1

In 1931, a journalist named Frederick Lewis Allen published a volume of informal history that did more

to shape the popular image of the 1920s than any book ever written by a professional historian. The book,

Only Yesterday, depicted the 1920s as a cynical, hedonistic interlude between the Great War and the

Great Depression--a decade of dissipation, jazz bands, raccoon coats, and bathtub gin. Allen argued that World War I shattered Americans' faith in reform and moral crusades, leading the younger generation to

rebel against traditional taboos while their elders engaged in an orgy of consumption and speculation.

The popular image of the 1920s, as a decade of prosperity and riotous living and of bootleggers and

gangsters, flappers and hot jazz, flagpole sitters, and marathon dancers, is indelibly etched in the American psyche. But this image is also profoundly misleading. The 1920s was a decade of deep cultural

conflict. The pre-Civil War decades had fundamental conflicts in American society that involved

geographic regions. During the Gilded Age, conflicts centered on ethnicity and social class. Conversely, the conflicts of the 1920s were primarily cultural, pitting a more cosmopolitan, modernist, urban culture

against a more provincial, traditionalist, rural culture.

The decade witnessed a titanic struggle between an old and a new America. Immigration, race, alcohol,

evolution, gender politics, and sexual morality all became major cultural battlefields during the 1920s.

Wets battled drys, religious modernists battled religious fundamentalists, and urban ethnics battled the Ku

Klux Klan.

The 1920s was a decade of profound social changes. The most obvious signs of change were the rise of a

consumer-oriented economy and of mass entertainment, which helped to bring about a "revolution in

morals and manners." Sexual mores, gender roles, hair styles, and dress all changed profoundly during the 1920s. Many Americans regarded these changes as liberation from the country's Victorian past. But for

others, morals seemed to be decaying, and the United States seemed to be changing in undesirable ways.

The result was a thinly veiled "cultural civil war."

On May 1, 1919 (May Day), postal officials discovered 20 bombs in the mail of prominent capitalists,

including John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan, Jr., as well as government officials like Supreme Court

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. A month later, bombs exploded in eight American cities.

On September 16, 1920, a bomb left in a parked horse-drawn wagon exploded near Wall Street in

Manhattan's financial district, killing 30 people and injuring hundreds. The bomb was suspected to have

been the work of alien radicals. Authorities came up with a list of subjects and even questioned the man

who had recently reshod the wagon's horse. But despite the offer of an $80,000 reward, no one was

charged with the crime.

The end of World War I was accompanied by a panic over political radicalism. Fear of bombs,

communism, and labor unrest produced a "Red Scare." In Hammond, Indiana, a jury took two minutes to

The 1920s - An Overview

The Postwar Red Scare

2

acquit the killer of an immigrant who had yelled "To Hell with the United States." At a victory pageant in

Washington, D.C., a sailor shot a man who refused to stand during the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner, while the crowd clapped and cheered. A clerk in a Waterbury, Connecticut clothing store was

sentenced to jail for six months for remarking to a customer that the Russian revolutionary Lenin was "the

brainiest" or "one of the brainiest" world leaders.

In November 1919, in the Washington State lumber town of Centralia, American Legionnaires stormed

the office of the International Workers of the World (IWW). Four attackers died in a gunfight before townspeople overpowered the IWW members and took them to jail. A mob broke into the jail, seized one

of the IWW members, and hanged him from a railroad bridge. Federal officials subsequently prosecuted

165 IWW leaders, who received sentences of up to 25 years in prison.

Congress and state legislatures joined in the attack on radicalism. In May 1919, the House refused to seat Victor Berger, a Socialist from Milwaukee, after he was convicted of sedition. The House again denied

him his seat following a special election in December 1919. Not until he was re-elected again in 1922,

after the government dropped the sedition charges, did Congress finally seat him. In 1920, the New York

State Legislature expelled five members. They were told that they had been elected on a platform

"absolutely inimical to the best interests" of New York State.

In 1919 and 1920, President Wilson's attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, led raids on leftist

organizations such as the Communist Party and the radical labor union, the International Workers of the

World. Palmer hoped to use the issue of radicalism in his campaign to become president in 1920. He created the precursor to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which collected the names of thousands of

known or suspected communists.

In November 1919, Palmer ordered government raids that resulted in the arrests of 250 suspected radicals

in 11 cities. The Palmer Raids reached their height on January 2, 1920, when government agents made

raids in 33 cities. Nationwide, more than 4,000 alleged communists were arrested and jailed without

bond, and 556 aliens were deported--including the radical orator Emma Goldman.

Palmer claimed to be ridding the country of the "moral perverts and hysterical neurasthenic women who

abound in communism," but his tactics alienated many people who viewed them as violations of civil

liberties.

Postwar Labor Tensions

The years following the end of World War I were a period of deep social tensions, aggravated by high

wartime inflation. Food prices more than doubled between 1915 and 1920; clothing costs more than tripled. A steel strike that began in Chicago in 1919 became much more than a simple dispute between

labor and management. The Steel Strike of 1919 became the focal point for profound social anxieties,

especially fears of Bolshevism.

Organized labor had grown in strength during the course of the war. Many unions won recognition, and the 12-hour workday was abolished. An 8-hour day was instituted on war contract work, and by 1919,

half the country's workers had a 48-hour work week.

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The war's end, however, was accompanied by labor turmoil, as labor demanded union recognition, shorter

hours, and raises exceeding the inflation rate. Over 4 million workers--one fifth of the nation's workforce--participated in strikes in 1919, including 365,000 steelworkers and 400,000 miners. The number of

striking workers would not be matched until the Depression year of 1937.

The year began with a general strike in Seattle. Police officers in Boston went on strike, touching off

several days of rioting and crime. But the most tumultuous strike took place in the steel industry. About

350,000 steelworkers in 24 separate craft unions went on strike as part of a drive by the American Federation of Labor to unionize the industry. From management's perspective, the steel strike represented

the handiwork of radicals and professional labor agitators. The steel industry's leaders regarded the strike

as a radical conspiracy to get the company to pay a 12-hour wage for 8 hours' work. At a time when communists were seizing power in Hungary and were staging a revolt in Germany, and workers in Italy

were seizing factories, some industrialists feared that the steel strike was the first step toward overturning

the industrial system.

The strike ended with the complete defeat of the unions. From labor's perspective, the corporations had

triumphed through espionage, blacklists, and the denial of freedom of speech and assembly, and through the complete unwillingness to recognize the right of collective bargaining with the workers'

representatives.

During the 1920s, many of labor's gains during World War I and the Progressive era were rolled back.

Membership in labor unions fell from 5 million to 3 million. The U.S. Supreme Court outlawed picketing,

overturned national child labor laws, and abolished minimum wage laws for women.

At midnight, January 16, 1920, the United States went dry; breweries, distilleries, and saloons were

forced to close their doors.

Led by the Anti-Saloon League and the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the dry forces had

triumphed by linking Prohibition to a variety of Progressive era social causes. Proponents of Prohibition

included many women reformers, who were concerned about alcohol's link to wife beating and child abuse, and industrialists, such as Henry Ford, who were concerned about the impact of drinking on labor

productivity. Advocates of Prohibition argued that outlawing drinking would eliminate corruption, end

machine politics, and help Americanize immigrants.

Even before the 18th Amendment was ratified, about 65 percent of the country had already banned

alcohol. In 1916, seven states adopted anti-liquor laws, bringing the number of states to 19 that prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. America's entry into World War I made Prohibition

seem patriotic since many breweries were owned by German Americans. Wayne Wheeler, lobbyist for the

Anti-Saloon League, urged the federal government to investigate "a number of breweries around the country which are owned in part by alien enemies." In December 1917, Congress passed the 18th

Amendment. A month later, President Woodrow Wilson instituted partial prohibition to conserve grain

for the war effort. Beer was limited to 2.75 percent alcohol content, and production was held to 70 percent of the previous year's production. In September, the president issued a ban on the wartime production of

beer.

