The “Roaring Twenties”: A Culture in Conflict “Normalcy”

• Isolationism

• Nativism

• Political Conservatism

The “Red Scare”

• Bolsheviks called for worldwide revolution in 1917

• Attorney-General A. Mitchell Palmer

– J. Edgar Hoover begins career hunting down radicals

• Creation of the US Communist Party (1919)

The Red “Scare” (cont.)

• November raids on alien “radicals”

! --The “Soviet Ark”

• More raids in January of 1920

• Crusade for 100% Americanism

• Sacco and Vanzetti Case

A Culture “on the Grow” and “on the Move”

• Significance of the 1920 census

• Increase of white collar workers

• “Consumer goods revolution”

• The automobile: symbol of the second American industrial revolution

! --Ford Motor Company founded in 1903

• The new technology of the moving assembly line

Culture “on the Move” (cont.)

• “Democratizing” the automobile

• Impact of cars on residential housing patterns

• The reality of traffic fatalities

• The need for advertising

Counter-Attacks from a More Traditional, Rural Culture

Prohibition

• Volstead Act (1919)

• Many average Americans violate the law

• A Boost to Organized Crime

! --Al “Scarface” Capone

! Ultimate failure of prohibition

Rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan

• Reorganization of the Klan (1915)

• Expanded “hate” list

– Catholics

– Jews

– Immigrants

• Centered in the Midwest

The Tulsa Race Riot• May 31, 1921

• Starts amid rumors of a Black assault on a white female elevator operator

• 35 blocks burned to the ground

• Officially:

– 10 White dead

– 26 Black dead

– Actual numbers may be in the hundreds

Religious Fundamentalism

• Definition of “fundamentalism”

• The Fundamentals (1910)

• ACLU attack on prohibition against teaching of evolution

• Scopes “Monkey” Trial—Dayton, TN (1925)

Religious Fundamentalism (cont.)

• Carnival-like atmosphere around the Trial

• Clarence Darrow vs. William Jennings Bryan

• Bryan’s opposition to the theory of evolution

• Darrow cross-examined Bryan

• Publicity of the Trial hurt fundamentalism

Immigration Restriction

• 1917 Literacy Test

• National Origins Quota Act (1924)

• Slanted toward favoring “old immigrants”

• Doors wide open to western hemisphere countries

• Increased mechanization had reduced need for labor

President Woodrow Wilson, explaining why he objected to the political and

literacy clauses in the proposed Immigration Act (28th January, 1915)

Restrictions like these, adopted earlier in our history as a Nation, would very materially have altered the course and cooled the humane ardors of

our politics. The right of political asylum has brought to this country many a man of noble character and elevated purpose who was marked as an

outlaw in his own less fortunate land.

The literacy test and the tests and restrictions which accompany it constitute an even more radical change in the policy of the Nation.

Hitherto we have generously kept our doors open to all who were not unfitted by reason of disease or incapacity for self-support or such

personal records and antecedents as were likely to make them a menace to our peace and order or to the wholesome and essential relationships of life. In this bill it is proposed to turn away from tests of character and of

quality and impose tests which exclude and restrict, the the new tests here embodied are not tests of quality or of character or of personal fitness, but tests of opportunity. Those who come seeking opportunity are not to be

admitted unless they have already had one of the chief of the opportunities they seek, the opportunity of education…

The Politics of the 1920’s

• Nation weary of reform and idealism

• A return to “normalcy”

• A Republican decade

• Low voter turnout

The Presidency of Warren G. Harding (1921-1923)

• Compromise choice at Republican convention in 1920

• Poor judge of character

• Scandal-ridden administration

Harding’s Presidency (cont.)

• Teapot Dome Scandal

• Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon’s favoritism of the rich

• Harding’s “Ohio gang”

The Presidency of Calvin Coolidge (1923-1929)

• Coolidge’s as the “passive president”

• Famous for saying very little: “Silent Cal”

• Built his presidency around conservative business values

• Demonstrated hostility toward labor unions

“The Business of America is business”

“The man who builds a factory builds a temple;

the man who works there worships there, and to each is due, not scorn and blame, but

reverence and praise.”

Coolidge’s Presidency (cont.)

• Coolidge believed in little government intervention in the economy

• McNary-Haugen Bill (1924)

The “Harlem Renaissance” and the “New Negro”

• The Harlem Renaissance

! --Langston Hughes

! --Zora Neale Hurston

! --Louis Armstrong

! --Duke Ellington

! --Bessie Smith

• NAACP

– Du Bois/James W. Johnson

– Anti-lynching laws

• “Negro Nationalism” of Marcus Garvey

! --United Negro Improvement Association (1916)

! --A more radical approach

The Culture of the Twenties: A Glittering Surface

• A “mass” culture

• Faith in the economy and American business

• The notion of being very “modern” and “new”

• Post-war disillusionment with the idea of the progress of civilization

! --Farewell to Arms (1929)

! --Waste Land (1922)

Radio and the Movies

• First radio station = KDKA (Pittsburgh)—1920

• NBC = first radio network (1926)

• Average annual movie attendance = 90 million

• The advent of “talkies” (1927)

• Disney pioneers in the arena of animation and sound (1928)

“The Sexual Revolution”

• F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920)

• The “flapper” stereotype

• Sexual revolution more of a sideshow for most American women

• Triumph of romantic love

• Changing feminist goals

• Escalating American divorce rate