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Roaring Twenties to Depression Introduction During the 1920s, American businessmen replaced political reformers as exemplars of progress. At the same time, tensions mounted between traditional values and modern conditions, rural and urban life, and admirers of consumerism and critics of vulgar materialism, while champions of an idealized, white‐male America railed against the rise of ʺnew women,ʺ ʺNew Negroes,ʺ and an expanding immigrant population. In many ways, Henry Ford symbolized the tensions that defined the era. From a rural background, he made his way to Detroit, Michigan, where he tinkered with the internal combustion engine, created the Ford Motor Company, and became the embodiment of American industry and free enterprise. Although Ford identified with the common folk and remained nostalgic for rural values, his assembly lines reduced Ford workers to near robots, and the idyllic past he commemorated at his Greenfield Village museum excluded the African Americans and immigrants who toiled in his River Rouge factory. The New Era, pp. 830‐840 President Calvin Coolidge declared that the business of America was business. In many ways, his statement defined the 1920s. Amid all the tensions, an unprecedented flood of new consumer items entered the marketplace, and progressive calls for government regulation were rejected in favor of a revival of the old free enterprise individualism. A Business Government During the postwar conversion from a wartime to a peacetime economy, economic problems loomed large. The unemployment rate was up to 20 percent by the winter of 1920‐1921. The Republicans nominated Warren G. Harding for president, even though he did not have strong political convictions. Hardingʹs campaign called for a return to normalcy. The ʺreturn to normalcyʺ was a term that he invented during his campaign to get the point across that after the turmoil of the previous era the country needed a return to normal procedures. Hardingʹs good humor and optimism toward the future dissipated the strife of the times and gave Americans feelings of optimism. Harding chose many talented men as cabinet officers; they would run his government for him. He also chose several loyal friends for high office—men who used their positions for personal gain. The Harding administration focused on domestic prosperity, high tariffs to support American business, price supports for agriculture, and a return to unregulated business activities; these positions made him quite popular. However, Hardingʹs administration suffered because of his willingness to trust friends who ultimately betrayed that trust and rocked the nation with some of the worst scandals in U.S. history. Among others, Interior Secretary Albert Fall was found to have accepted bribes totaling over $400,000. In an attempt to escape the political heat, Harding left Washington for Alaska, where he died unexpectedly. Vice President Calvin Coolidgeʹs ascendance to the White House brought a strong pro‐business president into the office. Coolidge supported Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellonʹs tax cuts for the wealthy and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hooverʹs desire for businesses to exert voluntary control over themselves. The Supreme Court also played a pro‐business role and attacked the regulation of businesses by state and national government. Coolidgeʹs overwhelming victory in the 1924 presidential election underscored the defeat of progressive principles in the 1920s and the speculative pro‐business boom. Promoting Prosperity and Peace Abroad Although the United States rejected the collective security offered throught the League of nations and Wilsonian internationalism, the United States did not retreat into isolationism. The United States remained involved in the world economically, politically, and culturally. President Hardingʹs administration engineered a reduction of naval power among the worldʹs leading powers in the Five‐Power Naval Treaty, which was signed in 1922. The Kellogg‐Briand pact of 1928 also pointed toward international peace by securing pledges from fifty nations to renounce war and promise to settle disputes peacefully. But the Dawes Plan, engineered by corporate leaders to aid German reparation payments to France, represented a Republican‐led American governmentʹs preference for private‐sector diplomacy over state action. Automobiles, Mass Production, and Assembly‐Line Progress The automobile industry emerged as the largest single manufacturing industry in the nation, aided by the federal governmentʹs decision to spend more on roads than on anything else. The Ford Motor Companyʹs location was perfect: and the necessary materials for automobile construction such as steel, oil, glass, and rubber were produced nearby. Ford created the cheap, black, rugged Model T through successful use of mass‐production techniques, such as the assembly line. The Model T became the symbol of a new, fast‐paced era. For Americans with cars, the distinction between country and city became blurred. Small towns, one‐room country schoolhouses, and all things rural began to decline in number when more people took to the roads. New industries developed in conjunction with Fordʹs Model T—filling stations, garages, fast‐food restaurants, and ʺguest cottagesʺ (motels). The scientific management of business, as developed by Frederick W. Taylor in the 1870s, became a key to harmony and progress in the 1920s. Its techniques were used not only to increase productivity but also to make laborers less rebellious through welfare capitalism. Within the factory, worker councils or industrial psychologists helped to ease class tensions and smooth labor‐management relations. Welfare capitalism purposely encouraged loyalty to the company and discouraged traditional labor unions. Consumer Culture White middle‐ and upper‐class Americans in the 1920s enjoyed the highest standard of living in the world. They experienced this good life, with all of its material goods, through