APUSH Chapter 21

1924 Pres Election

"Coolidge prosperity" was the decisive issue in the 1924 presidential election. Both major parties ran candidates who favored private initiative over government intervention. Republicans nominated Coolidge with little dissent. At their national convention, Democrats first debated whether to denounce the revived Ku Klux Klan, voting 546 to 543 against condemnation. They then endured 103 ballots, deadlocked between southern prohibitionists, who supported former treasury secretary William G. McAdoo, and antiprohibition easterners, who backed New York's governor, Alfred E. Smith. They finally compromised on John W. Davis, a New York corporate lawyer. Remnants of the Progressive movement formed a new Progressive Party and nominated Robert M. La Follette, the aging Wisconsin reformer. The new party stressed previous reform issues: public ownership of railroads and power plants, conservation of natural resources, aid to farmers, rights for organized labor, and regulation of business. The electorate, however, endorsed Coolidge prosperity. Coolidge beat Davis by 15.7 million to 8.4 million popular votes, and 382 to 136 electoral votes. La Follette finished third, receiving 4.8 million popular votes and 13 electoral votes. In Congress and the presidency, the urgency for political and economic reform that had moved the generation of Progressive reformers faded in the 1920s. Much reform, however, occurred at state and local levels. Following initiatives begun before the First World War, thirty-four states instituted or expanded workers' compensation laws and public welfare programs in the 1920s. In cities, social workers strove for better housing and poverty relief. By 1926, every major city and many smaller ones had planning and zoning commissions to harness physical growth to the common good. As a result of their efforts, a new generation of reformers who later influenced national affairs acquired valuable experience in statehouses, city halls, and universities.

The Jazz Singer / Shuffle Along

1927 - The first movie with sound; this "talkie" was about the life of famous jazz singer; Al Jolson. Attracted many people to theaters (see Importance of Movies). The 1921 musical comedy Shuffle Along is often credited with launching the Harlem Renaissance. The show featured talented black artists, such as lyricist Noble Sissle; composer Eubie Blake; and singers Florence Mills, Josephine Baker, and Mabel Mercer. The Harlem Renaissance also showcased several gifted writers, among them poets Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay; novelists Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Fauset, and Jean Toomer; and essayist Alain Locke. The movement also included painter Aaron Douglas and sculptress Augusta Savage. Black writers from other parts of the country also flourished during the decade. They included novelist Sutton E. Griggs of Houston and Memphis and journalist and historian Drusilla Dunjee Houston from Oklahoma.

Warren G. Harding

A symbol of the federal government's goodwill toward business was President Warren G. Harding, elected in 1920 over Democratic nominee and Ohio Governor James M. Cox, whose running mate was New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt (Teddy's cousin). Garnering 16 million popular votes to Cox's 9 million, Harding won the most lopsided victory in a presidential election to that date. (The total vote in the 1920 presidential election was 36 percent higher than in 1916, reflecting participation of women voters for the first time.) A small-town newspaperman and senator from Ohio who relished jokes and poker, Harding seemed suited to a nation recovering from world war and domestic hard times. Harding also benefited from voter disillusionment with the League of Nations and the collective world security system envisioned by Woodrow Wilson and previously rejected by the Senate. The League proved feeble as a peacemaker, not just because the United States refused to join, but also because League members failed to utilize it to settle important disputes. In due course, however, American officials participated discreetly in League meetings on public health, prostitution, drug and arms trafficking, counterfeiting of currency, and other international issues. American jurists served on the Permanent Court of International Justice, and the Rockefeller Foundation donated $100,000 a year to support League work in public health.

Mass consumption and advertising

Advertising, an essential component of consumerism, acquired new prominence. By 1929, more money was spent on advertising goods and services than on all types of formal education. Blending psychological theory with practical cynicism, advertising theorists confidently asserted that any person's tastes could be manipulated, and marketers developed new techniques to achieve their ends. For example, cosmetics manufacturers like Max Factor, Helena Rubenstein, and African American entrepreneur Madame C. J. Walker used movie stars and beauty advice in magazines to induce women to buy their products. Other advertisers hired baseball star Babe Ruth and football's Red Grange to endorse food and sporting goods.

"Bungalow bloom"

African Americans, continuing their Great Migration that had begun in 1910, made up a sizable portion of people on the move. Pushed from cotton farming by a boll weevil plague and lured by industrial jobs, 1.5 million blacks migrated, doubling African American populations of New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Houston. Black communities also enlarged in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego. In these cities, they found work just as exploitive as that in the South—menial labor as janitors, longshoremen, and domestic servants. But the move northward included psychological release because a parcel of freedom was available in New York and Chicago that did not exist in Charleston or Atlanta. In the North, a black person did not always have to act subordinately to a white. As one migrant wrote back home, "I . . . am living well. . . . I can ride in the [streetcar] anywhere I can get a seat." Forced by low wages and discrimination to seek the cheapest housing, African American newcomers squeezed into ghettos such as Chicago's South Side, New York's Harlem, and Los Angeles's Central Avenue. On the West Coast, however, black homeownership rates were higher than in other regions. Many took advantage of Los Angeles's "bungalow boom," in which they could purchase a small, one-story house for as little as $900. But unlike white migrants, who were free to move away from the inner city when they could afford to, blacks everywhere found better neighborhoods closed to them. They could either crowd further into already densely populated black neighborhoods or spill into nearby white neighborhoods, a process that sparked resistance and violence. Fears of such "invasion" prompted neighborhood associations to adopt restrictive covenants, whereby white homeowners pledged not to sell or rent property to blacks.

Al Capone

After 1925, the so-called noble experiment faltered as thousands of people made their own wine and gin illegally, and bootleg importers along the country's borders and shorelines easily evaded the few patrols that attempted to intercept them. Moreover, drinking, like gambling and prostitution, was a business with willing customers, and criminal organizations capitalized on public demand. The most notorious of such mobs belonged to Al Capone, a burly thug who seized control of illegal liquor, gambling, and prostitution in Chicago, maintaining power over politicians and the vice business through intimidation, bribery, and violence. Other mobsters, such as Charles "Lucky" Luciano (born Salvatore Lucania) and Arnold "the Brain" Rothstein, also netted huge incomes from the illegal production and sale of alcoholic beverages. Capone contended, in a statement revealing of the era, "Prohibition is a business. All I do is supply a public demand." Americans wanted their liquor and beer, and until 1931, when a federal court convicted and imprisoned him for income tax evasion (the only charge for which authorities could obtain hard evidence), Capone supplied them. Reflecting on contradictions inherent in prohibition, columnist Walter Lippmann wrote in 1931, "The high level of lawlessness is maintained by the fact that Americans desire to do so many things which they also desire to prohibit."

Installment plans

Aided by electric energy, a recovery began in 1922 and continued unevenly until 1929. Electric motors enabled manufacturers to replace steam engines and produce goods more cheaply and efficiently. Using new metal alloys, such as aluminum, and synthetic materials, such as rayon, producers could turn out an expanded array of consumer goods, including refrigerators, toasters, vacuum cleaners, and clothing. In addition, most urban households now had electric service, enabling them to utilize new appliances. The expanding economy gave Americans more spending money for these products, as well as for restaurants, beauty salons, and movie theaters. More important, installment, or time-payment, plans ("A dollar down and a dollar forever," one critic quipped) drove the new consumerism. Of 3.5 million automobiles sold in 1923, 80 percent were bought on credit. By the late 1920s, the United States produced nearly half of the world's industrial goods and ranked first among exporters.

N---- Leagues

Although African American ballplayers were prohibited from playing in the major leagues, they formed their own teams, and in 1920 the first successful Negro League was founded, consisting of eight teams from places such as Chicago, Kansas City, and Indianapolis.

United Fruit Company

American companies focused especially on Latin America, where they began to exploit Venezuela's rich petroleum resources, where the United Fruit Company became a huge landowner, and where Pam American Airways first developed air service. By 1929, direct American investment in the region totaled $3.5 billion and U.S. exports dominated trade. Country after country experienced repercussions from American economic and political decisions. For example, the price that Americans set for Chilean copper determined the health of Chile's economy. North American oil executives bribed Venezuelan politicians for tax breaks.

