1. A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
OUT OF MANY
A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
Chapter 23
The Twenties
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2. © 2009 Pearson Education, Inc.
Part One:
Introduction
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3. Chapter Focus Questions
How did the “second industrial revolution” transform the American economy?
What were the promises and limits of prosperity in the 1920s?
How and why did the Republican Party dominate 1920s politics?
How did the new mass media reshape American culture?
Which Americans were less likely to share in postwar prosperity and why?
What political and cultural movements opposed modern cultural trends.
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4. © 2009 Pearson Education, Inc.
Part Two:
American Communities: The Movie Audience and Hollywood: Mass Culture Creates a New National Community
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5. American Communities: The Movie Audience and Hollywood: Mass Culture Creates a New National Community
In the 1920s, the movies were America’s most popular form of the new mass culture.
A huge, national audience regularly attended movies in grand, majestic theaters.
The production center for this dream world was Hollywood, California.
A frontier boomtown, dominated by the movie stars who lived opulent lives, Hollywood symbolized Americans’ dreams of freedom, material success, and the chance to remake one’s very identity.
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6. Postwar Prosperity and Its Price
Part Three:
Postwar Prosperity and Its Price
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7. The Second Industrial Revolution
Technological innovations made it possible to increase industrial output without expanding the labor force.
Driven by electricity and automated machinery, industry concentrated on producing consumer goods.
Chart: Consumer Debt 1920–31
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8. FIGURE 23.2 Consumer Debt, 1920–31 The expansion of consumer borrowing was a key component of the era’s prosperity. These figures do not include mortgages or money borrowed to purchase stocks. They reveal the great increase in “installment buying” for such consumer durable goods as automobiles and household appliances.
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9. The Modern Corporation
A managerial revolution stressed scientific management and behavioral psychology. Successful corporations worked to:
integrate production and distribution
diversify products
expand industrial research
gain control of entire industries
Increasingly, a class of salaried executives rather than stockholders made corporate policy.
Chart: Stock Market Prices, 1921–32
Refer to photo “A&P.”
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10. FIGURE 23.1 Stock Market Prices, 1921–32 Common stock prices rose steeply during the 1920s. Although only about 4 million Americans owned stocks during the period, “stock watching” became something of a national sport.
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11. The A&P grocery chain expanded from 400 stores in 1912 to more than 15,000 by the end of the 1920s, making it a familiar sight in communities across America. A&P advertisements, like this one from 1927, emphasized cleanliness, order, and the availability of name-brand goods at discount prices.
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12. Welfare Capitalism
To improve worker morale and reduce the challenge of unions, corporations employed “welfare capitalism.”
To undercut unions, businesses promoted an “open shop” in which non-union workers received the same benefits as union workers.
Union membership rapidly declined.
The AFL showed no interest in organizing workers in the new industries.
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13. The Auto Age The car symbolized the rise of the consumer economy.
By 1925, the assembly line at Henry Ford’s Highland Park plant completed a car every 10 seconds.
Ford paid his workers more than the going rate, reducing turnover while enabling them to be both producers and consumers of his Model T. The car cost $300—three month’s wages.
The auto industry spurred production of steel, rubber, glass, and petroleum.
Road building triggered commercial development along highways, promoting new businesses and changed social habits.
Refer to photo “Ford Plant.”
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14. Finished automobiles roll off the moving assembly line at the Ford Motor Company, Highland Park, Michigan, ca During the 1920s, Henry Ford achieved the status of folk hero, as his name became synonymous with the techniques of mass production. Ford cultivated a public image of himself as the heroic genius of the auto industry, greatly exaggerating his personal achievements.
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15. Cities and Suburbs The automobile enabled people to move into suburbs.
Cities also grew at a fast pace, not only horizontally, but also vertically as new buildings reshaped the skyline.
Refer to photo “Ford Ad.”
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16. Until 1924, Henry Ford had disdained national advertising for his cars
Until 1924, Henry Ford had disdained national advertising for his cars. But as General Motors gained a competitive edge by making yearly changes in style and technology, Ford was forced to pay more attention to advertising. This ad was directed at “Mrs. Consumer,” combining appeals to female independence and motherly duties.
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17. The State, the Economy, and Business
Part Four:
The State, the Economy, and Business
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18. Harding and Coolidge
Warren G. Harding surrounded himself with his Ohio cronies and ran an administration riddled with scandal.
Led by Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, his administration pursued policies that trimmed the budget and reduced the taxes paid by the wealthy.
Harding’s death in 1923 brought stern, but honest, Calvin Coolidge to office. Coolidge continued the business-government partnership of Harding’s term, reducing federal spending, cutting taxes, and blocking congressional initiatives.
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19. Herbert Hoover and the “Associative State”
Herbert Hoover was the most influential figure during the period, serving as secretary of commerce under Harding and Coolidge.
He promoted business cooperation by creating trade associations and coordinating conferences to promote business efficiency and facilitated the growing concentration of corporate wealth.
