1920’s

Overview

Pro-Business

• Many Americans became comfortable with the

idea of large, successful businesses

• Most products were offered at reasonable prices

Labor Unions

• Fell out of favor

• Connected to Red Scare & radicalism

• Struck against industries necessary to keep industrial America running smoothly

• Pushed for higher wages and safer work conditions in steel, coal, and RR’s: suppressed by feds

• S.C. overturned minimum wage law for women

• Nullified child labor restrictions

“A Return to Normalcy”

President Harding (1921-

1923)

• Formerly an Ohio Governor & US Senator

• Surrounded himself with like-minded advisors

• Problem: many of the advisors were corrupt!

• Teapot Dome Scandal: oil companies bribed Sec. of Interior in order to drill on public lands

• Supported anti-lynching laws

• Tried to help farmers with $$ for farm loans

• Harding died in office; heart problems

President Coolidge (1923-

1929)

• Former Governor of Massachusetts

• “Silent Cal,” man of few word

• Coolidge continued Harding’s conservative

policies

• Pushed for lower income-tax rates

• This pro-business atmosphere led to a temporary

decline in the popularity of labor unions, and

membership dropped

“Keep Cool with Coolidge”

Welfare Capitalism

• The concept that businessmen could dissuade

workers from organizing and demanding

concessions by giving them benefits

• Pension plans, paid vacation, better pay, shorter

hours, communal spirit at work!

• New, important idea; but would not yet become

widespread

Modern Culture

• Automobile: became affordable to most middle-class

families

• Allowed people to move far away from city

centers, allowing for the advent of suburbs

• Roads had to be developed to accommodate the

increase in autos on the road

• Rise of auto affected countless other industries:

• Motels, restaurants, tourism, entertainment, etc.

Cost of Model T’s

Modern Culture

• Radio: 10 million families owned one

• A good way to gather socially

• Led to wanting other “electric and electronic

goods”

• More women entered working world, for financial

reasons

• “keeping up with the Jones’s”

• 15% of women in work force

• Women still earned much less than men

Other growth areas

• Sports

• Movies

• Literature

• Harlem Renaissance

• Jazz Age

• We will be researching much of this for the rest of

the week!

Cultural Backlash

• KKK grew to over 5 million members

• Widened its targets:

• Blacks, Jews, urbanites, anyone else whose

behavior deviated from the Klan’s narrowly-defined

code of “acceptable Christian behavior”

• Anti-immigration groups grew, targeting

specifically Southern and Eastern European

immigrants

• Sacco and Vanzetti

• http://chnm.gmu.edu/epis

odes/the-birth-of-a-nation-

and-black-protest/

Emergency Quota Act

• 1924 Act created to set quotas to pre-1890

standards, when levels of immigration were low

• Set up to reduce “foreign influence” on the US

Scopes Trial

• 1925

• Mass media coverage

• Traditional beliefs vs. modernism

• Teachers couldn’t teach evolution in TN

• Went to court, high powered attorneys brought the case to national attention• Clarence Darrow and WJB

• Bryan put on stand as “Bible expert”

• Bryan died just a few days after the trial

Prohibition

• Ban of manufacture, sale, or transport of alcoholic beverages

• 18th Amendment outlawed above

• Many began to resent the gov’t intrusion in private matters

• Organized crime began to get involved in use and sale of alcohol• Speakeasies, bootlegging

• Mobsters, Al Capone

• Competition w/in cities, violence, “racketeering”

Al Capone, “Scarface”

Washington Naval

Conference

• 1921 attempt at arms reduction

• Britain, US, Japan, Italy, France

• Halt construction of large battleships for 10 years

• Set limit on future shipbuilding

• Use of ratio (will discuss this concept when we

discuss foreign policy between wars later)

NYC in the 1920s

• http://www.livingcityarchive.org/htm/decades/1920

.htm