Importance of Entertainment (skippable)

Americans in the 1920s embraced commercial entertainment as never before. In 1919, they spent $2.5 billion on leisure activities; by 1929, such expenditures topped $4.3 billion, a figure not again equaled until after the Second World War. Spectator amusements—movies, music, and sports—accounted for 21 percent of the 1929 total; the rest involved participatory recreation such as games, hobbies, and travel. Entrepreneurs responded to an appetite for fads and spectacles. Early in the 1920s, mahjong, a Chinese tile game, was the craze. In the mid-1920s, devotees popularized crossword puzzles, printed in mass-circulation newspapers and magazines. Next, fun seekers adopted miniature golf. By 1930, the nation boasted thirty thousand miniature golf courses featuring tiny castles, windmills, and waterfalls. Dances like the Charleston won fans throughout the country, aided by live and recorded music and the growing popularity of jazz.

Federal Highway Act

Americans' passion for driving necessitated extensive road construction and abundant fuel supplies. Since the late 1800s, farmers and bicyclists had been lobbying for improved roads. After the First World War, motorists joined the campaign, and in the 1920s government aid made "automobility" truly feasible. In 1921, Congress passed the Federal Highway Act, providing funds for state roads, and in 1923 the Bureau of Public Roads planned a national highway system. Roadbuilding in turn inspired such technological developments as mechanized graders and concrete mixers. The oil-refining industry, which produced gasoline, became vast and powerful. In 1920, the United States produced about 65 percent of the world's oil. Automobiles also forced public officials to pay attention to safety and traffic control. General Electric Company produced the first timed stop-and-go traffic light in 1924.

Social changes in the 1920s

As Americans encountered new ways to use their time, altered behaviors and values were inevitable. Aided by new fabrics and chemical dyes, clothes became a means of self-expression as women and men wore more casual and gaily colored styles than their parents would have considered. The line between acceptable and inappropriate behavior blurred as smoking, drinking, and frankness about sex became fashionable. Birth control gained a large following in respectable circles. Newspapers, magazines, motion pictures (such as Why Change Your Wife?), and popular songs (such as "I Don't Care") made certain that Americans did not suffer from "sex starvation." A typical movie ad promised "brilliant men, beautiful jazz babies, champagne baths, midnight revels, petting parties in the purple dawn, all ending in one terrific smashing climax that makes you gasp." Other trends weakened inherited customs. Because restrictive child labor laws and compulsory attendance rules kept children in school longer than ever before, peer groups rather than parents played an influential role in socializing youngsters. In earlier eras, different age groups had often shared the same activities: children interacted with adults in fields and kitchens, and young apprentices toiled in work- shops beside older journeymen and craftsmen. Now, graded school classes, sports, and clubs constantly brought together children of the same age, separating them from the company and influence of adults. Furthermore, the ways that young people interacted with each other underwent fundamental changes. Between 1890 and the mid-1920s, ritualized middle- and upper-class courtship, consisting of men formally "calling" on women and of chaperoned social engagements, faded in favor of unsupervised "dating," in which a man "asked out" a woman and spent money on her. Unmarried young people, living in cities away from family restraints, eagerly went on dates to new commercial amusements, such as movies and nightclubs, and automobiles made dating even more extensive. A woman's job seldom provided sufficient income for her to afford these entertainments, but she could enjoy them if a man escorted and "treated" her. Companionship, romance, and, at times, sexual exploitation accompanied the practice, especially when a woman was expected to give sexual favors in return for being treated. A date thus ironically weakened a woman's prerogative at the same time that it expanded her opportunities. Under the courtship system, a woman had control over who could "call" on her. But once she entered a system in which a man's money enabled her to fulfill her desire for entertainment and independence, she might find herself faced with difficult moral choices.

Alfred E. Smith

As their candidate, Democrats in 1928 chose New York's governor Alfred E. Smith, whose background contrasted with Hoover's. Hoover had rural, native-born, Protestant, and business roots and had never previously run for public office. Smith was an urbane, gregarious politician of Irish stock with a career embedded in New York City's Tammany Hall political machine. His relish for the give-and-take of city streets is apparent in his response to a heckler during the campaign. When the heckler shouted, "Tell them all you know, Al. It won't take long!" Smith unflinchingly retorted, "I'll tell them all we both know, and it won't take any longer!" Smith was the first Roman Catholic to run for president on a major party ticket. His religion enhanced his appeal among urban ethnics (including women), who were voting in increasing numbers, but anti-Catholic sentiments lost him southern and rural votes. Smith had compiled a strong record on Progressive reform and civil rights during his governorship, but his campaign failed to build a coalition of farmers and city dwellers because he stressed issues unlikely to unite these groups, particularly his opposition to prohibition. Hoover, who emphasized national prosperity under Republican administrations, won the popular vote by 21 million to 15 million and the electoral vote by 444 to 87. Smith's candidacy nevertheless had beneficial effects on the Democratic Party. By luring millions of foreign-stock voters to the polls, he carried the nation's twelve largest cities, which formerly had given majorities to Republican presidential candidates. For the next forty years, the Democratic Party solidified this urban base, which in conjunction with its traditional strength in the South made the party a formidable force in national elections.

Suburbanization

As urbanization peaked, suburban growth accelerated. Though towns had sprouted around major cities since the nation's earliest years, prosperity and automobile transportation in the 1920s made suburbs more accessible to those wishing to leave urban neighborhoods. Between 1920 and 1930, suburbs of Chicago (such as Oak Park and Evanston), Cleveland (Shaker Heights), and Los Angeles (Burbank and Inglewood) grew five to ten times faster than did nearby central cities. They sparked an outburst of home construction; Los Angeles builders alone erected 250,000 homes for auto-owning suburbanites. Although some suburbs, such as Highland Park (near Detroit) and East Chicago, were industrial satellites, most were middle- and upper-class bedroom communities. Suburbanites wanted to escape big-city crime, grime, and taxes, and they fought to preserve control over their police, schools, and water and gas services. Consequently, suburbs increasingly resisted annexation to core cities. Particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, suburbs' fierce independence choked off expansion by the central cities and prevented them from access to the resources and tax bases of wealthier suburban residents. Suburban expansion had other costs, too, as automobiles and the dispersal of population spread the environmental problems of city life—trash, pollution, noise— across the entire metropolitan area.

Hoover's Administration

At his inaugural, Hoover proclaimed a New Day, "bright with hope."His cabinet, composed mostly of businessmen committed to the existing order, included six millionaires. To the lower ranks of government, Hoover appointed young professionals who agreed with him that a scientific approach could solve national problems. If Hoover was optimistic, so were the people who voted for him. There was widespread belief among them that success resulted from individual effort and that unemployment and poverty signaled personal weakness. Prevailing opinion also held that fluctuations of the business cycle were natural and therefore not to be tampered with by government.

Household labor

At home, housewives still toiled long hours cleaning, cooking, and raising children, but machines now lightened some tasks and enabled women to use time differently than their forebears had. Especially in middle-class households, electric irons and washing machines simplified some chores. Gas- and oil-powered central heating and hot water heaters. eliminated the hauling of wood, coal, and water, the upkeep of a kitchen fire, and the removal of ashes. Even as technology and economic change simplified some tasks, they also created new demands on a mother's time. The pool of those who could help housewives with cleaning, cooking, and childcare shrank because daughters stayed in school longer, and alternative forms of employment caused a shortage of domestic servants. In addition, the availability of washing machines, hot water, vacuum cleaners, and commercial soap put greater pressure on housewives to keep everything clean. Advertisers of these products tried to make women feel guilty for not devoting enough attention to cleaning the home. No longer a producer of food and clothing as her ancestors had been, a mother instead became the chief shopper, responsible for making sure her family spent money wisely. And the automobile made the wife chief chauffeur. One survey found that urban housewives spent on average seven and one-half hours per week driving to shop and transport children.

Lost Generation

At the same time that consumerism inspired Americans to do "so many things," the era's hardships and crassness spawned unease, and intellectuals like Lippmann were quick to point to persisting hypocrisies. Serious authors and artists felt at odds with society, and their rejection of materialism and conformity was both biting and bitter. In protest, several writers from the so-called Lost Generation, including novelist Ernest Hemingway and poets Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, abandoned the United States for Europe. Others, like novelists William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, and Edith Wharton remained in America but, like the expatriates, expressed disillusionment with the materialism that they witnessed.

