T he 1920s was a decade fi lled with sharp contrasts — bet.docx

T
he 1920s was a decade fi lled with
sharp contrasts — between Prohibi-
tion laws and speakeasy nightclubs,
modern science and fundamentalist reli-
gion, economic boom and fi nancial bust,
popular heroes and social villains. Charles
Lindbergh was one of the heroes. In May
1927, Lindbergh fl ew his small, single-
engine plane, The Spirit of St. Louis, from
New York to Paris, a distance of 3,620 miles.
He did it alone and without stopping — a
tense journey that stretched over 33 hours.
Nobody had ever done this before. Return-
ing home to tickertape parades, Lindbergh
became Time magazine’s fi rst Man of the
Year in 1928. The handsome young aviator
captivated the nation by combining exper-
tise in modern technology with the tradi-
tional virtues of hard work and individual
achievement. Amid the grinding routine of modern industrial
life, Lindbergh showed that
an adventurous individual could make a difference.
Samuel Insull taught Americans the same lesson — with a twist.
A fi nancial entre-
preneur who was more important than Lindbergh and almost as
well known, Insull
began the decade as a hero and ended it as a villain. Insull was
born in England and

came to New York as the personal secretary to the great
inventor Thomas Edison. In
1892, he moved to Chicago, where he built a small electrical
power company into a
giant enterprise. By 1907, Insull’s Commonwealth Edison
Company was providing
electrical power for the entire city; by 1924, his Chicago Rapid
Transit Company was
offering transportation to many of its residents as well. At the
peak of his power in
1929, Insull controlled electric utility companies in 5,000
communities in thirty-two
states. To assemble this utility empire, Insull used the tools of
modern capitalism: He
[Growing up, I never]
thought of myself as an
American. I came from
Brooklyn, and in Brooklyn
there were no Americans;
there were Jews and
Negroes and Italians
and Poles and Irishmen.
Americans lived in New
England, in the South, in
the Midwest: alien people

in alien places.
––Norman Podhoretz (b.1930)
Modern Times
1 9 2 0 – 1 9 3 223
C H A P T E R
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C H A P T E R 2 3 Modern Times, 1920–1932 � 671
created a pyramid of holding companies that allowed him to
manage companies val-
ued at $500 million with a personal investment of only $27
million. He funded the rest
by issuing low-priced stocks and bonds, which nearly one
million Americans eagerly
snapped up.
Insull’s electrical empire, along with Henry Ford’s mass

production techniques,
helped to give Americans the highest standard of living in the
world and to create a
new consumer culture. Millions of Americans could now enjoy a
plethora of assembly-
line-produced goods: cars, refrigerators, phonographs, and
radios. The values of the
nineteenth-century middle classes — the Protestant ethic of
hard work, self-denial,
and frugality — gave way to an optimistic fascination with
consumption, leisure, and
self-realization, some of the essential features of modern life.
Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, the collapse of the stock
market in 1929 and
the coming of the Great Depression threw the nation and its
political and business
leaders into disarray. By 1932, Insull’s pyramid of utility
companies had collapsed in
bankruptcy, and 600,000 investors had lost their life savings.
The Chicago fi nancier
fl ed to Greece and then to Paris, not in triumph — like
Lindbergh — but in disgrace. At
home, Americans faced silent factories and massive
unemployment, putting the opti-
mism of the 1920s to the test.
The Business-Government Partnership of the 1920s
The business-government partnership fostered by World War I
expanded throughout
the 1920s. As the Wall Street Journal enthusiastically
proclaimed, “Never before, here
or anywhere else, has a government been so completely fused
with business.” — and,
the Journal might have added, so successfully fused. The
nation’s prosperity from 1922

to 1929 seemed to confi rm the wisdom of allowing corporate
interests to manage
economic life. Gone, or at least submerged, was the reform
impulse of the Progressive
era (see Chapter 20). Middle-class Americans no longer viewed
business leaders as
greedy robber barons but saw them as respected — even sacred
— public fi gures.
President Calvin Coolidge captured the prevailing public mood
when he solemnly
declared, “The man who builds a factory builds a temple. The
man who works there
worships there.”
Politics in the Republican “New Era”
With the ailing Woodrow Wilson out of the presidential picture
in 1920, the Democrats
nominated Governor James M. Cox of Ohio for president and
Assistant Secretary of the
Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt as vice president. The Democratic
platform called for U.S.
participation in the League of Nations and a continuation of
Wilson’s progressivism.
The Republicans, now led by the conservative, probusiness wing
of the party, selected
Ohio Senator Warren G. Harding and Massachusetts Governor
Calvin Coolidge as their
candidates. Sensing the desire of many Americans to put the
war and the stresses of
1919 behind them, Harding promised “not heroics but healing,
not nostrums but nor-
malcy.” On election day, he won in a landslide, beginning a
Republican dominance that
would last until 1932.

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672 � PA R T F I V E The Modern State and Society,
1914–1945
Warren Harding had not been an outstanding state politician in
Ohio, and he did
not cut an impressive fi gure in the U.S. Senate. But with
victory nearly certain in
1920, Republican Party leaders wanted a pliable candidate.
Genial, loyal, and mediocre,
“Uncle Warren” fi t the bill. Harding knew his limitations and
assembled a strong
cabinet, composed of progressives as well as conservatives, to
guide the government.
Charles Evans Hughes, former reform governor, Supreme Court
justice, and presi-
dential candidate, took fi rm control of the State Department.
As secretary of agricul-
ture, Henry C. Wallace created new links with farm
organizations, while Attorney
General Harlan Fiske Stone, a future chief justice, cleaned up
the mess at the Depart-
ment of Justice left by the Palmer raids. Financier Andrew W.
Mellon ran the Treasury

Department and quickly reduced the high wartime tax rates on
corporate and per-
sonal income, freeing up money for private investment.
The most active member of the Harding administration was
Secretary of Com-
merce Herbert Hoover, the well-known head of the wartime
Food Administration.
Under Hoover’s direction, the Commerce Department fostered
the creation of 2,000
trade associations representing companies in almost every major
industry. Govern-
ment offi cials worked closely with the associations, providing
statistical research, sug-
gesting industry-wide standards, and promoting stable prices
and wages. By creating
informal governmental ties between government and industry —
an “associated
state” — Hoover hoped to achieve through voluntary
cooperation what Progressive-
era reformers had sought through governmental regulation.
Unfortunately, not all government-business cooperation served
the interests of the
public. The Republican-dominated Federal Trade Commission
(FTC) ignored antitrust
laws that prohibited collusion among companies to raise prices.
Similarly, the Supreme
Court, now headed by the former conservative Republican
president William Howard
Taft, refused to break up the mammoth United States Steel
Corporation; as long as
there was some competition in the steel industry, the Court
ruled, the company’s dom-
inant price-setting position was within the law.

If U.S. Steel was law-abiding, many of President Harding’s
political associates were
not. When Harding died suddenly of a heart attack in San
Francisco in August 1923,
evidence of widespread fraud and corruption in his
administration was just coming to
light. The worst scandal concerned the secret leasing to private
companies of govern-
ment oil reserves in Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and Elk Hills,
California. Secretary of the
Interior Albert Fall was eventually convicted of taking $300,000
in bribes and became
the fi rst cabinet offi cer in American history to serve a prison
sentence.
Following Harding’s death, Vice President Calvin Coolidge
moved to the White
House. In contrast to Harding’s political cronyism and outgoing
style, Coolidge
personifi ed the austere rectitude of a New England Yankee.
Coolidge’s reserved per-
sonality and unimpeachable morality reassured Republican
voters, who were drawn
primarily from the native-born Protestants, business owners,
and skilled workers but
also included propertied farmers and African Americans. To win
their backing for his
presidential candidacy in 1924, Coolidge called for isolationism
in foreign policy,
economy in government, tax cuts for business, and limited aid
to farmers.
As the Democrats gathered to nominate a candidate, they were
sharply divided.
Traditionally, the party had drawn its strength from white voters
in the Jim Crow

South and immigrant-based urban political machines in the
North. But in the 1920s,
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these two groups of Democrats disagreed mightily over
Prohibition, immigration re-
striction, and the mounting power of the racist and anti-
immigrant Ku Klux Klan
(Map 23.1). These cultural confl icts produced a hopeless
deadlock between northern
supporters of Governor Al Smith of New York and southern and
western advocates of
former Treasury Secretary William A. McAdoo of California.
After 103 ballots, the
delegates compromised on John W. Davis, a wealthy and infl
uential Wall Street lawyer
who hailed from West Virginia.
The 1924 campaign featured a third-party challenge by Senator
Robert M. La
Follette of Wisconsin, who ran on the Progressive Party ticket.

