A Turbulent Decade (Chapter 21)
The US had loaned the Allies nearly $10 billion to finance war-time purchases of American goods and rebuild war-torn Europe. Why did the Allies claim that their debt had been repaid? (649)
Americans had supplied money, but the Allies gave their blood. Moreover, the US could easily afford to cancel the loans as the country had profited enormously from the war.
Tunnels and Bridges (626)
An acute need soon developed for tunnels and bridges to line cities by car to ever-dispersed commuter suburbs. In 1927, the Holland Tunnel, the nation's first underwater motor vehicle tunnel, opened between New York City and New Jersey.
What did Lost Generation writers use to justify their revolt against "repressive" codes of conduct? (632)
Backed by Freud's theories, these writers championed sexual liberations as one way to escape the sterile and deadly confines of modern life.
The car seemed to offer a clean, flexible solution to filthy city transportation problems. Farmers also benefited from the new technology by providing better farm equipment and an opportunity to end the isolation of farm life. But who really benefited from America becoming a car culture? (626)
Besides enriching automobile manufactures, the explosion in car ownership meant boom times for numerous other industries.
Roadside Attractions (627)
Car travelers also needed food, lodging, and gas. To entice tourists to stop at their establishments, rural businessmen erected eye-catching signs and buildings. A revolution in commercial roadside architecture was soon underway.
Cars also transformed recreational habits. For example, ministered complained that instead of spending Sundays in church, many families chose to take all-day drives. How else did cars change families? (627-628)
Cars let teenagers take their courting out of the family parlor and into the backseat of the family automobile, to the dismay of parents everywhere. Cars also made it harder for town officials to regulate red-light districts.
The First Red Scare (1919-1920) (634)
Due to fear of a communist-inspired Russian Revolution, the Justice Department arrested and deported alien anarchists and Communists suspected of trying to destroy American democracy and capitalism.
When the stock market crashed, American bankers drastically reduced their overseas loans, so Germany and then the Allied nations eventually defaulted on their loans. What happened? (651)
Hoover successfully called for a one year moratorium on all international debts. With the connection between reparation payments and war loans now formally acknowledged by the US, the Allied governments canceled most of Germany's remaining reparation payments. (Finland was the only nation that repaid its entire debt.)
Fundamentalist initiated a campaign to stop the teaching of Darwin's views on evolution. Who won? (637)
In 1917 the US Supreme Court declared anti-evolution laws unconstitutional
Coolidge continued the Republican effort to find alternative ways to maintain with what pact? (648)
In Geneva, countries renounced agressive war as an instrument of national policy and agreed to resolve their disagreements through peaceful means.
When the war ended, the government abruptly canceled its orders and withdrew from managing worker-industrial relations. Some businesses returned to low wages, long hours, and blacklists. Others, however, turned to welfare capitalism. How did welfare capitalism differ from the usual tactics? (628)
Industrialists offered a wide range of benefits such as medical insurance, pensions, and stock ownership plans to create a loyal workforce. Despite workers' enthusiasm for welfare capitalism, the reality rarely matched the rhetoric. Seasonal layoffs continued, wage rates fluctuated, and long hours in factories persisted.
Who took over the idea of empowering blacks economically when Washington died in 1915? (640)
Jamaican immigrant Marcus Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association to encourage economic self-sufficiency by creating black-owned businesses. But unlike Washington, who wanted to improve life for blacks within the US, Garvey spoke often of acquiring enough economic power to establish an independent African nation that could reunite the world's dispersed black peoples.
Movie stars and athletes enjoyed nationwide adulation in the twenties. In an era dominated by cultural heroes, none rose to greater prominence than the pilot Charles A. Lindbergh. Lindbergh piloted the Spirit of St. Louis on the first nonstop solo flight from New York to Paris. What did the 33.5 hour flight symbolize? (630-631)
Lindbergh's triumph assured Americans that individual initiative still mattered and that technological advancement benefited humankind at a time where the recent industrialized slaughter on the Western Front suggested otherwise. "His flight illustrated the nation's industrial march forward"
Big businesses started sponsoring nationally syndicated radio shows to boost sales of their products. What did local radios promote? (630)
Local radio shows were designed specifically for union members, religious groups, immigrant communities, or African American to help strengthen bonds within these subcultures as well.
Johnson, the director of the NAACP int he twenties, coined the term "The Red Summer of 1919". What did this term refer to? (638-639)
Lynch mobs tortured and killed nearly 5,000 victims between 1880 and 1930. Specifically in 1919, there was a wave of vicious assaults against black communities that left at leas 43 dead.
While still agreeing that modern culture was flawed, other Americans wanted to bolster, rather than reject, traditional values. Temperance, on of the nation's longest lasting reform movements, took on a new life during WWI. Who won the political battle, the drys or wets? (632-633)
On December 18, 1917, Congress approved the Eighteenth Amendment, which banned the sale, manufacture, and transportation of intoxicating liquors. When Prohibition went into effect in 1920, Congress clarified the definition of "intoxicating" (any beverage with more that 0.5%) through the Volstead Act.
Belying the expectation that it would create a more virtuous, law-abiding society, prohibition lead to what other crimes? (633)
Organized crime syndicates (e.g. gangsters like Capone) Speakeaseis
The New Women (644)
Popular culture consistently defined the 1920s woman as someone who kept herself thin, pretty, and lively for her husband.