Cecil B. DeMille

Beth and Robert Gordon did not seem to be compatible marriage partners. Beth was frumpy and demanding; Robert liked to party. One evening at a nightclub, he met Sally Clark, who liked to party, too. They danced close together, and when Robert came home, Beth smelled perfume on his suit. The spouses argued, and shortly they divorced. It was not long, however, before Robert found that Sally's appeal had worn off; he missed Beth's intellect and wisdom. Meanwhile, Beth concluded that she needed to change her dowdy image. She bought new clothes and makeup, turning herself into a glamorous beauty. By coincidence, Beth and Robert visited the same summer resort and rekindled their romance. When Robert was injured in an accident, Beth took him home and nursed him back to health, much to Sally's disappointment. In the end, Beth and Robert remarried, and Sally accepted her loss of Robert philosophically, concluding with the wry remark "The only good thing about marriage, anyway, is the alimony." The experiences of Beth, Robert, and Sally make up the plot of the 1920 motion picture Why Change Your Wife?—one of dozens of films directed by Cecil B. DeMille. DeMille succeeded by giving audiences what they wanted to see and what they fantasized about doing. Beth, Robert, and Sally dressed stylishly, went out dancing, listened to phonograph records, rode in cars, and visited resorts. Although DeMille's films and others of the 1920s usually ended by reinforcing marriage, ruling out premarital sex, and supporting the work ethic, they also exuded a new morality.

Sin fronteras

Both rural and urban Mexicans moved back and forth between their homeland and the United States, seeking jobs and creating a way of life that Mexicans called sin fronteras—without borders.

"New lobbying"

Business and professional organizations that had arisen around 1900 also expanded in the 1920s. Retailers and manufacturers formed trade associations to swap information and coordinate planning. Farm bureaus promoted scientific agriculture and tried to stabilize markets for agricultural products. Lawyers, engineers, and doctors expanded their professional societies. In a complex society where government was playing an increasingly influential role, hundreds of organizations sought to convince federal and state legislators to support their interests through "new lobbying." One Washington, D.C., observer contended that "lobbyists were so thick they were constantly falling over one another."

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti

By 1925, however, the Invisible Empire was weakening, as scandal undermined its moral base. Most notably, in 1925 Indiana grand dragon David Stephenson was convicted of second-degree murder after he kidnapped and raped a woman who later died either from taking poison or from infection caused by bites on her body. More generally, the Klan's negative, exclusive brand of patriotism and purity could not compete in a pluralistic society. The KKK had no monopoly on bigotry; intolerance pervaded American society. Nativists had urged an end to open immigration since the 1880s. They charged that Catholic and Jewish immigrants clogged city slums and stubbornly embraced alien religious and political beliefs. Fear of immigrant radicals also fueled a dramatic trial in 1921, when two Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were convicted of murdering a paymaster and guard in Braintree, Massachusetts. Evidence for their guilt was flimsy, but Judge Webster Thayer openly sided with the prosecution, privately calling the defendants "anarchistic bastards."

Harlem Renaissance

Discontent quite different from that of white authors characterized a new generation of African American artists. Middle class, educated, and proud of their African heritage, black writers rejected white culture and exalted the militantly assertive "New N----." Most of them lived in New York's Harlem; in this "N---- Mecca," intellectuals and artists, aided by a few white patrons, celebrated black culture during what became known as the Harlem Renaissance.

The Indian Rights Association and the Indian Defense Association

Disturbed by the federal government's generally apathetic American Indian policy, reform organizations such as the Indian Rights Association, the Indian Defense Association, and the General Federation of Women's Clubs worked to obtain justice and social services, including better education and return of tribal lands. But because most Americans perceived American Indians as no longer a threat to whites' ambitions, they expected them to assimilate like other minorities. Such an assumption overlooked important problems. Severalty, the federal policy created by the Dawes Act of 1887 that allotted land to individuals rather than to tribes, had failed to make American Indians self-supporting. Native American farmers had to suffer poor soil, unavailable irrigation, and scarce medical care. Deeply attached to their land, they showed little inclination to move to cities. Whites still hoped to convert native peoples into "productive" citizens, but in a way that ignored indigenous cultures. Reformers were especially critical of Native American women, who refused to adopt middle-class homemaking habits and balked at sending their children to boarding schools. Meanwhile, the federal government struggled to clarify American Indians' citizenship status. The Dawes Act had conferred citizenship on all Native Americans who accepted land allotments, but not on those who remained on reservations. Also, the government retained control over Native Americans that it did not exercise over others. For example, because of alleged drunkenness on reservations, federal law banned the sale of liquor to American Indians even before ratification of prohibition. After several court challenges, Congress finally passed an Indian Citizenship Act (Snyder Act) in 1924, granting full citizenship to all Native Americans who previously had not received it in hopes that American Indians would help each other to assimilate.

Consolidation of Business

Economic expansion brought a continuation of the corporate consolidation that had created trusts and holding companies in the late nineteenth century. Although Progressive Era trust-busting had achieved some regulation of big business, it had not eliminated oligopoly, the control of an entire industry by one or a few large firms. Now, sprawling companies such as U.S. Steel and General Electric dominated basic industries, and oligopolies dominated much of marketing, distribution, and finance as well.

Flappers

Employed or not, women remade the image of femininity. In contrast to the heavy, floor-length dresses and long hair of previous generations, the short skirts and bobbed hair of the 1920s "flapper" symbolized independence and sexual freedom. Although few women lived the flapper life, the look became fashionable among office workers and store clerks as well as college students. As Cecil B. DeMille's movies showed, chaste models of female behavior were eclipsed by movie temptresses, such as Clara Bow, known as the "'It' Girl," and Gloria Swanson, notorious for torrid love affairs on and off the screen. Many women asserted social equality with men. One observer described "the new woman" as intriguingly independent.

Lack of Federal Regulation

Federal policies also underlay the crisis. The government refrained from regulating speculation and only occasionally scolded undisciplined bankers and businesspeople. In keeping with its support of business expansion, the Federal Reserve Board pursued easy credit policies, charging low discount rates (interest on its loans to member banks) even though such loans were financing the speculative mania. Partly because of optimism and partly because of relatively unsophisticated economic analysis, neither experts nor people on the street realized what really had happened in 1929. Conventional wisdom, based on experiences from previous depressions, held that little could be done to correct economic downturns; they simply had to run their course. So in 1929, people waited for the tailspin to ease, never realizing that the "new era" had come to an end and that the economy, politics, and society would have to be rebuilt.

"Fordisms"

Flush with industrial expansion at home, business and government leaders attempted to use American prosperity to create economic stability at home and profits abroad. The First World War had left Europe in shambles. Between 1914 and 1924, Europe suffered tens of millions of casualties from world war, civil war, massacres, the influenza epidemic, and famine. Germany and France both lost 10 percent of their workers. Crops, livestock, factories, trains, bridges—little was spared. The American Relief Administration and private charities delivered food to needy people, including Russians wracked by famine in 1921 and 1922. These efforts accompanied a move to strengthen America's prominence in the international economy. Because of World War I, the United States became a creditor nation and the financial capital of the world. From 1914 to 1930, private investment abroad grew fivefold, to more than $17 billion. For example, General Electric invested heavily in Germany, and U.S. firms began to challenge British control of oil in the Middle East. Also, American know-how became an export product. Germans marveled at Henry Ford's economic success and industrial techniques ("Fordismus"), buying out translations of his autobiography, My Life and Work (1922). Further advertising the American capitalist model were the Phelps-Stokes Fund, exporting to black Africa Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee philosophy of education, and the Rockefeller Foundation, battling diseases in Latin America and Africa, supporting colleges to train doctors in Lebanon and China, and funding medical research and nurses' training in Europe.

