1. The Roaring Twenties
Period 7 – Part to 1945

2. Think About It
To what extent did developments during the Roaring Twenties maintain continuity and foster change in American politics and society? Consider the reforms of the Progressive Era.

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

4. Warren G. Harding (R) (1921-1923)
“A Return to Normalcy.”
Emergency Quota Act (1921)
Washington Naval Conference ( )
Teapot Dome Scandal
Harding died in office
Calvin Coolidge assumed presidency

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

6. Calvin Coolidge (R) (1923-1928)
“The business of the American people is business.”
National Origins Act (1924)
Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928)

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

8. 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)

9. 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

10. Consumer Ads

11. 1920s Society African Americans
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

12. 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

13. 1920s Society Women Nineteenth Amendment and Voting Employment
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

14. 1920s Culture Wars Prohibition
Eighteenth Amendment and Volstead 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

15. 1920s Culture Wars Ku Klux Klan

16. 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

17. 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

18. 1920s Culture Wars The Jazz Age
Inspiration of rebellious youth and liberal reaction to conservatism and fundamentalism
Song and Dance
Jazz
Louis Armstrong
George Gershwin
Speakeasies
Dance Clubs
Waltz to Foxtrot to Charleston
Josephine Baker
Flappers
Radio
Mainstream medium
Networks: NBC, CBS
Cinema
Talkies
The Jazz Singer
Nickelodeons
Charlie Chaplin

19. 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.”

20. 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

21. H.L. Mencken Critiques America; A Critique of H.L. Mencken
H.L. Mencken – “On Being American” (1922)
Catherine Beech Ely – “The Sorrows of Mencken” (1928)
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.
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.