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1920’s African American Identity (1)
The United Negro Improvement Association was brought to Harlem from Jamaica by Marcus Garvey. Garvey advocated individual and racial pride for African Americans and developed political ideas of black nationalism. Going beyond the efforts of W. E. B. Du Bois, Garvey established an organization for black separatism, economic self-sufficiency, and a back-to-Africa movement. -
1920’s Economy (2)
The manufacturing process was made more efficient by the adoption of improved methods of mass production. Henry Ford had perfected a system for manufacturing automobiles by means of an assembly line. In the 1920s, most major industries adopted the
assembly line and realized major gains in worker productivity. -
1920’s Economy (4)
New technologies (chemical fertilizers, gasoline tractors) helped farmers increase their production in the 1920s, but did not solve
their problems. In fact, productivity only served to increase their debts, as growing surpluses produced falling prices. -
1920’s Economy (5)
Wages rose during the 1920s, but membership in unions declined 20 percent, partly because most companies insisted on an open shop (keeping jobs open to nonunion workers). Some companies also began to practice welfare capitalism, voluntarily offering their employees improved benefits and higher wages in order to reduce their interest in organizing unions. -
1920’s Culture (1)
Brought north by African American musicians, jazz became a symbol of the "new" and "modem" culture of the cities. High school and college youth expressed their rebellion against their elders' culture by dancing to jazz music. The proliferation of phonographs and radios made this new style of music available to a huge public. -
1920’s Culture (2)
Going to the movies became a national habit in cities, suburbs, and small towns. The movie industry centered in Hollywood, California, became big business in the 1920s. Elaborate movie theater "palaces" were built for the general public. With the introduction of talking (sound) pictures in 1927, the movie industry reached new heights. -
1920’s Culture (3)
In the 1920s, a new medium-the radio-suddenly appeared. The first commercial radio station went on the air in 1920 and broadcast
music to just a few thousand listeners. By 1930 there were over 800 stations broadcasting to 10 million radios, about a third of all U.S. homes. -
1920’s Culture (4)
A special fashion that set young people apart from older generations was the flapper look. Influenced by movie actresses as well as their own desires for independence, young women shocked their elders by wearing dresses hemmed at the knee, "bobbing" (cutting short) their hair, smoking cigarettes, and driving cars. -
1920’s Culture (5)
In the new age of radio and movies, Americans radically shifted their viewpoint and adopted as role models the larger-than-life personalities celebrated on the sports page and the movie screen. In the 1920s, people followed the knockouts of heavyweight boxer Jack Dempsey, the swimming records of Gertrude Ederle, the touchdowns scored by Jim Thorpe, the home runs hit by Babe Ruth, and the golf tournaments won by Bobby Jones. -
1920’s Literature (2)
Hemingway, who witnessed the horrors of World War I firsthand, wrote short stories in a simplified, minimalist style. He lived an adventurous life, and he typically dealt with themes of struggle, courage and loss. Among Hemingway's most popular works are The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls. -
1920’s African American Identity (2)
The Harlem Renaissance was an African American intellectual, social, and artistic movement in Harlem, New York. Harlem became famous in the 1920s for its concentration of talented actors, artists, musicians, and writers. -
1920’s African American Identity (3)
The leading Harlem poets included Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and Claude McKay. Commenting on the African American heritage, their poems expressed a range of emotions, from bitterness and resentment to joy and hope. -
Religion (2)
Revivalists of the 1920s preached a fundamentalist message but did so for the first time making full use of the new tool of mass communication, the radio. The leading radio evangelists were Billy Sunday, who drew large crowds as he attacked drinking, gambling, and dancing; and Aimee Semple McPherson, who condemned the
twin evils of communism and jazz music. -
Religion (1)
Modernists took a historical and critical view of certain passages in the Bible and believed they could accept Darwin's theory of evolution without abandoning their religious faith. Fundamentalists condemned the modernists and taught that every word in the Bible must be accepted as literally true. -
1920’s Literature (5)
