US History, Since Reconstruction
Rosen, The Roaring 1920’s to the Depression Notes
Section 1: The New Era
President Calvin Coolidge declared that the business of America was business. In many ways, his
statement defined the 1920s. Amid all the tensions, an unprecedented flood of new consumer items
entered the marketplace, and progressive calls for government regulation were rejected in favor of a
revival of the old free enterprise individualism.
A Business Government
During the postwar conversion from a wartime to a peacetime economy, economic problems loomed
large. The unemployment rate was up to 20 percent by the winter of 1920-1921. The Republicans
nominated Warren G. Harding for president, even though he did not have strong political
convictions. Harding's campaign called for a return to normalcy.
The "return to normalcy" was a term that he invented during his campaign to get the point across that
after the turmoil of the previous era the country needed a return to normal procedures. Harding's
good humor and optimism toward the future dissipated the strife of the times and gave Americans
feelings of optimism. Harding chose many talented men as cabinet officers; they would run his
government for him. He also chose several loyal friends for high office—men who used their
positions for personal gain.
The Harding administration focused on domestic prosperity, high tariffs to support American
business, price supports for agriculture, and a return to unregulated business activities; these
positions made him quite popular. However, Harding's administration suffered because of his
willingness to trust friends who ultimately betrayed that trust and rocked the nation with some of the
worst scandals in U.S. history. Among others, Interior Secretary Albert Fall was found to have
accepted bribes totaling over $400,000. In an attempt to escape the political heat, Harding left
Washington for Alaska, where he died unexpectedly.
Vice President Calvin Coolidge's ascendance to the White House brought a strong pro-business
president into the office. Coolidge supported Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon's tax cuts for
the wealthy and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover's desire for businesses to exert voluntary
control over themselves. The Supreme Court also played a pro-business role and attacked the
regulation of businesses by state and national government. Coolidge's overwhelming victory in the
1924 presidential election underscored the defeat of progressive principles in the 1920s and the
speculative pro-business boom.
Promoting Prosperity and Peace Abroad
Although the United States rejected the collective security offered through the League of Nations and
Wilsonian internationalism, the United States did not retreat into isolationism. The United States
remained involved in the world economically, politically, and culturally.
President Harding's administration engineered a reduction of naval power among the world's leading
powers in the Five-Power Naval Treaty, which was signed in 1922. The Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928
also pointed toward international peace by securing pledges from fifty nations to renounce war and
promise to settle disputes peacefully. But the Dawes Plan, engineered by corporate leaders to aid
German reparation payments to France, represented a Republican-led American government's
preference for private-sector diplomacy over state action.
Automobiles, Mass Production, and Assembly-Line Progress
The automobile industry emerged as the largest single manufacturing industry in the nation, aided by
the federal government's decision to spend more on roads than on anything else. The Ford Motor
Company's location was perfect: and the necessary materials for automobile construction such as
steel, oil, glass, and rubber were produced nearby. Ford created the cheap, black, rugged Model T
through successful use of mass-production techniques, such as the assembly line. The Model T
became the symbol of a new, fast-paced era.
For Americans with cars, the distinction between country and city became blurred. Small towns, oneroom country schoolhouses, and all things rural began to decline in number when more people took
to the roads. New industries developed in conjunction with Ford's Model T—filling stations, garages,
fast-food restaurants, and "guest cottages" (motels).
The scientific management of business, as developed by Frederick W. Taylor in the 1870s, became a
key to harmony and progress in the 1920s. Its techniques were used not only to increase productivity
but also to make laborers less rebellious through welfare capitalism. Within the factory, worker
councils or industrial psychologists helped to ease class tensions and smooth labor-management
relations. Welfare capitalism purposely encouraged loyalty to the company and discouraged
traditional labor unions.
Consumer Culture
White middle- and upper-class Americans in the 1920s enjoyed the highest standard of living in the
world. They experienced this good life, with all of its material goods, through consumption.
Illustrating how the business values and boom of the 1920s affected average Americans was the
sociological classic Middletown, published in 1929 by Robert and Helen Lynd. Gathering data about
the citizens of Muncie, Indiana, the Lynd's results were startling. They concluded that everything in
the town's culture was hinged on money.
Advertising worked to convert the citizens into a single consumer aggregate. The business of
advertising, they suggested, created these changes in "Middletown" and, by implication, throughout
all of America. By the 1920s, the United States produced enough consumer products to satisfy the
material wants of its people, so much so that it looked to expand its markets in foreign countries.