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20. War Debts, Reparations, and Keeping the Peace
The United States emerged from WWI as the strongest economic power and as the world’s most important creditor.
American officials insisted that former allies pay back the money they had borrowed during the war.
In the 1920s, the United States helped Germany refinance their reparations debt and reduced their payments.
The United States participated in naval disarmament agreements.
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21. Global Commerce and U.S. Foreign Policy
The ultimate foreign policy goal, however, remained economic expansion.
Business and government collaborated to expand United States investments and markets overseas, particularly in Latin America.
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22. Weakened Agriculture, Ailing Industries
Despite the boom in business, many workers and farmers suffered.
Agricultural profits steadily declined and the gap between farm and non-farm income widened.
Coolidge vetoed efforts to aid farmers, suffering from debts incurred during wartime expansion.
Other sick industries included:
coal mining—which faced competition from oil and natural gas
railroads—which faced competition from cars and trucks
New England textiles—which faced competition from low-wage southern producers
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23. © 2009 Pearson Education, Inc.
Part Five:
The New Mass Culture
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24. Movie-Made America
Mass communication media reshaped American culture in the 1920s.
Movie ticket sales soared.
Publicists whetted American appetites by creating an elegant image for movie stars.
Attacked by conservative groups for sexual permissiveness, Hollywood studios came up with a plan of self-censorship by hiring Will Hayes as a morals czar.
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25. Seeing History Creating Celebrity.
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26. Radio Broadcasting
Radio developed into the nation’s first comprehensive mass entertainment medium.
Large companies formed national networks that aired a variety of programs to homes across the country.
Building on blackface minstrelsy, “Amos ‘n’ Andy” was the first national radio hit show.
Radio also helped to commercialize previously isolated forms of music and build a mass following for sports.
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27. New Forms of Journalism
The 1920s saw the growth of newspaper tabloids that emphasized crime, sex scandals, gossip columns, and sports.
Their popularity forced advertisers to appeal directly to working class and immigrant readers.
As in other businesses, journalism saw the trend towards consolidation.
The Hearst chain controlled 14 percent of the nation’s circulation.
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28. Advertising Modernity
Advertising became a thriving industry that promoted consumerism.
Advertising agencies employed market research and psychology to stress consumer needs, desires, and anxieties rather than the qualities of the product.
They celebrated consumption as a positive good.
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29. A 1919 advertisement for Lucky Strike cigarettes featured the image of actress Billie Burke. Paid celebrity endorsements for consumer goods became a common practice in the post WWI years. Tobacco companies were among the most aggressive purveyors of this new advertising strategy.
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30. The Phonograph and the Recording Industry
Fueled in part by dance crazes, the recording industry transformed American mass and regional popular culture.
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31. Sports and Celebrity
Spectator sports reached unprecedented popularity as athletes took on a celebrity status.
Babe Ruth’s home run hitting and appetite for publicity helped restore baseball’s tarnished image as it recovered from the 1919 Black Sox scandal.
Attendance soared, prompting newspapers and radio stations to broaden their coverage.
Although African Americans were excluded from major league baseball, the Negro National League (organized in 1920) provided new opportunities.
Refer to photo “Pittsburgh Crawfords.”
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32. The Pittsburgh Crawfords, one of the most popular and successful baseball teams in the Negro National League, organized in Excluded from major league baseball by a “whites only” policy, black ballplayers played to enthusiastic crowds of African Americans from the 1920s through the 1940s. The “Negro leagues” declined after major league baseball finally integrated in 1947.
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33. Babe Ruth, baseball’s biggest star, shakes hands with President Warren G. Harding at the Opening Day of the brand new Yankee Stadium, Bronx, New York, April 4, The new celebrity culture of the 1920s routinely brought together public figures from the worlds of politics, sports, show business, and even organized crime.
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34. A New Morality?
For some people the 1920s saw a new morality symbolized by the flapper who danced to jazz, smoked cigarettes, drank bootleg liquor, and was sexually active.
Writers had encouraged a greater degree of openness about sexuality.
Surveys of sexual behavior showed that an increased number of women had sexual relations prior to marriage.
The new morality was reflected in American popular culture.
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35. A woman in a man’s shirt and necktie wears a pair of Paul Jones knickers in this 1922 advertisement. Her boyish, almost androgynous look reflects the way that notions of the “new woman” intersected with the worlds of fashion and advertising.
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36. Modernity and Traditionalism
Part Six:
Modernity and Traditionalism
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37. Prohibition
Many looked to prohibition as a way to restore public morality, but public demand for alcohol remained strong. As a result, illegal bootlegging proliferated.
Bootlegging provided a great boost to organized crime, which became a permanent feature of American life.
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38. Immigration Restriction
Dating back to the late nineteenth century, the movement to restrict immigration of southern and eastern Europeans accelerated in the twenties.
Backed by recurring American beliefs in racial inferiority, and fueled by wartime patriotism, the Red Scare, and nativist sentiment, legislation passed that set quotas on annual immigration.
Chart: Immigration Trends to the United States by Continent/Region,
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39. FIGURE 23.3 Immigration Trends to the United States by Continent/Region, 1880-1930.
