Somerset College Prep



Ch 26, 27, 28, & 29: The 1920sCh 26 Sec 4Nicola Sacco became an anarchist while working in a shoe factory.?Bartolomeo Vanzetti learned about anarchism while working at a rope factory.?The two met in 1917, when they fled to Mexico to escape the military draft.?When they returned to Massachusetts, they joined an East Boston anarchists' group.?Vanzetti later boasted, "Both Nick and I are anarchists—the radical of the radical." On the night of their arrest, both were carrying guns.?Sacco also had a pamphlet advertising an anarchist rally at which Vanzetti would speak.?After their trial, many came to believe that Sacco and Vanzetti had been convicted because of their radical politics.A Bomb Scare Fuels Fear of Radical Groups?On April 28, 1919, a mysterious package arrived in Seattle mayor Ole Hanson's office.?The package contained a bomb.?The next day, a similar package sent to former Georgia Senator Thomas Hardwick exploded, injuring his maid.?Acting on a tip from a New York City postal worker, the post office found 34 more bombs.?The addressees included capitalists like John D. Rockefeller and political figures like Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.?No one ever learned who mailed the bombs.2540381000Click to read captionMany Americans saw the bomb scare as another sign that?radicalism?was threatening public order.Radicalism is a point of view favoring extreme change, especially in social or economic structures.?At this time, it referred to the ideas of socialist, communist, and anarchist groups.?Socialists called for public ownership of the means of production, including land and factories.?They believed such changes could be brought about through peaceful munists followed the economic theories of the German philosopher Karl Marx (1818–1883).Similar to socialism,?communism?called for public ownership of the means of production.?The result would be a classless society in which all people shared equally in the wealth produced by their munists, however, believed such change could only be brought about through a revolution by the working class.American communists drew inspiration from the Russian Revolution of 1917.?During that time of unrest, a small group of communists called Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, had seized control of the country.?The Bolsheviks hoped their success would spark communist revolutions in other countries.?When that did not happen, Lenin established the Comintern (Communist International).?The Comintern united radical groups throughout the world who accepted Lenin's views on the need for revolution to create a communist state.Anarchists opposed all systems of government.?They wanted a society based on freedom, mutual respect, and cooperation.?Most anarchists were peaceful, but they had been associated with violence since the Chicago Haymarket Square bombing of 1886.?In that incident, seven policemen were killed as they broke up an anarchist rally.?None of these radical groups was very large.?Combined, their membership came to less than 1 percent of the adult population.?Nor were they very effective.?They argued constantly among themselves.?Still, many Americans viewed them with suspicion and alarm.?This postwar fear of radicals became known as the?Red Scare.Red was slang for communist.The Red Scare Leads to Raids on "Subversives"?On June 2, 1919, the intensity of the Red Scare increased.?Eight bombs exploded in eight cities at the same time.?One target was Attorney General Mitchell Palmer's house in Washington, D.C. In response, Palmer launched a campaign against subversives, or people who sought to overthrow the government.2540-190500Click to read captionPalmer and his assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, conducted raids on homes, businesses, and meeting places of people they thought might be subversives.?The?Palmer Raids?sought weapons, explosives, and other evidence of violent activity.?Officials entered buildings without warrants and seized records without permission.?With little or no cause, they arrested 6,000 suspected radicals.?Foreign-born suspects were deported, many without a court hearing.?The only evidence of violent activity they found was three pistols.Civil Liberties Suffer?Palmer's tactics trampled?civil liberties, basic rights guaranteed by law.Newspaper editor Walter Lippmann wrote of the abuses:?"It is forever incredible that an administration announcing the most spacious ideals in our history should have done more to endanger fundamental American liberties than any group of men for a hundred years."Yet for some Americans, the fear of radicalism overshadowed concerns about abuses of civil liberties.Some 30 states passed sedition laws, which made stirring up opposition to the government a crime.Books considered subversive were removed from public libraries.?A mob broke into the offices of a socialist newspaper in New York City and beat up the staff.?Another mob seized a Wobbly out of a jail in Washington, hanged him from a bridge, and used his body for target practice.Palmer had hoped to ride the wave of public alarm about radicals all the way to the White House.?But he went too far when he announced that a plot to overthrow the government would begin in New York City on May 1, 1920.?As that day drew near, the city's police force was put on 24-hour duty.Politicians were given armed guards for protection.?When nothing happened, Palmer's political ambitions were shattered.After this false alarm, the country worried less about subversion.?Most of the people arrested in the Palmer Raids were released without being accused of a crime.?Still, the campaign had crippled the nation's radical movements.Ch 26 Sec 5The police investigating the South Braintree robbery had little to go on except eyewitness accounts of two bandits who "looked Italian." Three weeks later, the police arrested Sacco and Vanzetti.?When searched, the suspects were found to be carrying pistols and ammunition.?When questioned, they lied about where they had been and how they had obtained their guns.?Their behavior made them look suspicious to the police and, later, to a jury.?But during this troubled time, some native-born Americans eyed many immigrants—especially those who were poor and spoke little English—with suspicion.Increased Immigration Causes a Revival of Nativism?Between 1905 and 1914, a million people a year immigrated to the United States.?Most came from southern and eastern Europe.?Immigration dipped sharply during World War I and then picked up again afterward.?In 1920, about 430,000 foreigners entered the country.?A year later, that number almost doubled.2540317500Click to read captionThe rising tide of immigrants triggered a resurgence of nativism along with calls for immigration restriction.?Many nativists feared that the latest immigrants would never become "100 percent American." As one nativist warned, "There are vast communities in the nation thinking today not in terms of America, but in terms of Old World prejudices, theories, and animosities." Others argued that reducing immigration would relieve urban crowding and reduce ethnic conflicts.?Union members favored restrictions because they worried that immigrants were taking jobs from union workers.?Even some large employers supported immigration restriction.?For this group, fear of immigrant radicalism had come to outweigh their desire for cheap immigrant labor.New Laws Close the Nation's "Open Door" to Immigrants?Congress responded to anti-immigrant pressure by passing the Emergency Immigration Act of 1921.?This new law capped the number of people allowed into the country each year at 375,000.?It also introduced a?quota system?to limit the number of immigrants from each country.?The quota, or maximum number, was set at 3 percent of a country's residents in the United States in 1910.?The quota system was intended to be a temporary measure until Congress could study immigration more closely.Three years later, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924.?This law reduced the number of immigrants allowed into the country each year to 164,000.?It also cut quotas to 2 percent of a country's residents in the United States in 1890.?That had been a time when most immigrants came from northern Europe.?By moving the date back, the law severely reduced immigration from southern and eastern Europe.?The new law also banned all immigration from Asia.?When the Japanese government heard this news, it declared a national day of mourning.By the end of the decade, immigration was more than one quarter of what it had been in 1921.?But even that was not enough of a reduction for many nativists.?In 1929, they persuaded Congress to lower the number of immigrants each year to 150,000.-18796086868000A Revived Ku Klux Klan Targets "Alien" Influences?Anti-immigrant feelings played a role in the revival of the Ku Klux Klan.?The Klan was reborn in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1915 after the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager.?Frank had been condemned to death for killing a young girl named Mary Phagan.Convinced that Frank was innocent, the governor of Georgia reduced Frank's sentence to life imprisonment.?At that point, armed men, calling themselves the Knights of Mary Phagan, broke Frank out of jail and hanged him.?The Knights then reformed themselves as the new invisible order of the Ku Klux Klan.Click to read captionThe revived Ku Klux Klan portrayed itself as a defender of American values.?It restricted membership to native-born white Protestants and set itself against African Americans, immigrants, Catholics, and Jews.?"The Klan is intolerant," bragged its Imperial Wizard, Hiram Wesley Evans, "of the people who are trying to destroy our traditional Americanism .?.?.?aliens who are constantly trying to change our civilization into something that will suit themselves better."In the early 1920s, the Klan swelled to between 3 and 4 million members and gained considerable political power throughout the country.?Lawmakers supported by the Klan won control of state legislatures in Oregon, Oklahoma, Texas, and Indiana.?To demonstrate their power, Klan members held massive marches in Washington, D.C., and other major cities.?Yet the Klan's violence and intimidation remained secretive.?They often struck at night, wearing hoods that concealed their faces and using whippings, kidnappings, cross burnings, arson, and murder to terrorize entire communities.The American Civil Liberties Union Defends Unpopular Views?The views of nativists and the Klan did not go unchallenged.?In 1920, a group of pacifists and social activists founded the?American Civil Liberties Union?