Chapter 23: The Twenties



Chapter 31: American Life in the “Roaring Twenties”, 1919 - 1929

p. 720 – 745

Postwar Prosperity and its Price

- enormous increase in the efficiency of production, a steady climb in real wages, a decline in the length of the average employees workweek, and a boom in consumer goods industries

- postwar prosperity was unevenly distributed

The Second Industrial Revolution

- Technological innovations – increase in industrial output w/out expanding the labor force

o Electricity replaced steam

o Older machinery replaced with more efficient and flexible electric machinery

o In 1914 – 30% of nations factories electrified; 1929 – 70%

- Electric Machinery

o Could be operated by unskilled workers

o Employed more workers than any other manufacturing sector

o Supplied 35% of the world market

- Mass Production

o Pioneered by machine tools, RR’s, iron, and steel (durable goods)

o 1920’s – automobiles, radios, washing machines, telephones (large profits at affordable prices)

o other industries – canning, chemicals, synthetics, plastics (consumables)

o doubling of production in the 1920’s

▪ more efficient management

▪ greater mechanization

▪ intensive product research

▪ new sales and advertising methods

- Construction industry boom

o Residential, business, and public projects

o Suburb expansion – growth in car ownership and mass transit

o Commercial banks, S & L’s, and insurance

o Residential debt rose from $8billion in 1919 to $27 billion in 1929

The Modern Corporation

- 1920’s – Managerial Revolution – divorce ownership of corporate stock from the everyday control of business

o salaried executives, plant managers, and engineers made corporate policy without themselves having a controlling interest in the companies

o use scientific management and latest theories of behavioral psychology to make workplaces more productive, stable, profitable

- Transformation from industrial use to consumer goods

o Integration of production and distribution

o Product diversification

o Expansion of industrial research

o DuPont – transformed from chemical manufacturer (gunpowder) to paints, fabrics, dyes, sponges

o GE and Westinghouse – transformed from lighting and power to household appliances (radios, washing machines, refrigerators)

- Oligopoly – control of a market by a few large producers

o 1929 – 200 largest corporations owned nearly ½ the nations corporate wealth (physical plant, stock,, property)

o 1929 – 100 largest corporations owned ½ the total industrial income (revenue from sales of goods)

▪ 4 companies rolled 9 of every 10 cigarettes

▪ 1 grocery chain (A&P) accounted for 10% of all retail food sales

Welfare Capitalism

- challenge the appeal of labor unions by promoting programs designed to improve worker well being and morale

o encourage workers to acquire property through stock-purchase plans – 1927 – 800k employees had more than $1 billion invested in more than 300 companies

o insurance policies covering accidents, illness, old age, and death – 1928 – 6 million workers had group insurance coverage valued at $7.5 billion

o improvement in safety conditions, medical services, and sports and recreation programs

- problems continuesd to give sympathy to unions – seasonal unemployment, low wages, long hours, and unhealthy factory conditions

- Anti-Union campaigns – “The American Plan”

o Open shop – no employee could be compelled to join a union; iif a union existed, nonmembers would still get whatever wages and rights the union had won

o Union shop – new employees had to join an existing union

o Closed shop – employers agreed to hire only union members

o Company unions were established to substitute largely symbolic employee representation in management conferences for the more confrontational process of collective bargaining

- Decline in union membership

o Dropped from about 5 million in 1920 to 3.5 million in 1926

o Samuel Gompers died in 1924, replaced by William Green – more conservative, showed no real interest in getting unorganized workers, such as those in the growing mass production industries of cars, steel, and electrical goods into unions

o Federal gov’t reverted to a more probusiness posture

o Supreme Court consistently upheld the use of injunctions to prevent strikes, picketing, and other union activities

