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A Black Sharecropper and His Family Move North

C H A P T E R 23Affluence and Anxiety

754

John and Lizzie Parker were black sharecroppers who lived in a “stubborn, ageless hutsquatted on a little hill” in central Alabama.They had two daughters—one age 6, theother already married. The whole family worked hard in the cotton fields, but theyhad little to show for their labor. One day in 1917, Lizzie straightened her shouldersand declared, “I’m through. I’ve picked my last sack of cotton. I’ve cleared my lastfield.” Like many southern African Americans, the Parkers sought opportunity and a

American Stories

The movies, illegal liquor, the stock market, and the new jazz dances all appear in Thomas HartBenton’s painting of the pleasures of urban life in the 1920s. Can you find any other symbols of the1920s in this painting? (Thomas Hart Benton, City Activities with Dance Hall, from America Today, 1930, Distem-per and egg tempera on gessoed linen with oil glaze, 92 x 134 1/2 in. Collection, AXA Financial, Inc.)

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better life in the North.World War I cut off the flow of immigrants from Europe, andsuddenly there was a shortage of workers. Some companies sent special trains intothe South to recruit African Americans. John Parker signed up with a mining companyin West Virginia.The company offered free transportation for his family.“You will be al-lowed to get your food at the company store and there are houses awaiting for you,”the agent promised.

The sound of the train whistle seemed to promise better days ahead for her familyas Lizzie gathered her possessions and headed north. But it turned out that thehouses in the company town in West Virginia were little better than those they left inAlabama.After deducting for rent and for supplies from the company store, almost nomoney was left at the end of the week. John hated the dirty and dangerous work inthe mine and realized that he would never get ahead by staying there. But instead ofventing his anger on his white boss, he ran away, leaving his family in West Virginia.

John drifted to Detroit, where he got a job with the American Car and FoundryCompany. It was 1918, and the pay was good, more than he had ever made before.Af-ter a few weeks, he rented an apartment and sent for his family. For the first time,Lizzie had a gas stove and an indoor toilet, and Sally, who was now 7, started school. Itseemed as if their dream had come true. John had always believed that if he workedhard and treated people fairly, he would succeed.

Detroit was not quite the dream, however. It was crowded with all kinds of mi-grants, many attracted by the wartime jobs at the Ford Motor Company and otherfactories.The new arrivals increased the racial tension already present in the city. Sallywas beaten up by a gang of white youths at school. Even in their neighborhood, whichhad been solidly Jewish before their arrival, the shopkeeper and the old residentsmade it clear that they did not like blacks moving into their community.The Ku KluxKlan, which gained many new members in Detroit, also made life uncomfortable forthe blacks who had moved north to seek jobs and opportunity. Suddenly the warended, and almost immediately John lost his job.Then the landlord raised the rent, andthe Parkers were forced to leave their apartment for housing in a section just outsidethe city near Eight Mile Road.The surrounding suburbs had paved streets, wide lawns,and elegant houses, but this black ghetto had dirt streets and shacks that remindedthe Parkers of the company town where they had lived in West Virginia. Lizzie had toget along without her bathroom, for here there was no indoor plumbing and no elec-tricity, only a pump in the yard and an outhouse.

The recession winter of 1921–1922 was particularly difficult. The auto industryand other companies laid off most of their workers. John could find only part-timeemployment, while Lizzie worked as a domestic servant for white families. Becauseno bus route connected the black community to surrounding suburbs, she oftenhad to trek miles through the snow.The shack they called home was freezing cold,and it was cramped because their married daughter and her husband had joinedthem in Detroit.

Lizzie did not give up her dream, however. With strength, determination, and asense of humor, she kept the family together. In 1924, Sally entered high school. Bythe end of the decade, Sally had graduated from high school, and the Parkers finallyhad electricity and indoor plumbing in the house, though the streets were still un-paved.Those unpaved streets stood as a symbol of their unfulfilled dream.The Park-ers, like most of the African Americans who moved north in the decade after WorldWar I, had improved their lot, but they still lived outside Detroit—and, in manyways, outside America.

Like most Americans in the 1920s, the Parkers pursued the American

dream of success. For them, a comfortable house and a steady job, a new

bathroom, and an education for their younger daughter constituted that dream.

CHAPTER OUTLINE

Postwar ProblemsThe Red ScareThe “Red Menace” and the Palmer

RaidsThe Ku Klux KlanEthnic and Religious Intolerance

A Prospering EconomyThe Rising Standard of LivingThe Rise of the Modern

CorporationElectrificationA Global Automobile CultureHenry FordThe Exploding MetropolisA Communications Revolution

Hopes Raised, PromisesDeferredClash of ValuesReligious FundamentalismImmigration and MigrationMarcus Garvey: Black MessiahThe Harlem RenaissanceThe Lost GenerationWomen Struggle for EqualityRural America in the 1920sThe Workers’ Share of Prosperity

The Business of PoliticsHarding and CoolidgeHerbert HooverGlobal ExpansionThe Survival of ProgressivismTemperance TriumphantThe Election of 1928Stock Market Crash

Conclusion:A New Era ofProsperity and Problems

755



756 PART 5 A Modernizing People, 1900–1945

For others during the decade, the symbol of success

might be owning a new automobile or a new suburban

house, or perhaps making a killing on the stock

market. The Parkers, like all Americans, whether they

realized it or not, were influenced by a global market

beyond their control. The 1920s, the decade between

the end of World War I and the stock market crash, has

often been referred to as the “jazz age,” a time when

the American people had one long party complete

with flappers, speakeasies, illegal bathtub gin, and

young people dancing the Charleston late into the

night. This frivolous interpretation has some basis in

fact, but most Americans did not share in the party, for

they were too busy struggling to make a living.

In this chapter, we will explore some of the conflict-

ing trends of an exciting decade. First, we will examine

the currents of intolerance that influenced almost all

the events and social movements of the time. We will

also look at some developments in technology, espe-

cially the automobile, which changed life for almost

everyone during the 1920s and created the illusion of

prosperity for all. We will then focus on groups—

women, blacks, industrial workers, and farmers—who

had their hopes and dreams raised but not always ful-

filled during the decade. We will conclude by looking

at the way business, politics, and foreign policy were

intertwined during the age of Harding, Coolidge, and

Hoover.




POSTWAR PROBLEMSThe enthusiasm for social progress that markedthe war years evaporated in 1919. Public housing,social insurance, government ownership of therailroads, and many other experiments quicklyended. The sense of progress and purpose that thewar had fostered withered. The year following theend of the war was marked by strikes and violenceand by fear that Bolsheviks, blacks, foreigners, andothers were destroying the American way of life.Some of the fear and intolerance resulted fromwartime patriotism, while some arose from thepostwar economic and political turmoil thatforced Americans to deal with new and immenselytroubling situations.

The Red ScareAmericans have often feared radicals and othergroups that seem to be conspiring to overthrow theAmerican way of life. In the 1840s, in the 1890s, andat other times in the past, Catholics, Mormons,Populists, immigrants, and holders of many politi-cal views have all been attacked as dangerous and“un-American.” But before 1917, anarchists seemedto pose the worst threat. The Russian Revolutionchanged that. Bolshevik suddenly became the mostdangerous and devious radical, while Communistwas transformed from a member of a utopian com-munity to a dreaded, threatening subversive. Forsome Americans, Bolshevik and German becamesomehow mixed together, especially after the Treatyof Brest–Litovsk in 1918 removed the new Sovietstate from the war. In the spring of 1919, with theRussian announcement of a policy of worldwide

revolution and with Communist uprisings in Hun-gary and Bavaria, many Americans feared that theCommunists planned to take over the United States.

Immediately after the war, there were perhaps25,000 American Communists, but they neverthreatened the United States. Some were idealists,such as John Reed, the son of a wealthy business-man, who had been converted to socialism in NewYork’s Greenwich Village.

Appalled by the carnage in what he considered acapitalistic war, Reed went to Russia as a journalist,just in time to witness the bloody Bolsheviktakeover. His eyewitness account, Ten Days ThatShook the World, optimistically predicted a world-wide revolution. Seeing little hope for that revolu-tion in postwar America, he returned to Moscow,where he died in 1920, disillusioned by the newregime’s authoritarian nature.

The “Red Menace” and the Palmer RaidsReed was one of the romantic American intellectu-als who saw great hope for the future in the RussianRevolution. His mentor Lincoln Steffens, the muck-raking journalist, remarked after a visit to the SovietUnion a few years later, “I have been over into thefuture and it works.” But relatively few Americans,even among those who had been Socialists, andfewer still among the workers, joined the Commu-nist party. The threat to the American system of gov-ernment was very slight. But in 1919, the Commu-nists seemed to be a threat, particularly as a series ofdevastating strikes erupted across the country.Workers in the United States had suffered fromwartime inflation, which had almost doubled prices



CHAPTER 23 Affluence and Anxiety 757

between 1914 and 1919, while most wages remainedthe same. During 1919, more than 4 million workerstook part in 4,000 strikes. Few wanted to overthrowthe government; rather, they demanded higherwages, shorter hours, and in some cases more con-trol over the workplace.

On January 21, 1919, some 35,000 shipyard workerswent on strike in Seattle, Washington. Within a fewdays, a general strike paralyzed the city; transportationand business stopped. The mayor of Seattle called forfederal troops. Within five days, using strong-arm tac-tics, the mayor put down the strike and was hailedacross the country as a “red-blooded patriot.”

Yet the strikes continued elsewhere. In September1919, all 343,000 employees of U.S. Steel walked out inan attempt to win an eight-hour workday and an“American living wage.” The average workweek in thesteel industry in 1919 was 68.7 hours; the unskilledworker averaged $1,400 per year, while the minimumsubsistence for a family of five that same year was es-timated at $1,575. Within days, the strike spread toBethlehem Steel.

From the beginning, the owners blamed the strikeson the Bolsheviks. They put ads in the newspapersurging workers to “Stand by America, Show Up theRed Agitator.” They also imported strikebreakers, pro-voked riots, broke up union meetings, and finallyused police and soldiers to end the strike. Eighteenstrikers were killed. Because most people believedthat the Communists had inspired the strike, the issueof long hours and poor pay got lost, and eventuallythe union surrendered.

While the steel strike was still in progress, the po-lice in Boston went on strike. Like most other workers,the police were struggling to survive on prewarsalaries in inflationary times. The Boston newspapersblamed the strike on Communist influence. Collegestudents and army veterans volunteered to replacethe police and prevent looting in the city. The presi-dent of Harvard assured the students that their gradeswould not suffer. The government quickly broke thestrike and fired the policemen. When Samuel Gom-pers urged Governor Calvin Coolidge to ask theBoston authorities to reinstate them, Coolidge re-sponded with the laconic statement that made himfamous and eventually helped him win the presi-dency: “There is no right to strike against the publicsafety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.”

To many Americans, strikes were bad enough, es-pecially strikes that dangerous radicals seemingly in-spired, but bombs were even worse. The “bomb-throwing radical” was almost a cliché, probablystemming from the hysteria over the Haymarket Riotof 1886. On April 28, 1919, a bomb was discovered ina small package delivered to the home of the mayor

of Seattle. The next day, the maid of a former senatorfrom Georgia opened a package, and a bomb blewher hands off. Other bombings occurred in June, in-cluding one that shattered the front of Attorney Gen-eral A. Mitchell Palmer’s home in Washington. Thebombings seem to have been the work of misguidedradicals who thought they might spark a genuine rev-olution in America. But their effect was to providesubstantial evidence that revolution was around thecorner, even though most American workers wantedonly shorter hours, better working conditions, and achance to realize the American dream.

The strikes and bombs, combined with the gen-eral postwar mood of distrust and suspicion, per-suaded many people of a real and immediate threatto the nation. No one was more convinced than A.Mitchell Palmer. From a Quaker family in a smallPennsylvania town, the attorney general had gradu-ated from Swarthmore College and had been admit-ted to the Pennsylvania bar in 1893 at age 21. Afterserving three terms as a congressman, he helpedswing the Pennsylvania delegation to Wilson at the1912 convention.

Wilson offered him the post of secretary of war,but Palmer’s pacifism led him to refuse. He did sup-port the United States’ entry into the war, however,and served as alien property custodian, a job cre-ated by the Trading with the Enemy Act. This posi-tion apparently convinced him of the danger of rad-ical subversive activities in America. The bombingof his home intensified his fears, and in the summerof 1919, he determined to find and destroy the Rednetwork. He organized a special antiradical divisionwithin the Justice Department and put a young mannamed J. Edgar Hoover in charge of coordinating in-formation on domestic radical activities.

Obsessed with the “Red Menace,” Palmer insti-tuted a series of raids, beginning in November 1919.Simultaneously, in several cities, his men rounded up250 members of the Union of Russian Workers, manyof whom were beaten and roughed up in the process.In December, 249 aliens, including the famous anar-chist Emma Goldman, were deported, although veryfew were Communists and even fewer hadany desire to overthrow the government ofthe United States. Palmer’s men arrested500 people in Detroit and 800 in Boston.

The Palmer raids, one of the most mas-sive violations of civil liberties in Americanhistory to this date, found few dangerousradicals but did fan the flames of fear andintolerance in the country. In Indiana, ajury quickly acquitted a man who hadkilled an alien for yelling, “To hell with the UnitedStates.” Billy Sunday, a Christian evangelist, suggested

A. MitchellPalmer on the

Menace ofCommunism

(1920)



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that the best solution was to shoot aliens rather thanto deport them.

Palmer became a national hero for ferreting outCommunists, but in the end, only about 600 were de-ported out of the more than 5,000 arrested. The worstof the “Red Scare” was over by the end of 1920, butthe fear of radicals and the emotional patriotism sur-vived throughout the decade to color almost everyaspect of politics, daily life, and social legislation.

The Red Scare promoted many patriotic organi-zations and societies determined to eliminate Com-munism from American life. The best known wasthe American Legion, but there were also the Ameri-can Defense Society, the Sentinels of the Republic,the United States Flag Association, and the Daugh-ters of the American Revolution. Such groups pro-vided a sense of purpose and a feeling of belongingin a rapidly changing America. But often whatunited their efforts was an obsessive fear of Com-munists and radicals.

Some organizations targeted women social re-formers. One group attacked the “Hot-House, HullHouse Variety of Parlor Bolshevists” and during the1920s circulated a number of “spider-web charts”that purported to connect liberals and progressives,especially progressive women, to communism.Protesting those charges did little good, for the ac-cusers claimed to know the “truth” and would not bedeflected from their purpose of exterminating dan-gerous radicals.

The Ku Klux KlanAmong the superpatriotic orga-nizations claiming to protect theAmerican way of life, the Ku KluxKlan (KKK) was the most ex-treme. The Klan was organizedin Georgia by William J. Sim-mons, a lay preacher, salesman,and member of many fraternalorganizations. He adopted thename and white-sheet uniformof the old antiblack Reconstruc-tion organization that was glori-fied in 1915 in the immenselypopular but racist feature filmBirth of a Nation. Simmons ap-pointed himself head (“ImperialWizard”) of the new Klan.