(ACLU) to protect freedom of speech.?The ACLU specialized in the defense of unpopular individuals and groups, including Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.In the first year of the ACLU, its lawyers fought to protect immigrants who had been rounded up in the Palmer Raids for their radical beliefs from being deported.?The ACLU also defended the right of trade unions to hold meetings and organize workers.?ACLU lawyers helped win the release of hundreds of Wobblies and other pacifists who had been jailed during the war for expressing antiwar sentiments.The ACLU opposed censorship by fighting efforts by the Customs Office and the Post Office to ban certain books from the mail.?As you will read in Chapter 29, the ACLU would later play a leading role in one of the most controversial trials of the 1920s.Ch 26 Sec 6On July 27, 1927, six years after Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted of murder, the Lowell Committee concluded that the trial of the two men had been fair.?On August 23, 1927, the two men were executed.?Decades after their executions, doubts remain about their guilt.?Modern analysis of the evidence has confirmed that the gun found on Sacco at the time of his arrest was one of the murder weapons.?This suggests that Sacco was guilty of the crime.?But no one has found proof to link Vanzetti to the murders.?"I have suffered because I was an Italian," Vanzetti wrote from prison.Asians and African Americans Face Discrimination?Italians were not the only victims of such prejudice.?Asian immigrants also faced severe legal discrimination.Asians were barred from becoming citizens and, in several states, from owning land.?Many states also banned marriages between whites and Asians.African Americans faced continuing discrimination as well.?At the end of World War I, returning black soldiers had high hopes that their service to the country would lessen prejudice.?These hopes proved illusory.?Black veterans had problems finding jobs.?In some places, lynching made an ugly comeback.?More than 70 blacks were murdered by lynch mobs in 1919.In the summer of 1919, tensions between whites and blacks erupted into race riots.?The most serious riot occurred in Chicago when whites killed a black swimmer who had strayed into the white section of a Lake Michigan beach.?Some 38 people were killed and 500 injured in the riots that followed.?The African American poet Claude McKay wrote of the summer of 19192540000Click to read captionIf we must die, let it not be like hogs?Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,?While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,?Making their mock at our accursed lot.?If we must die, O let us nobly die, .?.?.?Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,?Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!—Claude McKay, "If We Must Die," 1919In this climate of violence, many African Americans responded to the message of a leader named Marcus Garvey.?The Jamaican-born Garvey believed blacks would never be treated fairly in a white-dominated country.?"Our success educationally, industrially, and politically is based upon the protection of a nation founded by ourselves," he argued.?"And the nation can be nowhere else but in Africa."Garvey's?Back-to-Africa movement?attracted up to 2 million followers.?He also collected enough money to start several businesses, including a steamship line intended to transport his followers to Africa.?In 1925, however, Garvey was imprisoned for mail fraud connected with the sale of stock in one of his businesses.?After that, his Back-to-Africa movement faded away.?Yet Garvey had raised a critical issue:?Should African Americans create a separate society or work for an integrated one?Jews and Catholics Battle Religious Prejudice?The influx of 2.4 million Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe stirred up?anti-Semitism—prejudice against Jews.?In some communities, landlords refused to rent apartments to Jewish tenants.?Colleges limited the number of Jewish students they accepted.?Many ads for jobs stated "Christians only."The Leo Frank case, which gave birth to the new Ku Klux Klan, also led to the founding of the?Anti-Defamation League?(ADL) in 1913.?The organization's immediate goal was "to stop the defamation [false accusation] of the Jewish people." Its longer-term mission was "to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike." Throughout the 1920s, the ADL battled discrimination against Jews in all areas of life.Catholics were also targets of religious prejudice.?In 1928, the Democratic Party nominated New York Governor Al Smith, a Catholic, for president.?Soon, rumors swept the country that if Smith were elected, the Catholic pope would run the United States.?Smith spent most of the campaign trying to persuade voters that his religious beliefs did not present a threat to the nation.Smith was not convincing enough to overcome strong anti-Catholic sentiment in many parts of the country.?For the first time since the end of Reconstruction, the Republican Party carried several states in the South.?More than 30 years would pass before another Catholic candidate would be nominated for the nation's highest office.Ch 27 Sec 2The contrast between the aged, sickly Woodrow Wilson and the robust Warren Harding was proof enough that a new era had arrived.?But there was more.?Harding was the first president to have his inauguration speech amplified through loudspeakers.?After speaking, he walked to the Senate to personally nominate his cabinet members.?No president had done that since George Washington.?On entering the White House, he opened the front gates, raised the blinds, and welcomed the public.?Ordinary Americans had not been allowed on the White House grounds since the beginning of World War I.Harding Cuts Taxes and Spending?Before going into politics, Harding had owned a small newspaper in his hometown of Marion, Ohio.?"He looks like a president," thought Harry Daugherty when he first met Harding in 1899.?For the next 21 years, Daugherty managed Harding's political career all the way to the White House.2540571500Click to read captionBy his own admission, Harding was "a man of limited talents from a small town." But his cheerful, gregarious nature kept him popular with the public.?So did his commitment to the?free enterprise system.?Such an economic system is characterized by private ownership of property, including land and resources.?It relies on competition for profits and the forces of supply and demand to determine what goods and services should be produced and at what price.With the support of a Republican Congress, Harding set to work to end the postwar recession.?He repealed taxes that had been raised under Wilson to fund the war effort.?Harding also reduced federal spending.?His budget director, Chicago banker Charles Dawes, made the government operate in a more efficient way.?Dawes's efforts were believed to have saved at least a billion tax dollars annually at a time when the federal government's yearly spending came to less than $5 billion.?The resulting surplus was used to pay down the national debt.Harding's?fiscal policy, or approach to taxes and government spending, brought renewed prosperity.Prices plunged in 1921, so Americans could afford more goods and services.?Unemployment dropped from nearly 12 percent when Harding took office to just above 2 percent in 1923.Harding's Friends Betray Him:?The Teapot Dome Scandal?A loyal friend, Harding filled several government positions with old pals from Ohio.?The leading member of this "Ohio Gang" was Harding's former campaign manager and now attorney general, Harry Daugherty.?Another old friend, New Mexico Senator Albert Fall, became Harding's secretary of the interior.But the Ohio Gang betrayed Harding's trust.?Daugherty, for example, took bribes from suspects accused of crimes.?The worst instance of corruption was the?Teapot Dome Scandal, which began when Secretary of the Interior Fall persuaded Harding to give him control over national oil reserves in Elk Hills, California, and Teapot Dome, Wyoming.?Fall then leased the oil reserves to two companies that had paid him $360,000 in bribes.?When the bribes became public, Fall resigned.?But the scandal left the public wondering whether any other national properties had been offered up for sale.Harding stood by his friends, saying, "If Albert Fall isn't an honest man, I am not fit to be president of the United States." In fact, Harding was not all that physically fit.While on a "bloviating" tour of the West, Harding suffered a heart attack in San Francisco.?He died on August 2, 1923.2540-63500Calvin Coolidge Promotes Business?On August 3, 1923, Vice President Calvin Coolidge took the oath of office in a Vermont farmhouse.?Nicknamed "Silent Cal," Coolidge was a small man of few words.?Americans saw in him the quiet virtues of small-town New England:?integrity, hard work, and thriftiness.Like Harding, Coolidge believed "the chief business of the American people is business." But for Coolidge, business was more than a way to make a living.?It was a worthy calling.?"The man who builds a factory builds a temple," he wrote.?"And the man who works there worships there."Coolidge coasted to an easy victory in the election of 1924.?Working closely with Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, Coolidge worked to cut taxes and eliminate unnecessary spending.?He pushed for reductions in corporate taxes, income taxes, and?inheritance taxes—taxes on assets received from people who have died.?Coolidge even cut his own White House budget, economizing in little ways, such as reducing the number of towels in the bathrooms.Under Coolidge, the nation continued to prosper.?Americans assumed he would run for reelection in 1928.?But in August 1927, while on vacation, he shocked reporters by handing them a statement that simply said, "I do not choose to run for president in 1928." Silent Cal had spoken.Herbert Hoover Promises to "End Poverty as We Know It"?In 1928, the Republican Party turned to Herbert Hoover as its presidential nominee.?Hoover was an American success story.?Born in West Branch, Iowa, in 1874, he was orphaned at a young age.?Despite this, he worked his way through college and became a very wealthy mining engineer.?Hoover's success, along with his Quaker upbringing, inspired him to write a book titled?American Individualism.?In it, he wrote of his "abiding faith in the intelligence, the initiative, the character, the courage, and the divine touch in the individual."Click to read caption-571507620000At the age of 40, Hoover decided to leave engineering and devote his life to public service.?During World War I, he headed President Woodrow Wilson's Food Administration.?When the war ended, Hoover gained fame by setting up programs to feed the hungry in Europe.?In 1921, President Harding made Hoover his secretary of commerce.Like Harding and Coolidge, Hoover believed in promoting business.?He encouraged what he called "associationalism." This involved bringing industry leaders together to improve economic efficiency.?Hoover hoped that as businesses flourished, poverty would disappear.?In accepting the Republican nomination for president in 1928, he said,We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.?The poor-house is vanishing from among us.?We have not yet reached the goal, but given a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.