Prohibition laws and speakeasy nightclubs

T he 1920s was a decade fi lled with sharp contrasts between Prohibition laws and speakeasy nightclubs,
modern science and fundamentalist reli- gion, economic boom and fi nancial bust, popular heroes and social villains. Charles Lindbergh was one of the heroes. In May 1927, Lindbergh fl ew his small, single- engine plane, The Spirit of St. Louis, from New York to Paris, a distance of 3,620 miles. He did it alone and without stopping a tense journey that stretched over 33 hours. Nobody had ever done this before. Return- ing home to tickertape parades, Lindbergh became Time magazines fi rst Man of the Year in 1928. The handsome young aviator captivated the nation by combining exper- tise in modern technology with the tradi- tional virtues of hard work and individual

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achievement. Amid the grinding routine of modern industrial life, Lindbergh showed that an adventurous individual could make a difference.
Samuel Insull taught Americans the same lesson with a twist. A fi nancial entre- preneur who was more important than Lindbergh and almost as well known, Insull began the decade as a hero and ended it as a villain. Insull was born in England and came to New York as the personal secretary to the great inventor Thomas Edison. In 1892, he moved to Chicago, where he built a small electrical power company into a giant enterprise. By 1907, Insulls Commonwealth Edison Company was providing electrical power for the entire city; by 1924, his Chicago Rapid Transit Company was offering transportation to many of its residents as well. At the peak of his power in 1929, Insull controlled electric utility companies in 5,000 communities in thirty-two states. To assemble this utility empire, Insull used the tools of modern capitalism: He
[Growing up, I never]
thought of myself as an
American. I came from
Brooklyn, and in Brooklyn
there were no Americans;
there were Jews and
Negroes and Italians
and Poles and Irishmen.
Americans lived in New
England, in the South, in
the Midwest: alien people
in alien places. Norman Podhoretz (b.1930)
Modern Times 1 9 2 0 1 9 3 223
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created a pyramid of holding companies that allowed him to manage companies val- ued at $500 million with a personal investment of only $27 million. He funded the rest by issuing low-priced stocks and bonds, which nearly one million Americans eagerly snapped up.
Insulls electrical empire, along with Henry Fords mass production techniques, helped to give Americans the highest standard of living in the world and to create a new consumer culture. Millions of Americans could now enjoy a plethora of assembly- line-produced goods: cars, refrigerators, phonographs, and radios. The values of the nineteenth-century middle classes the Protestant ethic of hard work, self-denial, and frugality gave way to an optimistic fascination with consumption, leisure, and self-realization, some of the essential features of modern life.
Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, the collapse of the stock market in 1929 and the coming of the Great Depression threw the nation and its political and business leaders into disarray. By 1932, Insulls pyramid of utility companies had collapsed in bankruptcy, and 600,000 investors had lost their life savings. The Chicago fi nancier fl ed to Greece and then to Paris, not in triumph like Lindbergh but in disgrace. At home, Americans faced silent factories and massive unemployment, putting the opti- mism of the 1920s to the test.
The Business-Government Partnership of the 1920s The business-government partnership fostered by World War I expanded throughout the 1920s. As the Wall Street Journal enthusiastically proclaimed, Never before, here or anywhere else, has a government been so completely fused with business. and, the Journal might have added, so successfully fused. The nations prosperity from 1922 to 1929 seemed to confi rm the wisdom of allowing corporate interests to manage economic life. Gone, or at least submerged, was the reform impulse of the Progressive era (see Chapter 20). Middle-class Americans no longer viewed business leaders as greedy robber barons but saw them as respected even sacred public fi gures. President Calvin Coolidge captured the prevailing public mood when he solemnly declared, The man who builds a factory builds a temple. The man who works there worships there.
Politics in the Republican New Era With the ailing Woodrow Wilson out of the presidential picture in 1920, the Democrats nominated Governor James M. Cox of Ohio for president and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt as vice president. The Democratic platform called for U.S. participation in the League of Nations and a continuation of Wilsons progressivism. The Republicans, now led by the conservative, probusiness wing of the party, selected Ohio Senator Warren G. Harding and Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge as their candidates. Sensing the desire of many Americans to put the war and the stresses of 1919 behind them, Harding promised not heroics but healing, not nostrums but nor- malcy. On election day, he won in a landslide, beginning a Republican dominance that would last until 1932.
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Warren Harding had not been an outstanding state politician in Ohio, and he did not cut an impressive fi gure in the U.S. Senate. But with victory nearly certain in 1920, Republican Party leaders wanted a pliable candidate. Genial, loyal, and mediocre, Uncle Warren fi t the bill. Harding knew his limitations and assembled a strong cabinet, composed of progressives as well as conservatives, to guide the government. Charles Evans Hughes, former reform governor, Supreme Court justice, and presi- dential candidate, took fi rm control of the State Department. As secretary of agricul- ture, Henry C. Wallace created new links with farm organizations, while Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone, a future chief justice, cleaned up the mess at the Depart- ment of Justice left by the Palmer raids. Financier Andrew W. Mellon ran the Treasury Department and quickly reduced the high wartime tax rates on corporate and per- sonal income, freeing up money for private investment.
The most active member of the Harding administration was Secretary of Com- merce Herbert Hoover, the well-known head of the wartime Food Administration. Under Hoovers direction, the Commerce Department fostered the creation of 2,000 trade associations representing companies in almost every major industry. Govern- ment offi cials worked closely with the associations, providing statistical research, sug- gesting industry-wide standards, and promoting stable prices and wages. By creating informal governmental ties between government and industry an associated state Hoover hoped to achieve through voluntary cooperation what Progressive- era reformers had sought through governmental regulation.
Unfortunately, not all government-business cooperation served the interests of the public. The Republican-dominated Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ignored antitrust laws that prohibited collusion among companies to raise prices. Similarly, the Supreme Court, now headed by the former conservative Republican president William Howard Taft, refused to break up the mammoth United States Steel Corporation; as long as there was some competition in the steel industry, the Court ruled, the companys dom- inant price-setting position was within the law.
If U.S. Steel was law-abiding, many of President Hardings political associates were not. When Harding died suddenly of a heart attack in San Francisco in August 1923, evidence of widespread fraud and corruption in his administration was just coming to light. The worst scandal concerned the secret leasing to private companies of govern- ment oil reserves in Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and Elk Hills, California. Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall was eventually convicted of taking $300,000 in bribes and became the fi rst cabinet offi cer in American history to serve a prison sentence.
Following Hardings death, Vice President Calvin Coolidge moved to the White House. In contrast to Hardings political cronyism and outgoing style, Coolidge personifi ed the austere rectitude of a New England Yankee. Coolidges reserved per- sonality and unimpeachable morality reassured Republican voters, who were drawn primarily from the native-born Protestants, business owners, and skilled workers but also included propertied farmers and African Americans. To win their backing for his presidential candidacy in 1924, Coolidge called for isolationism in foreign policy, economy in government, tax cuts for business, and limited aid to farmers.
As the Democrats gathered to nominate a candidate, they were sharply divided. Traditionally, the party had drawn its strength from white voters in the Jim Crow South and immigrant-based urban political machines in the North. But in the 1920s,
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these two groups of Democrats disagreed mightily over Prohibition, immigration re- striction, and the mounting power of the racist and anti-immigrant Ku Klux Klan (Map 23.1). These cultural confl icts produced a hopeless deadlock between northern supporters of Governor Al Smith of New York and southern and western advocates of former Treasury Secretary William A. McAdoo of California. After 103 ballots, the delegates compromised on John W. Davis, a wealthy and infl uential Wall Street lawyer who hailed from West Virginia.
The 1924 campaign featured a third-party challenge by Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin, who ran on the Progressive Party ticket. La Follettes candi- dacy mobilized reformers and labor leaders as well as disgruntled farmers. His progressive-minded platform called for nationalization of railroads, public owner- ship of utilities, and a constitutional amendment to allow Congress to overrule the Supreme Court.
Governor elected with Klan support
U.S. senator elected with Klan support
Major areas of Klan violence
N
S
E W
0 250 500 kilometers
0 500 miles250
P A C I F I C O C E A N
A T L A N T I C O C E A N
Gulf of Mexico
OREGON
CALIF.
NEVADA UTAH
IDAHO
MONTANA
WYOMING
COLORADO
ARIZONA NEW MEXICO
TEXAS
OKLAHOMA ARK.
LA.
MISS. ALA.
TENN.
KY.
FLA.
GA.
S.C.
N.C.
VA. W. VA.
PA.
N.Y.
VT. N.H.
ME.
MASS.
CONN.
R.I.
N.J.
DEL.
MD.
NORTH DAKOTA
SOUTH DAKOTA
NEBRASKA
KANSAS MO.
IOWA
MINN.
WIS.
ILL. IND.
OHIO
MICH.
WASH.