Henry Ford promoted this new consumerism by raising the wages of his workers, who in turn
stimulated the United States economy. America's motto became spend, not save, and replace, rather
than make do.
Section 2: The Roaring Twenties
During the 1920s, the self-control of an earlier generation gave way to self-gratification and sexual
fulfillment. Using a twisted form of Freudian psychology as their model, Americans of the "Roaring
Twenties" sought pleasure without guilt. Advances in mass communication, a fascination with
celebrities, the "New Negro," and the exodus to Europe of a "lost generation" of disillusioned
American authors were also hallmarks of the period.
Prohibition
In January 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment, which prohibited the production and use of alcohol in
America, took effect. In theory, prohibition was supposed to boost production, eliminate crime, and
improve the nation's morality. Women, affected by alcohol's repercussions—domestic violence and
poverty—were keen supporters of the amendment.
Although treasury agents succeeded in lowering alcohol consumption in some areas of the country,
prohibition actually led to a rise in illegal sales, bootleggers, gangsters, and gangland murder. Al
Capone built his reputation in the bootlegging business and was finally imprisoned for tax evasion.
By 1931, however, public cynicism about the temperance movement was widespread, and in 1933,
the nation ended prohibition.
The New Woman
During the 1920s, the "new woman" challenged older conceptions of separate spheres for men and
women; increasing numbers of women worked and went to college; the so-called flapper challenged
Victorian notions of style and behavior; and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment finally
provided women with the right to vote. Despite these changes, women remained clustered in
"women's jobs," and expectations that women would dramatically transform the political landscape
went unfulfilled for a number of reasons.
Significantly, feminists remained divided between those who argued for a woman's right to special
protection under the law and those who demanded equal protection. The radical National Woman's
Party fought for the Equal Rights Amendment, which went down for defeat in 1923 and symbolized
the cresting tide of women's political influence during the age. Nevertheless, through private agencies
and reform associations, women continued to advocate for crucial causes from birth control to legal
equality for minorities to the end of child labor.
The New Negro
Although pernicious racism persisted after World War I, African Americans remained optimistic
about their futures. In Harlem, hope and talent merged to create an artistic outpouring of black pride
and expression. Poor blacks from the South, as well as immigrants from the West Indies, poured into
Harlem in uptown Manhattan. New York City's black population increased 115 percent (from
152,000 to 327,000) in the 1920s, while white population increased only 20 percent.
Marcus Garvey formed the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) to celebrate black
culture and achievement and also encouraged African Americans to gain autonomy from white
society and avoid miscegenation. In 1927, his attempt to found a black shipping line failed and led to
his deportation to Jamaica, but his ideas remained central to black nationalist thought. Black writers
and artists such as Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Aaron
Douglas created in the Harlem Renaissance a rebirth of culturally liberating art forms for African
Americans. White patrons were important to the Harlem Renaissance, but most whites continued to
see Harlem as an exotic place to get an evening's entertainment.
Mass Culture
In the twenties, popular culture, like consumer goods, was mass produced and consumed. Since
politics was undemanding and uninteresting, Americans looked elsewhere for excitement and in the
process created a national culture. One of the most popular forms of escape, pleasure without guilt,
and entertainment was the movies. By the 1920s, the movie industry had moved to Hollywood,
California, where movies were mass produced to cater to huge audiences. Hollywood created
glamorous movie stars and films to appeal to different tastes, including romances, adventures, and
comedies.
Americans found heroes in an assortment of sports as well. George Herman "Babe" Ruth, a baseball
player, was seen as a free spirit. Jack Dempsey, a boxer, was revered as an equalizer who was not
hemmed in by bureaucracy. Football was considered an upper-class sport but was presented by Knute
Rockne, the coach of Notre Dame, as a way of teaching hard work and teamwork. The decade's hero
worship reached its height with Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927. He
quickly became a legend, showing that there were still possibilities for human achievement in a time
with so many technological advances. The radio provided one of the greatest distractions during the
1920s.
By the end of the decade, over 10 million homes had radios, receiving news, sermons, soap operas,
sporting events, advertising, and music. Jazz, a distinctively African American form of music, took
on a popular life of its own. Jazz provided the sounds for the rebellious mood of youth, who for the
first time in the 1920s became a social class distinct in itself. As the traditional bonds of community,
religion, and family loosened, the young felt less pressure to imitate their elders and more freedom to
develop their own culture.