Ezra Pound was an American poet and a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement. His contribution to poetry began with his development of Imagism, a movement derived from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, stressing clarity, precision and economy of language. -
1920’s African American Identity (5)
African American jazz musicians such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong were so popular among people of all races that the 1920s is often called the Jazz Age. Other great performers included blues singer Bessie Smith and the multitalented singer and actor Paul Robeson. While these artists sometimes performed before integrated audiences in Harlem, they often found themselves and
their audiences segregated in much of the rest of the nation. -
Prohibition (1)
The 18th Amendment, prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, including liquors, wines, and beers, did not stop people from drinking alcohol either in public places or at home. Especially in the cities, it became fashionable to defy the law by going to clubs or bars known as speakeasies, where bootleg (smuggled) liquor was sold. -
1920’s Politics (3)
President Harding signed the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, establishing the Bureau of the Budget. The bureau placed formal restrictions on the spending of government funds. All government expenditures were to be placed in a single budget for Congress to review and vote on. -
1920’s Economy (1)
The Depression of 1920–21 was a sharp deflationary recession in the United States and other countries, beginning 14 months after the end of World War I. -
Immigration (2)
Liberal American artists and intellectuals protested against racist and nativist prejudices. They rallied to the support of two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who had been convicted of committing robbery and murder. Liberals protested that the two men were innocent, and that they had been accused, convicted, and sentenced to die simply because they were poor Italians and anarchists. -
1920's Politics (1)
The Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922 was a law that raised American tariffs on many imported goods to protect factories and farms. -
1920's Politics (2)
Albert Fall, a former Secretary of the Interior, was charged with accepting bribes from oil companies in exchange for exclusive rights to drill for oil on federal land. The Teapot Dome Scandal would empower the Senate to conduct rigorous investigations into government corruption. -
1920’s Literature (3)
T.S. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for literature for his poem The Waste Land. This poem that is one of the most widely discussed literary works. Written in 1922, The Waste Land expresses Eliot’s conception of the contrast between modern society and societies of the past. -
1920's Politics (4)
Coolidge was the overwhelming choice of the Republican party as their presidential nominee in 1924. The Democrats nominated a conservative lawyer from West Virginia, John W. Davis. Liberals formed a new Progressive party led by its presidential candidate, Robert La Follette. Coolidge won the election easily, but the Progressive ticket did extremely well for a third party in a conservative era. -
Immigration (1)
Congress passed two laws that severely limited immigration
by setting quotas based on nationality. The first quota act of 1921
limited immigration to 3 percent of the number of foreign-born persons from a given nation counted in the 1910 Census. The second quota act in 1924 set quotas of 2 percent based on the Census of 1890 to reduce the number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. -
1920’s Literature (1)
F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the most popular writers of the 1920s, published The Great Gatsby. The novel deals with issues of decadence and excess and is widely interpreted as a cautionary tale. -
1920’s Literature (4)
In 1925, Theodore Dreiser published An American Tragedy. Dreiser believed in representing life honestly in his fiction and accomplished this through accurate detail and descriptions of the urban settings of his stories. He also portrays his characters as victims of social and economic forces. -
1920's Politics (5)
Coolidge declined to run for the presidency a second time. The Republicans therefore nominated Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. Hoover's Democratic opponent was the governor of New York, Alfred E. Smith. Hoover won in a landslide because general dislike for Smith's religion outweighed the voters' usual allegiance to the Democratic party. -
Stock Market Crash (1)
On Black Thursday, October 24, 1929, there was an unprecedented volume of selling on Wall Street which caused stock
prices to plunge. -
Stock Market Crash (2)
Following Black Thursday, a group of bankers bought millions of dollars of stocks, hoping to stave off disaster by stabilizing prices.
