1. 21 A Turbulent Decade The Twenties
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Chapter Opener: Flappers (page 625)
Text Excerpt: On a cold December afternoon in 1926, two young women posed for the camera as they danced on the ledge of a Chicago hotel. With their short skirts, bobbed hair, and heel-kicking dance steps, they displayed a carefree lifestyle that defied the stricter morals embraced by their mothers’ generation. The pair embodied the high spirits of a generation ready to put the tragedy of World War I behind them and move forward into the modern era. Novelists and journalists referred to these women as flappers, an old slang term for young girls. Now it was used to describe independent young women who smoked, drank, danced to jazz, and flaunted their sexual liberation by wearing revealing clothes. Rebellious postwar writers made flappers a cultural icon. Their youthful exuberance and daring behavior excited some Americans and created a sense of moral outrage in others.
Background:
Bobbed hair, shorter skirts, mascara, lipstick and dancing the Charleston—this posed image of flappers exuded the playful sexuality associated with the flapper stereotype. Although the exact purpose of this staged photograph is not known, advertisers did use female sexuality to sell many products in the 1920s. The thin frames of these women also suggested another characteristic of the flapper—a body that resembled that of an adolescent boy. Thinness was a way to distinguish these modern women from their mothers. While perhaps giving free range to their sexual impulses, these women became carefully disciplined with their food intake. As one popular weight control book noted, “You will be tempted quite frequently, and you will have to choose whether you will enjoy yourself hugely for twenty minutes or so.” Rather than talking about sex, the author was referring to food.
Chapter Connections:
Competing Visions over the nature of modernity: liberating and progressive versus dangerous and foolhardy?
Competing Visions over the New Woman: more liberated or restricted in new ways?
Competing Visions over female sexuality and unfettered access to birth control.
Discussion Questions:
What qualities define these women in the photo as flappers?
What competing visions did Americans have towards female sexuality?
Were these “liberated” women?
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3. A Turbulent Decade Cars and Planes: The Promise of the Twenties
Cultural Unrest
Radical Violence and Civil Rights
The New Woman
Ensuring Peace: Diplomacy in the Twenties
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4. Cars and Planes: The Promise of the Twenties
The Car Culture
On the Road
Welfare Capitalism and Consumer Culture
The Age of Flight: Charles A. Lindbergh
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5. The Car Culture How did cars transform urban and rural lifestyles?
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6. On the Road
What messages did the architecture of roadside gas stations convey?
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Image 21.1: Cottage Gas Station (page 626)
Caption: Many businessmen built gas stations that looked like country cottages to assure passing motorists that their establishments were safe and clean.
Text Excerpt: Car travelers needed food, lodging, and gas. To entice tourists to stop at their establishments, rural businessmen erected eye-catching signs and buildings. A revolution in commercial roadside architecture was soon underway. Small clusters of cottages where tourists could spend the night on long road trips, forerunners of today’s motels, appeared in remote areas. The miniature house emerged as the most popular type of commercial roadside building in the twenties, a way to assure the passersby that the restaurant, store, or gas station was a safe and respectable establishment.
Background:
Americans strongly associated home ownership with respectability, independence, and belonging. A quaint country cottage conjured up images of idyllic rural living and conveyed the message that the business was a safe, legitimate, and respectable establishment. Many retailers constructed tiny bungalows from readymade components or do-it-yourself blueprints from Sears Roebuck mail-order catalogs. To ensure that motorists did not confuse the dwelling with a real house, builders exaggerated its features by making it a diminutive version of the real thing. This cottage gas station, for instance, looks more like a gingerbread house than a real family dwelling. Other retailers used surreal images to lure motorists into stopping. A range of giant milk bottles, toads, teapots and hot dogs soon lined the highways of America. This fantastic imagery sought to arouse the curiosity and whimsy of motorists. A driver would have to stop to find out that the duck housed a retail store. Americans debated the architectural merits of such buildings. Some celebrated them as a vernacular form of pop art, while others dismissed them as eyesores. Most were less divided about the aesthetic quality of the poorly constructed shacks that also lined the nation’s new paved roads. In the late twenties, a roadside reform movement led by well-to-do urbanites tried to remove these blights on the natural landscape. Car tourists left the city to enjoy the scenic beauty of the land and to escape stress of urban living, they argued. In their eyes, unsightly accumulations of signs and shacks simply extended the city slum to the country. This movement pitted middle-class reformers squarely against poor rural folk trying to earn some extra dollars from motorists. These reformers sponsored contests for improved designs and educational campaigns and advocated zoning restrictions or state ownership of the roads to limit commercial development. To win the movement’s favor, Standard Oil pledged to remove its billboards along Western highways.