—Herbert Hoover, speech accepting the Republican nomination, 1928Ch 27 Sec 3 The horrors of World War I had left many Americans yearning for a withdrawal from international affairs, a policy that became known as?isolationism.?Isolationist attitudes had been strong in the Senate when it had voted down the Treaty of Versailles.?At heart, however, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover were not isolationists.?They recognized that foreign trade connected American farmers and businesspeople to the rest of the world.Avoiding Involvement in Europe?Isolationist feeling was strongest toward Europe.?Although in his campaign, Harding had favored entry into the League of Nations, upon taking office, he declared, "We seek no part in directing the destinies of the Old World." During his presidency, the State Department did not even open mail from the League.2540317500Click to read captionAmerican distrust of the League of Nations softened with time.?The United States sent delegates to several League conferences in the 1920s.?Presidents Harding and Coolidge also supported U.S. membership in an international court of justice known as the World Court.?Established by the League in 1921, the World Court's purpose was to settle international disputes before they turned into wars.By the time the Senate approved membership in 1926, it had attached so many reservations that the other member nations refused to approve U.S. membership.Promoting Peace Through Disarmament?Although public opinion leaned toward isolationism, Americans also longed for world peace.?President Harding responded by inviting representatives of Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan to Washington to discuss naval?disarmament, or weapons reduction.?When the?Washington Naval Conference?opened in 1921, Secretary of State Charles Evan Hughes shocked the delegates by offering to scrap 30 U.S. warships.?The other nations soon agreed to limit the size of their navies as well.Supporters of the naval disarmament agreement hoped it would discourage future wars.?Naysayers, however, feared that military ambitions would not be so easily contained.?They were right.?The Washington Naval Conference did limit the construction of large warships, but it did not affect smaller ships and submarines.?Soon Japan, Great Britain, and the United States were adding cruisers and other small ships to their fleets.Using Diplomacy to Outlaw War?Efforts to negotiate an end to warfare peaked in 1928, when the United States signed the?Kellogg-Briand Pact.?This treaty began with an agreement between the United States and France to outlaw war between their countries.?Eventually 62 nations signed the pact, which rejected war as "an instrument of national policy."Americans cheered the Kellogg-Briand Pact as an important step toward world peace.?"It is a thing to rejoice over," gushed the Boston?Herald.?More practical-minded realists sneered that this "international kiss" was not worth much, because it still permitted defensive wars.?But the Senate approved the treaty by a vote of 85 to 1.Settling Europe's War Debts?In addition to worrying about the next war, the Republican presidents worked to clean up debts from the last one.?At the end of World War I, Great Britain and France owed U.S. lenders $11 billion.?With their economies in shambles, these countries relied on reparations from Germany to make their loan payments.?The German economy, however, was in even worse shape.?By 1923, Germany had stopped making reparation payments.25407620000Click to read captionCharles Dawes, a banker who had served as Harding's budget director, came up with a solution to the debt crisis.?American banks would loan money to Germany.?Germany would use that money to pay reparations to Great Britain and France.?Great Britain and France would then repay what they owed American lenders.?The circular flow of money in the?Dawes Plan?worked for a while.?But it also increased the amount of money Germany owed the United States, an issue that would cause problems later.Reducing Involvement in Latin America?Isolationist sentiment also had an impact on U.S. policy toward Latin America.?When Harding took office in 1921, U.S. troops were stationed in Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti.?Harding and Coolidge both tried to reduce such entanglements.?In 1921, Harding settled a long dispute with Colombia over the Panama Canal.?Three years later, Coolidge withdrew troops from the Dominican Republic.?Still, business ties and American investments continued to pull the United States into Latin American affairs.?After withdrawing the marines from Nicaragua in 1925, Coolidge sent them back in 1927 to counter a revolution.Hoover, however, embraced a policy of nonintervention.?Immediately after his election in 1928, he embarked on a goodwill tour of Latin America.?In 1930, he signaled his rejection of the Roosevelt Corollary by announcing that the United States did not have the right to intervene militarily in Latin America.?Even when revolutions shook Panama, Cuba, and Honduras in 1931, Hoover did not send troops.?"I have no desire," he said, "for representation of the American government abroad through our military forces."Ch 27 Sec 4 Under the economic policies of the Republican presidents, the post-World War I recession faded away.?Businesses began to expand.?Productivity increased dramatically.?Unemployment dropped and wages rose to double what they had been before the war.?By 1929, the United States was producing 40 percent of the world's manufactured goods.?"Big business in America," reported muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, "is providing what the socialists held up as their goal—food, shelter, clothing for all."Henry Ford Pioneers a New Age of Mass Production?The automobile industry led this new age of productivity.?In 1910, U.S. automakers built fewer than 200,000 cars a year at prices that only the wealthy could afford.?By 1929, at least half of all American families owned a car.?The credit for this transformation of the car from luxury item to consumer good goes to Detroit automaker Henry Ford.Ford's goal was to mass-produce cars in order to lower their prices.?"The public should always be wondering how it is possible to give so much for the money," he wrote.?He accomplished his goal by designing a revolutionary moving assembly line that cut production time from 14 to six hours.?He then could cut the price of his cars from $950 in 1908 to under $290 in 1926.When he unveiled his assembly line in 1914, Ford made a stunning announcement.?He was more than doubling his workers' pay from the $2.40 per nine-hour day common in his industry to $5.00 per eight-hour day.?The public loved him for it.?Business leaders hated him, saying that he was ruining the labor market.?Looking back, historian Frederick Lewis Allen observed,What Ford had actually done—in his manufacturing techniques, his deliberate price cutting, and his deliberate wage raising—was to demonstrate .?.?.one of the great principles of modern industrialism .?.?.?This is the principle that the more goods you produce, the less it costs to produce them; and the more people are well off, the more they can buy, thus making this lavish and economical production possible.—Frederick Lewis Allen,?The Big Change, 1952Ford sold so many cars that by the mid-1920s his Detroit, Michigan, factory complex had 19 buildings covering two square miles.?A new car rolled off his assembly lines every 10 seconds.?By 1930, Ford had produced 20 million cars.Innovations Give Birth to New Industries?The automobile industry's rapid expansion fueled growth in other industries, such as steel, rubber, and oil.?Highway construction boomed.?Restaurants and hotels sprang up along new roads to meet the needs of motorists.?The popularity of cars also created new service industries, such as gas stations and repair shops.?By the mid-1920s, one of every eight American workers had a job related to the auto industry.The airplane industry also boomed.?During World War I, airplanes had become weapons.?In 1927, the Boeing Airplane Company won the U.S. Post Office contract to fly mail and passengers from Chicago to San Francisco and back.?By 1930, there were 38 domestic and five international airlines operating in the United States.?The airplane had been transformed from novelty to vehicle.A "plastics craze" also changed American life in the 1920s.?Synthetic fibers like rayon revolutionized the clothing industry.?See-through cellophane became the first fully flexible, waterproof wrapping material.?Bakelite, the first plastic that would not burn, boil, melt, or dissolve in any common solvent, was vital to the production of radios.?Radio had first been used for wireless communication among ships at sea.?By 1920, radio stations had sprouted up in many U.S. cities.?Radio production soared as a result.?By 1929, radios were a big business, with Americans spending $850 million on sets and parts that year alone.Big Businesses Get Even Bigger?Businesses were not only prospering but also getting bigger due to a wave of?consolidation.?Consolidation is the merging, or combining, of two businesses.?During the Progressive Era, antitrust laws had slowed business consolidation.?Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, in contrast, chose to ignore antitrust laws.?The Republican presidents defended consolidation on the grounds that it made the economy more efficient.Consolidation came early to the automobile industry.?Before 1910, there were hundreds of companies building cars in the United States.?By 1929, three automakers—Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler—built almost 90 percent of the cars on the market.?General Motors was the brainchild of an entrepreneur named William Durant.Unlike Ford, who made just one car model, Durant offered several models at different price levels.?By the end of the decade, General Motors had become the nation's leading automaker.2540254000Click to read captionThe story was similar in other industries.?In the 1920s, a handful of?holding companies?bought up nearly 5,000 small utility companies.?A holding company is a corporation that owns or controls other companies by buying up their stock.?By 1929, about two thirds of American homes were wired for electricity, and consolidation led to a decline in the cost of electricity.Consolidation also revolutionized the grocery business, as the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (A&P) launched the first grocery store chain.?Mom-and-pop grocery shops were driven out of business as A&P's chain grew from fewer than 5,000 stores in 1920 to more than 15,000 by 1929.Not everyone viewed this triumph of big business as positive.?An anti-chain store movement swept through a number of states and cities.Speculators Aim to Get Rich Quick?As the good times rolled on, some Americans got caught up in get-rich-quick schemes, such as Ponzi Scheme and the?Florida Land Boom.?In this Florida scheme, shady real estate developers sold lots along the Florida coast to eager?speculators?in other parts of the country.?A speculator is someone who takes the risk of buying something in the hope of selling it for a higher price later.?As long as prices were going up, no one cared that some of the lots were under water.?Prices collapsed, however, after a hurricane devastated the Florida coast.?Many speculators were left with nothing but near-worthless land.Others saw the stock market as the road to riches.?In the past, only wealthy people had owned stock.?During the 1920s, stock ownership had spread to the middle class.?John Raskob, a General Motors executive, encouraged stock buying in a?Ladies' Home Journal?article titled "Everybody Ought to Be Rich." Raskob told his readers that if they invested a mere $15 a month in the stock market, they could expect a massive payoff of $80,000 in 20 years.Many Americans took his advice.?Housewives invested their pocket money in stocks.?Barbers, cab drivers, and elevator operators bought stocks on "hot tips" they had overheard while working.?As money poured into the market, stock prices soared.?The?Dow Jones Industrial Average, a measure of stock prices still used today, doubled between May 1928 and September 1929.Left Out of the Boom:?Enduring Poverty?Between 1921 and 1929, the?gross national product?