Chapter 22 History
Organization founded in 1910 by Black activists and White progressives that promoted education as a means of combating social problems and focused on legal action to secure the civil rights supposedly guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
________________________ was the founder of modern psychoanalysis. His writings on the subconscious, dreams, and latent sexual yearnings captured the attention of many Americans, especially young adults.
SIGMUND FREUD
During the twenties, the drive for industrial efficiency powered the wheels of mass production and consumption and became a cardinal belief of Republican leaders. Herbert Hoover, secretary of commerce in the Harding and Coolidge cabinets, embodied the dream of organizational efficiency, for he himself was a remarkable success story.
The Rise of Herbert Hoover
At the same time, significant social and political changes signaled what many called
a "New Era" in American life.
An early-twentieth-century cultural movement that rejected traditional notions of reality and adopted radical new forms of artistic expression.
modernism
_______________________________ Into Bondage (1936), a painting by Aaron Douglas (left), exemplifies how Black artists in the Harlem Renaissance used their African roots and collective history as inspiration. The sculpture Realization (right), by Augusta Savage, reflects her mission to challenge negative views of African Americans. After having been rejected from an arts fellowship abroad because of her race, Savage spoke out and became a pillar of the artistic community in Harlem.
AFRICAN AMERICAN ART
Advertisers targeted women, who purchased two-thirds of consumer goods, and sponsored new weekday radio programs (popular with middle-class homemakers) that were funded by "commercials" promoting laundry detergent and hand soap-hence the term soap operas.
Advertising and marketing
Al Capone and Organized Crime Prohibition turned many Americans into criminals and supplied organized crime with a source of enormous new income. The most ruthless Prohibition-era gangster was Alphonse Gabriel "Al" Capone. Born in Brooklyn in 1899, the son of Italian immigrants, he was expelled from school for hitting a female teacher. Capone then aligned himself with organized crime gangs. During a fight at a brothel, he suffered a knife wound on his cheek that gave him his lifelong nickname: "Scarface."
Al Capone
In the first decade of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein, a young German physicist, published several research papers that changed how scientists viewed the world—and the universe. Einstein used his intuition, imagination, and analytical skill to conduct what he called thought experiments. "Imagination," he said, "is more important than knowledge." He happily left it to others to test his mind-bending conclusions.
Albert Einstein
After the Great War, many American officials decided that the best way to keep the peace was to limit the size of armies and navies. The United States had no intention of maintaining a large army after 1920, but under the shipbuilding program begun in 1916, it had constructed a powerful navy second only to that of Great Britain. Although neither the British nor the Americans wanted a naval armaments race, both were worried about the growth of Japanese power in Asia and the Pacific.
Attempts at Disarmament
F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jazz Age label referred to the popularity of jazz music, a dynamic blend of several musical traditions. It had first emerged as piano-based "ragtime" at the end of the nineteenth century. Thereafter, African American musicians such as Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Bessie Smith combined the energies of ragtime with the emotions of the blues to create jazz, originally an African American slang term meaning sexual intercourse. In 1925, an African American journalist announced that jazz had "absorbed the national spirit, that tremendous spirit of go, the nervousness, lack of conventionality and boisterous good-nature characteristic of the American, white or black." The culture of jazz quickly spread from its origins in New Orleans, Kansas City, Memphis, and St. Louis to the African American neighborhoods of Harlem in New York City and Chicago's South Side. Large dance halls met the swelling demand for jazz music and the dance craze that accompanied it, including new dances like the Charleston and the Black Bottom whose sexually provocative movements shocked traditionalists.
Birth of Jazz
The celebration of Black culture found much different expression in what came to be called ___________________, which promoted Black separatism from mainstream American life. Its leader was Marcus Mosiah Garvey, who claimed to speak for all 400 million Blacks worldwide. In 1916, Garvey brought to Harlem the headquarters of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which he had started in his native Jamaica two years before.
Black nationalism / Marcus Mosiah Garvey / Universal
What Ruth and Grange were to their sports, William Harrison "Jack" Dempsey was to boxing. In 1919, he won the world heavyweight title from Jess Willard, a giant of a man weighing 300 pounds and standing six and a half feet tall. Dempsey knocked him down seven times in the first round. Willard gave up in the fourth round, and Dempsey's performance made him a global celebrity. The "Manassa Mauler" became a hero to millions and was especially popular with working-class men, for he had been born poor and lived for years as a hobo.
Boxing
In June 1928, Kansas-born Amelia Earhart joined two male pilots in being the first woman to cross the Atlantic in an airplane. In 1932, she flew solo from Canada to Northern Ireland in fifteen hours, thereby instantly becoming one of the most famous women in the world. In 1937, Earhart set out with a male navigator to fly around the globe at the equator. Tragically, while crossing the South Pacific, she lost radio contact and was never heard from again.