M E X I C O
C A N A D A
M A P 23.1 Ku Klux Klan Politics and Violence in the 1920s
Unlike the Reconstruction-era Klan, the Klan of the 1920s had substantial strength in the West and Mid- west as well as the South. Although the Klan is often viewed as a rural movement, its strongest klaverns were in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Detroit, and other large cities. KKK members operated as moral vigilantes in areas where they were strong; elsewhere, their aggressive tactics triggered riots between Klansmen and their ethnic and religious targets.
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674 PA R T F I V E The Modern State and Society, 19141945
The Republicans won an impressive victory: Coolidge received 15.7 million votes to Daviss 8.4 million and La Follettes 4.9 million. Signifi cantly, only 52 percent of the electorate cast ballots in 1924 (and in most subsequent elections), compared to more than 70 percent in presidential elections of the late nineteenth century. A drop in vot- ing by men, rather than apathy among newly enfranchised women voters, caused most of the decline.
After achieving the suffrage in 1920, politically conscious women sought posi- tions in Democratic and Republican party organizations but had little success. African American women were equally unsuccessful as they struggled for voting rights in the South and passage of a federal antilynching law. Women were more infl uential as lob- byists. The Womens Joint Congressional Committee, a Washington-based coalition of ten white womens organizations, including the newly formed League of Women Voters, lobbied actively for reform legislation. Its major accomplishment was the pas- sage in 1921 of the Sheppard-Towner Federal Maternity and Infancy Act. The fi rst federally funded health-care legislation, the act lowered infant mortality by subsidiz- ing medical clinics, prenatal educational programs, and visiting nurse projects. How- ever, conservatives charged that the Sheppard-Towner Act was part of a Communist plot to socialize American medicine and an attack on the rights of the states, which traditionally handled public health measures. Indeed, many men in Congress sup- ported the act because they feared the voting power of newly enfranchised women. By the late 1920s, when it became clear that women did not vote as a bloc, Congress cut off appropriations for the program.
As support for reform languished on the national level, some state leaders pursued ambitious progressive agendas. In New York, where Al Smith and Robert Wagner were developing a social-welfare liberal agenda (see Chapter 20), new legislation expanded aid to public schools; boosted workers compensation programs; and created new state forests, scenic parks, and automobile parkways. However, the dominant motif of the 1920s was limited government, which placed responsibility for the nations well-being in the hands of its corporate business leaders.
Corporate Capitalism The revolution in business management that began in the 1890s fi nally triumphed in the 1920s. Large-scale corporate bureaucracies headed by chief executive offi cers (CEOs) replaced individual- or family-run enterprises as the major form of business organization. Few CEOs owned a signifi cant part of their enterprises, but they and not the thousands of stockholder owners controlled daily operations. Moreover, many corporations were so large that they dominated their markets. What the famous eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith had called the invisible hand of market forces had given way to the visible hand of managers who controlled output, prices, and their own salaries.
Indeed, by 1930, a handful of managers stood at the center of American economic life. Because of a vigorous pattern of consolidation during the 1920s, the two hundred largest businesses controlled almost half the nonbanking corporate wealth in the United States. The largest number of mergers occurred in rapidly growing industries such as chemicals (in which Dupont emerged as the leader), electrical appliances and
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machinery (Westinghouse and General Electric), and automobiles (General Motors). Rarely did any single corporation monopolize an entire industry; rather, an oligopoly of a few major producers dominated the market.
The nations fi nancial institutions expanded and consolidated along with its cor- porations. Total banking assets rose from $48 billion in 1919 to $72 billion in 1929. Mergers between Wall Street banks enhanced the role of New York as the fi nancial center of the United States and, increasingly, the world. In 1929, almost half the nations banking resources were controlled by 1 percent of American banks, a mere 250 depositories.
Immediately after World War I, the nation experienced a series of economic shocks. As Americans spent their wartime savings, they sparked rampant infl ation: Prices jumped by one-third in 1919 alone. Then came a sharp two-year recession that raised unemployment to 10 percent and cut prices more than 20 percent. Finally, the economy began to grow smoothly and many Americans began to benefi t from the suc- cess of corporate enterprise. Between 1922 and 1929, the gross domestic product grew from $74.1 billion to $103.1 billion, approximately 40 percent, and per capita income rose impressively from $641 to $847 (about $10,000 today, one-third of present per capita income).
An abundance of new consumer products, particularly the automobile, sparked this economic expansion. Manufacturing output expanded 64 percent during the decade, as factories churned out millions of cars, refrigerators, stoves, and radios. To produce these goods, basic industries supplied huge quantities of raw materials: steel, copper, chemicals, natural gas, electrical power, oil, and gasoline. Scientifi c management, fi rst introduced in 1895 by Frederick W. Taylor (see Chapter 20), was widely implemented in the 1920s. In combination with more effi cient machinery and new methods of mass production, it increased productivity by 40 percent, boosting workers pay and corporate profi ts.
The economy had some signifi cant weaknesses. Agriculture which still em- ployed one-fourth of all workers never fully recovered from the postwar recession. During the war, American farmers had borrowed heavily to expand production, but the revival of European output produced a glut in world markets. The price of wheat quickly dropped by 40 percent, corn by 32 percent, and hogs by 50 percent, and they never completely recovered. Between 1919 and 1929, the farmers share of the national income plummeted from 16 percent to 8.8 percent. As their income plunged, farmers looked to Congress for help. The McNary-Haugen bills of 1927 and 1928 proposed a system of federal price supports for a slew of agricultural products: wheat, corn, cot- ton, rice, and tobacco. President Coolidge opposed the bills as class (special-interest) legislation and vetoed both of them.
Other sick industries, particularly coal and textiles, also missed out on the pros- perity of the 1920s. Like farmers, these businesses had expanded output during the war and now faced overcapacity and falling prices. This underside of American eco- nomic life foreshadowed the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Unlike farmers and miners, industrial workers and white-collar employees shared in the prosperity of the 1920s. Henry Ford and other major corporate employers paid their workers well, thereby increasing their buying power as consumers. Many indus- tries went to a shorter workweek (fi ve full days and a half day on Saturday), giving
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676 PA R T F I V E The Modern State and Society, 19141945
their employees more leisure time. Profi table fi rms, such as International Harvester, offered workers two weeks of paid vacation every year.
The 1920s marked the advent of welfare capitalism, a system of labor relations that stressed managements responsibility for employees well-being. At a time when unemployment compensation and government-sponsored pensions did not exist, General Electric, U.S. Steel, and other large corporations offered workers health insur- ance, old-age pension plans, and the opportunity to buy stock in the company at below-market prices. Other fi rms subsidized mortgages or contributed to employee savings plans. Their goal was to create a loyal and long-serving workforce, particularly among managers, dedicated offi ce workers, shop supervisors, and skilled machinists. But such welfare plans covered only about 5 percent of the industrial workforce.
Welfare capitalism had a second goal of deterring production-line workers from joining labor unions. Some companies set up employee committees to voice workers complaints and consult regularly with managers over working conditions. Other cor- porations accused unions of being un-American because they campaigned for closed shops that required workers to become members; employers celebrated the Ameri- can Plan of an open, nonunion shop. Decisions by the conservative-minded Supreme Court undercut union activism and government regulation of the labor market. In Colorado Coal Company v. United Mine Workers (1925), the Court ruled that a striking union could be penalized for illegal restraint of trade. The Court also struck down federal legislation regulating child labor, and in Atkins v. Childrens Hospital (1923), it voided a minimum wage for women workers in the District of Columbia. Such deci- sions and aggressive antiunion campaigns caused membership in labor unions to fall from 5.1 million in 1920 to 3.6 million in 1929 only 10 percent of the nonagricul- tural workforce. Welfare capitalism seemed to represent the wave of the future in in- dustrial relations.
Economic Expansion Abroad The growing power of U.S. corporations was apparent in the international arena. American manufacturers actively promoted foreign sales of consumer products: ra- dios, telephones, automobiles, and sewing machines. To supply these markets, fi rms built factories and took over existing businesses in foreign countries. General Electric set up production facilities in Latin America, China, Japan, and Australia; General Motors expanded its sales in Europe by taking over the Vauxhall Motor Company in Britain and Opel in Germany. Other American fi rms invested abroad in new sources of supply. Seeking lower livestock prices, three major American meatpackers Swift, Armour, and Wilson built plants in Argentina. The United Fruit Company devel- oped plantations in Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala; other American compa- nies set up sugar plantations in Cuba and rubber plantations in the Philippines and Malaya. Standard Oil of New Jersey acquired oil reserves in Mexico and Venezuela (a precursor to American oil investments in the Middle East after World War II). During the 1920s, foreign investments by U.S. corporations more than doubled, reach- ing a total of $15.2 billion.
American banks were equally active in providing funds to European countries to rebuild their war-torn societies and to fulfi ll their international debt obligations. The
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banks loaned money to Germany, enabling it to pay reparations to the Allied Powers. Britain and France then used these funds to pay off their wartime loans from the United States. While American political leaders insisted on payment of these debts (They hired the money, didnt they? scoffed President Coolidge), they made re- payment very diffi cult. The Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922 followed the long- standing Republican policy of using high tariffs to exclude foreign-made goods.
