CHAPTERS 15

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CHAPTERS 15 16

• THE JAZZ AGE

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Sacco and Vanzetti
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Anarchism the Sacco and Vanzetti Trial

• Ferdinando Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were
  anarchists who were convicted of murdering two
  men during a 1920 armed robbery in South
  Braintree, Massachusetts.
• Anarchism is the belief that all organization or
  government is oppressive.
• After a controversial trial and a series of
  appeals, the two Italian immigrants were executed
  on August 23, 1927
• There is a highly politicized dispute over their
  guilt or innocence.

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The Trial

• Vanzetti claimed that he had been selling fish at
  the time of the Braintree robbery. Sacco claimed
  that he had been in Boston applying for a
  passport at the Italian consulate
• The presiding judge was Webster Thayer. A few
  weeks earlier he had given a speech condemning
  Bolshevism and anarchism. He supported the
  suppression of radical speech
• A crucial piece of evidence was a cap that was
  left at the scene of the crime. It was
  supposedly Saccos, but when he tried it on, it
  was obviously too small. Thayer told the jury to
  ignore this.
• Most people believed that the trial was about
  race and immigrations rather than guilt and
  innocence.

5
KKK

• The KKK was almost out of business by the 1900s.
  Fear of immigrants brought new recruits.
• The new KKK expanded their hatred.

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New KKK

• Where the old KKK was primarily about
  segregation. The New KKK pointed their hatred at
  Jews, Catholics, foreigners, anything seen as
  different and unAmerican.
• Before, the KKK was seen as being made up of
  lower class white trash.
• The hired a public relations firm to advertise
  the New KKK and make it acceptable for middle
  class people to join. They were successful.

7
National Origins Act

• The National Origins Act was passed by Congress
  in response to fears of immigration.
• The Act placed specific quotas on the number of
  each nationality or race or religion that could
  come to the US.
• Mexicans were specifically excluded from the
  quotas to due political pressure by southwestern
  politicians.

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Immigrations Acts of 1921-24 29

• A series of acts limiting immigration were passed
  in the 1920s.
• These acts were in response to the immigration
  surge of the late 19th and early 20th century and
  in response to the Red Scare.
• People feared two things with continued
  immigration miscegnation and bolshevism.

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Eugenics

• Another response to the immigration surge and
  changed race relations was an interest in
  Eugenics.
• Eugenics is considered to be the science of
  selective breeding. The idea was that some kind
  of pure race could be attained.
• Many, many people believed this idea.

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Flappers

• Flapper was a term applied to a "new breed" of
  young women who wore short skirts, bobbed their
  hair, listened to jazz, and flaunted their
  disdain for what was then considered acceptable
  behavior.
• Flappers were seen as brash for wearing excessive
  makeup, drinking, treating sex in a casual
  manner, smoking, driving automobiles and
  otherwise flouting social and sexual norms.
• Flappers had their origins in the period of
  liberalism, social and political turbulence and
  increased transatlantic cultural exchange that
  followed the end of the First World War, as well
  as the export of American jazz culture to Europe.

11
Margaret Mead

• A woman that served as a role model for the new
  women of the 20s was Margaret Mead.
• Her book Coming of Age in Samoa examined sexual
  ideas in foreign countries and shed new light on
  American attitudes toward sex.
• Mead was a champion of broadened sexual mores
  within traditional religious life

12
Fundamentalism

• The 1920s saw the rise of fundamentalist
  religions.
• Fundamentalism is the belief that every word of
  the Bible is absolute fact and should be followed
  as such.
• Fundamentalism grew out of Americans fear of the
  changing roles of women, negroes, young people
  and materialistic society.

13
Billy Sunday

• Billy Sunday was a leading fundamentalist
  preacher.
• He was an ex-professional baseball player that
  found he could make more money preaching.
• His revivals attracted 100s of thousands of
  people.
• He was a leader in the Prohibition Movement.