National Prohibition was defended as a war measure. The amendment's proponents argued that grain

should be made into bread for fighting men and not for making liquor. Anti-German sentiment aided

Prohibition

4

Prohibition's approval. The Anti-Saloon League called Milwaukee's brewers "the worst of all our German

enemies," and dubbed their beer "Kaiser brew."

Unsuccessfully, the brewing industry argued that taxes on liquor were paying more for the war effort than were liberty bonds. Yet even after Prohibition was enacted, many ethnic Americans viewed beer or wine

drinking as an integral part of their culture, not as a vice.

The wording of the 18th Amendment banned the manufacture and sale (but not the possession,

consumption, or transportation) of "intoxicating liquors." Many brewers hoped that the ban would not

apply to beer and wine. But Congress was controlled by the drys, who advocated a complete ban on alcohol. A year after the ratification, Congress enacted the Volstead Act, which defined intoxicating

beverages as anything with more than 0.5 percent alcohol. This meant that beer and wine, as well as

whiskey and gin, were barred from being legally sold.

Advocates did not believe it would be necessary to establish a large administrative apparatus to enforce the law. The federal government never had more than 2,500 agents enforcing the law. A few states did try

to help out: Indiana banned the sale of cocktail shakers and hip flasks; Vermont required drunks to

identify the source of their alcohol. The original Congressional appropriation for enforcement was $5

million; several years later, the government estimated enforcement would cost $300 million.

Enforcing the law proved almost impossible. Smuggling and bootlegging were widespread. Two New York agents, Izzie Einstein and Mo Smith, relied on disguises while staging their raids--once posing as

man and wife. Their efforts were halted, however, after a raid on New York City's 21 trapped some of the

city's leading citizens. In New York, 7,000 arrests for liquor law violations resulted in 17 convictions.

Enforcement of Prohibition was originally assigned to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS); hence, the enforcement agents who destroyed moonshine stills were called “revenuers.” In 1930, enforcement

transferred to the Justice Department. After Prohibition, tax collection on liquor was returned to the IRS,

which was also charged with the registration of machine guns and sawed-off shotguns and the

enforcement of taxes on tobacco. These responsibilities were transferred in 1972 to the Bureau of

Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.

Prohibition failed because it was unenforceable. By 1925, half a dozen states, including New York,

passed laws banning local police from investigating violations. Prohibition had little support in the cities

of the Northeast and Midwest.

Prohibition did briefly pay some public health dividends. The death rate from alcoholism was cut by 80 percent by 1921 from pre-war levels, while alcohol-related crime dropped markedly. Nevertheless, seven

years after Prohibition went into effect, the total deaths from adulterated liquor reached approximately

50,000, and there were many more cases of blindness and paralysis. According to one story, a potential

buyer who sent a liquor sample to a laboratory for analysis was shocked when a chemist replied: "Your

horse has diabetes."

Prohibition quickly produced bootleggers, speakeasies, moonshine, bathtub gin, and rum runners

smuggling supplies of alcohol across state lines. In 1927, there were an estimated 30,000 illegal

speakeasies--twice the number of legal bars before Prohibition. Many people made beer and wine at home. It was relatively easy finding a doctor to sign a prescription for medicinal whiskey sold at

drugstores.

5

In 1919, a year before Prohibition went into effect, Cleveland had 1,200 legal bars. By 1923, the city had

an estimated 3,000 illegal speakeasies, along with 10,000 stills. An estimated 30,000 city residents sold liquor during Prohibition, and another 100,000 made home brew or bathtub gin for themselves and

friends.

Prohibition also fostered corruption and contempt for law and law enforcement among large segments of

the population. Harry Daughtery, attorney general under Warren Harding, accepted bribes from

bootleggers. George Remus, a Cincinnati bootlegger, had a thousand salesmen on his payroll, many of them police officers. He estimated that half his receipts went as bribes. Al Capone's Chicago organization

reportedly took in $60 million in 1927 and had half the city's police on its payroll.

Popular culture glamorized bootleggers like Chicago's Capone. These symbols served as the model for the

central characters in such films as Little Caesar and Scarface. In rural areas, moonshiners became folk heroes. The fashion of the flapper, dancing the Charleston in a short skirt, was incomplete without a hip

flask.

Prohibition created a huge consumer market unmet by legitimate means. Organized crime filled that

vacuum left by the closure of the legal alcohol industry. Homicides increased in many cities, partly as a

result of gang wars, but also because of an increase in drunkenness.

Prohibition devastated the nation's brewing industry. St. Louis had 22 breweries before Prohibition. Only nine reopened after Prohibition ended in 1933. Anheiser-Busch made it through Prohibition by making

ice cream, near beer, corn syrup, ginger ale, root beer, yeast, malt extract, refrigerated cabinets, and

automobile and truck bodies.

The jobs and tax revenue that a legal liquor industry would generate looked attractive as the country entered the Great Depression. During his presidential campaign in 1932, New York Governor Franklin D.

Roosevelt, who never hid his fondness for martinis, called for Prohibition's repeal.

The noble experiment ended at 3:32 p.m., December 5, 1933, when Utah became the 36th state to ratify

the 21st Amendment, repealing Prohibition. By then, even some proponents admitted that the 18th

Amendment resulted in "evil consequences." The Rev. Sam Small, an evangelist and temperance advocate, said that Prohibition had created "an orgy of lawlessness and official corruption." John D.

Rockefeller, a teetotaler, observed in 1932, "drinking has generally increased, the speakeasy has replaced

the saloon, and a vast army of lawbreakers has been recruited and financed on a colossal scale."

Even today, debate about the impact of Prohibition rages. Critics argue that the amendment failed to eliminate drinking, made drinking more popular among the young, spawned organized crime and

disrespect for the law, encouraged solitary drinking, and led beer drinkers to hard liquor and cocktails.

One wit joked that "Prohibition succeeded in replacing good beer with bad gin." The lesson these critics

derive: it is counterproductive to try to legislate morality.

Opponents argue that alcohol consumption declined dramatically during Prohibition--by 30 to 50 percent.

Deaths from cirrhosis of the liver for men fell from 29.5 per 100,000 in 1911 to 10.7 per 100,000 in 1929.

Was Prohibition a "noble experiment" or a misguided effort to use government to shape morality? Even

today, the answer is not entirely clear. Alcohol remains a serious cause of death, disability, and domestic

abuse. It was not until the 1960s that alcohol consumption levels returned to their pre-Prohibition levels. Today, alcohol is linked each year to more than 23,000 motor vehicle deaths and to more than half the

nation's homicides, and is closely linked to domestic violence.

6

Some of the most vicious racial violence in American history took place between 1917 and 1923. The

hostility stemmed partly from the dramatic shifts in the demography of race. Black workers who had been historically confined to the South had begun to move north and to compete with whites for factory jobs.

These black workers often found jobs as strikebreakers, the only way many could get hired. In addition,

animosity flared as black veterans returned from World War I insisting on the civil rights that they had fought for in Europe. In Chicago, Illinois, Longview, Texas, Omaha, Nebraska, Rosewood, Florida,

Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Washington, D.C., white mobs burned and killed in black neighborhoods.

In Tulsa, 40 city blocks were leveled and 23 African American churches and a thousand homes and

businesses were destroyed. In 1921, Tulsa (about 12 percent black) had the Southwest's most prosperous

African American business community. Booker T. Washington had called this area "the black Wall

Street."

The violence erupted after a 19-year-old African American bootblack was arrested for supposedly

assaulting a white, female teenager working as an elevator operator. Police later concluded that the young

man had stumbled into the woman as he was getting off the elevator. An inflammatory newspaper article

that helped touch off the violence was headlined "To Lynch Negro Tonight."

The death toll from the violence is still disputed. A government report said that 26 blacks and 10 whites had died, and another 317 were injured. A recent scholarly study concluded that black deaths approached

100 and may have been much higher.

Another incident of racial violence took place on New Year's Day in 1923, in the tiny black settlement of

Rosewood, Florida. A white mob, from as far away as Georgia and purportedly searching for an alleged rapist, burned the town of 150 residents. Only one structure, a house owned by the community's only

white resident, was not destroyed. Newspaper accounts differ on the total number of people killed; one

report lists 7 deaths, another 21. One Rosewood resident, a blacksmith, was hanged.