La Follette’s candi-
dacy mobilized reformers and labor leaders as well as
disgruntled farmers. His
progressive-minded platform called for nationalization of
railroads, public owner-
ship of utilities, and a constitutional amendment to allow
Congress to overrule the
Supreme Court.
Governor elected with Klan support
U.S. senator elected with Klan support
Major areas of Klan violence
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M A P 23.1 Ku Klux Klan Politics and Violence in the 1920s
Unlike the Reconstruction-era Klan, the Klan of the 1920s had
substantial strength in the West and Mid-
west as well as the South. Although the Klan is often viewed as
a rural movement, its strongest “klaverns”
were in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Detroit, and other large cities.
KKK members operated as moral vigilantes in
areas where they were strong; elsewhere, their aggressive
tactics triggered riots between Klansmen and
their ethnic and religious targets.
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1914–1945
The Republicans won an impressive victory: Coolidge received
15.7 million votes

to Davis’s 8.4 million and La Follette’s 4.9 million. Signifi
cantly, only 52 percent of the
electorate cast ballots in 1924 (and in most subsequent
elections), compared to more
than 70 percent in presidential elections of the late nineteenth
century. A drop in vot-
ing by men, rather than apathy among newly enfranchised
women voters, caused most
of the decline.
After achieving the suffrage in 1920, politically conscious
women sought posi-
tions in Democratic and Republican party organizations but had
little success. African
American women were equally unsuccessful as they struggled
for voting rights in the
South and passage of a federal antilynching law. Women were
more infl uential as lob-
byists. The Women’s Joint Congressional Committee, a
Washington-based coalition
of ten white women’s organizations, including the newly formed
League of Women
Voters, lobbied actively for reform legislation. Its major
accomplishment was the pas-
sage in 1921 of the Sheppard-Towner Federal Maternity and
Infancy Act. The fi rst
federally funded health-care legislation, the act lowered infant
mortality by subsidiz-
ing medical clinics, prenatal educational programs, and visiting
nurse projects. How-
ever, conservatives charged that the Sheppard-Towner Act was
part of a Communist
plot to socialize American medicine and an attack on the rights
of the states, which
traditionally handled public health measures. Indeed, many men
in Congress sup-

ported the act because they feared the voting power of newly
enfranchised women.
By the late 1920s, when it became clear that women did not
vote as a bloc, Congress
cut off appropriations for the program.
As support for reform languished on the national level, some
state leaders pursued
ambitious progressive agendas. In New York, where Al Smith
and Robert Wagner were
developing a social-welfare liberal agenda (see Chapter 20),
new legislation expanded
aid to public schools; boosted workers’ compensation programs;
and created new state
forests, scenic parks, and automobile parkways. However, the
dominant motif of the
1920s was limited government, which placed responsibility for
the nation’s well-being
in the hands of its corporate business leaders.
Corporate Capitalism
The revolution in business management that began in the 1890s
fi nally triumphed in
the 1920s. Large-scale corporate bureaucracies headed by chief
executive offi cers
(CEOs) replaced individual- or family-run enterprises as the
major form of business
organization. Few CEOs owned a signifi cant part of their
enterprises, but they — and
not the thousands of stockholder owners — controlled daily
operations. Moreover,
many corporations were so large that they dominated their
markets. What the famous
eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith had called the
“invisible hand” of market
forces had given way to the “visible hand” of managers who

controlled output, prices,
and their own salaries.
Indeed, by 1930, a handful of managers stood at the center of
American economic
life. Because of a vigorous pattern of consolidation during the
1920s, the two hundred
largest businesses controlled almost half the nonbanking
corporate wealth in the
United States. The largest number of mergers occurred in
rapidly growing industries
such as chemicals (in which Dupont emerged as the leader),
electrical appliances and
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machinery (Westinghouse and General Electric), and
automobiles (General Motors).
Rarely did any single corporation monopolize an entire
industry; rather, an oligopoly
of a few major producers dominated the market.

The nation’s fi nancial institutions expanded and consolidated
along with its cor-
porations. Total banking assets rose from $48 billion in 1919 to
$72 billion in 1929.
Mergers between Wall Street banks enhanced the role of New
York as the fi nancial
center of the United States and, increasingly, the world. In
1929, almost half the
nation’s banking resources were controlled by 1 percent of
American banks, a mere
250 depositories.
Immediately after World War I, the nation experienced a series
of economic
shocks. As Americans spent their wartime savings, they sparked
rampant infl ation:
Prices jumped by one-third in 1919 alone. Then came a sharp
two-year recession that
raised unemployment to 10 percent and cut prices more than 20
percent. Finally, the
economy began to grow smoothly and many Americans began to
benefi t from the suc-
cess of corporate enterprise. Between 1922 and 1929, the gross
domestic product grew
from $74.1 billion to $103.1 billion, approximately 40 percent,
and per capita income
rose impressively from $641 to $847 (about $10,000 today, one-
third of present per
capita income).
An abundance of new consumer products, particularly the
automobile, sparked
this economic expansion. Manufacturing output expanded 64
percent during the
decade, as factories churned out millions of cars, refrigerators,
stoves, and radios. To

produce these goods, basic industries supplied huge quantities
of raw materials:
steel, copper, chemicals, natural gas, electrical power, oil, and
gasoline. Scientifi c
management, fi rst introduced in 1895 by Frederick W. Taylor
(see Chapter 20), was
widely implemented in the 1920s. In combination with more effi
cient machinery
and new methods of mass production, it increased productivity
by 40 percent,
boosting workers’ pay and corporate profi ts.
The economy had some signifi cant weaknesses. Agriculture —
which still em-
ployed one-fourth of all workers — never fully recovered from
the postwar recession.
During the war, American farmers had borrowed heavily to
expand production, but
the revival of European output produced a glut in world
markets. The price of wheat
quickly dropped by 40 percent, corn by 32 percent, and hogs by
50 percent, and they
never completely recovered. Between 1919 and 1929, the
farmers’ share of the national
income plummeted from 16 percent to 8.8 percent. As their
income plunged, farmers
looked to Congress for help. The McNary-Haugen bills of 1927
and 1928 proposed a
system of federal price supports for a slew of agricultural
products: wheat, corn, cot-
ton, rice, and tobacco. President Coolidge opposed the bills as
“class” (special-interest)
legislation and vetoed both of them.
Other “sick industries,” particularly coal and textiles, also
missed out on the pros-

perity of the 1920s. Like farmers, these businesses had
expanded output during the
war and now faced overcapacity and falling prices. This
underside of American eco-
nomic life foreshadowed the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Unlike farmers and miners, industrial workers and white-collar
employees shared
in the prosperity of the 1920s. Henry Ford and other major
corporate employers paid
their workers well, thereby increasing their buying power as
consumers. Many indus-
tries went to a shorter workweek (fi ve full days and a half day
on Saturday), giving
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1914–1945
their employees more leisure time. Profi table fi rms, such as
International Harvester,
offered workers two weeks of paid vacation every year.

The 1920s marked the advent of welfare capitalism, a system of
labor relations
that stressed management’s responsibility for employees’ well-
being. At a time when
unemployment compensation and government-sponsored
pensions did not exist,
General Electric, U.S. Steel, and other large corporations
offered workers health insur-
ance, old-age pension plans, and the opportunity to buy stock in
the company at
below-market prices. Other fi rms subsidized mortgages or
contributed to employee
savings plans. Their goal was to create a loyal and long-serving
workforce, particularly
among managers, dedicated offi ce workers, shop supervisors,
and skilled machinists.
But such welfare plans covered only about 5 percent of the
industrial workforce.
Welfare capitalism had a second goal of deterring production-
line workers from
joining labor unions. Some companies set up employee
committees to voice workers’
complaints and consult regularly with managers over working
conditions. Other cor-
porations accused unions of being un-American because they
campaigned for “closed
shops” that required workers to become members; employers
celebrated the “Ameri-
can Plan” of an open, nonunion shop. Decisions by the
conservative-minded Supreme
Court undercut union activism and government regulation of the
labor market. In
Colorado Coal Company v. United Mine Workers (1925), the
Court ruled that a striking
union could be penalized for illegal restraint of trade. The Court

also struck down
federal legislation regulating child labor, and in Atkins v.
Children’s Hospital (1923), it
voided a minimum wage for women workers in the District of
Columbia. Such deci-
sions and aggressive antiunion campaigns caused membership in
labor unions to fall
from 5.1 million in 1920 to 3.6 million in 1929 — only 10
percent of the nonagricul-
tural workforce. Welfare capitalism seemed to represent the
wave of the future in in-
dustrial relations.
Economic Expansion Abroad
The growing power of U.S. corporations was apparent in the
international arena.
American manufacturers actively promoted foreign sales of
consumer products: ra-
dios, telephones, automobiles, and sewing machines. To supply
these markets, fi rms
built factories and took over existing businesses in foreign
countries. General Electric
set up production facilities in Latin America, China, Japan, and
Australia; General
Motors expanded its sales in Europe by taking over the
Vauxhall Motor Company in
Britain and Opel in Germany. Other American fi rms invested
abroad in new sources
of supply. Seeking lower livestock prices, three major American
meatpackers — Swift,
Armour, and Wilson — built plants in Argentina. The United
Fruit Company devel-
oped plantations in Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala; other
American compa-
nies set up sugar plantations in Cuba and rubber plantations in
the Philippines and

Malaya. Standard Oil of New Jersey acquired oil reserves in
Mexico and Venezuela
(a precursor to American oil investments in the Middle East
after World War II).
During the 1920s, foreign investments by U.S. corporations
more than doubled, reach-
ing a total of $15.2 billion.
American banks were equally active in providing funds to
European countries to
rebuild their war-torn societies and to fulfi ll their international
debt obligations. The
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banks loaned money to Germany, enabling it to pay reparations
to the Allied Powers.
Britain and France then used these funds to pay off their
wartime loans from the
United States. While American political leaders insisted on
payment of these debts
(“They hired the money, didn’t they?” scoffed President

Coolidge), they made re-
payment very diffi cult. The Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922
followed the long-
standing Republican policy of using high tariffs to exclude
foreign-made goods.
American Companies Abroad
United Fruit was one of the many American companies that
found opportunities for investment in South
America in the 1920s. It then had to “sell” tropical foods to
American consumers. To boost sales, the
company published elaborate and informative color
advertisements. Bananas were suffi ciently exotic
that the ads explained to consumers how to tell when bananas
were ripe and never to put them in the
ice-box, the precursor of the electric refrigerator. Duke
University Library, Special Collections.
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1914–1945

Unable to sell their goods in the United States, European
nations could not easily earn
the dollars needed to pay their debts.
In 1924, U.S. diplomats and bankers met with their counterparts
from France,
Great Britain, and Germany to address the debt situation. The
meeting produced the
Dawes Plan, named for Charles G. Dawes, the Chicago banker
who negotiated the
agreement. The plan reduced the reparations that Germany owed
to the Allies and
provided for substantial American bank loans to assist the
Germans in keeping up
with the payments. European fi nancial stability now depended
on the continuing fl ow
of American capital.
This fragile system of international fi nance collapsed with the
crash of the Amer-
ican stock market in October 1929. The outfl ow of capital from
the United States to
Europe slowed and then stopped, undermining the fl ow of
reparation payments. The
stock market crisis also increased congressional support for a
policy of economic na-
tionalism. The Hawley-Smoot Act of 1930 raised tariffs on
imports to an all-time high
and made it nearly impossible for the Allied Powers to pay off
the remaining $4.3 bil-
lion in war loans. Even as American corporations successfully
extended their sales and
investments to the corners of the earth, American politicians
and bankers failed to
create a stable structure of international fi nance.

