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Chapter 22: Beginning of Modern America: The 1920s
Important Keywords
Teapot Dome Scandal: Major scandal in the administration of President Warren Harding.
Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall had two oil deposits put under the jurisdiction of the Department of the Interior and leased them to private companies in return for large sums of money.
Red Scare: After World War I, the fear of the spread of communism in the United States.
Palmer Raids: as part of the Red Scare, in these 1919 to 1920 raids thousands of Americans not born in the United States were arrested, and hundreds were sent back to their countries of origin.
National Origins Act (1924): Anti-immigration federal legislation that took the number of immigrants from each country in 1890 and stated that immigration from those countries could now be no more than 2 percent of that.
In addition, immigration from Asia was halted.
The act also severely limited further immigration from eastern and southern Europe.
Scopes Trial (1925): Trial of teacher John Scopes of Dayton, Tennessee, for the teaching of evolution.
During this trial, lawyers Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan squared off on the teachings of Darwin versus the teachings of the Bible.
Jazz Age: Image of the 1920s that emphasized the more relaxed social attitudes of the decade.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is seen by many as the novel that best depicts this view.
Flapper: “New woman” of the 1920s, who was pictured as having bobbed hair, a shorter skirt, makeup, a cigarette in her hand, and somewhat liberated sexual attitudes.
Flappers would have been somewhat hard to find in small-town and rural America.
“Lost Generation”: Group of post–World War I writers who in their works expressed deep dissatisfaction with mainstream American culture.
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway is a novel that is representative of the works of these writers.
Harlem Renaissance: 1920s black literary and cultural movement that produced many works depicting the role of blacks in contemporary American society.
Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes were key members of this movement.
Key Timeline
1917: Race riots in East St. Louis, Missouri
1918: Armistice ending World War I
1919: Race riots in Chicago
Major strikes in Seattle and Boston
Palmer Raids
1920: Warren Harding elected president
First broadcast of radio station KDKA in Pittsburgh
Publication of Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
Arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti
Prohibition takes effect
1921: Immigration Quota Law passed
Disarmament conference held
1922: Fordney-McCumber Tariff enacted
Publication of Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
1923: Teapot Dome scandal
Death of Harding; Calvin Coolidge becomes president
Duke Ellington first performs in New York City
1924: Election of Calvin Coolidge
Immigration Quota Law enacted
Ku Klux Klan reaches highest membership in history
Women governors elected in Wyoming and Texas
1925: Publication of The Man Nobody Knows by Bruce Barton
Publication of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Scopes Trial held in Dayton, Tennessee
1926: Publication of The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
1927: The Jazz Singer, first movie with sound, released
Charles Lindbergh makes New York to Paris flight
Execution of Sacco and Vanzetti
15 millionth car produced by Ford Motor Company
$1.5 billion spent on advertising in United States
Babe Ruth hits 60 home runs
1928: Election of Herbert Hoover
1929: Nearly 30 million Americans have cars
Stock market crash
The Prosperous Twenties
After World War I, the American economy struggled to adjust to peacetime.
American prosperity peaked in the 1920s and was not shared equally.
Farmers fared worse than urbanites. Wealthier people benefited more.
However, a surprising number of Americans improved their lives.
In 1924, Industrial workers' wages nearly doubled.
Strikes decreased during good times.
Businessmen were increasingly willing to prevent unionization by improving wages and benefits.
The 1920s celebrated business, which the Progressive Era had demonized.
American industry gained global dominance.
American automakers led this trend.
Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler controlled 85% of the American car market after competition.
Assembly line improvements made affordable cars available.
In 1925, Ford Model Ts were produced every 24 seconds.
American industrialists adopted Frederick W. Taylor's "scientific management."
Production efficiencies reduced consumer goods prices.
This allowed more Americans to buy radios, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and other electric appliances.
The "installment plan," a marketing innovation that allowed consumers to buy goods over 36 to 48 monthly payments, made luxuries affordable.
By 1928, 65% of cars were bought this way.
In the 1920s boom, this marketing reliance on credit caused problems, but they were hard to predict.
Madison Avenue marketers persuade consumers that a specific car or refrigerator was the only way to live the "good life."
Advertising united all Americans, city or country.
Print and radio ads peddled the same commercial dreams.
The Republican “New Era”
The Republicans dominated the national government during the 1920s, controlling both houses of Congress and the presidency.
Even the Supreme Court was headed by a Republican, Chief Justice William Howard Taft, who had served as president from 1909–1913.