Lacking hard evidence, historians have had to rely on oral history. One man, who was 11 years old at the

time of the attack, recalled his father's reports of the violence. He described a black man who was forced to dig his own grave, then was shot and shoved into it; a man was hanged from a tree in his front yard

when he told a posse that he could not lead them to the alleged rapist; and a pregnant woman was shot as

she tried to crawl under her porch for protection. In 1994, the state of Florida paid $2.1 million in

reparations.

The racial composition of the nation's cities underwent a decisive change during and after World War I.

In 1910, three out of every four black Americans lived on farms, and nine out of ten lived in the South.

World War I changed that profile. Hoping to escape tenant farming, sharecropping, and peonage, 1.5 million Southern blacks moved to cities. During the 1910s and 1920s, Chicago's black population grew by

148 percent; Cleveland's by 307 percent; Detroit's by 611 percent.

Access to housing became a major source of friction between blacks and whites during this massive movement of people. Many cities adopted residential segregation ordinances to keep blacks out of

predominantly white neighborhoods. In 1917, the Supreme Court declared municipal resident segregation ordinances unconstitutional. In response, whites resorted to the restrictive covenant, a formal deed

Race

The Great Migration

7

restriction binding white property owners in a given neighborhood not to sell to blacks. Whites who broke

these agreements could be sued by "damaged" neighbors. Not until 1948 did the Supreme Court strike

down restrictive covenants.

Confined to all-black neighborhoods, African Americans created cities-within-cities during the 1920s.

The largest was Harlem, in upper Manhattan, where 200,000 African Americans lived in a neighborhood

that had been virtually all-white 15 years before.

African American Protests

In World War I, a higher proportion of black soldiers than white soldiers had lost their lives: 14.4 percent

black compared to 6.3 percent white. Many African Americans believed that this sacrifice would be repaid when the war was over. In the words of one Texan, "Our second emancipation will be the outcome

of this war." It was not to be. The federal government denied black soldiers the right to participate in the

victory march down Paris's Champs-Elysees boulevard, even though black troops from European colonies marched. Ten African American soldiers were among the 70 blacks lynched in 1919. Twenty-five anti-

black riots took place that year.

African Americans did not respond passively to these outrages. Even before the war, African Americans

had stepped up protests against discrimination. The National Urban League, organized in 1911 by social

workers, white philanthropists, and black leaders, concentrated on finding jobs for urban African Americans. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) won important

Supreme Court decisions against the grandfather clause (1915) and restrictive covenants (1917). The

NAACP also fought school segregation in northern cities during the 1920s and lobbied hard, though

unsuccessfully, for a federal anti-lynching bill.

No black leader was more successful in touching the aspirations and needs of the mass of African

Americans than Marcus Garvey. A flamboyant and charismatic figure from Jamaica, Garvey rejected

integration and preached racial pride and black self-help. He declared that Jesus Christ and Mary were

black; he exhorted his followers to glorify their African heritage and revel in the beauty of their black

skin. "We have a beautiful history," he told his followers, "and we shall create another one in the future."

In 1917, Garvey moved to New York and organized the Universal Negro Improvement Association

(UNIA), the first mass movement in African American history. By the mid-1920s, Garvey's organization

had 700 branches in 38 states and the West Indies. The organization also published a newspaper with as many as 200,000 subscribers. The UNIA operated grocery stores, laundries, restaurants, printing plants,

clothing factories, and a steamship line.

In the mid-1920s, Garvey was charged with mail fraud, jailed, and finally deported. Still, the "Black

Moses" left behind a rich legacy. At a time when magazines and newspapers overflowed with

advertisements for hair straighteners and skin lightening cosmetics, Garvey's message of racial pride

struck a responsive chord in many African Americans.

The Harlem Renaissance

The movement for black pride found its cultural expression in the Harlem Renaissance, the first self-

conscious literary and artistic movement in African American history.

For over three decades, African Americans had shown increasing interest in black history and African

American folk culture. As early as the 1890s, W.E.B. Du Bois, Harvard's first African American Ph.D.,

8

began to trace black culture in the United States to its African roots; Fisk University's Jubilee Singers

introduced Negro spirituals to the general public; and the American Negro Academy, organized in 1897, promoted African American literature, arts, music, and history. A growing spirit of racial pride was

evident. A group of talented writers, including Charles Chestnut, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and James

Weldon Johnson, explored life in black communities; the first Negro dolls appeared; and all-Negro towns

were founded in Whitesboro, N.J., and Allensworth, Calif.

Signs of growing racial consciousness proliferated during the 1910s. Fifty new black newspapers and magazines appeared in that decade, bringing the total to 500. The Associated Negro Press, the first

national black press agency, was founded in 1919. In 1915, Carter Woodson, a Harvard Ph.D., founded

the first permanent Negro historical association, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History,

and began publication of the Journal of Negro History.

During the 1920s, Harlem became the capital of black America, attracting black intellectuals and artists

from across the country and the Caribbean. Soon, the Harlem Renaissance was in full bloom. The poet

Countee Cullen eloquently expressed black artists' long-suppressed desire to have their voices heard: "Yet

do I marvel at a curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing!"

Many of the greatest works of the Harlem Renaissance sought to recover links with African and folk traditions. In "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," the poet Langston Hughes reaffirmed his ties to an African

past: "I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it." In his book Cane (1923), Jean Toomer,

the grandson of P.B.S. Pinchback, who served briefly as governor of Louisiana during Reconstruction, blended realism and mysticism, and poetry and prose to describe the world of the black peasantry in

Georgia. In the ghetto of Washington, D.C., Zora Neale Hurston, a Columbia University trained

anthropologist, incorporated rural black folklore and religious beliefs into her stories.

A fierce racial conscious and a powerful sense of racial pride animated the literature of the Harlem

Renaissance. The West Indian-born poet Claude McKay expressed the new spirit of defiance and protest

with militant words: "If we must die - oh let us nobly die...dying, but fighting back!"

After the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan, led by former Confederate General Nathaniel Bedford Forrest,

used terrorist tactics to intimidate former slaves. A new version of the Ku Klux Klan arose during the

early 1920s. Throughout this time period, immigration, fear of radicalism, and a revolution in morals and manners fanned anxiety in large parts of the country. Roman Catholics, Jews, African Americans, and

foreigners were only the most obvious targets of the Klan's fear-mongering. Bootleggers and divorcees

were also targets.

Contributing to the Klan's growth was a post-war depression in agriculture, the migration of African Americans into northern cities, and a swelling of religious bigotry and nativism in the years after World

War I. Klan members considered themselves defenders of Prohibition, traditional morality, and true

Americanism. The Klan efforts were directed against African Americans, Jews, Catholics, and

immigrants.

In 1920, two Atlanta publicists, Edward Clarke, a former Atlanta journalist, and Bessie Tyler, a former madam, took over an organization that had formed to promote World War I fund drives. At that time, the

organization had 3,000 members. In three years they built it into the Southern Publicity Association, a

national organization with three million members. After the war, they bolstered membership in the Klan

by giving Klansmen part of the $10 induction fee of every new member they signed up.

The Ku Klux Klan

9

During the early 1920s, the Klan helped elect 16 U.S. Senators and many Representatives and local

officials. By 1924, when the Klan had reached its peak in numbers and influence, it claimed to control 24 of the nation's 48 state legislatures. That year it succeeded in blocking the nomination of Al Smith, a New

York Catholic, at the Democratic National Convention.

The three million members of the Klan after World War I were quite open in their activities. Many were

small-business owners, independent professionals, clerical workers, and farmers. Members marched in

parades, patronized Klan merchants, and voted for Klan-endorsed political candidates. The Klan was particularly strong in the Deep South, Oklahoma, and Indiana. Historians once considered the Ku Klux

Klan a group of marginal misfits, rural traditionalists unable to cope with the coming of a modern urban

society. But recent scholarship shows that Klan members were a cross-section of native Protestants; many

were women, and many came from urban areas.

