History of the United States II, history homework help

User Generated

urwb88

Humanities

Description

1. How did the response to the 1920/21 depression differ from the response to the Great Depression? Again, outside research may help you form your response.

question 1 must have a 200 word minimum.

2. Describe the consumerism that developed in America during the early twentieth century, especially after World War I.

3. Explain the experiences of the nation that effectively put an end to the Progressive movement in America during the 1920s.

4. Describe the various kinds of leisure activities that became popular in America during the 1920s.

5. Explain the underlying causes of the depression, and evaluate President Hoover's attempts to help the economy.

6. Describe the experiences of both urban and rural Americans during the depression, and explain ways in which the depression affected American politics.

7. Evaluate FDR's actions designed to alleviate the effects of the depression, and discuss the opposition he faced.

8. Discuss the most significant long-term effects of the New Deal.

9. Explain America's foreign policy that developed after World War I and that was in place at the beginning of World War II, and describe how that policy changed as the war progressed.

10. Describe and discuss the American home front during World War II, paying special attention to long-term societal changes.

11. Explain how World War II was brought to an end, both in Europe and in the Pacific, and discuss the immediate aftermath of the war both in America and around the world.

All answers must be cited in APA format and referenced. all must be 100 word minimum and all answers must come from the text uploaded.

Unformatted Attachment Preview

Chapter 21 Prosperity and Change in the Twenties S M I T H , J O S H U A ­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 9781305178526, HIST: US History Since 1865, Volume 2, Third Edition, Schultz - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. “ 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 9781305178526, HIST: US History Since 1865, Volume 2, Third Edition, Schultz - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. 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 S H U A 6 8 9 0 B U 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 M I T 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 9781305178526, HIST: US History Since 1865, Volume 2, Third Edition, Schultz - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. 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 J O S H U A 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 0 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. I T H , Image courtesy of The Advertising Archives J O S H U A 6 8 9 0 B U 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 9781305178526, HIST: US History Since 1865, Volume 2, Third Edition, Schultz - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. 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 9781305178526, HIST: US History Since 1865, Volume 2, Third Edition, Schultz - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. 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 9781305178526, HIST: US History Since 1865, Volume 2, Third Edition, Schultz - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. 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 9781305178526, HIST: US History Since 1865, Volume 2, Third Edition, Schultz - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. © 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 9781305178526, HIST: US History Since 1865, Volume 2, Third Edition, Schultz - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. 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 S H U 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 9781305178526, HIST: US History Since 1865, Volume 2, Third Edition, Schultz - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. 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. S M I T H , J O S H U A 6 8 9 0 B U Reactions 385 9781305178526, HIST: US History Since 1865, Volume 2, Third Edition, Schultz - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. Chapter 22 The Great Depression and the New Deal S M I T H , J O S H U A ­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 9781305178526, HIST: US History Since 1865, Volume 2, Third Edition, Schultz - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. “ 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 9781305178526, HIST: US History Since 1865, Volume 2, Third Edition, Schultz - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. 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 9781305178526, HIST: US History Since 1865, Volume 2, Third Edition, Schultz - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. 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 8 9 0 B U The Hoover Dam, begun in 1928, was the single largest pub>> lic works project in American history up to that point. 390 C h apte r 2 2 >> 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 9781305178526, HIST: US History Since 1865, Volume 2, Third Edition, Schultz - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. 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 O S H U 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 9781305178526, HIST: US History Since 1865, Volume 2, Third Edition, Schultz - © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization. 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...
Purchase answer to see full attachment
User generated content is uploaded by users for the purposes of learning and should be used following Studypool's honor code & terms of service.

Explanation & Answer

Attached.