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Aimee Semple McPherson

• Aimee Semple McPherson was a Los Angeles,
  California evangelist and media celebrity in the
  1920s and 1930s.
• She founded the Foursquare Church.
• McPherson has been noted as a pioneer in the use
  of modern media, especially radio, which she drew
  upon through the growing appeal of popular
  entertainment in North America.

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Scopes Trial

• Scopes Monkey Trial occurred in 1925.
• A high school biology teacher John Scopes was
  accused of violating the a Tennessee law which
  made it unlawful to teach evolution.
• Scopes was found guilty, but the verdict was
  overturned on a technicality and he was never
  brought back to trial.
• The trial drew intense national publicity, as
  national reporters flocked to the small town of
  Dayton, to cover the big-name lawyers
  representing each side.
• William Jennings Bryan, three time presidential
  candidate for the Democrats, argued for the
  prosecution
• Clarence Darrow, the famed defense attorney,
  spoke for Scopes.
• The trial saw modernists, who said religion was
  consistent with evolution, against
  fundamentalists who said the word of God as
  revealed in the Bible trumped all human
  knowledge.

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Prohibition

• The 18th Amendment prohibited the making or
  selling of alcohol in the United States.
• This was a result of the reforms of the late
  nineteenth century and was aimed primarily at
  immigrants in the cities.
• The leadership of the prohibition movement was
  located in rural areas.

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The Volstead Act

• The Volstead Act was passed in 1919 was the
  enforcement legislation of the Prohibition.
• This act expanded the police powers of
  government to control private behaviors
  previously thought to be outside of governmental
  interference.
• Police powers are the powers of government that
  are used to punish or control behavior.

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The Result of Prohibition

• The primary result of Prohibition was to make
  organized crime in the United States a profitable
  business.
• The idea behind Prohibition was to lessen the use
  of alcohol. The opposite happened.
• People used as much or more alcohol after the
  18th amendment. The lure of illegality aided
  this.
• Crime soared in America as a result of the 18th
  Amendment and is the primary image that most
  Americans have of the 1920s.

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The Mafia

• The Mafia or Cosa Nostra was a Sicilian import
  that had spent the majority of its American
  existence in a 12 square block of Little Italy in
  New York.
• Prohibition made bootlegging or the making of
  illegal alcohol very profitable.
• Gangsters opened illegal bars called speakeasies
  and created huge organized crime organizations.
• One of the most famous was created in Chicago by
  Al Capone

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End of Prohibition

• The roaring 20s saw the prohibition of alcohol
  and the rise of crime.
• By the time of the Great Depression, the American
  people had had enough of government engaging in
  social experiments such as prohibition.
• The 21st Amendment ended Prohibition in 1933.

21
19th Amendment

• Womens Suffrage or the right to vote was
  attained with the 19th Amendment in 1920.
• This was the result of over a century of work by
  womens rights activists.

22
Lucky Lindy

• Charles Augustus Lindbergh "Lucky Lindy" and "The
  Lone Eagle was the first pilot to fly across the
  Atlantic alone.
• Lindbergh, then a U.S. Air Mail pilot, emerged
  from virtual obscurity to almost instantaneous
  world fame as the result of his solo non-stop
  flight from New York's Long Island to Le Bourget
  Field in Paris, France, a distance of nearly
  3,600 miles in the single-seat, single-engine
  monoplane Spirit of St. Louis.

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Radio

• Radio dominated the Twenties, with roughly 3
  million Americans owning radios by 1923.
• Most listeners still used crystal sets with
  earphones to receive news and bulletins,
  advertising and music.
• Later radios were developed that were large
  pieces of furniture that were present in most
  homes.
• Radio networks like ABC, NBC, CBS and
  RKOfeatured music broadcast live, news, serials
  and religious programs.
• The programs that were the biggest to come out of
  the 1920s were soap operas (One Life to Live and
  As the World Turns) ,comedies like Ma and Pa
  Kettle and serials like the Green Hornet,
  Superman and the Shadow.
• Baseball and Boxing became huge events and became
  the most important sporting events in America
  because of radio particulary with the arrival of
  baseball star Babe Ruth and Boxing champion Jack
  Dempsey.
• Football was also popular particularly with the
  arrival of the first great football celebrity,
  Red Grange.
• Radio ushered in the age of Mass Media or the
  presence of media in every event.