consumption. Illustrating how the business values and boom of the 1920s affected average Americans was the sociological classic Middletown, published in 1929 by Robert and Helen Lynd. Gathering data about the citizens of Muncie, Indiana, the Lyndsʹs results were startling. They concluded that everything in the townʹs culture was hinged on money. Advertising worked to convert the citizens into a single consumer aggregate. The business of advertising, they suggested, created these changes in ʺMiddletownʺ and, by implication, throughout all of America. By the 1920s, the United States produced enough consumer products to satisfy the material wants of its people, so much so that it looked to expand its markets in foreign countries. Henry Ford promoted this new consumerism by raising the wages of his workers, who in turn stimulated the United States economy. Americaʹs motto became spend, not save, and replace, rather than make do. The Roaring Twenties, pp. 840‐849 During the 1920s, the self‐control of an earlier generation gave way to self‐gratification and sexual fulfillment. Using a twisted form of Freudian psychology as their model, Americans of the ʺRoaring Twentiesʺ sought pleasure without guilt. Advances in mass communication, a fascination with celebrities, the ʺNew Negro,ʺ and the exodus to Europe of a ʺlost generationʺ of disillusioned American authors were also hallmarks of the period. Prohibition In January 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment, which prohibited the production and use of alcohol in America, took effect. In theory, prohibition was supposed to boost production, eliminate crime, and improve the nationʹs morality. Women, affected by alcoholʹs repercussions—domestic violence and poverty—were keen supporters of the amendment. Although treasury agents succeeded in lowering alcohol consumption in some areas of the country, prohibition actually led to a rise in illegal sales, bootleggers, gangsters, and gangland murder. Al Capone built his reputation in the bootlegging business and was finally imprisoned for tax evasion. By 1931, however, public cynicism about the temperance movement was widespread, and in 1933, the nation ended prohibition. The New Woman During the 1920s, the ʺnew womanʺ challenged older conceptions of separate spheres for men and women; increasing numbers of women worked and went to college; the so‐called flapper challenged Victorian notions of style and behavior; and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment finally provided women with the right to vote. Despite these changes, women remained clustered in ʺwomenʹs jobs,ʺ and expectations that women would dramatically transform the political landscape went unfulfilled for a number of reasons. Significantly, feminists remained divided between those who argued for a womanʹs right to special protection under the law and those who demanded equal protection. The radical National Womanʹs Party fought for the Equal Rights Amendment, which went down for defeat in 1923 and symbolized the cresting tide of womenʹs political influence during the age. Nevertheless, through private agencies and reform associations, women continued to advocate for crucial causes from birth control to legal equality for minorities to the end of child labor. The New Negro Although pernicious racism persisted after World War I, African Americans remained optimistic about their futures. In Harlem, hope and talent merged to create an artistic outpouring of black pride and expression. Poor blacks from the South, as well as immigrants from the West Indies, poured into Harlem in uptown Manhattan. New York Cityʹs black population increased 115 percent (from 152,000 to 327,000) in the 1920s, while white population increased only 20 percent. Marcus Garvey formed the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) to celebrate black culture and achievement and also encouraged African Americans to gain autonomy from white society and avoid miscegenation. In 1927, his attempt to found a black shipping line failed and led to his deportation to Jamaica, but his ideas remained central to black nationalist thought. Black writers and artists such as Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Aaron Douglas created in the Harlem Renaissance a rebirth of culturally liberating art forms for African Americans. White patrons were important to the Harlem Renaissance, but most whites continued to see Harlem as an exotic place to get an eveningʹs entertainment. Mass Culture In the twenties, popular culture, like consumer goods, was mass produced and consumed. Since politics was undemanding and uninteresting, Americans looked elsewhere for excitement and in the process created a national culture. One of the most popular forms of escape, pleasure without guilt, and entertainment was the movies. By the 1920s, the movie industry had moved to Hollywood, California, where movies were mass produced to cater to huge audiences. Hollywood created glamorous movie stars and films to appeal to different tastes, including romances, adventures, and comedies. Americans found heroes in an assortment of sports as well. George Herman ʺBabeʺ Ruth, a baseball player, was seen as a free spirit. Jack Dempsey, a boxer, was revered as an equalizer who was not hemmed in by bureaucracy. Football was considered an upper‐class sport but was presented by Knute Rockne, the coach of Notre Dame, as a way of teaching hard work and teamwork. The decadeʹs hero worship reached its height with Charles Lindberghʹs solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927. He quickly became a legend, showing that there were still possibilities for human achievement in a time with so many technological advances. The radio provided one of the greatest distractions during the 1920s. By the end of the decade, over 10 million homes had radios, receiving news, sermons, soap operas, sporting events, advertising, and music. Jazz, a distinctively African American form of music, took on a popular life of its own. Jazz provided the sounds for the rebellious mood of youth, who for the first time in the 1920s became a social class distinct in itself. As the traditional bonds of community, religion, and family loosened, the young felt less pressure to imitate their elders and more freedom to develop their own culture. The Lost Generation Many American writers and artists were embittered by World War I and, fed up with American idealism and the materialism of the 1920s, left the United States for refuge in Europe. Called ʺthe lost generationʺ by writer Gertrude Stein, they were responsible for one of Americaʹs most creative outpourings of literary achievement. Exemplified by Ernest Hemingway, the lost generation believed that they fought a doomed struggle with nature yet tried to live with ʺgrace under pressure.