Stock Market Speculation

Furthermore, in their eagerness to boost profits, many businesses overloaded themselves with debt. To obtain loans, they misrepresented their assets in ways that hid their inability to repay if forced to do so. Such practices, overlooked by lending agencies, put the nation's banking system on a precarious footing. When one part of the edifice collapsed, the entire structure crumbled. Risky stock market speculation also precipitated the Depression. Individuals and corporations bought millions of stock shares on margin, meaning that they invested by placing a down payment of only a fraction of a stock's actual price and then used stocks they had bought, but not fully paid for, as collateral for more stock purchases. When stock prices stopped rising, investors tried to minimize losses by selling holdings they had bought on margin. But numerous investors selling at the same time caused prices to plunge. As stock values crumbled, brokers demanded full payment for stocks bought on margin. Investors attempted to comply by withdrawing savings from banks or selling stocks for whatever they could get. Cash-short bankers pressured businesses to pay back their loans, tightening the vise further. The more obligations went unmet, the more the system tottered. Inevitably, banks and investment companies collapsed.

Marcus Garvey

Garvey promoted economic independence by encouraging black-owned businesses that would manufacture and sell products to black consumers, and his proposed Phillis Wheatley Hotel (named after a notable African American poet) would enable any black person to make a reservation. His newspaper, Negro World, preached black pride, and he founded the Black Star steamship line to transport manufactured goods and raw materials to black businesses in North America, the Caribbean, and Africa. In an era when whites were pouring money into stock market speculation, thousands of hopeful blacks invested their dollars in the Black Star Line.

Fordney-McCumber Tariff

Government policies helped businesses thrive, and legislators depended on lobbyists' expertise in making decisions. Prodded by lobbyists, Congress cut taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals in 1921 and passed the Fordney-McCumber Tariff (1922) to raise tariff rates. Presidents Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover appointed cabinet officers who were favorable toward business. Regulatory agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Interstate Commerce Commission, monitored company activities but, under the influence of lobbyists, cooperated with corporations more than they regulated them.

National Origins Act

Guided by such sentiments, the movement to restrict immigration gathered support. Labor leaders charged that alien workers depressed wages and caused unemployment of native-born men. Business executives, who formerly had opposed restrictions because they desired cheap immigrant laborers, changed their minds, having realized that they could keep wages low by mechanizing. Even some humanitarian reformers supported restriction as a means of reducing poverty and easing assimilation. Drawing support from such groups, Congress reversed previous policy and, in the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, set yearly immigration allocations for each nationality. Reflect- ing preference for Anglo-Saxon Protestant immigrants and prejudice against Catholics and Jews from southern and eastern Europe, Congress stipulated that annual immigration of a given nationality could not exceed 3 percent of the number of immigrants from that nation residing in the United States in 1910. The act thereby discriminated against immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, whose numbers were small in 1910 relative to those from northern Europe. In 1924, Congress replaced the Quota Act with the National Origins Act. This law limited annual immigration to 150,000 people and set quotas at 2 percent of each nationality residing in the United States in 1890, except for Asians, who were banned completely (Chinese immigration had been banned since 1882 by the Chinese Exclusion Act). The National Origins Act further restricted southern and eastern Europeans because even fewer of those groups lived in the United States in 1890 than in 1910. The law did, however, allow foreign-born wives and children of U.S. citizens to enter as nonquota immigrants. In 1927, a revised National Origins Act apportioned new quotas to begin in 1929. It retained the annual limit of 150,000 but redefined quotas to be distributed among European countries in proportion to the "national-origins" (country of birth or descent) of American inhabitants in 1920. People coming from the Western Hemisphere did not fall under the quotas, and soon they became the largest immigrant groups.

President Herbert Hoover

Hoover was an apt Republican candidate (Coolidge chose not to seek reelection) because he fused the traditional value of individual hard work with modern emphasis on corporate action. A Quaker from Iowa, orphaned at age ten, Hoover worked his way through Stanford University and became a wealthy mining engineer. During and after the First World War, he distinguished himself as U.S. food administrator and head of food relief for Europe. As secretary of commerce under Presidents Harding and Coolidge, Hoover promoted "associationalism." Recognizing the extent to which nationwide associations dominated commerce and industry, Hoover wanted to stimulate a cooperative, associational relationship between business and government. He took every opportunity to make the Commerce Department a center for the promotion of business, encouraging the formation of trade associations, holding conferences, and issuing reports, all aimed at improving productivity and profits. His active leadership prompted one observer to quip that Hoover was "Secretary of Commerce and assistant secretary of everything else."

Sheppard-Towner Act

In 1921, action by women's groups persuaded Congress to pass the Sheppard-Towner Act, which allotted funds to states to create maternity and pediatric clinics as means to reduce infant mortality. (The measure ended in 1929 when Congress, pressured by the American Medical Association, which believed the act was socialistic and threatened a doctor's professional prerogatives, canceled funding.) The Cable Act of 1923 reversed the law under which an American woman who married a foreigner lost her U.S. citizenship and had to assume her husband's citizenship. At the state level, women achieved rights such as the ability to serve as jurors. Internal divisions, however, complicated women's tasks in achieving their goals. Members of the National Association of Colored Women, for example, fought for the rights of minority women and men without support from white women's groups. Some organizations, such as the National Woman's Party, pressed for a constitutional amendment to ensure women's equality with men under the law. But such activity alienated the National Consumers League, the Women's Trade Union League, the League of Women Voters, and other groups that supported special protective legislation to limit hours and improve conditions for employed women.

Scopes Trial

In 1925, Christian fundamentalism clashed with modernism in a celebrated case in Dayton, Tennessee, that came to be known as the Scopes Trial. Early that year, the state legislature passed a law forbidding public school instructors to teach the theory that humans had evolved from lower forms of life rather than descended from Adam and Eve. Shortly thereafter, high-school teacher John Thomas Scopes volunteered to serve in a test case and was arrested for violating the law. Scopes's trial that summer became a headline event.

Importance of Movies

In addition to indulging actively, Americans were avid spectators, particularly of movies and sports. In total capital investment, motion pictures became one of the nation's leading industries. Nearly every community had at least one theater, whether a hundred-seat, small-town establishment or a big- city "picture palace" with ornate lobbies and two thousand cushioned seats. In 1922, movies attracted 40 million viewers weekly; by 1929, the number neared 100 million—at a time when the nation's population was 120 million and total weekly church attendance was 60 million. New technology increased movies' appeal. Between 1922 and 1927, the Technicolor Corporation developed a means of producing movies in color. This process, along with the introduction of sound in The Jazz Singer in 1927, made movies even more exciting and realistic. Responding to tastes of mass audiences, the movie industry produced escapist entertainment. Although DeMille's romantic comedies like Why Change Your Wife? explored worldly themes, his most popular films—The Ten Commandments (1923) and The King of Kings (1927)—were biblical. Lurid dramas like Souls for Sale (1923) and A Woman Who Sinned (1924) also drew big audiences, as did slapstick comedies starring Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin. Movie content was tame by current standards. In 1927, producers, bowing to pressure from legislators and religious leaders, instituted self-censorship, forbidding nudity, rough language, and plots that did not end with justice and morality triumphant. Movies also reproduced social prejudices. Although white actresses and actors played roles as glamour queens and action heroes, what few black actors there were had to take roles as maids and butlers.

Universal Negro Improvement Association

In response to discrimination, threats, and violence, thou- sands of urban African Americans joined movements that glorified racial independence. The most influential of these black nationalist groups was the Universal Negro Improve- ment Association (UNIA), headquartered in New York City's Harlem area and led by Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant who believed blacks should separate from corrupt white society. Proclaiming, "I am the equal of any white man," and appealing for pride in African heritage, Garvey spread his message with mass meetings and parades. Unlike the NAACP, which had been formed by elite African American and white liberals, the UNIA was comprised exclusively of blacks, most of whom occupied lower rungs of the economic hierarchy.

18th Amendment / Volstead Act

In their quest for fun and self-expression, some Americans became lawbreakers by refusing to give up drinking. The Eighteenth Amendment (1919), which prohibited the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages, and the federal law that implemented it (the Volstead Act of 1920) worked well at first. Per capita consumption of liquor dropped, as did arrests for drunkenness, and the price of illegal booze exceeded what average workers could afford. But federal and state authorities for the most part refrained from enforcing the new law. In 1922, Congress gave the Prohibition Bureau only three thousand employees and less than $7 million for nationwide enforcement, and by 1927 most state budgets omitted funds to enforce prohibition.