The Auto Age

- 1920’s – US made 85% of all the worlds passenger cars; 30 million by 1929

- Henry Ford

o Continuous assembly line

o 1914 – Highland Park plant – Michigan

o 1925 – 1 car produced every 10 seconds

o 1914 - $5 for an 8 hour day – new wage scale (workers as consumers helped boost sales of Ford cars); reduced high turnover rate and increased worker efficiency

o Labor force – 2/3 were immigrants from S and E Europe; Ford employed about 5000 African Americans, more than any other large US corporation

o Model T – cost just under $300 in 1924 (3 months wages); good compared to today

- General Motors and Alfred P. Sloan

o Ford’s major competition

o 3 separate divisions, each appealing to a different market

▪ Cadillac – wealthy buyer; Oldsmobile – middle; Chevrolet – working, lower middle

- matched production with demand through sophisticated market research and sales forecasting, becomes the model for large US corporations

- Effects of the auto industry

o Large market for makers of steel, rubber, glass, petroleum

o Stimulated public spending for roads, and extended the housing boom in the suburbs

o Showrooms, repair shops, and gas stations

o Motels, billboard advertising, roadside diners

o Rapid development of FL and CA

o Shopping in nearby cities and vacation (made leisure a more regular part of everyday life)

o Changed courtship patterns of America’s youth – privacy and distance from their parents

o Growth of urban population

Cities and Suburbs

- 1920 – first census in which urban population exceeded rural areas

- Steady increase in the number of big cities

o 1910 – 60 cities with more than 100k

o 1920 – 68 cities over 100k

o 1930 – 92 cities over 100k

o NYC – 7 million – 20% growth in the 1920’s

o Detroit – “The Motor City” – 2 million people – 100% growth in the 20’s

- Causes

o Job opportunities

o Immigrants – attracted by established ethnic communities

o African Americans – continuation of the Great Migration

- Vertical and Horizontal Growth

o 1930 – more than 400 buildings over 20 stories

o 1931 – Empire State Building – 1250 feet; 25k commercial and residential tenants

o Houston – demand for petroleum increased size from 75k in 1910 to 300k in 1920 – auto, cheap land, and the absence of zoning ordinances; decentralized, low densit city, sprawling miles in each direction

o Other sunbelt cities – LA, Miami, San Diego

- Suburban cities – grew at twice the rate of their core cities; residential heighborhoods, and encouraged the movement of workplaces out of the central city

Exceptions: Agriculture, Ailing Industries

- 1920’s – ¼ of all US workers employed in agriculture

o 1914-19 – golden age of nations farmers (record prices for food)

▪ increased wartime demand

▪ devastation of European agriculture

▪ food administration policies encouraged production

o 1920 – prices began to drop

▪ cotton fell from 37 cents a pound to 14 cents a pound

▪ hog and cattle prices declined nearly 50%

▪ land values dropped, wiping out billions in capital investment

▪ personal tragedies

o heavy debt from wartime borrowing (land and machinery)

▪ 1910 – mortgages totaled $3.3 billion

▪ 1920 – totaled $6.7 billion

▪ 1925 – totaled $9.4 billion

o increased competition from European farmers, and expanding output in Canada, Argentina, and Australia

- South – “King Cotton”

o Most farms were one/two mile farms on less that 50 acres

o Least diversified and poorest of the regions

o Average S farm had land and buildings worth $3525

o Average N farm had land and buildings worth $11,029

o Editors, state officials, and reformers preached the need for greater variety of crops, but S farmers actually raised less corn and livestock by the end of the decade

o White tenant famrers increased by 200k while black tenantry declined due to the Great Migration

o 700k southerners labored as share croppers

o modern conveniences – electric, indoor plumbing, cars – remained beyond the reach of the great majority of S farmers

- Wheat farmers

o Production jumped more than 300%

o Mechanized farms created a new class of wheat entrepreneurs on the plains

o Long range ecological impact of destroying so much native vegetation became evident in the dust storms of the 1930’s

- Improved transportation and chain supermarkets – citrus, dairy, and truck farmers profited from the growing importance of national markets