Foreign Policy in the 1920s
American foreign policy during the 1920s and 1930s was both
isolationist and inter-
nationalist. By refusing to join the League of Nations and the
Court of International
Justice (the World Court), the United States declined to play an
active role in interna-
tional politics; in this regard, the nation’s stance was clearly
isolationist. However, as
the Dawes Plan indicates, the United States pursued a vigorous,
internationalist eco-
nomic policy. Offi cials in the Department of State and the
Department of Commerce
worked constantly to open up new foreign markets for American
manufacturers and
bankers and to protect existing American interests in other
countries.
These initiatives were particularly important in the Caribbean
and Latin America,
the site of considerable investments by U.S. companies and
considerable military in-
tervention to protect those investments. Both continued during
the 1920s. To quell
civil unrest and protect American interests, the U.S. government
stationed troops in
the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924. American military
forces likewise re-
mained in Nicaragua almost continuously from 1912 to 1933
and in Haiti from 1915
to 1934. Relations with Mexico remained tense, a legacy of U.S.
intervention during
the Mexican Revolution (see Chapter 21) and of the Mexican
government’s efforts to
nationalize its oil and mineral wealth. This Mexican initiative
alarmed Standard Oil

of New Jersey (owned primarily by the Rockefeller family) and
other U.S. petroleum
companies with investments in Mexico.
While the United States maintained its dominant position in the
Western
Hemisphere, it reduced its political and military commitments
in East Asia and
Europe. The Washington Naval Arms Conference of 1921
revealed American strat-
egy in the Pacifi c. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes
won acceptance of a
bold plan that placed strict limits on naval expansion. His goals
were to avoid huge
U.S. naval expenditures and to prevent Japan from expanding its
naval forces and
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becoming the dominant nation in East Asia. The major naval
powers agreed to scrap
some warships; to halt the construction of large battleships for

ten years; and to
maintain a fi xed ratio of naval tonnage among the fl eets of
Britain, the United States,
Japan, France, and Italy. As one commentator quipped, in a
short speech Hughes sank
“more ships than all the admirals of the world have sunk in a
cycle of centuries.”
Seven years later, American Secretary of State Frank Kellogg
devised another low-
cost diplomatic plan, this time to calm French fears of a new
German invasion. To
avoid committing the United States to a pact that would
guarantee France’s territorial
integrity, Kellogg persuaded French foreign minister Aristide
Briand to support a
broader agreement condemning all militarism. Fifteen nations
signed the pact in Paris
in 1928; forty-eight more approved it later. The signatories
agreed to “condemn re-
course to war for the solution of international controversies, and
renounce it as an
instrument of national policy.” The U.S. Senate ratifi ed the
Kellogg Plan 85 to 1, but
critics correctly pointed out that the agreement
lacked mechanisms for enforcement and was lit-
tle more than an “international kiss.”
Pious declarations were no cure for the mas-
sive economic, political, and territorial problems
that World War I had created. U.S. policymakers
vacillated, as they would in the 1930s, between as-
suming a larger role in world events and fearing
that treaties would limit their ability to act uni-
laterally. Their diplomatic efforts would ulti-
mately prove inadequate in the face of the mount-

ing international crises that led to World War II.
A New National Culture
The 1920s marked the development of a mass national culture
that emphasized lei-
sure, consumption, and amusement. Automobiles, paved roads,
the parcel post service,
movies, radios, telephones, mass-circulation magazines, brand
names, and chain stores
suddenly took center stage. Together, they linked Americans —
in the mill towns in the
southern Piedmont, outposts on the Oklahoma plains, and ethnic
enclaves in states
along the Atlantic and Pacifi c coasts — in an expanding web of
national experience. In
fact, as consumerism spread around the world, American
products and culture
achieved global infl uence.
A Consumer Society
In homes across the country during the 1920s, Americans sat
down to breakfasts of
Kellogg’s corn fl akes and toast from a General Electric toaster.
They got into Ford
Model Ts to go to work or to go shopping at Safeway, A&P, or
Woolworth’s, some of
the many chain stores that had sprung up across the country. In
the evening, the fam-
ily gathered to listen to radio programs such as Great Moments
in History, to catch up
on events in the latest issue of Reader’s Digest, or enjoy the
melodramatic tales in True
� In what ways did government
and business work together
during the “new era”? How was

it diff erent from the Progressive
Era? Why did it change?
� Describe American foreign
policy—both political and
economic—during the 1920s.
Was it isolationist or internation-
alist?
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1914–1945
Story; on weekends, they might see the newest Charlie Chaplin
fi lm at the local theater.
Millions of Americans now shared similar cultural experiences.
Still, many Americans — blacks, immigrants, working-class
families, and many
farmers — did not participate fully in the new commercial
culture or accept its middle-
class values. As one historian explains, “Buying an electric
vacuum cleaner did not turn

Josef Dobrowolski into True Story’s Jim Smith.” Moreover, the
unequal distribution of
income limited many consumers’ ability to buy the enticing new
products. The bottom
40 percent of American families had an average annual income
of only $725 (about
$8,200 today); after paying for food, housing, and clothing,
these families had only $135
to spend on everything else. Many Americans stretched their
incomes by taking advan-
tage of newly devised installment plans that allowed people to
purchase cars, radios,
refrigerators, and sewing machines “on time.” “Buy now, Pay
later,” said the ads, and
millions did. By 1927, two-thirds of American cars were fi
nanced through monthly
payments, and consumer lending grew to $7 billion a year — the
tenth-largest business
in the United States.
New appliances — electric refrigerators, radios, fans, irons,
vacuum cleaners — had
a dramatic impact on women’s lives. While single women were
steadily increasing their
participation in the paid workforce, most married women spent
their time as house-
wives and mothers. Electric appliances made housewives’
chores much less arduous
but also encouraged middle-class housewives to do their own
housework and laundry,
replacing human servants with electric ones. The new gadgets
also raised standards of
cleanliness, encouraging women to spend more time doing
household chores. For
most women, leisure time remained scarce.

To encourage consumers to view the new products as
“necessities” rather than
“luxuries,” manufacturers were spending no less than $2.6
billion a year on advertising
by 1929. A new advertising industry (centered on New York
City’s Madison Avenue)
devised sophisticated ways to spur sales, often aided by experts
in the growing aca-
demic fi eld of psychology. Some ads for medicine featured
white-coated doctors to
suggest scientifi c approval of their products. Other ads
appealed to people’s social as-
pirations by depicting elegant men and women who smoked
certain brands of ciga-
rettes or drove a Buick, Pierce-Arrow, or other make of car. Ad
writers also preyed on
people’s insecurities, coming up with a variety of socially
unacceptable “diseases,” such
as the dreaded “B.O.” (body odor).
Consumers were less the passive victims of manipulative
advertising agencies
than willing participants in a new culture. For many middle-
class Americans, the tra-
ditional criteria for judging self-worth — personal character,
religious commitment,
and social standing — now had a powerful rival: the gratifi
cation of personal desires
through the acquisition of more and better possessions.
The World of the Automobile
No possession typifi ed the new consumer culture better than
the automobile. “Why on
earth do you need to study what’s changing this country?” a
Muncie, Indiana, resident
asked sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd. “I can tell you

what’s happening in just four
letters: A-U-T-O!” The showpiece of modern consumer
capitalism, the automobile
revolutionized American economic and social life.
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Mass production of cars stimulated the prosperity of the 1920s.
Before the intro-
duction of the moving assembly line in 1913, Ford workers took
twelve and a half
hours to put together an auto; subsequently, they did the job in
only ninety-three
minutes. By 1927, Ford was producing a car every twenty-four
seconds. Auto sales
climbed from 1.5 million in 1921 to 5 million in 1929, a year in
which Americans spent
$2.58 billion on cars. By the end of the decade, Americans
owned 23 million cars — about
80 percent of the world’s automobiles — an average of one car
for every six people.