The leader of Indiana's Klan was David Curtis Stephenson, a Texan who had worked as a printer's

apprentice in Oklahoma before becoming a salesman in Indiana. Given control of the Klan in Indiana in

1922 and the right to organize in 20 other states, he soon became a millionaire from the sale of robes and

hoods. A crowd estimated at 200,000 attended one Klan gathering in Kokomo, Ind., in 1923.

A public defender of Prohibition and womanhood, Stephenson was, in private, a heavy drinker and a womanizer. In 1925, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping and sexually

assaulting 28-year-old Madge Oberholtzer, who ran a state program to combat illiteracy. Stephenson's

downfall, which was followed by the indictment and prosecution of many Klan-supported politicians on corruption charges, led members to abandon the organization in droves. Within a year, the number of

Klansmen in Indiana fell from 350,000 to 15,000. By 1930, the Klan had just 45,000 members in the

nation as a whole.

During the 20th century, a number of trials have excited widespread public interest. One of the first cause

celebrities was the case of Nicola Sacco, a 32-year-old shoemaker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a 29-year-old fish peddler, who were accused of double murder. On April 15, 1920, a paymaster and a payroll guard

carrying a factory payroll of $15,776 were shot to death during a robbery in Braintree, Massachusetts,

near Boston. About three weeks later, Sacco and Vanzetti were charged with the crime. Their trial aroused intense controversy because it was widely believed that the evidence against the men was flimsy,

and that they were being prosecuted for their immigrant background and their radical political beliefs.

Sacco and Vanzetti were Italian immigrants and avowed anarchists who advocated the violent overthrow of capitalism.

It was the height of the post-World War I Red Scare, and the atmosphere was seething with anxieties about Bolshevism, aliens, domestic bombings, and labor unrest. Revolutionary upheavals had been

triggered by the war, and one-third of the U.S. population consisted of immigrants or the children of

immigrants.

U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer had ordered foreign radicals rounded up for deportation. Just three days before Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, one of the people seized during the Palmer raids, an

anarchist editor, had died after falling from a 14th floor window of the New York City Department of

Justice office. The police, judge, jury, and newspapers were deeply concerned about labor unrest.

Sacco and Vanzetti

10

No witnesses had gotten a good look at the perpetrators of the murder and robbery. The witnesses

described a shootout in the street and the robbers escaping in a Buick, scattering tacks to deter pursuers.

Anti-immigrant and anti-radical sentiments led the police to focus on local anarchists.

Sacco and Vanzetti were followers of Luigi Galleani, a radical Italian anarchist who had instigated a wave

of bombings against public officials just after World War I. Carlo Valdinoci, a close associate of Galleani,

had blown himself up while trying to plant a bomb at Attorney General Palmer's house. Palmer's house

was largely destroyed; the powerful blast hurled several neighbors from their beds in nearby homes.

Though not injured, Palmer and his family were thoroughly shaken by the blast.

After the incident Sacco and Vanzetti acted nervously, and the arresting officer testified that Sacco and

Vanzetti were reaching for weapons when they were apprehended. But neither man had a criminal record.

Plus, a criminal gang had been carrying out a string of armed robberies in Massachusetts and Rhode

Island.

Police linked Sacco's gun to the double murder, the only piece of physical evidence that connected the

men to the crime. The defense, however, argued that the link was overstated.

In 1921, Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted in a trial that was marred by prejudice against Italians,

immigrants, and radical beliefs. The evidence was ambiguous as to the pairs' guilt or innocence, but the

trial was a sham: the prosecution played heavily on the pairs' radical beliefs; the men were kept in an iron cage during the trial; the jury foreman muttered unflattering stereotypes about Italians. In his instructions

to the jury, the presiding judge urged the jury to remember their "true American citizenship."

The pair was electrocuted in 1927. As the guards adjusted his straps, Vanzetti said in broken English:

I wish to tell you I am innocent and never connected with any crime... I wish to forgive some people for

what they are now doing to me.

Their execution divided the nation and produced uproar in Europe. Harvard Law Professor and later U.S.

Supreme Court Justice, Felix Frankfurter, condemned the prejudice of the presiding judge (who

reportedly said in 1924, "Did you see what I did with those anarchistic bastards the other day?") and procedural errors during the trial. These errors included the prosecution's failure to disclose eyewitness

evidence favorable to the defense. A commission that included the presidents of Harvard and MIT

defended the trial's fairness.

Today, many historians now believe Sacco was probably guilty and Vanzetti was innocent but that the

evidence was insufficient to convict either one.

Before World War I, American industry, steamship companies, and railroads promoted immigration and financed groups opposed to immigration restriction. The United States did institute registration and

literacy requirements for immigrants; yet, opponents of restriction succeeded in blocking efforts to

establish immigration quotas.

World War I revealed that the economy could function effectively without foreign immigration; opposition to immigration restriction withered away. Not only had World War I demonstrated that

immigrants had become "Americanized," but with the establishment of new European nation states,

interest in European politics faded away. While some opponents of immigration argued that it threatened

the nation's culture, most of the arguments advanced against immigration were economic. Among the

Immigration Restriction

11

chief proponents of immigration restriction were the unions of the American Federation of Labor.

Organized labor feared that American workers' wages would decline if unskilled immigrant workers

flooded the labor market. Meanwhile, many businessmen feared dangerous foreign radicals.

During the 1920s, most ethnic groups agreed that the overall volume of immigration should be reduced.

The issue remained: how to distribute the immigration quotas. A compromise was easily reached: make

the quotas proportionate to the current population, so that future immigration would not change the

balance of ethnic groups.

In 1924, Congress reduced the number of immigrants allowed into the United States each year to two

percent of each nationality group counted in the 1890 census. It also barred Asians entirely.

Religion was a pivotal cultural battleground during the 1920s. The roots of this religious conflict were

planted in the late 19th century. Before the Civil War, the Protestant denominations were united in a

belief that the findings of science confirmed the teachings of religion. But during the 1870s, a lasting division had occurred in American Protestantism over Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Religious

modernists argued that religion had to be accommodated to the teachings of science, while religious

traditionalists sought to preserve the basic tenets of their religious faith.

As an organized movement, Fundamentalism is said to have started with a set of twelve pamphlets, The

Fundamentals: A Testimony, published between 1909 and 1912. Financed by two wealthy laymen, the pamphlets were to be sent free to "every pastor, evangelist, missionary, theological student, Sunday

School superintendent, Y.M.C.A. and Y.W.C.A. secretary in the English speaking world." Eventually,

some three million copies were distributed. The five fundamentals in these volumes testified to the infallibility of the literal interpretation of the Bible and the actuality of the virgin birth, the atonement, the

resurrection, and the second coming of Christ.

Pentecostalism, another current in Protestant revivalism, began on New Year's Day in 1901. A female

student at Bethel Bible College in Topeka, Kansas, began speaking in tongues, unintelligible speech that

accompanies religious excitation. To many evangelicals, speaking in tongues was evidence of the descent

of the Holy Spirit into a believer.

Pentecostals rejected the idea that the age of miracles had ended. During the 1920s, many Americans

became aware of Pentecostalism as charismatic faith healers claimed to be able to cure the sick and to

allow the crippled to throw away their crutches. Pentecostalism spread particularly rapidly among lower middle-class and poorer Protestants who sought a more spontaneous and emotional religious experience

than that offered by the mainstream religious denominations. The most prominent of the early Pentecostal

revivalists was Aimee Semple McPherson.

The Fundamentalist and Pentecostal movements arose in the early 20th century as a backlash against

modernism, secularism, and scientific teachings that contradicted their religious beliefs. Early fundamentalist doctrine attacked competing religions--especially Catholicism, which it portrayed as an

agent of the Antichrist--and insisted on the literal truth of the Bible, a strict return to fundamental

principles, and a thoroughgoing rejection of modernity.

Between 1921 and 1929, Fundamentalists introduced 37 anti-evolution bills into 20 state legislatures. The

first law to pass was in Tennessee.