Earhart
Electricity became a revolutionary new force influencing everyday life and the consumer culture. In 1920, only 35 percent of homes had electricity; by 1930, the number was 68 percent. Similar increases occurred in the number of households with indoor plumbing, washing machines, and automobiles. Moderately priced creature comforts and conveniences, such as flush toilets, electric irons and fans, handheld cameras, wristwatches, cigarette lighters, vacuum cleaners, and linoleum floors, became more widely available, especially among the rapidly growing urban middle class.
Electricity and modern conveniences
Most Americans expected the wartime debts to be repaid, but Europeans thought differently. The French and British had held off the German invasion at great cost while the United States was raising an army in 1917. The British also noted that after the American Revolution, the newly independent United States had repudiated old debts to British investors. The French likewise pointed out that they had never been repaid for helping the Americans win the Revolution.
European-American disagreements over war debts and economic interdependency
In 1923, Harding left on a trip to the West Coast and the Alaska Territory. Along the way, he asked Herbert Hoover, the secretary of commerce, what he should do about the Fall scandal. Hoover gave the correct response: "Publish it, and at least get credit for integrity on your side." Before Harding had time to act, he suffered an attack of food poisoning in Seattle. After showing signs of recovering, he died in San Francisco. He was fifty-seven years old.
Hardings death
The nation's first self-conscious Black literary and artistic movement; centered in New York City's Harlem district, which had a largely Black population in the wake of the Great Migration from the South.
Harlem Renaissance
With the outbreak of war in 1914, Herbert Hoover exchanged his business career for one in public service. He organized the evacuation of tens of thousands of Americans stranded in Europe by the German invasion of France, then led a massive program to provide food to 7.5 million starving civilians in German-occupied Belgium.
Herbert Hoovers Progressive Conservative
________________________ Federal legislation intended to favor northern and western European immigrants over those from southern and eastern Europe by restricting the number of immigrants from any one European country to 2 percent of the total numt of immigrants per year, with an overall limit of slightly over 150,000 new arrivals per year.
Immigration Act of 1924
Term coined by writer F. Scott Fitzgerald to characterize the spirit of rebellion and spontaneity among young Americans in the 1920s, a spirit epitomized by the hugely popular jazz music of the era.
Jazz Age
In her work as a midwife, Sanger witnessed the consequences of unwanted pregnancies, miscarriages, and alleyway abortions. To her, the problems had an obvious solution: birth control, a term she and friends coined in 1914. Birth control devices, she argued, provided the best alternative to abortions and "enforced, enslaved maternity."
Margaret Sanger and Birth Control
Pound recruited, edited, published, and reviewed the best young talents among the modernist writers, improving their writing, bolstering their courage, and propelling their careers. Eliot claimed that Pound was single-handedly responsible for the modernist movement in poetry. One of the young American writers Pound took under his wing was T. S. Eliot, who had recently graduated from Harvard. Within a few years, Eliot surpassed Pound to become the leading American modernist. His epic 433-line poem The Waste Land (1922), which Pound edited, became a monument of modernism. It expressed a sense of postwar disillusionment and melancholy that had a powerful effect on other writers. Eliot became the arbiter of modernist taste in Anglo-American literature.
Modernism in literature and poetry
(1) God did not exist; (2) reality was not rational, orderly, or obvious; and, in the aftermath of the Great War, (3) social progress could no longer be taken for granted. These premises led writers, painters, musicians, dancers, and architects to rebel against good taste, old-fashioned morals, and old-time religion. Experimental poet Ezra Pound provided the slogan for modernism when he exclaimed,
Modernism thrived on three unsettling assumptions
The UNIA grew quickly after the Great War ended. By 1923, Garvey claimed the UNIA had as many as 4 million members served by 800 offices. His goal was to build an all-Black empire in Africa. "Back to Africa" became his rallying cry. To that end, he called himself the "Provisional President of Africa," raised funds to send Americans to Africa, and expelled any The UNIA: "Back to Africa" Black nationalism UNIA member who married a White.
Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)
William Jennings Bryan died knowing that one of his other religious crusades had succeeded: alcoholic beverages had been outlawed nationwide. The movement to prohibit beer, wine, and liquor forged an unusual alliance between rural and small-town Protestants and urban political progressives-between believers in "old-time religion," who considered drinking sinful, and social reformers, mostly women, who were convinced that Prohibition would reduce divorces, prostitution, spousal abuse, and other alcohol-related violence. "There would not be any social evil," insisted Ella Boole of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, "if there was no saloon evil."
Prohibition
_______________________ National ban on the manufacture and sale of alcohol, though the law was widely violated and proved too difficult to enforce effectively.
