2. Pro-Business
• Many Americans became comfortable with the
idea of large, successful businesses
• Most products were offered at reasonable prices
3. Labor Unions
• Fell out of favor
• Connected to Red Scare & radicalism
• Struck against industries necessary to keep
industrial America running smoothly
• Pushed for higher wages and safer work
conditions in steel, coal, and RR’s: suppressed by
feds
• S.C. overturned minimum wage law for women
• Nullified child labor restrictions
5. President Harding (19211923)
• Formerly an Ohio Governor & US Senator
• Surrounded himself with like-minded advisors
• Problem: many of the advisors were corrupt!
• Teapot Dome Scandal: oil companies bribed Sec. of
Interior in order to drill on public lands
• Supported anti-lynching laws
• Tried to help farmers with $$ for farm loans
• Harding died in office; heart problems
6.
7. President Coolidge (19231929)
• Former Governor of Massachusetts
• “Silent Cal,” man of few word
• Coolidge continued Harding’s conservative
policies
• Pushed for lower income-tax rates
• This pro-business atmosphere led to a temporary
decline in the popularity of labor unions, and
membership dropped
9. Welfare Capitalism
• The concept that businessmen could dissuade
workers from organizing and demanding
concessions by giving them benefits
• Pension plans, paid vacation, better pay, shorter
hours, communal spirit at work!
• New, important idea; but would not yet become
widespread
10. Modern Culture
• Automobile: became affordable to most middle-class
families
• Allowed people to move far away from city
centers, allowing for the advent of suburbs
• Roads had to be developed to accommodate the
increase in autos on the road
• Rise of auto affected countless other industries:
• Motels, restaurants, tourism, entertainment, etc.
12. Modern Culture
• Radio: 10 million families owned one
• A good way to gather socially
• Led to wanting other “electric and electronic
goods”
• More women entered working world, for financial
reasons
• “keeping up with the Jones’s”
• 15% of women in work force
• Women still earned much less than men
13. Other growth areas
• Sports
• Movies
• Literature
• Harlem Renaissance
• Jazz Age
• We will be researching much of this for the rest of
the week!
14. Cultural Backlash
• KKK grew to over 5 million members
• Widened its targets:
• Blacks, Jews, urbanites, anyone else whose
behavior deviated from the Klan’s narrowly-defined
code of “acceptable Christian behavior”
• Anti-immigration groups grew, targeting
specifically Southern and Eastern European
immigrants
• Sacco and Vanzetti
16. Emergency Quota Act
• 1924 Act created to set quotas to pre-1890
standards, when levels of immigration were low
• Set up to reduce “foreign influence” on the US
17. Scopes Trial
• 1925
• Mass media coverage
• Traditional beliefs vs. modernism
• Teachers couldn’t teach evolution in TN
• Went to court, high powered attorneys brought the
case to national attention
• Clarence Darrow and WJB
• Bryan put on stand as “Bible expert”
• Bryan died just a few days after the trial
18.
19. Prohibition
• Ban of manufacture, sale, or transport of alcoholic
beverages
• 18th Amendment outlawed above
• Many began to resent the gov’t intrusion in private
matters
• Organized crime began to get involved in use and sale
of alcohol
• Speakeasies, bootlegging
• Mobsters, Al Capone
• Competition w/in cities, violence, “racketeering”
23. Washington Naval
Conference
• 1921 attempt at arms reduction
• Britain, US, Japan, Italy, France
• Halt construction of large battleships for 10 years
• Set limit on future shipbuilding
• Use of ratio (will discuss this concept when we
discuss foreign policy between wars later)
24. NYC in the 1920s
• http://www.livingcityarchive.org/htm/decades/1920
.htm