The Republicans of the “New Era” believed in limited government and supported free enterprise.
In their hands the regulatory state became an exercise in government and business partnership.
Herbert Hoover's creative statesmanship as secretary of commerce under Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge helped organize a national radio system and encouraged industries to standardize parts and procedures.
Warren G. Harding as President
In 1920, Warren G. Harding did not lead the Republican presidential nomination.
As a U.S. senator from Ohio, he ran a clever dark horse campaign to make himself the second choice of most convention delegates.
When the leading candidates deadlocked, he was an easy compromise nominee.
Governor James Cox was the Democratic presidential nominee.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson's assistant secretary of the navy, was Cox's young running mate.
Cox supported American entry into the League of Nations and defended the Wilson administration.
Harding understood that Americans were exhausted by the war and Wilson.
Higher tariffs and lower taxes were his Republican platform.
Millions of voters supported Harding's "return to normalcy" call.
In the first national election where women could vote, Harding won with 61% of the vote.
Wilsonian idealism and Progressivism's "social experiments" were repudiated by Harding's victory.
The economy was Harding's first priority.
He named Charles Dawes as the Bureau of the Budget's first director to help Congress better manage government revenues and expenditures.
Harding reduced federal spending and convinced Congress to lower taxes.
The postwar depression ended in a year in the US.
In 1921, unemployment was 12 percent; by the end of the decade, it was 3 percent.
For his cabinet, Harding wanted the "best minds."
Secretary of state was former Supreme Court Justice and presidential candidate Charles Evans Hughes.
The 1921 Washington Conference, intended to prevent a naval arms race, was led by Hughes.
Washington hosted military and diplomatic representatives from Great Britain, France, Japan, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, and China.
Hughes proposed scrapping many tons of battleships and a 10-year freeze on their expensive construction.
The Five Power Agreement between the US, UK, Japan, France, and Italy set ratios for their navies.
The invited powers recognized Chinese sovereignty and supported the Open Door in China.
In the early 1920s, these agreements seemed to promise peace and international cooperation. They couldn't stop World War II.
American diplomacy's 1924 Dawes Plan was another success.
German reparations were reduced by Charles Dawes.
The Germans paid reparations with loans from American banks.
The Allies used these funds to repay some of their war debts to the US.
In the second half of the 1920s, American capital helped Europe recover.
Harding appointed Andrew Mellon secretary of the treasury.
Throughout the 1920s, Mellon held this position.
One of America's richest men, Mellon led Alcoa.
Mellon believed that limiting government and cutting taxes would free up money for business investment, which would create more jobs.
Mellon reduced tax rates throughout the decade.
The wealthy and high-taxed corporations benefited from his policies.
Mellon was lauded as a great secretary of the treasury during the prosperous 1920s for his financial policies.
High tariffs were also Mellon's goal.
Manufacturing tariffs increased with the 1922 Fordney-McCumber Tariff.
In Congress, a bipartisan farm bloc could not be ignored.
Rates on imported agricultural products increased to appease farmers.
Organized labor was not promoted by the business-friendly Harding administration. Unions weakened in the twenties.
Employers and sometimes child labor were favored by the courts.
Civil liberties and rights were harmed by President Harding.
During World War I, he freed Eugene Debs and other political dissidents imprisoned by the Wilson administration for Espionage and Sedition Act violations.
In October 1921, Harding visited Birmingham, Alabama, and spoke out for racial equality.
Scandal and the Ruin of Harding’s Reputation
Along with the "best minds," Harding appointed men who betrayed him.
Some of them were men he had met during his rise in Ohio politics.
Harding did not commit their crimes.
His death may have been caused by their corruption discovery.
Charles Forbes misappropriated $250 million as Veterans' Bureau director.
After learning what Forbes had done, Harding fired him but let him flee abroad before sending him to prison.
A hung jury acquitted Attorney General Harry Daugherty, Harding's former campaign manager, of taking bribes from bootleggers and others seeking government favors.
The Teapot Dome Scandal was the Harding administration's most notorious misdeed.
Albert Fall, a respected New Mexico senator, became Harding's secretary of the interior.
In exchange for bribes, Fall leased the federal oil reserve in Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and other oil lands to private companies.
In 1929, Fall was imprisoned as the first cabinet secretary convicted of a felony.
In 1923, Harding began to realize the corruption in his administration.
He contemplated how to proceed after learning this.
Stress exacerbated his poor health.
