United States History

B

Mass Culture

Leisure industries, too, turned to mass production. Amusements of bygone days—amateur theatricals, sleigh rides—gave way to new industries in entertainment and culture. Rural or urban, Americans nationwide read mass-circulation magazines, full of advertising, such as The Saturday Evening Post, Reader’s Digest, or The Ladies’ Home Journal. They listened on the radio to the same popular music, comedy shows, and commercials, broadcast by new radio networks such as National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). Motion pictures gained vast urban audiences, and in 1927 Al Jolson’s film The Jazz Singer introduced sound to movie audiences. Fans followed the careers of movie stars in film magazines. The press also tracked other celebrities, such as Charles Lindbergh, who flew the first transatlantic flight in 1927, or novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, who epitomized an icon of the 1920s, the flapper.

Young and uninhibited, the flapper represented much of what typified the Jazz Age of the 1920s—youthful rebellion, female independence, exhibitionism, competitiveness, and consumerism. Although a symbol of liberation, the flapper was in fact the ultimate consumer, dependent on a variety of products. With her bobbed hairdos, short skirts, makeup, and cigarettes, she supported growth industries of the 1920s—the beauty parlor, the ready-made clothing industry, cosmetic manufacture, and tobacco production. Consumerism linked the carefree, adventurous mood of the Jazz Age with the dominance of large corporations and their conservative values.

Among African Americans, the great migration of Southern blacks to Northern jobs during the war created strong African American communities. During the 1920s these communities were home to cultural revivals, such as the Harlem Renaissance, where art, music, and literature flourished. The “New Negro,” a term used by critic and historian Alain Locke, celebrated African American heritage and racial identity. As black creativity flourished, African Americans began to raise their voices for equality. Interest also arose in black nationalism. Some African Americans became followers of Jamaican black nationalist Marcus Garvey, who urged racial pride, formed the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and led a “Back to Africa” movement. At its height the UNIA claimed more than 2 million members. It declined after Garvey was convicted of fraud and deported to Jamaica in 1927.

C

Political Conservatism

Many Americans of the 1920s endorsed conservative values in politics and economics. Republican presidents stood for these values, or what President Warren G. Harding called “normalcy … a regular steady order of things.” Under presidents Harding and Calvin Coolidge, tariffs reached new highs, income taxes fell for people who were most well off, and the Supreme Court upset progressive measures, such as the minimum wage and federal child labor laws. Both Harding and Coolidge tended to favor business. “The chief business of the American people is business,” Coolidge declared.

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Republican presidents shared isolationist inclinations in foreign policy; the United States never joined the League of Nations. Harding and Coolidge also endorsed pacifist policies. In 1921 Harding organized the International Conference on Naval Limitation, known as the Washington Conference, a pioneering effort to reduce arms and avoid an expensive naval arms race. Attended by the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Italy, and other countries, the conference proposed destruction of ships and a moratorium on new construction. In 1928, under Coolidge, the United States and France cosponsored the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which renounced aggression and called for the end of war. As a practical instrument for preventing war, the treaty was useless. However, it helped to establish the 20th-century concept of war as an outlaw act by an aggressor state on a victim state.

While remaining aloof from international concerns, the United States began to close its doors to immigrants. Antiforeign sentiment fueled demands for immigration limits. Protests against unrestricted immigration came from organized labor, which feared the loss of jobs to newcomers, and from patriotic organizations, which feared foreign radicalism.

Efforts to limit immigration led to the National Origins Act, passed by Congress in 1924. The law set an annual quota on immigration and limited the number of newcomers from each country to the proportion of people of that national origin in the 1890 population. (In 1929 the basis for the quotas was revised to the 1920 population.) The law discriminated against the most recent newcomers, southern and eastern Europeans, and excluded Asian immigrants almost entirely. Latin American immigration, however, was unlimited. Immigration from Mexico surged in the 1920s, abetted by the Mexican Revolution and by the need of southwestern businesses for agricultural labor. More than 1 million Mexicans (10 percent of the Mexican population) arrived in the United States from 1910 to 1930.

What happened to more critical voices in the conservative era? Radical political activism waned, dimmed by the Red Scare of 1919. Social criticism appeared in literary magazines such as The Masses; in newspapers such as the Baltimore Sun, where journalist H. L. Mencken published biting commentary; and in popular fiction such as Sinclair Lewis’s novel Babbitt (1922), an assault on provincial values. Some intellectuals fled the United States and settled in Paris. Progressivism faded. Its most enduring vestige, the post-suffrage women’s movement, faced its own problems.