Fundamentalism and Pentecostalism

12

During the summer of 1925, John Scopes, a high school teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, was tried for

violating the prohibition on the teaching of evolution in tax-supported schools. The statute forbade the teaching in public schools of any scientific theory that denied the literalness of the Biblical account of

creation. The Scopes case raised the legal issue of the validity of a law that seemed to violate the

constitutional separation of church and state.

The Scopes Trial is one of the best known in American history because it symbolizes the conflict

between science and theology, faith and reason, individual liberty and majority rule. The object of intense publicity, the trial was seen as a clash between urban sophistication and rural fundamentalism. The trial

was further popularized by the 1955 play, Inherit the Wind, which became a hit film in 1960. The play

and subsequent movie cast the trial as a struggle for truth and freedom against repression and ignorance.

In the summer of 1925, a young schoolteacher named John Scopes stood trial in Dayton, Tennessee, for violating the state law against the teaching of evolution. Two of the country's most famous attorneys

faced off in the trial. William Jennings Bryan, 65 years old and a three time Democratic presidential

nominee, prosecuted; 67-year-old Clarence Darrow, who was a staunch agnostic and who had defended Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb the year before, represented the defense. Bryan declared that "the

contest between evolution and Christianity is a duel to the death."

The five-year-old American Civil Liberties Union had taken out newspaper advertisements offering to

defend anyone who flouted the Tennessee law. George Rappelyea, a Dayton, Tenn., booster, realized that

the town would get enormous attention if a local teacher was arrested for teaching evolution. He enlisted John Scopes, a science teacher and football coach, who arranged to teach from George Hunter's Civic

Biology, a high school textbook promoting Charles Darwin's arguments in The Descent of Man.

The trial was marked by hoopla and a carnival-like atmosphere. Thousands of people swelled the town of

a thousand. For 12 days in July, 1925, 100 reporters sent dispatches.

The trial judge had prohibited the defense from using scientists as witnesses. So, on the trial's seventh

day, the defense team called Bryan to testify as an expert on the Bible. Darrow subjected Bryan to a withering cross-examination. He got Bryan to say that Creation was not completed in a week, but over a

period of time that "might have continued for millions of years."

The play, Inherit the Wind, would caricature Bryan as a Bible-thumping buffoon, but in actuality, Bryan's

position was complex. He opposed the mandated teaching of evolution in public schools because he thought the people should exercise local control over school curricula. He also opposed Darwin's theory

of evolution by natural selection because these ideas had been used to defend laissez-faire capitalism on

the grounds that a perfectly free market promotes the "survival of the fittest." As early as 1904, Bryan had

denounced social Darwinism as "the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak."

In addition, Bryan opposed Darwinism as justification for war and imperialism. In The Descent of Man, Darwin has argued that "at some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized

races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races." The textbook that Scopes

taught from, Civic Biology, identified five "races of man": Ethiopian, Malay, American Indian, and Mongolian, and "finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white

inhabitants of Europe and America." Bryan was also unhappy with Darwin's assumption that the entire

evolutionary process was purposeless and not the product of a larger design.

The Scopes Trial

13

Not a Biblical literalist, Bryan was aware of serious scientific difficulties with Darwinism, such as

Darwin's theory that slight, random variations were enough to generate life from non-life to produce a vast array of biological species. But Bryan mistook the lack of consensus about the mechanisms that

Darwin advanced to explain the evolutionary process for a lack of scientific support for the concept of

evolution itself.

The day after this exchange, Darrow changed his client's plea to guilty. Scopes was convicted and fined

$100. However, the conviction was thrown out on a technicality by the Tennessee Supreme Court: that the judge, and not the jury, had determined the $100 fine. In 1967, the Supreme Court struck down

Tennessee's anti-evolution law for violating the Constitution's prohibition against the establishment of

religion.

Five days after the trial's conclusion, Bryan died of apoplexy. The journalist H.L. Mencken wrote of Bryan: "He came into life a hero, a Galahad, in bright and shining armor. He was passing out a poor

mountebank." As for Scopes, he left teaching and became a chemical engineer in the oil industry. He died

at age 70 in 1970.

The Scopes trial resulted in two enduring conclusions: that legislatures should not restrain the freedom of

scientific inquiry, and that society should respect academic freedom.

The expansion of government activities during World War I was reversed during the 1920s. Government efforts to break-up trusts and regulate business practices gave way to a new emphasis on partnerships

between government and business.

In 1920, an Ohio political operator named Harry Daugherty offered a prediction about what would happen

at that year's Republican presidential nominating convention:

The convention will be deadlocked, and after the other candidates have gone their limit, some 12 or 15

men, worn out and bleary eyed for lack of sleep, will sit down about 2 o'clock in the morning around a table in a smoke-filled room in some hotel and decide the nomination. When the time comes, [Warren]

Harding will be nominated.

Daugherty was right. In 1920, a divided Republican convention selected Harding, a U.S. Senator from

Ohio, as its presidential nominee.

Harding's presidency is best known for a series of scandals that marred his time in office. But he also had some genuine accomplishments. He pardoned the imprisoned Socialist party leader, Eugene Debs, and

persuaded the steel industry to end the 12-hour day and replace it with an 8-hour day. Harding also called

an international disarmament conference in Washington that slowed down the arms race. At the end of the

conference, a treaty was signed. The treaty provided that, for every five battleships that the United States and Britain were each allowed to build, the Japanese could build three ships, and the Italians and the

French could each build one-and-three-quarters ships.

The son of a poor Ohio farmer, Harding spent two years at a rural academy, Ohio Central College, and

received a diploma at the age of 16. He taught school and sold insurance for several years before he bought a local newspaper. He guaranteed the newspaper’s success by mentioning every town resident in

the paper at least twice a year. Harding described his editorial policy as "inoffensivism." He later entered

Politics During the 1920s

14

Republican politics, rising from lieutenant governor to U.S. Senator before being nominated for the

presidency.

Harding made few major pronouncements during the campaign. The Republican Party followed an associate's advice: "Keep Warren at home. If he goes out on tour, somebody's sure to ask him questions,

and Warren's just the sort of damned fool that will try to answer them." Harding largely confined his

speeches to uncontroversial platitudes about the need to avoid moral crusades and return to "normalcy":

America's present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but

restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity....

Harding had few illusions about his qualifications for the presidency. "I am a man of limited talents from a small town," he said. He appointed a number of sleazy and corrupt officials to office. His administration

was marred by scandals involving bribes and kickbacks at the Justice Department and the Veterans

Bureau. After his sudden death from a stroke in 1923, his administration's biggest scandal, known as the Teapot Dome, was revealed. His Interior Secretary, Albert B. Fall, was sent to prison for accepting

$360,000 in bribes for transferring U.S. naval oil reserves in Wyoming to oil operators in exchange for

above ground petroleum storage. Private oil companies were also draining oil from federal lands.

Vice President Calvin Coolidge became president after Harding's death. Coolidge had come to national

attention in 1919, when, as governor of Massachusetts, he broke the Boston police strike after declaring:

"there is no right to strike against the public interest, anytime, anywhere."

Coolidge’s well-deserved nickname was "Silent Cal." Some acquaintances wagered whether they could

make him say more than two words. His answer: "You lose." During the 1924 presidential race, reporters

asked him whether he had any statement about the campaign. "No," he replied. He was then asked whether he had anything to say about the world situation. "No," he answered. Did he have anything to say

about Prohibition? "No." Then he told the reporters, "Now remember, don't quote me." At the end of his

presidency, he was asked whether he had a farewell message for the American people, he paused and

said, "Good-bye."

Coolidge slept ten hours a night, napped every afternoon, and seldom worked more than four hours a day. He spoke out ardently on behalf of the nation's business culture. "The man who builds a factory builds a

temple," said Coolidge. "The man who works there, worships there." The president was convinced that

the formula for economic prosperity was simple: "The chief business of the American people is business.

If government kept its hands off the economy, business would prosper.”

Among the most notable acts of his presidency were vetoes of bills to assist farmers in developing

government power plants along the Tennessee River. The best known accomplishment of his presidency

was the Kellogg-Briand Pact, an international agreement outlawing the use of force to settle international

disputes. Embodying the anti-war sentiment of the 1920s, this agreement lacked any methods of

enforcement.

