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The American Yawp, Volume 2, edited by Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the original free This shelf’s study material is shared under the same license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Chapter 8 · pp. 229–261
Chapter 20 covers the United States in the 1920s, a decade of mass consumption, new entertainment, and new roles for women and African Americans. It was also a decade of fear and backlash, shown in immigration limits, religious fundamentalism, and a revived Ku Klux Klan. This part covers the postwar mood, the Republican presidents, and the politics of the decade.
Warren G. Harding won the 1920 election in a landslide. His promise was a "return to normalcy." He took office in March 1921 and said the country needed healing and restoration, not dramatic change or revolution (p. 229).
Voters were worn out, and the reasons were concrete:
Harding could not fully deliver peace. Even so, his message of stability appealed to a frightened public (p. 230).
The decade was anything but normal. People later gave it several nicknames: the New Era, the Jazz Age, the Age of the Flapper, the Prosperity Decade, and most often the Roaring Twenties. Each name highlights a different change, such as new music, new roles for women, or a booming economy built on cars, appliances, film, and radio (p. 230).
The decade held two opposing forces at once. On one side were innovation and the push for equal rights, which observers called "the New Woman" and "the New Negro." On the other side was backlash: many Americans rejected political and economic reform, resented the country's changing population, limited immigration, turned back to "old-time religion," and joined a Ku Klux Klan that grew to millions of members. This clash of change and resistance is why the decade was a time of tension, not calm (p. 230).
Harding tried to bring stability by helping business. He signed laws that brought back a high protective tariff, which taxes imported goods to shield American producers. He also ended the last wartime government controls over industry (p. 230).
Labor lost ground. Business leaders pointed to the Russian Revolution to sideline socialists, anarchists, and almost all union activism. Union membership fell sharply. Workers lost bargaining power, and they also lost the support of courts, politicians, and much of the public (p. 230).
Harding's cabinet had two kinds of people. Some were respected: Herbert Hoover, a self-made millionaire who had run the wartime Food Administration, became secretary of commerce. Andrew Mellon, a conservative businessman, became secretary of the treasury. Henry C. Wallace, a farm editor who backed scientific farming, became secretary of agriculture. The others were friends and supporters, nicknamed "the Ohio gang," and they caused the trouble (pp. 230–231).
The worst case was the Teapot Dome scandal. Officials secretly leased government oil land in Wyoming to oil companies in exchange for cash. The site was named for a rock formation shaped like a teapot. Interior Secretary Albert Fall and Navy Secretary Edwin Denby resigned, and Fall was convicted and jailed. Harding's administration came to be seen as one of the most corrupt in American history (p. 231).
Harding died suddenly of a heart attack in August 1923. Vice President Calvin Coolidge, a shopkeeper's son who had risen from city councilman to governor of Massachusetts, became president (p. 231).
Coolidge worked to clear away the scandal's stain but kept Harding's economic approach. He refused to act for workers or consumers against business, and he said the main business of Americans is business (p. 231).
One observer called his approach "active inactivity." Coolidge stayed passive about regulating business, but he actively helped business and the wealthy. He backed tax cuts and high tariffs. Congress had already started lowering taxes on the wealthy from the wartime rate of 66 percent to 20 percent, and Coolidge supported this (p. 231).
Women's activism grew in the 1920s. The Nineteenth Amendment (1920) gave women the vote. The Eighteenth Amendment, which began Prohibition in January 1920, made it illegal to manufacture or sell alcohol. Many women had supported Prohibition because they were worried about poverty and domestic violence (p. 231).
Women voters, like men, held varied interests. Some pushed for lower death rates among infants and children, federal aid for schools, or peace and disarmament. Some wanted protective laws for women and children. Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party wanted to end all legal differences based on sex, so they proposed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). It was introduced in Congress but defeated. The split over protective laws versus the ERA shows that women did not act as one bloc (pp. 231–232).
Republicans held the presidency and both houses of Congress throughout the decade. Coolidge chose not to run again in 1928. He announced it by handing a reporter a scrap of paper saying he did not choose to run. This fit his nickname, "Silent Cal" (p. 232).
