The Twenties

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The Twenties

• 1920 1929

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The Roaring Twenties

• Overall theme decade of contradictions
• Mixing of radical, conservative, and reactionary
  ideas
• Many people calling for change while many long
  for a simpler pre-World War I time
• Many others embraced the new ideas and changes in
  ideology and society

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Influences on the 1920s

• Progressive Era
• World War I
• Spanish Flu
• Imperialism
• Isolationism
• Nativism
• Communism
• Conservatives
• Modernism
• Industrialization

• Fundamentalism
• Evolution
• Prohibition
• Womens Suffrage
• Segregation
• Jazz
• Labor Unions
• Mass Production
• Mass Media
• Transportation

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The Russian Revolution

• Czar Nicholas II loses power for entering WWI
• Vladimir Lenin leads Bolsheviks Revolution
  (11/7/1917)
• Civil War (1917 1922)
• Reds (Bolsheviks) vs. Whites (landowners, army
  leaders, U.S. secret war)
• Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.
  1922)
• Govt controls all land, banks and property
• 1 political party
• Individuals had no rights
• Try to spread Communism around the world
• Wages locked at highest level, workday shortened

5
The Red Scare Nativism

• Schenck v. U.S. (1919)
• Charles Schenck convicted of breaking the
  Espionage Act
• Limits to Free Speech
• The Palmer Raids
• Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer targeted
  Communists, socialists, and anarchists
• Terrorist attacks on Wall Street and Palmers
  home
• Sacco and Vanzetti
• Italian immigrants convicted of murder
• Conviction was because of being immigrants
• 1927, Executed
• Limiting Immigration
• Emergency Quota Act (1921) and National Origins
  Act (1924)
• Ended open immigration
• Creates quotas and limits where immigrants can
  come from

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The Resurgence of the KKK

• KKK returns to prominence as a more national and
  nativist organization in the 1920s
• 100 Americanism (anti-black, Catholic, Jewish,
  immigrant, Communist)
• Membership outside the south increased,
  especially in urban areas
• Pro White Anglo Saxon Protestant
• Peak of _at_ 6 million in 1924 (30,000 in 1930)
• Exposure of Klan activities turned many away

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Issues of Religion

• Fundamentalism
• Argued that Christian ideas were flawless and the
  Bible had no errors
• Found ways to implement their beliefs into laws
  (especially in the South)
• Evolution and the Scopes Trial
• John T. Scopes, Tennessee teacher challenges the
  Butler Act
• Scopes Monkey Trial (1926)
• Clarence Darrow the ACLU (defense)
• William Jennings Bryan (fundamentalist
  prosecutor)
• Fundamentalism on trial

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Prohibition

• 18th Amendment
• Volstead Act of 1919
• Problems with Enforcement
• Ignoring of laws
• Lack of officials
• Legal uses of alcohol
• Production at home
• Near Beer

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Prohibition (cont.)

• Development of Organized Crime
• Al Capone
• John Dillinger
• Gang Violence
• St. Valentine's Day Massacre
• J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI
• Speakeasies
• Wickersham Report
• 21st Amendment (1933)

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The Jazz Age

• From blues and ragtime (New Orleans)
• Radio helps to spread
• Jazz clubs in Harlem
• Duke Ellington
• Louis Armstrong

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Womens Changing Roles

• Sexual Revolution
• Sigmund Freud
• Margaret Sanger
• American Birth Control League (now Planned
  Parenthood)
• Eugenics
• The Flapper Image
• New type of woman
• Short dresses and short hair
• Working Women and Voting
• Working women had little chances for advancement,
  but more women in the workforce
• Suffrage movement turns into a movement for
  womens rights
• Push for Equal Rights Amendment (ERA fails in the
  1980s)