- Growing disparity b/t farm workers and industrial workers

o 1929 – avg income per person was only $223 for farmers but $870 for nonfarm workers

o 1930 – 42% of all farmers were tenants as compared to only 37% in 1919

- Farm Relief initiatives

o 1927 McNary-Haugen Farm Relief Bills – designed to prop up and stabilize farm prices – gov’t would purchase farm surpluses and either store them until prices rose or sell them on the world market

o vetoed by Pres Coolidge as unwarranted federal interference in the economy

- Coal Mines – decreased in importance as oil and natural gas production expanded

o Labor force reduced by ¼ - lower demand, new mining technology, series of losing labor strikes

o United Mine Workers – strongest union in the AFL in 1920 shrunk from 500k to 75k in 1928

o Economic hardship, especially in Appalachia and the southern Midwest

- Railroads – number of miles of track actually decreased as cars and trucks began to displace trains

- Textiles – shrinking demand and overcapacity

o Women’s fashions of the 1920’s required less material

o Competition from synthetic fibers (rayon) depressed demand for cotton

o Textile shops in New England switched production to the South where nonunion shops and substandard wages became the rule

o B/t 1923-1933, 40% of New England’s textile factories closed and nearly 100k lost their jobs

o Center of the American textile industry shifted permanently to the Piedmont region of North and South Carolina

▪ By 1933 the Carolinas employed nearly 70% of textile workers

▪ Operated night/day, used newest labor saving machinery, and cut back on the wage gains of WWI

The New Mass Culture

- The “Roaring Twenties” – image and sound making machinery that came to dominate American life: movies, radio, new kinds of journalism, the recording industry and a more sophisticated advertising industry led to the emergence of clelbrity as a defining element

- Media established national standards and norms for much of our culture – habit, dress, language, sounds, social behavior: “The good life”

Movie-Made America

- early movie industry – centered in NY

o 1914 – 18k movie houses, nickelodeons; 7 million daily admissions and $300 million in annual revenues

o most movies were short

o studios – made longer, more expensive movies called “features”

▪ Paramount, Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Universal, Warner Brothers

- The Studio System

o Each studio combined the 3 functions of production, distribution and exhibition

o Each controlled hundreds of movie theaters around the country

- New Genres

o End of silent films – The Jazz Singer – 1927 – first talking picture

o Musicals, gangster films, and screwball comedies

o Higher costs associated with “talkies” increased the studios reliance on Wall Street investors and banks for working capital

- Star system, and cult of celebrity

- Movie Palaces – the Roxy Theater (midtown Manhattan)

- Public Image

o Permissiveness associated with Hollywood life led to states creating censorship boards to screen movies before allowing them to be shown in theaters

o Hollywood studies began to censor themselves

- Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (Will Hays

- Will Hays, Indiana Republican and elder in the Presbyterian Church personified Protestant respectability

- Radio Broadcasting

o Westinghouse and KDKA (Pittsburgh)

▪ Presidential election returns in Nov 1920 – beginning of nightly broadcasts

▪ By 1923, 600 stations had been licensed by the Dept of Commerce and about 600k Americans had purchased radios

▪ By 1930, 12 million homes (40%) had radios

o commercial (toll) broadcasting – dominant operators (GE, Westinghouse, RCA, and AT&T) settled on the idea that advertisers should foot the bill for radio

- Radio Networks – National Broadcasting Company (1926); Columbia Broadcasting System (1928)

- Popular Shows

o Variety shows – hosted by vaudeville comedians – Amos and Andy Show (1928) was direct descendant of “blackface” minstrel entertainment

o Commercialized previously isolated forms of American music, Blues and Jazz

o Baseball Games

- helped shape broadcasting in both Canada and Mexico – amplified American commercialism throughout the hemisphere