The race pitted two men against each other:
Much of the campaign turned on Smith's religion and Prohibition. Some Protestant ministers warned that he would answer to the pope. Hoover won in a landslide. Smith carried the biggest cities, a sign of later political trends, but lost most of the rest of the country. Several southern states even voted Republican for the first time since Reconstruction (p. 233).
Christine Frederick was a marketing expert and home economist. Her 1929 book Selling Mrs. Consumer was built on one of the first surveys of American buying habits. It coached manufacturers and advertisers on how to win over women, whom she credited with roughly 90 percent of household spending. The book also shows how much daily life had changed during her own lifetime (p. 233).
Why businesses pushed consumption. Late-1800s industry used new energy sources and new factory methods. The result was a flood of goods such as ready-to-wear clothes, convenience foods, and home appliances. By the 1890s many people feared that supply had outrun demand. If so, overproduction could cause a financial disaster. Business leaders did not cut output. They invented new ways to sell and distribute goods, and these methods created a culture of wanting more (p. 233).
The department store. This was the first big tool of that change. By the 1880s large dry-goods houses had grown into department stores. A single building held a wide range of goods, from gloves to toy trains to washbasins. Variety alone was not enough, so stores added:
Marshall Field's store on State Street in Chicago was a leader. Its tearoom served the well-off women who were its main customers. One admirer said Field made shopping a joy (pp. 233–234). The idea was to make buying a pleasure in itself.
Credit and the buying boom. Mail-order catalogs, mass-circulation magazines, and national brand names increased demand further (p. 234). Credit then made big purchases possible for ordinary families:
Example: A family could not pay $300 for a washing machine at once. With installments, it could take the machine home and pay a little each month. Sales rose as a result.
The assembly line and the car. Henry Ford's assembly line was copied by many industries. It lowered the price of cars enough for middle-income families to buy them. By 1925, a Model T came off Ford's lines every ten seconds. Registered cars grew from just over 9 million in 1920 to nearly 27 million by 1930. Americans owned more cars than Britain, Germany, France, and Italy combined. About 80 percent of the world's cars were on American roads (pp. 234–235).
In the 1800s, steam and iron drove change. In the 1920s, gasoline and electricity did. They powered the automobile, movies, and radio, and these drove both consumption and popular culture (p. 235).
Tarzan author Edgar Rice Burroughs described the mood. He said people wanted to escape the restrictions of laws and social rules in an increasingly industrial society. Americans did so through cars, films, jazz records, and radio broadcasts of boxing matches. One observer guessed that people sang the silly hit "Yes! We Have No Bananas" more than the national anthem (p. 235).
How the car changed life. More reliable cars meant longer trips (p. 235).
By 1930, a handful of companies controlled a film industry that the United States dominated. Wealthier Americans of the early 1900s looked down on cinema as lower-class fun. This opened the door to outsiders. Immigrants, mostly Jewish people or their sons from central and Eastern Europe, "invented Hollywood." The Warner brothers started Warner Bros. Universal, Paramount, Columbia, and MGM were founded or led by Jewish executives. Aware of being outsiders, they made films that stressed opportunity, democracy, and freedom (p. 236).
From nickelodeon to picture palace. Early films were about thirty minutes long and were shown in small nickelodeons. Studio heads switched to longer, better films shown in grand theaters. These drew people who had once avoided movies. To keep working-class viewers, they blended old and new values. For example, The Ten Commandments (1923) showed wild revelry but also honored a Bible story. Theaters became luxurious. The Roxy in New York held over 6,000 people, and ushers led patrons past gardens and statues (pp. 236–237).
Sound arrives. The Jazz Singer (1927) was the first film with a voice track synchronized to the picture. Warner Bros. spent half a million dollars to equip two theaters for it. One MGM producer called sound a "passing fancy." He was wrong: Warner's assets rose from 230 million in 1930 (p. 237).
