Chapter 21
Prosperity and
Change in the
Twenties
S
M
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H
,
J
O
S
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Learning Outcomes
6
After reading this chapter, you should be able to do 8the following:
9
21-1 Describe the consumerism that developed in America
during the
0
early twentieth century, especially after World War I.
B
21-2 Explain the experiences of the nation that effectively
U put an end
to the Progressive movement in America during the 1920s.
21-3 Describe the various kinds of leisure activities that became
popular in America during the 1920s.
21-4 Discuss the strong reactions among various groups in America
to the changing cultural mores of the 1920s.
368
C h apte r 21
The Continued Move West
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“
America had begun its transition
into what one historian has called
‘the first years of our time.’
”
During the decade after the
First World War, America
became the richest society in
the history of the world. It had
entered what many observIn the 1920s, immigration restriction was necessary to
ers believed was a “new era”
prevent the millions of immigrants from changing the culof unending prosperity. As
ture of the United States.
always, economic changes
Strongly Disagree
Strongly Agree
S
prompted social and cultural
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
changes. Exhausted M
by constant efforts at reform, postI
war politicians from both parties largely gave up on the idea of “progressive” change,
which had dominatedTnational politics since Teddy Roosevelt. They were tired of moral
crusades. Instead, voters elected a series of Republican presidents who promised to
H
facilitate business expansion rather than impose Progressive regulations. Corporations
,
responded by accelerating
production and advertising their goods from one end of
America to the other, with unbounded boosterism and pep that masked potential
troubles within an unregulated economic system. As a result, America witnessed an
intensification of the J
mass consumer culture that had been growing since the start of
the Industrial Revolution.
O
With this backdrop of “good times,” new ideas that questioned the established order,
S
such as pluralism, psychoanalysis,
and relativity, entered the American vocabulary.
A series of AmericanH
writers picked up these themes and made American literature
respected throughout the world for the first time, mostly by critiquing America’s develU Also in 1920, for the first time, a majority of Americans were
oping consumer culture.
living in cities, creating
A a clash of values between those who lived in cities and those
who remained in rural parts of the country. African Americans were attempting to
refashion mainstream perceptions of their group too. Women were looking to establish
a new place in society.6And the culture seemed to be liberalizing, a development that led
to a widespread series of backlashes and America’s first culture war between religious
8
conservatives and progressives.
In all this turmoil,9
the 1920s have been depicted by historians as many things: a “new
era,” a “return to normalcy,” the “Roaring Twenties,” a period of isolation. This variety of
0
descriptions suggests that the period was characterized by many simultaneous changes.
B be described as major shifts inward, toward private consumpMost of the changes can
tion, privatized business
U practices, an inwardly facing foreign policy, a widespread dislike
and fear of “outsiders” (variously defined), and an end to the calls for broad social justice
that had characterized the Progressive era. Ultimately, this swirl of cultural newness
came to a halt with the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression that followed.
But, before then, America had begun its transition into what one historian has called “the
first years of our time.”
Image courtesy of The Advertising Archives
What do you think?
Jazz swept through the nation in the 1920s, putting on display the dramatic prosperity of the era, as well
> In 1929, five out of every six privately owned cars in the world belonged to Americans.
370
C h apte r 21
Along with recognizing the
need to pay higher wages,
many manufacturers began to
think of their factories not just
Prosperity and Change in the Twenties
9781305178526, HIST: US History Since 1865, Volume 2, Third Edition, Schultz - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization.
larly in the textile mills of the
South. Working conditions
in steel mills and coalmines
remained atrocious as well.
21-1b 1920s
Consumerism
Henry Ford’s assembly lines dramatically sped up the
>>
production of automobiles and became a sign that consumerism
more than industrialization would drive the economy of the 1920s.
An Assembly Line at the Ford Motor Company, c.1910–20 (b/w photo),
American Photographer, (20th century)/Private Collection, Archives Charmet/
The Bridgeman Art Library
S where
as places of work but also as social settings,
men and women spent a large part of theirMwaking
hours. A handful of pioneers in welfare capitalism, such as the Heinz Company (producerI of soup,
ketchup, and baked beans), reasoned that
T happy
workers would be more productive than resentful
ones. Heinz and other companies improvedH
lighting
and ventilation and also provided company
, health
plans, recreation centers, and even psychologists to
tend to their employees. Many companies shortened
the workweek. And in some firms, company
J unions
replaced the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in
O
representing workers’ grievances to management.
S
H
The combination of company unions, high wages,
U goods
and the hunger to own a car and other luxury
spelled hard times for traditional unions, as did a
A
Decline of Union Membership
growing suspicion of communism (described below).
The decade witnessed a decline in the number of
workers attached to unions in the AFL, from
6 4 million in 1920 to 2.5 million by 1929.
Employers kept iron fists inside their 8
new velvet gloves, though. They put men who were
9 known
union organizers on a blacklist, spied on union
0 antiactivities, and pressured employees to sign
union pledges. Along similar lines, a group of
Bmanufacturers came together in the National Association
U
of Manufacturers to promote what it called the
“American Plan,” which forced the maintenance of an
“open shop” labor environment, meaning that labor
unions could not force all employees in a specific
company to join their union in order to work there.
In addition, pro-business courts in the 1920s struck
down a series of Progressive-era laws against child
labor. Abusive forms of child labor persisted, particu-
welfare capitalism
Industry’s strategy of
improving working conditions and providing health
insurance for workers
company unions
Organizations of workers from a single company who represent
workers’ grievances to
management
Despite these obstacles, ordinary working-class people
blacklist
enthusiastically entered the
Those denied employment
consumer society of the 1920s,
for being known union
organizers
buying a wide assortment of
laborsaving devices. Speeding
this process, domestic electrification spread rapidly
throughout the United States, giving most urban
families electric lighting and power for the first time.
People could now aspire to own new inventions like
cars, refrigerators, toasters, radios, telephones, washing machines, vacuums, and phonographs, as well as
nationally marketed foods, clothes, and cosmetics.
Advertisements
These new consumer products spawned advertisements, which were everywhere in the 1920s: on
the radio and on billboards, in magazines and
newspapers, even painted on rocks and trees. With
nationwide marketing came nationwide advertising
campaigns by giant companies like Kellogg’s, Gillette,
Palmolive, and Nabisco. Most of the money that consumers paid when they bought goods like toothpaste
was used to pay for advertising rather than for the
actual product. Supermarkets were another 1920s
invention, replacing the old over-the-counter stores.
Now the customer, instead of asking a clerk for items
one by one, chose items from open shelves, put them
into a basket, and paid for them all at once.
Albert Lasker, Alfred Sloan, and Bruce Barton
were all pioneers of the field of marketing and
advertising, heightening the American public’s interest in orange juice (through a 1910s advertising campaign to increase consumption of oranges), tampons
(by going into schools to explain to schoolgirls the
process of menstruation—and how to manage it by
using tampons), and baked goods (by inventing the
maternal icon Betty Crocker). Bruce Barton’s noteworthy 1925 book, The Man Nobody Knows, depicted
Jesus Christ as the world’s most successful businessman, who formulated a resonating message (as
revealed in the New Testament) and an institutional
infrastructure (the Apostles) to spread the Gospel.
Read advertise- According to Barton, Jesus
ments from the was the businessman all
Americans should emulate.
1920s.
The Consumer Economy
371
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Buying on Credit
By the end of the
1920s, Americans
relied on credit to
purchase nearly
90 percent of their
major durable
goods.
Equally striking was a decline in
the historic American emphasis
on thrift. Instead of saving money
every month, buying on credit with
installment payments became a
socially acceptable way to acquire
goods. For industrialists, it was
necessary to stimulate demand
by encouraging people to spend
money they hadn’t yet earned. Car
companies experimented with different forms of financing car purchases. The result was fantastic for car sellers, as
more and more Americans bought cars on installment plans.
Issuing credit expanded throughout the 1920s.
One leading historian of installment buying estimates that, by the end of the 1920s, Americans reliedS
on credit to purchase nearly 90 percent of theirM
major durable goods. Correspondingly, Americans
I
saved a smaller percentage of their monthly income.
T
In part because of installment buying, cars becameH
very popular as well. By the late 1920s, there was one,
Early Car Culture
car for every five people in the country. A car was
the key object of desire for anyone who could scrape
together enough money to purchase one. A groupJ
of sociologists studying a small Midwestern town
Adventures in Real Estate
The economic boom boosted real
estate as well as consumer products, and nowhere more so than in Florida. Florida
was a remote backwater of America until the discovery of effective cures for yellow fever and malaria
around 1900. By the 1920s, road and rail connections
down to Miami made the area attractive for winter
holidays, and between 1920 and 1925, parcels of
land, or lots, began to change hands at rapidly escalating prices. In 1926, the weather intervened, as a
pair of devastating hurricanes killed four hundred
people, destroyed hundreds of housing projects,
threw boats into the streets, and wiped out an entire
town. After that, land in Florida appeared less attractive as an investment. Prices began to fall as steeply
as they had risen, and thirty-one local banks failed.
Much of the area was left a ghostly ruin and did not
recover until after World War II.
O
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6
8
9
0
B
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H. Armstrong Roberts/Classic Stock/Everett Collection
in the late 1920s found dozens of
car-owning families still living in
houses without bathtubs or indoor
plumbing. Young people especially longed for cars; after all, cars
bestowed freedom from watchful,
restrictive parents. In fact, at least
one preacher in the South called
cars “rolling bedrooms.”
As one
>>
marker of the high
level of consumerism
during the 1920s,
many grocery stores
converted from
small over-thecounter shops as
shown at the left
to larger supermarkets that
allowed customers to peruse the
aisles on their
own.
