United States History, Since 1877
Rosen
 From 1921 to 1933, Republicans controlled the White
House; Warren G. Harding, the first of the three
Republican presidents, was elected in 1920.
 At the time of Harding's inauguration, the national
unemployment rate hit 20 percent, the highest ever
suffered up to that point.
 Harding pushed several measures to aid American
enterprise and regain national prosperity; his policies
to boost American enterprise made him a very popular
president, but ultimately the corruption of his
appointees, most notably in the Teapot Dome Scandal,
did in his administration.
 Harding's sudden death from a heart attack in 1923
elevated his vice president, Calvin Coolidge, to the
presidency.
 Coolidge revered free enterprise and discouraged
members of his administration from taking initiatives
that would expand government.
 With the president's approval, Secretary of the
Treasury Andrew Mellon reduced the government's
controls over the economy.
 Coolidge's policies found a staunch ally in the Supreme
Court, whose decisions attacked government intrusion
in the free market, even when the prohibition of
government regulation threatened the welfare of
workers.
 Coolidge's easily won victory in the election of 1924
confirmed the defeat of the progressive principle that
the state should take a leading role in ensuring the
general welfare.
 The repudiation of Wilsonian internationalism and
the rejection of collective security offered through the
League of Nations did not mean that the United States
retreated into isolationism; New York replaced
London as the center of world finance, and the United
States became the world's chief creditor.
 One of the Republicans' most ambitious foreign policy
initiatives was the Washington Disarmament
Conference that convened in 1921 to establish a global
balance of naval power.
 A second major effort on behalf of world peace came
in 1928 with the Kellogg-Briand pact; nearly fifty
nations signed a pledge to renounce war and to settle
international disputes peacefully.
 In 1924, American corporate leaders produced the
Dawes Plan, which halved Germany's annual
reparation payments, initiated fresh American loans to
Germany, caused the French to retreat from the Ruhr,
and got money flowing again in Germany's financial
markets; these successes also fueled prosperity at
home.
 In the early twentieth century, the automobile
industry emerged as the largest single manufacturing
industry in the nation and brought other new
industries, such as filling stations, garages, and
motels, into being.
 Automobiles altered the face of America, changing
where people lived, what work they did, how they
spent their leisure time, and even the way they
thought.
 Efficient mass production made the automobile
revolution possible.
 As the assembly line became standard in industry,
corporations reaped great profits, but laborers lost
many of the skills in which they had once taken pride.
 With the intention of encouraging loyalty to the
company and discouraging traditional labor unions,
industries also developed programs that came to be
known as “welfare capitalism,” which sometimes
included improved factory safety and sanitation, paid
vacations, and pension plans.
 Mass production fueled corporate profits and national
economic prosperity and in this new era of abundance,
more people than ever conceived of the American
dream in terms of things they could acquire.
 The expanding business of advertising stimulated the
desire for new products and pounded away at the
traditional values of thrift and saving.
 By the 1920s, the United States had achieved the
physical capacity to satisfy the material wants of its
people; the economic problem had shifted from
production to consumption.
 One solution was to expand America's markets in
foreign countries, and government and business
joined in that effort; a second solution was to simply
expand the market at home
 While Henry Ford paid his workers twice the going
rate to encourage mass consumption, not all
industrialists were as far-seeing and many people with
low wages began to rely on credit purchasing.
 Republicans generally sought to curb the powers of
government and liberate private initiative, but the
1920s witnessed a great exception to this rule when the
federal government implemented one of the last
reforms of the Progressive era, the Eighteenth
Amendment, which took effect in January 1920,
banning the manufacture, sale, and transportation of
alcohol.
 Local resistance to the law was intense and treasury
agents faced a staggering task, as “speakeasies” became
a common feature of the urban landscape.
 Eventually, serious criminals took over the liquor
trade, turning bootlegging into a highly organized
business.
 Gang-war slayings, police corruption, disrespect for
the law by otherwise upright citizens, and a
demoralized judiciary prompted demands for repeal of
the Eighteenth Amendment.
 In 1933, after thirteen years, the nation ended
prohibition.
 Of all the changes in American life in the 1920s, none
sparked more heated debates than the alternatives
offered to the traditional roles of women.
 Politically, women entered uncharted territory in the
1920s when the Nineteenth Amendment granted them
the vote.
 Women began pressuring Congress to pass laws that
especially concerned women, including measures to
protect women in factories and grant federal aid to
schools, but their only legislative success came with
the passage of the Sheppard-Towner Act, which
funded state efforts to curb infant mortality.
 A number of factors helped to thwart women's
political influence, however, including male
domination of both political parties, the rarity of
female candidates, and women's lack of experience in
voting.
 Women failed to form a solid voting bloc; feminists
argued over whether women should fight for special
protection or equal protection, and in 1923, the divided
feminist movement saw Congress shoot down the
Equal Rights Amendment.
