The 1920S: Coping with Change (1920-1929)

Chapter 23

The 1920s: Coping with Change (1920-1929)

I.Economy

A.Booming business

1.Unemployment as low as three percent, steady prices, and the GNP grew by 43 percent from 1922 to 1929

2.Consumer goods such as home appliances (vacuums, refrigerators, washing machines, etc.)

i.Sixty percent of US homes electrified by mid 1920s

3.Automobiles

i.By end of decade, automobile industry accounted for about nine percent of all wages in manufacturing and stimulated other industries

4.Soaring stocks set market up for disaster in 1929

5.Capitalism abroad

i.US meatpackers in Argentina

ii.Anaconda Copper acquired Chile’s biggest copper mine

iii.United Fruit Company established processing plants across Latin America

B.Tariffs

1. The Fordney-McCumber Tariff (1922) and Smoot-Hawley Tariff (1930) pushed US import duties to all-time highs, benefiting domestic manufacturers but stifling foreign trade

2.Manufactured goods, less than half the value of total US exports in 1913, rose to 61 percent of the total by the end of the decade

C.Workers

1.Wage rates rose

2.Women workers, blacks, Mexican-Americans, and recent immigrants clustered at the bottom of the wage scale

i.Blacks were “last hired, first fired”

3.Higher wages would promote productivity – Henry Ford started it

D. Farmers

1.Did not share in prosperity

2.Grain prices plummeted when army purchases dwindled

3.High tariffs reduced exports

4.Large surpluses and weak prices

5.Had to pay back debts and loans

E.Assembly-line production

1.Discouraged individuality

2.Fordism

F.Business consolidation

1.Corporate giants dominated the major industries

2.By 1930, 100 corporations controlled almost half of US business

G.Chain stores accounted for about a quarter of all retail sales by 1930

H.Advertising

1.Used celebrity endorsements, promises of social success, and threats of social embarrassment

2.Offered seductive vision of new era – portrayed fantasy world of elegance, grace, and boundless pleasure

3.Encouraged consumerism

I.Credit purchases were much more common

J.Women in the workplace

1.The assembly-line did not increase employment opportunities

2.Faced wage discrimination

3. Only three percent belonged to unions by 1929

4. Worked in corporate offices as secretaries, typists, or filing clerks

K.Labor unions

1.Membership fell from 5 million in 1920 to 3.4 million in 1929

i.Higher wages reduced incentive to join

ii.Management hostility (ex: Ford hired thugs to intimidate union workers)

2.Welfare Capitalism

i.Giving workers benefits so they wouldn’t join a union

3.1929 – black membership about 82000

II.Harding

A.Bland Republican appealing after war and Wilson

B.Scandals

1.Example: Interior Secretary Fall went to jail for leasing government oil reserves, one in Teapot Dome, WY, for bribes

III.Coolidge

A.Lowered income taxes and inheritance taxes for the wealthy

B.“Trickle down” theory – tax cuts for the wealthy would promote business investment, stimulate the economy, and benefit everyone

C.Refused to help flood victims in 1927

D.McNary-Haugen bill

1.Price-support plan under which the government would annually purchase the surplus of cotton, corn, rice, hogs, tobacco, and wheat at their average price in 1909-1914 and sell them abroad.

2.Passed by Congress twice, Coolidge vetoed

E.Independent internationalism

1.US refused to join League or World Court

2.Washington Naval Arms Conference – set specific ratio of ships among the world’s naval powers and US and Japan agreed to respect territorial holding in the Pacific

i.Showed effort for arms control

3.Kellogg-Briand Pact 1928

i.US, France, and eventually sixty other nations

ii.Renounced aggression and called for outlaw of war

iii.No enforcement

4.US wanted repayment of $22 billion in war debts and reparations

F.Election of 1924

1.Democratic split between north and south – nominated John W. Davis

2. Coolidge won by landslide over Davis and La Follette (Progressive)

G.Women’s Joint Congressional Committee lobbied for child-labor laws, protection of women workers, and federal support for education and backed Sheppard-Towner Act (1921) which funded rural prenatal and baby-care centers staffed by public- health nurses

