The Roaring 20’s

The Roaring 20’sThe Roaring 20’sAn era of prosperity,An era of prosperity,

Republican power, Republican power,

and conflictand conflict

As the War Ended . . .

•Spanish Influenza Epidemic!

•Most deadly for 20-40 yr. olds

•Eventually killed 20-50 million worldwide (by contrast, WWI killed approx. 15 million people)

Philadelphia – October 1918

Emergency hospital at Camp Funston in Fort Riley, KS (1918)

Over 50 Thousand!

Mortality (Death) Rates from 1900 to 2000.

1. Economic Downturn

•Caused by demobilization, conversion from a wartime economy.

•Inflation of prices •Business activity slowed temporarily: farmers especially hurt

2. Labor Unrest• Caused by

unions demanding higher wages denied during war

• Management fought back

• Violence erupted throughout industries

3. Red Scare • Caused by Russian Revolution and an ongoing fear of foreigners and/or immigrants

• Deportations, imprisonment of immigrants, quotas, new racial tensions all occurred

Presidents During 1920s

•Warren G. Harding •Calvin Coolidge•Herbert Hoover

Warren G. Harding(1921-1923)

*isolationism, avoiding political or economic alliances with foreign countries.*international disarmament, a program in which nations voluntarily give up their weapons.

Foreign Policy

The Harding Presidency

Domestic Issues

•Normalcy - Harding’s campaign promised a return to pre- WWI peacefulness

•Red Scare - American’s fear of communism and other extreme ideas

Palmer Raids

•Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer

•Driven by fear of Communism • And hopes of one day being president…

•Held suspects without evidence

IWW (“Wobblies”) Headquarters after a Palmer Raid

Sacco and Vanzetti

• Suspected militant anarchists

• Convicted of murder

• Many felt they did not receive a fair trial because of their political ideas and ethnicity.

Bartolomeo Venzetti and Nicola Sacco

More Domestic Issues

•Nativism- a movement favoring native-born Americans over immigrants.

•Immigration quota- restrict or ban immigrants from certain countries.

•Racial tensions . . .

Ku Klux Klan

•Started in 1866 in South•Experienced it’s greatest

growth and popularity after WWI

•Three million members mostly in Indiana, Oklahoma, and deep South

Ku Klux Klan, cont.

•Discriminated by race, nationality, political beliefs, religion, etc.

•Many members were small-business owners, independent professionals, clerical workers, and farmers.

The Birth of a Nation: 1915

Black Codes: laws that restricted African-American rights

•Curfews

•Vagrancy laws (not working)

•Labor contracts

•Land restrictions (forced living on plantations)

Voting Restrictions

•Poll Tax: special fee paid to vote

•Literacy Tests (read, write, knowledge)

•Property ownership

• Black Americans in this period continued to live in poverty

• sharecropping kept them in de facto slavery

• 1915 - boll weevil wiped out the cotton crop

• white landowners went bankrupt & forced blacks off their land

• Blacks moved north to take advantage of booming wartime industry (= Great Migration) - Black ghettoes began to form, i.e. Harlem

• within these ghettoes a distinct Black culture flourished

• But both blacks and whites wanted cultural interchange restricted

• Marcus Garvey (Jamaican born immigrant) established the Universal Negro Improvement Association

• advocated racial segregation b/c of Black superiority

• Garvey believed Blacks should return to Africa

• attracted many investments: gov't charged him with w/fraud

• he was found guilty and eventually deported to Jamaica, but his organization continued to exist

Scandals of the Harding Administration

•Mostly related to the company he kept – “the Ohio Gang” there is no evidence that he was directly involved in the scandals

•Teapot Dome Scandal – the most infamous

The Teapot Dome Scandal

•Secretary of the Interior secretly gave drilling rights to two private oil companies in return for illegal payments.

This 1924 cartoon shows the dimensions of the Teapot Dome scandal

Harding dies suddenly (and mysteriously) while still in

office and Coolidge becomes president.

“Silent Cal”

Calvin Coolidge

1923-1929

Coolidge’s Foreign Policy

• Continued Isolationism

•Kellogg-Briand Pact – nations would not use the threat of war during negotiations. Pact failed, no enforcement.