SOURCE: Adapted from Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition(NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
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40. The Ku Klux Klan
The Ku Klux Klan was the most effective nativist organization.
Hiram W. Evans transformed the Klan into a mass movement by using modern promotional techniques.
The Klan attacked not only blacks but Catholics, Jews, and immigrants.
The Klan claimed over 3 million members and was a powerful force in Democratic Party politics in the South and in several western and midwestern states.
In 1925, the Klan began to fade, in part due to a scandal that discredited one of its leaders.
Refer to photo “Ku Klux Klan.”
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41. Women members of the Ku Klux Klan in New Castle, Indiana, August 1, The revived Klan was a powerful presence in scores of American communities during the early 1920s, especially among native-born white Protestants, who feared cultural and political change. In addition to preaching “100 percent Americanism,” local Klan chapters also served a social function for members and their families.
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42. Religious Fundamentalism
Religious fundamentalism paralleled political nativism.
Fundamentalists rejected the tenets of modern science, particularly evolution.
Five states banned its teaching in public schools.
William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow squared off in a celebrated trial in Dayton, Tennessee over teaching evolution.
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43. © 2009 Pearson Education, Inc.
Part Seven:
Promises Postponed
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44. Feminism in Transition
Once suffrage was gained, women’s rights advocates faced a dilemma: should they press for protective legislation or push for legal and civil equality? The National American Woman Suffrage Association:
reorganized itself as the League of Women Voters
promoted women’s involvement in politics and laws protecting women and children
Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party, opposed protective legislation and pushed for the Equal Rights Amendment.
Women continued to enter white-collar professions, though men still dominated the high-paid occupations.
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45. Mexican Immigration
Restrictions on European immigration opened up opportunities to Mexicans.
Job opportunities in agribusiness attracted Mexican immigrants and substantial, though segregated Mexican barrios grew up in several urban centers.
Mexicans were frequently barred from high-paying jobs and were targets of racist campaigns.
They established mutual aid societies to assist themselves and to fight for equality.
Chart: Mexican Immigration to the United States in the 1920s
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46. FIGURE 23.4 Mexican Immigration to the United States in the 1920s Many Mexican migrants avoided official border crossing stations so they would not have to pay visa fees. Thus, these official figures probably underestimated the true size of the decade’s Mexican migration. As the economy contracted with the onset of the Great Depression, immigration from Mexico dropped off sharply.
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47. Mexican workers gathered outside a San Antonio labor bureau in 1924
Mexican workers gathered outside a San Antonio labor bureau in These employment agencies contracted Mexicans to work for Texas farmers, railroads, and construction companies. Note the three Anglo men in front (wearing suits and ties), who probably owned and operated this agency. During the 1920s, San Antonio’s Mexican population doubled from roughly 40,000 to over 80,000, making it the second largest colonia in El Norte after Los Angeles.
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48. The “New Negro” Map: Black Population, 1920
The 1920s was the era of the “New Negro” and the Harlem Renaissance.
African Americans continued to migrate to northern urban communities.
Harlem became a major African-American cultural center as a wide range of artists explored aspects of black life in new ways.
New voices of black protest emerged in various quarters.
Marcus Garvey emphasized black pride, black-owned businesses, and unity among all people of African descent.
Most Harlem residents worked long hours at menial jobs for low pay.
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49. MAP 23.1 Black Population, 1920 Although the Great Migration had drawn hundreds of thousands of African Americans to the urban North, the Southern states of the former Confederacy still remained the center of the African American population in 1920.
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50. Alienated Intellectuals
Gertrude Stein described intellectuals of the 1920s as a “lost generation.”
Writers like Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos drew on their WWI experiences and expressed cynicism about society’s goals and purposes.
F. Scott Fitzgerald questioned the crass materialism of the opulent rich. H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis mocked the values of small town America.
A group of southern writers known as the Fugitives attacked industrialism.
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51. The Election of 1928
The presidential election of 1928 was a race between urban, Catholic, wet, Al Smith versus small-town, Protestant, dry, Herbert Hoover.
Smith’s Catholicism was widely attacked.
Both sides promised to support business, though Hoover could claim to have been the architect of the 1920s prosperity.
Smith lost, but ran strongly in the cities, a harbinger of what lay ahead.
Map: The Election of 1928
Refer to “1928 Political Cartoon.”
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52. MAP 23.2 The Election of 1928 Although Al Smith managed to carry the nation’s twelve largest cities, Herbert Hoover’s victory in 1928 was one of the largest popular and electoral landslides in the nation’s history.
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53. Clifford K. Berryman’s 1928 political cartoon interpreted that year’s presidential contest along sectional lines. It depicted the two major presidential contenders as each setting off to campaign in the regions where their support was weakest. For Democrat Al Smith, that meant the West, and for Republican Herbert Hoover, the East.
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54. © 2009 Pearson Education, Inc.
Part Eight:
Conclusion
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55. © 2009 Pearson Education, Inc.