1.19th amendment had little effect

2.Younger women ridiculed feminists

IV.Mass Society, Mass Culture

A.Massive cityward migration of African-Americans

B.Women had to spend less time on household chores due to new appliances

C.Cars

1.Huge social impact

i.Brought families together (road trips)

ii.Lover’s lane

iii.Women had new freedom

iv.Farmers – lessened isolation of rural life and reduced demands of farm labor

2.Problems - Traffic jams, parking problems, highway fatalities

D.Increased consumption of coal, oil, and natural gas led to increased preservation

1.Hoover created a National Conference on Outdoor Recreation to set national recreation policies and balance conservation ethic and vacation minded leisure culture

E.Entertainment

1.Literature

i. Light reading, like Saturday Evening Post and Reader’s Digest

ii.Mass marketing

2.Radio

i.Nov 2, 1920 – Pittsburgh – KDKA

ii.Comedy, sports, news, etc

iii.Amos ‘n’ Andy – offered stereotypical African-American portrayals

3.Movies

i.Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford

ii.The Jazz Singer (1927) – first movie with sound

F.Celebrity culture

1. Idolized celebrities like Babe Ruth (of NY Yankees), Ty Cobb (manager of Detroit Tigers)

i.Ruth, “the Sultan of Swat” was a coarse, heavy drinking womanizer and Cobb, “the Georgia Peach,” was an ill-tempered racist

2.Charles Lindbergh – flew solo across Atlantic- invited to White House

V.Cultural Ferment and Creativity

A.Changing Values

1.“Sexual revolution”

i.Premarital intercourse increased but remained widely condemned

ii.Informal ritual of “dating”

a.Casual, did not have to contemplate marriage

iii.Double standard

a.Men boasted of sexual adventures

b.Women risked a smirched reputation

iv.Female sexuality

a.Shorter skirts, makeup, boyish figure, cigarettes

b.Flappers – sophisticated, pleasure-mad young woman (name from a picture of a fashionable young woman whose rubber boots were open and flapping) – epitomized youthful rejection of older stereotype of womanhood

2.Jazz Age

i.F. Scott Fitzgerald – This Side of Paradise (1920), The Great Gatsby (1925)

ii.Captured a part of the postwar scene, esp. the brassy, urban mass culture and hedonism so different from the high-minded reformism of the Progressive era

B.Alienated Writers

1.Equally disliked the moralistic pieties of the old order and the business pieties of the new

2.Sinclair Lewis – satirized the smugness and cultural barrenness of a fictional Midwestern farm in Main Street (1920), and wrote about a real estate agent trapped in middle-class conformity in Babbitt (1922)

3.Henry L. Mencken – launched The American Mercury magazine in 1924 (the bible of alienated intellectuals) – ridiculed small-town America, Protestant fundamentalism, middle class “Booboisie,” and all politicians

4.Ernest Hemingway – The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms 1929) – depicts people damaged by WWI

C.Harlem Renaissance

1.Above all, literary movement

i.Poet Langston Hughes – The Weary Blues (1926)

ii.Jean Toomer – Cane (1923)

2.Offered sensuality, eroticism, and escape from taboos – had prostitutes, speakeasies, and cocaine

3.Ended with stock market crash of 1929 and Great Depression

4.Monument to black cultural creativity

D.Other

1.Architecture – skyscrapers

2.Artists

i.Turned to America, either real or imaginary

ii.Thomas Hart Benton, Edward Hopper – negative

iii.Charles Sheeler, Joseph Stella, Georgia O’Keefe – positive

3.Music

i.Jazz

a.Original Dixieland Jazz Band – white musicians imitating the black jazz bands of New Orleans debuted in NYC in 1917

b.George Gershwin – Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and An American in Paris (1928)

c.Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington

d.Survived even when the rest of 1920s culture faded

E.Advances in Science and Medicine

1.Nuclear physicist Arthur H. Compton won Nobel Prize in 1927 for his work on x-rays

2.Harvey Cushing made dramatic advances in neurosurgery

3.Conquered diseases such as diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, influenza

4.Rising cultural prestige of science

VI.A Society in Conflict

A.Immigration

1.National Origins Act of 1924

i.Restricted annual immigration from any foreign country to two percent of the total number of persons of the “national origin” in the US in 1890

ii.Intended to reduce immigration of southern/eastern Euro.