American Companies Abroad
United Fruit was one of the many American companies that found opportunities for investment in South America in the 1920s. It then had to sell tropical foods to American consumers. To boost sales, the company published elaborate and informative color advertisements. Bananas were suffi ciently exotic that the ads explained to consumers how to tell when bananas were ripe and never to put them in the ice-box, the precursor of the electric refrigerator. Duke University Library, Special Collections.
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678 PA R T F I V E The Modern State and Society, 19141945
Unable to sell their goods in the United States, European nations could not easily earn the dollars needed to pay their debts.
In 1924, U.S. diplomats and bankers met with their counterparts from France, Great Britain, and Germany to address the debt situation. The meeting produced the Dawes Plan, named for Charles G. Dawes, the Chicago banker who negotiated the agreement. The plan reduced the reparations that Germany owed to the Allies and provided for substantial American bank loans to assist the Germans in keeping up with the payments. European fi nancial stability now depended on the continuing fl ow of American capital.
This fragile system of international fi nance collapsed with the crash of the Amer- ican stock market in October 1929. The outfl ow of capital from the United States to Europe slowed and then stopped, undermining the fl ow of reparation payments. The stock market crisis also increased congressional support for a policy of economic na- tionalism. The Hawley-Smoot Act of 1930 raised tariffs on imports to an all-time high and made it nearly impossible for the Allied Powers to pay off the remaining $4.3 bil- lion in war loans. Even as American corporations successfully extended their sales and investments to the corners of the earth, American politicians and bankers failed to create a stable structure of international fi nance.
Foreign Policy in the 1920s American foreign policy during the 1920s and 1930s was both isolationist and inter- nationalist. By refusing to join the League of Nations and the Court of International Justice (the World Court), the United States declined to play an active role in interna- tional politics; in this regard, the nations stance was clearly isolationist. However, as the Dawes Plan indicates, the United States pursued a vigorous, internationalist eco- nomic policy. Offi cials in the Department of State and the Department of Commerce worked constantly to open up new foreign markets for American manufacturers and bankers and to protect existing American interests in other countries.
These initiatives were particularly important in the Caribbean and Latin America, the site of considerable investments by U.S. companies and considerable military in- tervention to protect those investments. Both continued during the 1920s. To quell civil unrest and protect American interests, the U.S. government stationed troops in the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924. American military forces likewise re- mained in Nicaragua almost continuously from 1912 to 1933 and in Haiti from 1915 to 1934. Relations with Mexico remained tense, a legacy of U.S. intervention during the Mexican Revolution (see Chapter 21) and of the Mexican governments efforts to nationalize its oil and mineral wealth. This Mexican initiative alarmed Standard Oil of New Jersey (owned primarily by the Rockefeller family) and other U.S. petroleum companies with investments in Mexico.
While the United States maintained its dominant position in the Western Hemisphere, it reduced its political and military commitments in East Asia and Europe. The Washington Naval Arms Conference of 1921 revealed American strat- egy in the Pacifi c. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes won acceptance of a bold plan that placed strict limits on naval expansion. His goals were to avoid huge U.S. naval expenditures and to prevent Japan from expanding its naval forces and
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becoming the dominant nation in East Asia. The major naval powers agreed to scrap some warships; to halt the construction of large battleships for ten years; and to maintain a fi xed ratio of naval tonnage among the fl eets of Britain, the United States, Japan, France, and Italy. As one commentator quipped, in a short speech Hughes sank more ships than all the admirals of the world have sunk in a cycle of centuries.
Seven years later, American Secretary of State Frank Kellogg devised another low- cost diplomatic plan, this time to calm French fears of a new German invasion. To avoid committing the United States to a pact that would guarantee Frances territorial integrity, Kellogg persuaded French foreign minister Aristide Briand to support a broader agreement condemning all militarism. Fifteen nations signed the pact in Paris in 1928; forty-eight more approved it later. The signatories agreed to condemn re- course to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it as an instrument of national policy. The U.S. Senate ratifi ed the Kellogg Plan 85 to 1, but critics correctly pointed out that the agreement lacked mechanisms for enforcement and was lit- tle more than an international kiss.
Pious declarations were no cure for the mas- sive economic, political, and territorial problems that World War I had created. U.S. policymakers vacillated, as they would in the 1930s, between as- suming a larger role in world events and fearing that treaties would limit their ability to act uni- laterally. Their diplomatic efforts would ulti- mately prove inadequate in the face of the mount- ing international crises that led to World War II.
A New National Culture The 1920s marked the development of a mass national culture that emphasized lei- sure, consumption, and amusement. Automobiles, paved roads, the parcel post service, movies, radios, telephones, mass-circulation magazines, brand names, and chain stores suddenly took center stage. Together, they linked Americans in the mill towns in the southern Piedmont, outposts on the Oklahoma plains, and ethnic enclaves in states along the Atlantic and Pacifi c coasts in an expanding web of national experience. In fact, as consumerism spread around the world, American products and culture achieved global infl uence.
A Consumer Society In homes across the country during the 1920s, Americans sat down to breakfasts of Kelloggs corn fl akes and toast from a General Electric toaster. They got into Ford Model Ts to go to work or to go shopping at Safeway, A&P, or Woolworths, some of the many chain stores that had sprung up across the country. In the evening, the fam- ily gathered to listen to radio programs such as Great Moments in History, to catch up on events in the latest issue of Readers Digest, or enjoy the melodramatic tales in True
In what ways did government and business work together during the new era? How was it diff erent from the Progressive Era? Why did it change?
Describe American foreign policyboth political and economicduring the 1920s. Was it isolationist or internation- alist?
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Story; on weekends, they might see the newest Charlie Chaplin fi lm at the local theater. Millions of Americans now shared similar cultural experiences.
Still, many Americans blacks, immigrants, working-class families, and many farmers did not participate fully in the new commercial culture or accept its middle- class values. As one historian explains, Buying an electric vacuum cleaner did not turn Josef Dobrowolski into True Storys Jim Smith. Moreover, the unequal distribution of income limited many consumers ability to buy the enticing new products. The bottom 40 percent of American families had an average annual income of only $725 (about $8,200 today); after paying for food, housing, and clothing, these families had only $135 to spend on everything else. Many Americans stretched their incomes by taking advan- tage of newly devised installment plans that allowed people to purchase cars, radios, refrigerators, and sewing machines on time. Buy now, Pay later, said the ads, and millions did. By 1927, two-thirds of American cars were fi nanced through monthly payments, and consumer lending grew to $7 billion a year the tenth-largest business in the United States.
New appliances electric refrigerators, radios, fans, irons, vacuum cleaners had a dramatic impact on womens lives. While single women were steadily increasing their participation in the paid workforce, most married women spent their time as house- wives and mothers. Electric appliances made housewives chores much less arduous but also encouraged middle-class housewives to do their own housework and laundry, replacing human servants with electric ones. The new gadgets also raised standards of cleanliness, encouraging women to spend more time doing household chores. For most women, leisure time remained scarce.
To encourage consumers to view the new products as necessities rather than luxuries, manufacturers were spending no less than $2.6 billion a year on advertising by 1929. A new advertising industry (centered on New York Citys Madison Avenue) devised sophisticated ways to spur sales, often aided by experts in the growing aca- demic fi eld of psychology. Some ads for medicine featured white-coated doctors to suggest scientifi c approval of their products. Other ads appealed to peoples social as- pirations by depicting elegant men and women who smoked certain brands of ciga- rettes or drove a Buick, Pierce-Arrow, or other make of car. Ad writers also preyed on peoples insecurities, coming up with a variety of socially unacceptable diseases, such as the dreaded B.O. (body odor).
Consumers were less the passive victims of manipulative advertising agencies than willing participants in a new culture. For many middle-class Americans, the tra- ditional criteria for judging self-worth personal character, religious commitment, and social standing now had a powerful rival: the gratifi cation of personal desires through the acquisition of more and better possessions.
The World of the Automobile No possession typifi ed the new consumer culture better than the automobile. Why on earth do you need to study whats changing this country? a Muncie, Indiana, resident asked sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd. I can tell you whats happening in just four letters: A-U-T-O! The showpiece of modern consumer capitalism, the automobile revolutionized American economic and social life.
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Mass production of cars stimulated the prosperity of the 1920s. Before the intro- duction of the moving assembly line in 1913, Ford workers took twelve and a half hours to put together an auto; subsequently, they did the job in only ninety-three minutes. By 1927, Ford was producing a car every twenty-four seconds. Auto sales climbed from 1.5 million in 1921 to 5 million in 1929, a year in which Americans spent $2.58 billion on cars. By the end of the decade, Americans owned 23 million cars about 80 percent of the worlds automobiles an average of one car for every six people.