Chapter Connections:
Emergence of the United States as a car culture
Competing Visions over transforming landscape and leisure habits of Americans
Competing Visions over modernity
Discussion Questions:
How might this cottage gas station encourage motorists to stop and buy gas there?
How does this cottage gas station reveal Americans’ ambiguity about changing modern life?
In what other ways did cars transform American life in the 1920s?
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8. Image 21.2: Teapot Dome Gas Station, Zillah, Washington
Roadside architecture in the twenties often included whimsical structures designed to entice passing motorists to stop. This gas station shaped like a teapot made a joke of the Teapot Dome scandal.
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9. Welfare Capitalism and Consumer Culture
How did welfare capitalism promise to help industrialists run their factories more efficiently? How did a mass popular culture emerge in the twenties?
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10. Image 21.3: The End of Silent Films
By the end of the decade Hollywood began advertising “all talking-singing” movies like “Cocoanuts.”
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11. SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT IN ACTION
Envisioning Evidence
SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT IN ACTION
In 1920s, scientists used tests to determine which jobs were best for which ethnic groups (social Darwinism).
Central Tube Company created a chart to determine which ethnicities to place in which positions. 11

12. SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT IN ACTION
Envisioning Evidence
SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT IN ACTION 12

13. SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT IN ACTION
Envisioning Evidence
SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT IN ACTION
Notes on Central Tube Company’s chart:
American whites at the top
Irish near top in spite of anti-Irish sentiment
American blacks suitable for only unskilled jobs
Jews at bottom
What kind of job could you have gotten in this factory? 13

14. The Age of Flight: Charles A. Lindbergh
Why did Americans celebrate Lindbergh’s solo flight to Paris?
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15. Image 21. 4: Photo Montage of the Spirit of St
Image 21.4: Photo Montage of the Spirit of St. Louis Flying near the Eiffel Tower
In this imagined scene an unnamed photographer celebrated the moment that pilot Charles Lindbergh arrived in Paris by pasting an image of his famous plane flying past Paris’s most recognized monument.
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16. Cultural Unrest The Lost Generation Prohibition
The First Red Scare and Immigration Restrictions
Fundamentalism
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17. The Lost Generation
What critique did the Lost Generation offer of American society?
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18. Prohibition
Why did Americans eventually conclude that national prohibition was a failed experiment?
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19. Prohibition
Eighteenth Amendment (1919) – Constitutional amendment that banned the sale, manufacture, and transportation of intoxicating liquors Twenty-First Amendment (1933) – Constitutional amendment that repealed the Eighteenth Amendment
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20. Image 21.5: Well-Dressed Trio Entering a Speakeasy
Frequenting speakeasies, which patrons entered by giving a secret password to the doorman, became fashionable for women during prohibition. Gone was the stigma that had stopped respectable women from drinking in public.
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21. The First Red Scare and Immigration Restrictions
Why did the nation enact strict immigration restrictions in the twenties?
What competing visions over radicalism emerged during the Sacco-Vanzetti trial?
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22. The First Red Scare and Immigration Restrictions
Immigration Act of 1924 – Law that allowed unrestricted immigration from the Western Hemisphere, curtailed all Asian immigration, and used quotas to control how many immigrants emigrated from individual European nations
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23. The First Red Scare and Immigration Restrictions
First Red Scare (1919–1920) – Period when the Justice Department arrested and deported alien anarchists and Communists suspected of trying to destroy American democracy and capitalism
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Image 21.6: Immigration Act of 1924 (page 635)
Caption: The United States enacted a quota system in the 1920s that allotted most slots to immigrants from northern Europe.