Domestic Policy

•Laissez Faire- Hands Off!! Government should not interfere with the growth of business

President Coolidge President Coolidge “The business of

America is business.”

High Tariffs

No help for farmers

This says it all about Silent Cal!

• Both his dry Yankee wit and his frugality with words became legendary. His wife, Grace Goodhue Coolidge, recounted that a young woman sitting next to Coolidge at a dinner party confided to him she had bet she could get at least three words of conversation from him. Without looking at her he quietly retorted, "You lose."

New Freedom for WomenNew Freedom for WomenAlthough many women held jobs in the 1920s, businesses remained prejudiced

against women seeking professional positions.

• The Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote in all elections beginning in

1920.

Women in 1900

• Long hair • Long sleeves• Long dresses• Shapely corset

Women in 1920s

• Short hair • Short sleeves• Short dresses• No corsets!

Women’s Changing Roles

The Flapper Image

The flapper, a type of bold, fun-loving young woman,

came to symbolize a revolution in manners and

morals that took place in the 1920s.

FlappersFlappers

• Flappers challenged conventions of dress,

hairstyle, and behavior.

• Many Americans disapproved of flappers’ free

manners as well as the departure from

traditional morals that they represented.

• Fads and Crazes Fads and Crazes

In the 1920's several fads and crazes came to being. • dancing marathons • the Charleston • Mah-jongg• flagpole sitting

• yo-yo's, • goldfish eating • pogo sticks• roller-skating

American Heroes

• Charles Lindbergh

• As the first to fly nonstop from New York to Paris,

• Hailed as an American hero and a champion of traditional values.

American HeroesAmelia Earhart• Amelia Earhart

set records as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic and the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to California.

• She and her navigator mysteriously disappeared while attempting to fly around the world in 1937.

• Sports Heroes• Champions in wrestling, football,

baseball, and swimming became American heroes.

American Heroes

• The most famous was baseball’s George

Herman “Babe” Ruth, whose record number

of home runs remained unbroken for 40 years.

The Mass MediaChapter 13, Section 2

• The popularity of motion

pictures grew throughout the

1920s; “talkies,” or movies with sound, were introduced in

1927.

• Growth of the mass media, instruments for communicating with large numbers of people, helped form a common American popular culture during the 1920s.

• In 1928, Walt Disney released the first cartoon, “Steamboat Willie”

The Mass Media

• Newspapers grew in both size and circulation.

• Between 1923 and 1930, 60 percent of American families purchased radios

Americans on the Move

• Rural and urban Americans were also split over cultural issues. While many in the cities were abandoning some traditional values, rural populations generally wanted to preserve these values.

Rural-Urban Split• The economy in the cities

expanded in the 1920s, while farmers found themselves economically stressed. This resulted in a migration from rural to urban areas.

The Jazz Age

• Jazz, a style of music that grew out of the African American music of the South, became highly popular during the 1920s.

• Jazz became so strongly linked to the culture of the 1920s that the decade came to be known as the Jazz Age.

The Jazz Age

• Harlem, a district in Manhattan, New York, became a center of jazz music.

• Flappers and others heard jazz in clubs and dance halls; the Charleston, considered by some to be a wild and reckless dance, embodied the Jazz Age.

The Harlem Renaissance

• A literary awakening

took place in Harlem in the 1920s that was known as

the Harlem Renaissance

.

• Harlem also emerged as an overall cultural center for African Americans.

• Expressing the joys and challenges of being African American, writers such as James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes enriched African American culture as well as American culture as a whole.

Billie Holiday

Louis Armstrong

Ella Fitzgerald

Prohibition

• The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which took effect on January 16, 1920, made the manufacture, sale, and transport of liquor, beer, and wine illegal.

Prohibition

• Many Americans turned to bootleggers, or suppliers of illegal alcohol.

• Bars that operated illegally, known as speakeasies, were either disguised as legitimate businesses or hidden in some way, often behind heavy gates.

Organized Crime

• The tremendous profit resulting from the sale of illegal liquor helped lead to the rise of organized crime.

• Success in bootlegging led to illegal activities such as gambling and prostitution.

• As rival groups fought for control in some American cities, gang wars and murders became commonplace.