Prints &
gress,
of Con SZ62-114699
ry
ra
ib
LC-U
on L
Collecti phs Division,
ra
Photog
372
C h apte r 21
Prosperity and Change in the Twenties
9781305178526, HIST: US History Since 1865, Volume 2, Third Edition, Schultz - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization.
Red Scare
Fear that the United States
was vulnerable to a communist takeover
21-2 The End
of the
Progressive
Era
Lordprice Collection/Alamy
21-2a National Politics
S
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The glamour of Wall Street at the end of the decade is
>>
H of its
captured in publicity for the 1929 movie Wall Street, the second
name, about a “Napoleon of Finance” and a woman with ideals.
,
Stocks and Shares
J
If speculating on real estate seemed too risky, buying
O
stocks had broader appeal. The managers, lawyers,
accountants, advertisers, brokers, and otherS“whitecollar” professional workers whose ranks increased
H
through the 1920s invested in the stock market in
Ushares,
great numbers. This meant that they bought
or small percentages, of a company, hoping that
A
the value of the company would increase, which
would therefore lead to a rise in the price of a share.
This would give the owners of these shares
6 a tidy
profit when they sold the shares that they owned.
8 stocks
Throughout most of the 1920s, the price of
and shares rose steadily, deceiving growing 9
numbers
of investors into thinking that the trend was des0
tined to continue indefinitely.
At the same time, bankers in the 1920sBdevised
the mutual fund, a professionally managed fund
U
whose shares people could buy. The fund owned
several stocks at one time, thus limiting the amount
of risk involved for the individual investor. Because
of this pretense of security and shared risk, mutual
funds were a popular form of investment throughout the 1920s. Tens of millions of dollars poured into
Wall Street from all over the world, inflating stock
prices far above their realistic value.
These perilous but generally
good economic times had an
effect on politics. After the
unprecedented challenges of
the Progressive era, when politicians sought to rein in the
most egregious effects of the
Industrial Revolution, the 1920s
saw the rise of a dominant
Republican Party that embraced
a “business-first” philosophy. These Republicans presided over national politics throughout the decade,
holding the presidency from 1920 until 1933.
Red Scare
Before the economic “good times” took hold, however, America confronted a Red Scare, or fear that
the United States was vulnerable to a communist
takeover. Why a Red Scare? In 1917, Vladimir Lenin
and his Russian Bolshevik Party (who were called the
“Reds” during the Russian Civil War) seized power in
Russia, declaring the advent of world communism
and the end of all private property. According to the
plan spelled out by Karl Marx, Lenin believed that
his communist revolution would spread to all the
major industrial nations, and he called for workers’
uprisings everywhere. This development prompted a
number of American politicians and businessmen to
fear for the safety of the American capitalist system.
On top of this, the pieces of a revolutionary puzzle seemed to be moving into place in the United
States. American socialism had been growing with
the labor movement. The Socialist Party presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs, won almost 1 million
votes in the election of 1920—from his prison cell.
He had been jailed for making speeches against U.S.
participation in World War I, which he denounced
as a capitalist endeavor. Many towns elected socialist mayors and council members, especially in
The End of the Progressive Era
373
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Sacco and Vanzetti
the industrialized Northeast
and along the northern
stretches of the Mississippi
River. And during World War
I a variety of anarchists had
bombed courthouses, police
stations, churches, and even
people’s homes.
Politicians and businessmen reacted to these
developments by initiating a hunt for potential
revolutionaries. President Wilson’s attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, set up a federal bureau to
seek out communists and anarchists, and the years
1918–1920 witnessed the arrest and deportation of
several hundred union members and foreign-born
radicals who had usually committed no crimes but
were suspected of favoring a Russian-style coup. To
be American, the Palmer raids suggested, was not to
S
be communist.
Italian immigrant suspects in a 1920 payroll heist, who were
arrested, tried, and
convicted of robbery and
murder despite a flimsy
trail of evidence
M
Fears of political radicals surrounded the courtI
case of Sacco and Vanzetti. Nicola Sacco andT
Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian immigrants living in
Massachusetts. They became suspects in a 1920 pay-H
roll heist and were arrested, tried, and convicted of,
Sacco and Vanzetti
robbery and murder despite a flimsy trail of evidence.
Under sentence of death, both proclaimed their anarchist beliefs but maintained their innocence in the
heist. A long series of appeals followed, with civil libertarians and friends of the political left taking up the
convicted men’s cause, claiming that it was the men’s
ethnicity and political beliefs that had convicted
them, not the evidence in the trial. Nevertheless, a
final committee of inquiry concluded that Sacco and
Vanzetti were indeed guilty, and both were executed
in the electric chair in 1927. Scholars continue to dispute the defendants’ guilt (most believe Sacco was
guilty while Vanzetti’s guilt is less certain). The case
encapsulated the American public’s fears about communists and foreigners in the early 1920s.
Despite the paranoia of the Red Scare, it is obvious today that a “red” revolution was never a real
possibility during these years. The economy was
too good. Although some anarchists were willing
to use violent methods to achieve their ends, and
although a small American Communist Party did
follow instructions from Moscow, many American
socialists were Christian pacifists rather than atheist revolutionaries. Eugene V. Debs himself had written a biography of Jesus, whom he depicted as a
socialist carpenter.
Race Riots
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The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, in which 800 people were injured and 10,000 became home>>
less after the burning of the African American Greenwood neighborhood (pictured here), was just
one of many race riots that followed the First World War, suggesting the deep fears embedded in an
uncertain era of social change.
374
C h apte r 21
© Corbis
6
8
9
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B
U
Fears of change also prompted
a series of violent race riots in
the years following the First
World War. Even before the war
was over, in 1917, white workers in East St. Louis, who had
kept African Americans out
of their unions, were appalled
when African Americans agreed
to work for lower wages than
white workers would accept.
Tempers flared when African
Americans then agreed to
work as strikebreakers. Fears of
white women and black men
fraternizing together at a labor
meeting erupted quickly into a
full-fledged riot. Three thousand
men surrounded the labor meeting, and, in the end, roughly one
hundred people died because of
the ensuing violence.
The East St. Louis riot was
only the beginning. In the summer of 1919 race riots broke out
in more than two dozen cities
Prosperity and Change in the Twenties
9781305178526, HIST: US History Since 1865, Volume 2, Third Edition, Schultz - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization.
across the United States. Chicago’s were perhaps
the worst, with dozens dying and hundreds more
injured. But riots also broke out in Connecticut,
Maryland, Arizona, Texas, Mississippi, and other
states, demonstrating that racial tensions affected
the nation as a whole, not just the South. They also
put on vivid display the fact that many African
Americans had begun to leave the South’s system
of Jim Crow segregation, heading to the supposedly
more racially progressive parts of the country in the
North, a broad movement called the Great Migration.
African Americans were not always welcome in the
new locales, and in the heated atmosphere of industrial conflict combined with post–World War I fears
of radicalism, they suffered the most.
Even after race relations quieted down throughout much of the rest of the 1920s, they always
remained potentially violent. In 1921, the most
destructive of all the race riots took place S
in Tulsa,
Oklahoma, where the one-day riot led to 800M
injuries
and 10,000 people becoming homeless as the racially
I was
segregated Tulsa neighborhood of Greenwood
essentially burned to the ground.
T
H
Once the economy settled down after two,years of
Warren G. Harding
peacetime conversion, politics mellowed as well.
Warren G. Harding won the presidential election
of 1920 by campaigning largely from the
J front
porch of his house in Marion, Ohio. Harding openly
O
declared his intention to abandon President
Wilson’s Progressive ideals, including Wilson’s
S idealistic international program, which had transformed
H
American politics during World War I by expandU also
ing U.S. involvement in world affairs. Harding
signaled an end to Progressive politics by using the
A
slogan of “a return to normalcy,” and by “normalcy”
(a newly coined word) he meant the pre-Progressive,
pro-business politics of the late 1800s.
6
With the First World War over, Harding disman8 agentled the National War Labor Board and other
cies designed to regulate private industry.9Instead,
he advocated independent control for corpora0
tions. After a two-year recession while the economy
transitioned to peacetime production levels,
B the
Republican ascendancy meant that politics in the
U
1920s would be predictably conservative.
Starting with Harding, three successive
Republican administrations pursued limited government via conservative policies on tariffs, taxes,
immigration restriction, labor rights, and business
administration. For better or worse, these policies
created a robust economy—one healthy enough
to allow Americans to make light of a major scan-
Great Migration
dal during Harding’s adminThe movement of nearly 2
istration, the Teapot Dome
million African Americans
Scandal of 1923. Teapot
out of the southern parts
of the United States to
Dome implicated Harding’s
the cities of the North
secretary of the interior,
between 1910 and 1930;
Albert B. Fall, and Fall’s willmost were rejecting Jim
Crow segregation
ingness to lease government
land to prominent American
oil men in exchange for
bribes. The scandal was exposed in the late 1920s,
and Teapot Dome came to symbolize the closeness between big business and government that
characterized the 1920s. Other scandals plagued
the Harding administration, including one in which
Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty resigned for
taking bribes.
“Silent Cal”
In August 1923, President Harding died suddenly in
San Francisco during a tour of the West Coast (just
before the Teapot Dome Scandal came to light).
Harding’s flinty vice president, Calvin Coolidge,
heard the news in his hometown of Plymouth,
Vermont, while visiting his elderly father. A notary
public, Coolidge Sr. administered the oath of office
to his son late that night, and “Silent Cal,” as he was
known, became president.