ʺ Writers who stayed home, like Sinclair Lewis, also attacked the American lifestyle while at the same time helped to produce some of Americaʹs most brilliant literature. Resistance to Change, pp. 849‐854 In the 1920s, the urban lifestyle began to dominate the nation. Farms lost income, and rural dwellers felt that they were losing their status and importance and that their traditional values were being threatened by a heterogeneous urban culture. Rejecting the ʺHuddled Massesʺ Anti‐immigrant sentiment increased, and in 1924, the Johnson‐Reid Act was passed, restricting the number of immigrants per year and giving each European nation a quota based on the number of immigrants listed in the United States 1890 census, thereby reducing the numbers of eastern and southern European immigrants. The immigrantsʹ few defenders were congressmen who represented urban, ethnic ghettoes. The 1924 law reaffirmed the 1880s legislation barring Chinese immigrants and added Japanese and other Asians to the list of those excluded. But it left open immigration from the Western Hemisphere, and during the 1920s, some 500,000 Mexicans crossed the border. The trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two anarchist Italian immigrants, for robbery and murder marked the climax of antiforeigner hysteria. The two were convicted by an obviously biased judge but were refused a retrial. After six years of protest, the two were executed in 1927. The Rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan One of the largest groups to respond to fears about modern life was the Ku Klux Klan, revived after Reconstruction in 1915 following the release of D. W. Griffithʹs Birth of a Nation. The Klan claimed itself to be the defender of family, morality, and traditional values against the threat posed by blacks, immigrants, radicals, feminists, Catholics, and Jews, and moved beyond the South to develop a national network of societies. By the 1920s, the Klan was a powerful political force throughout America, combining Americansʹ love of fraternal societies with violence against those different from themselves. At its peak, it boasted between three and four million members and had a significant impact on politics in several states. In the late 1920s, after social changes as well as a series of scandals surrounding its leadership, the Klanʹs membership declined, but the conditions that nurtured it remained very present. The Scopes Trial The conflict between the old faith in the Bible and the new science of evolution illustrated the resistance of many to modernism. In a Tennessee trial in 1925, John Scopes challenged the stateʹs ban on teaching Charles Darwinʹs theory of evolution in the public schools. William Jennings Bryan argued for the state and fundamentalism, and Clarence Darrow, a brilliant defense lawyer, argued for Scopes and evolution. Although Scopes lost the trial, Bryan and those who defied reason and science were humiliated in the eyes of modern, urban America. Al Smith and the Election of 1928 When Calvin Coolidge decided not to seek reelection in 1928, the clash of rural and urban values emerged. The Republicans nominated Herbert Hoover, the secretary of commerce for Harding and Coolidge, who was perceived to be representative of Middle America. The Democrats nominated the Irish Catholic governor of New York, Alfred E. Smith, who epitomized big‐city values. The debate that followed evolved around the issues of civil rights, ending prohibition, and Smithʹs Catholicism. Hoover, rural America, and traditional American values won by a landslide, although Republicans lost ground among urban voters and farmers. The Great Crash, pp. 854‐857 Within eight months of Herbert Hooverʹs inauguration as president, the United States fell into the most serious economic depression ever. Along with prosperity, Hoover and his reputation were among its victims. Herbert Hoover: The Great Engineer An orphan and a hugely successful mining engineer, Herbert Hoover lived an exceptional life before his presidency. His relief work during World War I and position as the head of the Food Administration under Wilson won him an international reputation as an organizing and managerial genius. As secretary of commerce for Harding and Coolidge, Hoover solidified his reputation. He urged a limited business‐government partnership that would actively manage the sweeping changes experienced by Americans. In his thoughtful book American Individualism (1922), Hoover candidly described flaws in American capitalism and turned to his cooperative brand of individual effort to address them. Yet he was new to elected office and feared that people would expect too much of him if a dire situation arose. The national calamity that did arise stemmed from a distorted national economy. The Distorted Economy Despite the glow of economic prosperity in 1929, gloom and doom were on the horizon. Serious economic problems existed throughout the national and international economies and brought the United States into a major depression. Americaʹs high tariff barriers were a major problem, disabling trade between the United States and the rest of the world. This in turn forced American bankers to extend credit to overextended and debt‐ridden European nations to keep trade alive. Another major problem was a