Presentation24

The Jazz AgeChapter 24

1921-29

Duke Ellington

Louis ArmstrongBillie Holiday

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Voting for the Anti-Wilson

America prospered during the 1920’s. American business set production records. Wages increased and working hours declined. To underscore the irrelevance of labor unionism, these outcomes were at a time when labor union membership was in rapid decline. The Recession of 1920 was and is still the worst in history, but because Harding did not use the government to intervene it was over in a year. He did nothing.

Harding was beloved and the train bearing his body was thronged by mobs of people from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. However, this is not to say Harding was not squeaky clean from scandal—the fathering of Nan Britton’s child (never corroborated), paying for a woman’s abortion, a 15 year affair with Carrie Phillips. His cabinet officials, became known as the “Ohio Gang,” because they supposedly were a gang of thieves from Ohio. In reality, most of the men linked to the Ohio Gang were not from Harding’s home state. When Harding confronted Jess Smith (for selling government favors) and Charles Cramer (profiting from veteran medical supplies), they both committed suicide.

Harding and Coolidge were strict supporters of laissez-faire economics and non-intervention in foreign affairs. During World War I, the income tax was raised from 7% to 73%. Andrew Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury, believed this tax rate was extremely damaging to the economy due to the theory later known as the Laffer Curve. The higher tax rate, the lower the tax revenues to the government because of the

“Harding will not try to be an autocrat, but will do his best to carry on government in the old and accepted Constitutional ways”

Massachusetts senatorHenry Cabot Lodge

Voting for the Anti-Wilson (cont’d)

rich sheltering their wealth to such withering and punishing taxation. Many Americans were investing in tax free state and municipal bonds which yielded relatively low returns but were tax free. States were awash with cash for dubious projects, but business was starved for cash. Mellon considered tax relief essential to the nation’s economic health and reduced the top 73% to 25% and lower tax brackets had their tax burdens eliminated all together. As a result of Mellon’s policy, tax revenues increased, but more importantly economic activity multiplied many times over. These tax reductions brought the prosperity of the 1920’s.

Harding and Coolidge did not establish a Square Deal, a New Deal, a New Frontier, a Great Society, or a New Covenant. They stayed out of the economy and out of people’s lives and America prospered.

Get Rich Quick!

President Calvin Coolidge had said during the long prosperity of the 1920’s that “The business of America is business.” Despite the seeming business prosperity of the 1920’s, however, there were serious economic weak spots, a chief one being a depression in the agricultural sector. Also depressed were such industries as coal mining, railroads, and textiles. Throughout the 1920’s, U.S. banks had failed—an average of 600 a year—as had thousands of other business firms. By 1928, the construction boom was over. The spectacular rise in prices on the stock market from 1924 to 1929 bore little relation to actual economic conditions. In fact, the boom in the stock market and in real estate, along with the expansion in credit (created, in part, by low-paid workers buying on credit) and high profits for a few industries, concealed basic problems. Thus the U.S. stock-market crash that occurred in October 1929, with huge losses, was not the fundamental cause of the marked the beginning of, the most traumatic economic period of modern times.

The Man and His Machine

The Ford family has had a major impact on the development of the U.S. automotive industry. Henry Ford, b. 30 Jul 1863, d. 7 Apr 1947, was the son of William Ford, who had emigrated from Ireland in 1847 and settled on a farm in Dearborn, MI. Henry disliked farm life and had a natural aptitude for machinery; when he was 15, he went to Detroit and trained as a machinist. In 1888, he married Clara Bryant. They had one child, a son, Edsel, b. 6 Nov 1893, d. 26 May 1943.

He achieved spectacular success with the Model T Ford, introduced in 1908 and eventually produced (1913) on a moving assembly line. Henry Ford was the major figure in the world’s automobile industry for the next 15 years. His production methods were intensively studied; in Germany, they were called Fordimus. He also startled the world by instituting (1914) the then high base-wage of $5 a day. He had gained favorable publicity (1911) by resisting the holders of the Selden patent, which purported to be a basic patent on the gasoline automobile, under conditions that made him appear to be a little man challenging a monopoly.

The Roaring Twenties Quiz1. The 1920’s economy was one of the best in history, but the

Recession of 1920 (worst in history) would have ruined it. What did Harding do?

2. What was the main reason for the prosperity of the 1920’s economy?

3. What was the statement that President Coolidge made about the economy of the United States?

4. What did Henry Ford improve to produce the Model T Ford?

5. What country studied Henry Ford’s production improvements—Fordimus?

Nothing

The income tax rate was reduced from 73% to 25%

“The business of America is business”

The moving assembly line

Germany

America Seeks the Fear Within America initiates the “Red Scare” for Communists

The “Red Scare” was a widespread public fear that Communists were involved in the increasing labor disputes and terrorists bombings.