Washington Naval Conference

In this climate, peace advocates convinced President Harding to convene the Washington Naval Conference of November 1921-February 1922. Delegates from Great Britain, France, Japan, Italy, China, Portugal, Belgium, and the Netherlands joined a U.S. team led by Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes to discuss limits on naval armaments. Britain, the United States, and Japan were facing a naval arms race whose huge military spending endangered economic recovery. American leaders also worried that an expansionist Japan, with the world's third-largest navy, would overtake the United States, ranked second behind Britain. Hughes opened the conference with a stunning announcement: he proposed to achieve real disarmament by offering to scrap thirty major U.S. ships, totaling 846,000 tons. He then turned to the shocked British and Japanese delegations and urged them to do away with smaller amounts. The final limit, Hughes declared, should be 500,000 tons each for the Americans and British, 300,000 tons for the Japanese, and 175,000 tons each for the French and Italians—a ratio of 5:3:1.75. These totals were ratified in the Five-Power Treaty, which also set a ten-year moratorium on construction of battleships and aircraft carriers. The governments also pledged not to build new fortifications in their Pacific possessions (such as the Philippines). Next, the conferees in Washington passed the Nine-Power Treaty, reaffirming the Open Door in China and recognizing Chinese sovereignty. Finally, in the Four-Power Treaty, the United States, Britain, France, and Japan agreed to respect one another's Pacific possessions. The three treaties did not limit submarines, destroyers, or carriers, nor did they provide enforcement powers. Still, the conference was a major accomplishment for Hughes. He achieved genuine arms limitations and at the same time improved America's strategic position vis-à-vis Japan in the Pacific.

International debt and reparations

International economic conditions also contributed to the Depression. During the First World War and postwar reconstruction, Americans loaned billions of dollars to war-torn European nations. By the late 1920s, however, American investors were keeping their money at home, investing instead in the stock market. Europeans, unable to borrow funds and unable to sell goods in the American market because of high tariffs, began to buy less from the United States. Moreover, the Allied nations depended on German war reparations so they could pay their war debts to the United States, and the German government depended on American bank loans to pay those reparations. When the crash choked off American loans, Germany could not meet obligations to the Allies, and in turn the Allies were unable to pay war debts to the United States. The Western economy ground to a halt. Some Europeans also branded the United States as stingy for its handling of World War I debts and reparations. Twenty-eight nations became entangled in a web of inter-Allied government debts, which totaled $26.5 billion ($9.6 billion of them owed to the U.S. government). Europeans owed private American creditors another $3 billion. Europeans urged Americans to erase these debts as a magnanimous contribution to the war effort. During the war, they angrily charged, Europe had bled while America profited. "There is only one way we could be worse with the Europeans," remarked the humorist Will Rogers, "and that is to have helped them out in two wars instead of one." American leaders, however, insisted on repayment, some pointing out that the victorious European nations had gained vast territory and resources as war spoils. Senator George Norris of Nebraska, emphasizing domestic priorities, declared that the United States could build highways in "every county seat" if only the Europeans would pay their debt

Manuel Ugarte

Latin American nationalists protested that their resources were being drained away as profits for U.S. companies. A distinguished Argentine writer, Manuel Ugarte, asserted that the United States had become a new Rome, annexing wealth rather than territory, and that unapologetic Americans wrongly believed they were bringing only material improvements and blessings of liberty to Latin American neighbors. Criticism mounted as years passed. In 1928, at the Havana Inter-American conference, U.S. officials unsuccessfully tried to kill a resolution stating that "no state has a right to intervene in the internal affairs of another. "Two years later, a Chilean newspaper warned that the American "Colossus" had "financial might" without "equal in history" and that its aim was "Americas for the Americans—of the North."

Isaac Max Rubinow and Abraham Epstein

Many Americans, however, believed that individuals should prepare for old age by saving in their youth; pensions, they felt, smacked of socialism. Yet, conditions were alarming for old people. Most inmates in state poorhouses were older people, and almost one-third of Americans age sixty-five and older depended financially on someone else. Few employers, including the federal government, provided for retired employees. Resistance finally broke at the state level in the 1920s. Led by physician Isaac Max Rubinow and journalist Abraham Epstein, reformers persuaded voluntary associations, labor unions, and legislators to endorse old-age assistance through pensions, insurance, and retirement homes. By 1933, almost every state provided at least minimal support to needy elderly people, and a path had been opened for a national program of old-age insurance—social security.

Yellow Dog Contracts

Meanwhile, corporations fought unions directly. To prevent labor organization, employers imposed "yellow-dog contracts" that, as a condition of employment, compelled an employee to agree not to join a union. Companies also countered the appeal of unions by offering pensions, profit sharing, and company-sponsored picnics and sporting events—a policy known as "welfare capitalism." State legislators aided employers by prohibiting closed shops (workplaces where unions required that all employees be members of their labor organization) and permitting open shops (in which employers could hire nonunion employees). As a result of court action, welfare capitalism, and ineffective leadership, union membership fell from 5.1 million in 1920 to 3.6 million in 1929.

General Economic Weakness

More generally, the economic weakness that underlay the Great Depression had several interrelated causes. One was declining demand. Since mid-1928, demand for new housing had faltered, leading to declining sales of building materials and unemployment among construction workers. Growth industries, such as automobiles and electric appliances, had been able to expand as long as consumers bought their products. Expansion, however, could not continue unabated. When demand leveled off, factory owners had to cut production and pare workforces. Retailers had amassed large inventories that were going unsold and, in turn, they started ordering less from manufacturers. Farm prices continued to sag, leaving farmers with less income to purchase new machinery and goods. As wages and employment fell, families could not afford things they needed and wanted. Thus, by 1929, a sizable population of underconsumers was causing serious repercussions. Underconsumption also resulted from widening divisions in income distribution. As the rich grew richer, middle- and lower-income Americans made modest gains at best. Although average per capita disposable income (income after taxes) rose about 9 percent between 1920 and 1929, income of the wealthiest 1 percent rose 75 percent, accounting for most of the general increase. Much of this money went for stock market speculation, not consumer goods.

Teapot Dome Scandal

Most notorious of his scandals: a congressional inquiry in 1923-1924 revealed that Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall had accepted bribes to lease government property to private oil companies. For his role in the affair— called the Teapot Dome scandal after a Wyoming oil reserve that he handed to the Mammoth Oil Company—Fall was fined $100,000 and spent a year in jail, the first cabinet member ever to be so disgraced. By mid-1923, Harding had become disillusioned. On a speaking tour that summer, Harding became ill and died in San Francisco on August 2. Although his death preceded the revelation of the Teapot Dome scandal, some people speculated that, to avoid impeachment, Harding committed suicide or was poisoned by his wife. Most evidence, however, points to death from natural causes, probably heart disease. Regardless, Harding was widely mourned.

Ku Klux Klan Resurgence

No ordinary civic club, this was the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), a revived version of the hooded order that terrorized southern communities after the Civil War. Reconstituted in 1915 by William J. Simmons, an Atlanta, Georgia, evangelist and insurance salesman, the Klan adopted the hoods, intimidating tactics, and mystical terminology of its forerunner (its leader was the Imperial Wizard; its book of rituals, the Kloran). But the new Klan had broader objectives than the old. It fanned outward from the Deep South and for a time wielded political power in places as diverse as Oregon, where Portland's mayor was a Klan member, and Indiana, where Klansmen held the governorship and several seats in the legislature. Its membership included men from the urban middle class who were fearful of losing social and economic gains achieved from postwar prosperity and nervous about immigration and a new youth culture that seemed to be eluding family control. It also included a women's adjunct, Women of the Ku Klux Klan, boasting an estimated half-million members. One phrase summed up Klan goals: "Native, white, Protestant supremacy." Native meant no immigration, no "mongrelization" of American culture. According to Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans, white supremacy was a matter of survival. "The world," he warned, "has been so made so that each race must fight for its life, must conquer, acceptslavery, or die. The Klansman believes the whites will not become slaves, and he does not intend to die before his time." Evans praised Protestantism for promoting "unhampered individual development," and accused the Catholic Church of discouraging assimilation and enslaving people to priests and a foreign pope. Using threatening assemblies, violence, and economic pressure, the new Klan menaced many communities. Klansmen meted out vigilante justice to suspected bootleggers, wife beaters, and adulterers; forced schools to stop teaching the theory of evolution; campaigned against Catholic and Jewish political candidates; urged members not to buy from merchants who did not share their views; and fueled racial tensions against Mexicans in Texas border cities, immigrants in northern cities, and African Americans everywhere. Although men firmly controlled Klan activities, women not only promoted native white Protestantism but also, with male approval, worked for moral reform and enforcement of prohibition. Because the KKK vowed to protect the "virtue" of women, housewives and other women sometimes appealed to the Klan for help in punishing abusive, unfaithful, or irresponsible husbands and fathers when legal authorities would not intervene. Rather than an arrest and trial, the Klan's method of justice was flogging.