In 1924, Democratic prospects in the upcoming presidential election seemed promising. The

administration of Republican Calvin Coolidge was rocked by a scandal, the Teapot Dome, which

involved secret leasing of the Navy's oil fields to private businesses.

The Democratic Convention of 1924

15

But the Democratic Party was deeply divided. The Democratic Party was an uneasy coalition of diverse elements: Northerners and Southerners, Westerners and Easterners, Catholics and Jews and Protestants, conservative landowners and agrarian radicals, progressives and big city machines, urban cosmopolitans

and small-town traditionalists. On one side were defenders of the Ku Klux Klan, prohibition, and

fundamentalism. On the other side were northeastern Catholics and Jewish immigrants and their children.

A series of issues that bitterly divided the country during the early 1920s were on display at the 1924 Democratic Convention held at Madison Square Garden in New York City from June 24 to July 9, 1924.

These issues included prohibition and religious and racial tolerance. The Northeasterners wanted an

explicit condemnation of the Ku Klux Klan.

The two leading candidates symbolized a deep cultural divide. Al Smith, New York's governor, was a Catholic and an opponent of prohibition and was bitterly opposed by Democrats in the South and West.

Former Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo, a Protestant, defended prohibition and refused to

repudiate the Ku Klux Klan, making himself unacceptable to Catholics and Jews in the Northeast.

Newspapers called the convention a "Klanbake," as pro-Klan and anti-Klan delegates wrangled bitterly

over the party platform. The convention opened on a Monday and by Thursday night, after 61 ballots, the convention was deadlocked. The next day, July 4, some 20,000 Klan supporters wearing white hoods and

robes held a picnic in New Jersey. One speaker denounced the "clownvention in Jew York." They threw

baseballs at an effigy of Al Smith. A cross-burning culminated the event.

Al Smith and William Gibbs McAdoo withdrew from contention after the 99th ballot. On the 103rd ballot, the weary convention nominated John W. Davis of West Virginia, formerly a US Representative

from West Virginia, Solicitor General for the United States, and US Ambassador to Britain under

President Woodrow Wilson. The nomination proved worthless. Liberals deserted the Democrats and voted for Robert La Follette, a third party candidate. Apathy and disgust kept many home, and just half of

those eligible went to the polls. The Democrat candidate, John Davis, received 8 million votes. The

Republican candidate, incumbent president Calvin Coolidge, received 15 million votes.

At stake in the presidential election of 1928 was whether the United States could elect a Catholic

president.

In 1928, the Democrats were resolved to avoid a repeat of the party divisions of 1924. The convention was held in Houston. The party platform stood in favor of aid to farmers and workers, collective

bargaining, abolition of labor injunctions, and stricter regulation of power companies. Al Smith was

nominated for president; a Southern advocate of prohibition was chosen for the vice president.

Born in 1873, Al Smith was an Irish Catholic from New York's Lower East Side. For almost a decade as governor of the nation's largest state, he had made New York a model for efforts to use government to

improve the public's well-being. Under his leadership, New York granted women a 40-hour work week

and instituted the nation's first public housing program. He also established state parks and a system of

public hospitals.

Smith doubled the Democratic vote of 1924. But it was not enough. He lost New York and much of the South. There was no single cause for the defeat. Economic prosperity and Prohibition played a part.

However, it appears that anti-Catholicism did him in. Minister's called New York “Satan's seat”; Smith

was attacked as the candidate in support of saloons, prostitution, and gambling. Smith refused to pretend

that he was anything other than what he was: a Catholic, who kept a picture of the Pope over his desk.

The Election of 1928

16

Nevertheless, Smith did make gains. He carried Massachusetts, the first Democrat to do so since the Civil

War. He awakened a great army of immigrant voters in the big cities--Italian, Jewish, Polish, as well as

Irish. And he helped shift the African American vote toward the Democrats.

In the presidential election of 1928, Al Smith was defeated by Herbert Hoover, a wealthy mining engineer

who had served as commerce secretary for both Presidents Harding and Coolidge.

Hoover had headed European relief efforts after World War I. "He is certainly a wonder," exclaimed the

young Franklin D. Roosevelt, "and I wish we could make him president of the United States. There

couldn't be a better one."

As secretary of commerce, Hoover proposed to eliminate destructive economic competition through the establishment of trade associations working in cooperation with government. By 1929, more than 2,000

trade associations had been created.

When Hoover campaigned for the presidency, the country seemed headed toward ever greater economic

prosperity. In a campaign speech, he said:

We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. We shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this

nation.

In his first steps in office, Hoover created the Federal Farm Board to increase farmers' income. He also called for a system of private, voluntary old-age pensions. The collapse of the stock market, however,

shattered his vision of a private economy operating largely free from government intervention.

By the end of the 1920s, Americans were overwhelmed by the rise of a modern consumer culture. In response, many of the bitter cultural tensions that had divided Americans had begun to subside. The

growth of exciting new opportunities to buy cars, appliances, and stylish clothing made the country's

cultural conflicts seem less significant. The collapse of the new economy at the decade's end would

generate economic debates as intense as the cultural conflicts of the early and mid-1920s.

Americans in the 1920s were the first to wear ready-made, exact-size clothing. They were the first to play

electric phonographs, to use electric vacuum cleaners, to listen to commercial radio broadcasts, and to

drink fresh orange juice year round. In countless ways, large and small, American life was transformed

during the 1920s, at least in urban areas. Cigarettes, cosmetics, and synthetic fabrics such as rayon became staples of American life. Newspaper gossip columns, illuminated billboards, and commercial

airplane flights were novelties during the 1920s. The United States became a consumer society.

Two automotive titans, Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan, symbolized the profound transformations that took

place in American industry during the 1910s and 1920s. In 1913, the 50-year-old Ford had revolutionized American manufacturing by introducing the automated assembly line. By using conveyor belts to bring

automobile parts to workers, he reduced the assembly time for a Ford car from 12 ½ hours in 1912 to just

1 ½ hours in 1914. Declining production costs allowed Ford to cut automobile prices six times between

1921 and 1925. The cost of a new Ford was reduced to just $290. This amount was less than three months wages for an average American worker. It made cars affordable for the average family. To lower

employee turnover and raise productivity, Ford introduced a minimum wage of $5 in 1914 (twice what

Herbert Hoover

The Consumer Economy and Mass Entertainment

17

most workers earned) and shortened the workday from nine hours to eight hours. Twelve years later, Ford

reduced his work week from six days to five days. Ford demonstrated the dynamic logic of mass production: that expanded production allows manufacturers to reduce costs, and therefore, increases the

number of products sold; and that higher wages allow workers to buy more products.

Alfred Sloan, the president of General Motors from 1923 to 1941, built his company into the world's

largest automaker, not by refining the production process, but by adopting new approaches to advertising

and marketing. Sloan summed up his philosophy with these blunt words: "The primary object of the corporation was to make money, not just to make cars." Unlike Ford, a farmer's son who wanted to

produce an inexpensive, functional vehicle with few frills (Ford said that his customers could have any

color that they wanted as long as it was black), Sloan was convinced that Americans were willing to pay extra for luxury and prestige. He advertised his cars as symbols of wealth and status. In 1927, he

introduced the yearly model change to convince motorists to trade in old models for newer ones with

flashier styling. He also developed a series of automobile divisions, differentiated by status, price, and level of luxury. Hence, Chevrolets were less expensive than Buicks or Cadillacs. He set up the nation's

first national consumer credit agency in 1919 to make his cars affordable. If Henry Ford demonstrated the

efficacy of mass production, Sloan revealed the importance of merchandising in a modern consumer

society.

Cars were the symbol of the new consumer society that emerged in the 1920s. In 1919, there were just 6.7 million cars on American roads. By 1929, there were more than 27 million cars--or nearly one car for

every household in the United States. In that year, one American out of every five owned a car, compared

to one out of every 37 English and one out of every 40 French car owners. Car manufacturers and banks encouraged the public to buy the car of their dreams on credit. Thus, the American love affair with the car

began. In 1929, a quarter of all American families purchased a car. About 60 percent bought cars on

credit, often paying interest rates of 30 percent or higher.