New Forms of Journalism – The Tabloid

- New York Daily News, founded by Joseph M. Patterson

o Folded in half page size – convenient to read on subways and buses

o Devoted much of its space to photographs and other illustrations

o Terse, lively reporting style that emphasized sex, scandal, and sports

o Circulation of 400k by 1922 and 1.3 million by 1929

o Adopted across America

o Did not effect the circulation of existing papers

▪ Discovered an audience of millions who had never read newspapers before

▪ Most readers were poorly educated working class city dwellers, especially immigrants

- The gossip column

o Walter Winchell – former vaudevillian; distinctive, rapid-fire, slangy style

o Scores of newspapers “syndicated” his column, making him the most widely read journalist in America

- Consolidation and mergers

o The Hearst Group

▪ 1930’s – 26 dailies in 18 cities, accounting for 14% of the nations newspaper circulation

▪ 1:4 papers sold on Sunday was controlled by Hearst

▪ contributed to a national consumer community

- Advertising Modernity

o Before the 1920’s

▪ Confined mostly to staid newspapers and magazines

▪ Offered little more than basic product information

▪ Total advertising volume in all media increased from $1.4 billion in 1919 to $3billion in 1929

- Market Research – reflected and encouraged the growing importance of consumer goods

o Utilized psychology – focusing on the needs, desires, and anxieties of the consumer rather than on the qualities of the product

o Made Fleischmann’s, Kleenex, and Listerine household names

o Celebrated consumption itself as a positive good

The Phonograph and the Recording Industry

- originally marketed in the 1890’s using cylinders, but quality was poor

- transformed the music business – records introduced in WWI; quality of sound was greatly improved; replaced sheet music as major source of music in the home

o Other effects:

▪ Dance crazes – fox trot, tango, grizzly bear

▪ Dixieland Jazz became very popular

▪ 1921 – more than 200 companies produced some 2 million records with annual sales exceeding $100 million

▪ discovered lucrative regional and ethnic markets

▪ record sales began to decline at the end of the decade due to radio, but the combination of both started a cross fertilization of American music styles

Sports and Celebrity

- image of the modern athlete – rich, famous, glamorous, and often a rebel against social convention came into being in the 20’s

- Major League Baseball

o George Herman “Babe” Ruth – The Sultan of Swat

o Attendance reached 10 million in 1929

▪ Urban newspapers increased their baseball coverage (sports sections)

▪ William K. Wrigley (Chicago) used radio broadcasts to win fans

o Supreme Court exempted baseball from antitrust protection (1922) ruling it was not “trade or commerce in the commonly accepted use of those words”; ensured control of owners over their players

o Excluded African Americans, who were banned by an 1890’s “gentlemen’s agreement” among the owners

▪ Negro National League (1920)

- College Football

o Illinois’s Harold E. “Red” Grange and Stanford’s Ernie Nevers

o Knute Rockne, and the “Four Horsemen of Notre Dame” backfield

o Big money in college football shifted emphasis from Ivy League to the Midwest and Pacific

o Most start were second generation Irish, Italians, and Slavs

- Other Sports

o Boxing – Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney

o Tennis – Bill Tilden and Helen Wills

o Swimming – Gertrude Ederle and Johnny Weismuller

A New Morality?

- The Flapper

o Usually portrayed on screen, in novels, and in the press as a young, sexually aggressive woman with bobbed hair, rouged cheeks and short skirt

o Loved to dance to jazz music, enjoyed smoking cigarettes, and drank bootleg liquor in cabarets and dance halls

o Neither as new nor as widespread a phenomenon as the image suggests

o What was new was that it spread to middle class whites and colleges

- Causes:

o Troops in WWI were exposed to gov’t sex education

o New psychological theories (Ellis, Key, Freud) stressed the central role of sexuality

o Pioneering efforts of Margaret Sanger in educating women about birth control

o Advertisers routinely used sex appeal to sell products

o Tabloids exploited sex to sell papers

o Movies featured powerful sex symbols such as Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson, John Gilbert, and Clara Bow

o Women born after the turn of the century were twice as likely to have had premarital sex as those born before 1900 (68% as compared to 26%)