"Welfare capitalism"

Organized labor suffered other setbacks during the 1920s. Fearful of communism allegedly being brought into the country by radical immigrants, public opinion turned against workers who disrupted everyday life with strikes. Perpetuating tactics used during the Red Scare of 1919, the Harding administration in 1922 obtained a court injunction to quash a strike by 400,000 railroad shop workers. The same year, the Justice Department helped end a nationwide strike by 650,000 miners. Courts at both the state and federal levels issued injunctions to prevent strikes and permitted businesses to sue unions for damages suffered because of labor actions.

Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928

Peace advocates also applauded the Locarno Pact of 1925, a set of agreements among European nations that sought to reduce tensions between Germany and France, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928. The latter document, named for U.S. secretary of state Frank B. Kellogg and French premier Aristide Briand, pledged sixty-two nations to "condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it as an instrument of national policy." The accord passed the U.S. Senate 85-1, but many lawmakers considered it little more than a state- ment of moral preference because it lacked enforcement provisions. Nevertheless, the agreement reflected popular aversion to war, and it stimulated further discussions of keeping the peace.

Impact of radio

Radio became a powerful advertising and entertainment agent. By 1929, 10 million families owned radios, and Americans spent $850 million a year on radio equipment. In the early 1920s, Congress decided that broadcasting should be a private enterprise, not a tax-supported public service as in Great Britain. As a result, American radio programming consisted mainly of entertainment rather than educational content because drama. music, and comedy attracted larger audiences and higher profits from advertisers. Station KDKA in Pittsburgh, owned by Westinghouse Electric Company, pioneered commercial radio in 1920, broadcasting results of the 1920 presidential election. Then, in 1922, an AT&T-run station in New York City broadcast recurring advertisements— "commercials"—for a real estate developer. Other stations began airing commercials; by the end of 1922, there were 508 such stations. In 1929, the National Broadcasting Company began assembling a network of stations and soon was charging advertisers $10,000 (equivalent to about $121,000 today) to sponsor an hour-long show.

Participation in civic organizations

Religious fervor spread wherever people struggling with economic insecurity became nervous about modernism's attack on old-time religion. Countless urban and rural Pentecostal churches attracted blacks and whites swayed by their pageantry and depiction of a personal Savior. Using modern advertising techniques and elaborately staged broadcasts on radio, magnetic "revivalist" preachers—such as the flamboyant Aimee Semple McPherson, whose radio broadcasts drew hundreds of thousands of listeners and who built the nation's first "megachurch"; former baseball player Billy Sunday, who preached to large crowds as on his nationwide travels; and Father Divine, an African American who amassed an interracial following from his base on Long Island—stirred revivalist fervor. Revivalism represented only one means of sustaining old-fashioned values and finding comfort in a fast-moving consumer society. Millions who did not belong to the KKK firmly believed that nonwhites and immigrants were inferior people who imperiled national welfare. Clergy and teachers of all faiths condemned dancing, new dress styles, and sex in movies and parked cars. Many urban dwellers supported prohibition, believing that eliminating the temptation of drink would help win the battle against poverty, vice, and corruption. Yet even while mourning a lost past, most Americans sincerely sought some kind of balance as they tried to adjust to the modern order in one way or another. Few refrained from listening to the radio and seeing movies like Why Change Your Wife?—activities that proved less corrupting than critics feared. More than ever, Americans sought fellowship in civic organizations such as Rotary, Elks, and women's clubs. Perhaps most important, more people were finding release in recreation and new uses of leisure time.

Black Sox Scandal

Spectator sports also boomed as each year millions packed stadiums and ballparks. In an age when technology and mass production had robbed experiences and objects of their uniqueness, sports provided the unpredictability and drama that people craved. Newspapers and radio magnified this tension, feeding sports news to eager readers and glorifying events with such dramatic narrative that sports promoters did not need to buy advertising space. Baseball's drawn-out suspense, diverse plays, and potential for keeping statistics attracted a huge following. After the "Black Sox scandal" of 1919, when eight members of the Chicago White Sox were banned from the game for allegedly throwing the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds (even though a jury acquitted them), baseball regained respectability by transforming itself. Discovering that home runs excited fans, the leagues redesigned the ball so that batters more easily could hit home runs. Game attendance skyrocketed. A record 300,000 people attended the six-game 1921 World Series between the New York Giants and New York Yankees. Millions gathered regularly to watch local teams, and even more listened to professional games on the radio.

The 1920s celebrity culture (skim)

Sports, movies, and the news created a galaxy of heroes. As technology and mass society made the individual less significant, people clung to heroic personalities as a means of identifying with the unique. Athletes like Bill Tilden in tennis, Gertrude Ederle in swimming (in 1926, she became the first woman to swim across the English Channel), and Bobby Jones in golf had national and international reputations. The power and action of boxing, football, and baseball produced the most popular sports heroes. Heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey attracted the first of several million-dollar gates in his fight with Frenchman Georges Carpentier in 1921. Harold "Red" Grange, running back for the University of Illinois football team, thrilled fans and sportswriters (who called him "The Galloping Ghost") with his speed and agility. Baseball's foremost hero was George Herman "Babe" Ruth, who began his career as a pitcher but found he could use his prodigious strength to better advantage hitting home runs. Ruth hit twenty-nine homers in 1919, fifty-four in 1920 (the year the Boston Red Sox sold him to the New York Yankees), fifty-nine in 1921, and sixty in 1927—each year a record. His talent and boyish grin endeared him to millions. Known for overindulgence in food, drink, and sex, he charmed fans into forgiving his excesses by appearing at public events and visiting hospitalized children. Americans also fulfilled a yearning for romance and adventure through movie idols. The films and personal lives of Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson, and Charlie Chaplin were discussed in parlors and pool halls across the country. One of the decade's most adored movie personalities was Italian-born Rudolph Valentino, whose looks and suave manner made women swoon and men imitate his pomaded hairdo and slick sideburns. Valentino's image exploited the era's sexual liberalism and flirtation with wickedness. In his most famous film, Valentino played a passionate sheik who carried away beautiful women to his tent, combining the roles of abductor and seducer. When he died at thirty-one of complications from ulcers and appendicitis, the press turned his funeral into a public extravaganza. Mourners lined up for a mile to file past his coffin.

Barrios

The 1920s also witnessed an influx of Puerto Ricans to the mainland. Puerto Rico had been a U.S. possession since 1898, and its natives were granted U.S. citizenship in 1916. When a shift in the island's economy from sugar to coffee production created a labor surplus, Puerto Ricans left for New York and other cities, attracted by employers seeking cheap labor. In the cities, they created barrios (communities) and found jobs in factories, restaurants, and domestic service. Puerto Ricans developed businesses—bodegas (grocery stores), cafes, boardinghouses— and social organizations to help them adapt to American society. As with Mexicans, educated Puerto Rican elites—doctors, lawyers, business owners—became community leaders.

Demobilization

The 1920s began with a jolting economic decline. Shortly after the First World War ended, industrial output dropped as wartime orders dried up. As European agriculture recovered from war, American exports diminished and farm incomes plunged. In the West, railroads and the mining industry suffered. As demobilized soldiers flooded the workforce, unemployment, around 2 percent in 1919, passed 12 percent in 1921. Layoffs spread through New England as textile companies abandoned outdated factories for the convenient raw materials and cheap labor of the South. As a consequence of these patterns, consumer spending dwindled, causing more contraction and joblessness.