While on a political tour of the western states, Harding died on August 2, 1923.
President Calvin Coolidge
Harding was succeeded by Vice President Calvin Coolidge.
The new president had simple tastes and was from New England.
“There can be no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime,” he said as governor of Massachusetts in 1919, ending a Boston police strike.
Little was known about the administration's scandals when Coolidge became president.
After they became public, Coolidge cleaned up the mess so well that he easily won the presidential election in 1924.
Harding was less articulate than Coolidge on limited government.
He was an eloquent free enterprise advocate and famous for saying "the business of the United States is business."
President Coolidge worked with Treasury Secretary Mellon to cut taxes, spending, and debt.
Peaceful and prosperous were the Coolidge years.
Launching major government programs or initiatives went against Coolidge's philosophy of government.
The federal government had built a dam on the Tennessee River at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, during World War I.
Coolidge proposed privatizing it, but Congress rejected his proposal.
The Revenue Act of 1926, which reduced taxes, was passed by Coolidge and Mellon.
The president was willing to take unpopular stands for his beliefs.
Congress overrode Coolidge's veto of a bill giving World War I veterans a bonus.
The Election of 1928
Coolidge's popularity warranted a second term.
“I do not choose to run,” he told the press.
Herbert Hoover became the Republican nominee.
Republican economics were embodied by the nominee.
Hoover went to Stanford University and became a wealthy mining engineer after being orphaned.
He became famous for helping starving European civilians during World War I.
He was President Wilson's Food Administrator, and he attended Paris peace talks.
He pioneered government-private industry cooperation as Harding and Coolidge's dynamic secretary of commerce.
Hoover championed "American individualism" and the Republican economic record during the 1928 election.
Northern urban politicians and Southern KKK-influenced Southerners divided the Democrats in the 1920s.
In 1928, Al Smith was nominated by Northerners.
Smith, a product of Tammany Hall, embodied America's bustling metropolis.
This alienated him from urban-skeptical Americans.
His Roman Catholicism and opposition to Prohibition disqualified him for the presidency for rural voters.
Smith lost to Hoover by almost 60 to 40 percent in the popular vote and won only eight states in New England and the Deep South.
The City Versus the Country in the 1920s
In 1928, Smith won the 12 largest cities despite a crushing loss.
The 1920s' cultural divide between rural and urban voters doomed him.
The Census reported that the US became urban at the start of the decade.
This did not mean most Americans lived in big cities, but the trend was there.
Modern mass media spread urban values nationwide.
Many rural and small-town Americans disliked these foreign customs.
Race Relations
Race relations reflected social and cultural resistance.
African Americans moved to the North to work in urban factories during the war.
Many returning soldiers feared these African Americans would prevent them from returning to their prewar jobs.
Other Northern workers did not want to compete with these migrants for jobs.
In 1919, Washington, D.C., Tulsa, Oklahoma, Omaha, Nebraska, and others experienced violent race riots.
Chicago rioted for two weeks.
15 whites and 23 African Americans died when thousands of African American homes burned.
In 1919, Southern repression of African Americans increased after black veterans returned home. 70 African-Americans were lynched.
In 1920, Marcus Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association amid racial violence.
Garvey wanted to return African Americans to Africa and found a new state.
500,000 people joined his association. Garvey's dream failed with the 1925 mail fraud conviction.
Garvey's planned migration to Africa failed because few African Americans supported racial separatism.
1927 saw Garvey deported to Jamaica.
By 1925, the Ku Klux Klan had over 5 million members, inspired by The Birth of a Nation and modern marketing.
Modern Klan was not Southern-only. It recruited nationwide, especially in small towns.
In the mid-1920s, the Klan ruled Indiana.
This modern Klan opposed African Americans but also Catholics and immigrants from big cities.
The Klan once dominated politics.
The Klan fell almost as fast as it rose.
Indiana Klan leader was convicted of rape and second-degree murder.
Other Klan leaders were credibly accused of sexual and financial corruption.
This scandal eroded Klan support. It upheld its prejudices.
Immigration and the Red Scarce
Since the 1886 Haymarket Square bombing, Americans have associated immigrants with political radicalism.
After the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, agitators worried about bringing communism to the US.
1919's anonymous terrorist bombings heightened these fears.
The Red Scare resulted from these outrages.
A bomb destroyed A. Mitchell Palmer's front porch, Woodrow Wilson's attorney general.
Palmer arrested radicals in response.