(GNP) of the United States rose by 40 percent.?The GNP is a measure of the total value of goods and services produced within a country in a year.?However, not all Americans shared in the prosperity.?In 1929, a family of four needed $2,500 a year to live decently.?More than half the families filing tax returns that year earned $1,500 or less.The 1920s were hard times for farmers, many of whom were deeply in debt after the war.?Surplus crops also caused farm prices to collapse.?Hard times for farmers meant even harder times for farmworkers.?Mexican, Mexican American, Asian, and Asian American workers earned the lowest wages and endured the worst working and living conditions.Unskilled workers also fared poorly in the 1920s.?Workers in old industries struggled to stay employed.?Coal miners were laid off by the thousands as gasoline, natural gas, and electricity became more popular sources of energy.?The textile industry faced heavy competition from new synthetic fabrics.?Among the hardest hit were African Americans, who were often the last to be hired and the first to be fired.?They were usually paid less than their white counterparts and were also barred from most unions.Ch 28Bee Jackson, a New York City dancer, was looking for a chance to become famous.?But she was only part of a Broadway musical chorus line, so no one really knew her.?Then one night in 1923, Jackson went to see?Runnin' Wild, the new African American musical everyone was talking about.?The dancers began doing a dance she had never seen before called the?Charleston.?"I hadn't been watching it three minutes," Jackson later recalled, "before I recognized it as old Mrs. Opportunity herself shouting, 'Hey!?Hey!'"The Charleston began as an African American folk dance in the South.?It got its name from the South Carolina city of Charleston.The dance migrated north to Harlem, an African American neighborhood in New York City.?There, Elida Webb, the dance mistress for?Runnin' Wild, saw it and adapted the dance for the musical.?After seeing the Charleston onstage, Jackson asked Webb to teach it to her.0000Click to read captionJackson created a dance act for herself featuring the Charleston.?A booking agent took one look at the act and said, "That dance is a hit.?You can't keep quiet when you are watching it." He booked Jackson into a New York City nightclub known as the Silver Slipper.?From there, she took her dance act on the road to other clubs around the country and then to London and Paris.?As the dance craze spread, Jackson gained the fame she had always wanted.Young people loved the Charleston.?Its fast-paced music and swinging moves were a perfect fit for a time known as the?Roaring Twenties.?"The first impression made by the Charleston was extraordinary," wrote one observer.?"You felt a new rhythm, you saw new postures, you heard a new frenzy in the shout of the chorus."?Older Americans, however, were often shocked by the dance.?At Smith College, students were not allowed to practice it in their dorm rooms.?This conflict over a dance was a sign that American culture was changing, sometimes far faster than many people could or would accept.Ch 28 Sec 2"How's your breath today?" Listerine ads from the 1920s often asked.?"Don't fool yourself .?.?.Halitosis makes you unpopular." The ad might show a sophisticated couple gliding across the dance floor, face-to-face.?Bad breath does not seem to be a problem for them.?Be like them, the ad seems to say.?"Halitosis doesn't announce itself.?You are seldom aware you have it .?.?.?Nice people end any chance of offending by .?.?.?rinsing .?.?.?with Listerine.?Every morning.?Every night."In 1914, Listerine was introduced as the nation's first over-the-counter mouthwash.?Until then, bad breath was something few people thought much about.?Listerine advertisements changed that.Suddenly people began to worry about "halitosis"—an obscure medical term for bad breath that Listerine's makers popularized.?"Halitosis spares no one," ads warned.?"The insidious [quietly harmful] thing about it is that you yourself may never realize when you have it." Listerine sales skyrocketed.?In just seven years, the product's sales revenues rose into the millions—all thanks to the power of advertising.New Products Promise to Make Life Easier?At the root of the Listerine ad was a promise.?Use Listerine every day, and your life will get better.?In the 1920s, the makers of other new products repeated such promises in radio and print advertisements.?In the process, they helped create a newconsumer culture.?This is a culture that views the consumption of large quantities of goods as beneficial to the economy and a source of personal happiness.The ideas for some new products emerged from brilliant minds.?George Washington Carver, for example, pioneered the creation of new goods based on agricultural products.?Carver made more than 300 products from peanuts, including a face powder, printer's ink, and soap.?He also created more than 75 products from pecans and more than 100 products from sweet potatoes, such as flour, shoe polish, and candy.?"Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough," Carver said of his work with humble plants.In 1919, Charles Strite invented the pop-up toaster because he was tired of being served burnt toast in a company cafeteria.?The appliance was a huge success.?Clarence Birdseye, with an investment of $7 in an electric fan, buckets of saltwater, and cakes of ice, invented a system of flash-freezing fresh food in 1923.The electrification of homes spurred the introduction of a host of new household appliances.?Electric vacuum cleaners made cleaning easier.?Electric-powered washing machines and irons revolutionized laundry day.?Food preparation became easier with electric refrigerators and stoves.0000Click to read captionAdvertising Builds Consumer Demand?New kinds of advertisements created demand for these new products.?No longer was it enough to say what the product was and why it was good.?Now advertisers used psychologists to tailor their ads to people's desires and behaviors.?In 1925, economist Stuart Chase observed,Advertising does give a certain illusion, a certain sense of escape in a machine age.?It creates a dream world:?smiling faces, shining teeth, school girl complexions, cornless feet, perfect fitting union suits, distinguished collars, wrinkleless pants, odorless breaths, .?.?.?charging motors, punctureless tires, .?.?.?self-washing dishes.—Stuart Chase, "The Tragedy of Waste,"?The Atlantic Monthly, 1925Businesses found that by changing styles frequently, they could induce consumers to buy their goods more often.?Women had already accepted the ups and downs of hemlines.?Now the practice of introducing new models every year was extended to goods that were supposed to last a long time, including cars, furniture, and household appliances.?Advertisers worked hand-in-hand with businesses to convince consumers of the value of staying up-to-date.?Buying the latest model, even if you didn't need it, became a sign of prestige.Bruce Barton was the most famous adman of the time.?In 1925, he published a book titled?The Man Nobody Knows.?In it, he praised Jesus as the founder of a successful business, saying, "He picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world." In Barton's view, "Jesus was a real executive .?.?.?a great advertising man.?The parables are the greatest advertisements of all time." Barton's "irreverent" and controversial book topped the nonfiction best-seller list in 1925, selling more than 750,000 copies by 1928.0317500Click to read captionAmericans Begin to Buy Now, Pay Later?In the 1920s, Americans achieved the highest standard of living in the world.?Still, many consumers could not afford all the goods they wanted and thought they needed.?One reason was that the new products often cost far more than the older ones they were replacing.?An electric washing machine cost much more than an old-fashioned washboard. The same was true of an electric shaver compared with a safety razor.The expansion of?credit?made it possible for consumers to buy what they wanted, even when they lacked enough cash.?Credit is an arrangement for buying something now with borrowed money and then paying off the loan over time.?In the past, most Americans had thought it shameful to borrow money to buy consumer goods.?Thrifty people saved the money they needed and paid cash.?By the 1920s, however, such thrift began to seem old-fashioned.The growth of?installment buying?made it possible for Americans to buy goods on credit.?In installment buying, a buyer makes a down payment on the product.?The seller loans the remainder of the purchase price to the buyer.?The buyer then pays back the loan in monthly installments.?If the buyer stops making payments before the loan is repaid, the seller can reclaim the product.By the end of the 1920s, about 15 percent of all retail sales were on installment plans.?This included about three out of every four radios and six out of every ten cars.Buying on credit was so easy that many Americans began to think the good times would go on forever.Ch 28 Sec 3On May 20, 1927, a little-known airmail pilot from Minnesota took off on an extraordinary journey.?Charles Lindberg was competing for the Orteig Prize—$25,000 for the first nonstop flight from New York City to Paris.?He packed sandwiches, two canteens of water, and 451 gallons of gas.?Lindbergh hit storm clouds and thick fog over the Atlantic that forced him at times to barely skim the ocean waves.?The sun set as he drew near France.?He later wrote,I first saw the lights of Paris a little before 10 P.M…and a few minutes later I was circling the Eiffel Tower at an altitude of about four thousand feet…The lights of Le Bourget [airfield] were plainly visible…I could make out long lines of hangers, and the roads appeared to be jammed with cars.—Charles Lindbergh,?The Spirit of St. Louis, 1953When Lindbergh landed, 100,000 people were waiting to greet him.?Overnight, he had become the biggest celebrity of the decade.That "Lucky Lindy" did not seem to care about such adulation only endeared him more to the public.0444500Click to read captionAirplanes Give Americans Wings?Airplanes had proven their usefulness during World War I. After the war, the U.S. government offered thousands of surplus warplanes for sale at bargain prices.?Made of wood and canvas, these planes were not all that safe.?Still, many wartime pilots bought the planes and used them for an exciting but dangerous style of flying called barnstorming.Barnstormers toured the country, putting on daring air shows at county fairs and other events.?They wowed audiences by flying planes in great loops and spirals.?"Wing walkers" risked death by walking from wingtip to wingtip of a plane while it was in flight.?Others leaped from the wing of one flying plane to another.?Many of the planes crashed, and a number of barnstormers were killed.?Lindbergh was one of the lucky barnstormers to live to old age.The U.S. Post Office also bought surplus military planes to fly mail between a few large cities.?The first transcontinental airmail route was opened between New York and San Francisco in 1920.?Airmail greatly aided the growth of commercial aviation.?Meanwhile, engineers were working to design safer, more powerful transport planes.?By 1926, Henry Ford was producing an all-metal airplane powered by three engines rather than one.?The Ford Tri-Motor could carry 10 passengers at speeds of 100 miles per hour.In the early days of flight, pilots became celebrities.?Adoring fans welcomed Lindbergh back from France with a ticker-tape parade in New York City, showering him with 1,800 tons of stockbrokers' ticker tape and confetti.?In 1932, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic.?Congress awarded her the Distinguished Flying Cross.?At the medal ceremony, she said her flight had proven that men and women were equal in "jobs requiring intelligence, coordination, speed, coolness, and willpower."0000Click to read captionAutomobiles Reshape American Life?By making cars affordable, automaker Henry Ford had changed the way Americans lived.?Cars quickly became more than just another means of transportation.?A car gave women and teenagers a new sense of freedom.?It ended the isolation of farmers.?It made travel to far-away places enjoyable.?By the late 1920s, Americans owned more cars than bathtubs.?As one woman explained, "You can't drive to town in a bathtub."The automobile changed where Americans lived.?Urban workers no longer had to live within walking distance of their workplace or near a streetcar line to get to work.?Suburbs began to spread farther around cities as people found it easier to travel to and from work by car.?In the 1920s, for the first time in the nation's history, suburbs grew more quickly than cities.Before cars became popular, most roads were dirt tracks.?When it rained, automobiles sometimes sank to their hubcaps in mud.?Motorists often had to wait days for mud to dry before they could move on.?The Federal Highway Act of 1916 encouraged states to create highway departments to address this problem.?Congress passed another highway act in 1921 to support road building.As highways crept across the continent, new businesses took root beside them.?Gas stations, diners, campgrounds, and motels sprang up to serve the needs of the car traveler.?Advertising billboards became common sights on roadsides.?At the same time, death tolls from accidents rose.?The number of people killed in automobile accidents each year increased from fewer than 5,000 before the 1920s to more than 30,000 by the 1930s.?Historian Frederick Lewis Allen noted yet another change brought about by the car:The automobile age brought a parking problem that was forever being solved and then unsolving itself again.?During the early nineteen-twenties the commuters who left their cars at the suburban railway stations at first parked them at the edge of the station drive; then they needed a special parking lot, and pretty soon an extended parking lot, and in due course, a still bigger one—and the larger the lot grew, the more people wanted to use it.—Frederick Lewis Allen,?The Big Change, 1952Ch 28 Sec 4Adoring fans worshipped movie star Rudolph Valentino as the "Great Lover." When he died suddenly at the age of 31, more than 100,000 people lined New York City streets to witness his funeral.?It was an astonishing send-off for an Italian immigrant who had come to New York as a teenager in 1913.?It was also a sign that Valentino had become an important part of his adopted country's?popular culture.?Popular culture is the culture of ordinary people and includes their music, art, literature, and entertainment.?Popular culture is shaped by industries that spread information and ideas, especially the mass media.0381000Click to read captionPrint Media Bring Popular Culture to a National Audience?Newspapers and magazines had long been sources of information for Americans.?During the 1920s, the amount of printed material available expanded enormously.?By 1929, Americans were buying more than 200 million copies a year of popular national magazines, such as the?Saturday Evening Post,?Ladies' Home Journal,?Reader's Digest, and?Time.As newspaper and magazine circulation increased, more and more people read the same stories, learned of the same events, and saw the same ideas and fashions.?As a result, a popular culture common to all regions of the United States began to take shape.?At the same time, regional differences that had once divided Americans began to fade in importance.Radio Gives Popular Culture a Voice?Radio burst onto the American scene in the 1920s.?Like newspapers and magazines, radio was a mass medium that could reach very large audiences.Suddenly, popular culture had a voice.Radio station KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is thought to be the first commercial radio station.When it broadcast the results of the 1920 presidential election, people began to have an inkling of what this new medium could do.?As a result, radio sales took off.Radio pioneer David Sarnoff had a huge impact on the development of broadcast radio.?Sarnoff, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, began working for the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company in 1906.?Radio was first called the "wireless," because it received signals through the air rather than over wires, as the telephone did.?On April 14, 1912, Sarnoff picked up a message relayed to New York City by ships at sea.?It read, "Titanic?ran into iceberg, sinking fast." For the next 72 hours, he stayed at his post, relaying the names of survivors to anxious relatives as the disaster at sea unfolded.0000Click to read captionIn 1919, Radio Corporation of America (RCA), a company that built radios, bought Marconi Wireless.?Sarnoff saw that for RCA to sell many radios, it had to invest in programming that people would want to hear.?But this idea was not easy to promote.?"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value," others argued.?"Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" To prove them wrong, Sarnoff arranged the broadcast of the Dempsey-Carpentier boxing match in 1921.?Public response to this event confirmed the power of radio broadcasting to reach large numbers of people.Sarnoff then proposed that RCA form a nationwide broadcasting network.?He saw this network as a collection of radio stations across the country that would share programming.?His proposal led to the formation of the National Broadcasting Company, or NBC.Much later, Sarnoff applied his vision to another medium—television.?In 1941, NBC made the first commercial television broadcast.By then, Sarnoff was president of NBC, where he was known to all as "the General."People soon came to expect radio stations to broadcast national news, such as elections.?Many stations also brought play-by-play accounts of sports events to their listeners.?In addition, stations began to broadcast regular programs of music, comedy, and drama.A situation comedy called?Amos 'n Andy?became so popular that many people would not answer their phones during its weekly broadcast.0000Motion Pictures Create Movie Stars and Fans?The movies, too, became a big business in the 1920s.?Motion pictures were first developed in the 1890s.?At that time, movies were silent.?After World War I, people flocked to movie theaters, eager to escape the problems of the postwar recession.?They drank in melodramatic love scenes, were thrilled by exciting fight scenes, and laughed at silly situations.?Income from ticket sales rose from $301 million in 1921 to $721 million in 1929.?Weekly attendance climbed from 50 million in 1920 to 90 million in 1929.The discovery of how to add sound to movies revolutionized the motion picture industry.?In 1927,?The Jazz Singer?became the first feature-length "talkie." It was an overnight hit.?Dialogue became an important part of films, expanding the job of writers.?While some silent-film stars adjusted to the new medium, a whole new group of stars were born.Like radio, the movies changed popular culture in powerful ways.?Movie stars became national celebrities.?Fans worshipped stars such as Valentino.?Actress Mary Pickford was called "America's Sweetheart." Motion pictures exposed Americans to new fashions, new hairstyles, and a loosening of the rules of social behavior.?As one historian wrote, "Radio told the masses what to do, and movies showed them how to do it."CH 28 Sec 6When Louis Armstrong arrived in New York City in 1924 to join Fletcher Henderson's band, the band members were not impressed.They took one look at Armstrong's long underwear and big clumpy boots and wondered if this was really the famed cornet player.?On the first night that Armstrong played a solo with the band at the Roseland Ballroom, he was nervous as well.?A fellow horn player encouraged him to "close your eyes and play what you feel .?.?.?Just let it go .?.?.?Be yourself .?.?.?Forget about all the people." Armstrong did as he was told, and his music soared.?The audience stopped dancing to gather around him.?For months afterward, the Roseland was packed with people who couldn't get enough of Armstrong's playing.Armstrong was a master of a new kind of music called?jazz.?Unlike more formal types of music, jazz was hard to define.?As Armstrong once said, "If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know."?This new music became so popular in the 1920s that this decade is often called the?Jazz Age.Jazz Grows Out of Blues and Ragtime?Jazz is a distinctly American musical form.?It grew from a combination of influences, including African rhythms, European harmonies, African American folk music, and 19th-century American band music and instruments.?At the turn of the 20th century, these forms began to mix and grew into blues and ragtime.?The blues sprang from African American work songs, with elements of gospel and folk music.?Many blues songs are about loneliness or sorrow, but others declare a humorous reaction to life's troubles.?Ragtime used a syncopated, or irregularly accented, beat that gave the music a snappy, lilting feel.035242500Click to read captionJazz combined the syncopation of ragtime with the deep feelings of the blues.?To this already rich mix, jazz musicians added?improvisation.?This is a process by which musicians make up music as they play rather than relying solely on printed scores.?So, to some degree, the jazz musician is his or her own composer.Jazz was born in New Orleans.?There, African American musicians were in demand to play at funeral parades, in minstrel shows, and as part of riverboat orchestras.?Many gifted but untrained black musicians did not know how to read music.?They began to make up melodies and expand on familiar tunes.?Eventually, the improvised solo became an integral element of jazz.?The jazz pianist Duke Ellington said of improvisation, "It's like an act of murder; you play with intent to commit something."As boats and then railroads traveled away from New Orleans, they carried the new music with them.Soon jazz caught fire in Kansas City, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City.Bandleader Paul Williams remembered,One moment, jazz was unknown, obscure—a low noise in a low dive.?The next it had become a serious pastime of a hundred million people, the diversion of princes and millionaires .?.?.?The time was ripe .?.?.?The whole tempo of the country was speeded up .?.?.?Americans .?.?.?lived harder, faster than ever before.?They could not go without some new outlet .?.?.?the great American noise, jazz.