The State, the Economy, and Business

- Republican party dominated national politics

Harding and Coolidge

- Warren Harding – Ohio

o Compromise candidate

o Shallow and intellectually weak

o “The Ohio Gang” – close circle of friends and advisors

- Scandals:

o To Kansas journalist William Allen White, Harding once quipped “…this is a hell of a job! I have no trouble with my enemies…but my damned friends…”

o Senate investigations (attorney general Harry M. Daugherty)

▪ Received bribes from violators of the Prohibition laws

▪ Failed to investigate graft in the Vets Bureau, where Charles R. Forbes had pocketed a large chunk of the $250 million spent on hospitals

▪ Teapot Dome Scandal (Interior Secretary Albert Fall) – Fall received hundreds of thousands of dollars in payoffs when he secretly leased navy oil reserves in Teapot Dome, WY and Elks Hills, CA to 2 private oil developers

- Sec of Treasury Andrew Mellon

o Pittsburgh banker and a leading investor in the Aluminum Corporation of America

o Believed gov’t should be run on the same principles as a corporation

o Leading voice for trimming the fed budget and cutting taxes on invomes, corporate profits, and inheritances

o Succeeded in rolling back much of the progressive taxation of Wilson

- Calvin Coolidge

o Succeeded to presidency in 1923 when Harding died of heart attack

o “Silent Cal” taciturn, genteel, completely honest

o “The business of America is business”

o defeated Democrat candidate John W. Davis and Progressive Robert M. LaFollette in 1924

o dedicated his terms to reducing federal spending, lowering taxes, and blocking congressional initiatives

o believed American businesses were the agents of the era’s unprecedented prosperity

- Herbert Hoover and the “Associative State”

o Sec of Commerce Herbert Hoover

▪ Believed enlightened business, encouraged and informed by the gov’t would act in the public interest

o The Associative State – The Dept of Commerce

▪ Gov’t would encourage voluntary cooperation among corporations, consumers, workers, farmers, and small businessmen

▪ The Bureau of Standards became one of the leading research centers, setting engineering standards for key American industries such as machine tools and autos

▪ The Bureau of Standards also helped standardize the styles, sizes, and designs of many consumer products such as canned goods and refrigerators

o actively encouraged the creation and expansion of national trade associations

▪ encouraged mutual cooperation in figuring prices and costs and then publishing the info

▪ idea was to improve efficiency by reducing competition

▪ 1920’s Justice Department Antitrust Division took a lax view

▪ Supreme Court consistently upheld the legality of trade associations

▪ Presidential appointments to regulatory commissions – men worked for the very firms the commissions had been designed to supervise – industry leaders brought technical expertise, but also conflict of interest

- Concentration of corporate wealth and power

o 1929 – the 200 largest corporations owned ½ total corporate wealth and about 1/5 of the total national wealth

o concentration was particularly strong in manufacturing, retailing, mining, banking, and utilities

o vertical integration was common

War Debts, Reparations and Keeping the Peace

- WWI transformed the US from the world’s leading debtor to its largest creditor

o European countries owed the US $10 billion I 1919

o WWI started a trend which expanded US investment abroad

o NY replaced London as the center of international finance and capital markets

- War Debts and France/Britain

o France and GB resented that the US did not forgive the debt

o 1922 – US Foreign Debt Commission negotiated an agreement with the debtor nations that called for them to repay $11.5 billion over a 62 year period

o late 1920’s – European financial situation had become so desperate that the US agreed to cancel a large part of these debts

o continued insistence by the US that the Europeans pay at least a portion of the debt fed anti-American feeling in Europe and isolationism at home

- War reparations and the Dawes Plan

o Germans were saddled with such massive debt that they did not have the means to repay it

o 1924 – the Dawes Plan – Hoover and Chicago banker Charles Dawes worked out a plan to aid the recovery of the German economy – reduced Germany’s debt, stretched out the repayment period, and arranged for American bankers to lend funds to Germany

o Measures helped stabilize Germany’s currency and allowed it to make reparations payments to France/GB, which enabled them to better pay their war debts to the US