Prohibition (1920-1933).
_______________________ Trial of two Italian immigrants that occurred at the height of Italian immigration and against the backdrop of numerous terror attacks by anarchists; despite a lack of clear evidence, the two defendants, both self-professed anarchis were convicted of murder and were executed.
Sacco and Vanzetti case (1921)
_______________________ Highly publicized trial of a high-school teacher in Tennessee for violating a state law that prohibited the teaching of evolution; the trial was seen as the climax of the fundamentalist war on Darwinism.
Scopes Trial (1925)
Scopes used a textbook that taught Darwinian evolution, and police arrested him for doing so. The town boosters succeeded beyond their wildest hopes: the Scopes Trial received worldwide publicity--but it was not flattering to Dayton. Before the start of the twelve-day "monkey trial" on July 10, 1925, the narrow streets of Dayton swarmed with evangelists, atheists, hot-dog and soda-pop peddlers, and hundreds of newspaper and radio reporters. A man tattooed with Bible verses preached on a street corner while a live monkey was paraded about town.
Scopes trial
Harding administration scandal in which Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall profited from secret leasing of government oil reserves in Wyoming to private oil companies.
Teapot Dome Scandal (1923)
During the 1920s, Americans fell in love with mass spectator sports. Baseball became the "national pastime." With larger-than-life heroes such as New York Yankee legends George Herman "Babe" Ruth and Henry Louis "Lou" Gehrig, teams attracted intense interest and huge crowds. Ruth may well have been the most famous athlete of all time. In 1920, more than a million spectators attended his games. Two years later, the Yankees built a new stadium, dubbing it the "House That Ruth Built." They went on to win World Series championships in 1923, 1927, and 1928. More than 20 million people attended professional games in 1927, the year that Babe Ruth, the "Sultan of Swat," set a record by hitting an astonishing sixty home runs. Yet for all its popularity, baseball would remain a racially segregated sport for another twenty years; the so-called Negro Leagues provided playing opportunities for African Americans.
The "national pastime"
On August 2, 1927, while on vacation in the Black Hills of South Dakota, President Coolidge announced, "I do not choose to run for President in 1928." Coolidge's decision cleared the way for Herbert Hoover to win the Republican nomination. The party's platform took credit for the nation's longest period of sustained prosperity, the government's cost cutting, debt and tax reduction, and the high tariffs ("as vital to American agriculture as... to manufacturing") designed to "protect" American businesses from foreign competition. The Democrats nominated four-term New York governor Alfred E. Smith, called the "Happy Warrior" by Franklin D. Roosevelt in his nominating speech. The candidates presented sharply different images: Hoover, the successful businessman and bureaucratic manager from an Iowa farm, and Smith, a professional Irish American politician from New York City's Lower East Side. To working-class Democrats in northern cities, Smith was a hero, the poor grandson of Irish Catholic immigrants who had become governor of the most populous state. His outspoken criticism of Prohibition also endeared him to the Irish, Italians, Germans, and others. On the other hand, as the first Roman Catholic nominated for president by a major party, a product of New York's machine-run politics, and a "wet" on Prohibition (in direct opposition to his party's platform), Smith represented all that was opposed by southern and western rural Democrats-as well as most rural and small-town Republicans. A Kansas newspaper editor declared that the "whole puritan civilization, which has built a sturdy, orderly nation, is threatened by Smith." The Ku Klux Klan issued a "Klarion Kall for a Krusade" against him, mailing thousands of postcards proclaiming that "Alcohol" Smith, the Catholic New Yorker, was the Antichrist.
The 1928 Election: Hoover versus Smith
To house the 1,200 works of modern art collected from more than 300 painters and sculptors in America and Europe, the two dozen young painters who organized the show leased the vast 69th Army Regiment Armory in New York City. The Armory Show, officially known as the International Exhibition of Modern Art, opened on February 17, 1913. As Dodge had predicted, it created an immediate sensation. For many who toured the Armory Show, modern art became the thing that they loved to hate. Modernism, growled a prominent art critic, "is nothing else than the total destruction of the art of painting." The New York Times warned visitors who shared the "old belief in reality" that they would enter "a stark region of abstractions" at the "lunatic asylum" show that was "hideous to our unaccustomed eyes."
The Armory Show
Early in 1923, the head of the Veterans Bureau resigned when faced with an investigation for stealing medical and hospital supplies intended for former servicemen. A few weeks later, the legal adviser to the bureau killed himself. Soon thereafter, authorities learned that Jesse Smith, a colleague of Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty, was illegally selling federal paroles, pardons, and judgeships from his Justice Department office. When Harding learned of his escapades, he called Smith to the Oval Office and dressed him down. The next day, Smith killed himself in Daugherty's apartment. Then, Daugherty was accused of selling, for personal gain, German assets seized after the war. When asked to testify about the matter, he refused on the grounds that doing so might incriminate him.
