23.5:

Promises Postponed

A. Feminism in Transition

1. Prosperity and progress were unevenly distributed. 2. Once suffrage was gained, women’s rights advocates

faced a dilemma: should they press for protective legislation or push for legal and civil equality? The National American Woman Suffrage Association:

a. reorganized itself as the League of Women Votersb. promoted women’s involvement in politics and laws

protecting women and children

3. Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party, opposed protective legislation and pushed for the Equal Rights Amendment.

4. Women continued to enter white-collar professions, though men still dominated the high-paid occupations.

B. Mexican Immigration

1. Restrictions on European immigration opened up opportunities to Mexicans.

2. Job opportunities in agribusiness attracted Mexican immigrants and substantial, though segregated Mexican barrios grew up in several urban centers.

3. Mexicans were frequently barred from high-paying jobs and were targets of racist campaigns.

4. They established mutual aid societies to assist themselves and to fight for equality.

Mexican workers gathered outside a San Antonio labor bureau in 1924. These employment agencies contracted Mexicans to work for Texas farmers, railroads, and construction companies. Note the three Anglo men in front (wearing suits and ties), who probably owned and operated this agency. During the 1920s, San Antonio’s Mexican population doubled from roughly 40,000 to over 80,000, making it the second largest colonia in El Norte after Los Angeles. SOURCE:Goldbeck Collection,Harry Ransom Humanities Research

Center,University of Texas at Austin.Photo by Summerville (46ND).

FIGURE 23.4 Mexican Immigration to the United States in the 1920s Many Mexican migrants avoided official border crossing stations so they would not have to pay visa fees. Thus these official figures probably underestimated the true size of the decade’s Mexican migration. As the economy contracted with the onset of the Great Depression, immigration from Mexico dropped off sharply.

MAP 23.1 Black Population, 1920 Although the Great Migration had drawn hundreds of thousands of African Americans to the urban North, the Southern states of the former Confederacy still remained the center of the African American population in 1920.

C. The “New Negro”1. The 1920s was the era of the “New Negro” and the

Harlem Renaissance. 2. African Americans continued to migrate to northern

urban communities. 3. Harlem became a major African-American cultural

center as a wide range of artists explored aspects of black life in new ways.

4. New voices of black protest emerged in various quarters.

5. Marcus Garvey emphasized black pride, black-owned businesses, and unity among all people of African descent.

6. Most Harlem residents worked long hours at menial jobs for low pay.

The critic and photographer Carl Van Vechten took this portrait of Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes in 1932. The print next to Hughes reflects the influence of African art, an important source of inspiration for Harlem Renaissance artists and writers. SOURCE:National Portrait Gallery,Smithsouian Institution/Art Resource,New York.

D. Intellectuals and Alienation1. Gertrude Stein described intellectuals of the 1920s as a

“lost generation.” 2. Writers like Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos drew

on their WWI experiences and expressed cynicism about society’s goals and purposes.

3. F. Scott Fitzgerald questioned the crass materialism of the opulent rich. H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis mocked the values of small town America.

4. Eugene O’Neill’s plays depicted the darker side of family life and explored racism. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land used the metaphor of impotence to comment on the postwar world.

5. A group of southern writers known as the Fugitives attacked industrialism.

E. The Election of 1928

1. The presidential election of 1928 was a race between urban, Catholic, wet, Al Smith versus small-town, Protestant, dry, Herbert Hoover.

2. Smith’s Catholicism was widely attacked. 3. Both sides promised to support business, though

Hoover could claim to have been the architect of the 1920s prosperity.

4. Smith lost, but ran strongly in the cities, a harbinger of what lay ahead.

MAP 23.2 The Election of 1928 Although Al Smith managed to carry the nation’s twelve largest cities, Herbert Hoover’s victory in 1928 was one of the largest popular and electoral landslides in the nation’s history.

Clifford K. Berryman’s 1928 political cartoon interpreted that year’s presidential contest along sectional lines. It depicted the two major presidential contenders as each setting off to campaign in the regions where their support was weakest. For Democrat Al Smith, that meant the West, and for Republican Herbert Hoover, the East. SOURCE:Copyright,1928,Lost Angeles

Times.Reprinted by permission.