The 1920s

1920s Social Trends

The Worker

The South

Big Difference between the "working" class and the "business" class:

income among workers rose 25% in the 1920s BUT unemployment often as high as 10%

unpredictably in employment #1 concern among workers

Business class's access to JOB SECURITY means EVERYTHING:

• could plan for the future
• go on vacation
• join social organization
• save $$$
• send kids to college

Mass Consumerism #fordism #whereautoindustygoesamericafollows

• Still looked much like it had in 1870
• Jim Crow being "perfected" throughout 1920s
• Sharecroppers most poverty stricken- African American sharecroppers take poverty into a "class-by-itself" (Wilson)

1925: Ford made a car every 10 seconds

1929: 26 million cars on the roads

Had to find ways to EXPAND the market:

1919 General Motors began "installment payments"

1920-1930 General movers spend $20 million on advertising

Immigrants

New Technology like the RADIO revolutionizes American Life

Rise of the KKK (again)

Stone Mountain GA 1915

5 million members by 1920

VERY influential in Indiana, Ohio (and Oregon)

"expand their interests" to include Catholics and Jews

"the vast obscurity beyond the city" (Fitzgerald)

Between 1892 and 1922 (Ellis Island to Anti Immigration Legislation)

• 4 mil Italians
• 2 mil Eastern European Jews
• 1.5 mil Poles
• .5 mil Greeks
• .5 mil Hungarians
• .5 mil Slovaks

Insulated in urban enclaves

After 1924 these enclaves begin to Americanize

Between 1890-1920 over 6 million people left the farm

BUT:

• 44% of USA considered "rural"
• 50 million people lived there
• 45 million no plumbing
• very few with electricity

The 1920s

Someone should make that Hoover guy @POTUS "there could not be a better one."

Be quiet Frank. Just smile

How deserved is the criticism Hoover gets over the Depression?

So what can we point to?

• Was non-partisan
• Self-made man
• Had worked ALL over the world
• Had been head of Food Administration during WWI
• Had served as Secretary of Commerce under Harding AND Coolidge
• Was a DATA MAN
• One of only a few people in the whole country who recognized that the Stock Market Crash of 1929 was NOT business as usual

A "return to normalcy"

James Cox:

• Grew up in Middletown
• Died in Kettering
• 48th Governor of OH
• took on "Boss" Lowe AND James Patterson
• Governor during Great Flood
• Newspaper man
• ** easily the better choice for President in 1920

Election 1920:

• First election women in all states could vote
• Republicans ran OHIO William G. Harding and Mass Governor Calvin Coolidge
• Democrats ran OHIO James Cox and Franklin D. Roosevelt
• Harding and Coolidge won in a landslide (404 - 127)
• Pro- business
• Anti-Immigration
• Harding ran a "front porch campaign"

Harding in Office:

Silent Cal

• more tax cuts
• stronger tariffs
• lesser role for Federal Government
• Johnson-Reed Immigration Act 1924

2% of 1890 Census data

NO Asians

Teapot Dome Scandal

Bacon leased Naval Oil reserves to private companies who bribed him

• reduced taxes on corporations and wealthy
• enacted high (very high) tariffs
• enacted Naval disarmament regulations
• Pushed for tighter immigration legislation (will not pass until 1924)
• appointed William Howard Taft Chief Justice to the Supreme Court
• appointed Herbert Hoover Secretary Commerce
• Appointed Andrew Mellon Secretary of Treasury
• Appointed Albert Bacon Secretary of the Interior...never heard of him?

Voluntarism:

generally believed that people (especially business leaders) would be able to help

Rugged Individualism:

• NOT the same as selfishness
• creates desire for ISOLATION
• creates feeling that government intervention is unnecessary

Let's take a closer look at "Bert" Hoover

1925: Scopes "Monkey Trial"

• Dayton, Tennessee
• Butler Act: March 1, 1925
• John T Scopes high school science and math teacher (and football coach #goeagles)
• ACLU test case

American Civil Liberties Union:

Butler Act repealed in 1967

cases concerning evolution and violations of the Establishment Clause continue to be fought

1920: nonprofit, nonpartisan (501 c (3) organization)

Support of FREE SPEECH

• began with Anti-war cases
• took on strikers and artists threatened under Espionage and Sedition Acts
• Joined with NAACP to battle racism
• Will later represent Native American groups and Japanese Americans

Arthur Garfield Hays (co-founder) saw opportunity in Tennessee Butler Act #perfecttestcase

Scopes Trial showed growing divide in the United States:

• Fundamentalists v Modernists
• Rural v Urban
• Haves and Have not?

Billy Sunday

Clarence Darrow lawyer for defense (Scopes)

William Jennings Bryan head of prosecution

Trial receives worldwide attention

Dayton becomes street fair for days

Darrow objects to daily prayer and "Read Your BIBLE" sign on court house

Darrow puts Bryan on the stand

Darrow refuses right to give final summation prevents Bryan from giving his

Repression

Fundamentalism

Repression gives birth to Civil Liberties and flight to the "Lost Generation"

Evangelical Protestants feel threatened by

• Jewish and Catholic immigrants
• Protestant "modernists"
• Mass Culture
• Urban Corruption (caused by Prohibition)

I have "never been in a country where the individual has such an abject fear of his fellow countrymen" (Lawrence)

Literal truth of the Bible-- need to rid Protestantism of modernist ideas and fight the sin of individualism to restore traditional morality

"Banned in Boston"

Art or books pulled or banned from entering the country

Hollywood Plans ahead:

sticks close (ish) to Hays code to avoid too much publicity

Can NOT be discounted as only a "backwater" movement

Supreme Court:

• 1919:
• upholds conviction of Charles Schenck
• upholds conviction of Eugene Debs (and the Ohio Newspaper guy)
• Establishes "clear and Present danger" test to First Amendment

Birth of Fundamentalism