Economic & Labor Hardship Americans demanded that the nation return to a peacetime economy Most of the gains workers had made during the war evaporated Seattle Shipyard workers strike of 1919 (Industrial Workers of the World (IIW) and American Labor Federation (AFL) called the strike) The Red Scare – Spanish Influenza & Russian bolshevism

Postwar Politics The Election of 1920 – Warren G. Harding, Republican senator of Ohio won A Business Government – “This is a business country, and it wants a business government” – Calvin Coolidge Foreign Policy – Washington Disarmament Conference (1921) & the Five-Power Naval Treaty of 1922 Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928) – nations agreed to settle international disputes peacefully Dawes Plan – halved Germany’s annual reparation payments, initiated fresh American loans to Germany

Mass Production & the Consumer Culture The automobile industry emerged as the largest single manufacturing industry Mass production by the assembly line technique became the standard in almost every factory Consumer culture – people believed that the American dream was possible by how many things they could acquire The influence of household appliances on middle class urban women

By the mid -1920s, the massive coal and steel industries of the Midwest had made that region the center of the new automobile industry

In this 1929 advertisement for Lucky Strike cigarettes there is a woman with a bathing suit. Millions of Americans smoked billions of cigarettes in the 1920s In countless tobacco advertisements, smoking promised instant maturity, sophistication, and worldliness

By 1929, oil company’s such as Conoco were supplying road maps as part of the its campaign to boost tourism

The Roaring 1920s Prohibition – passage of the 18 th Amendment which banned the manufacture and sale of alcohol The New Woman – increasing numbers of women in the workforce & receiving a higher education The New Negro (African American) – challenged the caste system that confined dark-skinned Americans to the lowest levels of society Harlem Renaissance – black artists who described their challenges in the U.S. and praised their race through poems, paintings, and plays

The August 1924 cover of Redbook, a popular women’s magazine, portrays the kind of post adolescent girl who was making respectable families frantic. Flappers scandalized their middle class parents by breaking the old moral code

Entertainment for the Masses Movies, radio, music, and sports provided plenty of entertainment for the masses Actors such as Charlie Chaplin and Clara Bow the “It Girl” became household names, George Herman “Babe” Ruth and Jack Dempsey in sports The Lost Generation – included writers and artists who felt alienated from America’s mass-culture society

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907 by Pablo Picasso This is a large painting of five nude women – the prostitutes of a Barcelona bodello – in a curtained interior African art influences are apparent in this painting as Picasso was fascinated with African masks (as shown on the right hand side)

The object on the right is Picasso’s art piece Guitar, It’s considered the first assemblages – artworks that were built up, or pieced together, from miscellaneous or commonplace materials The art of assemblage drew inspiration from African and Oceanic traditions (as shown on the left)

Immigrant Challenges in the U.S. War against Germany and its allies expanded nativist and antiradical sentiment The Johnson Reed Act (1924) – limited the number of immigrants and established quotas for each European nation Indian Citizenship Act (1924) – extended suffrage and citizenship to all American Indians The Sacco & Bartolomeo Vanzetti case (1920) The Rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan