American History
Chapter 22: The “New Era” (1920s)
Sources:
▪ American History: Connecting with the Past (Fifteenth Edition)
▪ Give Me Liberty!: An American History (Third Edition)
▪ American Pageant (Fourteenth Edition)
▪ America: A Concise History (Fourth Edition)
▪ The Scopes Trial: A Brief History with Documents
▪ Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans (Third Edition)
▪ Fabric of a Nation (Second Edition)
AP U.S. HISTORY: MR. ROLOFSON 1
Chapter 21 Review:
The trial of Sacco and Vanzetti illustrated America’s fear of
(A) African-American migration to northern cities
(B) The reemergence of hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan
(C) The growing support for women’s suffrage
(D) Immigrants who possessed radical or leftist beliefs
AP U.S. HISTORY: MR. ROLOFSON 2
Chapter 21 Review:
Dollar Diplomacy is most associated with the presidency of
A) Theodore Roosevelt
B) William McKinley
C) Woodrow Wilson
D) William Taft
President Taft’s Dollar Diplomacy did not succeed, but
in subsequent decades the deployment of capital did
come to play a significant role in American foreign
policy.
AP U.S. HISTORY: MR. ROLOFSON 3
The Roaring Twenties
(also known as the Jazz Age)
▪ The 1920s was a decade filled with sharp contrasts – between
Prohibition laws and speakeasy nightclubs, modern science
and fundamentalist religion, economic boom and financial
bust, popular heroes and social villains.
▪ In relation to race relations, the role of women, consumerism,
technology, and literature, possible contextualization and/or
synthesis points can be found in comparing the decades of
the 1920s and 1950s. (This can be found on a separate
PowerPoint).
▪ The last third of Chapter 21 is essentially the 1920s.
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Elections of 1920 and 1924
Election of 1920 Election of 1924
AP U.S. HISTORY: MR. ROLOFSON 5
Charles Lindbergh
Texas TEKS
Charles Lindbergh flew non-stop
across the Atlantic Ocean in the Spirit
of St. Louis in 1927. Lindbergh’s solo
flight was important to Americans
because it symbolized American
ingenuity, courage, and ability.
(Amelia Earhart flew solo across the
Atlantic Ocean in 1928.)
U.S. HISTORY: MR. ROLOFSON 6
American History
Chapter 22
1920s: Innovations in Communication and Technology
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Warren Harding's “Return to Normalcy”
▪ President Warren Harding promises a “return to normalcy” if
he is elected in 1920. During his presidency, Harding supported
big business, relaxed government control over industry, and
promoted high tariffs on imports. He called this “America First”
policies. Disillusioned by WWI, many Americans found his
conservative politics compelling.
▪ Possible Analysis Point: This tactic was similar in nature to one
a century later. Donald Trump presented himself as anti-
globalist. He vowed to “drain the swamp” that was the
Washington establishment and adopted the slogan “Make
America Great Again” (MAGA). Trump embodied isolationism.
He supported bilateral trade agreements over multilateral ones.
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Teapot Dome Scandal
Teapot Dome Scandal: a bribery
incident during the administration of
President Warren G. Harding (early
1920s). Secretary of the Interior
Albert B. Fall leased petroleum
reserves at Teapot Dome to private oil
companies without competitive
bidding.
Considered one of the worst scandals
in US history, Teapot Dome helped to
permanently damage the image of
President Harding.
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Henry Ford and the Automobile Industry
Key Concept 7.1: I A
Henry Ford: American industrialist
that developed the assembly line and
mass produced the first passenger car
– the Model-T – which revolutionized
transportation in the U.S.
Ford practiced “welfare capitalism”
and paid his workers top wages to
minimize turnover, maximize
efficiency, and prevent union growth.
Ford was notoriously anti-union and
Ford Motor Co. was the last of the
major American car companies to
allow collective bargaining.
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Significance of the Automobile Industry
Key Concept 7.1: I A
The automobile industry helped
stimulate the U.S. economy in the
1920s because it increased demand
for products such as steel, rubber, and
gasoline. Also, new roads were being
built, along with gas stations and
garages.
It promoted tourism and the growth
of suburbs and helped to reduce rural
isolation. Mass-production
techniques reduced prices on
consumer goods so that most people
could afford to buy new products.