Unlike the original organiza-tion, which took almost anyonewho was white, the new Klan wasthoroughly Protestant and explic-itly antiforeign, anti-Semitic, and

anti-Catholic. As an increasing number ofsecond- and third-generation AmericanCatholics began to achieve some success,even winning elections at the state andmunicipal level, many Protestants beganto worry. The Klan declared that “Americais Protestant and so it must remain.” It op-posed the teaching of evolution; glorifiedold-time religion; supported immigrationrestriction; denounced short skirts, petting, and “de-mon rum”; and upheld patriotism and the purity ofwomen. The Klan was also militantly antiblack andits members took as their special mission the task ofkeeping blacks in their “proper place.” They oftenused peaceful measures to accomplish their aim, butif those failed, they resorted to violence, kidnapping,and lynching.

The Klan grew slowly until after the war. Aggres-sive recruiting as well as the fear and confusion ofthe postwar period led to rapid growth in the 1920s.A great many women joined the Klan. Insome states Women of the Ku Klux Klan(WKKK) made up more than half themembership. Although women sharedthe ideology of their male counterparts,they also campaigned for women’s rightsand for equal treatment of all white,Protestant women. For both men and women, theKlan served as a social club—a club that kept out allwho were different and therefore dangerous.

Women of the Ku Klux Klan The Klan, with its elaborate rituals and uniforms, ex-ploited the fear of blacks, Jews, liberals, and Catholics while preaching “traditional” values. Theappeal of the Klan was not limited to the South, and many women joined. This is a photo ofwomen Klan members marching in an America First Parade in Binghamton, New York. Whydid so many women join the Klan? Is there anything like it today? (Bettmann/CORBIS)

Charles DanaGibson, “Like aMoth, It Worksin the Dark,”

1923

The Creed ofKlanswomen

(1924)






The Klan flourished in small towns and rural ar-eas in the South, where it set out to keep the return-ing black soldiers in their “proper place,” but it soonspread throughout the country; at least half themembers came from urban areas. The Klan was es-pecially strong in the working-class neighborhoodsof Detroit, Indianapolis, Atlanta, and Chicago,where the migration of African Americans and otherethnic groups increased fear of everything “un-American.” At the peak of its power, the Klan hadseveral million members, many of them from themiddle class. In some states, especially Indiana,Colorado, Oregon, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Texas,it influenced politics and determined some elec-tions. The Klan’s power declined after 1925 becauseof a series of internal power struggles and severalscandals. The Klan survived in some areas into the1930s, but it had all but disappeared by the outbreakof World War II. Yet the end of the Klan did not meanthe end of prejudice.

Ethnic and Religious IntoleranceOne result of the Red Scare and the unreasoned fearof foreigners and radicals, which dragged onthrough much of the decade, was the convictionand sentencing of two Italian anarchists, NicolaSacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Arrested in 1920 forallegedly murdering a guard during a robbery of theshoe factory in South Braintree, Massachusetts, thetwo were convicted and sentenced to die in thesummer of 1921 on what many liberals consideredcircumstantial and flimsy evidence. Indeed, itseemed to many that the two Italians, who spoke inbroken English and were admitted anarchists, werepunished because of their radicalism and their for-eign appearance.

The case took on symbolic significance as manyintellectuals in Europe and America rallied to their

defense and to the defense of civil liber-ties. Appeal after appeal failed, but finallythe governor of Massachusetts appointeda commission to re-examine the evidencein the case. The commission reaffirmedthe verdict, and the two were executed inthe electric chair on August 23, 1927, de-spite massive protests and midnight vigilsaround the country. Recent evidence, in-cluding ballistic tests, suggests that they

may have been guilty, but the trial and its aftermathnevertheless pointed to the ethnic prejudice and di-visions in American society.

The KKK and well-publicized cases such asSacco–Vanzetti touched a relatively small number ofpeople, but a general spirit of intolerance permeated

the decade and influenced the lives of millions. InDearborn, Michigan, Henry Ford published anti-Se-mitic diatribes in the Dearborn Independent, andmany country clubs and resort hotels prohibitedJews from even entering the doors. Unable to fre-quent the fashionable resorts, Jews built their own inthe Catskills in New York State, Long Branch in NewJersey, and other areas. Many colleges, private acade-mies, and medical schools had Jewish quotas, someopenly and others informally, and many suburbs ex-plicitly limited residents to “Christians.” Catholics,too, were prohibited from many fashionable and fra-ternal organizations as well as many country clubs,but unlike Jews, Catholics created their own schoolsand colleges. Few Catholics even tried to enroll in theelite colleges in which bias against Catholics andCatholicism remained. There had always been a greatdeal of prejudice and intolerance in the UnitedStates, but during the decade of the 1920s, much ofthat intolerance became more fixed and formal.

CourtStatements ofNicola Sacco

andBartolomeo

Vanzetti (1927)

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A PROSPERING ECONOMYA time of intolerance and anxiety for many Ameri-cans, the decade after World War I was a time of in-dustrial expansion and widespread prosperity fornumerous others. Recovering from a postwar de-pression in 1921 and 1922, the economy soared. Fu-eled by new technology, more efficient planningand management, and innovative advertising, in-dustrial production almost doubled during thedecade, and the gross national product rose by anastonishing 40 percent. A construction boom cre-ated new suburbs around American cities, and anew generation of skyscrapers transformed thecities themselves. However, the benefits of this pros-perity fell unevenly on the many social groups thatformed American society.

While the American economy boomed, much ofthe rest of the world suffered in the aftermath of thewar. Germany, wracked by inflation so great that ittook millions of marks to buy a loaf of bread, sankinto depression and was unable to make repara-tions payments. Great Britain and France recoveredslowly from the war’s devastation. Although it wasnot clear at the time, it became obvious later thatthe United States was part of a global economy andeventually would be affected by the economic diffi-culties of the rest of the world.

The Rising Standard of LivingSigns of the new prosperity appeared in manyforms. Millions of homes and apartments were built




and equipped with the latest conveniences. Thenumber of telephones installed nearly doubled be-tween 1915 and 1930. Plastics, rayon, and cello-phane altered the habits of millions of Americans,and new products, such as cigarette lighters, rein-forced concrete, dry ice, and Pyrex glass creatednew demands unheard of a decade before.

Perhaps the most tangible sign of the new pros-perity was the modern American bathroom. Hotels

and the urban upper class began to installcast-iron bathtubs and primitive flushtoilets in the late nineteenth century, butnot until the early 1920s did the enam-eled tub, toilet, and washbasin becomestandard. By 1925, American factoriesturned out 5 million enameled bathroom

fixtures annually. The bathroom, with unlimited hotwater, privacy, and clean white fixtures, symbolizedAmerican affluence.

In sharp contrast to people in European coun-tries, middle-class Americans had more leisuretime, a shorter workweek, and more paid vacationtime. The American diet also improved during thedecade. Health improved and life expectancy in-creased. Educational opportunities also expanded.In 1900, only 1 in 10 young people of high-schoolage remained in school; by 1930, that number hadgrown to 6 in 10, and much of the increase came inthe 1920s. In 1900, only 1 college-age person in 33attended an institution of higher learning; by 1930,the ratio was 1 in 7, and more than a million peoplewere enrolled in the nation’s colleges.

The Rise of the Modern CorporationThe structure and practice of American businesswere transformed in the 1920s. Mergers increasedduring the decade at a rate greater than at any timesince the end of the 1890s—there were more than1,200 mergers in 1929 alone—creating such giants asGeneral Electric, General Motors, Sears Roebuck, DuPont, and U.S. Rubber. These were not monopoliesbut oligopolies (industry domination spread amonga few large firms). By 1930, the 200 largest corpora-tions controlled almost half the corporate wealth inthe country.

Perhaps the most important business trend of thedecade was the emergence of a new kind of managerlike Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., an engineer who reorganizedGeneral Motors. Sloan divided the company intocomponents, freeing top managers to concentrate onplanning new products, controlling inventory, and in-tegrating the whole operation. Marketing and adver-tising became as important as production, and manybusinesses began to spend more money on research.The new manager often had a large staff but ownedno part of the company. He was usually an expert atcost accounting and analyzing data. Increasingly, hewas a graduate of one of the new business colleges.

Continuing and extending the trends started byFrederick Taylor before World War I, the new man-agers tried to keep employees working efficiently,but they used more than the stopwatch and the as-sembly line. They introduced pensions, recreationfacilities, cafeterias, and, in some cases, paid vaca-tions and profit-sharing plans. But the managerswere not being altruistic; rather, “welfare capital-ism” was designed to reduce worker discontent andto discourage labor unions.

Planning was the key to the new corporate struc-ture, and planning often meant a continuation of

Burning Money for Fuel A German woman in 1923 usesthe devalued mark to light a fire because it was cheaper to use papercurrency than to purchase kindling wood or even a newspaper.Women used baby carriages to carry enough money to buy a loaf ofbread. A postage stamp cost a million marks. Most European coun-tries faced inflation in the postwar years, but it was worst in Ger-many. In 1918, a mark was worth about a dollar. By January 1923, ittook 7,000 marks to buy a dollar; by February, 18,000; by July,160,000; by August, 1 million; and by December, 4 trillion marks toequal a dollar. The hyperinflation, caused by the war and by the harshpeace settlement, wiped out the savings of the middle class, led todepression, and contributed directly to the rise of Hitler. Do Ameri-cans in the twenty-first century still fear inflation?(Bettman/CORBIS)

The LivingRoom, 1916




761

HOW OTHERS SEE USLuigi Barzini, Jr.,An Italian Student Falls in Love with the United States

Luigi Barzini, Jr., an Italian writer and journalist, first cameto the United States in August 1925 to enroll as a studentat Columbia University. He was impressed with how every-thing seemed modern and constantly changing.“The rest-lessness, mobility, the unceasing quest for something betterimpressed me,” he wrote.

I was pleased with almost everything, from thenew gadgets in the bathroom and kitchen to thetaste of the chemical substitute for vanilla. I likedAmericans’ pride in their country, their common-sense acceptance of obvious ideas, their admirationfor their old bourgeoisie, the style of their lives andtheir houses. I thought American girls were morebeautiful than any in Europe. I could put up withAmerican coffee and liked home-cooked Americanfood. I loved American architecture, music, litera-ture, jokes. I was charmed by the lean, silent menwho smoked pipes, lived outdoors, wore tweeds,

and said disagreeable ironic things almost withoutopening their mouths; they charmed me, ofcourse, because there were no such people inItaly. I liked the obvious waste of precious materi-als, the heavy bronze doors of banks and movietheaters, the bronze cuspidors, the excessivelyheavy steel beams supporting bridges, the largebumpers on automobiles, all the unmistakablesigns of wealth—even to the use of cream insteadof milk in tea.

■ Like many foreign visitors, Barzini was impressed byAmerican wealth and American restlessness. Is there any-thing he didn’t like about the United States?

■ Do visitors have similar reactions to the United Statestoday?

the business–government cooperation that had de-veloped during World War I. Experts from philan-thropic foundations, the National Bureau of Eco-nomic Research, and the U.S. Department ofCommerce worked together, hoping that they couldprovide a middle ground between collectivism andlaissez-faire economy. All the planning and the newmanagerial authority failed to prevent the eco-nomic collapse of 1929, but the modern corporationsurvived the depression to exert a growing influenceon American life in the 1930s and after.

ElectrificationThe 1920s also marked the climax of the “second In-dustrial Revolution,” powered by electricity andproducing a growing array of consumer goods. By1929, electrical generators provided 80 percent ofthe power used in industry. Less than one of every

ten American homes had electricity in1907; by 1919 more than two-thirds did.

Electricity brought dozens of gadgetsand labor-saving devices into the home.Washing machines and electric irons grad-ually reduced the drudgery of washday forwomen, and vacuum cleaners, electrictoasters, and sewing machines lightenedhousework. But the new machines still

needed human direction and did not reduce the timethe average housewife spent doing housework. Formany poor urban and rural women, the traditionalfemale tasks of carrying, pushing, pulling, and liftingwent on as they had for centuries. In many ways, thesuccess of the electric revolution increased the con-trast in American life. The “great white ways” of thecities, lit by electric lights, symbolized progress, butthey also made the darkness of slums and hamletsseem even more forbidding.

A Global Automobile CultureAutomobile manufacturing, like electrification, un-derwent spectacular growth in the 1920s, and theUnited States led the way. The automobile was onemajor factor in the postwar economic boom. It stim-ulated and transformed the petroleum, steel, andrubber industries. The auto forced the constructionand improvement of streets and highways and led tomillions of dollars of expenditures on labor and con-crete. In 1925, the secretary of agriculture approvedthe first uniform numbering system for the nation’shighways, but it was still an adventure to drive fromone city to another.

The best known transcontinental road was theLincoln Highway. It started in New York; continuedto Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne, and Joliet;

Scranton,Pennsylvania,

1911—Streetlights at

Night





and then roughly traced the route of the firsttranscontinental railroad to Omaha, Cheyenne, SaltLake City, Reno, and San Francisco (paralleling to-day’s Route 80.) The Lincoln Highway was markedusing existing roads in 1913, but large sections werebarely passable until well into the 1920s. Beginningin 1916, with the Federal Highway Act, the govern-ment began to aid road building, but the great ma-jority of roads remained under state or local control.In Europe, where the national governments builtthe roads, the highways were superior in the 1920s,but there were far fewer cars in Europe and the dis-tance between cities much shorter than in theUnited States.

The auto created new suburbs and allowed fami-lies to live many miles from their work. The fillingstation, the diner, and the overnight cabin becamefamiliar and eventually standardized objects on theAmerican scene. Traffic lights, stop signs, billboards,and parking lots appeared. Hitching posts and wa-tering troughs became rarer, and gradually thegarage replaced the livery stable. The auto changedthe look of the American landscape and threatenedthe environment as well. Oil and gasoline contami-nated streams, and piles of old tires and rustinghulks of discarded cars became a familiar eyesorealong highways. At the same time, emissions fromthousands and then millions of internal combus-tion engines polluted the air. The increasing use ofnonrenewable fossil fuels was already apparent inthe 1920s, and it was a trend that would continue. In1916, American oil refineries produced 50 millionbarrels of gasoline; in 1929, production had in-creased to 425 million barrels. But there was noturning back. The age of the auto had replaced theage of the horse.

The auto changed American life in other ways. Itled to the decline of the small crossroads store as well

as many small churches because the ruralfamily could now drive to the larger city ortown. The tractor changed methods offarming. Trucks replaced the horse andwagon and altered the marketing of farmproducts. Buses began to eliminate theone-room schoolhouse, because it wasnow possible to transport students to

larger schools. The automobile allowed young peoplefor the first time to escape the chaperoning of parents.

