The Twenties: Chapters 30 and 31

I just couldn't keep up with how fast Willie was moving so here is his note sheet

The Twenties (Chapters 31 and 32) – WILLIAMSON

I. Background

A. Disillusionment after World War I

1. Not the war to end war.

2. Mass immigration because of war and Americas worried how to “Americanize” them.

3. Eliminate threats from Radicals (Anarchism, Socialism, IWW, and Bolsheviks or Communists).

                                                                                                                       

B. Wartime Emotions

1. Americans still hyped by the Creel Committee’s negative propaganda towards Germans (plus the Espionage and Sedition Acts).

2. Vigilantism led by individuals and groups like the American Protective League (#1 group).

3. Americans begin to fight anything that is not traditional – such as anti-immigrant, anti-radicals, anti-black, anti-urban (1920 census US is now 51% urban), anti-Catholic, etc.

C. Post-war Recession

1. Jobs formerly held by soldiers were taken by women and blacks especially coming up from the South.

2. Price controls were lifted after the war – massive inflation.

3. Strikes – 2,600 of them - Steel, Seattle General Strike, Coal, and Boston Police Strike (Gov. Coolidge used state troops to crush it and it helped him become VP in 1920).

D. Spanish Influenza

1. Began in US and took to Europe by US soldiers, so its silly that its called “Spanish Influenza.”

II. Scapegoats – Traditional Americans try to fight a changing America
(Rural vs. Urban America) or (Provincial vs. Modern America)

A. US fear of Bolsheviks or Communists (Revolution in Russia was 1917 and 1918) – Red Scare  Part 1

1. The Bolsheviks in Russia promised a world-wide revolution.

B. Anarchists and Socialists (were often immigrants).

1. Bombings and death threats to important people

2. Destruction to American governments.

3. Fear of these two led to the Palmer Raids in 1919 and 1920.  A witch hunt by Wilson’s Attorney General Mitchell Palmer to “ship or shoot” immigrants with radical ties like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman.  He creates the General Intelligence Division, led by J. Edgar Hoover.

4. Sacco and Vanzetti Trial in the 1920s also showed that Americans were unnerved about Anarchism.  These two men’s conviction and electrocution in 1927 led to international outcry over “guilt by association.”

5. This fear led to the Immigration Restriction League which demanded a restriction in Eastern Europeans.  The Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 (3% of Europeans in 1910) and the National Origins Act of 1924 which lowered it to 2% of 1890 and no Japanese immigrants at all.

C. Black Americans

1. Took jobs of whites during the war (Great Black Migration – about 10% of Southern Blacks went North) to find jobs. This led to race riots in the north like the Chicago Race Riots.

2. Rebirth of the KKK – thanks in part to “Birth of a Nation” by D.W. Griffith that glorified the Klan as heroes.  The “new” Klan (led by Hiram Evans) was “anti everything” that was not traditional America.

3. Marcus Garvey and the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association - early “Black Nationalism”) Self-help for Northern Blacks.  It concerned some whites but the Klan donated lots of money to his idea of a “Back to Africa” movement.

4. Although Northern black Americans were far from having their full civil rights, their situation was much better than their counterparts in the South.  With the Harlem Renaissance, there was a large movement to celebrate black culture.  Langston Hughes (“Shakespeare of the Harlem Renaissance”), Alice Walker (Color Purple), Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun), Countee Cullen (Color), Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God) in literature; W.C. Handy (St. Louis Blues), Louis Armstrong (Jazz trumpet) and Duke Ellington (famous night club called Cotton Club) in Jazz were all big contributors.

D. “Dries” vs. “Wets”

1. Carryover from WWI to save food (18^th Amendment and Volstead Act) – people intentionally broke the law.

2. Speakeasies, rumrunners (Kennedy), and bootleggers like gangsters Al Capone. Gang warfare often erupted such as the famous 1929 “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” in Chicago when Capone’s gang killed 7 members of his rival The Bugs Moran Gang.  (Capone is credited with the “drive-by shooting” idea).

3. States lost money in taxes and enforcement was almost impossible and lots of payoffs and bribes.

E. Urbanites or Modern Americans

1. City seen as evil and impersonal to country folks.  It was the home of immigrants, socialists, and just people without good old morals (like “Wets,” people who drank the most alcohol and flappers: a young women participating in the 20s).  Sinclair Lewis made fun of small town people
and introduced the word “feminism” in his book Main Street.  He also made fun of evangelists in Elmer Gantry, and poked fun at the middle class and its desire to maintain conformity in Babbitt.

2. Writers and artists also wrote about the materialism.  The Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise, both by Fitzgerald are excellent examples.  Gertrude Stein called them a “lost generation.”  Some of these writers were so disappointed with the materialistic, provincial, directionless attitudes of fellow Americans and fellow American writers that they often wrote in seclusion in Greenwich Village or later Paris (expatriates).

Term used to describe the generation of writers active immediately after World War I. Gertrude Stein used the phrase in conversation with Ernest Hemingway, supposedly quoting a garage mechanic saying to her, "You are all a lost generation." The phrase signifies a disillusioned postwar generation characterized by lost values, lost belief in the idea of human progress, and a mood of futility and despair leading to hedonism. The mood is described by F. Scott Fitzgerald in THIS SIDE OF PARADISE (1920) when he writes of a generation that found “all gods dead, all wars fought, and all faiths in man shaken.”