Text Excerpt: Assumptions about the racial superiority of northern Europeans strongly influenced the new national quotas portrayed in the “Immigration Act of 1924” chart. In this new quota system, Germany received the highest quota.
Background:
The 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act established a quota system that allocated a set number of immigration visas for each European nation. Besides limiting the overall number of immigrants coming to America, the law tried to protect the “national origins” of the U.S. population by favoring the nations that had traditionally sent the largest numbers of immigrants to the United States throughout the nineteenth century. The figures in this chart were 2% of the number of foreign-born residents from each nation living in the United States in 1890, the period before massive immigration began from eastern and southern Europe. These numbers were adjusted in the late 1920s, when the overall figure dropped to 150,000 and the percentage distribution of quotas was set to reflect the national origins of all white Americans in the Both formulas had the same desired effect: They privileged immigration from northwestern Europe over immigration from southern and eastern Europe.
Chapter Connections:
Competing Visions over the desirability of continued European immigration
Competing Visions over the reasons to restrict immigration: economic, political, and cultural
Insight into the continuing political relevance of social Darwinism
Discussion Questions:
What competing views did Americans have about immigration?
What accounts for the distribution of these quotas?
How does this view of desirable versus undesirable immigrants compare to views on immigration today?
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25. Fundamentalism
Why did Fundamentalists object to teaching evolution in public schools?
What cultural and religious tensions were exposed during the Scopes Trial?
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26. Fundamentalism
Fundamentalism – An evangelical Christian theology that viewed the Bible as an authentic, literal recounting of historical events and the absolute moral word of God Modernism – A liberal Christian theology embraced in many urban areas that emphasized the ongoing revelation of divine truth
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27. Image 21.7: Young Woman Holds Monkey Doll during the Scopes Trial
A supporter of prosecutor William Jennings Bryan wears a sign ridiculing the theory of evolution and displays the monkey doll she bought from a vender outside the courthouse.
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28. Racial Violence and Civil Rights
Lynching, Racial Rioting, and the Ku Klux Klan
Marcus Garvey
The Harlem Renaissance 
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29. Lynching, Racial Rioting, and the Ku Klux Klan
What does this souvenir postcard reveal about the ritual of lynching? Why did membership in the Ku Klux Klan surge in the twenties?
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Image 21.8: Souvenir Postcard, Lynching (page 638)
Caption: After witnessing the lynching of two black men, smiling men and women had their pictures taken as a memento. The two girls to the left clutch pieces of the victims’ hair. The photographer sold thousands of copies for 50 cents each.
Text Excerpt: Lynch mobs tortured and killed nearly 5,000 victims between 1880 and 1930, roughly two per week. The souvenir postcard by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler depicted the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, a disturbing relic from this grisly past. Professional photographers often attended lynchings and sold hundreds of picture postcards to perpetrators and witnesses, who put them in family scrapbooks or sent them to friends and relatives.
Background:
Thomas Shipp, Abe Smith, and James Cameron were arrested in Marion, Indiana on August 6, 1930 and accused of ambushing a white couple, raping the white 18-year-old Mary Ball, and killing her 24-year-old boyfriend, Claude Deeter. The men confessed while in custody and a crowd of 4,000 gathered in front of the jail on the evening of August 7. The sheriff ordered them to disperse, and even shot several cans of tear gas into the crowd. Unfazed, the crowd pulled Shipp and Smith from the jail and lynched them in Grant Courthouse Square. Not all members of the crowd agreed with these actions, and some began praying and begging the mob to stop. When the mob dragged Cameron from the jail and put a noose around his neck, the head of the local American Legion stood on a car shouting that Cameron was innocent. His interference saved Cameron’s life, and he was brought back to the jail. He served four years in jail and went on to create several NAACP chapters in Indiana in the 1940s. According to members of Marion’s black community, Abe Smith’s real crime may have been an interracial romance with Mary Ball. They suggest that the trio and Mary concocted a plan to lure Deeter to a secluded spot to rob him. When Deeter ended up dead, the white Marion community transformed Mary from Smith’s girlfriend and accomplice into a white woman in need of protection.
Chapter Connections:
Competing Visions over the purposes of lynching and the reasons for publicizing lynching.
Competing Visions over white supremacy and racial equality.