Gradually, as the decade progressed, the automo-bile became not just transportation but a sign of sta-tus. Advertising helped create the impression that itwas the symbol of the good life, of sex, freedom, andspeed. The auto in turn transformed advertising anddesign. It even altered the way products were pur-chased. By 1926, three-fourths of the cars sold were

bought on some kind of deferred-payment plan. In-stallment credit, first tried by a group of business-men in Toledo, Ohio, in 1915 to sell more autos, wassoon used to promote sewing machines, refrigera-tors, and other consumer products. “Buy now, paylater” became the American way.

The United States had a love affair with the autofrom the beginning. There were 8,000 motor vehiclesregistered in the country in 1900, and nearly a millionin 1912. But only in the 1920s did the auto comewithin the reach of middle-class consumers. In 1929,Americans purchased 4.5 million cars, and by theend of that year, nearly 27 million were registered.

In part because of Henry Ford and the develop-ment of the inexpensive car, and because theUnited States had a much larger middle class whocould afford a car, the ownership of automobiles ex-panded rapidly in the United States. Most Europeanautos were custom-made. Morris Motors, the mostimportant British company, did not adopt the as-sembly line method of production until 1934.France, Germany, and England all subsidized automanufacture for military purposes, further delayingthe development of an inexpensive car. But becauseof their strong central governments, Europeancountries adopted safety standards and requirednational licenses for vehicles and drivers beforesuch measures were adopted in the United States.

In America, the states created the rules, and inthe beginning it was assumed that anyone coulddrive a car. The world agreed on time zones, postageregulations, and other things, but not on which sideof the road to drive on. In Great Britain, Australia,Japan, and a few other countries, cars were drivenon the left side, while in the United States and mostof Europe, driving on the right side was the properthing to do. Eventually most of the world, followingthe American lead, was transformed by automobileculture, but in many countries, that did not happenuntil after World War II.

Henry FordMany men contributed to the development andproduction of the auto—William Durant organizedGeneral Motors; Charles Kettering, an engineeringgenius, developed the electric self-starter; and Ran-som E. Olds built the first mass-produced, moder-ately priced, light car. Above all the others loomed aname that would become synonymous with the au-tomobile itself—Henry Ford.

Ford had the reputation of being a progressive in-dustrial leader and a champion of the common peo-ple. As with all men and women who take on symbolicsignificance, the truth is less dramatic than the stories.

DowntownScene with

Cars





For example, Ford is often credited with inventing theassembly line. What he actually did (along with a teamof engineers) was adapt the assembly line and theconcept of interchangeable parts to the production ofautos. Introduced in 1913, the new method reducedthe time it took to produce a car from 14 hours to an

hour and a half. The product of the care-fully planned system, the Model T was theprototype of the inexpensive family car.

In 1914, Ford startled the country byannouncing that he was increasing theminimum pay of the Ford assembly-lineworker to $5 a day (almost twice the na-tional average pay for factory workers).

Ford was not a humanitarian. He wanted a depend-able workforce and realized that skilled workerswere less likely to quit if they received good pay.Ford was one of the first to recognize that workerswere consumers as well as producers and that theymight buy Model T Fords. But work in the Ford fac-tory had its disadvantages. Work on the assemblyline was repetitious and numbing. “You could dropover dead,” one worker recalled, “and they wouldn’tstop the line.” And when the line closed down, as itdid periodically, the workers were released withoutcompensation.

Henry Ford was not an easy man for whom towork. One newspaper account in 1928 called him “an

industrial fascist—the Mussoliniof Detroit.” He ruthlessly pres-sured his dealers and used themto bail him out of difficult finan-cial situations. Instead of bor-rowing money from a bank, heforced dealers to buy extra cars,trucks, and tractors. He used spies on theassembly lines and fired workers and exec-utives at the least provocation. But he didproduce a car that transformed America.

The Model T, which cost $600 in 1912,was reduced gradually in price until it soldfor only $290 in 1924. The “Tin Lizzie,” asit was affectionately called, was light andeasily repaired. Some owners claimed allone needed were a pair of pliers and somebaling wire to keep it running. If it gotstuck on bad roads, as it often did, a rea-sonably healthy man could lift it. Replace-ment parts were standardized and widelyavailable.

The Model T did not change from yearto year, nor did it deviate from its onecolor, black. Except for adding a self-starter, offering a closed model, and mak-ing a few minor face-lift changes, Ford

kept the Model T in 1927 much as he had intro-duced it in 1909. By that time, its popularity had de-clined as many people traded up to sleeker, morecolorful, and, they thought, more prestigious autosput out by Ford’s competitors; as a result, wages atFord dipped below the industry average.

The Model A, introduced in 1927, did not domi-nate the market as the Model T had done, but the gi-gantic River Rouge factory, spreading over a thou-sand acres in Dearborn, Michigan, was builtespecially to produce the new model. It became thesymbol of mass production in the new era. The autoindustry, like most American business, wentthrough a period of consolidation in the 1920s. In1908, more than 250 companies were producingcars in the United States. By 1929, only 44 remained.

The Exploding MetropolisThe automobile transformed the city and led to thegradual decline of the streetcar and the interurbantrolley. In the late nineteenth century, railroads andstreetcars had created suburbs near the major cities,but the great expansion of suburban population oc-curred in the 1920s. Shaker Heights, a Clevelandsuburb, was in some ways a typical development.Built on the site of a former Shaker community, thenew suburb was planned and developed by two

Automobile Assembly Line The automobile changed life in the UnitedStates in many ways. In 1929, 27 million cars were registered in the United States, upfrom 1 million in 1900. Hundreds of thousands of people were employed in the autoindustry, in manufacturing, sales, and service. The assembly line, first used by HenryFord in 1913, transformed not only the auto industry, but also the way other prod-ucts were manufactured. In addition, it changed the nature of work and altered thelives of those who worked on the line. Can you imagine working in a factory likethis? In what other ways did the auto change life for Americans in the 1920s? (Fromthe Collections of The Henry Ford Museum)

AutomobileAssembly Line,

1925

Henry Ford andHis First Car,

1918






businessmen. They controlled the size and style ofthe homes and restricted buyers. No blacks were al-lowed. Curving roads led off the main auto boule-vards, and landscaping and natural areas con-tributed to a parklike atmosphere. The suburbincreased in population from 1,700 in 1919 to morethan 15,000 in 1929, and the price of lots multipliedby 10 during the decade.

Other suburbs grew in an equally spectacularmanner. Beverly Hills, near Los Angeles, increasedin population by 2,485 percent during the decade.Grosse Point Park, near Detroit, grew by 725 per-cent, and Elmwood Park, near Chicago, increasedby 716 percent. The automobile also allowed indus-try to move to the suburbs. The number of employ-ees in manufacturing establishments in the suburbsof the 11 largest cities increased from 365,000 in1919 to 1.2 million in 1937.

The biggest land boom of all occurred in Florida,where the city of Miami mushroomed from 30,000 in1920 to 75,000 in 1925. One plot of land in West PalmBeach sold for $800,000 in 1923; two years later, it wasworth $4 million. A hurricane in 1926 ended theFlorida land boom temporarily, but most cities andtheir suburbs continued to grow during the decade.

The most spectacular growth of all took place intwo cities that the auto virtually created. Detroitgrew from 300,000 in 1900 to 1,837,000 in 1930, andLos Angeles expanded from 114,000 in 1900 to1,778,000 in 1930. With sprawling subdivisions con-nected by a growing network of roads, Los Angeleswas the city of the future.

Cities expanded horizontally during the 1920s,sprawling into the countryside, but city centers grewvertically. A building boom that peaked near the end

of the decade created new skylines for most urbancenters. Even cities such as Tulsa, Dallas, Kansas City,Memphis, and Syracuse built skyscrapers. By 1929,there were 377 buildings of more than 20 stories inAmerican cities. Many were started just before thestock market crash ended the building boom, andthe empty offices stood as a stark reminder of thelimits of expansion. The most famous skyscraper ofall, the Empire State Building in New York, whichtowers 102 stories in the air, was finished in 1931 butnot completely occupied until after World War II.

A Communications RevolutionChanging communications altered the way manyAmericans lived as well as the way they conductedbusiness. The telephone was first demonstrated in1876. By 1899, more than 1 million phones were inoperation. During the 1920s, the number of homeswith phones increased from 9 million to 13 million.Still, by the end of the decade, more than half ofAmerican homes were without phones.

Even more than the telephone, the radio symbol-ized the technological and communicationalchanges of the 1920s. Department stores quickly be-gan to stock radios, or crystal sets as they were called,but many Americans in the 1920s builttheir own receivers. The first station to be-gin commercial broadcasting was WWJ inDetroit in the summer of 1920. When WWJand KDKA in Pittsburgh broadcast theelection returns in 1920, they ushered in anew era in politics. The next year, WJZ ofNewark, New Jersey, broadcast the World Series, be-ginning a process that would transform baseball and

Ten Largest Cities in 1900 and 1930*

What trends are revealed by this chart? Why are some cities growing fasterthan others?

1900 1930

1. New York 4,023,000 1. New York 9,423,0002. Chicago 1,768,000 2. Chicago 3,870,0003. Philadelphia 1,458,000 3. Philadelphia 2,399,0004. Boston 905,000 4. Detroit 1,837,0005. Pittsburgh 622,000 5. Los Angeles 1,778,0006. St. Louis 612,000 6. Boston 1,545,0007. Baltimore 543,000 7. Pittsburgh 1,312,0008. San Francisco 444,000 8. San Francisco 1,104,0009. Cincinnati 414,000 9. St. Louis 1,094,000

10. Cleveland 402,000 10. Cleveland 1,048,000*Figures are for the entire metropolitan areas, including suburbs.

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census.

CollegeFootball, 1903




765

eventually football and basketball as well. Five hun-dred stations took to the airwaves in 1922 alone,many of them sponsored by department stores andothers by newspapers and colleges. In the same year,a radio station in New York broadcast the first com-mercial, an indication that the airways would be usedto increase the demand for the goods the factorieswere producing.

Much early broadcasting consisted of classicalmusic, but soon came news analysis and coverage ofpresidential inaugurals and important events. Somestations produced live dramas, but it was the serialssuch as Amos ’n’ Andy that more than any other pro-

grams made radio a national medium.Millions of people scattered across thecountry could sit in their living rooms (andafter 1927, in their cars) listening to thesame program. But until about 1924 oneneeded earphones to hear the radio. The

record industry grew just as rapidly. By the end of thedecade, people in all sections of the country werehumming the same popular songs. Actors and an-nouncers became celebrities. The radio, even morethan the automobile, marked the end of silence and,to a certain extent, the end of privacy.

A New Machine of Sound Most farmers did not own a ra-dio until the end of the 1930s when they finally got electricity, al-though a few had battery-powered models. The radio altered livesand brought a new magic of sound into 2 million to 3 million house-holds during the 1920s. Until about 1924, one had to use headsets tohear the sound. This man is using a battery-powered set with a wireconnected to an outside antenna. The reception on such sets was of-ten poor. Can you imagine a world without radio? How did the radioalter lives?

Hungarian Rag

AMERICAN VOICESBabe Ruth Homers in the 1927 World Series

The 1920s produced a number of sports heroes, but nonewere as famous or as flamboyant as Babe Ruth, who led theNew York Yankees to the American League Pennant and thento victory over the Pittsburgh Pirates in the World Series. Hehit .356 with 164 RBIs and 60 home runs (a record thatstood until 1961). Following is the account of game three ofthe World Series that appeared in the New York Times onSeptember 8, 1927.

The big time came in the seventh. The Yankshad the game safely stowed away and the sus-pense was over after six innings of sturdy batting,but the fans still stood up and demanded that Mr.Ruth get busy and do something for home andcountry. . . . “A homer, Babe! Give us a homer!”ran the burden of the plea, and the big fellowpulled his cap on tighter, took a reef in his belt,dug spikes into the ground and grimly faced littleMike Cvengros, the southpaw, who had just re-lieved Lee Meadows.

. . . Upward and onward, gaining speed andheight with every foot, the little white ball wingedwith terrific speed until it dashed itself against theseats of the right-field bleachers, more than aquarter of the way up the peopled slope.

And now the populace had its homer and itstood up and gave the glad, joyous howl that musthave rang out in the Roman arenas of old. . . .

Suddenly the Pirates looked very old and wearyand oppressed, and life seemed to lean very heavilyon their shoulders.

■ Has the language of sports journalism changed since1927?

■ Are any sports heroes today the equal of Babe Ruth inthe 1920s?

Source: “From Babe Ruth Homers in the 1927 World Series" New YorkTimes, September 8, 1927. Copyright © 1927 by The New York Times Co.Reprinted with Permission.




Have you ever noticed that television commercials canoften be more interesting and creative than the pro-grams? One authority has suggested that the best wayfor a foreign visitor to understand the American char-acter and popular culture is to study television com-mercials.Television advertising, the thesis goes, appealsto basic cultural assumptions.The nature of advertisingnot only reveals for historians the prejudices, fears, val-ues, and aspirations of a people but also makes an im-pact on historical development itself, influencing pat-terns of taste and purchasing habits. One modern criticcalls advertising a “peculiarly American force that nowcompares with such long-standing institutions as theschool and church in the magnitude of its social im-pact.”

As long as manufacturing was local and limited,there was no need to advertise. Before the Civil War,for example, the local area could usually absorb allthat was produced; therefore, a simple announcementin a local paper was sufficient to let people know thata particular product was available. But when factoriesbegan producing more than the local market couldordinarily consume, advertising came into play to cre-ate a larger demand.

Although national advertising began with the emer-gence of “name brands” in the late nineteenth cen-tury, it did not achieve the importance it now holdsuntil the 1920s. In 1918, the total gross advertisingrevenue in magazines was $58.5 million. By 1920, ithad more than doubled to $129.5 million, and by1929, it was nearly $200 million.These figures shouldnot be surprising in a decade that often equated ad-vertising with religion. The biblical Moses was calledthe “ad-writer for the Deity,” and in a best-sellingbook, Bruce Barton, a Madison Avenue advertiser,reinterpreted Jesus, the “man nobody knows,” as amaster salesman. Wrote Barton: “He would be a na-tional advertiser today.”

The designers of ads began to study psychology todetermine what motives, conscious or unconscious,

influenced consumers. One psychologistconcluded that the appeal to the human in-stinct for “gaining social prestige” wouldsell the most goods. Another way to sellproducts, many learned, was to create anx-iety in the mind of the consumer overbody odor, bad breath, oily hair, dandruff,

pimples, and other embarrassing ailments. In 1921, theLambert Company used the term halitosis for badbreath in an ad for Listerine.Within six years, sales ofListerine had increased from a little more than100,000 bottles a year to more than 4 million.

The appeal to sex also sold products, advertiserssoon found, as did the desire for the latest style or in-vention. But perhaps the most important thing adver-tisers marketed was youth. “We are going to sell

RECOVERING THE PAST

Advertising

Toothpaste advertisement.

766

Advertisementsfrom 1925 and

1927




767

every artificial thing there is,” a cosmetics salesmanwrote in 1926, “and above all it is going to be young-young-young! We make women feel young.” A greatportion of the ads were aimed at women. As onetrade journal announced: “The proper study ofmankind is man . . . , but the proper study of marketsis woman.”

REFLECTING ON THE PAST Look at the accompanyingadvertisements carefully.What do they tell you aboutAmerican culture in the 1920s? What do they suggestabout attitudes toward women? Do they reveal anyspecial anxieties? How are they similar to and differ-ent from advertising today?

Automobile advertisement (1929). (CORBIS)

Razor blade advertisement.




Even more dramatic was thephenomenon of the movies.Forty million viewers a week wentto the movies in 1922, and by1929 that number had increasedto more than 100 million. Earlymovies were made in New York,Chicago, and a few other cities,but by the mid-1920s, the villageof Hollywood, near Los Angeles,had become the movie capital ofthe world. Giant firms such asMetro-Goldwyn-Mayer, createdin 1924, dominated the industry,which ranked first among all in-dustries in California. Men,women, and children flocked tosmall theaters in the towns and tomovie palaces in the cities, wherethey could dream of romance oradventure. Charlie Chaplin,Rudolph Valentino, Lillian Gish,and Greta Garbo were more fa-mous and more important to mil-lions of Americans than weremost government officials. Themotion pictures, which beforethe war had attracted mostly theworking class, now seemed to ap-peal across class, regional, and generational lines.

The movies had the power to influence attitudesand ideas. In the 1920s, many parents feared thatthe movies would dictate ideas about sex and life.One young college woman remembered, “One day Iwent to see Viola Dana in The Five Dollar Baby. Thescenes which showed her as a baby fascinated me sothat I stayed to see it over four times. I forgot home,dinner and everything. About eight o’clock mothercame after me.” She also admitted that the moviestaught her how to smoke, and in some of the movies“there were some lovely scenes which just got me allhot ’n’ bothered.”

Not only movie stars became celebrities in the1920s. Sports figures such as Babe Ruth, BobbyJones, Jack Dempsey, and Red Grange were just asfamous. The great spectator sports of the decadeowed much to the increase in leisure time and to theautomobile, the radio, and the mass-circulationnewspaper. Thousands drove autos to college townsto watch football heroes perform. Millions listenedfor scores or read about the results the next day.

The year 1927 seemed to mark the beginning ofthe new age of mechanization and progress. Thatwas the year Henry Ford produced his 15 millionthcar and introduced the Model A. During that year,

radio-telephone service was established betweenSan Francisco and Manila. The first radio networkwas organized (CBS), and the first talking movie(The Jazz Singer) was released. In 1927, the HollandTunnel, the first underwater vehicular roadway,connected New York and New Jersey. It was also theyear that Charles Lindbergh flew fromNew York to Paris in his single-engineplane in 331/2 hours. Lindbergh was notthe first to fly the Atlantic, but he was thefirst to fly it alone, an accomplishmentthat won him $25,000 in prize money andcaptured the world’s imagination. He wasyoung and handsome, and his featseemed to represent not only the triumphof an individual but also the triumph of the ma-chine. Lindbergh never talked of his accomplish-ments in the first person; he always said “we,”meaning his airplane as well. He was greeted by 4million people when he returned to New York for atriumphant ticker-tape parade. Like many moviestars and sports heroes, he had become an instantcelebrity. When Americans cheered Lindbergh, theywere reaffirming their belief in the American dreamand their faith in individual initiative as well as intechnology.

A New Form of Entertainment This photograph shows opening night, October6, 1927, at a theater in Times Square, New York. The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson, the first com-mercially successful film with sound, attracted large audiences. The silent film continued to sur-vive for a few years, but gradually the sound film took over, forcing theaters to buy new equip-ment and actors to change their style. Some silent-film stars with unattractive voices wereforced to retire. Are movies as important today as they were in 1927? (Warner Brothers/FirstNational/The Kobal Collection)

CharlesLindbergh and

Spirit of St.Louis





HOPES RAISED, PROMISESDEFERREDThe 1920s was a time when all kinds of hopesseemed realizable. “Don’t envy successful sales-men—be one!” one advertisement screamed. Buy acar. Build a house. Start a career. Invest in land. In-vest in stocks. Make a fortune.

Not all Americans, of course, were intent on mak-ing a stock-market killing or expected to win a hugefortune. Some merely wished to retain traditionalvalues in a society that seemed to question them.Others wanted a steady job and a little respect. Stillothers hungered for the new appliances so allur-ingly described in ads and on the radio. Many dis-covered, however, that no matter how modest theirhopes might be, they lay tantalizingly out of reach.

Clash of ValuesDuring the 1920s, radio, movies, advertising, andmass-circulation magazines promoted a national,secular culture. But this new culture, which empha-sized consumption, pleasure, upward mobility, andeven sex, clashed with the traditional values of hardwork, thrift, church, family, and home. Although itwould be easy to see these cultural differences as areflection of an urban–rural conflict, in fact, manypeople clinging to the old ways had moved into thecities. Still, many Americans feared that new cul-tural values, scientific breakthroughs, and newideas such as bolshevism, relativism, Freudianism,and biblical criticism threatened their familiar wayof life. A trial over the teaching of evolutionary ideasin high school in the little town of Dayton, Ten-nessee, symbolized, even as it exaggerated, theclash of the old versus the new, the traditional ver-sus the modern, the city versus the country.

The scientific community and most educatedpeople had long accepted the basic concepts of evo-

lution, if not all the details of Charles Dar-win’s theories. But many Christians, espe-cially those from Protestant evangelicalchurches, accepted the Bible as the literaltruth. They believed that faith in theGospel message was crucial to living avirtuous life on earth and, more impor-tant, going to heaven. Many of thesefaithful saw a major spiritual crisis in the

dramatic changes of the 1920s. Resistance to theconcept of evolution resulted in legislative efforts inseveral states to forbid its teaching.

John Scopes, a young biology teacher, broke thelaw by teaching evolutionary theory to his class, andthe state of Tennessee brought him to trial. The

American Civil Liberties Union hired Clarence Darrow,perhaps the country’s most famous defense lawyer, todefend Scopes; the World Christian FundamentalistAssociation engaged William Jennings Bryan, formerpresidential candidate and secretary of state, to assistthe prosecution. Bryan was old and tired (he died onlya few days after the trial), but he was still an eloquentand deeply religious man. In cross-examination, Dar-row reduced Bryan’s statements to intellectual rubbleand also revealed that Bryan was at a loss to explainmuch of the Bible. He could not explain how Eve wascreated from Adam’s rib or where Cain got his wife.Nevertheless, the jury declared Scopes guilty, for hehad clearly broken the law.

The press from all over the country covered thetrial and upheld science and academic freedom.Journalists such as H. L. Mencken had a field daypoking fun at Bryan and the fundamentalists.“Heave an egg out a Pullman window,” Menckenwrote, “and you will hit a Fundamentalist almostanywhere in the United States today. . . . They areeverywhere where learning is too heavy a burden formortal minds to carry.”

Religious FundamentalismSome observers, including Mencken, thought thatthe Scopes trial ended what one writer in 1926called “the fundamentalist menace.” Yet religiousfundamentalism continued to survive in a worldfast becoming urban, modern, and sophisticated.Fundamentalism cut across many denominationsand covered over many differences, but all funda-mentalists believed in the literal interpretation andthe infallibility of the Bible and that Jesus Christ wasthe only road to salvation. They rejected secularism,liberal theology, pluralism, the Social Gospel, andany sense that reform on earth could lead to perfec-tion. They had a strong and unshakable belief inwhat they knew was the truth, and they were willingto fight for their belief.

Throughout the 1920s and the 1930s, attendanceat Christian colleges and the circulation of funda-mentalist periodicals and newspapers increaseddramatically, and evangelical ministers reachedlarge audiences. One of the most popular and flam-boyant of the ministers was Billy Sunday, a formerbaseball player who jumped about the stage as hepitched his brand of Christianity. For Sunday, Chris-tianity and patriotism were synonymous. Anotherpopular preacher was Aimee Semple McPherson, afaith healer who founded her own church, the Inter-national Church of the Four Square Gospel, in LosAngeles in 1927. Dressed as a University of SouthernCalifornia football player, she ran across the stage

ClarenceDarrow at theScopes Trial,

1925





John Steuart Curry, Baptismin Kansas Curry was one of the1920s regionalist painters who found in-spiration in the American heartland. Inthis painting, he depicts a religious ritualthat underscores the conflict betweenrural and urban values. Is there still areligious split today between urban andrural America? Or is the cultural dividedefined differently today? (John SteuartCurry, [1897–1946], Baptism in Kansas,1928. Oil on canvas, 40 x 50 in. [101.6 x127 cm]. Gift of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whit-ney © 1996 Whitney Museum of Ameri-can Art, New York [31.159])

“carrying the ball for Christ”; wielding a pitchfork,she drove the devil out of the auditorium.

Sunday and McPherson may have been flamboy-ant performers, but it was the radio that extended thereach of the fundamentalist preachers even moredramatically. McPherson was the first woman to holda radio license, and she had the second most popularradio show in Los Angeles in the late 1920s. In the1930s, The Old Fashioned Revival Hour was carriedon 356 stations and reached an audience of morethan 20 million people, more than any other prime-time broadcast. For many, the period between thewars was a time when people drifted away from orga-nized religion, an age of technological marvels, andmodernism in all fields, but for many others, it was atime when fundamentalist religion and old-fash-ioned values not only survived but also prospered.Yet many fundamentalist sects succeeded in winningnumerous converts because their leaders wereskilled at using modern technology.

Immigration and MigrationImmigrants and anyone else perceived as “un-American” seemed to threaten the old ways. Amovement to restrict immigration had existed fordecades. An act passed in 1882 prohibited the entryof criminals, paupers, and the insane, and specialagreements between 1880 and 1908 restricted bothChinese and Japanese immigration. But the fear and

intolerance of the war years and the period right af-ter the war resulted in major restrictive legislation.

The first strongly restrictive immigration lawpassed in 1917 over President Wilson’s veto. It re-quired a literacy test for the first time (an immigranthad to read a passage in one of a number of lan-guages). The bill also prohibited the immigration ofcertain political radicals. However, the literacy testdid not stop the more than 1 million im-migrants who poured into the country in1920 and 1921.

In 1921, Congress limited Europeanimmigration in any one year to 3 percentof the number of each nationality presentin the country in 1910. In order to limitimmigration from southern and easternEurope and to ban all immigration fromAsia, Congress in 1924 changed the quota to 2 per-cent of those in the country in 1890. The NationalOrigins Act of 1927 set an overall limit of 150,000 Eu-ropean immigrants a year, with more than 60 per-cent coming from Great Britain and Germany, butfewer than 4 percent from Italy.

Ethnicity increasingly became a factor in politi-cal alignments during the 1920s. Restrictive immi-gration laws, sponsored by Republicans, helped at-tract American Jews, Italians, and Poles to theDemocratic party. By 1924, the Democratic partywas so evenly divided between northern urbanCatholics and southern rural Protestants that the

EyeExamination atEllis Island, ca.

1913





party voted, by a very small margin, to condemnthe Ku Klux Klan.

The immigration acts of 1921, 1924, and 1927sharply limited European immigration and virtuallybanned Asian immigrants. The 1924 law contained a

provision prohibiting the entry of aliensineligible for citizenship. This provisionwas aimed directly at the Japanese, for theChinese had already been excluded; buteven without this provision, only a smallnumber could have entered the UnitedStates. “We try hard to be American,” oneCalifornia resident remarked, “But Ameri-

cans always say you always Japanese.” Denied bothcitizenship and the right to own land, the first-gen-eration issei placed all of their hope in their chil-dren, but the second-generation nisei often felttrapped between the land of their parents and theAmerica they lived in, and they still were treated assecond-class citizens.

The immigration laws of the 1920s cut off thestreams of cheap labor that had provided muscle foran industrializing country since the early nine-teenth century. At the same time, by exempting im-migrants from the Western Hemisphere, the newlaws opened the country to Mexican laborers whowere eager to escape poverty in their own land andto work in the fields and farms of California and theSouthwest. Though they never matched the flood ofeastern and southern Europeans who entered thecountry before World War I, Mexican immigrantssoon became the country’s largest first-generationimmigrant group. Nearly half a million arrived inthe 1920s, in contrast to only 31,000 in the firstdecade of the century. Mexican farm workers oftenlived in primitive camps, where conditions were un-sanitary and health care was nonexistent.

Mexicans also migrated to industrial cities suchas Detroit, St. Louis, and Kansas City. Northerncompanies recruited them and paid their trans-

Chicago(19,362)

Detroit(6,515)

Dallas(5,901)

Houston(14,149)

San Antonio(82,373)

Denver(6,837)

San Diego(9,266)

Los Angeles(97,116)

San Francisco(7,922)

El Paso(58,291)

WASHINGTON

OREGON

CALIFORNIA

NEVADA

IDAHO

MONTANA

WYOMING

UTAH

ARIZONA

COLORADO

NEWMEXICO

NORTHDAKOTA

SOUTHDAKOTA

NEBRASKA

KANSAS

OKLAHOMA

TEXAS

LOUISIANA

ARK.

MISSOURI

IOWA

MINN.

WISCONSIN

ILLINOIS IND.

MICHIGAN

OHIO

KENTUCKY

TENNESSEE

MISS. ALA. GEORGIA

FLORIDA

SOUTHCAROLINA

NORTHCAROLINA

VIRGINIAW.V.

PENN.

NEWYORK

N.J.

M.D. DEL.

CONN.R.I.

MASS.

VT.N.H.

MAINE

CANADA

MEXICO

PACIFICOCEAN

Gulf of Mexico

ATLANTICOCEAN

Below 1,000

1,001–10,000

10,001–50,000

50,001–100,000

Areas of Mexican Settlement(by states), 1930

*Population totals include Mexicans bornin Mexico and those born in the UnitedStates.

100,001–500,000

Over 500,000

Major cities (100,000or more) with significantMexican populations*

Mexican Population, 1930

Mexicans migrated across the border in great numbers in the 1920s; by 1930, they constituted a significant Spanish-speaking minority, especially in Texas, California, and Arizona.

1924Immigration

Law





portation. The Bethlehem Steel Corporationbrought 1,000 Mexicans into its Pennsylvania plantin 1923, and U.S. Steel imported 1,500 as strike-breakers to Lorain, Ohio, about the same time. Dur-ing the 1920s, the population of El Paso, Texas, be-came more than 50 percent Mexican, and that ofSan Antonio a little less than 50 percent Mexican. InCalifornia, the Mexican population reached 368,000in 1929, and in Los Angeles, the population wasabout 20 percent Mexican. Like African Americans,the Mexicans found opportunity by migrating, butthey did not escape prejudice or hardship.