Known for his ability to solve political problems with a minimum of words and minimal effort,
Coolidge won reelection in 1924, easily beating
Democrat John W. Davis (who carried only southern states) and the new Progressive Party’s Robert
F. La Follette, whose loss signaled the end of the
Progressive era in national politics. Coolidge continued Harding’s policy of minimizing the federal
government’s role in American life. He restored
his party’s reputation for scrupulous honesty and
integrity, which had been damaged by Teapot Dome,
by creating a bipartisan commission to investigate
the improprieties of the Harding administration.
Coolidge also avoided using the federal government to crusade for a cause, something that had
ultimately damaged Wilson’s presidency and reputation. Coolidge’s presidency was notable for its
paucity of action.
21-2b Prohibition
There was, however, one volatile issue that came
to the forefront of American politics in the 1920s:
Prohibition, or the outlawing of alcohol. After extensive political lobbying extending back before the Civil
War, and empowered by the anti-German sentiment
of the First World War (Germans being known for
The End of the Progressive Era
375
9781305178526, HIST: US History Since 1865, Volume 2, Third Edition, Schultz - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization.
Volstead Act
Legislation passed in
1919 that laid down
strict punishments for
violating the Eighteenth
Amendment
moonshine
Homemade corn
whiskey
Well, folks, do you think you
“could
stand breaking the law a
little?
”
—George F. Babbitt, in
speakeasy
Clandestine bar serving alcohol during
Prohibition
their extensive brewing tradition), Prohibition became
the law of the land in 1919.
The Eighteenth Amendment
to the Constitution prohibited the “manufacture,
sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” in the
United States.
Prohibition was difficult to enforce. Congress
passed the Volstead Act (1919), which laid down
strict punishments for violating the amendment.S
But from the start there were problems, not the leastM
of which was the fact that enforcement required a
high degree of citizen cooperation. This was simplyI
lacking in many parts of the country. Rural BaptistsT
and Methodists were usually strong supporters of
Prohibition, and Prohibition was most effective inH
small towns of the South and Midwest. But even,
there, farmers with long traditions of taking a surreptitious drink were reluctant to stop doing so.
Stills making moonshine whiskey proliferated inJ
mountain and country districts. The most promiO
nent journalist of the day,
Read a 1931
H. L. Mencken, joked thatS
report on the
Prohibition was the work of
difficulties of
H
“ignorant bumpkins of the
enforcing Prohibition.
cow states who resented theU
fact that they had to swill raw corn liquor while city
A
slickers got good wine and whiskey.”
Meanwhile, immigrants from societies with
strong drinking traditions, such as Germany, Ireland,6
and Italy, hated Prohibition. They were demographically strong in cities and formed ethnic gangs (the8
most notorious of which was the Sicilian Mafia) that9
made and sold their own supplies of alcohol. Former
saloonkeepers, who had been forced by Prohibition0
to close down, set up clandestine bars known asB
speakeasies and received their supplies from these
U
gangs.
Police, customs officials, and Treasury agents
pursued distillers and bootleggers, with little success. Gang leaders like Al Capone in Chicago bribed
police and politicians to look the other way when
alcohol shipments were coming into town. But
bribery didn’t always persuade public officials, and
those who resisted bribes were often victims of
376
C h apte r 21
intimidation and even
murder.
A large part of the
urban
middle
class
found that, despite the
problems
associated
Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt
with alcohol, the idea of
never having a drink was
generally
unbearable.
Novelist Sinclair Lewis described in his satiric novel
Babbitt (1922) how a generally law-abiding real estate
salesman went about preparing for a dinner party
at his home. First he enters “a place curiously like
the saloons of ante-prohibition days.” Admitted to
a back room, he persuades the owner to sell him a
quart of gin, then mixes cocktails at home before
his guests arrive. They are all longing for a drink
and are delighted when he asks, “Well, folks, do you
think you could stand breaking the law a little?”
After a couple of drinks each, the men declare that
they favor Prohibition as “a mighty good thing for
the working class” because it “keeps ’em from wasting their money and lowering their productiveness.”
But they add that Congress has interfered with “the
rights—the personal liberty—of fellows like ourselves,” for whom a drink could do no harm.
After fifteen contentious and tumultuous years,
Prohibition was repealed in 1933, with the Twentyfirst Amendment.
21-3 A New Culture: The
Roaring Twenties
With the economy seemingly good, radical politics
largely on the run, and national politics not terribly
interesting, many Americans turned to a vast array of
leisure activities. New technology, including moviemaking equipment, phonographic records, and
expanded commercial radio, enhanced a vibrant
social atmosphere, especially in the nation’s cities.
The “Roaring Twenties,” as they were sometimes
called, witnessed a dramatic expansion of popular
culture. However, this interest in lighter fare led
some to political and intellectual disillusionment,
based on the sense that Americans were leaving
behind the ideals of the Progressive era in favor of
less socially engaged interests. Others were more
interested in using culture to break stifling bonds
of long-standing restrictions. African Americans,
women, and leftist intellectuals were some of the
groups pushing against the old social limitations.
Prosperity and Change in the Twenties
9781305178526, HIST: US History Since 1865, Volume 2, Third Edition, Schultz - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization.
21-3a 1920s
Popular
Culture
In the 1920s breakthroughs
in
several
media allowed the public
to enjoy new diversions.
Movies
“
Go to a motion picture . . . and
let yourself go. . . . Out of the cage
of everyday existence! If only for
an afternoon or an evening—
escape!
”
—Saturday Evening Post, 1923
Thomas Edison and other
inventors had developed moving films at the turn
of the century. After a slow couple of years, films
caught on in the 1910s, and by 1920 a film industry
had developed in Hollywood, California, where there
was plenty of open space, three hundred sunny days
a year for outdoor filming, and 3,000 miles between
it and Edison’s patents. Far away in California, ignorS
ing the patents, which had made most of the topquality moviemaking equipment very expensive,
M
was relatively easy.
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Image courtesy of The Advertising Archives
J
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6
8
9
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A poster promoting Valentino, whose stardom symbolized
>>
the rise of film.
jazz
Rhythmic music derived
as part of African
American culture and
popularized by both white
and black musicians during the 1920s
phonograph
Invention that played
recorded music; pioneered by Edison in the
1870s
Once established in Hollywood, the movie
industry made a series of artistic and technical breakthroughs that popularized the art form
throughout the nation. Most exciting was the invention of talking pictures, which first appeared in 1927
with The Jazz Singer. At the same time, longer feature
films with sophisticated plotting, by directors such
as Cecil B. DeMille and D. W. Griffith, replaced the
melodramas of the 1910s. Urban movie houses were
built and decorated like oriental palaces, far more
lavish than they needed to be to show movies. This
gave patrons, who regularly arrived in their best
clothes, a sense of glamour and enchantment on
their night out. Moviegoing was wildly popular, and
stars such as Rudolph Valentino, Clara Bow, Mary
Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks Sr. enjoyed worldwide fame.
Music
Along with the movies, jazz music came into vogue
during the 1920s. Originally derived as part of
African American culture, jazz followed ragtime
music by “crossing over” to white audiences during
the 1920s. Most jazz stars of the 1920s were black
men such as pianist Duke Ellington and trumpeter Louis Armstrong, some of the first African
Americans to have enthusiastic white fans. Before
the 1920s, Americans who wanted to listen to jazz
(or any other kind of music) had had to create their
own sounds or attend a concert. The invention of the
phonograph, pioneered by Edison in the 1870s and
popularized in the first years of the 1900s, birthed
the record industry. This enabled fans to listen to
their favorite artists on their gramophones as many
times as they wanted.
Furthermore, commercial radio began broadcasting in 1922, allowing people everywhere to hear concerts being played hundreds of miles away. That same
year, Warren Harding became the first president to
make a radio broadcast. Among the earliest groups
to make use of the new medium were evangelical
preachers. While they insisted on old, established
virtues, they had no objection to using new-fangled
A New Culture: The Roaring Twenties
377
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Harlem Renaissance
A cultural and political
endeavor among African
Americans using art and
literature to protest the
perpetuation of racism in
America and in African
Americans’ historic
responses to it; its leaders demanded the rise
of a “new Negro” who
would stand up and fight
American racism; lasted
from 1919 to 1929
methods such as radio to
help them spread the Gospel.
Professional Sports
Radio promoted an interest
in professional and college
sports in the 1920s, especially baseball, boxing, and
college football. Listeners
could get real-time play-byplay, hearing the actions of
Universal Negro
their favorite local team or
Improvement
boxer. The increased popuAssociation
larity of sports during the
Marcus Garvey’s black
1920s made celebrities out
nationalist fraternal organization that advocated a
of the best players, the bigcelebration of blackness,
gest of whom was the New
the creation of blackYork Yankees’ slugger Babe
owned and -operated
businesses, and the
Ruth. It was during the 1920sS
dream of a return of all
that baseball truly becameM
black people to Africa
“America’s pastime,” and the
1927 New York Yankees areI
still considered by many to be the best baseball teamT
of all time.
Fads, Triumphs, and Sex Scandals
H
,
Games such as bridge and mah-jongg became popular during these years, and a national craze for
crossword puzzles began. The nation took pleasureJ
in reading about the first flight over the North Pole
O
by Admiral Byrd in 1926 and the first trans-Atlantic
flight by Charles Lindbergh in 1927. Lindbergh becameS
an international celebrity because of his aviation
H
triumphs.