Audiences and stars. Weekly attendance jumped from 16 million in 1912 to 40 million in the early 1920s. Admission was one low price with no class seating, so it suited nearly everyone, though Black Americans were excluded or segregated. Women were over 60 percent of moviegoers. Mary Pickford, "America's Sweetheart," earned a million dollars a year by 1920 from films and endorsements. She and other stars popularized the flapper look of short skirts, makeup, and cigarettes (p. 237).
Radio. Marconi sent the first transatlantic wireless message in 1901. Home radios did not spread until about 1920. By 1930, about half of homes had one. Stations paid for programs through ads and sponsors. Soap companies funded so many daytime dramas that the genre was called "soap operas." Networks like NBC and CBS carried the same programs nationwide, spreading a shared popular culture (p. 237).
Jazz. Jazz grew out of the African American community in New Orleans. It spread mainly by radio and records. The New York Times mocked it as "savage" because of its racial roots. For many Black musicians, such as William Dixon, it was music that white people did not own, a sign of cultural independence. Both white and Black Americans played and heard it. Al Jolson, who played the lead in The Jazz Singer, became America's most popular singer (pp. 237, 239).
Sports heroes. Play-by-play radio helped professional sports mature, although most sports stayed segregated (p. 239).
After the destruction of World War I, Americans wanted heroes who broke limits. On May 21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh made the first nonstop solo flight from New York to Paris. It took thirty-three hours. Some historians call him the "hero of the decade." He renewed faith in individual effort and in technology. The war had been fought with machine guns, submarines, and chemical weapons, and his flight showed that machines could also do inspiring things (pp. 239, 241).
The decade's entertainment, from Coney Island to movies, radio, and sports, was built around escape. It did not erase the memory of the war and the chaos after it. It did make the future seem brighter (p. 241).
The 1920s put heavy stress on spending and personal pleasure. The flapper became the symbol of that mood. She was a young woman with bobbed hair, short skirts, makeup, and cigarettes. Novelists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis wrote about her, and film stars helped make her famous. (pp. 241, 244)
Flappers rejected Victorian ideas that women should be modest and hold back their desires. They went to dance halls, cabarets, and nickelodeons. During Prohibition they also went to speakeasies, which were illegal places to drink. Spending time in these mixed-sex public spaces helped create a new morality. Young women gained more independence, more freedom to move around, and more access to city life. (p. 241)
The "New Woman" of the decade, however, had a mixed record. Women could vote at last, but the loose coalitions that won suffrage broke apart into separate causes. New household machines saved time, but standards for a clean, orderly home rose, so the work did not shrink. Ads said that today's woman "gets what she wants," yet only about 10 percent of married women worked outside the home. For unmarried women the figure was nearly half. (p. 243)
More women entered professional work in the 1920s. Most were in fields seen as female, such as teaching and nursing. Law and medicine stayed overwhelmingly male. Even in teaching and nursing, women had a hard time reaching leadership jobs. (p. 243)
Many young, middle-class white women worked in offices as clerks. Men had once held these jobs. The change had a catch: entry-level clerk jobs became "women's work," while better-paid positions above them stayed mostly male. Women did not change office culture. Their arrival mainly changed how the lower jobs were labeled. (pp. 243–244)
Married women were still expected to stay in the home. Consumer buying gave them more power over household money. But new appliances and new ideas about raising children and running a marriage raised expectations and kept them tied to the home. (p. 244)
The flapper was a famous image, not an average life. A woman's race, class, ethnicity, and marital status shaped whether she worked for pay and what jobs she could get. For many minority women, a paid job was a financial necessity. The most common job for them was hard, low-paid domestic service. Many young working-class white women also took jobs, often to help support struggling parents. The flapper fit best a young, single, middle-class white woman, and even she was a representation more than a full picture. Some women found new chances in the decade. Others found confusion and new pressures. (pp. 243, 245)
Sexual attitudes also loosened. Not everyone accepted the change. But many young, college-educated white women rebelled against Victorian ideas of sexuality, and premarital sex became so common that one historian called it nearly a matter of conformity. (pp. 244–245)