African Americans migrated north in great num-bers from 1915 to 1920. Reduced European immi-gration and industrial growth caused many north-ern companies to recruit southern blacks. Trainsstopped at the depots in small southern towns,sometimes picking up hundreds of blacks in a singleday. Lured by editorials and advertisements placedby industries in northern black newspapers such asthe Chicago Defender and driven out of the South byan agricultural depression, many African Americanseagerly headed north.

Most black migrants were unskilled. They foundwork in the huge meatpacking plants of Chicago,East St. Louis, Omaha, and Kansas City and in theshipyards and steel mills. Only 50 African Americansworked for the Ford Motor Company in 1916, but2,500 worked there in 1920 and 10,000 in 1926. Theblack population of Chicago increased from 44,000in 1910 to 234,000 by 1930. Cleveland’s black popu-lation grew eightfold between 1910 and 1930.

African Americans unquestionably improvedtheir lives by moving north. But most were like theParkers, whom we met at the beginning of thischapter—their dreams were only partly fulfilled.Most crowded into segregated housing and facedprejudice and hate.

Often the young black men moved first, and onlylater brought their wives and children, putting greatpressure on many black families. Some young men,like John Parker, restrained their anger, but otherslike Richard Wright’s fictional Bigger Thomas, por-trayed movingly in Native Son (1940), struck out vio-lently against white society. The presence of moreAfrican Americans in the industrial cities of theNorth led to the development of black ghettos and

increased the racial tension that occa-sionally flared into violence.

One of the worst race riots took placein Chicago in 1919. The riot began at abeach on a hot July day. A black youthdrowned in a white swimming area.Blacks claimed he had been hit by stones,but the police refused to arrest any of the

white men. A group of African Americans attackedthe police, and the riot was on. It lasted four days.White youths drove through the black sections ofthe city, shooting blacks from car windows. Blacksreturned the fire. Several dozen were killed, andhundreds were wounded. The tension between theraces did not die when the riot was over.

Race riots broke out in other places as well. In theearly 1920s, few cities escaped racial tension and vi-olence. Riots exploded in Knoxville, Tennessee; Om-aha, Nebraska; and Tulsa, Oklahoma.Racial conflict in Elaine, Arkansas,demonstrated that not even the ruralSouth was immune.

The wave of violence and racism an-gered and disillusioned W. E. B. Du Bois,who had urged African Americans toclose ranks and support the Americancause during the war. In an angry editor-ial for The Crisis, he announced: “We re-turn from fighting. We return fighting.Make way for Democracy; we saved it in France, andby the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the UnitedStates of America, or know the reason why.”

Marcus Garvey: Black MessiahDu Bois was not the only militant black leader in thepostwar years. A flamboyant Jamaican fed a growingsense of black pride during that time. Marcus Garveyarrived in New York at age 29. Largely self-taught, hewas an admirer of Booker T. Washington. Although henever abandoned Washington’s philosophy of self-help, he thoroughly transformed it. Washington fo-cused on economic betterment through self-help;Garvey saw self-help as a means of political empow-erment by which African peoples would reclaim theirhomelands from European powers.

In Jamaica, Garvey had founded the UniversalNegro Improvement Association. By 1919, he hadestablished 30 branches in the United States and theCaribbean. He also set up the newspaper The NegroWorld, the Black Cross Nurses, and a chain of gro-cery stores, millinery shops, and restaurants. Hisbiggest project was the Black Star Line, a steamshipcompany that was to be owned and operated byAfrican Americans. Advocating the return of blacksto Africa, he declared himself the “provisional presi-dent of Africa,” a title he adopted from Eamon DeValera, the first “provisional president of Ireland.”Garvey glorified the African past and preached thatGod and Jesus were black.

Garvey won converts, mostly among lower-mid-dle-class blacks, through the force of his oratory andthe power of his personality, but especially through

The ChicagoDefender, TheChicago Riot

(1919)

F. J. Grimke,Address to

AfricanAmericanSoldiers

Returning fromWar (1919)






Black Messiah Marcus Garvey (second from the right), showndressed in his favorite uniform, became a hero for many black Ameri-cans. How did his appeal differ from that of other African Americanleaders? (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

his message that blacks should be proud of beingblack. “Up you mighty race, you can accomplishwhat you will,” Garvey thundered. Thousands ofblacks cheered as his Universal African Legions,dressed in blue and red uniforms, marched by. Theywaved the red, black, and green flag and sang“Ethiopia, the Land of Our Fathers,” while thou-sands invested their money in the Black Star Line.The line soon collapsed, however, in part becausewhite entrepreneurs sold Garvey inferior ships andequipment. Garvey was arrested for using the mailsto defraud shareholders and was sentenced to fiveyears in prison. Although President Coolidge com-muted the sentence, Garvey was ordered deportedas an undesirable alien and left America in 1927.Despite his failures, he convinced thousands ofblack Americans, especially the poor and discour-aged, that they could join together and accomplishsomething and that they should feel pride in theirheritage and their future.

The Harlem RenaissanceA group of black writers, artists, and intellectualswho settled in Harlem after the war led a movementrelated in some ways to Garvey’s black nationalismcrusade. It was less flamboyant but in the end moreimportant. They studied anthropology, art, history,and music, and they wrote novels and poetry thatexplored the ambivalent role of blacks in America.Like Garvey, they expressed their pride in beingblack and sought their African roots and the folk tra-dition of blacks in America. But unlike Garvey, theyhad no desire to go back to Africa; instead, theysought a way to be both black and American.

Alain Locke, the first black Rhodes scholar and adapper professor of philosophy at Howard University,was in one sense the father of the movement calledthe Harlem Renaissance. His collection of essays andart, The New Negro (1925), announced the movementto the outside world. Langston Hughes, a poet and

Poet of the Harlem Renaissance Langston Hughes wasone of the most important Harlem Renaissance writers. Like manyother African American writers, he sought out his African roots. Buthe later wrote: “I was only an American Negro who loved the surfaceof Africa and the rhythms of Africa, but I was not Africa. I wasChicago and Kansas City and Broadway and Harlem.” What was thelarger impact of the Harlem Renaissance? (Fales Library/Special Collec-tions, New York University)




novelist born in Missouri, went to high school inCleveland, lived in Mexico, and traveled in Europeand Africa before settling in Harlem. He wrote bitterbut humorous poems, using black vernacular to de-scribe the pathos and the pride of African Americans.In Weary Blues, he adapted the rhythm and beat ofblack jazz and the blues to his poetry.

Jazz was an important force in Harlem in the1920s, and many prosperous whites came fromdowntown to listen to Louis Armstrong, FletcherHenderson, Duke Ellington, and other black musi-cians. The promise of expressing primitive emotions,the erotic atmosphere, the music, and the illegal sex,drugs, and liquor made Harlem an intriguing placefor many brought up in Victorian white America.

Harlem jazz was also exported to Europe, espe-cially to Paris. Returning black servicemen reportedthat African Americans were treated without preju-dice in France, and black musicians began to drift tothe Montmartre section of Paris, where Americanjazz and jazz singers such as the seductive JosephineBaker, star of Revue Nègre, became the toast of thetown. Ironically, many American tourists in the 1920sfirst heard an African American jazz band in Paris.Many Europeans criticized the United States for itsmaterialism and for its innocent exuberance. Theywere not impressed with American literature orAmerican art, but they loved American jazz. It wasthe beginning of the export of American popular cul-ture that would impress most of the rest of the worldin the decades after World War II.

The Jamaican Claude McKay, who came to Harlemby way of Tuskegee and Kansas, wrote about the un-derside of life in Harlem in Home to Harlem (1925),one of the most popular of the “new Negro” novels.McKay portrayed two black men—one, named Jake,who has deserted the white man’s army and finds alife of simple and erotic pleasure in Harlem’scabarets, the other an intellectual who is unable tomake such an easy choice. “My damned white educa-tion has robbed me of much of the primitive vitality,the pure stamina, the simple unwaggering strengthof the Jakes of the negro race,” he laments.

This was the dilemma of many of the Harlemwriters: how to be both black and intellectual.They worried that they depended on white pa-trons, who introduced them to writers and artistsin Greenwich Village and made contacts for themat New York publishing houses. Many of the whitepatrons pressured the black writers to conform tothe white elite idea of black authenticity. The blackwriters resented this intrusion, but it was theironly hope to be recognized. Jean Toomer, moreself-consciously avant-garde than many of theother black writers, wrote haunting poems trying

to explore the difficulty of black identity; in thenovel Cane (1923), he sketched maladjusted, al-most grotesque characters who expressed some ofthe alienation that many writers felt in the 1920s.

Many African American writers felt alienated fromAmerican society. They tried living in Paris or inGreenwich Village, but most felt drawn to Harlem,which in the 1920s was rapidly becoming the centerof black population in New York City. More than117,000 white people left the neighborhood duringthe decade, while more than 87,000 blacks moved in.Countee Cullen, the only writer in the group actuallyborn in New York, remarked, “In spite of myself I findthat I am activated by a strong sense of race con-sciousness.” So, too, was Zora Neale Hurston acti-vated—born in Florida, she went to New York tostudy at Barnard College, earned an advanced degreein anthropology from Columbia University, and usedher interest in folklore to write stories of robust andpassionate rural blacks. Much of the work of theHarlem writers was read by very small numbers, butanother generation of young black intellectuals inthe 1960s still struggling with the dilemma of how tobe both black and American would rediscover it.

The Lost GenerationOne did not need to be black to be disillusioned withsociety. Many white intellectuals, writers, and artistsalso felt alienated from what they perceived as thematerialism, conformity, and provincial prejudicethat dominated American life. Many writers, includ-ing F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, E. E. Cum-mings, and T. S. Eliot, moved to Europe. They wantedto divorce themselves from the country they pre-tended to detest, but cheap rents and inexpensivefood in Paris also influenced their decisions. Many ofthose who gathered at European cafés, drinking thewine that was illegal in the United States, wrote nov-els, plays, and poems about America. Like so manyAmerican intellectuals in all periods, they had alove–hate relationship with their country.

For many writers, the disillusionment began withthe war itself. Hemingway eagerly volunteered to goto Europe as an ambulance driver. But when he waswounded on the Italian front, he re-evaluated thepurpose of the war and the meaning of all theslaughter. His novel The Sun Also Rises (1926) is thestory of the purposeless European wanderings of agroup of Americans. But it is also the story of JakeBarnes, who was made impotent by a war injury. His“unreasonable wound” is a symbol of the futility oflife in the postwar period.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, who loved to frequent thecafés and parties in Paris, became a celebrity during




the 1920s. He was sometimes confused, even in hisown mind, with the dashing heroes about whom hewrote. He epitomized some of the despair of hisgeneration, which had “grown up to find all Godsdead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” Hisbest novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), was a critique ofthe American success myth. The book describes theelaborate parties given by a mysterious business-man, who, it turns out, has made his money illegallyas a bootlegger. Gatsby hopes to win back a beauti-ful woman who has forsaken him for another man.But wealth does not buy happiness, and Gatsby’s lifeends tragically, as so many lives seemed to end inthe novels written during this decade.

Paris was the place to which many American writ-ers flocked, but it was not necessary to live in Franceto criticize American society. Sherwood Anderson,born in Camden, Ohio, created a fictional midwesterntown in Winesburg, Ohio (1919) as a way to describethe dull, narrow, warped lives that seemed to providea metaphor for American culture. Sinclair Lewis, an-other midwesterner, created scathing parodies ofmiddle-class, small-town life in Main Street (1920)and Babbitt (1922). The “hero” of the latter novel is asalesman from the town of Zenith. He is a “he-man,” a“regular guy” who distrusts “red professors,” foreign-born people, and anyone from New York.

But no one had more fun laughing at the Ameri-can middle class than H. L. Mencken, who editedthe American Mercury in Baltimore and denouncedwhat he called the “booboisie.” He labeled WoodrowWilson a “self-bamboozled Presbyterian” and pokedfun at Warren Harding’s prose, which he said re-minded him of “a string of wet sponges, . . . of stalebean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idioti-cally through endless nights.”

Ironically, while intellectuals despaired overAmerican society and complained that art could not

survive in a business-dominated civiliza-tion, literature flourished. The novels ofHemingway, Fitzgerald, Lewis, WilliamFaulkner, and Gertrude Stein; the plays ofEugene O’Neill and Maxwell Anderson;the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, E. E.Cummings, and Marianne Moore; andthe work of many black writers, such as

Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Zora NealeHurston, marked the 1920s as one of the most cre-ative decades in American literature.

Women Struggle for EqualityAny mention of the role of women in the 1920sbrings to mind the image of the flapper—a youngwoman with a short skirt, bobbed hair, and a boyish

figure dancing the Charleston, smoking,drinking, and enjoying sexual encounters.F. Scott Fitzgerald’s heroines in novelssuch as This Side of Paradise (1920) andThe Great Gatsby (1925) provided the rolemodels for young people to imitate, andmovie stars such as Clara Bow and Gloria Swanson,aggressively seductive on the screen, supplied evenmore dramatic examples of flirtatious and provoca-tive behavior.

Without question, women acquired more sexualfreedom in the 1920s. “None of the Victorian moth-ers had any idea how casually theirdaughters were accustomed to beingkissed,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote. How-ever, it is difficult, if not impossible, toknow how accustomed those daughters(and their mothers) were to kissing andenjoying other sexual activity. Contracep-tives, especially the diaphragm, becamemore readily available during the decade,and Margaret Sanger, who had been in-dicted for sending birth control informationthrough the mail in 1914, organized the first Ameri-can birth control conference in 1921. Still, moststates made the selling or prescribing of birth con-trol devices illegal, and federal laws prohibitedsending literature discussing birth control throughthe mail.

Family size declined during the decade (from 3.6children in 1900 to 2.5 in 1930), and young peoplewere apparently more inclined to marryfor love than for security. More womenexpected sexual satisfaction in marriage(nearly 60 percent in one poll) and feltthat divorce was the best solution for anunhappy marriage. In another poll,nearly 85 percent approved of sexual in-tercourse as an expression of love and af-fection and not simply for procreation.But the polls were hardly scientific andtended to be biased toward the attitudes of the ur-ban middle class. Despite more freedom forwomen, the double standard persisted.