The Palmer Raids arrested thousands of immigrants.
Palmer's prisoners' civil rights were neglected during wartime.
Hundreds of defendants were expelled.
Palmer truly believed a communist conspiracy threatened the nation.
He hoped his strong actions would boost his political career.
After Palmer incorrectly predicted a radical uprising on May 1, 1920, the Red Scare faded.
In September, a Wall Street bombing killed 33 people and wounded over 200.
Most Americans blamed zealots, not communists. Red Scare ended.
Foreigners and radicals remained suspect.
In 1921, two Italian immigrant anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti, were convicted of robbing and murdering two shoe factory workers.
The men were executed in 1927 despite criticism of their trial.
After the war, massive immigration to the US resumed.
Many Americans worried about wage reductions.
Immigrants were thought to bring dangerous political ideas from the Red Scare.
Eugenicist Madison Grant warned against Americans mixing with "lesser breeds."
Small-town Americans still associated immigrants with urban culture that threatened their values.
Immigration restrictions followed.
The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 limited immigration to 3% of a nationality's 1910 US population.
Quotas reduced Southern and Eastern European immigration.
This halved immigration in 1922.
The 1924 National Origins Act tightened immigration restrictions.
This law set the immigration quota for each nationality at 2% of its 1890 US population.
Non-American immigrants were limited to 150,000.
Asian immigration was banned.
The law ended immigration from Italy, the Balkans, Poland, and Russia.
The National Origins Act halted mass immigration to the US for over 40 years.
Prohibition
Prohibition was another flashpoint in rural-urban conflict.
Rural America favored Prohibition.
Kansas had 95% Prohibition compliance in 1924, while New York State had 5%.
Rural Americans associated liquor with big cities, immigrants, political machines, and gangsters.
Alcohol was the devil's "instrument," and cities were his playground.
Prohibition unleashed urban monsters.
Alcohol prohibition helped organized crime.
In 1919, the government barely enforced Prohibition.
Prohibition failed in cities like New York where few supported full compliance. Cities had many speakeasies.
Local authorities secretly protected speakeasies and took a cut of the profits.
"Bathtub gin" was bad liquor sold in speakeasies. Bootleggers supplied better liquor to meet demand.
Bootleggers like Chicago's Al Capone made a fortune.
Capone led hundreds of gunmen in bloody turf wars with other gangsters.
Capone's men killed rival gangsters in a garage on St. Valentine's Day 1929.
Religion and the Theory of Revolution
Religion and evolution polarized rural and urban sensibilities.
Fundamentalist Christians opposed Darwinian evolution, which contradicted the Bible.
Other Christians worried about how evolution affected the traditional view of humans as God's special creation.
William Jennings Bryan, a three-time Democratic presidential candidate, led these smalltown Americans.
Bryan helped Tennessee lawmakers ban evolution education.
In 1925, the ACLU pledged to support teachers who broke the law.
They accepted Dayton, Tennessee high school teacher John Scopes.
The "Monkey Trial" Scopes Trial garnered national attention.
Scopes' famous defense attorney was Clarence Darrow.
Bryan helped the prosecution.
Scopes was acquitted after a technicality.
The trial was about science vs. religion and rural Americans' ability to reject unpopular ideas.
Bryan's cross-examination by Darrow as a "expert on the Bible" was the trial's climax.
Bryan admitted that the world was not created in six days, disappointing his supporters.
Bryan died after the trial.
Popular Culture in the 1920s
Mass media emerged in the 1920s.
Both city and country Americans were exposed to a glittering roster of heroes whose exploits were vigorously publicized in newspapers and magazines.
Americans in the new media environment had to work to ignore athletes like baseball home run king Babe Ruth, college football star Red Grange, and boxing champion Jack Dempsey.
Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Clara Bow, and Rudolph Valentino were recognized by millions. Fans flocked to favorite actors and actresses.
The media's reaction to Charles Lindbergh's 1927 solo Atlantic crossing in The Spirit of St. Louis was the decade's most dramatic event.
The brave, handsome, and humble aviator was hailed as the epitome of the American pioneer spirit. To his dismay, Lindbergh became famous.
The 1920s media embraced New Era business culture.
It encouraged wealth and showed that anyone could become a millionaire with smarts and hard work.
The media inflated a Florida real estate bubble that burst, causing many investors to lose money.
Popular culture didn't dampen Wall Street speculations.