- The Washington Naval Conference (1921) and Treaty (1922)

o 1921 – Sec of State Charles Evans Hughes – initiative on arms limitations w/ Great Britain, Japan, Italy, France, and China

o set ratios for tonnage based upon areas of responsibility – Pacific, Atlantic, Mediterranean: US (5), GB (5), Japan (3), Italy (1)

o 10 year moratorium on the construction of new battleships and cruisers, and limits on tonnage

o Japanese and Italians later complained about the limitations and abandoned the treaty

- Other international involvement

o US joined the World Court in 1926

o US signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact – renounced the principle of war by outlawing it

▪ Lacked powers of enforcement and relied solely on the moral force of world opinion

▪ Within weeks of its ratification the US Congress appropriated $250 million for new battleships

Commerce and Foreign Policy

- Sec of State Charles Evans Hughes

o US should seek “to establish a Pax Americana maintained not by arms but by mutual respect and good will and the tranquilizing processes of reason”

o Belief that US’s economic wealth – not military or political power could help create a new and prosperous international system free of the rivalries that had led to WWI

- Foreign Investment

o R leaders urged close cooperation b/t bankers and the gov’t as a strategy for expanding American investment and economic influence

o Investments in the Soviet Union and on non-productive enterprises such as munitions and weapons were strongly discouraged

o Investment bankers routinely submitted loan projects to Highes and Sec of Commerce Hoover for approval

- Growing World Market

o Oil, cars, farm machinery, and electrical equipment

o Direct investment abroad increased from $3.8 billion in 1919 to $7.5 billion in 1929

- Latin America

o US investment led to single commodity economies

▪ Chile – copper; Venezuela – oil; Guetemala – bananas

o negotiated a resolution to disputes w/ Mexico over oil and mining

o hampered the growth of democratic gov’t by favoring autocratic military regimes that could protect American interests

Resistance to Modernity

- Postwar Red Scare gave strength to the forces of antiradicalism in politics and traditionalism in politics and traditionalism in culture

- Resentments over the growing power of urban culture were very strong in rural and small-town Amercia

- Prohibition

o 18th Amend – banned the manufacture, sale, and transporation of alcoholic beverages – Jan 1920

o Supporters – “Drys” – women’s temperance groups; middle class progressives; rural protestants

o Volstead Act – 1919 – established a federal Prohibition Bureau to enforce the 18th – severely understaffed, only 1500 agents in entire country

o Opposition – “Wets” – big cities; bootlegging; illegal stills and breweries; “Speakeasy” – local law enforcement bribed

- Effects

o Organized crime: Al “Scarface” Capone – “Everybody calls me a racketeer. I call myself a businessman. When I sell liquor its bootlegging. When my patrons serve it on a silver tray on Lake Shore Drive, its hospitality”

o Consumption decreased from 2.6 gallons per person in 1920 to less than a gallon in 1934 (high price)

- Immigration Restriction

o 1891-1920 – 10.5 million immigrants from S and E Europe

o mostly catholic and Jewish

o darker skin, poorer, less willing and able to assimilate to the nations political and cultural values

o Immigration Restriction League – founded in 1894 by prominent Harvard grads Henry Cabor Lodge and John Fiske

o Contributing Factors

▪ Eugenics – pseudoscientific thinking sought to explain historical and social development solely as a function of racial differences

▪ 100% American fervor of WWI

▪ Red Scare of 1919-20

▪ Postwar depression brought massive immigration and job competition; AFL proposed stopping all immigration for 2 years

▪ Sensational press coverage of organized crime figures

- Immigration Act of 1921 – set max of 375k/year; immigration from Europe limited to 3% of natives counted in 1910 census