Women’s lives were shaped by other innovationsof the 1920s. Electricity, running water, washing ma-chines, vacuum cleaners, and other labor-savingdevices made housework easier for the middle class.Yet these developments did not touch large num-bers of rural and urban working-class women. Evenmiddle-class women discovered that new appli-ances did not reduce time spent doing housework.Standards of cleanliness rose, and women wereurged to make their houses more spotless than anynineteenth-century housekeeper would have felt

Clara Bow, the“It” Girl, 1927

ErnestHemingway on

Safari

MargaretSanger,

“Happiness inMarriage”(1926)

EleanorRowland

Wembridge,“Petting andthe Campus”

(1925)








necessary. At the same time, magazines and news-papers bombarded women with advertising urgingthem to buy products to make themselves betterhousekeepers yet still be beautiful. It must havebeen frustrating for those who could not afford themagic new products or whose hands and teeth andskin failed to look youthful despite all their efforts.The ads also promoted new dress styles, shorterskirts, and no corsets. The young adopted themquickly, and they also learned to swim (and to dis-play more of their bodies on the beach), to play ten-nis (but only if they belonged to a tennis club), andto ride a bicycle.

More women worked outside the home. Whereasin 1890, only 17 percent of women were employed,

by 1933, some 22 percent were. But theirshare of manufacturing jobs fell from 19percent to 16 percent between1900 and 1930. The greatest ex-pansion of jobs was in white-collar occupations that were be-ing feminized—for example,secretary, bookkeeper, clerk,and telephone operator. In

1930, fully 96 percent of stenographerswere women. Although more marriedwomen had jobs (an increase of 25 per-cent during the decade), most of themheld low-paying jobs, and most singlewomen assumed that marriage would ter-minate their employment.

For some working women—secretariesand teachers, for example—marriage of-ten led to dismissal from their jobs. Mar-ried women are “very unstable in theirwork; their first claim is to home and chil-dren,” a businessman concluded. Al-though women might not be able to workafter their weddings (in one poll of collegemen, only one in nine said he would allow

his wife to work after marriage), a job as a secretarycould be good preparation for marriage. A businessoffice was a good place to meet eligible men, butmore than that, a secretary learned endurance, self-effacement, and obedience, traits that would makeher a good wife. Considering these attitudes, it is notsurprising that the disparity between male and fe-male wages widened during the decade. By 1930,women earned only 57 percent of what men werepaid.

The image of the flapper in the 1920s promisedmore freedom and equality for women than they ac-tually achieved. The flapper was young, white, slen-der, and upper class (Fitzgerald fixed her ideal age at19), and most women did not fit those categories.The flapper was frivolous and daring, not profes-sional and competent. Although the proportion of

Women in the Labor Force, 1900–1930

Why is the percentage of women working gradually increasing between 1900 and 1930? Why are more married women working?

Women in Percentage of Women Percentage of Total Year Labor Force in Total Labor Force Women of Working Age Single Married Widowed

1900 4,997,000 18.1 20.6 66.2 15.4 18.41910* 7,640,000 NA 25.4 60.2 24.7 15.01920 8,347,000 20.4 23.7 77.0† 23.0 —†

1930 10,632,000 21.9 24.8 53.9 28.9 17.2*Data not comparable with other censuses due to a difference in the basis of enumeration.† Single includes widowed and divorced.

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census.

Working Women of the 1920s Although the flapper look of shortskirts and bobbed hair appeared in the workplace in the 1920s, for most workingwomen of the era, employed in low-paying jobs as file clerks, typists, and tele-phone operators, the flapper lifestyle of freedom and equality was more illusionthan reality. (Bettmann-CORBIS)

CarolineManning, The

ImmigrantWoman and

Her Job (1930)





women lawyers and bankers increased slightly dur-ing the decade, the rate of growth declined, and thenumber of women doctors and scientists dropped.In the 1920s, women acquired some sexual freedomand a limited amount of opportunity outside thehome, but the promise of the prewar feminist move-ment and the hopes that accompanied the suffrageamendment remained unfulfilled.

Winning the vote for women did not ensure equal-ity. Women could vote, but often they could not serveon juries. In some states, women could not hold of-fice, own a business, or sign a contract without theirhusbands’ permission. Women were usually held re-sponsible for an illegitimate birth, and divorce lawsalmost always favored men. Many women leaderswere disappointed in the small turnout of women inthe presidential election of 1920. To educate womenin the reality of politics, they organized the NationalLeague of Women Voters to “finish the fight.” A non-partisan organization, it became an important edu-cational organization for middle-class women, but itdid little to eliminate inequality.

Alice Paul, who had led the militant NationalWomen’s Party in 1916, chained herself to the WhiteHouse fence once again to promote an equal rightsamendment to the Constitution. The amendmentgot support in Wisconsin and in several other states,but many women opposed it on the grounds thatsuch an amendment would cancel the special legisla-tion to protect women in industry that had taken solong to enact in the two preceding decades. Femi-nists disagreed in the 1920s on the proper way to pro-mote equality and rights for women, but the politicaland social climate was not conducive to feministcauses.

Rural America in the 1920sMost farmers did not share in the prosperity of the1920s. Responding to worldwide demands and ris-ing prices for wheat, cotton, and other products,many farmers invested in additional land, tractors,and farm equipment during the war. Then pricestumbled. By 1921, the price of wheat had dropped40 percent, corn 32 percent, and hogs 50 percent.Total farm income fell from $10 million to $4 millionin the postwar depression. Many farmers could notmake payments on their tractors. Because the valueof land fell, they often lost both mortgage and landand still owed the bank money.

The changing nature of farming was part of theproblem. The use of chemical fertilizers and new hy-brid seeds, some developed by government experi-ment stations and land-grant colleges, increased theyield per acre. By 1930, some 920,000 tractors and

900,000 trucks were in use on American farms. Theynot only made farming more efficient, but they alsoallowed land formerly used to raise feed for horsesand mules to be planted in cash crops. Productionincreased at the very time that worldwide demandfor American farm products declined. In 1929, theUnited States shipped abroad only one-third thewheat it had exported in 1919, and only one-ninththe meat. Farmers, especially in North America andEurope, had prospered during the war because of thegreat demand for food. Expecting the demand tocontinue, many farmers borrowed to purchase newequipment and to increase the number of acres theycultivated. But the demand for produce did not last,leading to a worldwide decline in prices and makingdebts difficult to repay.

Victims not only of the global marketplace, Ameri-can farmers were also vulnerable to the power of na-ture. This became apparent in the spring of 1927when the worst flood in the nation’s history devas-tated the Mississippi River valley, flooding more than27,000 square miles of land and making a millionpeople homeless.

Not all farmers suffered. Large commercial opera-tions, using mechanized equipment, produced mostof the cash crops. At the same time, many small farm-ers found themselves unable to compete withagribusiness. Some of them, along with many farmlaborers, solved the problem of declining rural prof-itability by leaving the farms. In 1900, fully 40 percentof the labor force worked on farms; by 1930, only 21percent earned their living from the land.

Few farmers could afford the products of the newtechnology. Although many middle-class urban fam-ilies were more prosperous than they had everbeen—buying new cars, radios, and bathrooms—only one farm family in ten had electricity in the1920s. The lot of the farm wife had not changed forcenturies. She ran a domestic factory, did all thehousehold chores, and helped on the farm as well.

Farmers tried to improve their position by sup-porting legislation in the state capitals and in Wash-ington. Most of their efforts went into theMcNary–Haugen Farm Relief Bill, which would haveprovided government price support for key agricul-tural products. The bill was introduced a number oftimes between 1924 and 1928 without success, butfarm organizations in all parts of the country learnedhow to work together to influence Congress. Thatwould have important ramifications for the future.

The Workers’ Share of ProsperityHundreds of thousands of workers improved theirstandard of living in the 1920s, yet inequality grew.




Real wages increased 21 percent between 1923 and1929, but corporate dividends went up by nearlytwo-thirds in the same period. The workers did notprofit from the increased production they helpedcreate, and that boded ill for the future. The richest5 percent of the population increased their share ofthe wealth from a quarter to a third, and the wealth-iest 1 percent controlled a whopping 19 percent ofall income.

Even among workers there was great disparity.Those employed on the auto assembly lines or inthe new factories producing radios saw their wagesgo up, and many saw their hours decline. Yet themajority of American working-class families did notearn enough to move them much beyond subsis-tence level. One study suggested that a familyneeded $2,000 to $2,400 in 1924 to maintain an“American standard of living.” But in that year, 16million families earned less than $2,000. For thechambermaids in New York hotels who workedseven days a week or the itinerant Mexican migrantlaborers in the Southwest, labor was so exhaustingthat at the end of the day, it was impossible to takeadvantage of new consumer products and modernlifestyles, even if they had the money.

Organized labor fell on hard times in the 1920s.Labor union membership fell from about 5 millionin 1921 to less than 3.5 million in 1929. Although amajority of American workers had never supportedunions, unions now faced competition from em-ployers’ new policies. A number of large employerslured workers away from unions with promises thatseemed to equal union benefits: profit-sharingplans, pensions, and their own company unions.The National Association of Manufacturers and in-dividual businesses carried on a vigorous campaignto restore the open shop. The leadership of the AFLbecame increasingly conservative during thedecade and had little interest in launching move-ments to organize laborers in the large industries.

The more aggressive unions such as the UnitedMine Workers, led by the flamboyant John L. Lewis,also encountered difficulties. The union’s attempt toorganize miners in West Virginia had led to violentclashes between union members and importedguards. President Harding called out troops in 1921to put down an “army organized by the strikers.”The next year, Lewis called the greatest coal strike inhistory and further violence erupted, especially inWilliamson County, Illinois. Internal strife alsoweakened the union, and Lewis had to accept wagereductions in the negotiations of 1927.

Organized labor, like so many other groups, strug-gled desperately during the decade to take advantageof the prosperity. It won some victories, and it made

some progress. But American affluence was beyondthe reach of many groups during the decade. Eventu-ally, the inequality would lead to disaster.




THE BUSINESS OF POLITICS“Among the nations of the earth today Americastands for one idea: Business,” a popular writer an-nounced in 1921. “Through business, properly con-ceived, managed and conducted, the human race isfinally to be redeemed.” Bruce Barton, the head ofthe largest advertising firm in the country, was theauthor of one of the most popular nonfiction booksof the decade. In The Man Nobody Knows (1925), hedepicted Christ as “the founder of modern busi-ness.” He took 12 men from the bottom ranks of so-ciety and forged them into a successful organiza-tion. “All work is worship; all useful service prayer,”Barton argued. If the businessman would just copyChrist, he could become a supersalesman.

Business, especially big business, prospered inthe 1920s, and the image of businessmen, enhancedby their important role in World War I, rose further.The government reduced regulation, lowered taxes,and cooperated to aid business expansion at homeand abroad. Business and politics, alwaysintertwined, were especially allied duringthe decade. Wealthy financiers such asAndrew Mellon and Charles Dawes par-ticipated in formulating both domesticand foreign policy. Even more significant,a new kind of businessman was electedpresident in 1928. Herbert Hoover, inter-national engineer and efficiency expert,was the very symbol of the modern techniques andpractices that many people confidently expected totransform the United States and the world. Businessleaders wielded power in other countries, but in nocountry were business and politics so closely inter-twined as in the United States.

Harding and CoolidgeThe Republicans, almost assured of victory in 1920because of bitter reaction against Woodrow Wilson,might have preferred nominating their old standard-bearer, Theodore Roosevelt, but he had died the yearbefore. Warren G. Harding, a former news-paper editor from Ohio, captured thenomination after meeting late at nightwith some of the party’s most powerfulmen in a hotel room in Chicago. No oneever discovered what Harding promised,but the meeting in the “smoke-filled

Warren G.Harding

Edward EarlePurinton, “BigIdeas from Big

Business”(1921)






room” became legendary. To balance the ticket, theRepublicans chose as their vice presidential candi-date Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts, who hadgained attention by his firm stand during the Bostonpolice strike. The Democrats seemed equallyunimaginative. After 44 roll calls, they finally nomi-nated Governor James Cox of Ohio and pickedFranklin D. Roosevelt, a young politician from NewYork, to run as vice president. Roosevelt had beenthe assistant secretary of the navy but otherwise hadnot distinguished himself.

Harding won in a landslide. His 60.4 percent ofthe vote was the widest margin yet recorded in apresidential election. More significant, fewer than50 percent of the eligible voters went to the polls.The newly enfranchised women, especially in work-

ing-class neighborhoods, stayed awayfrom the voting booths. So did large num-bers of men. To many people, it did notseem to matter who was president.

In contrast to the reform-minded pres-idents Roosevelt and Wilson, Harding re-flected the conservatism of the 1920s. Hewas a jovial man who brought many Ohio

friends to Washington and placed them in positionsof power. A visitor to the White House describedHarding and his cohorts discussing the problems ofthe day, with “the air heavy with tobacco smoke,trays with bottles containing every imaginablebrand of whiskey” near at hand.

At a little house a few blocks from the WhiteHouse on K Street, Harry Daugherty, Harding’s at-torney general and longtime associate, held forthwith a group of friends. Amid bootleg liquor and theatmosphere of a brothel, they did a brisk business inselling favors, taking bribes, and organizing illegalschemes. Harding, however, was not personally cor-rupt, and the nation’s leading businessmen ap-proved of his policies of higher tariffs and lowertaxes. Nor did Harding spend all his time drinkingwith his cronies. He called a conference on disarma-ment and another to deal with the problems of un-employment, and he pardoned Eugene Debs, whohad been in prison since the war. Harding once re-marked that he could never be considered one of

the great presidents, but he thought per-haps he might be “one of the best loved.”He was probably right. When he died sud-denly in August 1923, the American peo-ple genuinely mourned him.

Only after Calvin Coolidge becamepresident did the full extent of the cor-ruption and scandals of the Harding ad-ministration come to light. A Senate com-mittee discovered that the secretary of the

interior, Albert Fall, had illegally leased govern-ment-owned oil reserves in the Teapot Dome sec-tion of Wyoming to private business interests in re-turn for over $300,000 in bribes. Illegal activitieswere also discovered in the Veterans Administrationand elsewhere in government. Daugherty resignedin disgrace, the secretary of the navy barely avoidedprison, two of Harding’s advisers committed sui-cide, and Fall was sentenced to jail.

Though dour and taciturn, Coolidge was honest.No hint of scandal infected his administration or hispersonal life. Born in a little town in Vermont, hewas sworn in as president by his father, a justice ofthe peace, in a ceremony conducted by the light ofkerosene lamps at his ancestral home. To many,Coolidge represented old-fashioned rural values,simple religious faith, and personal integrity—aworld fast disappearing in the 1920s.

Coolidge ran for re-election in 1924 with the fi-nancier Charles Dawes as his running mate. Therewas little question that he would win. The Democ-rats were so equally divided between northern ur-ban Catholics and southern rural Protestants that ittook 103 ballots before they nominated John Davis,an affable corporate lawyer with little national fol-lowing.