2.1929 – changed base year to 1920

3.Asians completely “ineligible to citizenship”

4.Ozawa v. US (1922) – rejected citizenship request by a Japanese-born student and UCBerkeley

B.Hispanics

1.Immigration laws placed no restraints on immigrants from W Hemisphere

2.Immigration from Latin America and French Canada soared

3.Most Mexicans were low-paid migratory workers in agribusiness

i.Lived in isolated settlements called colonias

4.Although deeply religious, found little support from US Catholic Church

5.Border Patrol created in 1925, deportations increased, and illegal entry was made a criminal offense in 1929

C.Nativism and Anti-Radicalism

1.Sacco-Vanzetti case – anarchists and Italian immigrants – electrocuted even though there was a complete lack of evidence

D.Fundamentalism

1.Named after The Fundamentals – series of essays from 1909-1914

2.Insisted on the literal truth of the Bible, rejected evolution theory

3.The Scopes trial

i.ACLU offered to defend any teacher willing to challenge the Tennessee law barring the teaching of evolution in 1925

ii.John T. Scopes took up offer

iii.Although the jury found Scopes guilty, the trial exposed fundamentalism to ridicule

iv.Media sensation

4.Aimee Semple McPherson – theatrical sermons, mass-entertainment techniques

E.KKK

1.Glorified in movie The Birth of a Nation (1915)

2.Two Atlanta businessmen started a recruitment scheme as a scam

3.100 percent Americanism – attacked blacks, Catholics, Jews, aliens, immoral people, etc

4.Filled emotional needs for its members – appealed to normal Americans and pledged to restore the nation’s lost purity – racial, ethnic, religious, and moral – sense of empowerment and group cohesion

5.Often contolled governments, as in Oklahoma

6.The collapse

i.Indiana’s politically powerful Grand Dragon, David Stephenson, raped his secretary. She swallowed poison the next day, Stephenson refused to call a doctor, and she died several weeks later

ii.Stephenson revealed details of political corruption in Indiana from jail

iii.Moral pretensions of KKK ruined

F.The Garvey Movement

1.Marcus Garvey – Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)

2.Glorified all things black, urged black economic solidarity, and summoned blacks to return to “Motherland Africa” to establish a great nation

3.About 80000 blacks joined

4.Parades, uniforms, flags = popularity

5.Critics – white America and middle-class leaders of the NAACP and black churches, like W.E.B. Du Bois

6.Garvey was convicted of fraud in the Black Star Steamship Line

i.Deported to Jamaica

ii.UNIAcollapsed

7.First mass movement in black America

G.Prohibition

1.Eighteenth Amendment took effect in January 1920

2.1921 alcohol consumption one-third of prewar level

3.What went wrong?

i.Virtually impossible to enforce a widely opposed law in a democracy

ii.The Volstead Act 1919

a.Prohibition law was underfunded and weakly enforced

iii.Illegality appealed to young people

iv.Speakeasies, home brew, sacramental wine

v.1929 alcohol consumption about 70 percent of prewar level

vi.Organized crime

a.Rival gangs battled to control the liquor business

b.Ex: Al Capone in Chicago

4.Drys vs Wets

i.Drys – usually native born Protestants, praised law as a necessary reform

ii.Wets – liberals, alienated intellectuals, Jazz Age rebels, big-city immigrants, condemned the law as moralistic meddling

5.Election of 1928

i.Dem. Al smith advocated Prohibition’s repeal

ii.Rep. Herbert Hoover praised Prohibition as “a great social and economic experience, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose”

6.Repealed in 1933

VII.Hoover

A.Hoover won 1928 election in a landslide – the nation’s twelve largest cities were carried by Smith

B.Social Creed

1.American Individualism (1922)

2.Disapproved of cutthroat capitalist competition

3.The economy should operate like an efficient machine

4.Welcomed growth of welfare capitalism and believed in volunteerism

5.Urged higher wages to increase consumer purchasing power

6.President’s Council on Recent Social Trends studied public issues and gathered data to guide policy makers

7.Federal Farm Board (1929) to promote cooperative commodity marketing