14
The New Negro

• Great Migration
• Spurred by factory work during WWI and limits on
  immigration
• 1910 1920 323,000 (5) move to the North
• 1920 1930 615,000 (8)
• Violence against African Americans in northern
  cities
• Red Summer
• The Harlem Renaissance
• African American literary awakening
• Langston Hughes
• http//www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15722
• Fighting Discrimination
• NAACP increases legal action
• W.E.B. DuBois
• Elimination of some segregation laws (etc.
  grandfather clause in Oklahoma)
• Push for anti-lynching laws, helps lead to a
  decrease in lynchings 1/3

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The Garvey Movement

• Jamaican who leads the United Negro Improvement
  Association (UNIA)
• Advocate of racial separation and promotion of
  black culture
• Liberia
• Pushed for racial pride and self-reliance
  (precursor to the Black Power movement)
• Convicted of mail fraud in 1925
• Deported in 1927

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American Art in the Twenties

• Art for arts sake
• Paintings
• Georgia OKeeffe
• Architecture
• Frank Lloyd Wright
• Literature
• Sinclair Lewis
• William Faulkner
• The Lost Generation
• F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Great Gatsby
• Earnest Hemingway
• Cult of masculinity
• e. e. cummings

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Mass Media

• Movies
• Talkies
• Newspapers
• William Randolph Hearst
• Joseph Pulitzer
• Radio
• Pittsburghs KDKA
• National Broadcasting Company (NBC)

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American Heroes

• Lucky Lindy
• Charles Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis
• Amelia Earhart
• Heroes in Sports
• Boxers like Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier
• Babe Ruth and baseball
• Gertrude Ederle swims the English Channel

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Labor Strikes

• Strikes in 1919 and 1920 blamed on Communists
• I.W.W. (socialist labor union)
• The Boston Police Strike
• Calvin Coolidge helps end
• Steel and Coal Strike
• AFL attempts to organize steel workers
• Steel industry used red scare as way to end
  strike
• United Mine Workers of Americas strike put down
  by Attorney General Palmer

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Economy

• Business Boom after World War I
• Consumer Economy
• Buying on credit
• Installment plans
• Advertising
• Electric Power
• General Electric
• New Products
• Automobiles
• Airplanes
• Home electric devices

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Ford and the Automobile

• Model T
• Horseless carraige
• Assembly Line
• Assembly line moved the cars
• Produced one every 24 seconds
• A Complex Businessman
• Pro-labor and anti-labor ideas and practices
• Industrial Growth
• Growth of the highway system, trucking, motels,
  restaurants, etc.

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Farmers in the 1920s

• Brief boom during the war until 1920
• Crop prices drop dramatically after Europe began
  producing again
• Farmers in a state of depression about a decade
  before the rest of the nation
• Creation of farm cooperatives that ran like
  businesses
• McNary-Haugen Bill (1927, 1928)
• Attempt to dump farm surpluses on the world
  market in an attempt to raise domestic prices
• Vetoed twice by Coolidge because he felt it was
  price fixing

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A Republican Decade

• Republicans control all three branches from 1921
  to 1933
• The Harding Presidency
• Return to normalcy campaign
• Poker Cabinet/Ohio Gang
• Trickle Down Economics
• Tax cuts for businesses and wealthy
• Increase in many tariffs
• Isolationism
• Stay out of League of Nations
• Disarmament program
• Fordney-McCumber Tariff to protect against German
  redevelopment
• Limiting Immigration

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Corruption under Harding

• Veterans Bureau
• Justice Department
• Attorney General put on trial
• Teapot Dome Scandal
• Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall
• Gave out oil rights to private companies
• Took loans from these companies
• Dies in office (1923) before scandals come out

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Silent Cal

• The Coolidge Presidency
• Restored confidence in presidency
• Continued many of Hardings policies, but with a
  character (or lack there of) that stayed away
  from scandal
• Laissez Faire with business
• Huge economic growth
• Election of 1924
• Easily defeats John Davis (Dem.) Robert
  LaFollette (Progressive/Socialist/AFL)
• Continued Isolationism
• Kellogg-Briand Pact (Pact of Paris) anti-Big
  Stick diplomacy
• The Election of 1928
• Herbert Hoover
• Goal continue Republican prosperity