Jazz

The Jazz Age, as the 1920s is sometimes called, owes its name to the music of black culture. Evolving from African and African American folk music, early jazz communicated exuberance, humor, and autonomy that black people seldom experienced in their public and political lives. With its emotional rhythms and improvisation, jazz blurred the distinction between composer and performer and created intimacy between performer and audience. Jazz arose in New Orleans (where it replaced African American ragtime music), and as African-Americans moved northward and westward after slavery, their music traveled with them. Centers of jazz formed in Kansas City, Chicago, and San Diego. Urban dance halls and nightclubs, some of which included interracial audiences, featured gifted jazz performers like trumpeter Louis Armstrong, trombonist Kid Ory, and blues singer Bessie Smith. They and others enjoyed wide fame thanks to phonograph records and radio. Music recorded by black artists and aimed at black consumers (sometimes called "race records") gave African Americans a place in commercial culture. More important, jazz endowed the nation with its own distinctive art form.

Women's Peace Union

The Progressive quest for justice and humanity combined with a desire to prevent future world wars to energize a widespread peace movement in the United States. Societies such as the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the National Council for Prevention of War worked to keep alive Woodrow Wilson's dream for a world body to preserve peace. Women peace advocates, blocked by male leaders from influence in these groups, formed their own organization. Carrie Chapman Catt's moderate National Conference on the Cure and Cause of War formed in 1924, and the more radical U.S. section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), organized in 1915 under leadership from Jane Addams and Emily Greene Balch, became the largest women's peace group. When Addams won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1921, she donated the money to the League of Nations. Most peace groups worked to prevent war from becoming a means of solving international disputes, but they differed over strategies to ensure world order. Some urged cooperation with the League of Nations and World Court. Others championed such causes as the arbitration of disputes, disarmament, the outlawing of war, and neutrality by non-combatants during armed conflict. The WILPF called for an end to U.S. economic imperialism and military intervention in Latin America to protect business interests. The Women's Peace Union, organized in 1921, lobbied for a constitutional amendment to require a national referendum on a declaration of war. Quakers, YMCA officials, and Social Gospel clergy in 1917 created the American Friends Service Committee to promote alternatives to warmaking. In all, peace seekers believed that their reform activities could and must deliver a world without war.

Taft Court Decisions

The Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice William Howard Taft, the former president whom Harding nominated to the Court in 1921, protected business and private property as aggressively as in the Gilded Age and abandoned its Progressive Era antitrust stance. Key decisions sheltered businesses from government regulation and hindered organized labor's ability to achieve its ends through strikes and legislation. In Coronado Coal Company v. United Mine Workers (1922), Taft ruled that a striking union, like a trust, could be prosecuted for illegal restraint of trade, yet in Maple Floor Association v. U.S. (1929), the Court decided that trade associations that distributed anti-union information were not acting in restraint of trade. The Court also voided the federal law restricting child labor (Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Company, 1922) because it infringed on state power, and it overturned a minimum wage law affecting women because it infringed on the liberty of contract (Adkins v. Children's Hospital, 1923).

W.E.B. DuBois

The UNIA declined in the mid-1920s after mismanagement plagued Garvey's plans. In 1923, Garvey was imprisoned for mail fraud involving the bankrupt Black Star Line and then deported to Jamaica in 1927 for trying to sell stock by advertising a ship that his company did not own. His prosecution, however, was politically motivated. Middle-class black leaders, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, and several clergymen opposed the UNIA, fearing that its extremism would undermine their efforts and influence. Beginning in 1919, the U.S. Bureau of Investigation (BOI), forerunner to the FBI, had been monitoring Garvey's radical activities by infiltrating the UNIA, and the BOI's deputy head, J. Edgar Hoover, proclaimed Garvey to be one of the most dangerous blacks in America. Du Bois also became incensed when word leaked out in 1922 that Garvey had met secretly with leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, who supported Garvey's idea of enabling blacks to move to Africa. Nevertheless, for several years the UNIA attracted a large following (contemporaries estimated 500,000; Garvey claimed 6 million), and Garvey's speeches instilled in many African Americans a heightened sense of racial pride.

Automobiles

The automobile stood as vanguard of the era's material wonders. During the 1920s, automobile registrations soared from 8 million to 23 million, and by 1929 one in every five Americans had a car. Mass production and competition made autos affordable even to some working-class families. A Ford Model T cost less than $300, and a Chevrolet sold for $700 by 1926—when factory workers earned about $1,300 a year and clerical workers about $2,300. Used cars cost less. At those prices, people could consider the car a necessity rather than a luxury. "There is no such thing as a 'pleasure automobile,'" proclaimed one newspaper ad in 1925. "You might as well talk of 'pleasure fresh air,' or of 'pleasure beef steak.' . . . The automobile increases length of life, increases happiness, represents above all other achievements the progress and the civilization of our age." Automobiles altered American life as railroads had seventy-five years earlier. Owners acquired a new "riding habit" and abandoned crowded, slow trolleys. Streets became cleaner as autos replaced horse-drawn carriages. Female drivers achieved newfound independence, taking touring trips with friends, conquering muddy roads, and making repairs when their vehicles broke down. Families created "homes on wheels," packing food and camping equipment to "get away from it all." By 1927, most autos were enclosed (they previously had open tops), offering young people new private space for courtship and sex. A vast choice of models (108 automobile manufacturers in 1923) and colors allowed owners to express personal tastes.

Charles Lindbergh

The era's most celebrated hero, however, was Charles A. Lindbergh, an intrepid aviator who in May 1927 flew a plane solo from New York to Paris. The flight seized the attention of millions, as newspaper and telegraph reports followed Lindbergh's progress. After the pilot landed success-ully, President Coolidge dispatched a warship to bring "Lucky Lindy" back home. Celebrants sent Lindbergh 55,000 telegrams and some 3 million to 4 million people celebrated him in a triumphant homecoming parade. Among countless prizes, Lindbergh received the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Congressional Medal of Honor. Promoters offered him millions of dollars to tour the world and $700,000 for a movie contract. Through it all, Lindbergh, nicknamed "The Lone Eagle," remained dignified, even aloof. Although his flight and its aftermath symbolized the new combination of technology and mass culture of the 1920s, Lindbergh himself epitomized individual achievement, self-reliance, and courage—old-fashioned values that attracted public respect amid the media frenzy.

Greenwich Village

The era's openness regarding sexuality also enabled the underground homosexual culture to surface a little more than in previous eras. In nontraditional city neighborhoods, such as New York's Greenwich Village and Harlem, cheap rentsand a tolerance for alternate lifestyles attracted gay men and lesbians, who patronized dance halls, speakeasies, cafes, and other gathering places. Establishments that catered to a gay clientele remained targets for police raids, however, demonstrating that gays and lesbians could not expect acceptance from the rest of society. These trends represented a break with the more restrained culture of the nineteenth century. But social change rarely proceeds smoothly. As the decade wore on, various groups mobilized to defend older values.

Immigration trends

The newest immigrants came from Mexico and Puerto Rico, where, as in rural North America, declining fortunes pushed people off the land. In parts of California and the Southwest, Mexicans had been among the original inhabitants and Anglo- Europeans were the immigrants. But by the twentieth century, Anglos had settled and taken control of many communities and businesses. During the 1910s, Anglo farmers' associations encouraged immigration from Mexico in order to obtain a source of cheap workers; by the 1920s, Mexican migrants constituted three-fourths of farm labor in the American West. Growers treated these laborers as slaves, paying them extremely low wages. Resembling other immigrant groups, Mexican newcomers lacked resources and skills, and men outnumbered women. Although some achieved middle-class status as shopkeepers and professionals, most crowded into low-rent districts in growing cities like Denver, San Antonio, Los Angeles, and Tucson, where they suffered poor sanitation, poor police protection, and poor schools.

