The “Roaring” Twenties
The 1920s
 Economy
 Society
 Politics
Economy
 “Boom time”
 Rebuilding Europe
 Second Industrial Revolution
“…the chief business of the American people
is business…The man who builds a factory,
builds a temple. The man who works there
worships there."
Calvin Coolidge
The Man Nobody Knows
1925
Bruce Barton
Stock market
“Welfare capitalism”
 Businesses providing benefits for
workers
 Increase productivity
 Reduce turnover
“fordism”
Construction
Automobile
radio
plexiglas
Motion pictures
“talkies”
Charles Lindbergh
Aviation
Social & Cultural “revolution”
 Women’s rights movement
 “Flappers”
 ERA – Equal Rights Amendment
“Culture Wars”
 Traditional vs. modern
 Conservative vs. “progressive”
 Rural vs. urban
“Nativism” - Anti-immigrant
 Anti-German
 Anti-pacifist
 1917-1918 – Espionage Act
 imposed heavy penalties on anyone
convicted of using "disloyal, profane,
scurrilous, or abusive language" about
the government, the Constitution, the flag
or the military
“Red Scare” – 1919-1920
 Fear of “radicals” AND their methods
 “Bolshevism” (communism)
 Anarchists
 “Syndicalists”
 Anti-union
 Anti-immigrant
Emma Goldman
“Red Scare” – 1919-1920
 Methods
 Bombs
 Mail bombs
 Assassinations
Wall Street
Sept 1920
A. Mitchell Palmer
June, 1919
“Red Scare” – 1919-1920
 “Palmer raids”
U.S.S. Buford – “The Soviet Ark”
“Bolshevism and anarchism – Put them out and Keep them out”
American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU)
Sacco & Vanzetti
“Second” Ku Klux Klan
Colonel William Simmons
Rural-Urban Conflict
 Prohibition
 18th Amendment
 Volstead Act
“Speakeasies”
Gangsters
Bugs Moran
Al Capone
Machine Gun Kelly
F.B.I.
J. Edgar Hoover
Rural-Urban Conflict
 “Modernists” vs. religious
fundamentalists
 Scopes “Monkey” Trial, 1925
 Teaching of Evolution
John Scopes
Clarence Darrow
William Jennings Bryan
Evolution on Trial
1920s Politics
 Republicans dominate
Warren G. Harding
Herbert Hoover
Calvin Coolidge
1920s Politics
 Democrats - split
 Rural, southern, white supremacist
 Urban, northern, immigrant
1920s Politics
 Election of 1928
 “New” Democrat
 Urban
 Child of immigrants
 Catholic
Al Smith
Stock Market Crashes
 Oct 29, 1929