The Roaring Twenties Unit 8A AP U.S. History

Fundamental Questions ► To what extent did developments during the Roaring Twenties continue the reforms of the Progressive Era?

Election of 1920 ► Warren G. Harding (R)  “A Return to Normalcy” ► James M. Cox (D) ► Eugene V. Debs (Socialist)  Received 913,664 votes despite incarceration

Warren G. Harding (R) ( ) ► “A Return to Normalcy.” ► Emergency Quota Act (1921) ► Fordney-McCumber Tariff (1922) ► Washington Naval Conference ( ) ► Teapot Dome Scandal ► Harding died in office  Calvin Coolidge assumed presidency

Election of 1924 ► Calvin Coolidge (R)  Booming economy and conservatism ► John W. Davis (D)  Democrats split between conservatives and liberals (LaFollette)

Calvin Coolidge (R) ( ) ► “The business of the American people is business.” ► National Origins Act (1924) ► Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928)

Election of 1928 ► Herbert Hoover (R) ► Al Smith (D)  First Catholic major party candidate

Herbert Hoover (R) ( ) ► “Given the chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon… be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.” ► Great Depression  Volunteerism  Stock Market Crash of 1929  Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (1930)  Reconstruction Finance Corporation (1932)  Bonus Army (1932)

American Consumer Society ► Welfare Capitalism  Real income increases ► Higher rate for owners, managers, skilled labor ► Minimal increased rates for unskilled labor and working class  Insurance, profit-sharing, worker safety  Decreased influence of unions ► Mass Production  Wide variety and availability of consumer products at affordable prices  Model T  Domestic appliances ► Installment Plans ► Impact of the Automobile

Consumer Ads

1920s Society Blacks ► White Resentment  Lynchings increased especially in the South ► Universal Negro Improvement Association  Marcus Garvey  Economic solidarity and advancement for blacks  Failed attempt of mass migration to Africa  Inspired black pride and nationalism

1920s Society Immigrants ► First Red Scare and Nativism ► Quota Laws  Emergency Quota Act (1921) ► 3% of 1910 Census  National Origins Act (1924) ► 2% of 1890 Census ► Sacco and Vanzetti Trial ( )  Two Italian immigrants executed for murder despite little evidence

1920s Society Women ► Nineteenth Amendment and Voting  Usually voted as husbands  Politicians catered to female- friendly legislation and programs ► Employment  Clerical, teachers, nurses, domestic servants  Lower wages and no managerial positions ► Margaret Sanger  American Birth Control League  Established Planned Parenthood ► Flapper Girl  Young women of the Jazz Age  Short hair, short hemline, cosmetics, cigarette

1920s Culture Wars Prohibition ► Eighteenth Amendment and Volsteadt Act  Supported by middle-class progressives and rural Protestants especially in South and West  Generally ignored in urban centers ► Bootleggers/Rumrunners  Smuggling of alcohol  Rise of organized crime ► Al Capone ► Speakeasies  Underground saloons

1920s Culture Wars Ku Klux Klan

1920s Culture Wars Religion ► Fundamentalism  Literal view of Bible; Creationism  Attacked urban lifestyle and culture  Revivalists ► Billy Sunday ► Aimee Semple McPherson ► Modernism  Liberal view of religion  Acceptance and coordination of science and context with faith ► Scopes Monkey Trial (1925)  Law against teaching of evolution in Tennessee public school  Creationism ► William Jennings Bryan  Evolution ► Clarence Darrow

1920s Culture Wars Hero Worship ► Athletes, celebrities, innovators famed for individual accomplishment ► A personification of American individualism  Babe Ruth  Charles Lindbergh ► Fueled tabloid and gossip columns in newspapers and magazines

1920s Culture Wars The Jazz Age ► Inspiration of rebellious youth and liberal reaction to conservatism and fundamentalism ► Song and Dance  Jazz ► Louis Armstrong Louis Armstrong Louis Armstrong ► George Gershwin  Speakeasies  Dance Clubs ► Waltz to Foxtrot to Charleston WaltzFoxtrotCharleston WaltzFoxtrotCharleston ► Josephine Baker  Flappers ► Radio  Mainstream medium  Networks: NBC, CBS ► Cinema  Talkies ► The Jazz Singer The Jazz Singer The Jazz Singer  Nickelodeons  Charlie Chaplin Charlie Chaplin Charlie Chaplin

1920s Culture Wars Literature ► The Lost Generation  Disillusioned by World War I, consumerism, and modernism  Ernest Hemingway ► The Sun Also Rises ► A Farewell to Arms  Sinclair Lewis ► Babbitt  F. Scott Fitzgerald ► The Great Gatsby

1920s Culture Wars Harlem Renaissance ► Fueled by the Great Migration ► “Black is beautiful”  Black nationalist themes challenged racial stereotypes  Promote social and racial integration ► Langston Hughes ► Zora Neale Hurston  “Sometimes I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can anyone deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.” ► The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925)

H.L. Mencken Critiques America; A Critique of H.L. Mencken H.L. Mencken – “On Being American” (1922) ► Apparently there are those who begin to find it disagreeable – nay, impossible. Their anguish fills the Liberal weeklies and every ship that puts out from New York carries a groaning cargo of them, bound for anywhere to escape the great curses and atrocities that make life intolerable for them at home… [T]he government of the United States, in both its legislative and its executive arm, is ignorant, incompetent, corrupt, and disgusting...It is a belief no less piously cherished that the administration of justice in the Republic is stupid, dishonest, and against all reason and equity...It is another that the foreign policy of the United States – its habitual manner of dealith with other nations, whether friend or foe – is hypocritical, disingenuous, knavish, and dishonorable...And it is my fourth conviction that the American people constitute the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose- steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages, and grow more timorous, more sniveling, more poltroonish, more ignominious every day. Catherine Beech Ely – “The Sorrows of Mencken” (1928) ► Mencken deplores our antiquated regard for the sacredness of home, church, and history. We are so slow to learn that there is no such word as tradition in the lexicon of modern thought. Tradition implies affection for the past, whereas the Mencken school would have us understand that we have no past and no future worth cherishing, only the present for donning harlequin’s attire and proclaiming the farcical futility of human endeavor… For the Mencken school faith is demoded, aspiration a weak delusion. Yet America refuses to repudiate religion. She makes it the foundation of her institutions, the motive-power of her charities, the keynote of her progress. Mencken sorrows over America’s narrow conformities, so contrary to the self-sufficiency of intellectualism. The American bourgeois blunders onward and upward instead of reclining at full length in the dry lands of Rationalism.