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Americans Become Consumers
Key Concept 7.2: I A
▪ This great spurt of economic growth in the 1920s resulted from
the application of technological innovation and scientific
management techniques to industrial production.
▪ Besides the automobile, the economy of the 1920s focused on
the production of consumer-oriented goods previously
considered luxuries. The electrification of urban homes created
demand for a wealth of new labor-saving appliances.
Refrigerators, washing machines, toasters, and vacuum cleaners
appealed to middle-class housewives whose husbands could
afford to purchase them.
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Technological Developments of the 1920s
Key Concept 7.2: I A
Mass media: Radios and phonographs
(record players) brought mass
entertainment into Americans’ living
rooms. These technological
developments helped to create and
spread a new celebrity culture, in
which recording, film, and sports stars
moved to the top of the list of
American heroes.
The radio helped build a national
culture, in that many people were
listening to the same music and the
same advertisements.
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The Limits of Prosperity
▪ Labor: Improved productivity meant that goods could be
produced with fewer workers. Parts of New England
experienced chronic unemployment caused by
deindustrialization. During the 1920s, organized labor lost
more than 2 million members. Propaganda campaigns
continued to link unionism and socialism as examples of the
sinister influence of foreigners on American life.
▪ Farmers: For the first time in the nation’s history, the number
of farms and farmers declined during the 1920s. Half of the
farmers in Montana lost their land to foreclosure between
1921 and 1925.
▪ Income Gap: At the beginning of 1929, the share of national
income of the wealthiest 5 percent of American families
exceeded that of the bottom 60 percent.
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Shaping a National Culture: Advertising
Key Concept 7.2: I A
▪ Glorification of Consumption
Spending becomes cultural ideal rather than thrift –
emergence of installment plans
Consumption becomes cultural ideal rather than production
Possession of goods replaces cultural ideals of character,
religion, and social standing
▪ Impact on Women
Alters image of beauty, sells idea that beauty can be
purchased
Changes is labor, more leisure time due to new devices
Makes sexuality, smoking, drinking more acceptable for
women
Focus on creating dissatisfactions with one’s body, status, etc.
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Shaping a National Culture: Entertainment
Key Concept 7.2: I A
▪ Entertainment: movies, radio, phonographs, juke boxes, jazz,
Harlem Renaissance, cars, professional sports, national
magazines
▪ Impacts: media influences national trends, changes courting
rituals, leisure time, home life, diffuses secular ideas and
values, changes image of women (flappers, open sexuality,
smoking, dancing, drinking, independence), promotes cult of
celebrity
▪ Postwar Cynicism: Lost Generation writings (F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Sinclair Lewis, H.L.
Mencken)
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Shaping a National Culture: Mass Production
Key Concept 7.2: I A
▪ Mass Production: more affordable consumer products, mass
distribution, national brand names, brand loyalties, middle
class salaries rise, prices fall, auto production stimulates other
industries
▪ Impact on Workers: further impact of Taylorism due to
mechanization of production, declining need for cheap
immigrant labor, declining union membership, labor-saving
devices increase leisure time
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HIPP practice
This is a Westinghouse
Appliance Advertisement
from 1924
Historical Situation:
Intended Audience:
Purpose:
Author’s Point of View:
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American History
Chapter 22
1920s: Cultural and Political Controversies
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Women’s Changing Roles in the 1920s
Key Concept 7.2: I D
Flappers were a so-called new style of
Western woman. Flappers believed in new
concepts like personal choice and
consumerism while ridding themselves of
rigid and older ideas about women’s roles.
Representing the liberated new woman,
flappers wore short skirts, used ample
makeup, and smoked in public.
Flappers were increasingly being regarded
as a symbol of the larger, societal change
that was underfoot, such as the first time
women were permitted to vote in the U.S.
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The Lost Generation (1920s)
Key Concept 7.2: I B
A group of writers disillusioned by WWI,
the Lost Generation rejected pop culture
and the quest for material possessions.
Famous writers of the Lost Generation
include F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great
Gatsby) and Ernest Hemingway (The Sun
Also Rises).
Lost Generation writers and poets were
pushing back against the blandness,
materialism, and conformity of
mainstream American culture.