- Johnson – Reed Immigration Act 1924

o Revised quotas to 2% counted for each nationality in the 1890 census

o Max total was cut to 164k

o Quotas did not apply to any countries in the west hemisphere

The Ku Klux Klan

- original Klan died out in the 1870’s and was limited to Georgia and Alabama

- Hiram W. Evans – Imperial Wizard (1922)

o Transformed the KKK using modern organization practices

o 100% American and “the faithful maintenance of white supremacy”

o 3 million members by 1924, including President Harding

o Strongest in S and Midwest

o Strong presence at the Democratic National Convention in 1924

- support for prohibition enforcement was the single most important issue – strong support among women; hosted spectacular social events aimed at reinvigorating community life

- began to decline in 1925

o Indiana Grand Dragon became involved in a sordid affair; wrangling among Klan leaders

o Success of immigration restriction

o General economic prosperity

Religious Fundamentalism

- literal interpretation of the Bible, rejecting the tenets of modern science as inconsistent with the revealed word of God

- The Scopes Trial “Monkey Trial” – 1925

o 5 southern states passed laws restricting the teaching of evolution

o John T. Scopes deliberately broke the law, teaching evolution in Tenn

o Defense team – ACLU and Clarence Darrow

o Prosecution – William Jennings Bryan

o Trial – Darrow denied the right to call scientists to testify, so put Bryan on the stand as an expert on the Bible (Bryan dies a week after trial)

o Scopes found guilty, although verdict later thrown out

o State laws continued, but prosecution for teaching evolution ceased

Feminism in Transition

- League of Women Voters, founded 1920

o Reorganized from the National American Woman Suffrage Assoc

o Mainstream of the suffrage movement; politicized domesticity

o Worked to educate the new female electorate, encourage women to run for office and support laws for the protection of women and children

- National Woman’s Party – 1916

o Militant suffragists (Alice Paul)

o Opposed protective legislation for women, claiming such laws reinforced stereotypes

o Focused on passage of and Equal Rights Amendment

▪ Introduced in Congress in 1923: “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the US and every place subject to its jurisdiction”

▪ Resisted by the older generation of women reformers b/c it would wipe out legal protections earned previously

▪ Effort to pass ERA defeated in Congress; more women’s groups opposed it than supported it

- Gains made by women

o Amelia Earhart – 1928 trans-Atlantic flight

o Anne O’Hare McCormick – first lady of American journalism

o Sheppard Towner Act – 1921

▪ Estab the first federally funded health care program providing matching funds for states to set up prenatal and child health care centers

▪ Opposed by the AMA who objected to gov’t sponsored health care, and to nurses who functioned outside the supervision of Dr’s

Mexican Immigration

- Mexicans not included in the 1921 and 1924 immigration laws

- 459k entered the US b/t 21-30

- tremendous agricultural pull in the American southwest

- more permanent than previous waves

- mostly confined to barrios

- attempts to limit immigration were defeated by powerful agribusiness

The “New Negro” – Harlem

- population of about 200k African Americans; 120k from immigration in the 1920’s

- demographic and cultural capital of black America

- Caribbean’s made up about ¼ of Harlem’s population

- Slum conditions – overcrowded apartments, unsanitary conditions and the rapid deterioration of housing

- Middle class population

o Intellectuals, artists, musicians, and writers

o “The New Negro” – Alain Locke – optimistic faith that encouraged African Americans to develop and celebrate their distinctive culture

o Politics – Marcus Garvey – created a mass movement that stressed black economic self-determination and unity among the black communities of the US, Caribbean, and Africa

o Entertainment – The Cotton Club – nightclub controlled by white organized crime

▪ Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong

▪ Black entertainment, but only whites in audience

The Election of 1928

- D’s – Alfred Smith – strong in S

o Former NY governor; ran a pro-business, conservative campaign

o D’s remained regionally divided over prohibition, Smith’s religion, and the widening split b/t rural and urban values

- R’s – Herbert Hoover

o One of the best known men in America

o Ran on the theme of continued prosperity and individualism

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