Competing Visions over modernity through debates over the rise of the KKK.
Discussion Questions:
What does this souvenir postcard reveal about the ritual of lynching?
How would an advocate of white supremacy interpret and explain this image?
How would the NAACP and civil rights activists interpret and explain this image?
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31. Image 21.9: Ku Klux Klan in Washington, D.C., 1925
Klan members unfurl a giant American flag on the steps of the Capitol, equating patriotism with their call for white supremacy.
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32. Marcus Garvey
Why did Garvey elicit such strong emotions among both followers and critics?
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33. Marcus Garvey
Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) – Organization founded by Marcus Garvey to spread his message of racial pride, economic self-sufficiency, and returning to Africa
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34. Image 21.10: Marcus Garvey
The leader of the UNIA often appeared in full military dress to project an image of strength and racial pride. He challenged prevailing racial stereotypes of black subservience by adopting regalia usually worn by kings.
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35. Competing Visions
DEBATING GARVEYISM
Garvey argued that an independent Negro nation in Africa could solve the problem of racial violence in the United States.
Du Bois attacked Garvey as misguided and inept and accused him of accepting white rule in the U.S.
How did Garvey and Du Bois link the U.S. Civil Rights Movement to international politics?

36. The Harlem Renaissance
Harlem Renaissance – An outpouring of African American artistic expression in the 1920s and 1930s
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37. The Harlem Renaissance
In these poems how do responses to racism vary?
What competing views arose over the purpose of art during the Harlem Renaissance?
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38. Claude McKay “If We Must Die” (1919)
If 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, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead! O kinsmen we must meet the common foe! Though far outnumbered let us show us brave, And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow! What though before us lies the open grave? Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
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39. Countee Cullen “Incident” (1924)
Once riding in old Baltimore, Heart-filled, head-filled with glee, I saw a Baltimorean Keep looking straight at me.
Now I was eight and very small, And he was no whit bigger, And so I smiled, but he poked out His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.”
I saw the whole of Baltimore From May until December; Of all the things that happened there That's all that I remember.
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40. Langston Hughes “I, Too, Sing America” (1925)
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.
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41. Image 21.11: Prodigal Son, 1927
Aaron Douglas’s innovative angular style evoked the fast pace of modern life in an illustration that both portrayed and epitomized the artistic innovations of the Harlem Renaissance.
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42. The New Woman Women in the Twenties
Margaret Sanger and the Fight for Birth Control 
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43. Women in the Twenties
What strategies did women develop to improve their lives in the twenties?
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44. Advertising the New Woman
Images as History
Advertising the New Woman
How did the popular media define “the new woman”? 44

45. Advertising the New Woman
Images as History
Advertising the New Woman
The maid indicates that the ideal woman was rich as well as thin.
Her sleek body, like that of the car being advertised, served mostly as a commodity or decorative object.
The new woman appeared liberated from the confines of the home.
Her silhouette more closely resembled the body of an adolescent.
“Body by Fisher”

46. Margaret Sanger and the Fight for Birth Control
What arguments did Sanger make to support her campaign for legal contraception?
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47. Image 21.12: Margaret Sanger Protests
When officials in Boston refused to let Margaret Sanger speak publicly about birth control, she appeared before a crowd with her mouth bandaged to protest their censorship. Her ploy garnered headlines across the nation, giving the birth control cause a boost.
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48. Ensuring Peace: Diplomacy in the Twenties
Disarmament
Wartime Debts
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49. Disarmament
How did Harding’s foreign policy visions differ from Wilson’s? What benefits and drawbacks did the Washington Conference agreements offer the United States?
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50. Disarmament
Washington Conference (1921–1922) – Meeting of world powers that resulted in agreements that limited naval arms, reaffirmed America’s Open Door policy that kept Chinese trade open to all, and secured pledges of cooperation among the world’s leading military powers
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51. Disarmament
Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928) – Treaty that renounced aggressive war as an instrument of national policy
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52. Image 21.13: The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
The allegorical figures of Peace, Valor, and Victory on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier encapsulated the Harding and Coolidge administration’s diplomatic goals in the early 1920s.