Cars revolutionized the American way of life. Enthusiasts claimed that the automobile promoted family

togetherness through evening rides, picnics, and weekend excursions. Critics decried squabbles between parents and teenagers over use of the automobile and an apparent decline in church attendance resulting

from Sunday outings. Worst of all, charged critics, automobiles gave young people freedom and privacy,

serving as "portable bedrooms" that couples could take anywhere.

The automobile also transformed the American landscape, quickly obliterating all traces of the horse and buggy past. During the 1920s, the country doubled its system of roads and highways. The nation spent

over $2 billion annually building and maintaining roads. By 1929, there were 852,000 miles of roads in

the United States, compared to just 369,000 miles in 1920. The car also brought pollution, congestion,

and nearly 30,000 traffic deaths a year.

The automobile industry provided an enormous stimulus for the national economy. By 1929, the industry produced 12.7 percent of all manufacturing output, and employed one out of every 12 workers.

Automobiles, in turn, stimulated the growth of steel, glass, and rubber industries, along with the gasoline

stations, motor lodges, campgrounds, and hot dog stands that dotted the nation's roadways.

Alongside the automobile, the telephone and electricity also became emblems of the consumer economy. By 1930, two-thirds of all American households had electricity, and half of American households had

telephones. As more and more of America's homes received electricity, new appliances followed:

refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and toasters quickly took hold. Advertisers claimed

that "labor saving" appliances would ease the sheer physical drudgery of housework, but they did not shorten the average housewife's work week. Women had to do more because standards of cleanliness kept

18

rising. Sheets had to be changed weekly. The house had to be vacuumed daily. In short, social pressure

expanded household chores to keep pace with the new technology. Far from liberating women, appliances

imposed new standards of cleanliness.

Ready-to-wear clothing was another important innovation in America's expanding consumer economy.

During World War I, the federal government defined standard clothing sizes to help the nation's garment

industry meet the demand for military uniforms. Standard sizes meant that it was now possible to mass

produce ready-to-wear clothing. Since there was no copyright on clothing designs until the 1950s,

garment manufacturers could pirate European fashions and reproduce them using less expensive fabrics.

Even the public's eating habits underwent far-reaching shifts. Americans began to consume fewer starches

(like bread and potatoes) and to consume more fruit and sugar. But the most striking development was the

shift toward processed foods. Instead of preparing food from scratch at home (plucking chickens, roasting nuts, or grinding coffee beans), an increasing number of Americans purchased foods that were ready-to-

cook. Important innovations in food processing occurred during World War I as manufacturers learned

how to efficiently produce canned and frozen foods. Processed foods saved homemakers enormous

amounts of time in peeling, grinding, and cutting.

Accompanying the rise of new consumer-oriented businesses were profound shifts in the ways that businesses operated. To stimulate sales and increase profits, businesses expanded advertising, offered

installment credit, and created the nation's first regional and national chains.

The nation's first million-dollar advertising campaign (Uneeda Biscuits in a waterproof box)

demonstrated advertising's power. Before the 1920s, most advertisements consisted of vast expanses of print. Absent were brand names, pictures, or catch phrases. During the 1920s, advertising agencies hired

psychologists (including John B. Watson, the founder of behaviorism, and Edward Bernays, Sigmund

Freud's nephew) to design the first campaigns. They touted products by building-up name brand

identification, creating memorable slogans, manipulating endorsements by doctors or celebrities, and appealing to consumers' hunger for prestige and status. By 1929, American companies spent $3 billion

annually to advertise their products--five times more than the amount spent on advertising in 1914.

Installment credit soared during the 1920s. Banks offered the country's first home mortgages.

Manufacturers of everything--from cars to irons--allowed consumers to pay "on time." About 60 percent of all furniture and 75 percent of all radios were purchased on installment plans. In contrast to a Victorian

society that had placed a high premium on thrift and saving, the new consumer society emphasized

spending and borrowing.

A fundamental shift took place in the American economy during the 1920s. The nation's families spent a

declining proportion of their income on necessities (food, clothing, and utilities) and an increasing share on appliances, recreation, and a host of new consumer products. As a result, older industries, such as

textiles, railroads, and steel, declined, while newer industries, such as appliances, automobiles, aviation,

chemicals, entertainment, and processed foods, surged ahead rapidly.

During the 1920s, the chain store movement revolutionized retailing. Chains of stores multiplied across the country, like Woolworth's, the five-and-dime chain. The largest grocery chain, A&P, had 17,500

stores by 1928. Alongside drugstore and cigar store chains, there were also interlocking networks of

banks and utility companies. These banks and utilities played a critical role in promoting the financial

speculation of the late 1920s, which would be one of the causes for the Great Depression.

The Formation of Modern American Mass Culture

19

Many of the defining features of modern American culture emerged during the 1920s. The record chart, the book club, the radio, the talking picture, and spectator sports all became popular forms of mass

entertainment. But the 1920s primarily stand out as one of the most important periods in American

cultural history because the decade produced a generation of artists, musicians, and writers who were among the most innovative and creative in the country's history.

Mass Entertainment

Of all the new appliances to enter the nation's homes during the 1920s, none had a more revolutionary impact than the radio. Sales of radios soared from $60 million in 1922 to $426 million in 1929. The first

commercial radio station began broadcasting in 1919, and during the 1920s, the nation's airwaves were

filled with musical variety shows and comedies.

Radio drew the nation together by bringing news, entertainment, and advertisements to more than 10 million households by 1929. Radio blunted regional differences and imposed similar tastes and lifestyles.

No other media had the power to create heroes and villains so quickly. When Charles Lindbergh became

the first person to fly nonstop across the Atlantic from New York to Paris in 1928, the radio brought this

incredible feat into American homes, transforming him into a celebrity overnight.

Radio also disseminated racial and cultural caricatures and derogatory stereotypes. The nation's most popular radio show, "Amos 'n Andy," which first aired in 1926 on Chicago's WMAQ, spread vicious

racial stereotypes into homes whose white occupants knew little about African Americans. Other

minorities fared no better. The Italian gangster and the tightfisted Jew became stock characters in radio

programming.

The phonograph was not far behind the radio in importance. The 1920s saw the record player enter

American life in full force. Piano sales sagged as phonograph production rose from just 190,000 in 1923

to 5 million in 1929. The popularity of jazz, blues, and "hillbilly" music fueled the phonograph boom. The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald called the 1920s the "Jazz Age"--and the decade was truly jazz's golden

age. Duke Ellington wrote the first extended jazz compositions; Louis Armstrong popularized "scat"

(singing of nonsense syllables); Fletcher Henderson pioneered big band jazz; and trumpeter Jimmy

McPartland and clarinetist Benny Goodman popularized the Chicago school of improvisation.

The blues craze erupted in 1920 when a black singer named Mamie Smith released a recording called "Crazy Blues." The record became a sensation, selling 75,000 copies in a month and a million copies in

seven months. Recordings by Ma Rainey, the "Mother of the Blues," and Bessie Smith, the "Empress of

the Blues," brought the blues, with their poignant and defiant reaction to life's sorrows, to a vast audience.

"Hillbilly" music broke into mass culture in 1923 when a Georgia singer named "Fiddlin' John" Carson sold 500,000 copies of his recordings. Another country artist, Vernon Dalhart, sold 7 million copies of a

recording of "The Wreck of Old 97." "Country" music's appeal was not limited to the rural South or West;

city folk, too, listened to country songs, reflecting a deep nostalgia for a simpler past.

The single most significant new instrument of mass entertainment was the movies. Movie attendance

soared, from 50 million a week in 1920 to 90 million weekly in 1929. According to one estimate, Americans spent 83 cents of every entertainment dollar going to the movies, and three-fourths of the

population went to a movie theater every week.