Americans enjoyed a steady stream of celeb-U
rity sex scandals too, like the one surrounding the
A
disappearance of radio evangelist Aimee Semple
McPherson in 1926. A theatrical preacher who had
built up a radio audience and constructed an audi-6
torium called the “Angelus Temple” in Hollywood,
she disappeared while bathing in the sea in 1926.8
Disciples, finding her clothes on the beach, feared9
that “Sister Aimee” had drowned. She reappeared
a few weeks later, claiming that she had been0
abducted and imprisoned in Mexico, had bro-B
ken free, crossed the desert on foot, and darU
ingly evaded her kidnappers. Investigators knocked
holes in the story almost at once, especially when
evidence from Carmel, farther up the California
coast, showed that she had been enjoying herself
in a love nest with an engineer from her own radio
station. The widespread interest in this type of
gossip-column fare was typical of a carefree, apolitical era.
378
C h apte r 21
21-3b The “New Negro”
African American jazz musicians blossomed as the
musical facet of a larger ferment among African
Americans in the 1920s, known collectively as the
Harlem Renaissance. Following the First World War
and the race riots that followed, many African
Americans had grown frustrated with America’s
entrenched racism and became motivated to challenge the prevailing order. They sought to establish
themselves as different from their parents’ generation, which they saw as unnecessarily kowtowing to
white interests in an effort to advance through
accommodation. Instead, the younger generation
of African Americans declared it would rather “die
fighting” than be further subjugated in American
society. This new generation epitomized what one
Harlem Renaissance leader, the philosopher Alain
Locke, called “the new Negro.”
Despite its seemingly political goals, the Harlem
Renaissance was mostly a literary celebration, as
prominent authors like Langston Hughes and Zora
Neale Hurston emerged under its auspices. As
African Americans moved north to escape sharecropping and the social segregation of the South,
many headed to the large northern cities. No neighborhood grew more than Harlem, which was by real
estate code the only large neighborhood in New York
City where black people could live as a group.
Several intellectuals, such as W. E. B. Du Bois
and James Weldon Johnson, sought to politicize the
growing number of urban black people, although few
leaders had much luck organizing politically. The
NAACP, meanwhile, pursued a legal strategy to end
forced segregation in America’s cities. Throughout
much of the twentieth century, the NAACP brought
these challenges to America’s courts, forcing the
court system to evaluate the segregation that persisted in the United States. Whether the courts were
willing to confront and overturn segregation was
another matter altogether.
Marcus Garvey
The Harlem Renaissance was not a political movement, though, and the legal strategies of the NAACP
were unlikely to provoke a social movement. Marcus
Garvey occupied this vacuum. The first black nationalist leader to foment a broad movement in the
United States, Garvey founded the Universal Negro
Improvement Association in 1914 and moved its
headquarters to Harlem in 1916. Through parades,
brightly colored uniforms, and a flamboyant style of
leadership, Garvey advocated a celebration of blackness, the creation of black-owned and -operated busi-
Prosperity and Change in the Twenties
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The Granger Collection, New York/The Granger Collection
S
M
I
T
H
,
Aaron Douglass was one of the most prominent visual art>>
ists of the Harlem Renaissance, creating images full of life and energy
that often harkened back to Africa, giving pride and a foundation to a
people often thought to be rootless.
J
O
nesses, and the dream of a return of all black
S people
to Africa. Indeed, he created his own line of steamH
ships, the “Black Star Line,” with the intention of
U the
tying together black-owned businesses in Africa,
Caribbean, and the United States. His organization
A
won over more than 1 million members worldwide,
although most mainstream American politicians
ignored him. More damningly, the antipathy
6 he suffered from other African American civil rights workers curtailed his power further. He suffered8a harsh
decline in the early 1920s, indicted for mail
9 fraud
while selling stock in the Black Star Line, and, in 1927,
0
he was deported back to Jamaica, his birthplace.
On a variety of fronts, black urbanites
B were
struggling to locate their political and cultural voice.
These members of the Great Migration U
became
vividly aware that racism did not stop north of the
Mason-Dixon line.
21-3c Changing Roles for Women
Women won the right to vote with the Nineteenth
Amendment in 1920, one of the final great reforms of
National Women’s
the Progressive era. The first
Party
election in which they voted
Political lobbying coalition
put Harding into office. Many
founded in 1913 that promoted women’s right to
people expected the amendvote and to share political
ment to have dramatic
and economic equality
consequences in national
Equal Rights
politics, but the female vote
Amendment
was actually split evenly
Proposed amendment to
between the candidates.
the Constitution meant to
eliminate all legal distincRather than swaying the baltions between the sexes,
ance in any one direction,
such as those that permitunmarried women generted different pay scales
for men and women doing
ally voted the same as their
the same job
fathers, and married women
generally voted the same as
their husbands.
Winning the vote marked the triumphant end
of a long and frequently bitter campaign. Suffragists
had hoped to transform politics for the better. They
imagined national politics as a locale where deals
were brokered by unscrupulous groups of men in
smoke-filled back rooms, and they intended to bring
politics into the light of day and bring morality to
bear on politics. In light of the corruption scandals of
the Harding administration (namely, Teapot Dome),
winning the vote had not achieved this, so now what
were activists to do?
ERA
Many activists turned their attention to economics and the job market. At the urging of Alice Paul,
a former suffragist and now head of the National
Women’s Party (a political lobbying coalition
founded in 1913), a group of congressmen proposed
an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution
in 1923. It read: “Men and women shall have equal
rights throughout the United States and every place
subject to its jurisdiction.” The amendment’s objective was to eliminate all legal distinctions between
the sexes, such as those that permitted different
pay scales for men and women doing the same job.
Some women, especially trade unionists, opposed
the amendment because it would have nullified
laws that protected mothers and working women
from harsh working conditions and excessively long
hours. Congress did not approve the amendment
until 1972, and then the necessary three-quarters of
the states did not ratify it. In the years since, however, its equal-pay provision has become law.
The “New” Woman
If the political successes largely stopped in 1920,
the rest of the 1920s witnessed the development
of a distinct youth culture, especially among young
A New Culture: The Roaring Twenties
379
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Burke/Triolo/Brand X Pictures/Jupiterimages
S
M
I
T
H
,
>>
“Flappers” were the decade’s outspoken, independent women
who openly displayed disregard for the Victorian ethos of the past and
suggested one possible avenue for women’s roles in the future.
single women. New fashions, notably short “bobbed”
hair, knee-length dresses that seemed daringly
short, public smoking, and dance crazes such as
the Charleston all generated controversy. “Flappers”
were the decade’s outspoken, independent women,
who scorned the “Victorian” inhibitions of their
parents’ generation. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of
Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and the Damned (1922)
evoked the cosmopolitanism of the era, especially its
changing attitudes toward unchaperoned courtship
and “petting.” Margaret Sanger promoted the liberalizing culture of the 1920s as the leading advocate for
birth control (a phrase she coined) and planned parenthood. Sanger became a touchstone for women’s
rights in the period, lecturing all over the United
States and Europe. There are several reasons why the
Protestant morality that had dominated American
mores throughout the second half of the nineteenth
century came under assault in the early twentieth
century (see “The reasons why . . .” box below).
21-3d Disillusioned Writers,
Liberalizing Mores
The 1920s also saw the coming of age of American
literature. An influential group of writers, including
poets T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and novelists John
Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein,
found commercial America vulgar—so distasteful
that they declined to participate altogether. They
J
O
S
The reasons
why . . .
H
U
A morality came under assault in the first
There were at least four reasons why Protestant
{
}
decades of the twentieth century:
Loss of biblical authority. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, 6
which questioned the authenticity of the biblical story of creation, and
8
therefore the Bible as a whole, was widely accepted in the second half
of the nineteenth century. At the same time, European historians and
9
intellectuals were developing a school of biblical criticism that examined the Bible as a historical artifact worthy of investigation rather than0
a book of revealed divine truth. The loss of biblical authority unmoored
B
many people’s beliefs in Christian morality, and in Christianity in general.
Decline of universal morality. At the same time, anthropolo- U
gists and sociologists like Franz Boas and Robert Park began arguing
that other cultures were not any less valuable or moral than white
Protestant culture, just different from it. There were, these thinkers
argued, no hierarchies of races or hierarchies of moral authority. If
the value of a particular cultural was relative based on one’s perception, this meant that any notion of universal morals was highly
questionable as well.
380
C h apte r 21
Psychology. Meanwhile, psychologists like Sigmund Freud placed
sexual desires at the heart of human urges, making sex a legitimate
topic of discussion, indeed, a necessary one if someone wanted to
learn the various drives that make one human. Sex was no longer an
act to be held under wraps, but one worthy of exploration and even
trial and error.
Consumerism. Nothing sells better than sex, a fact not missed
by the new generation of advertising agents and marketers. At the
same time, greater freedoms promoted by inventions like automobiles made it easier to escape the watchful gaze of parents.
Meanwhile, movies promoted scintillating images of love and lust
as well as valor and honor, at the same time providing a darkened
environment for viewers, perhaps hand-in-hand, to enjoy these new
images.
Prosperity and Change in the Twenties
9781305178526, HIST: US History Since 1865, Volume 2, Third Edition, Schultz - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization.
went to Europe, usually to London and Paris, where
they formed intellectual expatriate communities.
But in their self-exile they remained preoccupied by
their American roots and wrote some of the most
effective American literature of their age. Together,
the writers of the 1920s are referred to as “the Lost
Generation,” mainly because of their disillusionment
with the Progressive ideals that had been exposed as
fraudulent during the First World War.