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Harlem Renaissance

• The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement
  that spanned the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it
  was known as the "New Negro Movement", named
  after the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke.
• Historians disagree as to when the Harlem
  Renaissance began and ended. The Harlem
  Renaissance is unofficially recognized to have
  spanned from about 1919 until the early or mid
  1930s. Many of its ideas lived on much longer.

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The Harlem Renaissance

• The Harlem Renaissance was a result of black
  culture finding the freedom of northern cities
  following the Great Migration.
• Writers, musicians, dancers, artists and
  designers made up the Harlem Renaissance.
• This was the most important artistic movement in
  US history.

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Langston Hughes

• James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American
  novelist, playwright, short story writer, and
  columnist.
• He was one of the earliest innovators of the new
  literary art form jazz poetry.
• Hughes is one of the most famous of the Harlem
  Renaissance writers.

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Jazz

• Jazz is a style of music that originated at the
  beginning of the 20th century in New
• Jazz is set off from other musical styles in its
  emphasis on improvisation
• It is the only truly American art form.
• The word "jazz" (in early years also spelled
  "jass") began as a West Coast slang term and was
  first used to refer to music in Chicago in about
  1915.

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Louis Armstrong

• The along with Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong is
  the most important musical figure of the 20th
  century.
• A trumpeter from New Orleans, Armstrong
  singlehandedly created most of the modern forms
  of jazz creation.
• He ranks ahead of Hendrix, the Beatles or any
  other more well known musician in his influence.

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Duke Ellington

• If Armstrong is the most important
  instrumentalist of the 20th century, Duke
  Ellington is the most important composer.
• Ellington created a big band version of jazz that
  incorporated all the innovations of earlier small
  groups and added his own voice.
• Ellington is the most important American composer
  in history

30
Bessie Smith

• While Jazz was becoming more popular in among
  white audiences, the blues, a more rural music
  stayed popular mainly among black audiences.
• Certain performers are remembered from this
  period, Tampa Red, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith.
• Smith is particulary noteworthy in that she was
  called the voice of soul for her emotional
  delivery.

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Civil Rights in the 1920s

• Most African Americans were members of the
  Republican party in the early 20th century. This
  was due to the influence of Lincoln.
• The NAACP became particularly active in the
  1920s.
• Their biggest success was the blocking of the
  Supreme Court nomination of John J. Parker, a
  noted racist.
• The organization supported the Dyer Act, which
  would have made lynching illegal. The bill was
  not passed, but the publicity helped to lessen
  the number of lynchings.

32
Oscar DePriest

• In 1928, Oscar dePriest was elected to Congress
  from Chicago.
• He was the first African American to be elected
  Congress.

33
Black Nationalism

• Black Nationalism also arose during the 1920s.
• This movement was led by Marcus Garvey and his
  Back to Africa Movement or Garveyism.
• Garveyism would eventually inspire others,
  ranging from the Nation of Islam, to the
  Rastafari movement
• The intention of the movement was for those of
  African ancestry to "redeem" Africa and for the
  European colonial powers to leave it.

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Marcus Garvey
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CHAPTER 16
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The Politics of the 1920s

• The Presidents of the 1920s stand as a testament
  to the idea that the American people would elect
  Satan if the economy is good.
• The election of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover was
  a result of everyone else being too busy making
  money to run the country.
• These zeros were elected on platforms that
  praised motherhood, racism, conformity and
  wealth.

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Warren G. Harding

• Usually seen as tied for Grant as conducting the
  most corrupt administration in American History.
  
• He appointed outright thieves to office and kept
  his mistresses in the closets in the White House
  (literally). The thieves were known as the Ohio
  Gang and the mistresses were called secretaries.
• Even as a blind hog finds an acorn, Harding did
  some good by accident.
• Budget and Accounting Act of 1921
• He personally supported anti lynching
  legislation, but he couldnt get it passed.
• Sponsored the Fordney / McCumber Tariff, lowered
  taxes and social spending.
• Thats about it.