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Harlem Renaissance and Black Nationalism
Key Concept 7.2: I B
Harlem Renaissance: An African American
literary awakening in the 1920’s, in the
1920s, Harlem became the focal point of
intellectual, cultural, and artistic Black
community. This “renaissance” was the
first time Black artists and thinkers
produced works that focused on what it
meant to be Black in America.
Refusing to accept white supremacy,
authors associated with the Harlem
Renaissance include Langston Hughes and
Zora Neale Hurston.
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Duke Ellington
Born and raised in Washington, D.C.,
Ellington was based in New York City
from the mid-1920s and gained a
national profile through his orchestra's
appearances at the Cotton Club in
Harlem.
Although a pivotal figure in the history
of jazz, Ellington himself embraced the
phrase "beyond category", considering
it a liberating principle, and referring
to his music as part of the more
general category of American music.
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Review: Marcus Garvey’s UNIA
Key Concept 7.2: II C
▪ Of all the new organizations and fresh approaches to black
elevation, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement
Association (UNIA) was the largest and most militant. By 1919,
the UNIA claimed two million members in thirty chapters in the
United States and the West Indies. By 1921, the number had
grown to four million members worldwide.
▪ The UNIA’s astonishing growth owed not only go Garvey’s vision
but also to the brutal racism of the wartime and postwar era.
Garvey emphasized race pride and racial unity at a time when
these messages resonated deeply with blacks.
▪ Unlike the NAACP, which were integrationist, the UNIA was
separatist. It emphasized black self-determinism rather than
fighting for civil and political rights in the United States.
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Challenges to Traditional Beliefs and the Rise
of Cultural Tensions
Key Concept 7.2: I B
▪ older generation vs. young generation
▪ rural vs. urban
▪ “drys” vs. “wets”
▪ fundamentalism vs. modernism
▪ native-born vs. immigrants
▪ management vs. labor
▪ idealism vs. disillusionment
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Prohibition, Fundamentalism, and Modern
American Life
▪ After decades of efforts to combat the use of alcohol, the
Eighteenth Amendment, banning its manufacture and sale,
was ratified in 1919. That same year, Congress passed the
Volstead Act, which set up the legal machinery to enforce the
amendment. Supporters claimed that prohibition would
promote family stability, improve morals, and prevent crime.
They took aim at the ethnic culture of saloons associated with
urban immigrants.
▪ Enforcing this proved to be a problem. Rural “moonshiners”
and urban “speakeasies” offered illegal alcohol. Organized
crime lords paid off police, bribed judges, and turned cities into
battlegrounds between rival gangs for control.
▪ By the end of the decade, most Americans welcomed an end to
prohibition.
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Prohibition
Key Concept 7.2: I B
CAUSES EFFECTS
▪ Attempt to eliminate ▪ Rise of speakeasies and
drunkenness and get rid of bootleggers
saloons, where vice thrived ▪ Development of organized
▪ Prevent absenteeism and on crime (ex: Al Capone)
the job accidents ▪ Provide women with
experience in political
mobilization (this is similar to
the temperance movement of
the mid-1800s, coming out of
the Second Great Awakening)
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Scopes Trial
Key Concept 7.2: I D
Scopes Trial: (1925) John Scopes
challenged Tennessee law banning
teaching of evolution as
unconstitutional. (first trial broadcast
on radio)
Clarence Darrow: supported free
speech, joins defense
William Jennings Bryan: supported
fundamentalism, joins prosecution
The trial was a clash between modern
and traditional beliefs, and the legal
right at issue is the right to teach
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The Scopes Trial
Key Concept 7.2: I D
▪ Clarence Darrow: Renowned labor lawyer and defense
attorney, Darrow defended John Scopes for teaching about
evolution in a science class in Tennessee. The Scopes Monkey
Trial tested the Tennessee state law prohibiting public school
teachers from denying the biblical account of man’s origin.
While Scopes was found guilty, the trial captured the attention
of the nation in the ongoing modernist vs. traditional debate.