Other fine writers felt no desire to flee. Sinclair
Lewis produced a long stream of satirical novels about
1920s America that won him a Nobel Prize for literature in 1930, America’s first. Literary critic Malcolm
Cowley, himself a Paris expatriate in the 1920s,
observed that American literature was maturing rapidly and that “by 1930 it had come to be valued for
itself and studied like Spanish or German or Russian
literature. There were now professors of American litS
erature at the great European universities. American
plays, lowbrow and highbrow, were being applauded
M
in the European capitals.” It is, of course, ironic that
I period
most of the American writers of this formative
made their mark by deriding mainstream America
T for
its jocularity. Their own erudition contradicted their
claims that America was anti-intellectual. H
21-4 Reactions
,
With all these changes swirling around, many
J
Americans felt uncomfortable with what they saw
as the liberal mores of the youth culture O
and the
diminishing of community life prompted by the
S
Industrial Revolution. Some of these dissenters
HOthers
found a home in Protestant fundamentalism.
rejected what they viewed as an increasing
U acceptance of cosmopolitanism and moral relativity. If the
A libera1920s were an age of social and intellectual
tion, they also gave birth to new forms of reaction
that created a clash of values.
6
21-4a Religious Divisions
8
Protestants have always been denominationally
9
divided, but in the 1920s, a split between modernists
0 leadand fundamentalists became readily apparent,
ing to a landmark court case.
B
U
Modernists
On the one hand, a group of Protestants calling
themselves modernists consciously sought to adapt
their Protestant faith to the findings of scientific
theories such as evolution and evidence that called
into question the literalness of the Bible, something
called biblical criticism. As these twin impulses
became increasingly accepted by scholars, some
modernists
liberal Protestants stopped
Protestants who conthinking of the Bible as God’s
sciously sought to adapt
infallible word. Instead,
their Protestant faith to
the findings of scientific
they regarded it as a coltheories, such as evolulection of ancient writings,
tion and evidence that
some of them historical,
questioned the literalness
of the Bible
some prophetic, and some
mythological. In the modfundamentalists
ernists’ view, represented in
Protestants who insisted
that the Bible should be
the writings of the notable
understood as God’s
preacher Harry Emerson
revealed word, absolutely
Fosdick, God did not literally
true down to the last
detail; they asserted and
make the world in six days,
upheld the main points
Adam and Eve weren’t actual
of traditional Christian
people, and there was no
doctrine, including biblical
inerrancy, the reality of
real flood covering the whole
miracles, and the Virgin
earth. Men like Fosdick conbirth
tended that these events
were mythic explanations of
human origins. Jesus was as central as ever, the
divine figure standing at the center of history and
transforming it, but Jesus would surely encourage
his people to learn modern science and comparative religion, and to focus on other studies that
enriched their knowledge of God’s world and spread
peace and tolerance far and wide. Not to do so was
to be intolerant, and this was no way to act in a
pluralistic world.
Fundamentalists
On the other hand, the group of Protestants who
have come to be known as fundamentalists (after
the publication in the 1910s of a series of pamphlets
labeled “the Fundamentals”) insisted that the Bible
should be understood as God’s revealed word, absolutely true down to the last detail. In their view, the
main points of traditional Christian doctrine, including biblical inerrancy, the reality of miracles, and
the Virgin birth, must be asserted and upheld. Most
fundamentalists were troubled by evolution, not
only because it denied the literal truth of Genesis
but also because it implied that humans, evolving
from lower species, were the outcome of random
mutations, rather than a creation of God in His own
image. Traveling evangelists such as Billy Sunday, an
ex–major league baseball player, and Aimee Semple
McPherson denounced evolution and all other deviations from the Gospel as the Devil’s work. They also
attacked the ethos of the social gospel (for more on
the social gospel, see Chapter 19).
Scopes Monkey Trial
In 1925, the conflict between modernists and fundamentalists came to a head in Dayton, Tennessee, in
Reactions
381
9781305178526, HIST: US History Since 1865, Volume 2, Third Edition, Schultz - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization.
Scopes Monkey Trial
the Scopes Monkey Trial. The
case revolved around a state
law that prohibited the teaching of evolution in Tennessee
schools. John Scopes, a young
teacher, offered to deliberately break the law to test
its constitutionality (in order
American Civil
to obtain publicity for this
Liberties Union
struggling “New South” town)
(ACLU)
with the understanding that
Organization founded in
the American Civil Liberties
1920 that was dedicated
to fighting infringements
Union (ACLU) would pay the
on civil liberties, includcosts to defend him. The trial
ing free speech
drew journalists from all over
Americanization
America and was one of the
Notion that all American
first great media circuses of
immigrant groups should
the century.
leave behind their old
ways and melt into the
At the trial, the nation’sS
Anglo-Saxon mainstream
most prominent defenseM
melting pot
lawyer, Clarence Darrow,
Concept that all the
volunteered to help Scopes.I
nation’s people contribWilliam Jennings Bryan, theT
uted their cultural traits
three-time Democratic presito a single mix, creating
something altogether new
dential candidate and formerH
secretary of state, volun-,
cultural pluralism
Idea that each cultural
teered to assist the prosegroup should retain its
cution. Darrow, an agnostic,
uniqueness and not be
actually called Bryan as aJ
forced to change by a
restrictive state or culture
witness for the defense and
O
questioned him about the
origins of the earth. DidS
Read transcripts not the geological evidence
H
from the Scopes prove the immense age of
trial.
its rocks? asked Darrow. “I’mU
not interested in the age of rocks but in the Rock of
A
Ages!” countered Bryan, who believed the earth was
about 6,000 years old. Scopes was convicted (the
conviction was later overturned on a technicality)6
and fined $100, and the law against teaching evolution remained in effect. Press8
Read H. L.
coverage by urbane journal-9
Mencken’s
ists such as H. L. Mencken
account of the
and Joseph Wood Krutch ridi-0
Scopes trial.
culed the anti-evolutionists,B
but fundamentalism continued to dominate rural
U
Protestantism, especially in the South and Midwest.
21-4b Immigration Restriction
and Quotas
If modern mores were one cause of fear, another
was the transformation provoked by immigration.
382
C h apte r 21
Former baseball player Billy Sunday grew to great fame as
>>
a dynamic preacher of what he called the Christian fundamentals.
AP Photo
Famous 1925 court case
that revolved around a
state law prohibiting the
teaching of evolution
in Tennessee schools;
John Scopes, a young
teacher, offered to deliberately break the law to
test its constitutionality
As we have seen in chapters past, millions of immigrants entered the United States between 1880
and 1920, and in the early 1920s many congressmen and social observers articulated a fear that
the “Anglo-Saxon” heritage of the United States
was being “mongrelized” by “swarthy” Europeans.
These Europeans (Italians, Russians, Greeks, or other
people from southern and eastern Europe) would
be considered white by today’s standards, but they
were viewed as “others” during the 1920s because
they were Catholics or Jews from countries in eastern and southern Europe, and they spoke foreign
languages and cooked odd-smelling foods.
Immigration Restrictions
The ideology undergirding the fears of American
politicians was the idea of Americanization. This
was defined as the notion that all American immigrant groups should leave behind their old ways and
melt into the Anglo-Saxon mainstream. Some intellectuals were challenging this idea through concepts
like the melting pot (in which all the nation’s people
contributed their cultural traits to a single mix,
creating something altogether new) and cultural
pluralism (the idea that each cultural group should
retain its uniqueness and not be forced to change by
a restrictive state or culture).
Prosperity and Change in the Twenties
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© Cengage Learning 2014
Despite the power of these countervailing
ideas, acts of Congress in 1921 (the Quota Act) and
1924 (the National Origins
View the quotas Act) restricted the number
established for
of immigrants permitted to
all countries.
enter the United States, creating a series of quotas. These limits were based
on immigration figures from the end of the nineteenth century, when most immigrants were from
England, Ireland, or northern Europe. They appeased
the widespread fear of the
Read a congress- alien during these years, at
man’s denunciaa time when antisemitism,
tion of quotas.
anti-Catholicism, nativism,
and racism meaningfully influenced the ideas and
positions of serious politicians and public figures.
One major result of the new immigration policy
was that Italian, Polish, Hungarian, and Jewish comS“greenmunities no longer received a steady flow of
horns” to keep them in touch with the oldM
country.
Instead, these communities gradually dissolved as
their members learned English in publicI schools
and followed work and housing opportunities
T into
non–ethnically defined neighborhoods. This process
of dissolution was mostly completed by theH
1950s.
The boosterism and “pep”
of the 1920s extended only
so far. For many Americans,
the national narrative only
concerned the advancement of white, Anglo-Saxon
Protestants.
21-4c Social
Intolerance
National Origins Act
Legislation that restricted
the number of immigrants
permitted to enter the
United States, creating a
series of quotas in 1924
Ku Klux Klan
A paramilitary organization
formed to “redeem” the
South after Reconstruction
by intimidating newly
freed blacks; after a temporary decline, the group
reformed in 1915
Perhaps unsurprisingly, along
with immigration restriction
a new nativism emerged in response to all the economic and social changes taking place. Immigration
restriction was one arm of this nativism, and other
aspects emerged as well.
The Resurgence of the Klan
The Ku Klux Klan, an organization formed to
“redeem” the South after Reconstruction, enjoyed a
revival in the 1920s after being reborn in a ceremony
on Georgia’s Stone Mountain in 1915. Attesting to
the power of movies during this era, the Klan’s
resurgence was in part inspired by the positive
portrayal it received in D. W. Griffith’s three-hour
,
Quotas
film Birth of a Nation. This movie is often considered
the most influential in American film history for
Reflecting Congress’s implementation of quotas,
its innovative techniques and sweeping dramatic
many colleges and universities, especially
J in the
arc—despite the fact that it was overtly racist and
Northeast, began instituting quotas to limit the numO
lionized the Klan. The Klan of the 1920s saw itself as
ber of Jews who could attend. Social fraternities and
the embodiment of old Protestant and southern virhousing developments limited membershipS
by racial
tues. In this new era, the Klan enlisted members in
and religious restrictions, and most attempts to cirH
the North as well, especially in cities, thus reemergcumvent these restrictions were met with violence.