A group of dissidents, mostly representing thefarmers and the laborers dissatisfied with bothnominees, formed a new Progressive party. Theyadopted the name, but little else, from TheodoreRoosevelt’s party of 1912. Nominating Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin for president, they drafted aplatform calling for government ownership of rail-roads and ratification of the child labor amend-ment. La Follette attacked the “control of govern-ment and industry by private monopoly.” Hereceived nearly 5 million votes, only 3.5 millionshort of Davis’s total. But Coolidge and prosperitywon easily.

Like Harding, Coolidge was a popular president.Symbolizing his administration was his wealthy sec-retary of the treasury, Andrew Mellon, who set out tolower individual and corporate taxes. In 1922, Con-gress, with Mellon’s endorsement, repealed thewartime excess profits tax. Although it raised sometaxes slightly, it exempted most families from anytax at all by giving everyone a $2,500 exemption,plus $400 for each dependent. In 1926, the rate waslowered to 5 percent and the maximum surtax to 40percent. Only families with incomes above $3,500paid any taxes at all. In 1928, Congress reducedtaxes further, removed most excise taxes, and low-ered the corporate tax rate. The 200 largest corpora-tions increased their assets during the decade from$43 to $81 billion.

PresidentsHarding and

Coolidge

ExecutiveOrders and

SenateResolutions on

the TeapotDome Scandal

(1920)






“The chief business of the American people isbusiness,” Coolidge announced. “The man whobuilds a factory builds a temple. . . . The man whoworks there worships there.” Coolidge’s idea of theproper role of the federal government was to have aslittle as possible to do with the functioning of busi-ness and the lives of the people. Not everyone ap-proved of his policies, or his personality. “No otherpresident in my time slept so much,” a White Houseusher remembered. But most Americans approvedof his inactivity.

Herbert HooverOne bright light in the lackluster Harding andCoolidge administrations was Herbert Hoover.Born in Iowa, raised in Oregon, and educated inCalifornia, he served as secretary of commerce un-der both presidents. Hoover had made a fortune asan international mining engineer before 1914 andthen earned a reputation as a great humanitarianfor his work managing the Belgian Relief Commit-tee and directing the Food Administration duringWorld War I. He was mentioned as a candidate forpresident in 1920, when he had the support of such

progressives as Jane Addams, Louis Brandeis, andWalter Lippmann.

Hoover was a dynamo of energy and efficiency. Heexpanded his department to control and regulate theairlines, radio, and other new industries. By directingthe Bureau of Standards to work with the trade asso-ciations and with individual businesses, Hoovermanaged to standardize the size of almost everythingmanufactured in the United States, from nuts andbolts and bottles to automobile tires, mattresses, andelectric fixtures. He supported zoning codes, theeight-hour workday in major industries, better nutri-tion for children, and the conservation of national re-sources. He pushed through the Pollution Act of1924, which represented the first attempt to controloil pollution along the American coastline.

As secretary of commerce, Hoover used the forceof the federal government to regulate, stimulate,and promote, but he believed first of all in free en-terprise and local volunteer action to solve prob-lems. In 1921, he convinced Harding of the need todo something about unemployment during thepostwar recession. The president’s conference onunemployment, convened in September 1921,marked the first time the national government had

Businessmen and the President Beginning in 1920, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and HarveyFirestone went on auto trips together in part to celebrate the new automobile culture. In the summer of 1924,they stopped in Plymouth, Vermont, to visit with President Calvin Coolidge, who was vacationing at the familyhomestead. A local photographer took this photograph and made it into a postcard, which he sold as a sou-venir. The president is autographing a sap bucket to be placed in Henry Ford’s new museum near Detroit.From left to right: Harvey Firestone, President Coolidge, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Russell Firestone, GraceCoolidge, and John Coolidge, the president’s father. Coolidge often pretended he was a simple Vermonter, butactually he was much more comfortable around the corporate elite than he was dealing with ordinary Ameri-cans. What was the danger of the close relationship between the presidents and business leaders in the 1920s?Does that close relationship still exist? (Allen F. Davis Collection)




admitted any responsibility to the unemployed. Theresult of the conference (the first of many on a vari-ety of topics that Hoover was to organize) was aflood of publicity, pamphlets, and advice from ex-perts. Most of all, the conference urged state and lo-cal governments and businesses to cooperate on avolunteer basis to solve the problem. The primaryresponsibility of the federal government, Hooverbelieved, was to educate and promote. With all hisactivity and his organizing, Hoover earned a reputa-tion during the Harding and Coolidge years as an ef-ficient and progressive administrator and as a hu-manitarian who could organize flood relief. Hebecame one of the most popular figures in govern-ment service.

Global ExpansionThe decade of the 1920s is often remembered as atime of isolation, when the United States rejectedthe League of Nations treaty and turned its back onthe rest of the world. It is true that many Americanshad little interest in what was going on in Paris,Moscow, or Rio de Janeiro, and it is also true that abloc of congressmen was determined that theUnited States would never again enter another Eu-ropean war. But the United States remained in-volved—indeed, increased its involvement—in in-ternational affairs during the decade. Although theUnited States never joined the League of Nations,and a few dedicated isolationists, led by SenatorWilliam Borah, blocked membership in the WorldCourt, the United States cooperated with manyleague agencies and conferences and took the leadin trying to reduce naval armaments and to solvethe problems of international finance caused in partby the war.

Looking back from the vantage point of WorldWar II, the decade of the 1920s seemed happy, pro-ductive, and normal in most parts of the world. Butthere were ominous clouds on the horizon. GreatBritain and France were slow to recover from thewar, while Germany was mired in economic and po-litical chaos. Japan and Italy were unhappy with thepeace settlement. Germany’s African colonies hadbeen split between France and Great Britain, butimperialism and colonial empires had not dimin-ished. Fascism was establishing a foothold in Spainand Italy, while Soviet communism was becomingmore firmly entrenched in Russia. The collapse ofthe Ottoman Empire had led to the establishment ofa new Turkish republic, but the rest of the MiddleEast was fragmented both economically and politi-cally and presented problems that would persist forthe rest of the twentieth century and beyond.

Business, trade, and finance marked the decadeas one of international expansion for the UnitedStates. With American corporate investments over-seas growing sevenfold during the decade, theUnited States was transformed from a debtor to acreditor nation. The continued involvement of theUnited States in the affairs of South and CentralAmerican countries also indicated that the countryhad growing interests beyond its national bound-aries. The United States also increased its interna-tional position in cable communication, wirelesstelegraphy, news services, and motion pictures. Insome areas, such as film, the United States led theworld. In 1925, 95 percent of the films shown inGreat Britain and Canada and 70 percent of thoseshown in France were American made.

Despite growing global expansion in many areas,the U.S. government took up its role of internationalpower reluctantly and with a number of contradic-tory and disastrous results. “We seek no part in di-recting the destiny of the world,” Harding announcedin his inaugural address, but even Harding discov-ered that international problems would not disap-pear. One that required immediate attention was thenaval arms race. Since the late nineteenth century,the battleship had become the symbol of nationalpower and pride. Although the aircraft carrier wouldbe more important than the battleship in World WarII, the battleship retained its prestige between thewars. A navy was important for protecting trade andempire, but the race to build battleships was causedby something more than practical economics.

The United States called the first internationalconference to discuss disarmament. At the Wash-ington Conference on Naval Disarmament, whichconvened in November 1921, Secretary of StateCharles Evans Hughes startled the delegates byproposing a 10-year “holiday” on the constructionof warships and by offering to sink or scrap 845,000tons of American ships, including 30 battleships. Heurged Britain and Japan to do the same. The dele-gates greeted Hughes’s speech with enthusiasticcheering and applause, and they set about the taskof sinking more ships than the admirals of all theircountries had managed to do in a century.

The conference participants ultimately agreed tofix the tonnage of capital ships at a ratio of theUnited States and Great Britain, 5; Japan, 3; andFrance and Italy, 1.67. Japan agreed only reluctantly,but when the United States promised not to fortifyits Pacific Island possessions, Japan yielded. In lightof what happened in 1941, the Washington NavalConference has often been criticized, but in 1921, itwas appropriately hailed as the first time in historythat the major nations of the world had agreed to




disarm. The conference did not cause World War II;neither, as it turned out, did it prevent it. But it was acreative start to reducing tensions and to meetingthe challenges of the modern arms race. And it wasthe United States that took the lead by offering to bethe first to scrap its battleships.

American foreign policy in the 1920s tried to re-duce the risk of international conflict, resist revolu-tion, and make the world safe for trade and invest-ment. In its dealings with Latin America, the UnitedStates continued its policy of intervention. By the endof the decade, the United States controlled the finan-cial affairs of 10 Latin American nations. The marineswere withdrawn from the Dominican Republic in1924, but that country remained a virtual protec-torate of the United States until 1941. The govern-ment ordered the marines out of Nicaragua in 1925but sent them back the next year when a liberal in-surrection threatened the conservative government.But the U.S. Marines, and the Nicaraguan troops theyhad trained, had a difficult time containing a guer-rilla band led by Augusto Sandino, a charismaticleader and one of Latin America’s greatest heroes.The Sandinistas, supported by the great majority ofpeasants, came out of the hills to attack the politi-cians and their American supporters. In 1934,Sandino was murdered by General Anastasio So-moza, a ruthless leader supported by the UnitedStates. For more than 40 years, Somoza and his twosons ruled Nicaragua as a private fiefdom, a legacynot yet resolved in that strife-torn country.

Mexico frightened American businessmen in themid-1920s by beginning to nationalize foreign hold-ings in oil and mineral rights. Fearing that furthermilitary activity would “injure American interests,”businessmen and bankers urged Coolidge not tosend marines but to negotiate instead. Coolidge ap-pointed Dwight W. Morrow of the J. P. Morgan Com-pany as ambassador, and his conciliatory attitude ledto agreements protecting American investments.Throughout the decade, the goal of U.S. policy to-ward Central and South America, whether in theform of negotiations or intervention, was to maintaina special sphere of influence.

The U.S. policy of promoting peace, stability, andtrade was not always consistent or carefully thoughtout, and this was especially true in its relationshipswith Europe. At the end of the war, European coun-tries owed the United States more than $10 billion,with Great Britain and France responsible for aboutthree-fourths of that amount. Both countries, miredin postwar economic problems, suggested that theUnited States forgive the debts, arguing that they hadpaid for the war in lives and property destroyed. Butthe United States, although adjusting the interest and

the payment schedule, refused to forget the debt.“They hired the money, didn’t they?” Coolidge sup-posedly remarked.

The only way European nations could repay theUnited States was by exporting products, but in a se-ries of tariff acts, especially the Fordney–McCumberTariff of 1922, Congress erected a protective barrier totrade. This act also gave the president power to loweror raise individual rates; in almost every case, bothHarding and Coolidge used the power to raise them.Finally, in 1930, the Hawley–Smoot Tariff raised rateseven further, despite the protests of many econo-mists. American policy of high tariffs (a counterpro-ductive policy for a creditor nation) caused retalia-tion and restrictions on American trade, whichAmerican corporations were trying to increase.

The inability of the European countries to exportproducts to the United States and to repay their loanswas intertwined with the reparations agreementmade with Germany. Germany’s economy was in dis-array after the war, with inflation raging and its in-dustrial plant throttled by the peace treaty. By 1921,Germany was defaulting on its payments. The UnitedStates, which believed a healthy Germany importantto European stability and world trade, instituted aplan engineered by Charles Dawes whereby the Ger-man debt would be renegotiated and spread over alonger period. In the meantime, American bankersand the American government lent Germany hun-dreds of millions of dollars. In the end, the UnitedStates lent money to Germany so it could make pay-ments to Britain and France so that those countriescould continue their payments to the United States.

The United States had replaced Great Britain asthe dominant force in international finance, but thenation in the 1920s was a reluctant and inconsistentworld leader. The United States had stayed out of theLeague of Nations and was hesitant to get involved inmultinational agreements. However, some agree-ments seemed proper to sign; the most idealistic ofall was the Kellogg–Briand pact to outlaw war. TheFrench foreign minister, Aristide Briand, suggested atreaty between the United States and France in largepart to commemorate long years of friendship be-tween the two countries, but secretary of state FrankB. Kellogg in 1928 expanded the idea to a multina-tional treaty to outlaw war. Fourteen nations agreedto sign the treaty, and eventually 62 nations signed,but the only power behind the treaty was moral forcerather than economic or military sanctions.

The Survival of ProgressivismThe decade of the 1920s was a time of reactionagainst reform, but progressivism did not simply




die. It survived in many forms through the periodthat Jane Addams called a time of “political and so-cial sag.”

The greatest success of the social justice move-ment was the 1921 Sheppard–Towner Maternity Act,one of the first pieces of federal social welfare legis-lation and the product of long progressive agitation.A study conducted by the Children’s Bureau discov-ered that more than 3,000 mothers died in child-birth in 1918 and that more than 250,000 infantsalso died. The United States ranked eighteenth outof 20 countries in maternal mortality and eleventhin infant deaths. The low rank of the United Stateswas caused in part by the poor conditions in urbanslums and by rural poverty, especially among south-ern blacks. But it was also the result of the lack ofgovernment intervention to improve health carewhile many European countries provided health in-surance and government-supported medical clin-ics. Sara Josephine Baker, the pioneer physician andfounder of the American Child Health Association,was not being ironic when she remarked, “It’s sixtimes safer to be a soldier in the trenches in Francethan to be born a baby in the United States.”

The maternity bill called for $1 million a year toassist the states in providing medical aid and visit-ing nurses to teach expectant mothers how to carefor themselves and their babies. The bill was contro-versial from the beginning. The American MedicalAssociation, which had supported pure food anddrug legislation and laws to protect against healthquacks and to enforce standards for medicalschools, attacked this bill as leading to socialismand interfering with the relationship between doc-tor and patient.

Despite the opposition, the bill passed Congressand was signed by President Harding in 1921. The

appropriation for the bill was for only six years, andthe opposition, again raising the specter of a femi-nist-Socialist-Communist plot, succeeded in re-pealing the law in 1929. Yet the Sheppard-TownerAct, promoted and fought for by a group of progres-sive women, indicated that concern for social jus-tice was not dead in the age of Harding andCoolidge.

Temperance TriumphantFor one large group of progressives, Prohibition, likechild labor reform and maternity benefits, was animportant effort to conserve human resources. By1918, more than three-fourths of the people in thecountry lived in dry states or counties, but it was thewar that allowed the antisaloon advocates to associ-ate Prohibition with patriotism. “We have Germanenemies across the water,” one prohibitionist an-nounced. “We have German enemies in this countrytoo. And the worst of all our German enemies, themost treacherous, the most menacing are Pabst,Schlitz, Blatz and Miller.” In 1919, Congress passedthe Volstead Act, banning the brewing and selling ofbeverages containing more than one-half of onepercent alcohol. In June 1919, the thirty-sixth stateratified the Eighteenth Amendment, prohibiting themanufacture, sale, and transport of intoxicatingliquors. But the country had, for all practical pur-poses, been dry since 1917.

