United States History, Since 1877
Rosen, The Roaring ‘20s Lecture Notes
The New Era
A Business Government
1. From 1921 to 1933, Republicans controlled the White House; Warren G. Harding, the first of the three Republican presidents,
was elected in 1920.
2. At the time of Harding's inauguration, the national unemployment rate hit 20 percent, the highest ever suffered up to that point.
3. 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.
4. Harding's sudden death from a heart attack in 1923 elevated his vice president, Calvin Coolidge, to the presidency.
5. Coolidge revered free enterprise and discouraged members of his administration from taking initiatives that would expand
government.
6. With the president's approval, Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon reduced the government's controls over the economy.
7. 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.
8. 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.
Promoting Prosperity and Peace Abroad
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
Automobiles, Mass Production, and Assembly-Line Progress
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Efficient mass production made the automobile revolution possible.
4. 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.
5. 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.
Consumer Culture
1. 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.
2. The expanding business of advertising stimulated the desire for new products and pounded away at the traditional values of thrift
and saving.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
The Roaring Twenties
Prohibition
1. 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.
United States History, Since 1877
Rosen, The Roaring ‘20s Lecture Notes
2.
3.
4.
5.
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.
The New Woman
1. 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.
2. Politically, women entered uncharted territory in the 1920s when the Nineteenth Amendment granted them the vote.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Increased earnings gave women more buying power and a special relationship with the new consumer culture.
8. The new woman both reflected and propelled the modern birth control movement as well which, by the 1920s, linked birth
control and eugenics.
9. Flapper style and values spread from coast to coast through films, novels, magazines, and advertisements.
10. 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 New Negro
1. The 1920s also witnessed the emergence of the “New Negro.”
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. During this active time, an extraordinary mix of black artists, sculptors, novelists, musicians, and poets made Harlem their home.
5. Despite the dazzling talent produced by the Harlem Renaissance, Harlem remained a separate black ghetto that most whites knew
only for its lively nightlife.
6. This creative burst left a powerful legacy, but did little in the short run to dissolve the prejudice of a white society.
Mass Culture
1. 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.
2. By 1929, Hollywood drew more than 80 million people to the movies in a single week.
3. Americans also found heroes in sports, as they fell in love with baseball's Babe Ruth and boxing's Jack Dempsey.
4. 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.
5. 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.
The Lost Generation
1. Some writers and artists felt alienated from American mass-culture society, finding it shallow, anti-intellectual, and materialistic.
2. 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.
3. 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.
United States History, Since 1877
Rosen, The Roaring ‘20s Lecture Notes
Resistance to Change
Rejecting the Undesirables
1. 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.
2. Congress responded by severely restricting immigration.
3. 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.
4. The act revealed the fear and bigotry that fueled anti-immigration legislation, squeezing out some nationalities far more than
others.
5. 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.
6. Rural Americans, who had little contact with eastern or southern European immigrants, along with industrialists and labor leaders,
supported the 1924 act.
7. 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.
8. 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 Rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan
1. 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.
2. The Klan promised to defend family, morality, and traditional American values against the threat posed by blacks, immigrants,
radicals, feminists, Catholics, and Jews.
3. 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.
4. Eventually, social changes, along with lawless excess, decreased the Klan's significance, yet Klan members' grievances remained.
The Scopes Trial
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. The trial dramatized and inflamed divisions between city and country, intellectuals and the unlettered, the privileged and the poor,
the scoffers and the faithful.
Al Smith and the Election of 1928
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Hoover, who neatly combined the images of morality, efficiency, service, and prosperity, won the election by a landslide.
The Great Crash
Herbert Hoover: The Great Engineer
1. 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.
2. However, Hoover's ideological and political liabilities prevented him from providing the leadership demanded by the Great
Depression.
The Distorted Economy
1. 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.
2. The domestic economy was also in trouble: The distribution of wealth in America was badly skewed, and farmers continued to
United States History, Since 1877
Rosen, The Roaring ‘20s Lecture Notes
3.
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.
The Crash of 1929
1. 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.
2. Between 1924 and 1929, the values of the stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange increased by more than 400 percent.
3. Finally, in the autumn of 1929, the market hesitated, and nervous investors began to sell their overvalued stock.
4. The dip quickly became a panic, as investors tried desperately to unload overvalued stock on Black Thursday, October 24, and
Black Tuesday, October 29.
5. 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.
Hoover and the Limits of Individualism
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Despite his efforts, with each year of Hoover's administration, economic conditions worsened.
5. In 1932, Hoover authorized the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), a federal agency empowered to lend government
funds to endangered banks and corporations.
6. The trickle-down economic theory behind the RFC did little to help the poor, whose numbers steadily increased.
7. 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.
8. Hoover's circumscribed philosophy of legitimate government action proved vastly inadequate to the problems of restarting the
economy and ending human suffering.
Life in the Depression
The Human Toll
1. Jobless, homeless victims wandered in search of work, and the tramp, or hobo, became one of the most visible figures of the
decade.
2. Rural poverty was most acute, and tenant farmers and sharecroppers, mainly in the South, came to symbolize how poverty
crushed the human spirit.
3. There was no federal assistance to meet this human catastrophe, only a patchwork of strapped charities and destitute state and
local agencies.
4. The deepening crisis roused old fears and caused some Americans to look for scapegoats, such as recently arrived Mexican
immigrants.
5. The depression deeply affected the American family; young people postponed marriage and had fewer children, and men lost jobs
while women kept them.
Denial and Escape
1. President Hoover tried to express his optimism about economic recovery, but amidst the shantytowns and suffering, Hoover
became increasingly unpopular.
2. While Hoover practiced denial, maintaining that no one in America was starving, other Americans sought refuge at the movies.
3. Grim conditions moved a few filmmakers to grapple with the depression woes rather than to escape them.
4. Crime increased during the 1930s.
Working-Class Militancy
1. The nation's working class bore the brunt of the economic collapse.
2. The American people were slow to anger, then strong in protest, and workers and farmers began to mount uprisings across the
country.
3. 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.
United States History, Since 1877
Rosen, The Roaring ‘20s Lecture Notes
4.
5.
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.