 Economically, more women worked for pay, but they
clustered in “women's jobs,” many working as
secretaries, stenographers, typists, nurses, librarians,
elementary school teachers, salesclerks, and telephone
operators.
 Increased earnings gave women more buying power
and a special relationship with the new consumer
culture.
 The new woman both reflected and propelled the
modern birth control movement as well which, by the
1920s, linked birth control and eugenics.
 Flapper style and values spread from coast to coast
through films, novels, magazines, and advertisements.
 New women challenged American convictions about
women and men in separate spheres, the double
standard of sexual conduct, and Victorian ideas of
proper female appearance and behavior.
 The 1920s also witnessed the emergence of the “New
Negro.”
 During the 1920s, the prominent African American
intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois and the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) aggressively pursued the passage of a federal
antilynching law to counter mob violence against
blacks in the South.
 Many poor urban blacks, disillusioned with
mainstream politics, turned to a Jamaican born
visionary named Marcus Garvey for new leadership;
Garvey urged African Americans to rediscover the
heritage of Africa, take pride in their own culture and
achievements, and maintain racial purity by avoiding
miscegenation.
 During this active time, an extraordinary mix of black
artists, sculptors, novelists, musicians, and poets made
Harlem their home.
 Despite the dazzling talent produced by the Harlem
Renaissance, Harlem remained a separate black ghetto
that most whites knew only for its lively nightlife.
 This creative burst left a powerful legacy, but did little
in the short run to dissolve the prejudice of a white
society.
 In the 1920s, popular culture, such as consumer goods,
was mass-produced and mass-consumed, and nothing
offered escapist delights as effectively as the movies.
 By 1929, Hollywood drew more than 80 million people
to the movies in a single week.
 Americans also found heroes in sports, as they fell in
love with baseball's Babe Ruth and boxing's Jack
Dempsey.
 The decade's hero worship reached its zenith when
Charles Lindbergh, a young pilot, set out on May 20,
1927, from Long Island in his plane, The Spirit of St.
Louis, to become the first person to fly nonstop across
the Atlantic.
 The radio became important to mass culture in the
1920s, bringing news, sermons, soap operas, sports,
comedy, and music, especially jazz, into America's
homes.
 Some writers and artists felt alienated from American
mass-culture society, finding it shallow, antiintellectual, and materialistic.
 Many of these writers and artists left the United States
to live in Europe, where they helped launch one of the
most creative periods in American art and literature in
the twentieth century.
 Writers who remained in America —many of whom
had embraced progressive reform movements early in
the century—were often exiles in spirit and acted as
lonely critics of American cultural barrenness and
vulgarity.
 After the war, large-scale immigration resumed at a
moment when industrialists no longer needed new
factory workers, and nativist and antiradical
sentiments ran high.
 Congress responded by severely restricting
immigration.
 The Johnson-Reid Act of 1924 limited the number of
immigrants to no more than 161,000 a year and gave
each European nation a quota based on 2 percent of
the number of people from that country in America in
1890.
 The act revealed the fear and bigotry that fueled antiimmigration legislation, squeezing out some
nationalities far more than others.
 The 1924 law reaffirmed 1880s legislation that barred
Chinese immigrants and added Japanese and other
Asians to the list of the excluded nationalities;
however, it did not restrict immigration from the
Western Hemisphere because agriculture in the
Southwest had come to rely on Mexican labor.
 Rural Americans, who had little contact with eastern
or southern European immigrants, along with
industrialists and labor leaders, supported the 1924
act.
 Antiforeign hysteria climaxed during the 1920 trial of
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two anarchist
immigrants from Italy who were arrested for robbery
and murder.
 When Massachusetts executed the two on August 23,
1927, 50,000 mourners followed the caskets in the rain,
convinced that the men had died because they were
immigrants and radicals, not because they were
murderers.
 The nation's sour, antiforeigner mood struck a
responsive chord in members of the Ku Klux Klan,
which experienced a rebirth in the early twentieth
century.
 The Klan promised to defend family, morality, and
traditional American values against the threat posed
by blacks, immigrants, radicals, feminists, Catholics,
and Jews.
 Building on the frustrations of rural America, the Klan
quickly attracted some 3 to 4 million members, men
and women alike, and by the mid-1920s wielded a
strong influence over politics in many states.
 Eventually, social changes, along with lawless excess,
decreased the Klan's significance, yet Klan members'
grievances remained.
 Old-time fundamentalist religion and the new spirit of
science went head-to-head in a Tennessee courtroom
after John Scopes, a biology teacher, offered to test the
constitutionality of his state's ban on teaching
evolution.
 The trial quickly degenerated into a media circus; most
of the reporters from big-city papers were hostile to
fundamentalist Bryan, who successfully defended the
Tennessee law, and continued to side with Scopes.
 The trial dramatized and inflamed divisions between
city and country, intellectuals and the unlettered, the
privileged and the poor, the scoffers and the faithful.