Over 6000 suspected Communists were arrested in the raids ordered by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in 1919.

America restricted foreign immigration with the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 to an annual rate of 3% of the number of each nationality in America in 1910 and limited total immigration to 350,000 per year. The National Origins Act of 1924 changed: The quota to 2% and the base year to 1890 Ended immigration from Asia Allowed unlimited immigration from Canada and Latin America

A 1927 bill changed the base year to 1920 and the overall immigration limit to 150,000.

Hallucinogenic ArtSurrealism in art—a style in which imagery is based on fantasy and the world of dreams—grew out of a French literary movement founded during the 1920’s. The term surrealist was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917; the artistic movement, however, came into being only after the French poet Andre Breton published the first surrealist manifesto, Manifeste du surrealisme, in 1924. In this book, Breton suggested that rational thought was repressive to the powers of creativity and imagination and thus inimical to artistic expression. An admirer of Sigmund Freud and his concept of the subconscious, Breton felt that contact with this hidden part of the mind could produce poetic truth.

Breton soon recognized the kinship between his literary aims and the artistic aims of certain painters fascinated by Freudian concepts. In 1925, with Breton’s encouragement, the first group exhibition of surrealist painting took place in Paris. Among those included were Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Andre Masson, Joan Miro, and Man Ray.

The presurrealist paintings of de Chirico, done before 1919, were of particular influence to certain of the surrealists, including Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, and Yves Tanguy. These painters developed a dreamlike, or hallucinatory imagery that was all the more startling for its highly realistic rendering. Other painters, including Miro and Masson, used biomorphic forms and accidental effects that approached abstraction.

Are You a Monkey’s Uncle?

In March 1925, the state of Tennessee forbade the teaching of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. John T. Scopes, a schoolteacher hired by the ACLU and willing to be arrested, was tried in July of that year for violating the law. His trial became a public confrontation between a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible and more liberal views. The prosecution was conducted by William Jennings Bryan, a former presidential candidate, and the famous criminal lawyer Clarence Darrow conducted the defense. Both men volunteered their services (pro bono). At one point, Darrow cross-examined Bryan, who proved deficient in both Biblical and biological knowledge. Scopes was found guilty, but his conviction was overturned by the state supreme court, which nevertheless upheld the statute. The U.S. Supreme Court declared a similar statute unconstitutional in 1968.

William Jennings Bryan making a speech during trial

Clarence Darrow addressing the jury during the trial

Americans Move and Communicate Better

Economic and social conditions were improved by the automobile Wider travel radius The development of suburbs Greater independence for young people Increased demand for petroleum products A doubling of the miles of paved roads

The movies contributed by: Advertising the new products that industry produced Informed people of new styles Contributed to raising the material expectations of the average

American

The radio similarly helped spread information on new styles and products. It also helped carry the news and the voices of political leaders

into American households

Ford Model T, 1912

Guglielmo Marconi, the father of the radio

1920’s Quiz1. Over 6000 suspected Communists were arrested in the

raids ordered by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in 1919 in what was called?

2. Name an artist of the hallucinogenic art.

3. Name one of the lawyers of the Scopes Monkey Trial.

4. Name one of the technological advances of the 1920-30’s.

5. Who was the inventor of the radio?

Booker T. WashingtonBooker Taliaferro Washington, b. Franklin County, Va., Apr. 5, 1856, d. Nov. 14, 1915, was an American educator and a black leader. As a child he worked in coal mines nine months a year and attended school for three months. He worked his way through Hampton Institute, graduating in 1875. In 1881 he was appointed the first president of Tuskegee Institute, an Alabama trade school for blacks. Tuskegee opened with one teacher, about 50 pupils, and funds of $2,000 a year from the state of Alabama. By its 25th anniversary under Washington's leadership, the school had more than 1,500 students training in 37 industries.

Although Washington lived during a time when his race was widely discriminated against, he advocated training black people for trades to build up their economic position before fighting for integration and equality. He believed that black people would advance only if they were educated. This strategy was opposed by others, notably W. E. B. Du Bois. When Washington presented his views in a speech at the Atlanta Exposition in 1895, he rapidly gained the attention of white leaders. He became influential in channeling contributions to black causes and in getting blacks appointed to federal jobs. He advised Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft on racial matters. Washington wrote several books, including an autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901).