U
ing in response to the new urban culNumber of immigrants entering the United States, 1820–1950
ture of the 1920s, which it blamed
A
on immigrants. Hiram Wesley Evans, a
1,200,000
Texas dentist, was the Klan’s Imperial
Wizard during these years. He declared
6
1,000,000
he was pledged to defend decency and
8
Americanism from numerous threats:
800,000
race-mixing, Jews, Catholics, and the
9
immoralities of urban sophistication.
0
600,000
The Klan was mainly anti-Catholic
in northern and western states. For
B
instance, Klan members won election
400,000
U
to the legislature in Oregon and then
outlawed private schools for all chil200,000
dren ages eight to sixteen. This was
meant to attack the Catholic paro0
chial school system that had been
1820 1830 1840 1850 1860 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950
established in response to the overt
After peaking during the first two decades of the twentieth century, the number
Protestantism taught in public schools
of foreigners coming to the United States declined precipitously as a result of the immigrain the 1800s. Oregon’s Catholics fought
tion restriction laws of the 1920s.
>>
Reactions
383
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back, eventually battling to the U.S. Supreme Court,
which, in the case of Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925),
upheld the Catholic Church’s right to run its own
school system.
This second wave of Klan activity came to a
highly publicized end when one of the organization’s
leaders, David (D. C.) Stephenson, was convicted of
the abduction, rape, and second-degree murder of
a woman who ran a literacy program in Indiana.
When Indiana governor Ed Jackson refused to commute his sentence in 1927, Stephenson released the
names of several politicians who had been on the
Klan’s payroll, leading to the indictments of many
politicians, including the governor, for accepting
bribes. Both the Klan and several Indiana politicians
were shamed in the debacle.
21-4d The Election of 1928
S
The multitude of changes during the 1920s andM
the variety of reactions against them were symbolized by the candidates in the presidential elec-I
tion of 1928. The election pitted the Democrat AlT
Smith against Republican Herbert Hoover. Hoover
was idealized as a nonpolitical problem solver andH
an advocate of big business. He represented the,
freewheeling Republican values of the 1920s and
1928
WA
7
MT
4
OR
5
ID
4
NV
3
CA
13
ND
5
SD
5
WY
3
CO
6
WI
13
IA
13
NE
8
UT
4
AZ
3
MN
12
KS
10
OK
10
NM
3
IL
29
MO
18
AR
9
LA
10
TX
20
OH
24
KY
13
AL
12
WV
8
VA
12
NC
12
TN
12
MS
10
ME
6
VT
4 NH MA
NY
4 18
45
RI
PA
NJ CT 5
38
14 7
MI
15
IN
15
GA
14
FL
6
Electoral Vote
Popular Vote
Hoover (Republican)
444
83.6%
21,392,190
87
16.4%
15,016,443
Map 21.1.
The Election of 1928
Cengage Learning
Single column map
. Cengage Learning 2014
Election
1916
No bleeds
Ms00438
20p6 x 17p0
Final proof 9/11/08
Revision 7/29/09—cm: update Pop Vote
counts and %s per Office of the Clerk of
the House of Representatives
384
C h apte r 21
DE
3
MD
8
SC
9
Candidate (Party)
Smith (Democrat)
J
O
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A
6
8
9
0
58.0%
B
40.7%
U
also epitomized America’s Anglo-Saxon Protestant
heritage. Smith, meanwhile, was the Democratic
governor of New York and the first Catholic to be
nominated for president by one of the major parties.
He represented the surging tide of social change.
Although no radical, he was known to be a friend of
the immigrant and a supporter of civil liberties and
Progressive-era social welfare.
During the election, the major issue dividing the two men was Prohibition. That issue also
symbolized the clash of values that had surfaced
in American life in the 1920s: Hoover represented
the rural and Protestant population that advocated
and understood the reasons for Prohibition, while
Smith represented the ethnic and urban groups who
viewed it as restrictive and racist. Although Smith
had a surprisingly strong showing in every large city,
Hoover won in a landslide (see Map 21.1).
What else was happening . . .
1920
Harry Burt, a Youngstown, Ohio, candy maker, sells
first ice cream on a stick, the Good Humor bar.
1922
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is formed
after communists take power in the Russian
Revolution of 1917.
1925
Yale students invent the Frisbee while tossing
empty pie plates from the Frisbie Baking Company.
1927
The first words are heard in a motion picture:
“Wait a minute! You ain’t heard nothing yet!” (Al
Jolson in The Jazz Singer)
1929
Color television pictures are transmitted in New
York.
1929
Museum of Modern Art opens in New York City,
celebrating the birth of modern art that developed
alongside the Industrial Revolution.
1873
Mark Twain patents the scrapbook.
Looking Ahead . . .
The Democrats, with their hodgepodge of supporters, were on the rise, but as yet they lacked an
issue that would propel them to power. That issue
emerged quickly. In October 1929, the stock market,
rising steadily from 1925 to mid-1929, began a steep
drop. On October 29, later known as “Black Tuesday,”
16 million shares changed hands and countless
stocks lost almost all of their value. During the next
Prosperity and Change in the Twenties
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three years, the supply of capital flowing into the
economy contracted sharply, dozens of businesses
went bankrupt, factories with inventory closed
down, and growing numbers of men and women lost
their jobs. Complex problems in the American and
international economy meant that the crash wasn’t
just one of the periodic “adjustments” the market
always experiences, but something much more
serious: an economic depression that would affect
the entire world for a decade. The Great Depression
would cause Democratic landslides throughout the
1930s, which saw the rise of Franklin D. Roosevelt as
president and his New Deal plan of social action. It is
to the Great Depression that we turn next.
Visit the CourseMate website
at www.cengagebrain.com for
additional study tools and review
materials for this chapter.
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Reactions
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Chapter 22
The Great
Depression
and the
New Deal
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Learning Outcomes
6
After reading this chapter, you should be able to do 8the following:
9
22-1 Explain the underlying causes of the depression,0and evaluate
President Hoover’s attempts to help the economy.
B
22-2 Describe the experiences of both urban and rural
UAmericans
during the depression, and explain ways in which the
depression affected American politics.
22-3 Evaluate FDR’s actions designed to alleviate the effects of the
depression, and discuss the opposition he faced.
22-4 Discuss the most significant long-term effects of the New Deal.
386
C h apte r 21
The Continued Move West
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“
In the 1920s, many things seemed
possible. Now the hurdles seemed
insurmountable. Fear overcame
hope.
”
In 1928, when Herbert Hoover
defeated Al Smith for the presidency, Hoover had every reason to believe that the future
of the country was bright.
The New Deal did not end the Great Depression.
In his Inaugural Address, he
Strongly Disagree
Strongly Agree
expressed his belief that the
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
United States was “rich in
S
resources; stimulating in its
glorious beauty; filledM
with millions of happy homes; blessed with comfort and opportunity.” He later said, “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty
I
than ever before in any land in history. The poorhouse is vanishing from among us.”
Just eight monthsTafter his inauguration, Hoover was facing a very different situation. The stock market had crashed, the bottom had fallen out of an already weakened
H
housing market, the markets for agricultural goods stalled, demand for consumer goods
, factories to slow production, and the United States entered into
fell precipitously leading
the Great Depression.
The Great Depression caused massive unemployment and declining wages. People
J savings, their aspirations, and their dreams. The poorest faced
lost their homes, their
the literal threat of starvation.
Breadlines became common. Nearly one in four working
O
Americans was out of work, and in some cities it was nearly every other person.
S affected people’s everyday lives in ways that are hard to
The Great Depression
describe. Americans were
H terrified of succumbing to a disaster they did not understand.
In the 1920s, many things seemed possible. You were sure that if you worked hard you
would have a job, andUmaybe even prosper. Now the hurdles seemed insurmountable.
Year after year colleges
A and universities produced graduates with little to no prospects
for jobs. The birthrate declined. In an effort to increase the prices by limiting the amount
of goods that reached markets, farmers in Iowa, Indiana, and elsewhere destroyed livestock and let milk rot,6all while many urban dwellers teetered on the edge of starvation.
Even Babe Ruth took a significant pay cut. Fear overcame hope.
8
In the end, hope was revived before the economy was. The election of Franklin D.
9
Roosevelt in 1932 inaugurated
a new era of social and economic experimentation. Under
Roosevelt’s guidance, a “New Deal” of government intervention into the economy and
0
everyday lives of Americans attempted to rein in the economic collapse. This chapter
examines the causes B
and effects of the Great Depression before turning to Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s attempts to
Ucontrol them.
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF34-T01-009093-C
What do you think?
Dorothea Lange’s famous photo of a 32-year-old mother of seven captured the pain and hopelessness of
>
388
C h apte r 2 2
OFF/AFP/Getty Images
the early 1920s. The industrial sector,
The stock market crash.