20

During the late teens and 1920s, the film industry took on its modern form. In cinema's earliest days, the

film industry was based in the nation's theatrical center--New York. By the 1920s, the industry had relocated to Hollywood, drawn by its cheap land and labor, the varied scenery that was readily accessible,

and a suitable climate ideal for year-round filming (some filmmakers moved to avoid lawsuits from

individuals like Thomas Edison who owned patent rights over the filmmaking process). Each year,

Hollywood released nearly 700 movies, dominating worldwide film production. By 1926, Hollywood had

captured 95 of the British market and 70 percent of the French market.

A small group of companies consolidated their control over the film industry and created the "studio

system" that would dominate film production for the next 30 years. Paramount, 20th Century Fox, MGM,

and other studios owned their own production facilities, ran their own worldwide distribution networks, and controlled theater chains committed to showing their companies' products. In addition, they kept

stables of actors, directors, and screenwriters under contract.

The popularity of the movies soared as films increasingly featured glamour, sophistication, and sex

appeal. New kinds of movie stars appeared: the mysterious sex goddess, personified by Greta Garbo; the

passionate hot-blooded lover, epitomized by Rudolph Valentino; and the flapper, with her bobbed hair and skimpy skirts. New film genres also debuted, including swashbuckling adventures, sophisticated sex

comedies, and tales of flaming youth and their new sexual freedom. Americans flocked to see Hollywood

spectacles such as Cecil B. DeMille's Ten Commandments with its "cast of thousands" and dazzling special effects. Comedies, such as the slapstick masterpieces starring Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton,

enjoyed great popularity as well.

Like radio, movies created a new popular culture with common speech, dress, behavior, and heroes. Like

radio, Hollywood did its share to reinforce racial stereotypes by denigrating minority groups. The radio,

the electric phonograph, and the silver screen both molded and mirrored mass culture.

Spectator Sports

Spectator sports attracted vast audiences in the 1920s. The country yearned for heroes in an increasingly impersonal, bureaucratic society, and sports provided them. Prize fighters like Jack Dempsey became

national idols. Team sports flourished, however, Americans focused on individual superstars, people

whose talents or personalities made them appear larger than life. Knute Rockne and his "Four Horsemen" at Notre Dame spurred interest in college football. Professional football began during the 1920s. In 1925,

Harold "Red" Grange, the "Galloping Ghost" halfback for the University of Illinois, attracted 68,000 fans

to a professional football game at Brooklyn's Polo Grounds.

Baseball drew even bigger crowds than football. The decade began, however, with the sport mired in

scandal. In 1920, three members of the Chicago White Sox told a grand jury that they and five other players had thrown the 1919 World Series. As a result of the "Black Sox" scandal, eight players were

banished from the sport. But baseball soon regained its popularity, thanks to George Herman ("Babe")

Ruth, the sport's undisputed superstar. Up until the 1920s, Ty Cobb's defensive brand of baseball, with its emphasis on base hits and stolen bases, had dominated the sport. Ruth transformed baseball into the game

of the home-run hitter. In 1921, the New York Yankee slugger hit 59 home runs--more than any other

team. In 1927, the "Sultan of Swat" hit 60 home runs.

Few decades have produced as many great works of art, music, or literature as the 1920s. At the decade's beginning, American culture stood in Europe's shadow. By the decade's end, Americans were leaders in

The Avant-Garde

21

the struggle to liberate the arts from older canons of taste, form, and style. It was during the 1920s that

Eugene O'Neill, the country's most talented dramatist, wrote his greatest plays, and that authors William

Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe published their first novels.

American poets of the 1920s, such as Hart Crane, E. E. Cummings, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes,

Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Wallace Stevens experimented with new styles of punctuation, rhyme, and

form. Likewise, artists like Charles Demuth, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Joseph Stella challenged the

dominant realist tradition in American art and pioneered non-representational and expressionist art forms.

The 1920s marked America's entry into the world of serious music. It witnessed the founding of 50 symphony orchestras and three of the country's most prominent music conservatories--Julliard, Eastman,

and Curtis Institution. This decade also produced America's first great classical composers, including

Aaron Copland and Charles Ives, and saw George Gershwin create a new musical forms by integrating

jazz into symphonic and orchestral music.

World War I had left many American intellectuals and artists disillusioned and alienated. Neither

Wilsonian idealism nor Progressive reformism appealed to America's post-war writers and thinkers who

believed that the crusade to end war and to make the world safe for democracy had been a senseless

mistake. "Here was a new generation…" wrote the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1920 in This Side of

Paradise, "grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken…" (page 180)

During the 1920s, many of the nation's leading writers exposed the shallowness and narrow-mindedness

of American life. The United States was a nation awash in materialism and devoid of spiritual vitality: "a

wasteland," wrote the poet T.S. Eliot, "inhabited by hollow men." No author offered a more scathing attack on middle class boorishness and smugness than Sinclair Lewis, who in 1930 became the first

American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. In Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922), he satirized the

narrow-minded complacency and dullness of small town America, while in Elmer Gantry (1922), he

exposed religious hypocrisy and bigotry.

As editor of Mercury magazine, H.L. Mencken wrote hundreds of essays mocking practically every aspect of American life. Calling the South a "gargantuan paradise of the fourth rate," and the middle class

the "booboisie," Mencken directed his choicest barbs at reformers, whom he blamed for the bloodshed of

World War I and the gangsters of the 1920s. "If I am convinced of anything," he snarled, "it is that Doing

Good is in bad taste."

The writer Gertrude Stein defined an important group of American intellectuals when she told Ernest

Hemingway in 1921, "You are all a lost generation." Stein was referring to the expatriate novelists and

artists who had participated in the Great War, only to emerge from the conflict convinced that it was an

exercise in futility. In their novels, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway pointed toward a philosophy now known as "existentialism," which maintains that life has no transcendent purpose and that each individual

must salvage personal meaning from the void. Hemingway's fiction lionized toughness and "manly

virtues" as a counterpoint to the softness of American life. In The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), he emphasized meaningless death and the importance of facing stoically the absurdities

of the universe. In the conclusion of The Great Gatsby (1925), Fitzgerald gave pointed expression to an

existentialist outlook: "so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

The New Woman

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In 1920, after 72 years of struggle, American women received the right to vote. After the 19th

Amendment passed, reformers talked about female voters uniting to clean up politics, improve society, and end discrimination.

At first, male politicians moved aggressively to court the women's vote, passing legislation guaranteeing women's rights to serve on juries and hold public office. Congress also passed legislation to set up a

national system of women's and infant's health care clinics, as well as a constitutional amendment

prohibiting child labor--a measure supported by many women's groups.

The early momentum quickly dissipated, however, as the women's movement divided within and faced growing hostility from without. The major issue that split feminists during the 1920s was a proposed

Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution outlawing discrimination based on sex. The issue pitted the

interests of professional women against those of working class women, many of whom feared that the amendment would prohibit "protective legislation" that stipulated minimum wages and maximum hours

for female workers.

The women's movement also faced mounting external opposition. During the Red Scare following World

War I, the War Department issued the "Spider Web" chart which linked feminist groups to foreign

radicalism. Many feminist goals were unachieved in the mid-1920s. Opposition from many Southern states and the Catholic Church defeated the proposed constitutional amendment outlawing child labor.

The Supreme Court struck down a minimum wage law for women workers, while Congress failed to fund

the system of health care clinics.

Women did not win new opportunities in the workplace. Although the American work force included eight million women in 1920, more than half were black or foreign-born. Domestic service remained the

largest occupation, followed by secretaries, typists, and clerks--all low-paying jobs. The American

Federation of Labor (AFL) remained openly hostile to women because it did not want females competing

for men's jobs. Female professionals, too, made little progress. They consistently received less pay than their male counterparts. Moreover, they were concentrated in traditionally "female" occupations such as

teaching and nursing.

During the 1920s, the organized women's movement declined in influence, partly due to the rise of the

new consumer culture that made the suffragists and settlement house workers of the Progressive era seem old-fashioned. Advertisers tried self-consciously to co-opt many of the themes of pre-World War I

feminism, arguing that the modern economy was filled with exciting and liberating opportunities for

consumption. To popularize smoking among women, advertisers staged parades down New York's 5th Avenue, imitating the suffrage marches of the 1910s in which young women carried "torches of

freedom"--cigarettes.