Enthused by winning the right to vote, women of the 1920s pursued political roles as voters, candidates, national committeewomen, and activists in voluntary groups. But the women’s movement still encountered obstacles. Women’s organizations did not agree on supporting the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), first proposed in 1923. The amendment would have made illegal all forms of discrimination based on sex. The National Woman’s Party, led by Alice Paul, pressed for passage of the amendment, but most women’s organizations, including the newly formed League of Women Voters, did not support it, and the ERA made no progress.

Women reformers also suffered setbacks in national politics. The Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921, a pioneering health-care measure aimed at women voters, provided matching funds for prenatal and baby-care centers in rural areas, but Congress repealed the law in 1929. Other important goals of women reformers, such as a federal child labor law and the minimum wage, failed as well.

D

Political Conflicts

Political and cultural debates divided Americans of the 1920s. Major issues of the decade reflected a split between urban and rural, modern and traditional, radical and reactionary. Nativist, anti-radical sentiments emerged in a 1921 trial, the Sacco-Vanzetti Case. Two anarchists, Italian immigrants, were tried and convicted of murder. Many believed that the men’s immigrant origins and political beliefs played a part in their convictions. The case evoked protests from socialists, radicals, and prominent intellectuals, and remained a source of conflict for decades. Nativism also inspired the revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. The new Klan targeted Catholics, Jews, and immigrants, as well as African Americans. It thrived in the Midwest and Far West, as well as in the South. With its women’s auxiliary, the Women of the Klan, it raised millions of dollars and wielded political power in several states, including Oklahoma, Oregon, and Indiana.

Conflict also arose over religious fundamentalism. In 1925 John T. Scopes, a Tennessee schoolteacher, was tried for breaking a state law that prohibited the teaching of the theory of evolution in schools. This theory, its foes said, contradicted the account of creation in the Bible. Scopes and the American Civil Liberties Union believed that the law violated freedom of speech, an argument made by Scopes’s lawyer, Clarence Darrow. Reporters converged on Dayton, Tennessee, to witness the courtroom battle between traditionalism and modernism. Scopes was convicted, although the verdict was later reversed on technical grounds (see Scopes Trial).

The battle over Prohibition, finally, symbolized the divisive spirit of the 1920s. “Drys” favored Prohibition and “wets” opposed it. The Volstead Act of 1919, which enforced the 18th Amendment, prohibited the manufacture, sale, or distribution of alcoholic beverages, but was riddled with loopholes. Organized crime entered the liquor business; rival gangs and networks of speakeasies induced a crime wave. By the end of the 1920s, Prohibition was discredited, and it was repealed in 1933.

Meanwhile, the conflict between “wets” and “drys” played a role in the presidential election of 1928. The Democratic candidate, Al Smith, governor of New York, was a machine politician and a “wet,” who represented urban, immigrant constituencies. Republican Herbert Hoover, an engineer from Iowa, was a “dry” who represented rural, traditional constituencies. A foe of government intervention in the economy, Hoover envisioned a rational economic order in which corporate leaders acted for the public good. Promising voters “a chicken for every pot and a car in every garage,” Hoover won a substantial majority of votes, except in the nation’s largest cities. But he had the misfortune to assume office just before the nation encountered economic collapse.

XX

The Great Depression

In 1929, Hoover’s first year as president, the prosperity of the 1920s capsized. Stock prices climbed to unprecedented heights, as investors speculated in the stock market. The speculative binge, in which people bought and sold stocks for higher and higher prices, was fueled by easy credit, which allowed purchasers to buy stock “on margin.” If the price of the stock increased, the purchaser made money; if the price fell, the purchaser had to find the money elsewhere to pay off the loan. More and more investors poured money into stocks. Unrestrained buying and selling fed an upward spiral that ended on October 29, 1929, when the stock market collapsed. The great crash shattered the economy. Fortunes vanished in days. Consumers stopped buying, businesses retrenched, banks cut off credit, and a downward spiral began. The Great Depression that began in 1929 would last through the 1930s.

A

Causes of the Depression

The stock market crash of 1929 did not cause the Great Depression, but rather signaled its onset. The crash and the depression sprang from the same cause: the weaknesses of the 1920s economy. An unequal distribution of income meant that working people and farmers lacked money to buy durable goods. Crisis prevailed in the agricultural sector, where farmers produced more than they could sell, and prices fell. Easy credit, meanwhile, left a debt burden that remained unpayable.

The crisis also crossed the Atlantic. The economies of European nations collapsed because they were weakened by war debts and by trade imbalances; most spent more on importing goods from the United States than they earned by exporting. European nations amassed debts to the United States that they were unable to repay. The prosperity of the 1920s rested on a weak foundation.

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