The strategy worked for only one business day, Friday. The selling frenzy resumed on Monday. On Black Tuesday, October 29, the bottom fell out as millions of panicky investors ordered their brokers to sell, but almost no buyers could be found. -
Herbert Hoover’s Policies (1)
At the time of the stock market crash, President Hoover believed the nation could get through the difficult times if the people took his advice about exercising voluntary action and restraint. Hoover urged businesses not to cut wages, unions not to strike, and private charities to increase their efforts for the needy and the jobless. -
1920’s Economy (3)
There was an increase in use of oil and electricity, although coal was still used for the railroads and to heat most homes. Oil was used to power factories and to provide gasoline for the rapidly increasing numbers of automobiles. By 1930, oil would account for 23 percent of U.S. energy. -
1920’s African American Identity (4)
By 1930, almost 20 percent of African Americans lived in the North, as migration from the South continued. In the North, African Americans still faced discrimination in housing and jobs, but they found at least some improvement in their earnings and material standard of living. -
Herbert Hoover’s Policies (2)
The Hawley-Smoot Tariff passed by Congress set tax increases ranging from 31 percent to 49 percent on foreign imports. In retaliation for the U.S. tariff, however, European countries enacted higher tariffs of their own against U.S. goods. The effect was to reduce trade for all nations, meaning that both the national and international economies sank further into depression. -
Dust Bowl (2)
The federal government created the Soil Conservation Service to teach and subsidize the plains farmers to rotate crops, terrace fields, use contour plowing, and plant trees to stop soil erosion and conserve water. For those who could stay behind, the region recovered, but environmental issues remained. -
Dust Bowl (1)
A severe drought in the early 1930s ruined crops in the Great Plains. This region became a dust bowl, as poor farming practices coupled with high winds blew away millions of tons of dried topsoil. With their farms turned to dust, and their health often compromised, thousands of "Okies" from Oklahoma and surrounding states migrated westward to California in search of farm or factory work that often could not be found. -
New Deal Programs (2)
Banks were failing at a frightening rate as depositors flocked to withdraw funds. To restore confidence in those banks that were still solvent, the president ordered the banks closed for a bank holiday. He went on the radio to explain that the banks would be reopened after allowing enough time for the government to reorganize them on a sound basis. -
New Deal Programs (3)
The Emergency Banking Relief Act authorized the government to
examine the finances of banks closed during the bank holiday and
reopen those judged to be sound. -
New Deal Programs (5)
The Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) provided refinancing of small homes to prevent foreclosures. -
New Deal Programs (11)
The National Recovery Administration (NRA) was an attempt to guarantee reasonable profits for business and fair wages and hours for labor. With the antitrust laws temporarily suspended, the NRA could help each industry (such as steel, oil, and paper) set codes for wages, hours of work, levels of production, and prices of finished goods. The law creating the NRA also gave workers the
right to organize and bargain collectively. -
New Deal Programs (12)
The Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) encouraged farmers to reduce production (and thereby boost prices) by offering to pay government subsidies for every acre they plowed under. -
New Deal Programs (1)
Immediately after being sworn into office, Roosevelt called Congress into a hundred-day-long special session. During this
brief period, Congress passed into law every request of President Roosevelt, enacting more major legislation than any single Congress in history. Most of the new laws and agencies were commonly referred to by their initials: WPA, AAA, CCC, NRA. -
New Deal Programs (4)
The Glass-Steagall Act increased regulation of the banks and limited how banks could invest customers' money. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) guaranteed individual bank deposits. The gold standard was restricted to international transactions, and the Americans could no longer exchange their dollars for gold. -
New Deal Programs (6)
The Farm Credit Administration provided low-interest farm loans and mortgages to prevent foreclosures on the property of indebted farmers. -
New Deal Programs (7)
The Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) offered
outright grants of federal money to states and local governments that were operating soup kitchens and other forms of relief for the jobless and homeless. -
New Deal Programs (8)
The Public Works Administration (PWA), directed by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, allotted money to state and local governments for building roads, bridges, dams, and other public works. Such construction projects were a source of thousands of jobs. -
New Deal Programs (9)
The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) employed young men on projects on federal lands and paid their families small monthly sums. -
Prohibition (2)
Supporters of the 18th Amendment pointed to declines in alcoholism and alcohol-related deaths, but as the years passed, they gradually weakened in the face of growing public resentment
and clear evidence of increased criminal activity. In 1933, the 21st Amendment repealing the Eighteenth was ratified, and millions
celebrated the new year by toasting the end of Prohibition. -
New Deal Programs (10)
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was a huge experiment in
regional development and public planning. As a government corporation, it hired thousands of people in one of the nation's poorest regions, the Tennessee Valley, to build dams, operate electric power plants, control flooding and erosion, and manufacture fertilizer. The TVA sold electricity to residents of the region at rates that were well below those previously charged by a private power company. -
New Deal Programs (13)
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was created to regulate the stock market and to place strict limits on the kind of speculative practices that had led to the Wall Street crash in 1929. The SEC also required full audits of and financial disclosure by corporations to protect investors from fraud and insider trading.