 The presidential election of 1928 brought many of the
significant developments of the 1920s—prohibition,
immigration, religion, and the clash of rural and urban
values—into sharp focus.
 Republicans nominated Herbert Hoover, the energetic
secretary of commerce and the leading public symbol
of 1920s prosperity; Democrats nominated four-time
governor of New York , Alfred E. Smith, dubbed
“Alcohol Al” for his opposition to prohibition.
 Smith, whose parents were immigrants and who got
his start in New York City's Irish-dominated political
machine, seemed to represent all that rural America
feared and resented, and was especially vulnerable in
the heartland because he was Catholic.
 Hoover, who neatly combined the images of morality,
efficiency, service, and prosperity, won the election by
a landslide.
 Hoover entered the White House as a Progressive
Republican, calling for a limited government-business
partnership and a reform agenda that called for a
nation of homeowners and farm owners whose savings
were protected and whose jobs were secure.
 However, Hoover's ideological and political liabilities
prevented him from providing the leadership
demanded by the Great Depression.
 In the spring of 1929, the United States enjoyed a
fragile prosperity, but high tariffs and demands on
Europeans for repayment of wartime loans led to an
unstable international economy.
 The domestic economy was also in trouble: The
distribution of wealth in America was badly skewed,
and farmers continued to suffer from low prices and
chronic debt, which produced a serious problem in
consumption.
 Signs of economic trouble began to appear at mid-
decade, when new construction slowed down,
automobile sales faltered, companies began cutting
back production and laying off workers, and many
banks were failing.
 Even as the economy faltered, America's faith in it
remained unshaken and Americans continued to
speculate wildly in the stock market on Wall Street.
 Between 1924 and 1929, the values of the stocks listed
on the New York Stock Exchange increased by more
than 400 percent.
 Finally, in the autumn of 1929, the market hesitated,
and nervous investors began to sell their overvalued
stock.
 The dip quickly became a panic, as investors tried
desperately to unload overvalued stock on Black
Thursday, October 24, and Black Tuesday, October 29.
 Though the crash alone did not cause the Great
Depression, the dramatic losses in the stock market
and the fear of risking what was left acted as a great
brake on economic activity and shattered the new era's
aggressive confidence that America would enjoy a
perpetually expanding prosperity.
 To prevent future economic panics, Hoover urged
business leaders to maintain production and keep
their workers on the job, and urged labor leaders to
accept existing wages, hours, and conditions.
 The bargain quickly fell apart as demand for products
continued to decline, which led to further cuts in
production and loss of jobs, thus fueling the terrible
cycle of economic decline.
 In 1929, Hoover got Congress to pass the Agricultural
Marketing Act, which created a Farm Board to help
raise crop prices. When prices continued to decline,
Congress established the Hawley-Smoot tariff in 1930,
the highest tariff in history, and also authorized $420
million for public works projects to give the
unemployed jobs and create more purchasing power.
 Despite his efforts, with each year of Hoover's
administration, economic conditions worsened.
 In 1932, Hoover authorized the Reconstruction
Finance Corporation (RFC), a federal agency
empowered to lend government funds to endangered
banks and corporations.
 The trickle-down economic theory behind the RFC did
little to help the poor, whose numbers steadily
increased.
 Cries grew louder for the federal government to give
hurting people relief, but Hoover's response revealed
the limits of his conception of the government's proper
role.
 Hoover's circumscribed philosophy of legitimate
government action proved vastly inadequate to the
problems of restarting the economy and ending
human suffering.
 Jobless, homeless victims wandered in search of work,
and the tramp, or hobo, became one of the most
visible figures of the decade.
 Rural poverty was most acute, and tenant farmers and
sharecroppers, mainly in the South, came to symbolize
how poverty crushed the human spirit.
 There was no federal assistance to meet this human
catastrophe, only a patchwork of strapped charities
and destitute state and local agencies.
 The deepening crisis roused old fears and caused some
Americans to look for scapegoats, such as recently
arrived Mexican immigrants.
 The depression deeply affected the American family;
young people postponed marriage and had fewer
children, and men lost jobs while women kept them.
 President Hoover tried to express his optimism about
economic recovery, but amidst the shantytowns and
suffering, Hoover became increasingly unpopular.
 While Hoover practiced denial, maintaining that no
one in America was starving, other Americans sought
refuge at the movies.
 Grim conditions moved a few filmmakers to grapple
with the depression woes rather than to escape them.
 Crime increased during the 1930s.
 The nation's working class bore the brunt of the
economic collapse.
 The American people were slow to anger, then strong
in protest, and workers and farmers began to mount
uprisings across the country.
 Hard times also revived the left in America, bringing
socialism back to life and propelling the Communist
Party to its greatest size and influence in American
history.
 The left also led the fight against racism, attacking the
sharecropping system in the South.
 Breadlines, soup kitchens, foreclosures,
unemployment, and cold despair drove patriotic men
and women to question American capitalism.