53. Image 21.14: Looking into the Black Hole of Ruin
This 1927 political cartoon forecasts disaster if the world powers failed to reach a second naval disarmament agreement. In the cartoon the world is in disarray after a naval gun had showered it with gun powder.
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54. Wartime Debts
Which nations received the greatest financial aid from the United States during and after World War I? How did lingering financial issues from World War I shape relations between the United States and Europe?
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55. Image 21.15: American Loans to Europe, 1914–1925
The United States demanded that Europe repay loans given to help nations defeat Germany and rebuild after World War I.
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56. Image 21.16: The Global Flow of Reparation Payments
American capital kept the reparation system created by the Versailles Treaty afloat in the twenties.
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57. Choices and Consequences
PREVENTING WAR IN EUROPE
Some Europeans wanted the United States to play a peacekeeping role in Europe.
After the United States declined to join the League of Nations, France invited the United States to sign a bilateral nonaggression treaty.
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58. Choices and Consequences
PREVENTING WAR IN EUROPE
Choices and Consequences, Chapter 21: Preventing War in Europe, A Christmas Carol (page 650)
Text Excerpt: In 1928, France invited the United States to sign a treaty renouncing war between the two nations, hoping to coax the American government into playing a more active peacekeeping role in Europe. President Coolidge faced four choices on how to respond. Americans had conflicting visions of the best way to avoid another war, and vocal supporters backed each option.
Background:
This cartoon shows Uncle Sam flanked by other world leaders heartily singing a Christmas carol advocating “peace on earth, good will towards man,” with their hands behind their backs. The bottom panel shows that behind their backs each is clutching arms and battleships, suggesting that despite the public renunciations of aggressive war in the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact and the 1921–22 naval disarmament treaties, nations are not willing to forgo all their weapons. These weapons reflect the mutual distrust of these nations, indicating their desire to maintain adequate defenses and perhaps the capacity to attack. Great Britain and the United States clutch battleships, revealing that their strength lies in naval power rather than land forces. The United States adhered to the ten-year ban on new battleships construction in the 1921–1922 Five Power Treaty of the Washington Conference of 1921–22, but during the same period made significant upgrades to its existing fleet (new engines, converting from gas to oil, improvements in the firing power of mounted turret guns, improved radio communications, radar, and radio-controlled torpedoes). Perhaps most importantly, in the 1920s the navy began experimenting with the concept of a naval aircraft carrier—a weapon that would play a critical role in World War II.
Chapter Connections:
Competing Visions about the postwar role of the United States in the world.
Competing Visions about the value of disarmament and non-aggression treaties.
Competing Visions about the ongoing legacy of Wilsonian ideals in U.S. foreign policy.
Discussion Questions:
What perspective does this cartoon take on disarmament and non-aggression treaties?
How might a supporter of these treaties respond?
How did these international agreements represent a new path in American foreign policy?
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59. Choices and Consequences
PREVENTING WAR IN EUROPE
Choices Regarding the Role of the United States in Peacekeeping
Adopt a noninterven-tionist policy
Agree to a bilateral nonaggression treaty with France
Reject bilateral treaties and join the League of Nations
Negotiate a multilateral nonaggression pact
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60. Choices and Consequences
PREVENTING WAR IN EUROPE
Decision and Consequences
U.S. Secretary of State Kellogg and French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand devised a multinational nonaggression pact.
Eventually 62 nations signed the Kellogg-Briand pact.
The treaty made President Coolidge popular with both non-interventionists and internationalists.
Did the Kellogg-Briand Pact represent a new path in American foreign policy?
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61. Choices and Consequences
PREVENTING WAR IN EUROPE
Continuing Controversies
What value did the Kellogg-Briand Pact have?
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62. Chapter Review Questions
What features and controversies characterized America’s transformation into a car culture in the 1920s? How did lifestyles and labor relations also change during the decade?
Compare the various manifestations of cultural conflict in the twenties. What similar impulses motivated Americans to enact prohibition, immigration restrictions, and laws prohibiting the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution? How did these various reforms affect American society?
Why were the Harlem Renaissance and Marcus Garvey controversial?
Were the 1920s a time of political, economic, and social liberation for women? What traditional concerns or ideas remained intact?
How did the United States fashion a new role for itself in world affairs in the twenties?
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