The Roaring 20

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The Roaring 20s

• An era of prosperity,
• Republican power,
• and conflict

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As the War Ended . . .

• Spanish Influenza Epidemic!
• Most deadly for 20-40 yr. olds
• Eventually killed 20-50 million worldwide (by
  contrast, WWI killed approx. 15 million people)

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Philadelphia October 1918
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Emergency hospital at Camp Funston in Fort Riley,
KS (1918)
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Over 50 Thousand!
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Mortality (Death) Rates from 1900 to 2000.
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1. Economic Downturn

• Caused by demobilization, conversion from a
  wartime economy.
• Inflation of prices
• Business activity slowed temporarily farmers
  especially hurt

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2. Labor Unrest

• Caused by unions demanding higher wages denied
  during war
• Management fought back
• Violence erupted throughout industries

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3. Red Scare

• Caused by Russian Revolution and an ongoing fear
  of foreigners and/or immigrants
• Deportations, imprisonment of immigrants, quotas,
  new racial tensions all occurred

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Presidents During 1920s

• Warren G. Harding
• Calvin Coolidge
• Herbert Hoover

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Warren G. Harding (1921-1923)
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The Harding Presidency
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Domestic Issues

• Normalcy - Hardings campaign promised a return
  to pre- WWI peacefulness
• Red Scare - Americans fear of communism and
  other extreme ideas

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Palmer Raids

• Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer
• Driven by fear of Communism
• And hopes of one day being president
• Held suspects
• without evidence

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IWW (Wobblies) Headquarters after a Palmer Raid
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Sacco and Vanzetti

• Suspected militant anarchists
• Convicted of murder
• Many felt they did not receive a fair trial
  because of their political ideas and ethnicity.

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Bartolomeo Venzetti and Nicola Sacco
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More Domestic Issues

• Nativism- a movement favoring native-born
  Americans over immigrants.
• Immigration quota- restrict or ban immigrants
  from certain countries.
• Racial tensions . . .

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Ku Klux Klan

• Started in 1866 in South
• Experienced its greatest growth and popularity
  after WWI
• Three million members mostly in Indiana,
  Oklahoma, and deep South

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Ku Klux Klan, cont.

• Discriminated by race, nationality, political
  beliefs, religion, etc.
• Many members were small-business owners,
  independent professionals, clerical workers, and
  farmers.

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The Birth of a Nation 1915
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Black Codes laws that restricted
African-American rights

• Curfews
• Vagrancy laws (not working)
• Labor contracts
• Land restrictions (forced living on plantations)

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Voting Restrictions

• Poll Tax special fee paid to vote
• Literacy Tests (read, write, knowledge)
• Property ownership

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• Black Americans in this period continued to live
  in poverty
• sharecropping kept them in de facto slavery
• 1915 - boll weevil wiped out the cotton crop
• white landowners went bankrupt forced blacks
  off their land

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• Blacks moved north to take advantage of booming
  wartime industry ( Great Migration) - Black
  ghettoes began to form, i.e. Harlem
• within these ghettoes a distinct Black culture
  flourished
• But both blacks and whites wanted cultural
  interchange restricted

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• Marcus Garvey (Jamaican born immigrant)
  established the Universal Negro Improvement
  Association
• advocated racial segregation b/c of Black
  superiority
• Garvey believed Blacks should return to Africa
• attracted many investments gov't charged him
  with w/fraud
• he was found guilty and eventually deported to
  Jamaica, but his organization continued to exist

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Scandals of the Harding Administration

• Mostly related to the company he kept the Ohio
  Gang there is no evidence that he was directly
  involved in the scandals
• Teapot Dome Scandal the most infamous

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The Teapot Dome Scandal

• Secretary of the Interior secretly gave drilling
  rights to two private oil companies in return for
  illegal payments.

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This 1924 cartoon shows the dimensions of the
Teapot Dome scandal
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Harding dies suddenly (and mysteriously) while
still in office and Coolidge becomes
president. Silent Cal
Calvin Coolidge 1923-1929
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Coolidges Foreign Policy

• Continued Isolationism
• Kellogg-Briand Pact nations would not use the
  threat of war during negotiations. Pact failed,
  no enforcement.

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Domestic Policy

• Laissez Faire- Hands Off!! Government should not
  interfere with the growth of business

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President Coolidge

• The business of America is business.
• High Tariffs
• No help for farmers

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This says it all about Silent Cal!