The boom in the auto industry rippled through the American economy. It stimu- lated the steel, petroleum, chemical, rubber, and glass industries and, directly or indirectly, provided jobs for 3.7 million workers. Highway construction became a billion-dollar-a-year enterprise, fi nanced by federal subsidies and state gasoline taxes. Car ownership broke down the isolation of rural life, spurred the growth of suburbs, and, in 1924, spawned the fi rst suburban shopping center: Country Club Plaza outside Kansas City, Missouri.
The auto also changed the way Americans spent their leisure time. Although gasoline was not cheap (about $2.50 a gallon in 2008 prices), Americans took to the roads, becoming a nation of tourists. The American Automobile Association, founded in 1902, estimated that in 1929 about forty-fi ve million people almost one-third of the population took vacations by automobile, patronizing the auto- camps and tourist cabins that were the forerunners of postWorld War II motels. Like the movies, cars changed the dating patterns of young Americans. Contrary to many parents views, premarital sex was not invented in the backseat of a Ford, but a Model T offered more privacy than did the family living room or the front porch and contributed to increased sexual experimentation among the young.
The Movies and Mass Culture The new mass media glossy magazines, radio, and especially movies formed the centerpiece of a common national culture. American movies had their roots in turn- of-the-century nickelodeons, where for a nickel, working-class audiences viewed one-reel silent fi lms such as The Great Train Robbery. By 1910, the moviemaking in- dustry had moved to southern California, which had cheap land, plenty of sunshine, and varied scenery mountains, deserts, cities, and the Pacifi c Ocean within easy reach. By the end of World War I, Hollywood reigned as the movie capital of the world, producing nearly 90 percent of all fi lms.
As directors produced feature fi lms and exhibited them in large, ornate theaters, movies attracted a middle-class audience. Early movie stars, including Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, became idols who set na- tional trends in clothing and hairstyles. Then a new cultural icon, the fl apper, burst on the scene to represent emancipated womanhood.
Actress Clara Bow was Hollywoods favorite fl apper, a bobbed-hair jazz baby who won a movie contract at the age of eighteen. Three years later, she was a star the lead character in It, one of the fi rst movies to gross $1 million. Whatever It was, Clara had it. With her boyish fi gure and shock of red hair, she had a strikingly sensual pres- ence; she could fl irt with a grizzly bear, wrote one reviewer. Thousands of young women took Bow as their model. Decked out in short skirts and rolled-down silk
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stockings, fl appers wore makeup, smoked, danced to jazz, and fl aunted their liberated lifestyle. Like so many cultural icons, the fl appers represented only a tiny minority of women, but thanks to the movies and advertising industry, they became the symbol of womens sexual and social emancipation.
The movies were big business, grossing $1.6 billion in 1926. The large studios United Artists, Paramount, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer dominated the industry and were run mainly by eastern European Jewish immigrants such as Samuel Goldfi sh (later Goldwyn). Movies became even more profi table and culturally powerful with the advent of the talkies. Warner Brothers The Jazz Singer (1927), starring Al Jolson, was the fi rst feature-length fi lm to offer sound. Despite the enormous expense some $300 million to equip fi lm sets and thousands of theaters with sound equipment all the major studios quickly made the transition to talkies. By 1929, the nations 23,000 movie theaters were selling ninety million tickets a year.
That The Jazz Singer was the fi rst talkie was not a coincidence. Jazz music captured the sensibility of the 1920s, especially its creative excitement and sensual character. As a word, jazz was originally a vulgar term for the sex act; as music, it was (and is) an improvisational form whose notes are rarely written down. Jazz began in the dance halls and bordellos of turn-of-the century New Orleans and was a thor- oughly American indeed, African American art form. Most of the early jazz musicians were black, and they carried its rhythms to Chicago, New York, Kansas City, and Los Angeles. The best-known performers were composer-pianist Ferdinand Jelly Roll Morton, trumpeter Louis Satchmo Armstrong, composer-bandleader Edward Duke Ellington, and singer Bessie Smith, the empress of the Blues.
Phonograph records increased the appeal of jazz and the blues by capturing their spontaneity and transmitting it to a wide audience; jazz, in turn, boosted the infant recording industry. Soon, this uniquely American art form had caught on in Europe, especially in France. Because jazz often expressed black dissent against the straightfor- ward, optimistic rhythms of white music, it became popular among specifi c types of white Americans young people, intellectuals, and social outcasts who felt stifl ed by middle-class culture. Later in the century, other African American musical forms notably rhythm-and-blues and hip-hop would again challenge middle- class values by injecting themes of sex and violence into American popular culture.
Mass-circulation magazines and the radio were also key factors in the creation of a national culture. In 1922, ten magazines each claimed a circulation of at least 2.5 million, including Time, the Saturday Evening Post, the Ladies Home Journal, and Good Housekeeping. Tabloid newspapers, which highlighted crime, sports, comics, and scandals, became part of urban culture, and news services such as the Associated Press (AP) and United Press (UP) appeared on the national scene. Thanks to AP and UP, people across the United States read the same articles.
The newest instrument of mass culture, professional radio broadcasting, was truly a child of the 1920s. In November 1920, station KDKA in Pittsburgh carried the presidential election returns; a mere nine years later, 800 stations, most affi liated with the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) or the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), were on the air, and nearly ten million American households (40 percent of the total) owned a radio. Unlike the situation in Europe, where radio was a government monopoly, American radio stations were licensed by the government but privately
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owned; they drew their revenue from advertisers and corporate sponsors. One of the most popular radio shows of all time, Amos n Andy, which premiered on the NBC network in 1928, featured two white actors playing stereotypical black characters. Stock phrases from the weekly show, such as Check and double check, quickly be- came part of everyday speech. So many people tuned in (a new phrase of the 1920s, similar to log on today) to Amos n Andy that other activities came to a halt during the shows airtime.
All That Jazz
The phonograph machine expanded the popularity of jazz, which now could be heard at home as well as in a city jazz joint. Crazy Blues by Mamie Smith and her Jazz Hounds sold a million records in 1920 and convinced record companies that there was a market among African Americans for what were called race records. By the 1950s, black music had become American music. Perry Bradford, the piano player and composer of Crazy Blues, was also the composer of Keep A Knockin, which Little Richard made into a major rock n roll hit in 1957. Division of Political History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
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As the workweek shrank and paid vacations increased, Americans had more time and energy to expend on recreation. Cities and suburbs built baseball diamonds, tennis
courts, swimming pools, and golf courses. Sports became a big business as private entrepreneurs built huge football and baseball stadiums and hired professional teams to play in them. Fans could attend games, listen to them on the radio, or catch highlights in the movie newsreels. Star athletes such as boxer Jack Dempsey, golfer Bobby Jones, and baseball slugger Babe Ruth became national celebrities. Excluded from the white teams, out- standing black athletes such as baseball pitcher Satchel Paige played on teams in the Negro National League and the Southern Negro League.
Redefining American Identity As movies, radio, advertising, and assembly-line products began to transform the country into a modern, cosmopolitan nation, many Americans welcomed these changes as exciting evidence of progress. Others were uneasy. Flappers dancing to jazz, youthful experimentation in Model Ts, sexually suggestive movies these harbingers of a new era worried native-born Americans of religious stock. They were also trou- bled by the powerful presence in American cities of millions of Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Europe and African American migrants from the South. Beneath the clichs of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties were deeply felt tensions that surfaced in confl icts over immigration, religion, Prohibition, and race relations. At stake was the defi nition of what it meant to be an American.
The Rise of Nativism Tensions between city dwellers and rural folk escalated sharply during the 1920s. For the fi rst time in the nations history, more people lived in urban areas ranging from small towns of 2,500 people to large cities than in rural areas. There was no mistak- ing the trend. During the 1920s, about 6 million Americans left farms for the cities. By 1929, ninety-three cities had populations over 100,000. New York City exceeded 7 mil- lion; Chicago boasted almost 3 million, and the population of Los Angeles had exploded to 1.2 million. However, because political districts did not refl ect this shift in population, rural areas still controlled most state legislatures. As cities demanded more services and tax dollars from state governments, confl ict between the two regions was inevitable.
Racial and ethnic pluralism intensifi ed these struggles. When native-born white Protestants both farmers and city dwellers looked at their society in 1920, they saw a nation of 105 million people that had changed dramatically in only forty years. Dur- ing that time, more than 23 million immigrants had come to America, and many of them were Jews or Catholics from southern and eastern Europe. Senator William Bruce of Maryland branded them indigestible lumps in the national stomach, implying
How do you explain the rise of a national culture in the 1920s? In what ways did Americans across the nation begin to share com- mon experiences?
Which had a greater impact on American life: the automobile or the movies? In more specifi c terms, compare the historical contributions of Henry Ford and Clara Bow.
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that they might never be absorbed into the dominant culture. Such nativist sentiments, which recalled the reaction to immigrants from Ireland and Germany in the 1840s and 1850s, were widely shared.