Gay communities grew in cities such as New York. Gay men generally lived more openly than they would for decades after World War II, though police pressure rose late in the decade. For lesbians, the new focus on women's sexuality meant that close relationships between women, once seen as harmless, now drew suspicion. (p. 245)
Racial violence continued through the decade. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, Black residents had built the Greenwood District into a prosperous business and residential area. Booker T. Washington had called it "Black Wall Street." On May 31, 1921, a false claim of assault was made against Dick Rowland, a nineteen-year-old Black man. He had probably only tripped near a white elevator operator. An armed white mob then attacked Greenwood. Over thirty square blocks were destroyed and more than a thousand homes burned. The mob may have killed several hundred people. Survivors described machine guns and planes overhead that fired and dropped firebombs. Victims were buried in mass graves, and thousands were left homeless. (p. 245)
This constant violence pushed a generation of Black Americans to look for new options. The Great Migration moved huge numbers of Black southerners north. New York's Black population grew 257 percent, from 91,709 in 1910 to 327,706 in 1930. The white population grew only 20 percent. Harlem grew to about 164,000 residents, mostly African American. Crowding made crime, health, housing, and unemployment worse. Even so, Harlem brought together people energized by race pride, their World War I service, city life, and Pan-Africanism (the idea of unity among people of African descent). James Weldon Johnson called it "the Culture Capital." (p. 246)
The Harlem Renaissance was a flowering of Black writing, art, theater, and music in Harlem. It was tied to the New Negro Movement. Alain Locke did not invent the term, but his 1925 anthology The New Negro popularized it. Locke said Black Americans were gaining a "spiritual emancipation." His book was by African Americans, not just about them. (pp. 246–247)
Between 1922 and 1935, writers published about twenty-six novels and ten volumes of poetry. Langston Hughes and Claude McKay were among them, and women such as Jessie Fauset and Zora Neale Hurston wrote nearly a third of the novels. Their work often challenged racial stereotypes. (p. 247)
The movement spread beyond books. Broadway showed Black actors in serious roles, and Dixie to Broadway (1924) was the first all-Black show to reach mainstream audiences. Artists such as Aaron Douglas and Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller portrayed Black heritage and daily life. Jazz boomed. White audiences traveled to the Cotton Club to hear Duke Ellington. But the local Black community was often kept out, and performers faced insults such as service-door entry and limits on restroom use. (p. 247)
Garvey, a Jamaican publisher and organizer, reached New York in 1916. He quickly built the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) into the largest Black nationalist group in the world. Its goals were racial pride, Black economic independence, and an end to oppression in Africa and the Diaspora (Black communities outside Africa). From Harlem it published the newspaper Negro World. It also held parades in which members marched in uniforms. (pp. 247, 249)
Garvey attacked the NAACP for relying on slow court cases and for accepting white members and money. He argued that votes and industrial progress would not help a Black person facing lynching or segregation. The UNIA planned the Black Star Line, a shipping company funded by members buying shares, and promoted a "return to Africa." (p. 249)
Critics said his parades were showy, his businesses were badly run, and his gestures ignored real needs. NAACP leaders said his message amounted to giving up. A "Garvey Must Go" campaign followed. He was indicted in 1922, jailed in 1925 for mail fraud, and later deported. The UNIA never regained its members or money. Even so, his message of dignity influenced Malcolm X, whose parents supported Garvey, and Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first president. (p. 249)
Fear of foreign radicals also shaped the decade. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists, were arrested in May 1920 for a robbery and murder at a Massachusetts factory. The evidence was thin. Eyewitnesses disagreed, and one account of the getaway driver did not match Vanzetti. Protests around the world failed, and both men were executed on August 23, 1927. Vanzetti said he was dying because he was a radical and an Italian. (pp. 249–250)
Nativism is hostility toward immigrants and minorities, paired with favoritism for people born in the United States. It surged in the 1920s. Many native-born Americans felt unsettled by fast cultural change, and they blamed Eastern European and Latin American immigrants, Catholics, and Black Americans who were pressing for civil rights. (Asian immigration was already almost fully banned.) The Great Migration added to the tension. After 1910, nearly half a million Black Southerners moved to northern cities. (p. 250)