• Both his dry Yankee wit and his frugality with
  words became legendary. His wife, Grace Goodhue
  Coolidge, recounted that a young woman sitting
  next to Coolidge at a dinner party confided to
  him she had bet she could get at least three
  words of conversation from him. Without looking
  at her he quietly retorted, "You lose."

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New Freedom for Women

• Although many women held jobs in the 1920s,
  businesses remained prejudiced against women
  seeking professional positions.
• The Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to
  vote in all elections beginning in 1920.

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Women in 1900

• Long hair
• Long sleeves
• Long dresses
• Shapely corset

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Women in 1920s

• Short hair
• Short sleeves
• Short dresses
• No corsets!

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Womens Changing Roles

• The Flapper Image
• The flapper, a type of bold, fun-loving young
  woman, came to symbolize a revolution in manners
  and morals that took place in the 1920s.

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Flappers

• Flappers challenged conventions of dress,
  hairstyle, and behavior.
• Many Americans disapproved of flappers free
  manners as well as the departure from traditional
  morals that they represented.

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Fads and Crazes

• In the 1920's several fads and crazes came to
  being.
• dancing marathons
• the Charleston
• Mah-jongg
• flagpole sitting

• yo-yo's,
• goldfish eating
• pogo sticks
• roller-skating

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American Heroes

• Charles Lindbergh
• As the first to fly nonstop from New York to
  Paris,
• Hailed as an American hero and a champion of
  traditional values.

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American Heroes

• Amelia Earhart
• Amelia Earhart set records as the first woman to
  fly solo across the Atlantic and the first person
  to fly solo from Hawaii to California.

• She and her navigator mysteriously disappeared
  while attempting to fly around the world in 1937.
  

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American Heroes

• Sports Heroes
• Champions in wrestling, football, baseball, and
  swimming became American heroes.

• The most famous was baseballs George Herman
  Babe Ruth, whose record number of home runs
  remained unbroken for 40 years.

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The Mass Media
Chapter 13, Section 2

• Growth of the mass media, instruments for
  communicating with large numbers of people,
  helped form a common American popular culture
  during the 1920s.

• The popularity of motion pictures grew throughout
  the 1920s talkies, or movies with sound, were
  introduced in 1927.

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The Mass Media

• Newspapers grew in both size and circulation.
• Between 1923 and 1930, 60 percent of American
  families purchased radios

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Americans on the Move

• Rural-Urban Split
• The economy in the cities expanded in the 1920s,
  while farmers found themselves economically
  stressed. This resulted in a migration from rural
  to urban areas.

• Rural and urban Americans were also split over
  cultural issues. While many in the cities
  were abandoning some traditional values, rural
  populations generally wanted to preserve these
  values.

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The Jazz Age

• Jazz, a style of music that grew out of the
  African American music of the South, became
  highly popular during the 1920s.

• Jazz became so strongly linked to the culture of
  the 1920s that the decade came to be known as the
  Jazz Age.

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The Jazz Age

• Harlem, a district in Manhattan, New York, became
  a center of jazz music.

• Flappers and others heard jazz in clubs and dance
  halls the Charleston, considered by some to be a
  wild and reckless dance, embodied the Jazz Age.

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The Harlem Renaissance

• Harlem also emerged as an overall cultural center
  for African Americans.

• A literary awakening took place in Harlem in the
  1920s that was known as the Harlem Renaissance.

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• Expressing the joys and challenges of being
  African American, writers such as James Weldon
  Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes
  enriched African American culture as well as
  American culture as a whole.

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Prohibition

• The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution,
  which took effect on January 16, 1920, made the
  manufacture, sale, and transport of liquor, beer,
  and wine illegal.

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Prohibition

• Many Americans turned to bootleggers, or
  suppliers of illegal alcohol.

• Bars that operated illegally, known as
  speakeasies, were either disguised as legitimate
  businesses or hidden in some way, often behind
  heavy gates.

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Organized Crime

• The tremendous profit resulting from the sale of
  illegal liquor helped lead to the rise of
  organized crime.
• Success in bootlegging led to illegal activities
  such as gambling and prostitution.
• As rival groups fought for control in some
  American cities, gang wars and murders became
  commonplace.

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Homicide Rate dramatically rises, then peaks in
1933 the year prohibition ends!
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• One of the most notorious criminals of this time
  was Al Capone, nicknamed Scarface, a gangster
  who rose to the top of Chicagos organized crime
  network. Capone proved talented at avoiding jail
  but was finally imprisoned in 1931.