The Lost Generation
Many American writers and artists were embittered by World War I and, fed up with American
idealism and the materialism of the 1920s, left the United States for refuge in Europe. Called "the
lost generation" by writer Gertrude Stein, they were responsible for one of America's most creative
outpourings of literary achievement. Exemplified by Ernest Hemingway, the lost generation believed
that they fought a doomed struggle with nature yet tried to live with "grace under pressure." Writers
who stayed home, like Sinclair Lewis, also attacked the American lifestyle while at the same time
helped to produce some of America's most brilliant literature.
Section 3: Resistance to Change
In the 1920s, the urban lifestyle began to dominate the nation. Farms lost income, and rural dwellers
felt that they were losing their status and importance and that their traditional values were being
threatened by a heterogeneous urban culture.
Rejecting the "Huddled Masses"
Anti-immigrant sentiment increased, and in 1924, the Johnson-Reid Act was passed, restricting the
number of immigrants per year and giving each European nation a quota based on the number of
immigrants listed in the United States 1890 census, thereby reducing the numbers of eastern and
southern European immigrants. The immigrants' few defenders were congressmen who represented
urban, ethnic ghettoes.
The 1924 law reaffirmed the 1880s legislation barring Chinese immigrants and added Japanese and
other Asians to the list of those excluded. But it left open immigration from the Western Hemisphere,
and during the 1920s, some 500,000 Mexicans crossed the border. The trial of Nicola Sacco and
Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two anarchist Italian immigrants, for robbery and murder marked the climax of
antiforeigner hysteria. The two were convicted by an obviously biased judge but were refused a
retrial. After six years of protest, the two were executed in 1927.
The Rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan
One of the largest groups to respond to fears about modern life was the Ku Klux Klan, revived after
Reconstruction in 1915 following the release of D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation. The Klan claimed
itself to be the defender of family, morality, and traditional values against the threat posed by blacks,
immigrants, radicals, feminists, Catholics, and Jews, and moved beyond the South to develop a
national network of societies. By the 1920s, the Klan was a powerful political force throughout
America, combining Americans' love of fraternal societies with violence against those different from
themselves.
At its peak, it boasted between three and four million members and had a significant impact on
politics in several states. In the late 1920s, after social changes as well as a series of scandals
surrounding its leadership, the Klan's membership declined, but the conditions that nurtured it
remained very present.
The Scopes Trial
The conflict between the old faith in the Bible and the new science of evolution illustrated the
resistance of many to modernism. In a Tennessee trial in 1925, John Scopes challenged the state's
ban on teaching Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in the public schools. William Jennings Bryan
argued for the state and fundamentalism, and Clarence Darrow, a brilliant defense lawyer, argued for
Scopes and evolution. Although Scopes lost the trial, Bryan and those who defied reason and science
were humiliated in the eyes of modern, urban America.
Al Smith and the Election of 1928
When Calvin Coolidge decided not to seek reelection in 1928, the clash of rural and urban values
emerged. The Republicans nominated Herbert Hoover, the secretary of commerce for Harding and
Coolidge, who was perceived to be representative of Middle America. The Democrats nominated the
Irish Catholic governor of New York, Alfred E. Smith, who epitomized big-city values. The debate
that followed evolved around the issues of civil rights, ending prohibition, and Smith's Catholicism.
Hoover, rural America, and traditional American values won by a landslide, although Republicans
lost ground among urban voters and farmers.
Section 4: The Great Crash
Within eight months of Herbert Hoover's inauguration as president, the United States fell into the
most serious economic depression ever. Along with prosperity, Hoover and his reputation were
among its victims.
Herbert Hoover: The Great Engineer
An orphan and a hugely successful mining engineer, Herbert Hoover lived an exceptional life before
his presidency. His relief work during World War I and position as the head of the Food
Administration under Wilson won him an international reputation as an organizing and managerial
genius. As secretary of commerce for Harding and Coolidge, Hoover solidified his reputation. He
urged a limited business-government partnership that would actively manage the sweeping changes
experienced by Americans.
In his thoughtful book American Individualism (1922), Hoover candidly described flaws in American
capitalism and turned to his cooperative brand of individual effort to address them. Yet he was new
to elected office and feared that people would expect too much of him if a dire situation arose. The
national calamity that did arise stemmed from a distorted national economy.
The Distorted Economy
Despite the glow of economic prosperity in 1929, gloom and doom were on the horizon. Serious
economic problems existed throughout the national and international economies and brought the
United States into a major depression. America's high tariff barriers were a major problem, disabling
trade between the United States and the rest of the world. This in turn forced American bankers to
extend credit to overextend and debt-ridden European nations to keep trade alive.