[“Lost means not vanished but disoriented, wandering, directionless — a recognition that there was great confusion and aimlessness among the war's survivors in the early post-war years.”]

F. Darwinism

1. Traditional and Fundamental Christian America (esp. South) worried about “evilution” in the public schools.

2. Scopes Monkey Trial – 1925 – Roger Baldwin and the Civil Liberties Bureau (ACLU) get a Dayton Tenn. teacher John Scopes to teach Darwinism and Scopes is arrested (he knew that he was going to be arrested and had agreed to it). The local townsfolk realized that if they got two heavyweight attorneys in Dayton it would put Dayton on the map and on the road to prosperity.  Therefore, attorney Clarence Darrow defended Scopes and William J. Bryan volunteered to prosecute.  Satire writer H.L. Mencken of the Baltimore Sun constantly poked fun at the people of Tennessee and their fundamentalist beliefs.

3. Darrow argued that “the right to think” was on trial – not religion or God.

4. Scopes found guilty, but Tenn. State Supreme Court threw it out on a technicality.

G. Social Changes in the Jazz Age

1. Henry Ford, and William Durant/Alfred Sloan (GM) – the auto remakes society as younger generation gets mobile.  It alters social patterns as people begin to relocate to the suburbs (especially after WWII).

Vulcanization process invented by Charles Goodyear to be used on shoes

Late 1880s Charles Boyd Dunlop uses the pneumatic tires on bicycles & gets a patent to use them as auto tires.

1891 – Michelin brothers patent a removable pneumatic tire.

1900 – Cords added to tires by B.F. Goodrich

1903 – Goodyear Corp begins selling tubeless tires.

1931 – DuPont begins mfg and marketing neoprene since rubber prices were skyrocketing.

1940 – Fall of SE Asia, Goodrich takes neoprene to a new level with Ameripol (a cheap variation of neoprene made just for the auto tire industry).

2. Movies – “The Great Train Robbery” was first silent movie (15 minutes) and “Birth of a Nation” (first full length movie).  Silent stars were Charlie Chaplin (“The Little Tramp”) and Mary Pickford (“America’s Sweetheart”).  “The Jazz Singer” (first “talkie”) in 1927 gave Warner Brothers a chance to show off sound (it starred about Al Jolson in “blackface” singing and dancing).

3. Radio – KDKA Pittsburgh (first to report an election victory – Harding in 1920).

4. Art –The Armory Show in NYC is considered the first modern art show.  Also Grant Wood (“American Gothic”) and Georgia O’Keeffe (flowers, urban scenes, and cow skulls) were famous.

5. Music – Irving Berlin, John Phillip Sousa, Jazz and Blues (in some ways Jazz came out of Great Migration).

6. Architecture – Frank Lloyd Wright with form and function together – “Falling Water” in PA and the Guggenheim Museum in NYC.

7. Vaudeville – big in the major cities like NYC – various acts (like the Rockettes) on one stage (Ziegfeld Follies was one of the most famous vaudeville acts).  Replaced by movies and radio.

III. Politics in the 1920s – The Politics of Complacency

A. Warren G. Harding – 1921 to 1923 – “A Return to Normalcy”

1. Esch-Cummins Act of 1920 was the beginning of tearing down Progressivism as it allowed RR to
combine and become larger.

2. Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922 – raises the rate to 38.5% and also includes a flexible arm that
gave the president the power to raise and lower the tariff without congressional permission.

3. Scandals – “The Ohio Gang” were bad apples in a good cabinet (Hughes, Hoover, and Mellon):

a. Daugherty Scandal – Attorney General sold govt favors (get out of jail free card?).

b. Forbes Scandal – Veterans Bureau rip-off of millions.

c. Teapot Dome Scandal – US Naval oil reserves in Wyoming were sold to oil companies like Sinclair Oil (Sec. of Interior Albert Fall becomes first cabinet officer to go to jail).

B. Calvin Coolidge – 1921 to 1929

1. “The Business of America is business” – business leaders serve on govt regulatory boards (bad idea).

2. Unions take a major setback.

3. Coolidge retaliates against other countries with higher tariffs and refuses to cut the loans to debtor nations like Britain and France a break.  He does try to help Germany with their reparations (Dawes-Young Act).

4. Coolidge also refuses to help struggling farmers as he twice vetoes McNary-Haugen farm bill.

C. Election of 1924

“Keep Cool with Coolidge” (R) vs. John W. Davis (D) vs. Robert LaFollette (P)

382                                       136                          13 (all from Wisconsin)

D. Election of 1928

Sec. of Commerce Herbert Hoover (R) vs. Alfred E. Smith (D - “The Happy Warrior” 4X Gov. of NY).

Hoover represented rural, dry, business, Protestant, traditional America.

Smith represented urban, wet, labor (first to seek union vote), Catholic (first ever), immigrant (Irish).

444 to 87 (Hoover even won part of the Solid South – called themselves “Hoovercrats”).