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Issues of Religion

• Fundamentalism supported traditional Christian
  ideas and argued for a literal interpretation of
  the Bible.
• Fundamentalists worked to pass laws against
  teaching the theory of evolution in public
  schools.

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• A science teacher named John T. Scopes agreed to
  challenge such a law in Tennessee. His arrest
  led to what was called the Scopes trial.

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Consumer Economy
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A Car for the Masses

• Ford Model T
• First built by Henry Ford in 1908, the Model-T
  popularized the use of automobiles by offering
  them at an affordable price -
• Only 290 by 1924

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Tin Lizzy
Ford could keep costs down because the cars were
the first to be built on a moving assembly line,
which revolutionized U.S. car building.

• Powered by a four-cylinder engine, the car could
  hit speeds of up to 45 miles an hour, and got an
  impressive 25 to 30 miles per gallon.

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Ford didnt invent the car he made it
affordable!

• Painted in only one color -- black -- Ford could
  produce the Model-T in vast numbers.

• By 1928 a record 15 million Model-Ts were built
  -- a mark not broken until Volkswagen passed it
  1971.

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The Great Depression

• The Crash!

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The Roaring Twenties

• In the 1920s, many Americans enjoyed a feeling
  of prosperity.
• New cars, new appliances, new technology
• A relaxation of moral standards - a sense of
  being care-free
• Emerged from World War I with the most powerful
  economy in the world

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The Reality

• By 1929, our false sense of prosperity was
  becoming apparent
• Farmers were defaulting on loans

• Banks were closing
• Postwar Europe no longer needed our steel,
  lumber, etc

• The rich seemed to be getting richer, the poor
  were getting poorer
• Easy credit was putting many families in debt

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Domestic Problems!
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The Stock Market

• The profit making ability of a company helps to
  determine how much a stock costs
• Many people make money by buying a stock at a low
  price and then reselling at a high price
  (speculation)

You may pay 10 for a stock this week but sell it
next week for 50
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• Stocks are ownership in a company
• Stocks are divided into shares
• All the shares make up all the ownership in the
  company
• If you had a company divided into 100 shares and
  you owned fifty shares, you would own half the
  voting rights (decision making power) in that
  company
• A share entitles you to a percentage of the
  profit earned by the company
• Your are paid dividends on a regular basis

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The Stock Market

• Millions of people played or speculated in the
  stock market.
• As the stock market boomed in the 20s, many
  invested their savings in hopes of quick riches
• Stocks could be bought on margin (credit),
  increasing the false sense of wealth

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Uh-Oh

• By the end of the 1920s, stock prices as a whole
  had risen dramatically

• Unfortunately, this only encouraged more people
  to put their savings into stocks

• On October 24, 1929 stock prices began to fall
  and brokers began to sell.
• By noon, millions of shares had been sold. The
  selling frenzy continued all afternoon. By
  closing, 13 million shares had been traded and
  the market dropped four billion dollars.
• Many banks and businesses were forced to close.

• But the worst was yet to come!

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Black Tuesday

• On October 29, later nicknamed "Black Tuesday,"
  the stock market crashed!
• Investors panicked as prices fell, A frenzy of
  selling drove prices down until many were
  worthless
• People who had invested their entire life savings
  during the boom were now bankrupt
• On that day, over 16 million shares of stock were
  sold and the market fell over 14 billion dollars.
  By comparison, the entire budget of the U.S.
  Government that year was three billion dollars.
• In one day, the United States lost more capital
  than it had spent in all of World War I.

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Impact

• The banks who had lent heavily to fund share
  buying found themselves saddled with debt, which
  caused many banks to fail.
• While millions of people lost their savings,
  businesses lost their credit lines and were
  forced to close, causing massive unemployment.

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Aftermath

• Ripples from this collapse affected all aspects
  of society in the U.S. and throughout the world
• Within months, millions were without work
• The new president, Herbert Hoover had the task of
  fixing the broken economy

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Herbert Hoover

• Quote "Prosperity is just around the corner."
  (1932)
• Claim to Fame As president, Hoover opposed
  giving federal welfare payments to the
  unemployed, who numbered over 12 million by the
  end of his one-term administration. The
  shantytowns of the era were dubbed
  "Hoovervilles."
• Postscript Lost the 1932 presidential election
  to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 472 electoral votes
  to 59.