Another major problem was a worldwide agricultural depression, which prevented millions of
American farmers from being potential consumers. Additionally, the fabulous wealth of the few in
the 1920s created an imbalance of wealth for the majority, which created serious problems in
consumption.
Buying on credit brought an impressive boom in the marketplace as well as a new level of
indebtedness for millions of Americans. The bubble of speculation and of overextended credit
masked the fact that many markets were fully saturated. By 1925, there were warning signs that
supply was ready to outstrip demand.
The Crash of 1929
Throughout the 1920s, the stock market was a gambling casino. People became rich buying stocks on
margin and using credit to buy the stock. Stocks continued to rise, and unsecured loans for buying
stocks drove the market higher and higher.
Despite President Hoover's calls for tighter regulation of the market, a destructive wave of
speculation consumed Wall Street. In late October of 1929, the bubble burst; the market crashed and
pulled the banks and thousands of investors down with it.
Hoover and the Limits of Individualism
Throughout his presidency, Hoover remained committed to the idea of voluntarism and resisted plans
for government intervention in the private sector. He called on business and labor leaders to work
together to maintain production and wages at current levels, although the bargain fell apart quickly
when the economy did not recover. Despite his beliefs, Hoover did act.
He supported a limited public works program to create jobs. In 1929, Congress passed the
Agricultural Marketing Act. The act created the Farm Board, which used its budget of $500 million
to buy up agricultural supplies and thus, it was hoped, raise prices. Although the Farm Board bought
one-third of the nation's wheat supply in 1930, conditions worsened. To help end the decline, Hoover
joined conservatives in urging protective tariffs on agricultural goods, and, with his approval, the
Hawley-Smoot tariff of 1930 established the highest rates in history.
As unemployment rose to 12 million, Hoover doled out limited federal aid. However, none of these
actions produced the desired results. In the realm of industry, Hoover maintained his earlier
commitment to encouraging cooperation between government and big business. He created the
Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), a government agency designed to loan money to banks
and businesses with the hopes it would "trickle down" to the lower (consumer) levels of the
economy. This and Hoover's other government actions did little to help the failing economy.
Section 5: Life in the Depression
By 1930, it had become obvious that prosperity would not return quickly. Human suffering led to
despair, compounded by political leaders' insensitivity. By 1932, the Great Depression became a
serious social crisis.
The Human Toll
The depression brought the American economy to its knees. Production dwindled, and by 1933,
unemployment hit 12.5 million workers, or 25 percent of the workforce. To cope with the depression,
people did whatever they could to survive. Some traveled the rails as tramps, the symbol of the
depression. Others lived on the streets, eating what they could find in alleys and dumps. Even for
those with jobs, their paychecks got smaller.
Poverty hit the rural South especially hard. Because there was no system of federal assistance, there
was no real safety net for most unemployed Americans. The crisis caused people to look for
scapegoats; for example, in Los Angeles County, Mexicans, perceived as taking jobs from
Americans, and their native-born children were deported.
Family life changed, as people postponed marriage, and the size of families shrank. Since women's
jobs were not as affected as men's industrial jobs, many wives became the breadwinners; idle men
fell prey to guilt and loss of self-respect.
Denial and Escape
As the depression worsened, it became apparent that those who led the country into collapse knew
little of how or why it occurred; they wanted to deny that problems existed. President Hoover took a
lot of blame for the depression but did not help himself when he tried to restore confidence with
continued formality in the White House.
While the wealthy practiced denial, other Americans sought escape at the movies. Tales of rags-toriches, gangster features, and films offering social commentary became the blockbusters of their day.
Crime increased, as did the reputation of bank robbers, whom many saw as taking back what banks
already had stolen.
Working-Class Militancy
Organized labor initially echoed Hoover's arguments against direct government relief and did not
respond quickly to the Great Depression. However, organizations such as the American Federation of
Labor (AFL) eventually became more militant, and Americans became more outraged by business
and government officials' callousness.
In Dearborn, Michigan, Ford's private security forces killed several demonstrators, whose funerals
brought thousands of mourners. Farmers led uprisings to demand better prices for their goods and to
halt foreclosures. Fieldworkers in California, mostly Mexicans, led a strike after landowners cut their
substandard wages. The left enjoyed a renaissance, supporting both the labor movement and equal
rights for African Americans. While relatively few Americans joined left-wing organizations, many
questioned the capitalist system.