Nativist animosity fueled a new drive against immigration. America must be kept American, President Coolidge declared in 1924. Congress had banned Chinese im- migration in 1882, and Theodore Roosevelt had negotiated a Gentlemans Agree- ment that limited Japanese immigration in 1907 (see Chapter 21). Now nativists charged that there were too many European immigrants and certainly too many who were anarchists, socialists, and radical labor organizers. Responding to these concerns, Congress passed an emergency immigration act in 1921 and a more restrictive mea- sure, the National Origins Act, in 1924. The act cut immigration quotas to 2 percent of each nationality present in the United States in 1890, when the census had listed few people from southeastern Europe and Russia. In 1929, Congress imposed even more restrictive quotas, setting a cap of 150,000 immigrants per year from Europe and continuing to ban most migrants from Asia.
The new laws continued to permit unrestricted immigration from countries in the Western Hemisphere, and Latin Americans arrived in increasing numbers. Over one million Mexicans entered the United States between 1900 and 1930.
Some were fleeing the chaos of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, but many migrated in response to American labor shortages during World War I. Nativists lobbied Congress to cut this flow, and so did the leaders of labor unions, who pointed out that a fl ood of impov- erished migrants would lower wages for all American workers. But Congress heeded the pleas of American employers, especially large-scale farmers in Texas and California, who wanted cheap labor. Only the coming of the Great Depression cut off migration from Mexico.
Another expression of nativism in the 1920s was the revival of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) (see
Patriotic Protestant Nativism
While the Ku Klux Klan of the 1860s and 1870s stood for the cause of Confederate nationalism and white racism, the new KKK of the 1920s embraced the values of American patriotism and Protestantism. In its view, neither Catholics nor Jews could be real Americans. This powerful image of a hooded knight on horseback, replete with the symbolism of Flag and Cross, conveys not only the movements ideology but also its latent violence. Picture Research Consultants & Archives.
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We are a movement of the plain people, very weak in the matter of culture, intellectual support, and trained leadership. We are demanding, and we expect to win, a return of power into the hands of the everyday, not highly cultured, not overly intellectualized, but entirely unspoiled and not de- Americanized, average citizen of the old stock. . . . This is undoubtedly a weakness. It lays us open to the charge of being hicks and rubes and drivers of second-hand Fords. We admit it. Far worse, it makes it hard for us to state our case and advocate our crusade in the most effective way, for most of us lack skill in language. . . . To understand the Klan, then, it is necessary to understand the character and present mind of the mass of old-stock Americans. The mass, it must be remem- bered, as distinguished from the intellectu- ally mongrelized Liberals. These are . . . a blend of various peoples of the so-called Nordic race . . . which, with all its faults, has given the world almost the whole of modern civilization. . . . These Nordic Americans for the last generation have found themselves increasingly uncomfortable. . . . Finally came the moral breakdown that has been going on for two decades. . . . All our traditional moral standards went by the boards or were so disregarded that they ceased to be binding. The sacredness of our
A M E R I C A N V O I C E S
Sabbath, of our homes, of chastity, and fi nally even of our right to teach our own children in our own schools fundamental facts and truths were torn away from us. . . . One more point about the present attitude of the old-stock American: he has revived and increased his long-standing distrust of the Roman Catholic Church. . . . [which is] the chief leader of alienism, and the most dangerous alien power with a foothold inside our boundaries. . . . The Ku Klux Klan . . . is an organiza- tion which gives expression, direction and purpose to the most vital instincts, hopes, and resentments of the old-stock Ameri- cans, provides them with leadership, and is enlisting and preparing them for militant, constructive action toward fulfi lling their racial and national destiny . . . a defi nite crusade for Americanism! . . . There are three of these great racial instincts. . . . These are the instincts of loyalty to the white race, to the traditions of America, and to the spirit of Protestant- ism, which has been an essential part of Americanism ever since the days of Roanoke and Plymouth Rock. They are condensed into the Klan slogan: Native, white, Protestant supremacy.
S O U R C E : Hiram Wesley Evans, The Klans Fight for Americanism, The North American Review 223 (March 1926): 3739.
The Fight for Americanism H I R A M W E S L E Y E VA N S Hiram Wesley Evans was a Texas dentist and the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, which
boasted a nationwide membership of three million. He published this defense of the Klan
in The North American Review, a leading journal of opinion. Like fascist movements in Italy
and Germany, the Klan focused on racial identity. For the KKK, real Americans were those
of Nordic (northern European) descent; all others were aliens, including those of southern
or central European ancestry (Italian, Spanish, Polish, Czech, etc.) and those with Jewish or
African forebears.
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Chapter 15). Shortly after the premiere in 1915 of Birth of a Nation, a popular fi lm that glorifi ed the Reconstruction-era Klan, a group of southerners gathered on Stone Mountain outside Atlanta to revive the racist organization. Taking as its motto Native, white, Protestant supremacy, the modern Klan recruited thousands of sup- porters in the Far West, the Southwest, and the Midwest, especially Oregon, Indiana, and Oklahoma. Its largest klaverns were in urban areas. The new Klan did not limit its harassment to blacks but targeted Catholics and Jews as well (see American Voices, p. 686). Its tactics remained the same: arson, physical intimidation, and economic boycotts. The KKK also turned to politics, and hundreds of Klansmen won election to local offi ces and state legislatures. At the height of its power in 1925, the Klan had over three million members including a strong contingent of women who pursued a political agenda that combined racism, nativism, and equal rights for white Protes- tant women.
After 1925, the Klan declined rapidly, undermined by internal rivalries, rampant corruption, and the conviction for rape and murder of David Stephenson, the Klans Grand Dragon in Indiana. In addition, the passage of the National Origins Act in 1924 robbed the Klan of a potent issue. Nonetheless, the Klan remained strong in the Jim Crow South; during the 1930s, some northern Klansmen supported the American Nazi movement, which shared its antiblack and anti-Jewish beliefs.
Legislating Values: Evolution and Prohibition Other cultural confl icts erupted over religion and alcoholic beverages. The debate between modernist and revivalist Protestants, which had been simmering since the 1890s (see Chapter 18), came to a boil in the 1920s. Modernists, or liberal Protestants, found ways to reconcile their religious beliefs with Charles Darwins theory of evolu- tion and other scientifi c principles. Revivalist Protestants, who were strongly rooted in fundamentalist Baptist and Methodist churches, insisted on a literal reading of the Bible. So did popular evangelical preachers, such as Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson, who used storefront churches and open-air revivals to popularize their own brands of charismatic Christian fundamentalism.
Religious controversy entered the political arena when fundamentalists wrote their beliefs into law. In 1925, the Tennessee state legislature made it unlawful . . . to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which had been formed during the Red Scare to protect free speech rights, challenged the constitutionality of the law. It intervened in the trial of John T. Scopes, a high school biology teacher, who had taught the prin- ciples of evolution to his class and faced a jail sentence for doing so. The case attracted national attention because Clarence Darrow, a famous criminal lawyer, defended Scopes, and William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic presidential candidate and ardent fundamentalist, spoke for the prosecution.
The press dubbed the Scopes trial the monkey trial. The label referred both to Darwins argument that human beings and other primates share a common ancestor and to the circus atmosphere at the trial, which was broadcast live over a Chicago radio station. The jury took only eight minutes to deliver its verdict: guilty. Although the
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688 PA R T F I V E The Modern State and Society, 19141945
Tennessee Supreme Court overturned Scopess conviction, the controversial law remained on the books for more than thirty years. As the 1920s ended, science and religion were locked in a standoff. Beginning in the 1980s, fundamentalists would launch new political attacks against Darwin and modern science (see Chapter 32).
Like the dispute over evolution, Prohibition the noble experiment, as it was called involved the power of the state to enforce social values (see Chapter 22). Americans drank less after the Eighteenth Amendment took effect in January 1920, but those who continued to drink gave the decade its reputation as the Roaring Twen- ties. Urban ethnic groups German, Irish, and Italian had long opposed restric- tions on drinking and refused to comply with the new law. Some Americans brewed their own beer or distilled bathtub gin. Many others patronized illegal saloons and clubs, called speakeasies, which sprang up in every city; there were more than
The First Modern Evangelist: Aimee Semple McPherson (18901944)
Aimee McPherson founded the Foursquare Gospel Church, which now claims a worldwide membership of over three million. Born as Aimee Kennedy in Ontario, Canada, she married missionary Robert Semple in 1907. After his death in China, she married Harold McPherson and eventually settled in Los Angeles. By 1923, McPherson was preaching to a radio audience and to crowds of 5,000 at her massive Angelus Temple. In 1926, she attracted national attention by disappearing for a month and claiming that she had been kidnapped. Many people suspected that McPherson was at a romantic hideaway with the temples radio operator, but her preaching career fl ourished into the 1930s. She died of an overdose of sedatives in 1944. Bettmann/Corbis.