The boom in the auto industry rippled through the American
economy. It stimu-
lated the steel, petroleum, chemical, rubber, and glass industries
and, directly or
indirectly, provided jobs for 3.7 million workers. Highway
construction became a
billion-dollar-a-year enterprise, fi nanced by federal subsidies
and state gasoline taxes.
Car ownership broke down the isolation of rural life, spurred
the growth of suburbs,
and, in 1924, spawned the fi rst suburban shopping center:
Country Club Plaza outside
Kansas City, Missouri.
The auto also changed the way Americans spent their leisure
time. Although
gasoline was not cheap (about $2.50 a gallon in 2008 prices),
Americans took to the
roads, becoming a nation of tourists. The American Automobile
Association,
founded in 1902, estimated that in 1929 about forty-fi ve
million people — almost
one-third of the population — took vacations by automobile,
patronizing the “auto-
camps” and tourist cabins that were the forerunners of post–
World War II motels.
Like the movies, cars changed the dating patterns of young
Americans. Contrary to
many parents’ views, premarital sex was not invented in the
backseat of a Ford, but
a Model T offered more privacy than did the family living room
or the front porch
and contributed to increased sexual experimentation among the
young.
The Movies and Mass Culture

The new mass media — glossy magazines, radio, and especially
movies — formed the
centerpiece of a common national culture. American movies had
their roots in turn-
of-the-century nickelodeons, where for a nickel, working-class
audiences viewed
one-reel silent fi lms such as The Great Train Robbery. By
1910, the moviemaking in-
dustry had moved to southern California, which had cheap land,
plenty of sunshine,
and varied scenery — mountains, deserts, cities, and the Pacifi c
Ocean — within easy
reach. By the end of World War I, Hollywood reigned as the
movie capital of the world,
producing nearly 90 percent of all fi lms.
As directors produced feature fi lms and exhibited them in
large, ornate theaters,
movies attracted a middle-class audience. Early movie stars,
including Buster Keaton,
Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, became
idols who set na-
tional trends in clothing and hairstyles. Then a new cultural
icon, the fl apper, burst on
the scene to represent emancipated womanhood.
Actress Clara Bow was Hollywood’s favorite fl apper, a
bobbed-hair “jazz baby”
who won a movie contract at the age of eighteen. Three years
later, she was a star — the
lead character in It, one of the fi rst movies to gross $1 million.
Whatever “It” was, Clara
had it. With her boyish fi gure and shock of red hair, she had a
strikingly sensual pres-
ence; “she could fl irt with a grizzly bear,” wrote one reviewer.
Thousands of young

women took Bow as their model. Decked out in short skirts and
rolled-down silk
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1914–1945
stockings, fl appers wore makeup, smoked, danced to jazz, and
fl aunted their liberated
lifestyle. Like so many cultural icons, the fl appers represented
only a tiny minority of
women, but thanks to the movies and advertising industry, they
became the symbol of
women’s sexual and social emancipation.
The movies were big business, grossing $1.6 billion in 1926.
The large studios —
United Artists, Paramount, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer —
dominated the industry
and were run mainly by eastern European Jewish immigrants
such as Samuel Goldfi sh
(later Goldwyn). Movies became even more profi table and
culturally powerful with

the advent of the “talkies.” Warner Brothers’ The Jazz Singer
(1927), starring Al Jolson,
was the fi rst feature-length fi lm to offer sound. Despite the
enormous expense — some
$300 million to equip fi lm sets and thousands of theaters with
sound equipment — all
the major studios quickly made the transition to “talkies.” By
1929, the nation’s 23,000
movie theaters were selling ninety million tickets a year.
That The Jazz Singer was the fi rst talkie was not a coincidence.
Jazz music
captured the sensibility of the 1920s, especially its creative
excitement and sensual
character. As a word, jazz was originally a vulgar term for the
sex act; as music, it was
(and is) an improvisational form whose notes are rarely written
down. Jazz began in
the dance halls and bordellos of turn-of-the century New
Orleans and was a thor-
oughly American — indeed, African American — art form.
Most of the early jazz
musicians were black, and they carried its rhythms to Chicago,
New York, Kansas
City, and Los Angeles. The best-known performers were
composer-pianist Ferdinand
“Jelly Roll” Morton, trumpeter Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong,
composer-bandleader
Edward “Duke” Ellington, and singer Bessie Smith, “the
empress of the Blues.”
Phonograph records increased the appeal of jazz and the blues
by capturing their
spontaneity and transmitting it to a wide audience; jazz, in turn,
boosted the infant
recording industry. Soon, this uniquely American art form had

caught on in Europe,
especially in France. Because jazz often expressed black dissent
against the straightfor-
ward, optimistic rhythms of white music, it became popular
among specifi c types of
white Americans — young people, intellectuals, and social
outcasts — who felt stifl ed
by middle-class culture. Later in the century, other African
American musical
forms — notably rhythm-and-blues and hip-hop — would again
challenge middle-
class values by injecting themes of sex and violence into
American popular culture.
Mass-circulation magazines and the radio were also key factors
in the creation
of a national culture. In 1922, ten magazines each claimed a
circulation of at least
2.5 million, including Time, the Saturday Evening Post, the
Ladies’ Home Journal,
and Good Housekeeping. Tabloid newspapers, which
highlighted crime, sports,
comics, and scandals, became part of urban culture, and news
services such as the
Associated Press (AP) and United Press (UP) appeared on the
national scene.
Thanks to AP and UP, people across the United States read the
same articles.
The newest instrument of mass culture, professional radio
broadcasting, was
truly a child of the 1920s. In November 1920, station KDKA in
Pittsburgh carried the
presidential election returns; a mere nine years later, 800
stations, most affi liated with
the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) or the National

Broadcasting Company
(NBC), were on the air, and nearly ten million American
households (40 percent of
the total) owned a radio. Unlike the situation in Europe, where
radio was a government
monopoly, American radio stations were licensed by the
government but privately
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owned; they drew their revenue from advertisers and corporate
sponsors. One of the
most popular radio shows of all time, Amos ’n’ Andy, which
premiered on the NBC
network in 1928, featured two white actors playing stereotypical
black characters.
Stock phrases from the weekly show, such as “Check and
double check,” quickly be-
came part of everyday speech. So many people “tuned in” (a
new phrase of the 1920s,
similar to “log on” today) to Amos ’n’ Andy that other activities
came to a halt during

the show’s airtime.
All That Jazz
The phonograph machine expanded the popularity of jazz, which
now could be heard at home as well
as in a city jazz joint. “Crazy Blues” by Mamie Smith and her
Jazz Hounds sold a million records in 1920
and convinced record companies that there was a market among
African Americans for what were called
“race records.” By the 1950s, black music had become
“American” music. Perry Bradford, the piano player
and composer of “Crazy Blues,” was also the composer of
“Keep A Knockin,” which Little Richard made into
a major rock ’n’ roll hit in 1957. Division of Political History,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
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1914–1945
As the workweek shrank and paid vacations increased,
Americans had more time

and energy to expend on recreation. Cities and suburbs built
baseball diamonds, tennis
courts, swimming pools, and golf courses. Sports
became a big business as private entrepreneurs
built huge football and baseball stadiums and hired
professional teams to play in them. Fans could
attend games, listen to them on the radio, or catch
highlights in the movie newsreels. Star athletes
such as boxer Jack Dempsey, golfer Bobby Jones,
and baseball slugger Babe Ruth became national
celebrities. Excluded from the white teams, out-
standing black athletes such as baseball pitcher
Satchel Paige played on teams in the Negro
National League and the Southern Negro League.
Redefining American Identity
As movies, radio, advertising, and assembly-line products began
to transform the
country into a modern, cosmopolitan nation, many Americans
welcomed these
changes as exciting evidence of progress. Others were uneasy.
Flappers dancing to jazz,
youthful experimentation in Model Ts, sexually suggestive
movies — these harbingers
of a new era worried native-born Americans of religious stock.
They were also trou-
bled by the powerful presence in American cities of millions of
Catholic and Jewish
immigrants from Europe and African American migrants from
the South. Beneath the
clichés of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties were deeply
felt tensions that surfaced
in confl icts over immigration, religion, Prohibition, and race
relations. At stake was
the defi nition of what it meant to be an American.

The Rise of Nativism
Tensions between city dwellers and rural folk escalated sharply
during the 1920s. For
the fi rst time in the nation’s history, more people lived in
urban areas — ranging from
small towns of 2,500 people to large cities — than in rural
areas. There was no mistak-
ing the trend. During the 1920s, about 6 million Americans left
farms for the cities. By
1929, ninety-three cities had populations over 100,000. New
York City exceeded 7 mil-
lion; Chicago boasted almost 3 million, and the population of
Los Angeles had
exploded to 1.2 million. However, because political districts
did not refl ect this shift in
population, rural areas still controlled most state legislatures.
As cities demanded more
services and tax dollars from state governments, confl ict
between the two regions was
inevitable.
Racial and ethnic pluralism intensifi ed these struggles. When
native-born white
Protestants — both farmers and city dwellers — looked at their
society in 1920, they saw
a nation of 105 million people that had changed dramatically in
only forty years. Dur-
ing that time, more than 23 million immigrants had come to
America, and many of
them were Jews or Catholics from southern and eastern Europe.
Senator William Bruce
of Maryland branded them “indigestible lumps” in the “national
stomach,” implying
� How do you explain the rise of a

national culture in the 1920s? In
what ways did Americans across
the nation begin to share com-
mon experiences?
� Which had a greater impact on
American life: the automobile
or the movies? In more specifi c
terms, compare the historical
contributions of Henry Ford and
Clara Bow.
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that they might never be absorbed into the dominant culture.
Such nativist sentiments,
which recalled the reaction to immigrants from Ireland and
Germany in the 1840s and
1850s, were widely shared.
Nativist animosity fueled a new drive against immigration.
“America must be kept
American,” President Coolidge declared in 1924. Congress had
banned Chinese im-