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A Return to Normalcy

• People were tired of the war and tired of all the
  reforms of the Progressive Era and just wanted to
  make money and sleep late.
• Harding was the perfect man for this. He was
  very handsome (which appealed to the female vote-
  sorry, but it was true)
• He wasnt very smart. To his credit, he knew
  this. He didnt try to pretend he knew how to
  run the country.
• He is most famous for the quote Americans want
  to return to normalcy (no such word, think of it
  as an early 20th century version of strategery)

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Harding Administration Scandals

• Now for the bad stuff
• Charles Forbes runs the Veterans Bureau. He not
  only runs it, but uses it as his personal bank.
• Along with looting the Bureaus funds, he also
  required bribes to award contracts, this process
  being so open as to having its own government
  bid document printed at government expense.
• The fraud in the disable veterans department was
  so extensive that it is estimated that up to 50
  of wounded veterans did not receive pensions
  because the budgets were taken up with
  administrative expenses.
• Forbes later went to prison, being the only
  bright spot in a dismal administration, but was
  later appointed CEO of Nabisco Co.

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Harry Daugherty

• Harry Daugherty was attorney general of the
  United States.
• In this capacity he accepted bribes and let it be
  known that prisoners could be released by bribing
  him.
• He was indicted for fraud. He was placed in the
  odd position of being charge of prosecuting
  himself.
• He fixed this by simply refusing to do so and
  returning a bill of insufficient cause and
  dismissing the charges against himself.
• What is most amazing is that the majority of the
  administration saw no problem in this.

41
Teapot Dome

• Albert Fall was a genius in much they way that Al
  Capone was a successful businessman.
• He was in charge of the Defense Departments oil
  reserves as Secretary of the Interior.
• He used the oil fields as his personal property
  and leased the fields to oil companies.
• He also sold the naval oil reserves to the oil
  companies and gave the money to his wife.
• This came to be known as Teapot Dome Scandal and
  resulted in his conviction of corruption and
  spent a year in prison, the first cabinet officer
  to do so.
• The reason the sentence was so light was that
  most of the White House staff was in on it along
  the judge that heard the case.

42
Jess Smith

• During the years of Prohibition, when alcohol was
  against the law, the President regularly had
  parties in the White House featuring bootleg
  alcohol.
• Jess Smith, one of Hardings closest advisors
  sold government jobs. He at least had the
  decency to commit suicide when he was caught.

43
Warren G. Harding

• There is very little evidence that Harding
  himself benefited from this corruption and was
  actually, like Grant, exploited by his friends.
• Harding took a trip to Alaska to avoid the
  publicity and died of a heart attack in San
  Francisco.
• There were rumors of his death being a result of
  jealous women, jealous husbands or a product of
  organized crime.
• I prefer the idea that God had simply had enough
  of this foolishness.

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Calvin Coolidge

• Silent Cal, just about as exciting as toothpaste.
  A tightwad and a firm believer in Laissez Faire.
  He believed that government should not only stop
  expanding, but rather, he wanted to shrink it.
• Cal spent most of his presidency sleeping,
  literally. He took a nap every day and only
  worked four hours a day. He said that he had to
  have at least ten hours of sleep every night to
  stay alert. Nobody can quite figure out what
  he needed to stay alert for.
• He was Hardings vice-president but ran on his
  own in 1924 and won easily. The country was
  prosperous (he had nothing to do with this, but
  like all presidents, he got credit).

45
Silent Cal

• Coolidge was a small town man and remained as
  such until his death (when he died, Dorothy
  Parker asked How could they tell?)
• When told that the British were having trouble
  making their war loan payments and wanted
  extensions, he refused and when asked why he said
  they borrowed the money didnt they?
• When he was mayor of Boston he used the military
  to break a police strike and believed to the end
  of his life that America was still the small town
  society he grew up in.