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30,000 speakeasies in New York City alone. Liquor smugglers operated with ease along Canadian and Mexican borders and used speedboats to land cargoes of wine, gin, and liquor along the Atlantic Coast. Organized crime (the Mob), already strong among Italians and Jews in major cities, took over the bootleg trade and grew wealthy from its profi ts. The noble experiment turned out to be a dismal failure.
The Americans who favored repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment the wets slowly built support for their cause in Congress and the state legislatures. The coming of the Great Depression hastened the process as politicians looked for ways to create jobs and raise tax revenues. With the ratifi cation of the Twenty-fi rst Amendment on December 5, 1933, nationwide Prohibition came to an inglorious end.
Intellectual Crosscurrents As millions of Americans celebrated victory in the Great War and prosperity in peace- time, infl uential writers and intellectuals rendered bitter dissents. The novelist John Dos Passos railed at the obscenity of Mr. Wilsons war in The Three Soldiers (1921) and again in 1919 (1932). Ernest Hemingways novels In Our Time (1924), The Sun Also Rises (1926), and A Farewell to Arms (1929) powerfully portrayed the dehuman- izing consequences and futility of war. In his despairing poem The Waste Land (1922), T. S. Eliot portrayed a fragmented civilization in ruins.
Infl uenced by Eliots dark vision, writers offered stinging critiques of what they saw as the complacent, moralistic, and anti-intellectual tone of American life. In Babbitt (1922), the novelist Sinclair Lewis satirized the stifl ing conformity of a middle-class businessman. In 1925, Theodore Dreiser wrote his naturalistic masterpiece An American Tragedy, and F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, both probing indictments of the mindless pursuit of material goods and wealth.
More affi rmative works of art and literature emanated from Harlem, the center of African American life in New York City. During the 1920s, Harlem stood as the symbol of liberty and the Promised Land to Negroes everywhere, as an infl uential black minister put it. Talented African American artists and writers fl ocked to Harlem, where they broke with older genteel traditions of black literature to assert cultural ties to Africa. The poet Langston Hughes drew on the black artistic forms of blues and jazz in The Weary Blues (1926), a groundbreaking collection of poems. And he captured the upbeat spirit of the Harlem Renaissance when he asserted, I am a Negro and beautiful.
Like Hughes, the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance championed racial pride. Authors Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Jessie Fauset explored the black experience and represented the New Negro in fi ction. Augusta Savage used sculpture to draw attention to black accomplishments. Zora Neale Hurston spent a decade collecting folklore in the South and the Caribbean and incorporated that material into her short stories and novels. This creative work embodied the ongoing African American struggle to fi nd a way, as the infl uential black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois explained, to be both a Negro and an American.
The vitality of the Harlem Renaissance was short-lived. During the Jazz Age, wealthy white patrons and infl uential publishers courted its writers. But white interest
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and black creativity waned as the depression of the 1930s cut incomes and sparked riots in Harlem over jobs and living conditions. However, the writers of the Harlem Renaissance found a new popularity during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, when black intellectuals rediscovered their work.
As black artists championed racial pride, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) mobilized African American workers. Led by Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey and based in Harlem, the UNIA championed black separatism. The charismatic Garvey urged blacks to return to Africa, arguing that peoples of African descent would never be treated justly in white-run countries. The UNIA grew rapidly in the early 1920s and soon claimed four million followers, including many recent migrants to northern cities. It published a newspaper, Negro World; opened liberty halls in northern cities; and solicited funds for the Black Star Line steamship company, to trade with the West Indies and carry American blacks back to Africa.
The UNIA declined as quickly as it had arisen. In 1925, Garvey went to jail for mail fraud because of his solicitations for the Black Star Line; two years later, President Coolidge commuted Garveys sentence but ordered his deportation to Jamaica. With- out Garveys leadership, his movement quickly collapsed.
Culture Wars: The Election of 1928 Cultural issues the emotionally charged questions of Prohibition, Protestant fun- damentalism, and nativism set the agenda for the presidential election of 1928. The national Democratic Party, now controlled by its northern urban wing, nomi- nated Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York. Smith was the fi rst presidential candi- date to refl ect the aspirations of the urban working classes and of European Catholic immigrants. A Catholic and the grandson of Irish peasants, Smith began his politi- cal career as a Tammany Hall ward heeler, became a dynamic state legislative leader and reformer, and matured as the effective four-term governor of the nations most populous state.
But Smith had liabilities. He spoke in a heavy New York accent and sported a brown derby that highlighted his ethnic working-class origins. Middle-class reformers questioned his ties to the political bosses of Tammany Hall; temperance advocates op- posed him as a wet. The governors greatest handicap was his religion. Although Smith insisted that his beliefs would not affect his duties as president, most Protestants opposed his candidacy. No Governor can kiss the papal ring and get within gunshot of the White House, declared a Methodist bishop from Buffalo.
The Republican nominee, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, was also a new breed of candidate. Hoover had never run for any political offi ce and did not run very hard for the presidency, delivering only seven campaign speeches. He rested his candidacy on his outstanding career as an engineer and administrator; for many Americans, he embodied the managerial and technological promise of the Progressive era. Beyond that, Hoover had the benefi t of eight years of Republican prosperity and strong support from the business community. He promised voters that his vision of individualism and cooperative endeavor would banish poverty from the United States.
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Hoover won a stunning victory. He received 58 percent of the popular vote to Smiths 41 percent and 444 electoral votes to Smiths 87. Because many southern Protestants refused to vote for a Catholic, Hoover carried Texas, Virginia, and North Carolina, breaking the Democratic Solid South for the fi rst time since Reconstruc- tion. Equally signifi cant, Smith won the industri- alized states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island and carried the nations twelve largest cities (Map 23.2). The Democrats were on their way to fash- ioning a new identity as the party of the urban masses and social welfare liberalism, a reorienta- tion that the New Deal would push forward in the 1930s.
Ironically, Herbert Hoovers victory put him in the unenviable position of leading the United States when the Great Depression struck in 1929. Having claimed credit for the prosperity of the 1920s, the Republicans could not escape blame for the depression.
Candidate Popular
Vote Percent of
Popular Vote Electoral
Vote
Herbert C. Hoover (Republican)
444
87
21,391,993
15,016,169
58.2
40.9Alfred E. Smith (Democrat)
13
29 15 24
38
6
3 14 7 5
184 4
18 8
45
13
13 15
5
13
12
3
10 8
6
8
20 10
9 12
10 12 14
6
9
12
12
7
3 3
4
4
4
3
5
5
10
MAP 23.2 Presidential Election of 1928
Historians still debate the extent to which 1928 was a critical election, that is, one that produced a signifi – cant realignment in voting behavior. Republican Herbert Hoover swept the popular vote and the electoral vote, but Democrat Alfred E. Smith won majorities not only in the South, his partys traditional stronghold, but also in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and (although it is not evident on this map) in all of the large cities of the North and Midwest. Subsequently, the Democrats won even more votes among African American and European ethnic groups, making them the nations dominant political party until the 1980s. For more help analyzing this map, see the Online Study Guide at bedfordstmartins.com/henrettaconcise.
What changes in American society prompted the activities of nativists, the Ku Klux Klan, and religious fundamentalists? How did these groups express their outrage?
What were the similarities and diff erences between the Harlem Renaissance and Marcus Garveys UNIA movement?
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692 PA R T F I V E The Modern State and Society, 19141945
The Onset of the Great Depression, 19291932 Booms and busts are characteristic features of the business cycle in capitalist economies, and they were familiar features of the American landscape. Beginning with the Panic of 1819, the United States had experienced a recession or panic about every twenty years. But none was as severe as the Great Depression of the 1930s, and none lasted as long.
Causes and Consequences The economic downturn began almost imperceptibly in 1927. For fi ve years, Americans had spent money at a faster pace than their incomes had risen. As consumers ran short of cash and credit, spending declined and housing construction slowed. Soon, inventories piled up; in 1928, manufacturers began to cut back production and lay off workers, rein- forcing the slowdown. By the summer of 1929, the economy was clearly in recession.
A few commentators noted the slowdown in production, but most celebrated the rapid rise in the stock market. Stock prices surged 40 percent in 1928 and 1929 as in- vestors got caught up in a speculative frenzy. On Black Thursday, October 24, and again on Black Tuesday, October 29, the bubble burst. On those two bleak days, mil- lions of shares changed hands in panic trading. Practically overnight, stock values fell from a peak of $87 billion to $55 billion.
The crash exposed long-standing weaknesses in the economy. Agriculture was in the worst shape because farm products had sold at low prices for a decade. In 1929, the yearly income of farmers averaged only $273, compared to $750 for other occupations. Because farmers accounted for one-fourth of the nations workers, their meager buying power had long been a drag on the economy. Two other major industries railroads and coal had also fallen on hard times. As automobile and truck traffi c increased, railroad revenues from passenger travel and freight shipments declined, forcing several railroads into bankruptcy. Coal-mining companies experienced similar fi nancial diffi culties. Battered by overexpan- sion, obsolescent machinery, and bitter labor struggles, they faced sharp competition from companies producing other sources of energy: hydroelectric power, fuel oil, and natural gas. A fi nal structural weakness was the unequal distribution of wealth. In 1929, the top 5 percent of American families received 30 percent of the nations income while the bot- tom 50 percent received only about 20 percent, most of which was spent on food and housing. Once the depression began, a majority of the population lacked suffi cient buy- ing power to revive the economy.