Jazz Age Experimentation and Rebellion
Postwar Americans were ready to reject traditional sexuality and personal expression.
They thought the war had discredited the previous generation's manners and morals, making them outdated in modern America.
Younger Americans danced to jazz music.
Doing so was pleasingly rebellious because this music was associated with uninhibited sexuality and originated among African Americans and lower class whites.
Like rock and roll 30 years later, jazz became more popular as traditionalists called it "the devil's music."
The Jazz Age was named for the decade's jazz soundtrack.
Young women led social change in the 1920s.
Prewar femininity's long hair and full skirts were gone.
A girl with bobbed hair, a short dress, a de-emphasized bust line, and a powder case, cigarette, or drink became the flapper, an emancipated companion for carefree young men.
In 1919, Most young women pursued personal self-expression after the Nineteenth Amendment gave them the vote.
Compared to later years, the 1920s sexual revolution was mild, but it shocked traditionalists.
Birth control became more accessible thanks to Margaret Sanger and others.
Young people could date without parental supervision thanks to cars.
Drinking and premarital sex increased in the 1920s, but most young people were not the giddy "flaming youth" that fascinated and appalled social critics.
Women continued to move away from the cult of domesticity without entering politics or voting as a bloc.
Married women were expected to stay home, but more single women worked.
Though working women increased, they worked in traditionally female fields like teaching, nursing, clerking, and secretarial work.
Women rarely became managers and earned less.
Women's personal freedom and the decline of traditional social structures were reflected in rising divorce rates.
The Growth of the Mass Media
In the 1920s, a massive increase in press and popular entertainment exposure supported mass media influence.
This prosperous decade saw most families subscribe to one or more newspapers.
As Hollywood became the center of American filmmaking, movie attendance soared.
By 1929, 90 million people saw movies weekly, up from 35 million in 1922.
The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, revolutionized cinema in 1927.
Sound technology quickly replaced silent movies and many famous silent stars.
Radio was possibly more popular than movies in the 1920s.
In 1920, the first radio station licensed was KDKA.
Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover drafted new industry regulations.
In 1926, National Broadcasting Company (NBC) founded the first radio network. By the end of the decade, listeners nationwide had a variety of news, entertainment, and sports programming.
A Lost Generation?
The 1920s business culture was celebrated in many books.
Advertising executive Bruce Barton's The Man Nobody Knows (1925) was a hit and controversial.
Here Barton imagined Jesus Christ as a dynamic businessman whose leadership and promotion skills allowed Him to build the most successful organization in history.
Gertrude Stein's "Lost Generation" writers were very different.
Many of these writers were shaped by World War I's disorientation.
Republican "New Era" America's business, political, and cultural values were most despised.
Some joined Stein in Paris, a hub for expatriate American writers.
Some went to New York and other big cities.
Sinclair Lewis became famous and wealthy by criticizing middle America's materialism and cultural philistinism.
In Main Street (1920) and Babbit (1922), he satirized small-town life and its inhabitants.
Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919) depicted desperate people in a remote Midwestern community.
Jazz Age materialism fascinated and repulsed F. Scott Fitzgerald.
In The Great Gatsby (1925), he brilliantly depicted the spiritual emptiness of upper-class New Yorkers living a life of decadent self-indulgence.
In The Sun Also Rises (1926), Ernest Hemingway depicted expatriate writers and artists traveling between France and Spain.
Hemingway spoke eloquently about World War I's disillusionment.
In A Farewell to Arms (1929), a character rejects the war's false idealism and brutal hypocrisy and tries to escape with the woman he loves.
H. L. Mencken was America's most influential social critic.
Mencken, a brilliant writer with a taste for invective, called ordinary Americans the "ignorant mob" and the "booboisie."
Mencken was a college student favorite.
In the 1920s, African American art flourished.
African American intellectuals grappled with their American identity in a country where they were still second-class citizens in Harlem, New York City.
Harlem Renaissance artists looked to African American folk art and Negro spirituals for authentic black expression.
The Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes and novelist Zora Neale Hurston were prominent.
African American musicians benefited from jazz's popularity.
Musicians like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington reached mainstream audiences through club performances and recordings.
Early in 1929, the stock market peaked. Herbert Hoover, inaugurated in March, promised to end poverty.
Given his stellar record as a philanthropist and administrator, this didn't seem like empty posturing.
American dream possibilities seemed possible for a moment.
The Great Depression's inexplicable cruelty was exacerbated by the contrast between early 1929's hopes and October's events.