—Paul Williams, quoted in?Jazz:?A History of America's Music, 2000Night Clubs and Radio Bring Jazz to New Audiences?In the 1920s, the black population in New York City more than doubled as a result of migration from the South.?The black migrants brought their love of jazz with them to the city, and the African American neighborhood of Harlem became a magnet for jazz lovers.0317500Click to read captionThe number of nightclubs and jazz clubs in Harlem in the 1920s is estimated at anywhere from 500 to several thousand.?Nearly all the great jazz musicians played there at some point.?Harlem's most famous jazz club was the Cotton Club.?The floorshow featured dancers in lavish costumes.?The dancers and musicians were African American, but most of the patrons were white.Although people could hear jazz at nightclubs in the cities, many first heard the new music on records.?The first recordings of jazz were made in the 1910s.?As the style gained popularity, many artists made records featuring their own work.?Radio also helped spread jazz.?In the late 1920s, the music of Duke Ellington and his band was broadcast nationwide from the Cotton Club.?Benny Goodman, a white clarinetist, also had a popular band there.?By 1929, a survey of radio stations showed that two thirds of airtime was devoted to jazz.Jazz Becomes America's Music?By then it was clear that jazz was here to stay.?Jelly Roll Morton became the first musician to write the new music down.?Bandleader Duke Ellington composed jazz standards that are still played widely today.?George Gershwin blended jazz with classical musical pieces like?Rhapsody in Blue, which were written for full orchestras.Young people, in particular, loved dancing to the new music.?The Charleston and other dances swept the country.?Unlike earlier forms of dancing, the new dances, with their kicks, twists, and turns, seemed wild and reckless.?Many older Americans were shocked by jazz.?They felt that its fast rhythms and improvisations were contributing to a loosening of moral standards.?The?Ladies' Home Journal?even launched an anti-jazz crusade.?Jazz, however, became the first uniquely American music to be played and loved around the world.Ch 28 Sec 7Young Langston Hughes had been living in Mexico with his father the year before he entered Columbia University.?When he arrived in New York in 1921, his first stop was not his new college.?Instead, Hughes headed to 135th Street, the heart of Harlem.?He wrote of his arrival:I came out on the platform with two heavy bags and looked around .?.?.?Hundreds of colored people.?I hadn't seen any colored people for so long .?.?.?I went up the steps and out into the bright September sunlight.?Harlem!?I stood there, dropped my bags, took a deep breath and felt happy again.—Langston Hughes,?The Big Sea, 1940For African American writers in the 1920s, Harlem was?the?place to be.African Americans Create a "Harlem Renaissance"?The word?renaissance?means a "revival" or "rebirth." It usually describes a literary or artistic movement.?The?Harlem Renaissance?was the outpouring of creativity among African American writers, artists, and musicians who gathered in Harlem during the 1920s.?They shared their work and encouraged each other.Many African American writers who were part of this movement explored what it meant to be black in the United States.?Langston Hughes wrote poetry, plays, and fiction that captured the anguish of African Americans' longing for equality.?He composed one of his best-known poems while traveling to New York at the age of 17.30765756350000I've known rivers:?I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human?blood in human veins.?My soul has grown deep like the rivers.I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.?I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.?I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.?I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to?New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.I've known rivers:?Ancient, dusky rivers.My soul has grown deep like the rivers.—Langston Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," 1920Click to read captionJames Weldon Johnson broke new ground with his best-known book,?The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.?The novel describes an attempt by an African American to escape racial discrimination while exploring black culture in early 1900s.?He also wrote the lyrics for "Lift Every Voice and Sing," which is sometimes called the Negro national anthem.Zora Neale Hurston began her career as an anthropologist.?She traveled through the South and the Caribbean, collecting the folklore of black people.?She later transformed these into novels, short stories, and essays.?Hurston's best-known novel is?Their Eyes Were Watching God.?It tells the story of an African American woman living in the black town of Eaton, Florida.?Hurston lets her characters, both men and women, speak in their own dialect and voices.Literature and Art Reflect American Life?White writers were also critical of American ideas and values.?Sickened by the slaughter of war, some even moved to Europe, especially Paris.?There they gathered at the apartment of writer Gertrude Stein, who called these young people the?Lost Generation.?They included E. E. Cummings, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and Sherwood Anderson.?These writers developed themes and writing styles that still define modern literature.The poet E. E. Cummings brought fresh ideas to his poetry.?He used no capitalization and did not follow the usual way of presenting verse on a page.?Ernest Hemingway used a direct, taut style in his novels.?His first book,?The Sun Also Rises, describes the rootless feelings of many young people after the war.F.?Scott Fitzgerald was the leading writer of the Jazz Age.?His novel?The Great Gatsby?critiques the moral emptiness of upper-class American society.?This passage from another Fitzgerald novel reveals the impact of the World War on the Lost Generation.0000Click to read captionThis land here cost twenty lives a foot that summer .?.?.?See that little stream—we could walk to it in two minutes.?It took the British a month to walk it—a whole empire walking very slowly .?.?.?leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs.?No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.—F.?Scott Fitzgerald,?Tender Is the Night, 1933Writers in the United States also found fault with American life.Sinclair Lewis's novel?Main Street?looked at the tedium and narrowness of life in small-town America.?Playwright Eugene O'Neill wove dark, poetic tragedies out of everyday life.?Both O'Neill and Lewis won the Nobel Prize for Literature.Artists also used their work to portray modern life.?Edward Hopper's paintings of New York City and New England towns express a sense of loneliness and isolation.Rockwell Kent, one of the most popular artists of this period, used tonal contrasts to create moody scenes of nature.Georgia O'Keeffe also found inspiration in nature.?She is famous for her paintings of huge flowers and, later, desert landscapes.?O'Keeffe once said of her paintings, "Nobody sees a flower—really—it is so small it takes time—we haven't time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time."Exploring Culture Becomes a Popular Pastime?Americans responded to this explosion of culture with enthusiasm.?Art museums displayed the works of new artists such as Hopper and O'Keeffe.?Magazines also showcased popular art of the time.The American public developed a growing interest in literature as well.?Magazines and newspapers helped introduce new writers to a range of readers.?In addition, two publishing innovations made books more available to readers.?One was the paperback book, less expensive than hardback, clothbound books.?The other was the book club.?Founded in 1926, the Book of the Month Club distributed books by writers such as Hemingway to members by mail.?The Book of the Month Club exposed millions of Americans to new books.Ch 28 Sec 8The year was 1926.?No woman had ever swum across the English Channel.?Many people doubted that a woman could, but Gertrude Ederle, an American swimmer, was about to try.?Ederle had already won Olympic medals in 1924.?She had also already tried to swim the channel but had failed.In this attempt, she succeeded.?Ederle not only swam across the 35-mile channel.?She also beat the men's record by nearly two hours.?Upon her return to the United States, Americans greeted Ederle with a ticker-tape parade through New York City.0000Click to read captionSpectator Sports Become Big Business in the 1920s?By the 1920s, the eight-hour workday, five-day workweek had become the rule in many industries.?More leisure time freed Americans to pursue interests beyond work.?Economist Stuart Chase estimated that Americans spent one fourth of the national income on play and recreation.?Some of this money went toward?spectator sports, or sports that attract large numbers of fans who attend games.Sports became a big business.?Professional baseball and football teams attracted legions of loyal fans.?Boxing and wrestling matches also attracted crowds.?The promoter of the 1921 boxing match between U.S. heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey and French challenger Georges Carpentier built a 60,000-seat stadium for the event.?Ticket sales hit $1.8 million, more than any previous boxing match.?When Dempsey fought to regain his title from Gene Tunney in 1927, more than 100,000 people bought tickets worth $2,658,660—a record at that time.The mass media helped raise the public interest in sports.?Millions of Americans listened to radio broadcasts of popular sporting events.?One entrepreneur even figured out a way to add "live action" to a radio broadcast.?He had a blow-by-blow radio broadcast of the 1927 Dempsey-Tunney match piped into a large hall while two local boxers reenacted the fight for the audience.Sports Stars Become National Celebrities?Before the 1920s, the light of publicity had never shone so brightly on sports figures.?Now Americans wanted to know everything about their favorites.?The media gladly fed this passion.-219075-26670000Click to read captionThe most famous sports celebrity of this era was baseball slugger Babe Ruth, the legendary "Sultan of Swat." In the 1927 season, Ruth hit 60 home runs, a record that would remain unbroken for 34 years.?Ruth attracted so many fans that Yankee Stadium, which opened in 1923, was nicknamed "the House That Ruth Built."3295650186690000Jim Thorpe, an American Indian, was one of the greatest all-around athletes.?He began his sports career as an outstanding college football player.?He won fame as an Olympic track and field champion, and then went on to play professional baseball and football.?In 1920, Thorpe became the first president of the group that was to become the National Football League (NFL).Women also made their mark on sports.?Gertrude Ederle broke national and world swimming records on a regular basis.?Tennis star Helen Wills won many tennis championships in the United States and Europe.?She was known for her ability to hit the ball harder than any woman she faced and for a calm manner that earned her the nickname "Little Miss Poker Face."Ch 29 Sec 1Norman Rockwell was born in New York City in 1894.?A talented artist, he studied at a number of the city's art schools.?For many young painters in the 1920s, it would have been natural to draw all the new and strange sights the city offered.?But Rockwell's works had nothing to do with New York.?Instead, they depicted a more traditional America, one that could be found on farms and in small towns.Click to read captionIn 1916, the?Saturday Evening Post, one of the country's most popular weekly magazines, started putting Rockwell's charming pictures on its covers.?By 1925, Rockwell was nationally famous."Without thinking too much about it in specific terms," Rockwell said of his work, "I was showing the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed."Most of the trends and changes that made the 1920s roar emerged in the nation's cities.?Although rural life was changing as well, Rockwell's paintings appealed to a longing for the reassurance of the simple life.?Some people who lived in rural areas did not approve of the changes they had witnessed since the end of World War I. They were?traditionalists, or people who had deep respect for long-held cultural and religious values.?For them, these values were anchors that provided