migration in 1882, and Theodore Roosevelt had negotiated a
“Gentleman’s Agree-
ment” that limited Japanese immigration in 1907 (see Chapter
21). Now nativists
charged that there were too many European immigrants and
certainly too many who
were anarchists, socialists, and radical labor organizers.
Responding to these concerns,
Congress passed an emergency immigration act in 1921 and a
more restrictive mea-
sure, the National Origins Act, in 1924. The act cut immigration
quotas to 2 percent of
each nationality present in the United States in 1890, when the
census had listed few
people from southeastern Europe and Russia. In 1929, Congress
imposed even more
restrictive quotas, setting a cap of 150,000 immigrants per year
from Europe and
continuing to ban most migrants from Asia.
The new laws continued to permit unrestricted immigration
from countries
in the Western Hemisphere, and Latin Americans arrived in
increasing numbers.
Over one million Mexicans entered the United States between
1900 and 1930.
Some were fleeing the chaos of the Mexican
Revolution of 1910, but many migrated in
response to American labor shortages during
World War I. Nativists lobbied Congress to
cut this flow, and so did the leaders of labor
unions, who pointed out that a fl ood of impov-
erished migrants would lower wages for all
American workers. But Congress heeded the
pleas of American employers, especially

large-scale farmers in Texas and California,
who wanted cheap labor. Only the coming of
the Great Depression cut off migration from
Mexico.
Another expression of nativism in the 1920s
was the revival of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) (see
Patriotic Protestant Nativism
While the Ku Klux Klan of the 1860s and 1870s stood
for the cause of Confederate nationalism and white
racism, the new KKK of the 1920s embraced the values
of American patriotism and Protestantism. In its view,
neither Catholics nor Jews could be real “Americans.”
This powerful image of a hooded knight on horseback,
replete with the symbolism of Flag and Cross, conveys
not only the movement’s ideology but also its latent
violence. Picture Research Consultants & Archives.
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1914–1945
We are a movement of the plain people, very
weak in the matter of culture, intellectual
support, and trained leadership. We are
demanding, and we expect to win, a return of
power into the hands of the everyday, not
highly cultured, not overly intellectualized, but
entirely unspoiled and not de- Americanized,
average citizen of the old stock. . . .
This is undoubtedly a weakness. It lays
us open to the charge of being hicks and
“rubes” and “drivers of second-hand Fords.”
We admit it. Far worse, it makes it hard for
us to state our case and advocate our
crusade in the most effective way, for most
of us lack skill in language. . . .
To understand the Klan, then, it is
necessary to understand the character and
present mind of the mass of old-stock
Americans. The mass, it must be remem-
bered, as distinguished from the intellectu-
ally mongrelized “Liberals.”
These are . . . a blend of various peoples
of the so-called Nordic race . . . which, with
all its faults, has given the world almost the
whole of modern civilization. . . . These
Nordic Americans for the last generation
have found themselves increasingly
uncomfortable. . . .
Finally came the moral breakdown that
has been going on for two decades. . . . All
our traditional moral standards went by the
boards or were so disregarded that they
ceased to be binding. The sacredness of our

A M E R I C A N V O I C E S
Sabbath, of our homes, of chastity, and fi nally
even of our right to teach our own children in
our own schools fundamental facts and
truths were torn away from us. . . . One
more point about the present attitude of the
old-stock American: he has revived and
increased his long-standing distrust of the
Roman Catholic Church. . . . [which is]
the chief leader of alienism, and the most
dangerous alien power with a foothold
inside our boundaries. . . .
The Ku Klux Klan . . . is an organiza-
tion which gives expression, direction and
purpose to the most vital instincts, hopes,
and resentments of the old-stock Ameri-
cans, provides them with leadership, and is
enlisting and preparing them for militant,
constructive action toward fulfi lling their
racial and national destiny . . . a defi nite
crusade for Americanism! . . .
There are three of these great racial
instincts. . . . These are the instincts of
loyalty to the white race, to the traditions
of America, and to the spirit of Protestant-
ism, which has been an essential part of
Americanism ever since the days of
Roanoke and Plymouth Rock. They are
condensed into the Klan slogan: “Native,
white, Protestant supremacy.”
S O U R C E : Hiram Wesley Evans, “The Klan’s Fight
for Americanism,” The North American Review 223
(March 1926): 37–39.

The Fight for Americanism H I R A M W E S L E Y E VA N S
Hiram Wesley Evans was a Texas dentist and the Grand Wizard
of the Ku Klux Klan, which
boasted a nationwide membership of three million. He published
this defense of the Klan
in The North American Review, a leading journal of opinion.
Like fascist movements in Italy
and Germany, the Klan focused on racial identity. For the KKK,
“real” Americans were those
of Nordic (northern European) descent; all others were “aliens,”
including those of southern
or central European ancestry (Italian, Spanish, Polish, Czech,
etc.) and those with Jewish or
African forebears.
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Chapter 15). Shortly after the premiere in 1915 of Birth of a
Nation, a popular fi lm
that glorifi ed the Reconstruction-era Klan, a group of
southerners gathered on Stone
Mountain outside Atlanta to revive the racist organization.
Taking as its motto
“Native, white, Protestant supremacy,” the modern Klan
recruited thousands of sup-
porters in the Far West, the Southwest, and the Midwest,
especially Oregon, Indiana,
and Oklahoma. Its largest “klaverns” were in urban areas. The
new Klan did not limit
its harassment to blacks but targeted Catholics and Jews as well
(see American Voices,
p. 686). Its tactics remained the same: arson, physical
intimidation, and economic
boycotts. The KKK also turned to politics, and hundreds of
Klansmen won election
to local offi ces and state legislatures. At the height of its power
in 1925, the Klan had
over three million members — including a strong contingent of
women who pursued
a political agenda that combined racism, nativism, and equal
rights for white Protes-
tant women.
After 1925, the Klan declined rapidly, undermined by internal
rivalries, rampant
corruption, and the conviction for rape and murder of David
Stephenson, the Klan’s
Grand Dragon in Indiana. In addition, the passage of the
National Origins Act in 1924
robbed the Klan of a potent issue. Nonetheless, the Klan
remained strong in the Jim
Crow South; during the 1930s, some northern Klansmen
supported the American

Nazi movement, which shared its antiblack and anti-Jewish
beliefs.
Legislating Values: Evolution and Prohibition
Other cultural confl icts erupted over religion and alcoholic
beverages. The debate
between modernist and revivalist Protestants, which had been
simmering since the
1890s (see Chapter 18), came to a boil in the 1920s. Modernists,
or liberal Protestants,
found ways to reconcile their religious beliefs with Charles
Darwin’s theory of evolu-
tion and other scientifi c principles. Revivalist Protestants, who
were strongly rooted
in fundamentalist Baptist and Methodist churches, insisted on a
literal reading of the
Bible. So did popular evangelical preachers, such as Billy
Sunday and Aimee Semple
McPherson, who used storefront churches and open-air revivals
to popularize their
own brands of charismatic Christian fundamentalism.
Religious controversy entered the political arena when
fundamentalists wrote
their beliefs into law. In 1925, the Tennessee state legislature
made it “unlawful . . . to
teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine creation of
man as taught in the
Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower
order of animals.” The
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which had been
formed during the Red Scare
to protect free speech rights, challenged the constitutionality of
the law. It intervened
in the trial of John T. Scopes, a high school biology teacher,
who had taught the prin-

ciples of evolution to his class and faced a jail sentence for
doing so. The case attracted
national attention because Clarence Darrow, a famous criminal
lawyer, defended
Scopes, and William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic
presidential candidate
and ardent fundamentalist, spoke for the prosecution.
The press dubbed the Scopes trial the “monkey trial.” The label
referred both to
Darwin’s argument that human beings and other primates share
a common ancestor
and to the circus atmosphere at the trial, which was broadcast
live over a Chicago radio
station. The jury took only eight minutes to deliver its verdict:
guilty. Although the
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1914–1945

Tennessee Supreme Court overturned Scopes’s conviction, the
controversial law
remained on the books for more than thirty years. As the 1920s
ended, science and
religion were locked in a standoff. Beginning in the 1980s,
fundamentalists would
launch new political attacks against Darwin and modern science
(see Chapter 32).
Like the dispute over evolution, Prohibition — the “noble
experiment,” as it was
called — involved the power of the state to enforce social
values (see Chapter 22).
Americans drank less after the Eighteenth Amendment took
effect in January 1920,
but those who continued to drink gave the decade its reputation
as the Roaring Twen-
ties. Urban ethnic groups — German, Irish, and Italian — had
long opposed restric-
tions on drinking and refused to comply with the new law. Some
Americans brewed
their own beer or distilled “bathtub gin.” Many others
patronized illegal saloons
and clubs, called speakeasies, which sprang up in every city;
there were more than
The First Modern Evangelist: Aimee Semple McPherson (1890–
1944)
Aimee McPherson founded the Foursquare Gospel Church,
which now claims a worldwide membership
of over three million. Born as Aimee Kennedy in Ontario,
Canada, she married missionary Robert Semple
in 1907. After his death in China, she married Harold
McPherson and eventually settled in Los Angeles.
By 1923, McPherson was preaching to a radio audience and to

crowds of 5,000 at her massive Angelus
Temple. In 1926, she attracted national attention by
disappearing for a month and claiming that she had
been kidnapped. Many people suspected that McPherson was at
a romantic hideaway with the temple’s
radio operator, but her preaching career fl ourished into the
1930s. She died of an overdose of sedatives
in 1944. © Bettmann/Corbis.
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30,000 speakeasies in New York City alone. Liquor smugglers
operated with ease
along Canadian and Mexican borders and used speedboats to
land cargoes of wine,
gin, and liquor along the Atlantic Coast. Organized crime (the
“Mob”), already strong
among Italians and Jews in major cities, took over the bootleg
trade and grew wealthy
from its profi ts. The “noble experiment” turned out to be a
dismal failure.