The Great Crash itself had a devastating impact. It wiped out the savings of thou- sands of individual investors and dealt a severe blow to many banks, which had in- vested heavily in corporate stocks or lent money to speculators. Hundreds of banks failed, and because bank deposits were uninsured, their depositors lost some or all of their money. Frightened customers withdrew their savings from solvent banks, forcing them to close as well and deepening the crisis.
The American economy now went rapidly downhill. Between 1929 and 1933, the U.S. gross domestic product fell almost by half, from $103.1 billion to $58 billion. Con- sumption dropped by 18 percent, construction by 78 percent, and private investment by 88 percent. Nearly 9,000 banks closed their doors, and 100,000 businesses failed. The consumer price index declined by 25 percent, and corporate profi ts fell from $10 billion to $1 billion. Most tellingly, unemployment rose from 3.2 percent to 24.9 percent;
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twelve million people were out of work, and many who had jobs took wage cuts. We didnt go hungry, said one family, but we lived lean.
The downturn became self-perpetuating. The more the economy contracted, the longer people expected the decline to last; so corporations did not invest in new plants, and consumers refused to buy new cars or appliances. You could feel the depression deepen, recalled writer Caroline Bird.
President Hoover later blamed the severity of the American depression on the in- ternational factors, and his analysis had considerable merit. During the 1920s, the fl ow of international credit depended on American banks and corporations; their loans and investments in European countries allowed those nations to pay reparations and war debts and to buy U.S. goods. Now U.S. banks and companies reduced their foreign in- vestments, disrupting the European fi nancial system and cutting demand for American exports. The Hawley-Smoot Tariff of 1930 cut trade still further by raising American rates to all-time highs and prompting European governments to impose similar restrictions. When Great Britain also abandoned the gold standard, which assisted international trade by stabilizing exchange rates among currencies, there was a further contraction of commerce and a fall in demand for American agricultural products.
Soon, the crisis brought on a worldwide depression. In 1929, the United States had produced 40 percent of the worlds manufactured goods. As American companies cut back production, they reduced their purchases of Argentine cattle, Brazilian coffee, Chinese silk, Mexican oil, Indonesian rubber, African minerals, and raw materials from many other countries. Thus, the American crash of 1929 undermined fragile economies around the globe.
Herbert Hoover Responds Campaigning for the presidency in 1928, Herbert Hoover predicted a fi nal triumph over poverty. Even after the Great Crash, he stubbornly insisted that the downturn was temporary. The Depression is over, the president told a delegation of business executives in June 1930.
As the slump continued, Hoover adopted a two-pronged strategy. Refl ecting his ideology of voluntarism and his longtime reliance on the business community, he turned fi rst to corporate leaders. Hoover asked business executives to maintain wages and pro- duction levels and rebuild Americans confi dence in the capitalist economic system.
But the president recognized that voluntarism might not be enough, given the depth of the crisis, and he proposed government action as well. Following the stock market crash, he cut federal taxes in an attempt to boost private spending and corpo- rate investment. Hoover called on state and local governments to provide jobs by in- vesting in public projects; and by 1932, he had secured an unprecedented increase in federal spending for public works to $423 million. Some presidential initiatives were misguided. For instance, the Revenue Act of 1932, which increased taxes to balance the budget, choked both consumption and investment. Similarly, Hoovers refusal to consider direct federal relief for unemployed Americans and to rely on private charity the American way, he called it was a mistake; unemployment during the depression was too massive for private charities and local governments to handle.
Hoovers most innovative program was the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), which Congress approved in January 1932. The RFC was modeled on the War
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694 PA R T F I V E The Modern State and Society, 19141945
Finance Corporation of World War I and, like that agency, stimulated economic activ- ity by providing federal loans to railroads, banks, and other businesses. This strategy of pump priming infusing funds into the major corporate enterprises was meant to increase production and thereby create new jobs and invigorate consumer spend- ing. This plan might have worked, but the RFC lent money too cautiously; by the end of 1932, it had loaned out only 20 percent of its $1.5 billion in funds.
Compared with previous chief executives and in contrast to his popular image as a do-nothing president Hoover had responded to the national emergency with government action on an unprecedented scale. But the nations needs were also un- precedented, and Hoovers programs failed to meet them.
Rising Discontent As the depression continued, many citizens came to hate Herbert Hoover. The American vocabulary now included Hoovervilles (shanty towns where people lived in packing crates) and Hoover blankets (newspapers). Rising discontent led
Hoovervilles
By 1930, homeless people had built shantytowns in most of the nations cities. In New York City, squatters camped out along the Hudson River railroad tracks, built makeshift homes in Central Park, or lived at the city dump. This photograph, taken near the old reservoir in Central Park, looks east toward the fancy apartment buildings of Fifth Avenue and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at left. Bettmann/Corbis. For more help analyzing this image, see the Online Study Guide at bedfordstmartins.com/henrettaconcise.
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to violence. Bankrupt farmers banded together to resist the bank agents and sheriffs who tried to evict them from their land. To protest low prices for their goods, thou- sands of farmers joined the Farm Holiday Association, which cut off supplies to urban areas by barricading roads and dumping milk, vegetables, and other food- stuffs onto the roadways. Layoffs and wage cuts led to violent industrial strikes. When coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky, went on strike over a 10 percent wage cut in 1931, the mine owners called in the states National Guard, which crushed the union. A confrontation in 1932 between workers and security forces at the Ford Motor Companys giant River Rouge factory left three workers dead and fi fty with serious injuries.
Civil disorder erupted in the nations cities. In 1931 and 1932, unemployed citi- zens demanded jobs and bread from local authorities, and hard-pressed wage earners staged rent strikes. Some protests were the work of the Communist Party, which hoped to use the depression to overturn the capitalist system. Although the strikes and
The Soup Kitchen
Some of the most vivid images from the depression are of long lines of men standing outside soup kitchens, like the one pictured here, and of well-dressed men on street corners selling apples and off ering shoe shines. Most of the people in this line are white men but there are a few blacks. Some of the men wear workers caps but almost as many wear fedoras, the stylish hat favored by the middle and upper classes. The absence of women is striking; many women chose to endure deprivation rather than violate standards of respectable behavior by soliciting aid in public. Bettmann/Corbis.
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696 PA R T F I V E The Modern State and Society, 19141945
marches received broad support, they won few converts to communism. In the early 1930s, the American Communist Party had only 12,000 members.
Not radicals but veterans staged the most publicized and most tragic protest. In the summer of 1932, the Bonus Army, a ragtag group of about 15,000 unem- ployed World War I veterans, hitchhiked to Washington to demand immediate payment of their Service Certifi cates, a pension award that was due to be paid in 1945. We were heroes in 1917, but were bums now, one veteran complained bitterly. While their leaders unsuccessfully lobbied Congress, the Bonus Army set up camps near the U.S. Capitol building. Eventually Hoover called out regular army troops under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, who would become a leading fi gure during World War II and the Korean War. A headstrong commander who habitu- ally exceeded his orders, MacArthur forcefully evicted the marchers and burned their main encampment to the ground. As newsreel footage showing the U.S. Army attacking and injuring its veterans reached movie theaters across the nation, Hoovers popularity plunged.
The 1932 Election Despite this discontent, the nation was not in a revolutionary mood as the election of 1932 approached. Middle-class Americans had internalized the ideal of the self-made man and blamed themselves for their economic hardships. Despair and apathy, not anger, characterized their mood (see Voices from Abroad, p. 697). The Republicans, reluctant to dump an incumbent president, unenthusiastically renominated Hoover. The Democrats turned to Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt of New York, who had persuaded his states legislature to run a budget defi cit to fi nance innovative relief and unemployment programs.
Roosevelt, born into a wealthy New York family, was a distant cousin to former president Theodore Roosevelt, whose career he emulated. After attending Harvard College and Columbia University, Roosevelt served as assistant secretary of the navy during World War I (as T.R. had done before the Spanish-American War). Franklin Roosevelts service in the Wilson administration, in combination with his famous name and speaking abilities, made him the Democrats vice presidential nominee in 1920. Then, in 1921, a crippling attack of polio left both of his legs paralyzed for life. Strongly supported by his wife, Eleanor, he slowly returned to public life and campaigned successfully for the governorship of New York in 1928 and again in 1930.
Roosevelts campaign for the presidency in 1932 pledged vigorous action but gave no indication as to what it might be: The country needs and, unless I mistake its tem- per, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. He won easily, receiving 22.8 million votes to Hoovers 15.7 million. Despite the nations economic collapse, Americans remained fi rmly committed to the two-party system. The Socialist Party candidate, Norman Thomas, got fewer than a million votes, and the Communist nom- inee, party leader William Z. Foster, drew only 100,000 votes.