order and stability to society.For other Americans, particularly those in urban areas, there was no going back to the old ways.They were?modernists, or people who embraced new ideas, styles, and social trends.?For them, traditional values were chains that restricted both individual freedom and the pursuit of happiness.As these groups clashed in the 1920s, American society became deeply divided.?Many rural dwellers lined up against urbanites.?Defenders of traditional morality bemoaned the behavior of "flaming youth." Teetotalers opposed drinkers.?Old-time religion faced off against modern science.?The result was a kind of "culture war" that in some ways is still being fought today.Ch 29 Sec 2As the war ended and the doughboys began to come home from France, the title of a popular song asked a question that was troubling many rural families:?"How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm (after they've seen Paree)?" After seeing the bright lights of cities, many returning soldiers decided to leave behind the small towns they came from.?The 1920 census revealed a startling statistic:?for the first time ever, the United States was more than 50 percent urban.?This population shift set the stage for the growing divide between traditionalists and modernists.Urban Attractions:?Economic Opportunity and Personal Freedom?During the 1920s, some 19 million people would move from farms to cities, largely in search of economic opportunities.?Urban areas, with their factories and office buildings, were hubs of economic growth.?As the economy boomed, the demand for workers increased.?Wages rose as well.?Between 1920 and 1929, the average per capita income rose 37 percent.?At the same time, the?consumer price index, a measure of the cost of basic necessities such as food and housing, remained steady.?As a result, urban wage earners saw their standard of living improve.0127000Click to read captionCities also offered freedom to explore new ways of thinking and living.?City dwellers could meet people from different cultures, go to movies, visit museums, and attend concerts.?They could buy and read an endless variety of magazines and newspapers.?They could drink, gamble, or go on casual dates without being judged as immoral.Rural Problems:?Falling Crop Prices and Failing Farms?The personal freedom people experienced in cities stood in strong contrast to small-town life.?In rural areas, most people lived in quiet communities, where they watched out for one another.?New ideas and ways of behaving were often viewed with suspicion.-47625109537500In addition to losing their younger generation to cities, rural communities faced other problems during the 1920s.?Farmers had prospered during the war, producing food crops for the Allies and the home front.?Enterprising farmers had taken out loans to buy new machines or extra land in hopes of increasing their output and profits.?After the war, however, European demand for U.S. farm products dropped sharply, as did crop prices.?With their incomes shrinking, large numbers of farmers could not repay their loans.?Hundreds of thousands of farmers lost their farms in the early 1920s alone.?For the rest of the decade, farmers' share of the national income dropped steadily.?By 1929, per capita income for farmers was less than half the national average.Congressmen from rural states tried to reverse this downward slide with farm-friendly legislation.?The most ambitious of these measures, the McNary-Haugen Bill, was first introduced in 1924.?This legislation called on the federal government to raise the price of some farm products by selling surplus crops overseas.?Congress passed the bill twice, in 1927 and then in 1928, but President Calvin Coolidge vetoed it both times.?A strong opponent of the government's interference in markets, the president dismissed the McNary-Haugen Bill as "preposterous."Changing Values Lead to Mutual ResentmentThe divide between urban modernists and rural traditionalists was not just economic.?Modernists tended to view rural Americans as behind the times.?Sinclair Lewis, the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, mocked small-town values.?In one of his novels, he described the residents of a small Midwestern town asa savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world.—Sinclair Lewis,?Main Street, 1920Rural traditionalists, not surprisingly, resented such attacks on their behavior and values.?In their eyes, they were defending all that was good in American life.?They saw the culture of the cities as money-grubbing, materialistic, and immoral.?At the same time, however, many rural people could not help but envy the comfort and excitement city life seemed to offer.The defenders of traditional values often looked to their faith and the Bible for support in their struggle against modernism.?As a result, the 1920s saw a rise in religious?fundamentalism—the idea that religious texts and beliefs should be taken literally and treated as the authority on appropriate behavior.Billy Sunday, a former major league baseball player, emerged as the most prominent fundamentalist preacher in the nation.?His dramatic preaching style drew huge crowds.?He was said to have preached to more than 100 million people in his lifetime.?Sunday's largest following was in rural areas, including the South.?"There is ten times more respect for God and the Bible and the Christian religion in the South," he said, "than in any other part of the United States."Still, times were changing.?A growing number of young modernists were rejecting long-accepted American values.?Rural areas were losing population to the cities, and agriculture was no longer the backbone of the American economy.?In addition, with improvements in mass media, country people themselves were being exposed to new ideas, music, and social values.Ch 29 Sec 3Before World War I, if a young man were interested in courting a young woman, he would visit her at home and meet her parents.?If things went well at this first meeting, the boy would visit again.?If he invited the girl to a dance or concert, an older adult would go with them as a chaperone.?Eventually, the girl's parents might trust the young couple enough to let them sit by themselves on the front porch.?In traditional families, these courtship patterns continued after the war.?In more modern families, however, courtship changed dramatically, often confusing, if not upsetting, the older generation.?Courtship was one example of how the older and younger generations clashed in the 1920s.The Youth Perspective:?The Old Ways Are Repressive?During the 1920s, a growing drive for public education sent a majority of teenagers to high school for the first time in U.S. history.?College enrollment also grew rapidly.?As young people spent more time than ever before outside the home or workplace, a new youth culture emerged.?This culture revolved around school, clubs, sports, music, dances, dating, movies, and crazy fads.The fads young people followed were, for the most part, ephemeral.?In one fad, young couples entered marathon dance competitions.The last couple left standing after many hours of dancing won a prize.?Flagpole sitting, in which a participant would spend days perched atop a flagpole, was another short-lived fad.?One fad from the 1920s that remains popular today is the crossword puzzle.The most daring young women broke with the past by turning themselves into "flappers." They colored their hair and cut it short.Their skimpy dresses—worn without restrictive corsets—barely covered their knees.?They rolled their stockings below their knees and wore unfastened rain boots that flapped around their ankles.?Flappers wore makeup, which until that time had been associated with "loose" women of doubtful morals.?Draped with beads and bracelets and carrying cigarette holders, they went to jazz clubs and danced the night away.In a magazine article on the flapper, Zelda Fitzgerald wrote,She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure, she covered her face with paint and powder because she didn't need it and she refused to be bored because she wasn't boring .?.?.?Mothers disapproved of their sons taking the Flapper to dances, to teas, to swim and most of all to heart.—Zelda Fitzgerald, "Eulogy on the Flapper," 19220000Click to read captionModern young couples traded old-fashioned courtship for dating.?Whereas the purpose of courtship had been marriage, the main point of dating was to have fun away from the watchful eyes of parents.Sedate tea parties or chaperoned dances gave way to unsupervised parties.Older people fretted about the younger generation's "wild" ways.?Many young people, however, felt free to ignore their elders.?After witnessing the war's waste of life, they decided that the adults who had sent young men into battle did not deserve respect.?As one young person said, "The older generation had certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us."Easy access to cars and the mass media helped fuel the youth rebellion.?Cars gave young people a means to escape the supervision of their elders.?Magazines and movies, in the meantime, spread images of a good life that was often very different from the way their parents had grown up.Writers Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about youth of the time in books with such titles as?The Beautiful and Damned.?Perhaps no one better captured the feelings of rebellious youth than poet Edna St. Vincent Millay when she wrote,My candle burns at both ends;?It will not last the night;?But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—?It gives a lovely light.—Edna St. Vincent Millay, "A Few Figs from Thistles," 1920The Adult Perspective:?Young People Have Lost Their Way?Many adults considered the behavior of young people reckless and immoral.?They tried to restore the old morality in a number of ways.?One was censorship.?Traditionalists pulled books they saw as immoral off library shelves.?They also pressured filmmakers for less sexually suggestive scenes in movies.?The Hays Office, named for former Postmaster General Will Hays, issued a movie code that banned long kisses and positive portrayals of casual sex.?In bedroom scenes, movie couples had to follow a "two feet on the floor" rule.Some states tried to legislate more conservative behavior.?They passed laws to discourage women from wearing short skirts and skimpy swimsuits.?Police with yardsticks patrolled beaches looking for offenders.Mostly, however, the older generation restricted itself to expressing loud disapproval.?When nagging did not work, many parents crossed their fingers and hoped for the best.?More often than not, they were not disappointed.?Most young people, even the most rebellious flappers, usually ended their dating days by getting married and raising the next generation of rebellious youth.CH 29 Sec 4 On February 14, 1929, men dressed in police uniforms raided the headquarters of Chicago's Moran gang.?When the officers ordered the gangsters to raise their hands and line up against the wall, the gang members thought nothing of it.?The police were always annoying them.?These "police officers," however, were members of Al "Scarface" Capone's rival gang in disguise.?Capone's men whipped out their guns and blasted away.?Seven members of the Moran gang died in what soon became known as the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre.?This bloodbath was one of many unexpected consequences of what Herbert Hoover called "an experiment noble in purpose"—prohibition.The "Dry" Perspective:?Prohibition Improves Society?Traditionalists and