Running Head: HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES II

History of the United States II
Students’ name
Institution Affiliation
Date

1

HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES II

2

1. How did the response to the 1920/21 depression differ from the response to the
Great Depression?
The response which the government initiated following the Great Depression is very different
from the initiatives of the government in response to 1920/1921 depression. The president during
the 1920-21 depression, Warren Harding chooses not to institute any federal government
spending to resuscitate the economy. Instead, he felt that the economy was better to adjust by its
own. Instead of increasing federal government spending, the president reduced government
spending while taxes were reduced. Federal debts were also reduced as the Federal Reserve did
nothing to control prices. This was in contrast with how the government responded to the Great
Depression. Herbert Hoover was the president when the depression began in 1929 and did little if
anything to collect the situation. As his term ended, President Hoover, however, attempted to
collect the situation by increasing government spending without much effect. When President
Franklin D. Roosevelt won the election in 1932, he promised to try something to collect the
economy. True to his word, President Roosevelt initiated one of the largest federal government's
spending in an attempt to rescue the economy. He achieved this by creating many federal
agencies and programs such as the AAA and the CCC which would address specific needs of the
economy termed as the new deal. The president later created the Second New Deal in 1935 with
agencies and programs such as the NYA and SSA with the aim of making the economy grow
faster. The also put in place mechanisms which would avoid the future collapse of the economy
with new regulations in the banking and stock market industries. In comparison, while the 192021 depression was characterized with little to no government interventions, the Great Depression
witnessed the largest form of Federal Government interventions in the form of increased

HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES II
spending to create employment opportunities. Despite his effort, the Great Depression lasted for
ten years.
2. Describe the consumerism that developed in America during the early twentieth
century, especially after World War I
Following the First World War, the economy of most the European nations had been destroyed.
This made the products produced in the USA dominant in the European market leading to a
boom in the economy. This was characterized by increased production and better pay for the
Americans working class. Due to this, a period of consumerism engulfed the ordinary working
class in the 1920s. This was characterized by the purchase of a wide range of assortment of
laborsaving devices with the widespread of electrification across the country. This led to most
urban families accessing electric lighting and power for the first time. The most working class
could now purchase new inventions such as cars, refrigerators, toaster, radios, the telephone,
washing machines, as well as nationally marketed foods, clothes, and cosmetics. This led to the
rise of advertisements to market consumer goods. Most Americans adopted the use of credit
cards with most of them using them to purchase about 90% of their goods. Cars became more
popular with Americans especially the young.
3. Explain the experiences of the nation that effectively put an end to the Progressive
movement in America during the 1920s
Despite experiencing a period of economic prosperity after the end of the 1st WW termed as the
Progressive era, several factors contributed to the end of this era. The rise of the Republican
Party which dominated politics putting business-first contributed to the end of the Progressive
era. With the prosperity of the economy, many Americans resulted to purchasing stocks and

3

HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES II

4

shares. Many such investors believed that the share prices would rise with time and they would
earn a profit by selling the shares at a high price after some period. Due to these forms of
investment being less risky, many Americans bought into this leading to an inflation of the stock
prices above their realistic value. Another factor which led to the end of the progressive era was
the rise of communism in Russia following Vladimir Lenin of the Russian Bolshevik Party
seizing power who adopted the ideologies of Karl Marx. There was a fear called ‘the red scare'
that communism would spread the whole world with businessmen and workers fearing for the
capitalist system. Race riots also rocked the country, especially between Black Americans and
whites. This led to mass migration especially from the Southern States to more accommodating
the North States. The election of President Warren Harding into office in 1920 who openly
criticized the progressive ideas also contributed to its ending. Prohibition of alcoholic drinks also
contributed to the end of the progressive era.
4. Describe the various kinds of leisure activities that became popular in America
during the 1920s.
During the 1920s' new form of leisure activities were witnessed especially with the urban
population. Watching movies became a popular leisure activity especially with the rise of
Hollywood in California. Urban movie houses became popular. Along with the development of
the movie industry saw the creation of jazz music. With the development of the recording
industry enabled music lovers to listen to music from home on their gramophones as many times
as they wanted. When commercial radio began, this became a new form of leisure for
Americans. Professional and college sports such as baseball, boxing, and college football
increased with the growth of commercial radio.

HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES II

5

5. Explain the underlying causes of the depression, and evaluate President Hoover's
attempts to help the economy.
Eight months into President Hoovers' term, American economy experienced one of the worst
depression of the time referred to as the Great Depression. Three events, the collapse of the stock
market which was large as a result of the increased interest rates which made borrowing hard.
The collapse of the stock market compounded the weaknesses of the economy of the country.
The agricultural sector, industries, and the automobile industries had been witnessing a
slowdown for some time and only became worse wit...


Anonymous
Awesome! Perfect study aid.

Studypool
4.7
Trustpilot
4.5
Sitejabber
4.4

Related Tags