46
Herbert Hoover

• Herbert Hoover was probably the unluckiest
  President since James Buchanan.
• A devout Quaker and an Engineer, he rose from
  poverty, worked his way through Stanford and
  became a wealthy mining engineer.

47
Hoover

• He was a wonderful executive and administrator.
  He had handled the relief efforts in Europe
  following the war and during the war he had been
  head of the War Industries Board. He then became
  Secretary of Commerce. His reputation for hard
  work, honesty and intelligence was impeccable.

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Hoover

• The problem was that he possessed a good
  intellect, poor instincts and bad ideals.
• He bought completely into the Republican laissez
  faire, market economy, social Darwinist view.
• When the bubble of prosperity burst in 1929 he
  refused to give up the Republican platform and
  ignored the poverty and starvation at the gates
  of the White House.
• A truly tragic figure and absolutely
  representative of America in the 20s.

49
Hoover

• The Crash of 29 destroyed his presidency and to a
  large extent, Hoover himself.
• As criticism of him grew stronger, he became more
  stubborn.
• He was criticized for eating 7 course meals while
  people starved but responded by saying that as
  president he had to set an example of optimism.
• He truly believed this stuff.
• His wife had different opinions and as the
  Depression deepened they simply stopped talking.
  She also required that all the butlers in the
  White house be exactly 55 tall.
• The Hoovers lived in a world that changed on them
  and they couldnt change.

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Prosperity

• The First World War was an economic boon. The
  United States benefited from the war in a number
  of ways.
• American goods and armaments more fully developed
  what was already a strong economy.
• The production of armaments in a country not
  previously dedicated to arms production allowed
  industry to diversify and to teach industry that
  they could quickly change production methods
  quickly on a national scale.
• the war experience made what was produced in
  American industry more diverse.
• the production of the first wave of the
  industrial revolution was aimed at what was known
  as heavy industry, the second wave spawned by the
  war was for consumer goods.

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Mass Production

• The biggest factor in Americas prosperity was
  the perfection of the assembly line in American
  factories.
• On an assembly line, the job of making something
  is divided up into smaller and smaller tasks.
  This allows employers to pay lower wages for
  unskilled labor.

52
Henry Ford

• Henry Ford perfected the American car and made it
  affordable to most Americans.
• He did this by perfecting the assembly line and
  creating the Model T Ford also called the tin
  lizzy.
• By the 1920s, automobiles had been around a long
  time, but they were expensive.
• Ford made it possible for most Americans to own a
  car and thus literally changed America.

53
Union Troubles

• The unions had agreed not to strike during the
  war. The end of the war and war time shortages
  combined to create inflation.
• The unions struck for higher wages to offset
  higher prices. Employers used hired thugs and
  federal troops to break the strikes.
• The general prosperity of the 1920s made it
  possible for people to ignore these abuses.

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Welfare Capitalism

• Welfare capitalism in the United States refers to
  the policies of large companies that developed
  internal welfare systems for their employees.
• It was promoted by business leaders during the
  1920s because of widespread economic insecurity,
  social reform activism, and labor unrest.
• It was based on the idea that Americans should
  look not to the government or to labor unions but
  to the workplace benefits provided by
  private-sector employers for protection against
  the fluctuations of the market economy.
• Companies employed these types of welfare
  policies to encourage worker loyalty,
  productivity and dedication and to discourage the
  formation of unions.

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Open Shop

• An open shop is a place of employment where you
  are not required to join or financially support a
  union as a condition of being hired or working.
• Open shop is also known as merit shop

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Isolationism

• A national policy of not having political or
  economic relations with other countries.
• Isolationism was the official foreign policy of
  the US after WWI.

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Supply Side Economics

• Supply side economics focuses on tax relief and
  aid to manufacturers and the upper classes. The
  profits they create would then trickle down to
  the lower classes.
• The idea is that since these groups create a
  large number of jobs and make the stock market
  profitable, then they should be considered first
  in the economic policy.
• This ignores the idea that 90 of Americas GNP
  is related to small businesses.