▪ William Jennings Bryan: Three-time democratic candidate for
president, Bryan was a nationally known populist, supporter of
traditional values, and evangelical Christian. After successfully
campaigning for anti-evolution laws in 15 states, Bryan joined
the prosecution in the Scopes Monkey Trial. The Scopes
Monkey trial was the first legal proceeding to be broadcast on
the radio.
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H.L. Mencken
Key Concept 7.2: I D
H.L. Mencken was an American
journalist, essayist, magazine editor,
satirist, and critic of American culture.
He was skeptical of economic theories
and particularly critical of anti-
intellectualism, bigotry, populism,
Fundamentalist Christianity,
creationism, organized religion, and
the existence of God.
His writings remain popular today.
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Restriction of Immigration
Key Concept 7.2: I D
▪ Prohibition reflected the surge in nativist (anti-immigrant) and
racist thinking that in many ways revealed long-standing fears.
In the past, temperance reform was aimed at immigrants. The
end of World War I brought a new wave of Catholic and Jewish
emigration from eastern and southern Europe, triggering
religious prejudice among Protestants. Just as immigrants had
been linked to socialism and anarchism in the 1880s and 1890s,
old-stock Americans associated these immigrants with immoral
behavior and political radicalism and saw them as a threat to
traditional U.S. culture and values. Moreover, as in the late
nineteenth century, native-born workers saw immigrant as a
source of cheap labor that threatened their jobs and wages.
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Restriction of Immigration
(continued…)
Key Concept 7.2: I D
▪ Immigration from Mexico and elsewhere in the Western
Hemisphere, however, was exempted from the quotas of the
National Origins Act of 1924 because farmers in the Southwest
needed Mexican laborers to tend their crops and pressured the
government to excuse them from coverage. In a related
measure, in 1924, Congress established the Border Patrol to
control the flow of undocumented immigration from Mexico.
Nevertheless, legal immigration to the United States from
Mexico increased during the 1920s.
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Review: Immigration Quotas
Key Concept 7.2: I D
▪ WWI and the Red Scare that followed renewed strong nativist
sentiments in the US resulting in legislation in the early 1920s
that restricted immigration by establishing a quota system.
▪ These measures were supported by labor unions because of
fears of unemployment caused by WWI demobilization,
possible wage reductions, and continued damage control after
the Red Scare (To many Americans, immigrants = radicals).
▪ Emergency Quota Act of 1921: quota for immigrants from
Europe set at 3% (of 1910 population)
▪ Immigration Act of 1924: (National Origins Act) quotas for
foreigners cut to 2% (of 1890 population)
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The Rebirth of the KKK
Key Concept 7.2: I D
▪ The new Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was only loosely connected with the
earlier KKK (during Reconstruction). The new KKK saw itself as a
secret army and fraternal order preparing for the impending
race war. The modern KKK’s commitment to whiteness meant
that it was not only anti-black but also anti-immigrant and anti-
foreign. The KKK’s very narrow view of whiteness led it to
oppose accepting “darker” European immigrants from southern
and eastern Europe.
▪ The KKK’s fundamental religious intolerance also fed its intense
anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism. Klan violence and murders
targeted Catholics and Jews as well as blacks.
▪ The Klan was also anti-radical, anti-urban, and anti-modern.
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The Klan’s March on Washington, D.C.
Key Concept 7.2: I D
The 1920s KKK was highly popular and
influential nationwide. In 1925, the KKK
marched forty thousand strong in
Washington, D.C. By that same year, it had
three million members all over the country,
including the North, West, and Midwest.
The lengths to which incensed whites
would go to police the boundaries of
whiteness all to often led to horrific acts of
anti-black terrorism. The Tulsa Race
Massacre of 1921 and the Rosewood
Massacre of 1923 illustrate the depravity of
white supremacist violence.
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Rise of Nativism: 1900-1930
Key Concept 7.2: I D
▪ “New Immigrants” from southern and eastern Europe
Ethnicities, religions, languages are different
Job competition, immigrants work for lower wages
Impact of Social Darwinism
▪ Anti-German sentiment during and after WWI
No performances of German music, removal of German names
▪ 1920s Nativism:
Red Scare and the Palmer Raids, fear of communism
Rise of KKK
Tie between support for Prohibition and anti-foreign sentiment
Emergency Quota Act of 1921
National Origins Act of 1924
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