"Factories in fields"

The picture was different in farming. Pressed into competition with growers in other countries and trying to increase productivity by investing in machines, such as harvesters and tractors, American farmers found themselves steeped in hardship. Irrigation and mechanization had created "factories in the fields," making large-scale farming so efficient that fewer farmers could produce more crops than ever before. As a result, crop prices plunged, big agribusinesses took over, and small landholders and tenants could not make a living. Shortly after the end of the First World War, for example, the price that farmers could get for cotton dropped by two-thirds and that for livestock fell by half. Incomes of small farmers (but not agribusinesses) plummeted, and debts rose.

Women's paid labor

The practice of dating burgeoned because, after the First World War, women streamed into the labor force. By 1930, 10.8 million women held paying jobs, an increase of 2 million since war's end. The sex segregation that had long characterized workplaces persisted; most women took work that men seldom sought. Thus, more than 1 million women held jobs as teachers and nurses. In the clerical category, some 2.2 million women were typists, bookkeepers, and filing clerks, a tenfold increase since 1920. Another 736,000 were store clerks, and growing numbers could be found in the personal service category as waitresses and hairdressers. Wherever women were employed, their wages seldom exceeded half of those paid to men for similar work. Even though the vast majority of married women did not hold paying jobs (only 12 percent were employed in 1930), married women as a proportion of the workforce rose by 30 percent during the 1920s, and the number of employed married women swelled from 1.9 million to 3.1 million. These figures omit countless widowed, divorced, and abandoned women who held jobs and who, like married women, often had children to support. The proportion of racial and ethnic minority women in paid labor was double that of white women. Often they entered the workforce because their husbands were unemployed or underemployed. The majority of employed African American women held domestic jobs doing cooking, cleaning, and laundry. The few who had manufacturing jobs, such as in cigarette factories and meatpacking plants, performed the least desirable, lowest-paying tasks. Some opportunities opened for educated black women in social work, teaching, and nursing, but these women also faced discrimination and low incomes. More than white mothers, employed black mothers called on a family network of grandmothers and aunts to help with child care. Economic necessity also drew other minority women into the labor force. Mexican women worked as domestic servants, operatives in garment factories, and agricultural laborers. Next to black women, Japanese American women were the most likely to hold paying jobs. They toiled as field hands and domestics, jobs in which they encountered racial bias and low pay.

Alan Locke / New N----

These artists and intellectuals grappled with notions of identity. Though cherishing their African heritage and the folk culture of the slave South, they realized that blacks had to come to terms with themselves as free American people. Thus, Alain Locke urged that the New N---- should become "a collaborator and participant in American civilization." But Langston Hughes wrote, "We younger N---- artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful."

Black Thursday and Tuesday

This trust dissolved on October 24, 1929, known as Black Thursday, when stock market prices suddenly plunged, wiping out $10 billion in value (worth over $100 billion today). Panic selling set in. Prices of many stocks hit record lows; some sellers could find no buyers. Stunned crowds gathered outside the frantic New York Stock Exchange. At noon, leading bankers met at the headquarters of J. P. Morgan and Company. To restore faith, they put up $20 million and ceremoniously began buying stocks. The mood brightened, and some stocks rallied. The bankers, it seemed, had saved the day. But as news of Black Thursday spread, frightened investors decided to sell stocks rather than risk further losses. On Black Tuesday, October 29, with so many people trying to sell, prices plummeted again. Hoover, who had never approved of what he called "the fever of speculation," assured Americans that "the crisis will be over in sixty days." Three months later, he still believed that "the worst is over without a doubt." He shared the popular assumptions that the stock market's ills could be quarantined and that the economy was strong enough to endure until the market righted itself. Instead, the crash ultimately helped to unleash a devastating worldwide depression. In hindsight, it is evident that the Depression began long before the stock market crash. Prosperity in the 1920s was not as widespread as optimists believed. Agriculture had been languishing for decades, and many areas, especially in the South, had been excluded from the bounty of consumer society. Racial minorities suffered from economic as well as social discrimination in both urban and rural settings. Industries such as mining and textiles failed to sustain profits throughout most of the decade, and even the high-flying automotive and household goods industries stagnated after 1926. The fever of speculation that concerned Hoover included rash investments in California and Florida real estate, as well as in the stock market, and masked much of what was unhealthy in the national economy.

Women's political movements and organizations

Though they had achieved suffrage through the Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in 1920, politically active women remained excluded from local and national power structures. But like business associations, women's voluntary organizations used tactics that advanced pressure-group politics. Whether the issue was birth control, world peace, education, American Indian affairs, or opposition to lynching, women in these associations lobbied for legislation to support their causes. For example, the League of Women Voters reorganized out of the National Woman Suffrage Association, encouraged women to run for office, and actively lobbied for laws to improve conditions for employed women, the mentally ill, and the poor.

1920s mass culture

Together, cities and suburbs fostered the mass culture that gave the decade its character. Most consumers who jammed shops, movie houses, and sporting arenas and who embraced fads like crossword puzzles and miniature golf lived in or around cities. In these places, people defied older morals by patronizing speakeasies (illegal saloons during prohibition), wearing outlandish clothes, and dancing to jazz. Yet the ideal of small-town society survived. While millions thronged cityward, Americans reminisced about the simplicity of a world gone by, however mythical that world might have been. This was the dilemma the modern nation faced: how does one anchor oneself in a world of rampant materialism and rapid social change?

Margaret Mead

United States anthropologist noted for her claims about adolescence and sexual behavior in Polynesian cultures (1901-1978). Said that Samoan cultured nurtured these relations and was better for the minds of the young.

President Calvin Coolidge

Vice President Calvin Coolidge, who now became president, was far less outgoing than his predecessor. Journalists nicknamed him "Silent Cal," and one quipped that Coolidge could say nothing in five languages. As governor of Massachusetts, Coolidge attracted national attention in 1919 when he used the National Guard to end a strike by Boston policemen, an action that won him business support and the vice presidential nomination in 1920. Coolidge's presidency coincided with and assisted business prosperity. Respectful of private enterprise and aided by treasury secretary Andrew Mellon, Coolidge's administration reduced federal debt, lowered income tax rates (especially for the wealthy), and began construction of a national highway system. But Coolidge refused to apply government power to assist struggling farmers. Responding to farmers' complaints of falling prices, Congress twice passed bills to establish government-backed price supports for staple crops (the McNary-Haugen bills of 1927 and 1928). Resembling the subtreasury scheme that Farmers' Alliances had advocated in the 1890s, these bills proposed to establish a system whereby the government would buy surplus farm products and either hold them until prices rose or sell them abroad. Farmers argued that they deserved as much government protection as manufacturers got. Coolidge, however, vetoed the measures both times as improper government interference in the market economy.

Christian fundamentalism and revivalism

Whereas nativists tried to establish ethnic and racial purity, the pursuit of spiritual purity stirred religious fundamentalists. Millions of Americans sought certainty and salvation by following Protestant evangelical denominations that interpreted the Bible literally. Resolutely believing that God's miracles created the world and its living creatures, they condemned the theory of evolution as heresy and argued that wherever fundamentalists constituted a majority of a community, as they did in many places, they should be able to determine what would be taught in schools. Their enemies were "modernists," who used reasoning from social sciences, such as psychology and anthropology, to interpret behavior. To modernists, God was important to the study of culture and history, but science was responsible for advancing knowledge.

Clarence Darrow

William Jennings Bryan, former secretary of state and three-time presidential candidate, argued for the prosecution, and a team of civil liberties lawyers headed by noted defense attorney Clarence Darrow represented Scopes. News correspondents crowded into the small town, and radio stations broadcast the trial. Although Scopes was convicted—clearly he had broken the law—modernists claimed victory. The testimony, they believed, showed fundamentalism to be illogical. The trial's climax occurred when Bryan took the witness stand as an expert on the Bible. Responding to Darrow's probing, Bryan asserted that Eve really had been created from Adam's rib, that the Tower of Babel was responsible for the diversity of languages, and that Jonah had been swallowed by a big fish. Spectators in Dayton cheered Bryan for his declarations, but the liberal press mocked him and his allies. Nevertheless, fundamentalism continued to expand. For example, the evangelical Southern Baptist Convention became the fastest-growing Protestant sect, and, along with other fundamentalist groups, pressured school boards to stop teaching about evolution. Advocates for what they believed to be basic values of family and conduct, these churches created an independent subculture, with their own schools, camps, radio ministries, and missionary societies.