The Americans who favored repeal of the Eighteenth
Amendment — the
“wets” — slowly built support for their cause in Congress and
the state legislatures. The
coming of the Great Depression hastened the process as
politicians looked for ways to
create jobs and raise tax revenues. With the ratifi cation of the
Twenty-fi rst Amendment
on December 5, 1933, nationwide Prohibition came to an
inglorious end.
Intellectual Crosscurrents
As millions of Americans celebrated victory in the Great War
and prosperity in peace-
time, infl uential writers and intellectuals rendered bitter
dissents. The novelist John
Dos Passos railed at the obscenity of “Mr. Wilson’s war” in The
Three Soldiers (1921)
and again in 1919 (1932). Ernest Hemingway’s novels In Our
Time (1924), The Sun
Also Rises (1926), and A Farewell to Arms (1929) powerfully
portrayed the dehuman-
izing consequences and futility of war. In his despairing poem
The Waste Land (1922),
T. S. Eliot portrayed a fragmented civilization in ruins.
Infl uenced by Eliot’s dark vision, writers offered stinging
critiques of what they saw
as the complacent, moralistic, and anti-intellectual tone of
American life. In Babbitt
(1922), the novelist Sinclair Lewis satirized the stifl ing
conformity of a middle-class
businessman. In 1925, Theodore Dreiser wrote his naturalistic
masterpiece An American
Tragedy, and F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby,
both probing indictments of

the mindless pursuit of material goods and wealth.
More affi rmative works of art and literature emanated from
Harlem, the center of
African American life in New York City. During the 1920s,
Harlem stood as “the symbol
of liberty and the Promised Land to Negroes everywhere,” as an
infl uential black
minister put it. Talented African American artists and writers fl
ocked to Harlem,
where they broke with older genteel traditions of black
literature to assert cultural ties
to Africa. The poet Langston Hughes drew on the black artistic
forms of blues and
jazz in The Weary Blues (1926), a groundbreaking collection of
poems. And he captured
the upbeat spirit of the Harlem Renaissance when he asserted, “I
am a Negro — and
beautiful.”
Like Hughes, the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance
championed racial pride.
Authors Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Jessie Fauset
explored the black experience
and represented the “New Negro” in fi ction. Augusta Savage
used sculpture to draw
attention to black accomplishments. Zora Neale Hurston spent a
decade collecting
folklore in the South and the Caribbean and incorporated that
material into her short
stories and novels. This creative work embodied the ongoing
African American struggle
to fi nd a way, as the infl uential black intellectual W. E. B. Du
Bois explained, “to be both
a Negro and an American.”

The vitality of the Harlem Renaissance was short-lived. During
the Jazz Age,
wealthy white patrons and infl uential publishers courted its
writers. But white interest
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1914–1945
and black creativity waned as the depression of the 1930s cut
incomes and sparked
riots in Harlem over jobs and living conditions. However, the
writers of the Harlem
Renaissance found a new popularity during the civil rights
movement of the 1960s,
when black intellectuals rediscovered their work.
As black artists championed racial pride, the Universal Negro
Improvement
Association (UNIA) mobilized African American workers. Led
by Jamaican-born
Marcus Garvey and based in Harlem, the UNIA championed
black separatism.

The charismatic Garvey urged blacks to return to Africa,
arguing that peoples of
African descent would never be treated justly in white-run
countries. The UNIA
grew rapidly in the early 1920s and soon claimed four million
followers, including
many recent migrants to northern cities. It published a
newspaper, Negro World;
opened “liberty halls” in northern cities; and solicited funds for
the Black Star Line
steamship company, to trade with the West Indies and carry
American blacks back
to Africa.
The UNIA declined as quickly as it had arisen. In 1925, Garvey
went to jail for
mail fraud because of his solicitations for the Black Star Line;
two years later, President
Coolidge commuted Garvey’s sentence but ordered his
deportation to Jamaica. With-
out Garvey’s leadership, his movement quickly collapsed.
Culture Wars: The Election of 1928
Cultural issues — the emotionally charged questions of
Prohibition, Protestant fun-
damentalism, and nativism — set the agenda for the presidential
election of 1928.
The national Democratic Party, now controlled by its northern
urban wing, nomi-
nated Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York. Smith was the fi
rst presidential candi-
date to refl ect the aspirations of the urban working classes and
of European Catholic
immigrants. A Catholic and the grandson of Irish peasants,
Smith began his politi-
cal career as a Tammany Hall ward heeler, became a dynamic

state legislative leader
and reformer, and matured as the effective four-term governor
of the nation’s most
populous state.
But Smith had liabilities. He spoke in a heavy New York accent
and sported a
brown derby that highlighted his ethnic working-class origins.
Middle-class reformers
questioned his ties to the political bosses of Tammany Hall;
temperance advocates op-
posed him as a “wet.” The governor’s greatest handicap was his
religion. Although
Smith insisted that his beliefs would not affect his duties as
president, most Protestants
opposed his candidacy. “No Governor can kiss the papal ring
and get within gunshot
of the White House,” declared a Methodist bishop from Buffalo.
The Republican nominee, Secretary of Commerce Herbert
Hoover, was also a
new breed of candidate. Hoover had never run for any political
offi ce and did not
run very hard for the presidency, delivering only seven
campaign speeches. He
rested his candidacy on his outstanding career as an engineer
and administrator;
for many Americans, he embodied the managerial and
technological promise of the
Progressive era. Beyond that, Hoover had the benefi t of eight
years of Republican
prosperity and strong support from the business community. He
promised voters
that his vision of individualism and cooperative endeavor would
banish poverty
from the United States.

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Hoover won a stunning victory. He received 58 percent of the
popular vote to
Smith’s 41 percent and 444 electoral votes to Smith’s 87.
Because many southern
Protestants refused to vote for a Catholic, Hoover carried
Texas, Virginia, and North
Carolina, breaking the Democratic “Solid South” for the fi rst
time since Reconstruc-
tion. Equally signifi cant, Smith won the industri-
alized states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island
and carried the nation’s twelve largest cities (Map
23.2). The Democrats were on their way to fash-
ioning a new identity as the party of the urban
masses and social welfare liberalism, a reorienta-
tion that the New Deal would push forward in
the 1930s.
Ironically, Herbert Hoover’s victory put him
in the unenviable position of leading the United

States when the Great Depression struck in 1929.
Having claimed credit for the prosperity of the
1920s, the Republicans could not escape blame
for the depression.
Candidate
Popular
Vote
Percent of
Popular Vote
Electoral
Vote
Herbert C. Hoover
(Republican)
444
87
21,391,993
15,016,169
58.2
40.9Alfred E. Smith
(Democrat)
13
29 15
24

38
6
3
14
7
5
184
4
18 8
45
13
13
15
5
13
12
3
10
8
6
8

20 10
9
12
10 12
14
6
9
12
12
7
3 3
4
4
4
3
5
5
10
MAP 23.2 Presidential Election of 1928

Historians still debate the extent to which 1928 was a “critical”
election, that is, one that produced a signifi -
cant realignment in voting behavior. Republican Herbert Hoover
swept the popular vote and the electoral
vote, but Democrat Alfred E. Smith won majorities not only in
the South, his party’s traditional stronghold,
but also in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and (although it is not
evident on this map) in all of the large cities
of the North and Midwest. Subsequently, the Democrats won
even more votes among African American
and European ethnic groups, making them the nation’s dominant
political party until the 1980s.
For more help analyzing this map, see the Online Study Guide
at bedfordstmartins.com/henrettaconcise.
� What changes in American
society prompted the activities
of nativists, the Ku Klux Klan,
and religious fundamentalists?
How did these groups express
their outrage?
� What were the similarities and
diff erences between the Harlem
Renaissance and Marcus Garvey’s
UNIA movement?
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1914–1945
The Onset of the Great Depression, 1929–1932
Booms and busts are characteristic features of the business
cycle in capitalist economies,
and they were familiar features of the American landscape.
Beginning with the Panic of
1819, the United States had experienced a recession or panic
about every twenty years.
But none was as severe as the Great Depression of the 1930s,
and none lasted as long.
Causes and Consequences
The economic downturn began almost imperceptibly in 1927.
For fi ve years, Americans
had spent money at a faster pace than their incomes had risen.
As consumers ran short of
cash and credit, spending declined and housing construction
slowed. Soon, inventories
piled up; in 1928, manufacturers began to cut back production
and lay off workers, rein-
forcing the slowdown. By the summer of 1929, the economy
was clearly in recession.
A few commentators noted the slowdown in production, but
most celebrated the
rapid rise in the stock market. Stock prices surged 40 percent in
1928 and 1929 as in-
vestors got caught up in a speculative frenzy. On “Black

Thursday,” October 24, and
again on “Black Tuesday,” October 29, the bubble burst. On
those two bleak days, mil-
lions of shares changed hands in panic trading. Practically
overnight, stock values fell
from a peak of $87 billion to $55 billion.
The crash exposed long-standing weaknesses in the economy.
Agriculture was in the
worst shape because farm products had sold at low prices for a
decade. In 1929, the yearly
income of farmers averaged only $273, compared to $750 for
other occupations. Because
farmers accounted for one-fourth of the nation’s workers, their
meager buying power had
long been a drag on the economy. Two other major industries —
railroads and coal — had
also fallen on hard times. As automobile and truck traffi c
increased, railroad revenues from
passenger travel and freight shipments declined, forcing several
railroads into bankruptcy.
Coal-mining companies experienced similar fi nancial diffi
culties. Battered by overexpan-
sion, obsolescent machinery, and bitter labor struggles, they
faced sharp competition from
companies producing other sources of energy: hydroelectric
power, fuel oil, and natural
gas. A fi nal structural weakness was the unequal distribution of
wealth. In 1929, the top
5 percent of American families received 30 percent of the
nation’s income while the bot-
tom 50 percent received only about 20 percent, most of which
was spent on food and
housing. Once the depression began, a majority of the
population lacked suffi cient buy-
ing power to revive the economy.

