The Roaring Twenties

1
The Roaring Twenties

• Unit 8A
• AP U.S. History

2
Fundamental Questions

• To what extent did developments during the
  Roaring Twenties continue the reforms of the
  Progressive Era?

3
Election of 1920

• Warren G. Harding (R)
• A Return to Normalcy
• James M. Cox (D)
• Eugene V. Debs (Socialist)
• Received 913,664 votes despite incarceration

4
Warren G. Harding (R) (1921-1923)

• A Return to Normalcy.
• Emergency Quota Act (1921)
• Fordney-McCumber Tariff (1922)
• Washington Naval Conference (1922-1923)
• Teapot Dome Scandal
• Harding died in office
• Calvin Coolidge assumed presidency

5
Election of 1924

• Calvin Coolidge (R)
• Booming economy and conservatism
• John W. Davis (D)
• Democrats split between conservatives and
  liberals (LaFollette)

6
Calvin Coolidge (R) (1923-1928)

• The business of the American people is
  business.
• National Origins Act (1924)
• Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928)

7
Election of 1928

• Herbert Hoover (R)
• Al Smith (D)
• First Catholic major party candidate

8
Herbert Hoover (R) (1929-1933)

• Given the chance to go forward with the policies
  of the last eight years, we shall soon be in
  sight of the day when poverty will be banished
  from this nation.
• Great Depression
• Volunteerism
• Stock Market Crash of 1929
• Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (1930)
• Reconstruction Finance Corporation (1932)
• Bonus Army (1932)

9
American Consumer Society

• Welfare Capitalism
• Real income increases
• Higher rate for owners, managers, skilled labor
• Minimal increased rates for unskilled labor and
  working class
• Insurance, profit-sharing, worker safety
• Decreased influence of unions
• Mass Production
• Wide variety and availability of consumer
  products at affordable prices
• Model T
• Domestic appliances
• Installment Plans
• Impact of the Automobile

10
Consumer Ads
11
1920s SocietyBlacks

• White Resentment
• Lynchings increased especially in the South
• Universal Negro Improvement Association
• Marcus Garvey
• Economic solidarity and advancement for blacks
• Failed attempt of mass migration to Africa
• Inspired black pride and nationalism

12
1920s SocietyImmigrants

• First Red Scare and Nativism
• Quota Laws
• Emergency Quota Act (1921)
• 3 of 1910 Census
• National Origins Act (1924)
• 2 of 1890 Census
• Sacco and Vanzetti Trial (1920-1927)
• Two Italian immigrants executed for murder
  despite little evidence

13
1920s SocietyWomen

• Nineteenth Amendment and Voting
• Usually voted as husbands
• Politicians catered to female-friendly
  legislation and programs
• Employment
• Clerical, teachers, nurses, domestic servants
• Lower wages and no managerial positions
• Margaret Sanger
• American Birth Control League
• Established Planned Parenthood
• Flapper Girl
• Young women of the Jazz Age
• Short hair, short hemline, cosmetics, cigarette

14
1920s Culture WarsProhibition

• Eighteenth Amendment and Volsteadt Act
• Supported by middle-class progressives and rural
  Protestants especially in South and West
• Generally ignored in urban centers
• Bootleggers/Rumrunners
• Smuggling of alcohol
• Rise of organized crime
• Al Capone
• Speakeasies
• Underground saloons

15
1920s Culture WarsKu Klux Klan
16
1920s Culture WarsReligion

• Fundamentalism
• Literal view of Bible Creationism
• Attacked urban lifestyle and culture
• Revivalists
• Billy Sunday
• Aimee Semple McPherson
• Modernism
• Liberal view of religion
• Acceptance and coordination of science and
  context with faith
• Scopes Monkey Trial (1925)
• Law against teaching of evolution in Tennessee
  public school
• Creationism
• William Jennings Bryan
• Evolution
• Clarence Darrow

17
1920s Culture WarsHero Worship

• Athletes, celebrities, innovators famed for
  individual accomplishment
• A personification of American individualism
• Babe Ruth
• Charles Lindbergh
• Fueled tabloid and gossip columns in newspapers
  and magazines

18
1920s Culture WarsThe Jazz Age

• Inspiration of rebellious youth and liberal
  reaction to conservatism and fundamentalism
• Song and Dance
• Jazz
• Louis Armstrong
• George Gershwin
• Speakeasies
• Dance Clubs
• Waltz to Foxtrot to Charleston
• Josephine Baker
• Flappers
• Radio
• Mainstream medium
• Networks NBC, CBS
• Cinema
• Talkies
• The Jazz Singer
• Nickelodeons
• Charlie Chaplin

19
1920s Culture WarsLiterature

• The Lost Generation
• Disillusioned by World War I, consumerism, and
  modernism
• Ernest Hemingway
• The Sun Also Rises
• A Farewell to Arms
• Sinclair Lewis
• Babbitt
• F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Great Gatsby

20
1920s Culture WarsHarlem Renaissance

• Fueled by the Great Migration
• Black is beautiful
• Black nationalist themes challenged racial
  stereotypes
• Promote social and racial integration
• Langston Hughes
• Zora Neale Hurston
• Sometimes I feel discriminated against, but it
  does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me.
  How can anyone deny themselves the pleasure of my
  company? Its beyond me.
• The New Negro An Interpretation (1925)

21
H.L. Mencken Critiques AmericaA Critique of
H.L. Mencken

• H.L. Mencken On Being American (1922)

• Catherine Beech Ely The Sorrows of Mencken
  (1928)

• Apparently there are those who begin to find it
  disagreeable nay, impossible. Their anguish
  fills the Liberal weeklies and every ship that
  puts out from New York carries a groaning cargo
  of them, bound for anywhere to escape the great
  curses and atrocities that make life intolerable
  for them at home The government of the United
  States, in both its legislative and its executive
  arm, is ignorant, incompetent, corrupt, and
  disgusting...It is a belief no less piously
  cherished that the administration of justice in
  the Republic is stupid, dishonest, and against
  all reason and equity...It is another that the
  foreign policy of the United States its
  habitual manner of dealith with other nations,
  whether friend or foe is hypocritical,
  disingenuous, knavish, and dishonorable...And it
  is my fourth conviction that the American people
  constitute the most timorous, sniveling,
  poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and
  goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in
  Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages, and
  grow more timorous, more sniveling, more
  poltroonish, more ignominious every day.

• Mencken deplores our antiquated regard for the
  sacredness of home, church, and history. We are
  so slow to learn that there is no such word as
  tradition in the lexicon of modern thought.
  Tradition implies affection for the past, whereas
  the Mencken school would have us understand that
  we have no past and no future worth cherishing,
  only the present for donning harlequins attire
  and proclaiming the farcical futility of human
  endeavor For the Mencken school faith is
  demoded, aspiration a weak delusion. Yet America
  refuses to repudiate religion. She makes it the
  foundation of her institutions, the motive-power
  of her charities, the keynote of her progress.
  Mencken sorrows over Americas narrow
  conformities, so contrary to the self-sufficiency
  of intellectualism. The American bourgeois
  blunders onward and upward instead of reclining
  at full length in the dry lands of Rationalism.