W.E.B. Du BoisWilliam Edward Burghardt Du Bois, b. Great Barrington, Mass., Feb. 23, 1868, d. Aug. 27, 1963, was a lifelong advocate of world peace and a leading champion of the liberation of Africans and people of African descent. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Fisk and Harvard universities and the first black to be awarded (1895) a Ph.D. from Harvard, Du Bois, in more than 20 books and more than 100 scholarly articles, pioneered both in historical studies of the black experience and in sociological explorations into Afro-American life. His argument, expressed lyrically and with passion in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), that an educated black elite should lead blacks to liberation (the progressive, socialist model), contrasted sharply with Booker T. Washington's emphasis on industrial training for blacks and virtual silence on the questions of social and political equality.

With the aim of ending racial discrimination, Du Bois founded (1905) the Niagara Movement, a forerunner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which he helped organize in 1909 and for which he edited Crisis from 1910 to 1934. For decades this was essential reading for all those interested in the fate of black people. Du Bois resigned from the NAACP in 1934 following a dispute in which he argued that blacks should make segregated schools and other institutions serve them even as they struggled to eliminate

W.E.B. Du Bois (cont’d)

the racism that had created them. Du Bois's view that Africans, freed from their colonial status, should help determine the world's destiny was scarcely more appealing to American civil rights leaders than his pragmatic approach to segregation. He returned to the NAACP in 1944 after a ten-year absence but was forced to resign in 1948 when his association with the cause of world peace, his expressed admiration for the USSR, and his articulate condemnation of racial oppression at home and abroad made him a liability to the organization in a time of political reaction and anticommunist hysteria.

A pariah in many quarters of the black community throughout the 1950s, Du Bois spent his last years in virtual exile but lived to see advances in racial relations in the United States and the coming of independence--which he had helped make possible--to much of Africa. At the age of 93, Du Bois joined the U.S. Communist party before renouncing his U.S. citizenship and becoming (1963) a citizen of the West African nation of Ghana.

Jim Crow

Jim Crow laws, named for an antebellum minstrel show character, were late-19th-century statutes passed by the legislatures of the Southern states that created a racial caste system in the American South. Although slavery had been abolished, many whites at this time believed that nonwhites were inherently inferior and to support this belief sought rationalizations through religion and science. The U.S. Supreme Court was inclined to agree with the white-supremacist judgment and in 1883 began to strike down the foundations of the post-Civil War Reconstruction, declaring the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. In 1896 it legitimized the principle of "separate but equal" in its ruling Plessy v. Ferguson.

The high court rulings led to a profusion of Jim Crow laws. By 1914 every Southern state had passed laws that created two separate societies--one black, the other white. This artificial structure was maintained by denying the franchise to blacks through the use of devices such as the grandfather clause, poll tax, and literacy test. It was further strengthened by the creation of separate facilities in every part of society, including schools, restaurants, streetcars, health-care institutions, and cemeteries.

Jim Crow, the archetypal slave character as created by Rice

Jim Crow (cont’d)

The first major blow against the Jim Crow system of racial segregation was struck in 1954 by the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which declared segregation in the public schools unconstitutional. In the following decade the system slowly crumbled under the onslaught of the civil rights movement. The legal structure of segregation was finally ended by the civil rights legislation of 1964-68.

Picaninny caricatures

Many later minstrel troupes, such as this one in 1910, tried to project an image of refinement. Note that only the endmen are in blackface.

Race RiotsIn the decade immediately preceding World War I, a pattern of racial violence began to emerge in which white mob assaults were directed against entire black communities. These race riots were the product of white society’s desire to maintain its superiority over blacks, vent its frustrations in times of distress, and attack those least able to defend themselves. In these race riots, white mobs invaded black neighborhoods, beat and killed large numbers of blacks and destroyed black property. In most instances, blacks fought back and there were many casualties on both sides, though most of the dead were black.

Gunnar Myrdal opposed the use of the term “riots” to describe these interracial conflicts. He preferred to call this phenomena “a terrorization or massacre, and (considered) it a magnified, or mass, lynching.” Race riots occurred in both the North and South, but were more characteristic of the North. They were primarily urban phenomena, while lynching was primarily a rural phenomenon.

On August 1908, a brutal two-day assault by several thousand white citizens on the black community of Springfield, IL was triggered by the transfer of a black prisoner charged with rape (an accusation later withdrawn), the riot was symptomatic of fears of racial equality in North

Race Riots (cont’d)and South alike. Almost the entire Illinois state militia was required to quell the frenzy of the mob, which shot innocent people, burned homes, looted stores, and mutilated and lynched two elderly blacks.

On July 2 1917, a bloody outbreak of violence in East St. Louis, Ill., stemming specifically from the employment of black workers in a factory holding government contracts. It was the worst of many incidents of racial antagonism in the United States during World War I that were directed especially toward black Americans newly employed in war industries. In the riot, whites turned on blacks, indiscriminately stabbing, clubbing, and hanging them and driving 6,000 from their homes; 40 blacks and 8 whites were killed.