The 1921 Emergency Immigration Act was the first US law to set numerical limits and broad national-origin restrictions for much of the world. Before it, the nation had mostly turned away particular groups. After it, the starting assumption flipped: most people could not immigrate. Congress meant it as a temporary fix, but the quota idea became permanent in 1924. (p. 250)
The Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act) capped total immigration. It also set each country's yearly quota at 2% of the people from that country living in the US in 1890:
The choice of 1890 mattered. It came before the big waves from southern and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia. So a country with few residents in the US in 1890 got a tiny quota. Legal entry for anyone outside northern Europe became almost impossible. (pp. 250–251)
The law had other effects:
The American Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 declared all Native Americans US citizens. It stated that tribal and other property rights were not affected. Before it, some Native Americans had become citizens through an uneven process, while others were "wards" under federal guardianship. The law gave a base for legal protections and civil rights. Some people saw it as forced on them, because it clashed with the sovereignty of Native nations. (p. 251)
Christian fundamentalism grew out of a split among Protestants. Liberal modernists wanted to link faith with science and modern culture. They read miracles as metaphors and often backed the social gospel, which urged Christians to fight inequality. Fundamentalists took the opposite view. The Bible was inerrant, and its miracles were literally true. For example, Jesus would physically return to earth. The movement took its name from The Fundamentals, about ninety essays paid for by oil businessmen Lyman and Milton Stewart in the 1910s. Fundamentalists came from many denominations and had no central organization. All agreed that modernism was the enemy. They also worried about looser sexual morals, Catholic growth, and the open mockery of Prohibition. (pp. 251–252)
The Scopes Trial (1925) took place in Dayton, Tennessee. Tennessee's Butler Act banned teaching evolution in public schools. The ACLU wanted a test case to challenge the law, and teacher John Scopes volunteered. His guilt was never in doubt, since he admitted breaking the law. Clarence Darrow defended him, and William Jennings Bryan argued for biblical literalism. Radio carried the trial across the country. Darrow called Bryan as a Bible "expert" and asked questions about Jonah and the sun standing still. Bryan could answer only with faith, and he admitted that Genesis's "day" might be allegory. The jury convicted Scopes in minutes. Later the case was thrown out on a technicality. (pp. 252–254)
Scopes lost, but the public saw fundamentalism as the real loser. H. L. Mencken mocked the "circus in Tennessee," and modernists celebrated. Fundamentalists pulled back from national life. They built their own local subculture and returned decades later, stronger. (p. 254)
The second Klan was founded in 1915 in Georgia by William Simmons. Two events inspired it: the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory worker falsely convicted of murder, and the film The Birth of a Nation, which praised the Reconstruction-era Klan. It stayed mostly in Georgia and Alabama until 1920. Then professional recruiting spread chapters nationwide and membership reached the millions. Its targets went beyond Black people to include immigrants, Catholics, Jews, feminists, radicals, and bootleggers. (pp. 254–255)
Misconception: many people think the 1920s Klan was southern and lower-class. In fact it was national and largely middle-class. It grew in Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, and Portland, and it recruited through churches and fraternal groups. Its women's auxiliary, founded in 1923, had chapters in all forty-eight states. At its peak the Klan claimed four to five million members. (pp. 255–256)
The Klan also held real political power. Texas elected Klansman Earle Mayfield to the US Senate in 1922. In Arkansas in 1924, a rival candidate sought honorary membership to avoid being called anti-Klan. The Klan was also violent, using lynching and nightriding, and Oklahoma's governor declared martial law in 1923. By 1930, scandal had cut membership to about thirty thousand. (pp. 256–257)
President Hoover praised the decade's prosperity in 1929, but the economy was fragile. Risks included heavy reliance on credit, weak European economies, high tariffs, wealth inequality, a construction bubble, and a market flooded with goods. Farmers, racial minorities, and union workers had never shared in the boom. The Great Depression followed. (p. 257)
