacher and coach, stepped up and voluntarily admitted to teaching evolution (Scopes\u2019s violation of the law was never in question). Thus the stage was set for the pivotal courtroom showdown\u2014\u201cthe trial of the century\u201d\u2014between the champions and opponents of evolution that marked a key moment in an enduring American \u201cculture war.\u201d[footnote]Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial<\/strong> and America\u2019s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nThe case became a public spectacle. Clarence Darrow, an agnostic attorney and a keen liberal mind from Chicago, volunteered to aid the defense and came up against William Jennings Bryan. Bryan, the \u201cGreat Commoner,\u201d was the three-time presidential candidate who in his younger days had led the political crusade against corporate greed. He had done so then with a firm belief in the righteousness of his cause, and now he defended biblical literalism in similar terms. The theory of evolution, Bryan said, with its emphasis on the survival of the fittest, \u201cwould eliminate love and carry man back to a struggle of tooth and claw.\u201d[footnote]Leslie H. Allen, ed., Bryan and Darrow at Dayton: The Record and Documents of the \u201cBible-Evolution\u201d Trial (New York: Arthur Lee, 1925).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_223\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"912\"]
- The Fundamentals<\/em><\/strong> - A series of essays that served as a foundational document of Christian fundamentalism that argued that the Bible is literally and exactly true.<\/li>\r\n \t
- National Origins Act of 1924 <\/strong> - Also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, a federal law that restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and completely banned immigration from Asia. Created U.S. Border Patrol for the first time.<\/li>\r\n \t
- Sacco and Vanzetti<\/strong> - Italian immigrants and anarchists who were controversially convicted of murder. Anti-immigrant and anti-anarchist bias was believed to have heavily influenced the jury.<\/li>\r\n \t
- The Great Migration <\/strong> - The movement of ~6 million Black people out of the rural South to more urban areas in the Northwest, Midwest, and West between 1910 and 1970 that was driven by families seeking safety from lynching and Jim Crow as well as economic opportunities.<\/li>\r\n \t
- Black Wall Street<\/strong> - The Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma that was known for its Black owned businesses and great prosperity. This district, and the areas that surrounded it, were destroyed in the Tulsa Massacre by white mobs under the false claim of sexual assault by a Black man against a white woman.<\/li>\r\n \t
- Flapper<\/strong> - A subculture of women in the 1920s who shunned Victorian norms by wearing short dresses, bobbed hair, drinking alcohol and dancing in jazz clubs.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nThe rising emphasis on spending and accumulation nurtured a national ethos of materialism and individual pleasure. These impulses were embodied in the figure of the flapper<\/strong>, whose bobbed hair, short skirts, makeup, cigarettes, and carefree spirit captured the attention of American novelists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis. Rejecting the old Victorian values of desexualized modesty and self-restraint, young \u201cflappers<\/strong>\u201d seized opportunities for the public coed pleasures offered by new commercial leisure institutions, such as dance halls, cabarets, and nickelodeons, not to mention the illicit blind tigers and speakeasies spawned by Prohibition. So doing, young American women had helped usher in a new morality that permitted women greater independence, freedom of movement, and access to the delights of urban living. In the words of psychologist G. Stanley Hall, \u201cShe was out to see the world and, incidentally, be seen of it.\u201d\r\n\r\nSuch sentiments were repeated in an oft-cited advertisement in a 1930 edition of the Chicago Tribune<\/em>: \u201cToday\u2019s woman gets what she wants. The vote. Slim sheaths of silk to replace voluminous petticoats. Glassware in sapphire blue or glowing amber. The right to a career. Soap to match her bathroom\u2019s color scheme.\u201d As with so much else in the 1920s, however, sex and gender were in many ways a study in contradictions. It was the decade of the \u201cNew Woman,\u201d and one in which only 10 percent of married women\u2014although nearly half of unmarried women\u2014worked outside the home.[footnote]See Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 113.[\/footnote] It was a decade in which new technologies decreased time requirements for household chores, and one in which standards of cleanliness and order in the home rose to often impossible standards. It was a decade in which women finally could exercise their right to vote, and one in which the often thinly bound women\u2019s coalitions that had won that victory splintered into various causes. Finally, it was a decade in which images such as the \u201cflapper\u201d gave women new modes of representing femininity, and one in which such representations were often inaccessible to women of certain races, ages, and socioeconomic classes.\r\n\r\nWomen undoubtedly gained much in the 1920s. There was a profound and keenly felt cultural shift that, for many women, meant increased opportunity to work outside the home. The number of professional women, for example, significantly rose in the decade. But limits still existed, even for professional women. Occupations such as law and medicine remained overwhelmingly male: most female professionals were in feminized professions such as teaching and nursing. And even within these fields, it was difficult for women to rise to leadership positions.\r\n\r\nFurther, it is crucial not to overgeneralize the experience of all women based on the experiences of a much-commented-upon subset of the population. A woman\u2019s race, class, ethnicity, and marital status all had an impact on both the likelihood that she worked outside the home and the types of opportunities that were available to her. While there were exceptions, for many minority women, work outside the home was not a cultural statement but rather a financial necessity (or both), and physically demanding, low-paying domestic service work continued to be the most common job type. Young, working-class white women were joining the workforce more frequently, too, but often in order to help support their struggling mothers and fathers.\r\n\r\nFor young, middle-class, white women\u2014those most likely to fit the image of the carefree flapper\u2014the most common workplace was the office. These predominantly single women increasingly became clerks, jobs that had been primarily male earlier in the century. But here, too, there was a clear ceiling. While entry-level clerk jobs became increasingly feminized, jobs at a higher, more lucrative level remained dominated by men. Further, rather than changing the culture of the workplace, the entrance of women into lower-level jobs primarily changed the coding of the jobs themselves. Such positions simply became \u201cwomen\u2019s work.\u201d\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_221\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"928\"]
- Jazz <\/strong> - An American musical genre that grew out of Black communities. The genre was known for its energy and improvisation that appealed to dancers.<\/li>\r\n \t
- Nickelodeons<\/strong> - A type of motion-picture theatre that shows short films where customers paid one nickel for entrance.<\/li>\r\n \t
- Department Stores<\/strong> - Chains like Macys, Sears and Roebuck, and J.C. Penney, first offered one stop shopping for clothing, household goods, furniture and more.<\/li>\r\n \t
- Marketing<\/strong> - The beginning of mass media advertising to appeal to consumers in newspapers, magazines, radio, and other means.<\/li>\r\n \t
- Teapot Dome Scandal<\/strong> - A major example of corruption during the Harding administration connected to the leasing of oil reserves.<\/li>\r\n \t
- Russian Revolution<\/strong> - The overthrow of the Russian monarchy and the placement of Bolsheviks (socialists) in power.<\/li>\r\n \t
- What were the major tensions and contradictions of the 1920s?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n