The Great Crash itself had a devastating impact. It wiped out
the savings of thou-
sands of individual investors and dealt a severe blow to many
banks, which had in-
vested heavily in corporate stocks or lent money to speculators.
Hundreds of banks
failed, and because bank deposits were uninsured, their
depositors lost some or all of
their money. Frightened customers withdrew their savings from
solvent banks, forcing
them to close as well and deepening the crisis.
The American economy now went rapidly downhill. Between
1929 and 1933, the
U.S. gross domestic product fell almost by half, from $103.1
billion to $58 billion. Con-
sumption dropped by 18 percent, construction by 78 percent,
and private investment
by 88 percent. Nearly 9,000 banks closed their doors, and
100,000 businesses failed. The
consumer price index declined by 25 percent, and corporate
profi ts fell from $10 billion
to $1 billion. Most tellingly, unemployment rose from 3.2
percent to 24.9 percent;
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twelve million people were out of work, and many who had jobs
took wage cuts. “We
didn’t go hungry,” said one family, “but we lived lean.”
The downturn became self-perpetuating. The more the economy
contracted, the
longer people expected the decline to last; so corporations did
not invest in new plants,
and consumers refused to buy new cars or appliances. “You
could feel the depression
deepen,” recalled writer Caroline Bird.
President Hoover later blamed the severity of the American
depression on the in-
ternational factors, and his analysis had considerable merit.
During the 1920s, the fl ow
of international credit depended on American banks and
corporations; their loans and
investments in European countries allowed those nations to pay
reparations and war
debts and to buy U.S. goods. Now U.S. banks and companies
reduced their foreign in-
vestments, disrupting the European fi nancial system and
cutting demand for American
exports. The Hawley-Smoot Tariff of 1930 cut trade still further
by raising American
rates to all-time highs and prompting European governments to
impose similar
restrictions. When Great Britain also abandoned the “gold
standard,” which assisted

international trade by stabilizing exchange rates among
currencies, there was a further
contraction of commerce and a fall in demand for American
agricultural products.
Soon, the crisis brought on a worldwide depression. In 1929, the
United States
had produced 40 percent of the world’s manufactured goods. As
American companies
cut back production, they reduced their purchases of Argentine
cattle, Brazilian coffee,
Chinese silk, Mexican oil, Indonesian rubber, African minerals,
and raw materials
from many other countries. Thus, the American crash of 1929
undermined fragile
economies around the globe.
Herbert Hoover Responds
Campaigning for the presidency in 1928, Herbert Hoover
predicted a “fi nal triumph
over poverty.” Even after the Great Crash, he stubbornly
insisted that the downturn
was temporary. “The Depression is over,” the president told a
delegation of business
executives in June 1930.
As the slump continued, Hoover adopted a two-pronged
strategy. Refl ecting his
ideology of voluntarism and his longtime reliance on the
business community, he turned
fi rst to corporate leaders. Hoover asked business executives to
maintain wages and pro-
duction levels and rebuild Americans’ confi dence in the
capitalist economic system.
But the president recognized that voluntarism might not be

enough, given the
depth of the crisis, and he proposed government action as well.
Following the stock
market crash, he cut federal taxes in an attempt to boost private
spending and corpo-
rate investment. Hoover called on state and local governments
to provide jobs by in-
vesting in public projects; and by 1932, he had secured an
unprecedented increase in
federal spending for public works to $423 million. Some
presidential initiatives were
misguided. For instance, the Revenue Act of 1932, which
increased taxes to balance the
budget, choked both consumption and investment. Similarly,
Hoover’s refusal to consider
direct federal relief for unemployed Americans and to rely on
private charity — the
“American way,” he called it — was a mistake; unemployment
during the depression was
too massive for private charities and local governments to
handle.
Hoover’s most innovative program was the Reconstruction
Finance Corporation
(RFC), which Congress approved in January 1932. The RFC was
modeled on the War
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1914–1945
Finance Corporation of World War I and, like that agency,
stimulated economic activ-
ity by providing federal loans to railroads, banks, and other
businesses. This strategy
of pump priming — infusing funds into the major corporate
enterprises — was meant
to increase production and thereby create new jobs and
invigorate consumer spend-
ing. This plan might have worked, but the RFC lent money too
cautiously; by the end
of 1932, it had loaned out only 20 percent of its $1.5 billion in
funds.
Compared with previous chief executives — and in contrast to
his popular image
as a “do-nothing” president — Hoover had responded to the
national emergency with
government action on an unprecedented scale. But the nation’s
needs were also un-
precedented, and Hoover’s programs failed to meet them.
Rising Discontent
As the depression continued, many citizens came to hate
Herbert Hoover. The
American vocabulary now included “Hoovervilles” (shanty
towns where people
lived in packing crates) and “Hoover blankets” (newspapers).
Rising discontent led

Hoovervilles
By 1930, homeless people had built shantytowns in most of the
nation’s cities. In New York City, squatters
camped out along the Hudson River railroad tracks, built
makeshift homes in Central Park, or lived at
the city dump. This photograph, taken near the old reservoir in
Central Park, looks east toward the fancy
apartment buildings of Fifth Avenue and the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, at left. © Bettmann/Corbis.
For more help analyzing this image, see the Online Study Guide
at bedfordstmartins.com/henrettaconcise.
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to violence. Bankrupt farmers banded together to resist the bank
agents and sheriffs
who tried to evict them from their land. To protest low prices
for their goods, thou-
sands of farmers joined the Farm Holiday Association, which
cut off supplies to

urban areas by barricading roads and dumping milk, vegetables,
and other food-
stuffs onto the roadways. Layoffs and wage cuts led to violent
industrial strikes.
When coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky, went on strike
over a 10 percent
wage cut in 1931, the mine owners called in the state’s National
Guard, which
crushed the union. A confrontation in 1932 between workers
and security forces at
the Ford Motor Company’s giant River Rouge factory left three
workers dead and
fi fty with serious injuries.
Civil disorder erupted in the nation’s cities. In 1931 and 1932,
unemployed citi-
zens demanded jobs and bread from local authorities, and hard-
pressed wage earners
staged rent strikes. Some protests were the work of the
Communist Party, which hoped
to use the depression to overturn the capitalist system. Although
the strikes and
The Soup Kitchen
Some of the most vivid images from the depression are of long
lines of men standing outside soup
kitchens, like the one pictured here, and of well-dressed men on
street corners selling apples and
off ering shoe shines. Most of the people in this line are white
men but there are a few blacks. Some of
the men wear worker’s caps but almost as many wear fedoras,
the stylish hat favored by the middle and
upper classes. The absence of women is striking; many women
chose to endure deprivation rather than
violate standards of respectable behavior by soliciting aid in

public. © Bettmann/Corbis.
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1914–1945
marches received broad support, they won few converts to
communism. In the early
1930s, the American Communist Party had only 12,000
members.
Not radicals but veterans staged the most publicized — and
most tragic — protest.
In the summer of 1932, the “Bonus Army,” a ragtag group of
about 15,000 unem-
ployed World War I veterans, hitchhiked to Washington to
demand immediate
payment of their Service Certifi cates, a pension award that
was due to be paid in 1945.
“We were heroes in 1917, but we’re bums now,” one veteran
complained bitterly. While
their leaders unsuccessfully lobbied Congress, the Bonus Army
set up camps near the

U.S. Capitol building. Eventually Hoover called out regular
army troops under the
command of General Douglas MacArthur, who would become a
leading fi gure
during World War II and the Korean War. A headstrong
commander who habitu-
ally exceeded his orders, MacArthur forcefully evicted the
marchers and burned
their main encampment to the ground. As newsreel footage
showing the U.S. Army
attacking and injuring its veterans reached movie theaters
across the nation,
Hoover’s popularity plunged.
The 1932 Election
Despite this discontent, the nation was not in a revolutionary
mood as the election of
1932 approached. Middle-class Americans had internalized the
ideal of the self-made
man and blamed themselves for their economic hardships.
Despair and apathy, not
anger, characterized their mood (see Voices from Abroad, p.
697). The Republicans,
reluctant to dump an incumbent president, unenthusiastically
renominated Hoover.
The Democrats turned to Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt
of New York, who had
persuaded his state’s legislature to run a budget defi cit to fi
nance innovative relief and
unemployment programs.
Roosevelt, born into a wealthy New York family, was a distant
cousin to former
president Theodore Roosevelt, whose career he emulated. After
attending Harvard
College and Columbia University, Roosevelt served as assistant

secretary of the
navy during World War I (as “T.R.” had done before the
Spanish-American War).
Franklin Roosevelt’s service in the Wilson administration, in
combination with his
famous name and speaking abilities, made him the Democrats’
vice presidential
nominee in 1920. Then, in 1921, a crippling attack of polio left
both of his legs
paralyzed for life. Strongly supported by his wife, Eleanor, he
slowly returned to
public life and campaigned successfully for the governorship of
New York in 1928
and again in 1930.
Roosevelt’s campaign for the presidency in 1932 pledged
vigorous action but gave
no indication as to what it might be: “The country needs and,
unless I mistake its tem-
per, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation.” He
won easily, receiving
22.8 million votes to Hoover’s 15.7 million. Despite the
nation’s economic collapse,
Americans remained fi rmly committed to the two-party
system. The Socialist Party
candidate, Norman Thomas, got fewer than a million votes, and
the Communist nom-
inee, party leader William Z. Foster, drew only 100,000 votes.
Elected in November, Roosevelt would not begin his presidency
until March
1933. (The Twentieth Amendment, ratifi ed in 1933, set
subsequent inaugurations