S
including the vital home construction
Throughout the 1920s, the stock
M
and automobile industries, was beginmarket seemed to reflect the
ning to slow down from its amazing
strength of the U.S. economy, and
I
growth in the previous decade. If these
stock investments increased dramatiT
markets had been strong, the nation’s
cally. In part, this growth reflected
economy would not have been as
the expansion of business profits durH
vulnerable to the decline of the stock
ing the 1920s. In addition, the federal
market. Instead, because so much of
government reduced taxes during the
,
the 1920s boom was attributable to
1920s (especially for the wealthy),
consumption, when people stopped
putting more money in the pockets
buying goods the economy ground to
of investors. But the most important
J
a halt.
factor affecting the rise of the stock
Run on a bank, O
1929.
market was credit. The most common form of credit for stock purchases was the call loan, which
European economy. The third reason had to do with problems
S The
allowed a stock buyer to put down anywhere from 10 to 50 percent
in Europe. The economies of Britain, France, and Germany experiof a stock’s price and borrow the rest of the money in order to make
H enced problems similar to the American economy in the late 1920s:
the full payment. The lender could then “call back” the loan and
(1) declining industrial production, (2) low prices in agriculture, and
demand repayment when a stock fell below a certain price. By the U (3) over-speculation in the stock market. But the biggest problem
end of 1928, there was nearly $8 billion in outstanding call loans. A stemmed from the end of World War I, when the Treaty of Versailles
When, in September 1929, the Federal Reserve Board raised
forced Germany to pay back the costs of the war. These reparainterest rates, a move they hoped would prevent over-speculation
tions were difficult for Germany to pay back because the war had
in the stock market, banks cut back on lending because costs had 6 destroyed its industrial infrastructure.
increased. With less money available for loans, fewer people were
The solution came from U.S. banks. In order to pay the reparabuying stock, so stock prices began to fall. Once they fell slightly, 8 tions, Germany borrowed from American banks. Britain and France,
some banks began to call in their call loans, leading to more selling
used that money to repay the debts they had incurred during
9 intheturn,
and further drops in the market, creating a cycle of selling and more
war, most often to the U.S. government. The United States was
selling. After a slight recovery of prices in late September, the mar-0 sending money to Germany, which was giving it to France and Britain,
ket eventually collapsed. Journalists and social watchers had begun
which were sending it back to the United States. This cycle of debt,
to spread the word that the economic bubble was about to burst, B though very unstable, was supported by U.S. businesses because the
prompting a selling frenzy. By early November, stock values had U borrowed funds also allowed European countries to buy U.S. products.
decreased an unimaginable $26 billion, more than a third of what the
When the stock market crashed, this system fell apart. U.S.
stock market’s value had been in August. It would only get worse
businesses that had lost money in the crash cut back on production
during the next two years. When the stock market finally stabilized
and stopped buying products from European countries. In addition,
in 1932, stocks had lost nearly 90 percent of their value.
after the crash U.S. banks wanted their debts repaid. This was
impossible. When European countries couldn’t pay back those loans
Internal weaknesses in the American economy. The stock marand U.S. banks began to fail, the economic decline of both the
ket crash compounded existing problems within the American econUnited States and other countries became worse.
omy. The agricultural sector had been in a severe depression since
The Great Depression and the New Deal
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Business investments in industrial construction
declined from $23.3 billion in 1929 to $10.1 billion in
1932. The automobile industry’s earnings dropped
40 percent between 1929 and 1930. Between 1929
and 1932, the United States gross national product declined from $103.1 billion to $58 billion. The
national unemployment rate skyrocketed from 3.2
percent in 1929 to nearly 25 percent in 1933. In some
areas, the rate was even higher. In Detroit, for example, unemployment was more than 50 percent in the
early 1930s. When people lost money, they could not
buy products, forcing industries to slow production
and lay off workers, which left even fewer consumers.
22-1b Hoover
Hawley-Smoot Tariff
on foreign agricultural and
Bill passed in 1930 that
manufactured goods by as
raised American tariffs on
much as 50 percent.
foreign agricultural and
manufactured goods by as
Hoover believed that raismuch as 50 percent; triging prices on foreign prodgered European retaliation
ucts would protect American
products from competition.
But the effect was disastrous. European governments, already saddled with debts, were further
damaged because the bill hurt their ability to earn
money to pay back World War I debts. Furthermore,
these nations retaliated with very high tariffs of their
own, making it difficult for American businesses to
sell their products overseas.
Hoover had better luck providing relief to the
unemployed, but again, he relied most heavily on
voluntary organizations rather than the federal government. Unemployed workers, the Red Cross, and
church groups came together to offer surplus food
to those in need. The Unemployed Citizen’s League
in Seattle, for instance, created a system whereby
The Granger Collection, New York
Naturally, most Americans looked to the president to
solve the national crisis. But Hoover had a difficult
Sworked
time. An orphan as a young man, Hoover had
his way from the bottom up, becoming a millionaire
M
in the mining industry and eventually becoming one
of only two presidents to redistribute hisI
presidential salary (John F. Kennedy was theT
other, giving it to charity). Hoover believed
his success was due to self-reliance, hardH
work, and the fact that he always had to,
work his way out of his own problems.
He was not anti-government, but he felt
that government assistance would createJ
reliance on handouts and defeat the very
O
self-reliance that he deemed sacrosanct.
Instead, he, like most Republicans of the era,S
believed that citizens, businesses, and the
H
government should work together voluntarily to overcome the depression, insteadU
of being rescued through governmentA
mandated programs. He thus formulated
policies based on his idea of voluntary
cooperation, which held that business lead-6
ers would make sacrifices for the benefit of
the nation, just as workers would too. But8
in both farming and banking, the idea of9
voluntary cooperation failed to stabilize the
troubled industries. Simply asking industry0
leaders and laborers to sacrifice for the goodB
of the country was not going to be enough.
U
While he understood that he would
have to do more than simply ask business
leaders to help, one of Hoover’s first efforts
to help the American economy proved to
be the most ruinous. In June 1930, Hoover
signed the Hawley-Smoot Tariff (named
for the congressmen who helped write the
No matter what he tried, Hoover seemed ill-equipped to deal with the
legislation). The bill raised American tariffs
depression, leading to much public scorn.
>>
The Economics and Politics of Depression
389
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people could exchange work
for food, clothing, and other
goods.
Eventually responding
to perpetual public pressure,
Hoover pledged some federal
funds to assist the worsening economic situation.
By the end of his presidency, he nearly doubled
the budget for public works expenditures, which
funded the Hoover Dam, one of the largest government construction projects ever undertaken. He
also established the President’s Organization on
Unemployment Relief (POUR), which persuaded local
organizations across the country to raise money and
to form voluntary groups that would sponsor soup
kitchens and clothing exchanges.
But Hoover’s belief that the federal government
should not come to the aid of its citizens because it
would damage their own capacities for self-relianceS
and hard work elicited a stern rebuke from theM
population. In the depths of the Great Depression,
I
relying on volunteerism was not enough.
While running for reelection in 1932, HooverT
realized that he needed to do still more to ease peo-
Popular name for a shantytown built by homeless Americans during
the Great Depression
H
,
iStockphoto.com/Kathy Steen
J
O
S
H
U
A
ple’s financial woes. In January 1932, he established
the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC). The
RFC was a federally funded agency that loaned
money to businesses with the hope that they would
hire more workers. The RFC also provided loans to
states to undertake public projects such as buildings
and roads.
But Hoover’s plan, ambitious as it was, still
didn’t help the average American quickly enough.
The RFC’s cautious, business-centered approach
defeated its purpose of helping as many Americans
as possible. No matter what Hoover did, the Great
Depression seemed hopeless to most Americans.
22-2 The Depression
Experience in
America
Numbers tell only part of the story of the Great
Depression. The experiences of millions of Americans
suffering in terrible conditions between the late
1920s and the early 1930s tell the rest. As hundreds
of thousands of people in the nation’s urban areas
grappled with homelessness, rural America was
pounded by a series of environmental catastrophes
that made the situation even worse and exposed the
fact that the government seemed powerless.
22-2a Urban America
City life during the depression was a stark contrast
to the carefree 1920s. In many places, homeless
Americans built makeshift towns on the outskirts of
cities and in abandoned lots and parks. They derisively nicknamed these towns Hoovervilles after the
6
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The Hoover Dam, begun in 1928, was the single largest pub>>
lic works project in American history up to that point.
390
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>>
Bettmann/Corbis. All Rights Reserved.
Hooverville
Shantytowns like this one in New York appeared in city parks
throughout the nation, earning the derisive nickname “Hoovervilles.”
The Great Depression and the New Deal
9781305178526, HIST: US History Since 1865, Volume 2, Third Edition, Schultz - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization.
“
The depression brought
everybody down a peg or two.
And the Negroes had but few
pegs to fall.
president. These people built
homes from abandoned
cardboard boxes, scrap lumber and metal, and anything else they could find
to devise shelter. In some
places, Hoovervilles grew
enormous. For many it was
—Langston
the only alternative to living
on the street.
Hoovervilles existed in virtually all of the nation’s
cities, but homelessness was a problem much larger
than a few shantytowns. By 1932, there were an
estimated 250,000 homeless children in the country.
The homeless problem was far greater than even
these numbers indicate, because people living in
Hoovervilles were usually not counted as “homeless.”
African American Neighborhoods
S
In these hard times, African Americans M
suffered
more than urban white people. African American
I
neighborhoods were often already in a depressed
state before the stock market crash, as T
business
slowdowns and other signs of a weak economy in
the 1920s hurt black communities first. H
In many
communities, African Americans were routinely
the
,
“last hired and first fired” for jobs. Thus, even before
the depression hit Chicago’s South Side, home to
236,000 African Americans, all the banks and
J businesses in the neighborhood had already closed.
O
Many African American communities turned
to self-help as the best way to survive. InS
Harlem,
Father Divine led his Divine
H
Read a brief
Peace Mission and created
contemporary
U
a network of businesses,
history of
church
groups,
and
self-help
depression-era Harlem.