The Harding Scandals
The most violent of the reactionary movements during the twenties was a revived Ku Klux Klan, the infamous post-Civil War group of White racists that had re-created itself in 1915. The old Klan had died out in the 1870s once White Democrats regained control of the former Confederate states after Reconstruction. Now, no longer simply a southern group intent on terrorizing African Americans, the new Klan was a nationwide organization devoted to "100 percent Americanism"; only "natives"-White Protestants born in the United States-could be members. With its secret signs and codes, weird rituals, and its costumes featuring white sheets and spooky hats, the Klan promoted strict personal morality, supported Prohibition, and preached hatred against not only African Americans but Roman Catholics, Jews, immigrants, Communists, and atheists. The Grand Dragon of Indiana, a con man named David C. Stephenson, grew so influential in electing local and state officials (the "kluxing" of America, as he called it) that he boasted, "I am the law in Indiana!" Klan-endorsed candidates won the Indiana governorship and controlled the state legislature.
The Ku Klux Klan remerges
The most serious controversy was the Teapot Dome Scandal. The Teapot Dome was a government-owned oil field in Wyoming managed by the Department of the Interior. Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall, deeply in debt and eight years overdue in paying his taxes, began selling the oil to close friends who were executives of petroleum companies. In doing so, Fall took huge bribes from two oil tycoons. It was, in the words of Thomas J. Walsh, the senator whose committee hearings blew the lid off the teapot, "the most stupendous piece of thievery known to our annals, or perhaps to those of any other country."
The Teapot Dome Scandal
Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and other young modernists came to be labeled the Lost Generation-those who had lost faith in the values and institutions of Western civilization and were frantically looking for new gods to worship. It was Gertrude Stein who in 1921 told Hemingway that he and his friends who had served in the war were "a lost generation." When Hemingway objected, she held her ground. "You are [lost]. You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death."
The lost Generation: Grappling With the wake of WW|
For vice president, they selected New Yorker Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who as assistant secretary of the navy occupied the same position his Republican cousin Theodore Roosevelt had once held. The country voted overwhelmingly for the Republican party's promised return to normalcy. Harding won big, getting 16 million votes to 9 million for Cox, and the Republicans increased their majority in both houses of Congress. Harding's victory led Clarence Darrow to quip that he had grown up hearing that "anybody can become president. I'm beginning to believe it." Franklin Roosevelt predicted that the Democratic party could not hope to return to power until the Republicans led the nation "into a serious period of depression and unemployment." He was right.
Warren G Harding Election
The Eighteenth Amendment (1919) outlawed the production and sale of _____________________________ but many Americans defied the law. By some accounts, more people drank, and drank more, than before the ban.
alcoholic beverages ("Prohibition"),
The most significant economic and social development of the early twentieth century was the widespread ownership of automobiles. The first motorcars had been manufactured for sale in the late nineteenth century, but the founding of the Ford Motor Company in 1903 revolutionized the infant industry, for Henry Ford vowed to democratize the automobile. "When I'm through," he predicted, "everybody will be able to afford one." In 1916, the total number of cars in the United States passed 1 million; by 1920, more than 8 million were registered, and in 1929 there were more than 23 million. The automobile revolution benefited from the discovery of vast oil fields in Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, and California. By 1920, the United States was producing two thirds of the world's oil and gasoline.
automobiles
Perhaps the most visible change during the twenties was the emergence of a powerful "_____________________" in which mass production and consumption of nationally advertised products dictated much of social life and social status.
consumer culture
"A change has come over our democracy," a 1920 newspaper editorial insisted. "It is called _________________." The American's "first importance to his country is no longer that of citizen but that of consumer. Consumption is a new necessity."
consumptionism
Young women of the 1920s whose rebellion against prewar standards of femininity included wearing shorter dresses, bobbing their hair, dancing to jazz music, driving cars, smoking cigarettes, and indulging in illegal drinking and gambling.
flappers
Reactionary conservative movement characterized by heightened nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and laws setting stricter regulations on immigration.
nativism
Business policy of not requiring union membership as a condition of employment; such a policy, where legal, has the effect of weakening unions and diminishing workers' rights.
open shop
Campaign promise of Republican presidential candidate Warren G. Harding in 1920, meant to contrast with Woodrow Wilson's progressivism and internationalism.
return to normalcy.
The Air Commerce Act of 1926 provided federal funds for the advancement of air transportation and navigation, including the construction of airports. The aviation industry received a huge boost in May 1927 when twenty-six-year-old Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., made the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight, traveling from New York City to Paris in thirty-three and a half hours.
the new aviation industry