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One does not need to be long in New York
(or for that matter in Chicago, in Cleveland,
in Detroit, in Kansas, or in Buffalo) to see
that there are plenty of real tragedies, as well
as plenty of not-so-real ones. . . . In New
York, one has only to pass outside the
central island bounded by Lexington and
Sixth Avenues to see hardship, misery, and
degradation, accentuated by the shoddy
grimness of the shabby houses and broken
pavements. Look down from the Elevated
[railway], and there are long queues of
dreary-looking men and women standing in
“breadlines” outside the relief offi ces and
the various church and other charitable
institutions. Times Square, at any hour of
the day and late into the evening, offers an
exhibit for the edifi cation of the theater-
goer, for it is packed with shabby, utterly
dumb and apathetic-looking men, who
stand there, waiting for the advent of the
coffee wagon run by Mr. W. R. Hearst of the
New York American. . . . At every street
corner, and wherever taxi or car has to

pause, men try to sell one apples, oranges,
or picture papers. . . . On a fi ne day,
men . . . line every relatively open space,
eager to shine one’s shoes. It is perhaps
because so many people are doing without
this “shine,” or attempting with unfamiliar
hands and a sense of deep indignity to shine
their own, that the streets look shabby and
the persons on them so much less well-
groomed than of yore. The well-shod feet of
the States struck me forcibly on my fi rst
visit; the ill-cleaned feet of New York struck
me as forcibly in January and April 1932. . . .
Yes, distress is there; the idle are there. How
many, no one really knows. Ten million or
more in the country; a million and a half in
New York are reported. They are there; as is,
admittedly a dark undergrowth of horrid
suffering that is certainly more degraded
and degrading than anything Britain or
Germany knows. Their immense presence
makes a grim background to the talk of
depression: there is an obscure alarm as to
what they may do “if this goes on.” . . .
The American people, unfamiliar with
suffering, with none of that long history of
catastrophe and calamity behind it which
makes the experience of European nations, is
outraged and baffl ed by misfortune. . . .
The nation now suffers from a despair of any
and every kind of leadership. Every institu-
tion is assailed; even the sacred foundations
of democracy are being undermined. The
defeatism that has been so lamentably
evidenced in Congress is not peculiar to

Congressmen, any more than is the crude
individualism of their reactions. It lies like a
pall over the spirit of the nation. . . . How to
break it nobody knows.
S O U R C E : Mary Agnes Hamilton, “In America
Today,” in America through British Eyes, ed. Allan
Nevins (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1968),
443–444.
Breadlines and Beggars M A R Y A G N E S H A M I LT O N
British writer and Labor Party activist Mary Agnes Hamilton
arrived in New York in
December 1931. Following a wide-ranging lecture tour,
Hamilton wrote a book conveying
her impressions of American life. Her observations of
conditions in New York City during
the grim winter of 1931–1932 suggest the devastation and
despair gripping urban America.
V O I C E S F R O M A B R O A D
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1914–1945
for January 20.) As FDR waited, Americans suf-
fered through the worst winter of the depres-
sion. Nationwide, the unemployment rate stood
at 20 to 25 percent; in three major industrial cit-
ies in Ohio, it was staggering: 50 percent in
Cleveland, 60 percent in Akron, and 80 percent
in Toledo. Public-welfare institutions were to-
tally overwhelmed. Despite dramatic increases
in their spending, private charities and public
relief agencies reached only a fraction of the
needy. The nation’s banking system was so close
to collapse that many state governors closed banks
temporarily to avoid further withdrawals. By
March 1933, the nation had hit rock bottom.
S U M M A R Y
By the 1920s, the United States had become a modern, urban
society based on cor-
porate business enterprises and mass consumption. As we have
seen, the Republican
Party controlled the national government and fostered a close
partnership with busi-
ness interests. At home, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover
promoted industry-
wide trade associations; abroad, diplomats assisted American
businesses while avoid-
ing entangling alliances.
We also explored how movies, radio, and other mass media

encouraged the devel-
opment of a national culture. This emergent culture placed an
emphasis on leisure,
consumption, and amusement. However, families needed a
middle-class income to
take full advantage of the goods (such as cars, radios, and
vacuum cleaners) and life-
styles promoted by the new advertising industry. Most farmers
remained outside the
charmed circle of prosperity, as were most African Americans
and most working-class
immigrants from Europe and Mexico.
Not everyone welcomed the new secular values of the 1920s.
Cultural disputes
over prohibition, evolution, and immigration led to the creation
of the new Ku Klux
Klan and further disrupted the already fractured Democratic
Party. Republican politi-
cal ascendancy continued under President Herbert Hoover, who
expected to extend
the prosperity of the Roaring Twenties.
Instead, Hoover had to deal with the Great Depression. As we
have seen, the depres-
sion had many causes: speculation in stocks, weaknesses in
major industries, and fragile
international fi nances. When Hoover’s policies failed, voters
turned to Democrat
Franklin D. Roosevelt, who entered offi ce facing massive
unemployment, a banking
crisis, and a despairing citizenry.
Connections: Society
As we noted in the essay that opened Part Five, two central

themes of the years be-
tween 1914 and 1945 were internal migration within the United
States and intolerance
toward immigrants and racial minorities. Both were apparent in
Chapter 22. There,
� What were the domestic and
foreign causes of the Great
Depression? How did President
Hoover respond to the economic
emergency?
� In what ways did the state and
federal governments intervene
in the cultural confl icts and
economic crises of 1920s?
� What problems in the economy
and society of the United States
were exposed by the Great
Depression?
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we described attacks during World War I against German
Americans and the postwar
riots against newly arrived African Americans in Chicago, East
St. Louis, and other
cities. As we have just seen in Chapter 23, nativist sentiment
reached a peak in the
mid-1920s as the “new” Ku Klux Klan harassed Catholics, Jews,
and blacks and Con-
gress enacted restrictive immigration legislation. Chapter 24
will continue that story by
explaining how the Great Depression of the 1930s prompted a
“reverse migration” back
to Mexico, Asia, and Europe. It will also discuss the movement
to California of 350,000
farmers from the “dust bowl” states of the Great Plains and
explain how New Deal agri-
cultural programs forced many African Americans to leave the
rural South. Finally, in
Chapter 25, we will see that World War II triggered a new
round of internal migration
1920 � Eighteenth Amendment
imposes Prohibition
� First commercial radio
broadcast
� Warren G. Harding elected
president
� Census reveals major shift
of people from farms to
cities

1920–1921 � Economic recession cuts
jobs
1921 � Sheppard-Towner Act
assists maternal care
� Washington Conference
leads to naval
disarmament
1922–1929 � Record economic growth
expands consumption
� Automobile Age begins
1922 � T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
published
1923 � President Harding dies;
succeeded by Calvin
Coolidge
� Time magazine founded
1924 � Dawes Plan reduces
German reparations
� Teapot Dome scandal
� U.S. troops withdrawn from
Dominican Republic
� National Origins Act limits
immigration
1925 � F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The
Great Gatsby published

� Height of Ku Klux Klan’s
power
� Scopes trial over free speech
and the teaching of science
1927 � First “talkies” in movie
industry
� Charles Lindbergh’s solo
fl ight
1928 � Herbert Hoover elected
president
� Kellogg-Briand Pact
condemning militarism
signed
1929 � Ernest Hemingway’s A
Farewell to Arms published
� Stock market crash
1930 � Hawley-Smoot Tariff cuts
imports
1931 � Miners strike in Harlan
County, Kentucky
1932 � Reconstruction Finance
Corporation created
� Bonus Army rebuff ed in
Washington

� Communist-led hunger
marches in cities
� Farm Holiday Association
dumps produce
� Franklin D. Roosevelt
elected president
T I M E L I N E
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1914–1945
and race riots and, in an extreme example of racial prejudice,
the internment of more
than 100,000 Japanese Americans.
F O R F U R T H E R E X P L O R AT I O N
Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and

Society in the 1920s (1995),
and Loren Baritz, ed., The Culture of the Twenties (1970),
provide good overviews.
For politics, consult Ellis W. Hawley, The Great War and the
Search for a Modern
Order (1979), and Lee Nash, ed., Understanding Herbert Hoover
(1987). For fi ction, see
Sinclair Lewis’s classics, Main Street (1920) and Babbitt
(1922). To watch the rise of
consumer society, log onto
memory.loc.gov/ammem/coolhtml/coolhome.html.
On the Harlem Renaissance, read Alain Locke, ed., The New
Negro (1925), and con-
sult www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/circle/harlem-ren-sites.html.
For Marcus Garvey,
see www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/garvey. Good studies include
Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice:
A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age
(2004), and David Levering
Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois (2000).
“Flapper Station” at home.earthlink.net/~rbotti details the new
youth culture;
on speakeasies and their music, go to
www.authentichistory.com/1920s/music/index
.html. Also see “Jazz Roots” at www.jass.com and
www.redhotjazz.com. On 1920s
fi lms, go to www.fi lmsite.org/20sintro.html; for
advertisements, see scriptorium.lib
.duke.edu/adaccess. For America’s fi rst media superstar, see
www.charleslindbergh
.com. The Scopes trial is covered at
www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/
scopes.htm.
For the crash of 1929, see www.nytimes.com/library/fi
nancial/index-1929-crash
.html and www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/crash.

T E S T Y O U R K N O W L E D G E
To assess your mastery of the material in this chapter and for
Web sites, images, and
documents related to this chapter, visit
bedfordstmartins.com/henrettaconcise.
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