worldwide agricultural depression, which prevented millions of American farmers from being potential consumers. Additionally, the fabulous wealth of the few in the 1920s created an imbalance of wealth for the majority, which created serious problems in consumption. Buying on credit brought an impressive boom in the marketplace as well as a new level of indebtedness for millions of Americans. The bubble of speculation and of overextended credit masked the fact that many markets were fully saturated. By 1925, there were warning signs that supply was ready to outstrip demand. The Crash of 1929 Throughout the 1920s, the stock market was a gambling casino. People became rich buying stocks on margin and using credit to buy the stock. Stocks continued to rise, and unsecured loans for buying stocks drove the market higher and higher. Despite President Hooverʹs calls for tighter regulation of the market, a destructive wave of speculation consumed Wall Street. In late October of 1929, the bubble burst; the market crashed and pulled the banks and thousands of investors down with it. Hoover and the Limits of Individualism Throughout his presidency, Hoover remained committed to the idea of voluntarism and resisted plans for government intervention in the private sector. He called on business and labor leaders to work together to maintain production and wages at current levels, although the bargain fell apart quickly when the economy did not recover. Despite his beliefs, Hoover did act. He supported a limited public works program to create jobs. In 1929, Congress passed the Agricultural Marketing Act. The act created the Farm Board, which used its budget of $500 million to buy up agricultural supplies and thus, it was hoped, raise prices. Although the Farm Board bought one‐third of the nationʹs wheat supply in 1930, conditions worsened. To help end the decline, Hoover joined conservatives in urging protective tariffs on agricultural goods, and, with his approval, the Hawley‐Smoot tariff of 1930 established the highest rates in history. As unemployment rose to 12 million, Hoover doled out limited federal aid. However, none of these actions produced the desired results. In the realm of industry, Hoover maintained his earlier commitment to encouraging cooperation between government and big business. He created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), a government agency designed to loan money to banks and businesses with the hopes it would ʺtrickle downʺ to the lower (consumer) levels of the economy. This and Hooverʹs other government actions did little to help the failing economy. Life in the Depression, pp. 857‐862 By 1930, it had become obvious that prosperity would not return quickly. Human suffering led to despair, compounded by political leadersʹ insensitivity. By 1932, the Great Depression became a serious social crisis. The Human Toll The depression brought the American economy to its knees. Production dwindled, and by 1933, unemployment hit 12.5 million workers, or 25 percent of the workforce. To cope with the depression, people did whatever they could to survive. Some traveled the rails as tramps, the symbol of the depression. Others lived on the streets, eating what they could find in alleys and dumps. Even for those with jobs, their paychecks got smaller. Poverty hit the rural South especially hard. Because there was no system of federal assistance, there was no real safety net for most unemployed Americans. The crisis caused people to look for scapegoats; for example, in Los Angeles County, Mexicans, perceived as taking jobs from Americans, and their native‐born children were deported. Family life changed, as people postponed marriage, and the size of families shrank. Since womenʹs jobs were not as affected as menʹs industrial jobs, many wives became the breadwinners; idle men fell prey to guilt and loss of self‐respect. Denial and Escape As the depression worsened, it became apparent that those who led the country into collapse knew little of how or why it occurred; they wanted to deny that problems existed. President Hoover took a lot of blame for the depression but did not help himself when he tried to restore confidence with continued formality in the White House. While the wealthy practiced denial, other Americans sought escape at the movies. Tales of rags‐to‐riches, gangster features, and films offering social commentary became the blockbusters of their day. Crime increased, as did the reputation of bank robbers, whom many saw as taking back what banks already had stolen. Working‐Class Militancy Organized labor initially echoed Hooverʹs arguments against direct government relief and did not respond quickly to the Great Depression. However, organizations such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL) eventually became more militant, and Americans became more outraged by business and government officialsʹ callousness. In Dearborn, Michigan, Fordʹs private security forces killed several demonstrators, whose funerals brought thousands of mourners. Farmers led uprisings to demand better prices for their goods and to halt foreclosures. Fieldworkers in California, mostly Mexicans, led a strike after landowners cut their substandard wages. The left enjoyed a renaissance, supporting both the labor movement and equal rights for African Americans. While relatively few Americans joined left‐wing organizations, many questioned the capitalist system. Conclusion: Dazzle and Despair The dazzle of the Roaring Twenties hid deep divisions in American society, and the decadeʹs prosperity masked structural flaws in the economy. Blue‐collar America did not fully share in white‐collar prosperity, and rural Americans almost entirely were left out of it. While most Americans felt the pain of the crash of 1929 and the full onset of the depression, the nationʹs poor were hurt the worst. Soon, images of the Roaring Twenties were replaced by new images of destitution along with mounting voices that demanded more radical measures and new leaders to save them from the ʺHoover Depression.ʺ