HOMICIDE

1

11

1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000

Homicide Rate dramatically rises, then peaks in 1933 – the year prohibition ends!

One of the most notorious criminals of this time was Al Capone, nicknamed “Scarface,” a

gangster who rose to the top of Chicago’s organized crime network. Capone proved

talented at avoiding jail but was finally imprisoned in 1931.

Issues of Religion

• Fundamentalism supported traditional Christian ideas and argued for a literal interpretation of the Bible.

• Fundamentalists worked to pass laws against teaching the theory of evolution in public schools.

• A science teacher named John T. Scopes agreed to challenge such a law in Tennessee. His arrest led to what was called the Scopes trial.

Consumer Economy

A Car for the Masses

• Ford Model T

• First built by Henry Ford in 1908, the Model-T popularized the use of automobiles by offering them at an affordable price -

• Only $290 by 1924

Tin Lizzy

Powered by a four-cylinder engine, the car could hit speeds of up to 45 miles an hour, and got an

impressive 25 to 30 miles per gallon.

Ford could keep costs down because the cars were the first to be built on a moving assembly line, which revolutionized U.S. car building.

Ford didn’t invent the car – he made it affordable!

By 1928 a record 15 million

Model-Ts were built -- a mark

not broken until

Volkswagen passed it 1971.

Painted in only one color -- black -- Ford could produce the Model-T in vast numbers.

The Great Depression

The Crash!

The Roaring Twenties

In the 1920’s, many Americans enjoyed a feeling of prosperity.

New cars, new appliances, new technology

A relaxation of moral standards - a sense of being “care-free”

Emerged from World War I with the most powerful economy in the world

The Reality By 1929, our false sense of

prosperity was becoming apparent

Farmers were defaulting on loans

The rich seemed to be getting richer, the poor were getting poorer

Easy credit was putting many families in debt

Banks were closing Postwar Europe no longer needed our steel,

lumber, etc

Domestic Problems!

The Stock Market

The profit making ability of a company helps to determine how much a stock costs

Many people make money by buying a stock at a low price and then reselling at a high price (speculation)

You may pay $10 for a stock this week but sell it next week for $50

Stocks are ownership in a company

Stocks are divided into shares All the shares make up all the

ownership in the company If you had a company divided

into 100 shares and you owned fifty shares, you would own half the voting rights (decision making power) in that company

A share entitles you to a percentage of the profit earned by the company

Your are paid “dividends” on a regular basis

The Stock Market

Millions of people “played” or speculated in the stock market.

As the stock market “boomed” in the 20’s, many invested their savings in hopes of quick riches

Stocks could be bought on margin (credit), increasing the false sense of wealth

Uh-Oh…

By the end of the 1920s, stock prices as a whole had risen dramatically

Unfortunately, this only encouraged more people to put their savings into stocks

On October 24, 1929 stock prices began to fall and brokers began to sell. By noon, millions of shares had been sold. The selling frenzy continued all afternoon. By closing, 13 million shares had been traded and the market dropped four billion dollars. Many banks and businesses were forced to close.

…But the worst was yet to come!

Black Tuesday

On October 29, later nicknamed "Black Tuesday," the stock market crashed!

Investors panicked as prices fell, A frenzy of selling drove prices down until many were worthless

People who had invested their entire life savings during the boom were now bankrupt

On that day, over 16 million shares of stock were sold and the market fell over 14 billion dollars. By comparison, the entire budget of the U.S. Government that year was three billion dollars.

In one day, the United States lost more capital than it had spent in all of World War I.

Impact

The banks who had lent heavily to fund share buying found themselves saddled with debt, which caused many banks to fail.

While millions of people lost their savings, businesses lost their credit lines and were forced to close, causing massive unemployment.

Aftermath

Ripples from this collapse affected all aspects of society in the U.S. and throughout the world

Within months, millions were without work

The new president, Herbert Hoover had the task of fixing the broken economy

Herbert Hoover Quote: "Prosperity is just around the

corner." (1932) Claim to Fame: As president, Hoover

opposed giving federal welfare payments to the unemployed, who numbered over 12 million by the end of his one-term administration. The shantytowns of the era were dubbed "Hoovervilles."

Postscript: Lost the 1932 presidential election to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 472 electoral votes to 59.