progressive reformers saw passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, which prohibited the manufacture, sale, or transport of alcoholic beverages, as a great victory.?They pointed to evidence that alcoholism caused crime, violence, and the breakup of families.?"Drys," as backers of prohibition were known, believed that stopping people from drinking would result in a healthier, happier society.099123500Drys also saw prohibition as a way of taming city life.?Support for prohibition centered mainly in rural areas, and many drys saw the Eighteenth Amendment as a triumph of rural over urban Americans.As one dry put it, prohibition allowed the "pure stream of country sentiment and township morals to flush out the cesspools of cities." In addition, many traditionalists were suspicious of foreigners.?They associated beer drinking with immigrants of German descent and wine drinking with Italian immigrants.?To them, prohibition was a way to curb such "foreign" influences.At first, prohibition seemed to the drys to deliver its expected benefits.?The national consumption of alcohol did decline, from an annual average of 2.6 gallons per capita before the war to less than 1 gallon by the 1930s.?Fewer workers spent their wages at saloons, to the benefit of their families.?The greatest decline in drinking probably occurred in the groups that resented prohibition the most—poor and working-class ethnic groups.?In their view, prohibition was just another example of nativist prejudice toward immigrants.Click to read captionThe "Wet" Perspective:?Prohibition Restricts Freedom and Breeds Crime?Opponents of prohibition, called "wets," were small in number at first.?But as the law went into effect, their numbers grew.?Opposition centered mainly in large cities and immigrant communities.Many modernists attacked prohibition as an attempt by the federal government to legislate morality.?Journalist H. L. Mencken, a champion of modernism, called drys "ignorant bumpkins of the cow states who resented the fact that they had to swill raw corn liquor while city slickers got good wine and whiskey." Another modernist, Massachusetts Senator David Walsh, rejected traditionalist arguments that drinking was sinful.?He reminded drys that the first miracle performed by Jesus had been to turn water into wine.?Were Jesus to perform this miracle in prohibition-era America, Walsh observed, "he would be jailed and possibly crucified again."Prohibition seemed doomed from the start.?In October 1919, Congress passed the?Volstead Act?to enforce the Eighteenth Amendment.?But the federal government never gave the enforcement agency, called the Prohibition Bureau, sufficient personnel, money, or supplies.?The bureau's agents were simply outnumbered by the millions of Americans who wanted to drink.?Hoover later estimated that the government would need 250,000 agents to make prohibition work.As a result, prohibition led to an increase in illegal behavior by normally law-abiding citizens.?Millions of Americans simply refused to abstain from drinking.?Some learned how to brew their own "bathtub gin." Others bought "bootleg" alcohol that was distilled illegally or smuggled into the United States from Canada.?As thousands of bars and pubs were forced to close, they were replaced by nearly twice as many secret drinking clubs, called?speakeasies.?The term speakeasy came from the practice of speaking quietly about illegal saloons so as not to alert police.?A 1929 issue of New York City's?Variety?boldly reported, "five out of every seven cigar stores, lunchrooms, and beauty parlors are 'speaks' selling gin." The number of speakeasies in New York City alone was estimated at 32,000.?The widespread availability of illegal alcohol led the humorist Will Rodgers to quip, "Prohibition is better than no liquor at all."The growing demand for liquor created a golden opportunity for crooks like Al Capone.?Bootlegging—the production, transport, and sale of illegal alcohol—was a multibillion dollar business by the mid-1920s.?Chicago bootlegger Capone exhibited his wealth by driving around in a $30,000 Cadillac while flashing an 11 1/2-carat diamond ring.?To keep his profits flowing without government interference, he bribed politicians, judges, and police officers.?He also eliminated rival bootleggers.?His thousand-member gang was blamed for hundreds of murders.?In 1931, Capone finally went to jail—not for bootlegging or murder, but for tax evasion.As lawlessness, violence, and corruption increased, support for prohibition dwindled.?By the late 1920s, many Americans believed that prohibition had caused more harm than good.?In 1933, the states ratified the Twenty-First Amendment, which repealed prohibition.Ch 29 Sec 5 In 1925, Dayton, Tennessee, was a sleepy town of almost 2,000 people, plus a freethinking New York transplant named George Rappelyea.?That year, the state legislature passed a law making it illegal for a public school "to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible."While chatting with friends one day, Rappelyea mentioned an offer by the American Civil Liberties Union to defend any teacher who would test the law.?Why not find one right here, he suggested.?A trial would show how foolish the law was.?It would also attract national attention to Dayton.?One of his friends knew just the man for the job—a young science teacher named John Scopes, who would be willing to teach a lesson on evolution.?And so the stage was set for a dramatic contest between modernists and traditionalists over the place of science and religion in public schools.0000Click to read captionThe Modernist Perspective:?Science Shows How Nature Works?Like many modernists, Rappelyea looked to science, not the Bible, to explain how the physical world worked.?Scientists accepted as true only facts and theories that could be tested and supported with evidence drawn from nature.?By the 1920s, people could see the wonders of modern science every time they turned on an electric light, listened to the radio, or visited their doctors.One of the most controversial scientific ideas of that time was British naturalist Charles Darwin's?theory of evolution.?Darwin theorized that all plants and animals, including humans, had evolved from simpler forms of life.?The evolution of one species from another took place over thousands or millions of years.?It worked through a process he called "natural selection." Others called it "survival of the fittest." In this process, species that make favorable adaptations to their environment are more likely to survive than those that do not.?As favorable adaptations pile up, new species evolve from old ones.?In such a way, Darwin argued, human beings had evolved from apes.Modernists embraced the concepts of evolution and natural selection.?Rather than choosing between science and religion, they believed that both ways of looking at the world could coexist.?"The day is past," declared a New York City preacher, "when you can ask thoughtful men to hold religion in one compartment of their minds and their modern world view in another." By the 1920s, the theory of evolution was regularly taught in schools.The Traditionalist Perspective:?The Bible Is the Word of God?Traditionalists were more likely to see science and religion in conflict.?This was especially true of Christian fundamentalists, who believed the Bible was the literal word of God.?They rejected the theory of evolution because it conflicted with?creationism, the belief that God created the universe as described in the Bible.During the early 1920s, fundamentalists vigorously campaigned to ban the teaching of evolution in public schools.?They found a champion in William Jennings Bryan.A spellbinding speaker, Bryan had played a -228600-20002500major role in American politics for 30 years.?He had run for president three times and served as secretary of state under President Woodrow Wilson.?Bryan toured the country, charging that modernists had "taken the Lord away from the schools."Click to read captionBryan had two reasons for taking up the creationist cause.?The first was his deeply held Christian faith.?The second was his fear that teaching evolution could lead young people to accept social Darwinism.?This is the belief that as in nature, only the fittest members of a society will survive.Social Darwinism had been used to justify imperialism on the grounds that the fittest, or most powerful, peoples should rule the less powerful.?It had also been used to promote?eugenics, or the idea that the human species should be improved by forbidding people with characteristics judged undesirable to reproduce.?Bryan saw such views as a threat to the poor and weak.?He worried that widespread acceptance of social Darwinism and eugenics "would weaken the cause of democracy and strengthen class pride and power of wealth."470535019050000Creationism Versus Evolution in Tennessee?Tennessee became the first state to enact a law banning the teaching of evolution in public schools.?The law might not have caused a nationwide stir if Rappelyea had not decided to contest it.?He sent a student to pull Scopes off a tennis court and said, "John, we've been arguing, and I said that nobody could teach biology without teaching evolution." Scopes not only agreed but also volunteered to teach a lesson on evolution the next day.Rappelyea then asked the American Civil Liberties Union to defend the young science teacher before going to the police and having Scopes arrested.Click to read captionThe?Scopes trial, which began on July 10, 1925, brought far more attention to Dayton than Rappelyea had hoped.?Bryan offered to represent the state of Tennessee.?Scope's supporters added high-powered lawyer Clarence Darrow to the defense team.?Although Darrow had supported Bryan for president, he disagreed with him about religion and agreed to defend Scopes for free.?Some 200 reporters arrived in Dayton as the trial opened, along with tourists and hawkers selling toy monkeys.?The whole country was following this contest between creationism and evolution.In their opening statements, the opposing lawyers recognized that the issue to be decided was much more than whether Scopes had broken the law.?"If evolution wins," Bryan had warned, "Christianity goes." Darrow argued, "Scopes isn't on trial; civilization is on trial." To make his point, Darrow had brought a variety of experts to Dayton to testify against the Tennessee law.?After hearing one of them, the judge refused to let the rest testify because what they had to say was not relevant to the guilt or innocence of the science teacher.For a moment, it looked like Darrow had no defense.?Then he surprised everyone by calling Bryan to the stand as an expert on the Bible.?"Do you claim that everything in the Bible should be literally interpreted?" Darrow asked.?Bryan answered, "I believe everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there." However, when asked if Earth had been created in six days, Bryan answered, "I do not think it means necessarily a twenty-four-hour day." Creation, he added, "might have continued for millions of years." Darrow had tricked Bryan, the fundamentalist champion, into admitting that he himself did not always interpret each and every word in the Bible as the literal truth.When the trial ended, it took the jury fewer than 10 minutes to find Scopes guilty,?whereupon the judge fined him $100.?A year later, the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the conviction because the judge, not the jury, had imposed the fine. ................
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