A
organizations, enabling him
to serve over 3,000 meals a day to the destitute and
homeless in the neighborhood. Community
6 members in Harlem began a campaign against white
8 too
shop owners and building owners who charged
much for consumer goods and rent. The 9
agitation
led to the establishment of the Consolidated Tenants
0
League (which organized strikes
against landlords who charged too
B
much rent) and the Harlem Boycott
U
of 1934 (which discouraged consumers from purchasing products
at white-owned stores).
Hunger
In the cities, many suffered from
hunger. Although the country’s
farms produced plenty of food,
”
Hughes, poet
breadline
A line of people waiting to
receive free food handed
out by a charitable organization or public agency
Dust Bowl
Parts of Kansas,
Oklahoma, Nebraska, and
Texas that suffered punishing dust storms and
drought from the early
1930s to the early 1940s
the lack of funds to support commercial transportation prevented most
food from reaching urban marketplaces. Breadlines
formed in all of America’s cities. Hunger triggered a
number of problems in the nation’s cities, ranging
from malnourishment to riots and looting.
The problem of hunger triggered major political activity, especially among women, who actively
participated in a number of riots all over the country.
In 1930, women in Minneapolis, Minnesota, marched
on a local food store and
Read a story
raided its shelves. Food riots
about Detroit
expanded to other parts of
in the Great
Depression.
the country in 1931 and 1932;
nearly every city in the country had some kind of protest movement driven by
the lack of food.
22-2b Rural America
Rural dwellers suffered as well. For the most part, the
depression simply exacerbated a decade-long problem of overproduction and
Experience “Sur- lowered revenues. But rural
viving the Great
poverty was intensified by a
Depression: An
massive drought and a series
Interactive Module.”
of severe dust storms in the
South and Midwest during the early 1930s. Southern
states like Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi
received less than half their normal rainfall during
the early 1930s. Crop failures became commonplace. From the early 1930s to the early 1940s, parts
of Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska,
and Texas were called the “Dust
Bowl” because the dust storms and
drought were so punishing.
Crop losses plunged farmers
even deeper into the debts they
had acquired early in the Industrial
Revolution. Foreclosures on farms
became commonplace, and the
dust storms and drought prompted
an exodus from the rural regions
In 1930, women
in Minneapolis,
Minnesota,
marched on a local
food store and
raided its shelves.
The Depression Experience in America
391
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S
M
of the country to the Far West. John Steinbeck’sI
novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) traced the story ofT
Dust Bowl migrants making their way to California,
where they hoped for a better life. The Okies (asH
the Midwest migrants were called) were not always,
welcome in California, however, and they suffered
discrimination, just as African Americans did.
J
O
22-2c Cultural Politics
While many businesses dried up during the depres-S
sion, people still found time for leisure activities like
H
attending movies or reading fiction. The films and novels of the period responded to the psychological needsU
of the people by offering either dreamy escapism or
A
a leftist political message that criticized the current
this photo conspired
with the economy
against many farmers,
forcing refugees to flee
with all their belongings
to California in search of
a new life.
Responding to the psychological needs of
depression-era audiences, Hollywood films served
up seductive dreamscapes, most notably with stories of wealthy and carefree people. The “rags-toriches” theme was immensely popular, as were
musicals and gangster films. Hollywood films many
times took gentle jabs at the upper classes, while
reassuring the audience that the old rags-to-riches
dream was still alive.
The films of Frank Capra are the most renowned
of the era, and they often dramatized the fight to
capitalist order. Cultural outlets grew so popular during the depression that one historian has argued that6
this “Cultural Front” helped move American politics as
8
a whole to the left during the 1930s.
9
During the Great Depression, nearly 60 percent0
of the nation attended at least one film a week.B
Hollywood studios responded by churning out more
than 5,000 movies during the 1930s. This prodigiousU
Movies
output came courtesy of the “studio system.” Just
as Henry Ford had pioneered the assembly line to
mass-produce his automobiles, studios learned to
streamline their production process to make many
more movies. Both sound and color techniques
were mastered in this era; they were employed with
increasing frequency throughout the 1930s.
392
C h apte r 2 2
Charlie Chaplin’s iconic 1936 film Modern Times told the
>>
story of a likeable man besieged by the huge anonymous forces of
Image courtesy of The Advertising Archives
Corbis. All Rights Reserved.
Huge dust
>>
storms like the one in
the industrial era.
The Great Depression and the New Deal
9781305178526, HIST: US History Since 1865, Volume 2, Third Edition, Schultz - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization.
rise from poverty to success. At a time when many
individuals felt powerless, Capra’s films, such as
perennial favorites Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), called for a return
to the virtues of small-town communities, placing
hope in the power of one man to stand up against
the iniquities of big business, corrupt government,
and a cynical media.
The struggle to realize the American dream
was a popular theme in slapstick comedian Charlie
Chaplin’s films as well, most notably in his Modern
Times (1936). Chaplin’s character in the film, the Little
Tramp, is rendered helpless in the face of daunting
machines as the gears of business literally swallow
him up. The Tramp is then thrown out of work and
mistakenly jailed for being a dangerous radical.
Modern Times captured the plight of American workers who were buffeted by the impersonal forces of
S
modern industrial society.
Another performer who buoyed everyone’s
M spirits with her carefree antics and her attempts to
I was
always remain on the sunny side of the street
Shirley Temple. Like many other performers,
T her
work provided an escape from the harsh realities
H
of the depression, but she also came to symbolize
,
Image courtesy of The Advertising Archives
J
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H
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A
6
8
9
0
B
U
What better time than the depression for a superhero to be
>>
born to save the day? Superman first appeared in Action Comics in 1938.
the fact that Hollywood was not accurately portraying the real woes that most Americans faced in
the 1930s. People often enjoyed the films of Shirley
Temple, but it was obvious to many that she was too
much a part of the Hollywood dreamscape to represent real problems.
Writers
In the 1930s a growing number of writers shared
Chaplin’s critique. During the prosperous 1920s,
writers felt ignored in a society dominated by business concerns. When the stock market crashed and
the depression hit, many intellectuals felt energized.
“One couldn’t help being exhilarated at the sudden
collapse of that stupid gigantic fraud,” said the leftist
social critic Edmund Wilson.
Intellectuals basically agreed on the cause of
the depression: for too long, they said, America had
been devoted to unbridled competition, sacrificing
the good of society for individual wealth. Many intellectuals subsequently called for government control
and greater centralized planning. This position was
most skillfully articulated by philosopher John Dewey
in many articles and his books A Common Faith (1934)
and Liberalism and Social Action (1935), and by writer
Alfred Bingham in his journal Common Sense.
More radical critics were drawn to the Communist
Party. During the 1930s, communism seemed an
attractive alternative to capitalism, mainly because
the Soviet Union seemed to be thriving. There were
certainly problems with this contention—namely,
that the Soviet Union was not doing as well as it
seemed (its successes were mostly a product of its
international propaganda) and that what advances
it did have were coming at a brutal human cost
under the harsh regime of Josef Stalin. Nevertheless,
many intellectuals drifted dramatically leftward
during these years.
Fiction writers moved left as well. Chief among
them was John Steinbeck, who aimed to create
a proletarian literature that sympathetically portrayed the struggles of the working classes. African
American authors such as Richard Wright used
their writing to examine the political activities of
the Communist Party and the struggles for African
American civil rights. The Southern Agrarians, notably John Crowe Ransom and Allan Tate, wrote of
their hopes for the nation to return to its rural roots
in order to address the problems caused by modern
industrial society.
Radio
Radio was wildly popular during the 1930s, as technological developments during the depression extended
The Depression Experience in America
393
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394
C h apte r 2 2
personalities like Walter Winchell attracted listeners by freely combining the daily headlines with
personal editorial opinions.
In sum, American popular culture in the 1930s
was deeply influenced by the Great Depression.
All forms of popular culture,
Sample a collec- from movies to fiction to
tion of popular
radio, helped Americans deal
culture from
with the nation’s economic
the 1930s.
crisis. They also helped push
American politics leftward, something made evident
by the radicalizing politics of the era.
22-2d Radicalizing Politics
Predictably, political events were especially contentious. The political climate of the early 1930s created
the impression of a nation out of control.
Communist Party
In the United States, the party leading most of the
organized protest was the Communist Party of the
United States, which, under the direction of Earl
Browder and William Z. Foster, sought to eliminate
all private property and make the state responsible
for the good of the people. With capitalism experiencing violent turbulence, communism seemed to
many to be a plausible alternative. The party had led
hunger marches in the early 1930s and continued its
activities into the presidential election year of 1932.
Its actions gained it considerable attention from
the American public, making communism a greater
force in American politics than ever before.
The Communist Party intended to use its
strength during the depression to highlight racist dimensions of American society (which would
show the worldwide communist effort to be the true
egalitarian force in the world). Notably, the
party funded the legal
defense of nine African
American boys who
had been accused of
raping a white woman
in Scottsboro, Alabama,
in 1931. The convictions
of the Scottsboro Boys,
as the nine came to be
Corbis
its reach into American
homes. By 1926, the National
Broadcasting
Company
(NBC) had hooked up stations around the country,
creating the first nationwide
radio network. The Columbia
Broadcasting System (CBS)
followed a year later.
The same songs were now popular nationwide,
and a handful of them dealt with depression themes
(most notably, Bing Crosby’s rendition of “Brother,
Can You Spare a Dime?”). The songs of Woody Guthrie
were about farmers affected by the depression.
His song “This Land Is Your Land,” although today
regarded as a celebration of the country, is actually
about the nation’s suffering during the depression.
The most popular music of the day, however, usually avoided economics and advised listeners to, asS
songwriters Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh putM
it, stay “on the sunny side of the street.” The upbeat
grandeur of large swing orchestras dominated popu-I
lar music, led by such masters as Duke Ellington,T
Cou...
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