The Prohibition experiment probably did reducethe total consumption of alcohol in the country, es-pecially in rural areas and urban working-classneighborhoods. Fewer arrests for drunkenness oc-curred, and deaths from alcoholism declined. Butthe legislation showed the difficulty of using law topromote moral reform. Most people who wanted to

Presidential Elections, 1920–1928

What political trends are revealed in this chart?

Year Candidate Party Popular Vote Electoral Vote

1920 WARREN G. HARDING Republican 16,152,200 (60.4%) 404James M. Cox Democratic 9,147,353 (34.2%) 127Eugene V. Debs Socialist 919,799 (3.4%) 0

1924 CALVIN COOLIDGE Republican 15,725,016 (54.0%) 382John W. Davis Democratic 8,385,586 (28.8%) 136Robert M. La Follette Progressive 4,822,856 (16.6%) 13

1928 HERBERT C. HOOVER Republican 21,392,190 (58.2%) 444Alfred E. Smith Democratic 15,016,443 (40.9%) 87

Note: Winners’ names appear in capital letters.




drink during the “noble experiment” found a way.Speakeasies replaced saloons, and people con-sumed bathtub gin, home brew, and many strangeand dangerous concoctions. Bartenders inventedthe cocktail to disguise the poor quality of liquor,and women, at least middle- and upper-classwomen, began to drink in public for the first time.

Prohibition also created great bootlegging rings,which were tied to organized crime in many cities.

Al Capone of Chicago was the most fa-mous underworld figure whose powerand wealth were based on the sale of ille-gal alcohol. His organization alonegrossed an estimated $60 million in 1927;ironically, most of the profit came fromdistributing beer. Many supporters of

Prohibition slowly came to favor its repeal, some be-cause it reduced the power of the states, others be-cause it stimulated too much illegal activity and be-cause it did not seem to be worth the social andpolitical costs.

The Election of 1928On August 2, 1927, President Coolidge announcedsimply, “I do not choose to run for President in1928.” Hoover immediately became the logical Re-publican candidate. Hoover and Coolidge were notespecially close. Coolidge resented what he consid-ered Hoover’s spendthrift ways. “That man has of-fered me unsolicited advice for six years, all of itbad,” Coolidge once remarked. Though lacking an

enthusiastic endorsement from the presi-dent and opposed by some Republicanswho thought him to be too progressive,Hoover easily won the nomination. In ayear when the country was buoyant withoptimism and when prosperity seemed asif it would go on forever, few doubted that Hooverwould be elected.

The Democrats nominated Alfred Smith, aCatholic Irish American from New York. With hisNew York accent, his opposition to Prohibition, andhis flamboyant style, he contrasted sharply with themore sedate Hoover. On one level, it was a bittercontest between Catholic “wets” and Protestant“drys,” between the urban, ethnic Tammany politi-cian and former governor of New York against therural-born but sophisticated secretary of com-merce. Religious prejudice, especially a persistentanti-Catholicism, played an important role in thecampaign. But looked at more closely, the two can-didates differed little. Both were self-made men,both were “progressives.” Social justice reformerscampaigned for each candidate. Both candidatestried to attract women voters, both were favorableto organized labor, both defended capitalism, andboth had millionaires and corporate executivesamong their advisers.

Hoover won in a landslide, 444 electoral votes to76 for Smith, who carried only Massachusetts andRhode Island outside the Deep South. But the 1928campaign revitalized the Democratic party. Smithpolled nearly twice as many votes as the Democratic

“Black Thursday” Cars, mounted po-licemen, frantic bankers, worried stock brokers,and investors on Wall Street on October 24,1929—“Black Thursday.” The stock marketcrash in the United States would have a globalimpact. It revealed weaknesses in the worldeconomy and helped trigger a global depression.(CORBIS)

Prohibition Is aFailure

A Heavy Loadfor Al, 1928





1924 Coolidge reelected presidentPeak of Ku Klux Klan activityImmigration Quota Law

1925 Scopes trial in Dayton, TennesseeF. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great GatsbyBruce Barton, The Man Nobody KnowsAlain Locke, The New NegroClaude McKay, Home to Harlem5 million enameled bathroom fixtures produced

1926 Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

1927 National Origins ActMcNary–Haugen Farm Relief BillSacco and Vanzetti executedLindbergh flies solo from New York to ParisFirst talking movie, The Jazz SingerHenry Ford produces 15 millionth car

1928 Herbert Hoover elected presidentKellogg–Briand TreatyStock market soars

1929 27 million registered autos in country10 million households own radios100 million people attend moviesStock market crash

T I M E L I N E

1900–1930 Electricity powers the “second IndustrialRevolution”

1917 Race riot in East St. Louis, Illinois

1918 World War I ends

1919 Treaty of VersaillesStrikes in Seattle, Boston, and elsewhereRed Scare and Palmer raidsRace riots in Chicago and other citiesMarcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement

Association spreads

1920 Warren Harding elected presidentWomen vote in national electionsFirst commercial radio broadcastSacco and Vanzetti arrestedSinclair Lewis, Main Street

1921 Immigration Quota LawNaval Disarmament ConferenceFirst birth control conferenceSheppard–Towner Maternity Act

1921–1922 Postwar depression

1922 Fordney–McCumber TariffSinclair Lewis, Babbitt

1923 Harding dies; Calvin Coolidge becomes presidentTeapot Dome scandal


candidate in 1924, and for the first time, the Democ-rats carried the 12 largest cities.

Stock Market CrashHoover, as it turned out, had only six months to ap-ply his progressive and efficient methods to runningthe country; in the fall of 1929, the prosperity thatseemed endless suddenly came to a halt. In 1928and 1929, rampant speculation made the stock mar-ket boom. Money could be made everywhere—inreal estate and business ventures, but especially inthe stock market. “Everybody ought to be Rich,” AlSmith’s campaign manager argued in an article inLadies’ Home Journal early in 1929. Just save $15 amonth and buy good common stock with it, andthat money would turn into $80,000 in 20 years (aconsiderable fortune in 1929). Good common stockseemed to be easy to find in 1929.

Only a small percentage of the American peopleinvested in the stock market, for many had no wayof saving even $15 a month. But a large number gotinto the game in the late 1920s because it seemed asafe and sure way to make money. For many, the

stock market came to represent the American econ-omy, and the economy was booming. The New YorkTimes index of 25 industrial stocks reached 100 in1924, moved up to 181 in 1925, dropped a bit in1926, and rose again to 245 by the end of 1927.

Then the orgy started. During 1928, the marketrose to 331. Many investors and speculators beganto buy on margin (borrowing to invest). Business-men and others began to invest in the marketmoney that would ordinarily have gone into houses,cars, and other goods. Yet even at the peak of theboom, probably only about 1.5 million Americansowned stock.

In early September 1929, the New York Times indexpeaked at 452 and then began to drift downward. OnOctober 23, the market lost 31 points. The next day(“Black Thursday”), it first seemed that everyone wastrying to sell, but at the end of the day, the panic ap-peared to be over. It was not. By mid-November, themarket had plummeted to 224, about half what it hadbeen two months before. This represented a loss onpaper of over $26 billion. Still, a month later, thechairman of the board of Bethlehem Steel could an-nounce, “Never before has American business been




as firmly entrenched for prosperity as it is today.”Some businessmen even got back into the market,thinking that it had reached its low point. But it con-tinued to go down. Tens of thousands of investorslost everything. Those who had bought on marginhad to keep coming up with money to pay off theirloans as the value of their holdings declined. Therewas panic and despair, but the legendary stories of

executives jumping out of windows were grossly ex-aggerated.

The stock market crash was more symptom thancause of the economic collapse. Weak banking sys-tems in both Europe and America, the rise of protec-tionism, the drop in farm prices, and the decline ofpurchasing power all foreshadowed the economicdisaster that would follow the stock market debacle.

Conclusion

A New Era of Prosperity and Problems

The stock market crash ended the decade of pros-perity. The crash did not cause the Depression, butthe stock market debacle revealed the weakness ofthe economy. The fruits of economic expansion hadbeen unevenly distributed. The Parker family, intro-duced at the beginning of this chapter, and manyother families in both rural and urban America didnot share in the prosperity. Not enough people couldafford to buy the autos, refrigerators, and other prod-ucts pouring from American factories. Prosperityhad been built on a shaky foundation. When thatfoundation crumbled in 1929, the nation slid into amajor depression. But the Depression was related toglobal financial trends and to economic problemscreated by World War I and the peace settlement.High tariffs and reparations that wrecked the Ger-man economy and a weakened banking system allcontributed to the economic collapse. Looking backfrom the vantage point of the 1930s or later, the1920s seemed a golden era—an age of flappers,bootleg gin, constant parties, literary masterpieces,sports heroes, and easy wealth. The truth is much

more complicated. More than most decades, the1920s was a time of paradox and contradictions.

The 1920s was a time of prosperity, yet a greatmany people, including farmers, blacks, and otherordinary Americans, did not prosper. The 1920s wasa time of modernization, but only about 10 percentof rural families had electricity. It was a time whenwomen achieved more sexual freedom, but the fem-inist movement declined. It was a time of Prohibi-tion, but many Americans increased their consump-tion of alcohol. It was a time of reaction againstreform, yet progressivism survived. It was a timewhen intellectuals felt disillusioned with America,yet it was one of the most creative and innovativeperiods for American writers. It was a time of flam-boyant heroes, yet the American people elected thelackluster Harding and Coolidge as their presidents.It was a time of progress, when almost every yearsaw a new technological breakthrough, but it wasalso a decade of hate and intolerance. The complexand contradictory legacy of the 1920s continues tofascinate and to influence our time.

1. What was the Harlem Renaissance?

2. Did the Prohibition experiment succeed or fail?

3. In foreign policy during the 1920s did the UnitedStates try to isolate itself from the rest of the world?

Questions for Review and Reflection

4. What groups did not share in the prosperity of thedecade?

5. Why are Harding and Coolidge often consideredamong our worst presidents?

Recommended ReadingRecommended Readings are posted on the Web site for this textbook. Visit www.ablongman.com/nash




Red Scare (1918–1921)www.newman.baruch.cuny.edu/digital/redscare/default.htmThe site presents an extensive database of post–World WarI images, mostly taken from Literary Digest, a weekly com-pendium of news from various newspapers and maga-zines contemporary to the period.

The Trial of Sacco and Vanzettiwww.courttv.com/greatesttrials/sacco.vanzetti/An illustrated summary of the trial, commentary by ex-perts, and video clips from the companion film.

Automotive Historywww.mel.lib.mi.us/business/autos-history.htmlThis site, from the Michigan Electronic Library, hasseveral links to sites about automotive history in America.

Emergence of Advertising in Americahttp://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/eaaThe images presented in this exhibit “illustrate the rise ofconsumer culture, especially after the American Civil War,and the birth of a professionalized advertising industry inthe United States.”

Chicago: Destination for the Great Migrationwww.loc.gov/exhibits/african/afam011.htmlThis Library of Congress site looks at the black experienceof the great migration through the lens of one prominentdestination.

Titanicwww.nationalgeographic.com/society/ngo/explorer/titanic/movie.htmlThis site offers historical perspective via photos from thewreckage of the Titanic, a first-person account from a sur-vivor, and a discussion forum.

Ernest Hemingwaywww.npg.si.edu/exh/hemingway/This site presents a biography of author Ernest Heming-way, illustrated with various paintings.

Tennessee vs. John Scopeswww.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/scopes.htmThis site contains images, chronology, and court and offi-cial documents of the so-called Monkey Trial of 1925.

The 1920swww.louisville.edu/~kprayb01/1920s.htmlThis site is divided into three sections: a descriptive time-line, essays and biographies, and an opinion essay.

The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro ImprovementAssociation Papers Projectwww.isop.ucla.edu/mgppThis site presents a biography of Garvey, sample docu-ments from the volumes of his papers, and photo andsound archives.

Harlem 1900–1940: An African-American Communitywww.si.umich.edu/CHICO/HarlemA timeline of the Harlem Renaissance along with an ex-hibit that covers such topics as the “Schomburg Center it-self, political movements, education, sports, social orga-nizations, religion, the Harlem Hospital theater, businessand music.”

Photographs from the Golden Age of Jazzhttp://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/wghtml/wghome.htmlA searchable database of Gottlieb’s photographs of jazz pi-oneers, audio commentary on some of the photographs,and scanned articles from the 1940s in which his pho-tographs appeared.

Negro League Baseballwww.negroleaguebaseball.comThis site has articles about desegregation, baseball, andJim Crow, as well as images of teams and players.

Urban Leisurewww.suba.com/~scottn/explore/mainmenu.htmAn exploration of the jazz culture in Chicago and its influ-ence on the multi-ethnic commercial culture in that city,the “groundwork for the spread of mass culture across thenation during the twentieth century.”

Fiction and Film

Sinclair Lewis’s novel Babbitt (1922) depicts thenarrowness of small-town life in the Midwest. F.Scott Fitzgerald describes the reckless lives of thevery rich in The Great Gatsby (1925). ClaudeMcKay’s novel Home to Harlem (1928) is one of thebest fictional works to come out of the Harlem Re-naissance. Front Page (1931) is a movie that depictsthe world of corrupt politicians and cynical

newspapermen in Chicago during the roaring twen-ties. The 1974 film version of The Great Gatsby is notentirely faithful to the novel, but it still capturessome of the opulence and pathos of the lives of thevery rich in the 1920s. To appreciate two of the greatactors and comics of the silent film era, check outCharles Chaplin in City Lights (1931) and BusterKeaton in The General (1927).

Discovering U.S. History Online




The Harlem Renaissancewww.nku.edu/~diesmanj/harlem_intro.htmlThis site provides an overview of writing and paintingfrom the Harlem Renaissance, with a gallery of paintingsby Loïs Mailou, William H. Johnson, and Palmer Haydenand the full text of several poems and short stories by vari-ous authors.

Temperance and Prohibitionhttp://prohibition.history.ohio-state.eduThis site looks at the temperance movement over timeand contains many information links.

The Coolidge Era and the Consumer Economy,1921–1929http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/coolhtml/ccpres00.htmlThis site “assembles a wide array of Library of Congresssource materials from the 1920s that document the wide-spread prosperity of the Coolidge years, the nation’s tran-

sition to a mass consumer economy, and the role of gov-ernment in this transition.”

Calvin Coolidgewww.potus.com/ccoolidge.htmlThis site contains basic factual data about Coolidge’s elec-tion and presidency, speeches, and online biographies.

Herbert C. Hooverwww.potus.com/hhoover.htmlThis site contains basic factual data about Hoover’s elec-tion and presidency, speeches, and online biographies.

October 24, 1929www.arts.unimelb.edu.au/amu/ucr/student/1997/Yee/ny.htmlAn overview of “Black Thursday” and the events leadingup to it by way of headlines that appeared in the New YorkTimes.



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