Who was Margaret Sanger? (646)
Sanger opened the nation's first birth control clinic in Brooklyn, New York, where she passed out flyers to advertise the benefits of contraception over illegal and dangerous back-alley abortions.
In the 1920 election, the Republicans had selected Harding for "a return to normalcy". Harding easily defeated Democrat Cox. However, Harding died two years into his term, leaving VP Coolidge in charge. What scandal tarnished Coolidge's presidency? (627)
Secretary of the Interior Fall went to jail for accepting bribes from two wealthy businessmen to lease government-controlled oil reserves in Teapot Dome.
Why was Sanger arrested for distributing information about birth control? (644)
Since 1873, the Comstock Act had prohibited sending information about contraception, abortion, or pornography. By openly discussing birth control, Sanger made public the private contraception practices of middle-class couples, and changed attitudes toward birth control that reduce enforcement of the Comstock Act.
In the early twenties, the US underwent a historic shift, changing immigration views to a nativist vision. What laws did Congress pass that reflected this shift? (634)
The 1921 Emergency Immigration Act temporarily set immigration quotas. The Immigration Act of 1924 made these quotas permanent, allowing unrestricted immigration from the West, curtailing all Asian immigration, and using quotas to control how many immigrants emigrated from individual European nations.
The Allies reparation payments from Germany to repay their US war loans, but Germany was missing payments. This crisis threatened to undermine American economic interests by thrusting Europe into a recession. Having ruled out lowering the tariff or canceling Allied war loans, how did America help foster Europe's economic recovery? (651)
The Dawes Plan loaned Germany $200 million in gold to pay a reduced reparation bill and gave it more time to meet its debt. Certain that a German recovery was imminent, American bankers early provided half the funds for the plan and made private loans to help Germany even more. The Young Plan further reduced Germany's final bill to $8 billion and restructured the payment schedule.
What was the outcome of the conference? (648)
The Five Power Treaty set a ten year moratorium on battleship construction and limited the guns that ships could carry (excluding subs, aircraft, or land forces). In the Four Power Treaty, forces agreed to respect one another's Pacific possessions and consult if any dispute arose. In the Nine Power Treaty, USA, France, Britain, Japan, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, and China all agreed to respect the Open Door Policy in China.
The federal government had suppressed the original Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction. But did it ever come back? (639)
The Klan revived in the 1910s and became a national organization that drew members from all parts of the country with membership fluctuating between three and six million throughout the twenties. (Indiana was home to the largest chapter of the KKK).
The New Negro (642)
The New Negro embodied a spirit of black racial pride and militancy that set a younger generation of black artists and civil rights leaders apart form their predecessors, who had emphasized assimilation
When women got the right to vote nationwide, an aging generation of feminists tried immediately to organize the female vote behind causes that particularly affected women. Responding to studies that revealed high rates of infant and mother mortality in childbirth, for what did the League of Women Voters lobby Congress? (644)
The Sheppard-Towner Act offered eight years of matching funds to states for classes that taught poor mothers about nutrition, hygiene, and prenatal care. It also provided visiting nurses for low-income pregnant women and new mothers.
The high point of the disarmament movement came when Harding convened the Washington Conference in DC to negotiate agreements that would limit warships. How was the conference celebrated? (647)
The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier memorialized all deceased soldiers who went missing or unidentified during the war. Additionally, it encapsulated the Harding and Coolidge administration's diplomatic goals in the early twenties.
Petroleum (626)
To satisfy the unquenchable thirst for gasoline, the petroleum industry underwent a major expansion with new oil wells appearing daily in Texas and California.
Roads (626-627)
To satisfy their wanderlust, the public demanded good roads even through rural areas. The government responded with a massive road-building and paving program to create a new national high-way system.
The competing visions of whether illegal drinking was harmless fun or a vice that destroyed families kept the political debate over prohibition alive throughout the 1920s. What ended prohibition? (633-634)
With the onset of the Great Depression, Wets made headway with the argument that enforcing the law drained the federal treasury. When FDR entered the White House, he immediately asked Congress to repeal prohibition with the Twenty-First Amendment. (Few states passed minimum-age drinking laws.)
Younger women displayed little interest in the social movements championed by their elders. Instead, they focused on their economic prospects. (644)
Women made up 23.6% of the work force by 1920, although they remained restricted to professions considered appropriate for their gender.
Modernism (636)
a liberal Christian theology that emphasized the ongoing revelation of divine truth
Fundamentalism (636)
an evangelical Christian theology that viewed the Bible as an authentic, literal recounting of historical events and absolute moral word of God (
African Americans during the Twenties were also active, employing new strategies to advance racial equality. What was the Harlem Renaissance? (642)
an outpouring of African American artistic expression in the 1920s and 1930s with the themes of black aspirations, working-class countryside life, female sexuality, and violence
Increased industrial productivity and efficiency created an unprecedented abundance of affordable goods in the twenties. Going against the traditional Victorian values of thrift and restraint, Americans instead increasingly relied on credit to by what kind of goods? (628-630)
cars, radios, and household appliances
What two key provisions of the 1924 law have remained key stable of the modern American immigration legislation? (636)
the principle of family reunification and the desirability of certain skills
Gertrude Stein coined the term "the Lost Generation" to describe who? (632)
white intellectuals and artists who rebelled against Victorian values in the twenties (choosing instead to live i the moment) and who lived primarily overseas