Elected in November, Roosevelt would not begin his presidency until March 1933. (The Twentieth Amendment, ratifi ed in 1933, set subsequent inaugurations
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One does not need to be long in New York (or for that matter in Chicago, in Cleveland, in Detroit, in Kansas, or in Buffalo) to see that there are plenty of real tragedies, as well as plenty of not-so-real ones. . . . In New York, one has only to pass outside the central island bounded by Lexington and Sixth Avenues to see hardship, misery, and degradation, accentuated by the shoddy grimness of the shabby houses and broken pavements. Look down from the Elevated [railway], and there are long queues of dreary-looking men and women standing in breadlines outside the relief offi ces and the various church and other charitable institutions. Times Square, at any hour of the day and late into the evening, offers an exhibit for the edifi cation of the theater- goer, for it is packed with shabby, utterly dumb and apathetic-looking men, who stand there, waiting for the advent of the coffee wagon run by Mr. W. R. Hearst of the New York American. . . . At every street corner, and wherever taxi or car has to pause, men try to sell one apples, oranges, or picture papers. . . . On a fi ne day, men . . . line every relatively open space, eager to shine ones shoes. It is perhaps because so many people are doing without this shine, or attempting with unfamiliar hands and a sense of deep indignity to shine their own, that the streets look shabby and the persons on them so much less well- groomed than of yore. The well-shod feet of
the States struck me forcibly on my fi rst visit; the ill-cleaned feet of New York struck me as forcibly in January and April 1932. . . . Yes, distress is there; the idle are there. How many, no one really knows. Ten million or more in the country; a million and a half in New York are reported. They are there; as is, admittedly a dark undergrowth of horrid suffering that is certainly more degraded and degrading than anything Britain or Germany knows. Their immense presence makes a grim background to the talk of depression: there is an obscure alarm as to what they may do if this goes on. . . . The American people, unfamiliar with suffering, with none of that long history of catastrophe and calamity behind it which makes the experience of European nations, is outraged and baffl ed by misfortune. . . . The nation now suffers from a despair of any and every kind of leadership. Every institu- tion is assailed; even the sacred foundations of democracy are being undermined. The defeatism that has been so lamentably evidenced in Congress is not peculiar to Congressmen, any more than is the crude individualism of their reactions. It lies like a pall over the spirit of the nation. . . . How to break it nobody knows.
S O U R C E : Mary Agnes Hamilton, In America Today, in America through British Eyes, ed. Allan Nevins (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1968), 443444.
Breadlines and Beggars M A R Y A G N E S H A M I LT O N British writer and Labor Party activist Mary Agnes Hamilton arrived in New York in
December 1931. Following a wide-ranging lecture tour, Hamilton wrote a book conveying
her impressions of American life. Her observations of conditions in New York City during
the grim winter of 19311932 suggest the devastation and despair gripping urban America.
V O I C E S F R O M A B R O A D
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698 PA R T F I V E The Modern State and Society, 19141945
for January 20.) As FDR waited, Americans suf- fered through the worst winter of the depres- sion. Nationwide, the unemployment rate stood at 20 to 25 percent; in three major industrial cit- ies in Ohio, it was staggering: 50 percent in Cleveland, 60 percent in Akron, and 80 percent in Toledo. Public-welfare institutions were to- tally overwhelmed. Despite dramatic increases in their spending, private charities and public relief agencies reached only a fraction of the needy. The nations banking system was so close to collapse that many state governors closed banks temporarily to avoid further withdrawals. By March 1933, the nation had hit rock bottom.
S U M M A R Y
By the 1920s, the United States had become a modern, urban society based on cor- porate business enterprises and mass consumption. As we have seen, the Republican Party controlled the national government and fostered a close partnership with busi- ness interests. At home, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover promoted industry- wide trade associations; abroad, diplomats assisted American businesses while avoid- ing entangling alliances.
We also explored how movies, radio, and other mass media encouraged the devel- opment of a national culture. This emergent culture placed an emphasis on leisure, consumption, and amusement. However, families needed a middle-class income to take full advantage of the goods (such as cars, radios, and vacuum cleaners) and life- styles promoted by the new advertising industry. Most farmers remained outside the charmed circle of prosperity, as were most African Americans and most working-class immigrants from Europe and Mexico.
Not everyone welcomed the new secular values of the 1920s. Cultural disputes over prohibition, evolution, and immigration led to the creation of the new Ku Klux Klan and further disrupted the already fractured Democratic Party. Republican politi- cal ascendancy continued under President Herbert Hoover, who expected to extend the prosperity of the Roaring Twenties.
Instead, Hoover had to deal with the Great Depression. As we have seen, the depres- sion had many causes: speculation in stocks, weaknesses in major industries, and fragile international fi nances. When Hoovers policies failed, voters turned to Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, who entered offi ce facing massive unemployment, a banking crisis, and a despairing citizenry.
Connections: Society
As we noted in the essay that opened Part Five, two central themes of the years be- tween 1914 and 1945 were internal migration within the United States and intolerance toward immigrants and racial minorities. Both were apparent in Chapter 22. There,
What were the domestic and foreign causes of the Great Depression? How did President Hoover respond to the economic emergency?
In what ways did the state and federal governments intervene in the cultural confl icts and economic crises of 1920s?
What problems in the economy and society of the United States were exposed by the Great Depression?
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we described attacks during World War I against German Americans and the postwar riots against newly arrived African Americans in Chicago, East St. Louis, and other cities. As we have just seen in Chapter 23, nativist sentiment reached a peak in the mid-1920s as the new Ku Klux Klan harassed Catholics, Jews, and blacks and Con- gress enacted restrictive immigration legislation. Chapter 24 will continue that story by explaining how the Great Depression of the 1930s prompted a reverse migration back to Mexico, Asia, and Europe. It will also discuss the movement to California of 350,000 farmers from the dust bowl states of the Great Plains and explain how New Deal agri- cultural programs forced many African Americans to leave the rural South. Finally, in Chapter 25, we will see that World War II triggered a new round of internal migration
1920 Eighteenth Amendment imposes Prohibition
First commercial radio broadcast
Warren G. Harding elected president
Census reveals major shift of people from farms to cities
19201921 Economic recession cuts jobs
1921 Sheppard-Towner Act assists maternal care
Washington Conference leads to naval disarmament
19221929 Record economic growth expands consumption
Automobile Age begins 1922 T. S. Eliots The Waste Land
published 1923 President Harding dies;
succeeded by Calvin Coolidge
Time magazine founded 1924 Dawes Plan reduces
German reparations Teapot Dome scandal U.S. troops withdrawn from
Dominican Republic National Origins Act limits
immigration
1925 F. Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby published
Height of Ku Klux Klans power
Scopes trial over free speech and the teaching of science
1927 First talkies in movie industry
Charles Lindberghs solo fl ight
1928 Herbert Hoover elected president
Kellogg-Briand Pact condemning militarism signed
1929 Ernest Hemingways A Farewell to Arms published
Stock market crash 1930 Hawley-Smoot Tariff cuts
imports 1931 Miners strike in Harlan
County, Kentucky 1932 Reconstruction Finance
Corporation created Bonus Army rebuff ed in
Washington Communist-led hunger
marches in cities Farm Holiday Association
dumps produce Franklin D. Roosevelt
elected president
T I M E L I N E
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700 PA R T F I V E The Modern State and Society, 19141945
and race riots and, in an extreme example of racial prejudice, the internment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans.
F O R F U R T H E R E X P L O R AT I O N
Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (1995), and Loren Baritz, ed., The Culture of the Twenties (1970), provide good overviews. For politics, consult Ellis W. Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order (1979), and Lee Nash, ed., Understanding Herbert Hoover (1987). For fi ction, see Sinclair Lewiss classics, Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922). To watch the rise of consumer society, log onto memory.loc.gov/ammem/coolhtml/coolhome.html. On the Harlem Renaissance, read Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro (1925), and con- sult www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/circle/harlem-ren-sites.html. For Marcus Garvey, see www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/garvey. Good studies include Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (2004), and David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois (2000). Flapper Station at home.earthlink.net/~rbotti details the new youth culture; on speakeasies and their music, go to www.authentichistory.com/1920s/music/index .html. Also see Jazz Roots at www.jass.com and www.redhotjazz.com. On 1920s fi lms, go to www.fi lmsite.org/20sintro.html; for advertisements, see scriptorium.lib .duke.edu/adaccess. For Americas fi rst media superstar, see www.charleslindbergh .com. The Scopes trial is covered at www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/ scopes.htm. For the crash of 1929, see www.nytimes.com/library/fi nancial/index-1929-crash .html and www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/crash.
T E S T Y O U R K N O W L E D G E
To assess your mastery of the material in this chapter and for Web sites, images, and documents related to this chapter, visit bedfordstmartins.com/henrettaconcise.
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