On July 28 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) staged a silent parade down Fifth Avenue in New York City, protesting the riot and other acts of violence toward black Americans. German propaganda magnified these incidents in an attempt to arouse antiwar sentiment in the American black community, and President Woodrow Wilson publicly denounced mob violence and lynchings, of which there had been 54 in 1916 and 38 in 1917, however Wilson was the president who reintroduced segregation to the military and other aspects of federal governmental service.

Chicago race riot of 1919 shows a white gang looking for blacks during the riots.

Motherland Africa

Marcus Mosiah Garvey, b. Jamaica, 17 Aug 1887, d. 10 Jun 1940, organized the black nationalist movement of the 1920’s in the United States. Garvey went to New York City in 1916 and recruited followers for his Universal Negro Improvement Association. Its program was to unite all black peoples through the establishment in Africa of a country and government of the own. Garvey was a magnetic speaker who dressed in a resplendent uniform (he was never in the military or any uniformed service) and led his followers in parades through Harlem. In 1921, he claimed nearly 1 million followers.Garvey’s newspaper, Negro World, carried his views to all parts of the United States. He preached economic independence, pride of race, and the need for black Americans to return to Africa. Garvey organized a steamship company, the Black Star Line, to provide a commercial link among all the black peoples of the world. His methods of selling stock in the line, however, led to his conviction (1923) for using the U.S. mails to defraud. After serving nearly 3 years of a 5-year sentence, he was pardoned by President Coolidge and deported to Jamaica in 1927. Although he died in obscurity, Garvey is remembered as a national hero in his native Jamaica.

Marcus Garvey as commander in chief of his Universal African Legion

Niagara Movement In 1905–10, it was an organization of black intellectuals led by W.E.B. Du Bois that called for full political, civil, and social rights for black Americans. This stance stood in notable contrast to the accommodation philosophy proposed by Booker T. Washington in the Atlanta Compromise of 1895. The Niagara Movement was the forerunner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In the summer of 1905, 29 prominent blacks, including Du Bois, met secretly at Niagara Falls, Ont., and drew up a manifesto calling for full civil liberties, abolition of racial discrimination, and recognition of human brotherhood. Subsequent annual meetings were held in such symbolic locations as Harpers Ferry, W.Va., and Boston's Faneuil Hall.Despite the establishment of 30 branches and the achievement of a few scattered civil-rights victories at the local level, the group suffered from organizational weakness and lack of funds as well as a permanent headquarters or staff, and it never was able to attract mass support. After the Springfield (Ill.) Race Riot of 1908, however, white liberals joined with the nucleus of Niagara “militants” and founded the NAACP the following year. The Niagara Movement disbanded in 1910, with the leadership of Du Bois forming the main continuity between the two organizations.

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

An interracial American organization created to work for the abolition of segregation and discrimination in housing, education, employment, voting, and transportation; to oppose racism; and to ensure black Americans their constitutional rights. The NAACP was formed partly in response to the continuing horrific practice of lynching and the 1908 race riot in Springfield, the capital of Illinois and birthplace of President Abraham Lincoln. Appalled at the violence that was committed against blacks, a group of white socialist progressives that included Mary White Ovington and Oswald Garrison Villard, both the descendants of abolitionists, William English Walling and Dr. Henry Moscowitz issued a call for a meeting to discuss racial justice. They met in New York City January 1909 in what is credited to be the original meeting that led to the founding of the NAACP.  It wasn't until later that W.E.B. DuBois from Harvard and others were brought in.  Some 60 people, seven of whom were black American (including W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Mary Church Terrell), signed the call, which was released on the centennial of Lincoln's birth.

National Association for the Advancement of Colored

People

Many of the NAACP's actions have focused on national issues; for example, the group helped persuade President Woodrow Wilson to denounce lynching in 1918. Other areas of activism have involved political action to secure enactment of civil rights laws, programs of education and public information to win popular support, and direct action to achieve specific goals.

W.E.B. DuBois, Mrs. Alexander, Mary White Ovington, Mrs. Joel Elisa Spingarn, UnknownWilliam English Walling- socialist and progressive

Henry Moscowitz- socialist and progressive

Mary White Ovington- socialist and progressive

Oswald Garrison Villard- socialist and progressive

Black History Quiz1. When did Booker T. Washington believe blacks would free?

2. How did W.E.B. Dubois believe blacks would become free?

3. Where did the race riots of the 1910-30s occur?

4. Who started a black nationalist movement and want to establish Pan-Africanism?

5. Name one of the founders of the NAACP.