Months before the landslide victory of

26 An Exhilarating Decade American Life in the 1920s M onths before the landslide victory of Republican Warren G. Harding in 1920, it was clear tha...
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An Exhilarating Decade American Life in the 1920s

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onths before the landslide victory of Republican Warren G. Harding in 1920, it was clear that the electorate’s mood had changed and that the progressive political coalition had collapsed. Politically, the nation veered to the right in the 1920s, electing a sequence of Republican presidents. Progressivism did not vanish, and many of the political changes wrought in the preceding decades remained in place; the federal government, particularly the executive branch, continued to grow in size and prestige. Progressives remained a powerful force in Congress, and the last of the decade’s Republican presidents, Herbert Hoover, was the leader of the reforming side of his party. Nonetheless, the prevailing political sense of the twenties was that the government should act as cheerleader, and perhaps coach, to the nation’s successful business team, but should not attempt to be a referee. The Republican presidents claimed credit for sowing the decade’s prosperity, but after 1929 Hoover had to reap the economic whirlwind. A long boom began in 1922, producing a new surge of consumerism and euphoric optimism. Exhausted by years of crusades for reform culminating in the bitter treaty debate, most Americans opted for getting on with the business of living; satisfied consumers formed the majority that turned the reins of government back to conservative Republicans. If large numbers of Americans were contented with their economic state during the twenties, the level of social anxiety was nonetheless high, sparking ferocious debates. Indeed, as wartime patriotism faded, the nation seemed more divided than ever. The strikes, the

Chapter 26 at a Glance A Decade of Relative Prosperity Welfare Capitalism and the Decline of Unionism The Consumer Boom Gathers Steam Americans on the Road and in the Air A Leisure Society Winds of Change The New Science The Literature of Revolt The New Morality and the New Woman The “New Negro” Conservative Backlash Religious Diversity and Confrontation Nativist Fears and Immigration Restrictions The Case Against Foreigners The Ku Klux Klan Defines “Pure Americanism” The Failure of Prohibition The Spread of Organized Crime High Republican Politics The Election of 1920 Harding and the Return to “Normalcy” Calvin Coolidge Rides the Boom The Coolidge Boom The Election of 1928 The Great Engineer at the Wheel Boom and Bust in the Stock Market Conclusion: A Decade of Prosperity and Self-Analysis

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race riots, and the crackdown on leftists in 1919 laid bare deep-seated popular apprehensions about the nation’s ethnic and cultural diversity. In addition, the surge of consumerism, long regarded by religious leaders as the most menacing modern challenge to morality, continued to alter traditional behavior and, many believed, the American character. Other social and intellectual trends, none of them really new, added to the decade’s controversies. Urbanization continued. Most Americans were aware that in 1920 the Census Bureau reported that for the first time a majority of Americans lived in cities and small towns. With the end of World War I, moreover, immigration began to increase again, rekindling anxieties in the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant majority. The divisive scientific idea most debated in the twenties, the Darwinian theory of evolution, had been pondered by intellectuals for decades, but in the 1920s open controversy about it erupted in the nation’s churches and schools. Among other new scientific ideas, FreudAmerican Leaders, 1921 From left to right, Henry Ford, Thomas A. Edison, Warren G. Harding, and tire manufacturer Harvey Firestone enjoy a break from their responsibilities as American icons.

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ian psychology and Einstein’s theory of relativity posed serious challenges to traditional beliefs. Chroniclers of the twenties have been fascinated by the decade’s social clashes, seeing them as harbingers of America’s escalating twentieth-century encounter with modernity. The decade has been labeled “The Age of the Flapper,” “The Jazz Age,” and “The Roaring Twenties.” Its most engaging characters were the cynical, disillusioned young intellectuals who ridiculed their more conventional contemporaries, flailing away at Prohibition and preachers, “rubes” and Rotarians, democracy and do-gooders. They scorned America’s Puritan past as repressive and explored personal freedom with a youthful zest and flamboyance, permanently influencing American fashion, music, literature, and public morality. But interesting and influential as they were, the talented literary rebels of the twenties numbered in the hundreds and did not speak for or to most Americans. The majority of Americans were social and political conservatives, and many of them launched ferocious counterattacks. Indeed, the intensity and extremity of conservative causes in the twenties was a measure

American Life in the 1920s

of the anxiety felt by many old-stock Americans. Their crusades in the twenties had the appearance of lastditch battles. Prohibition came to symbolize the conservative desire to establish legally a purer and more Christian society. Protestant Fundamentalists tried to ban the teaching of evolution in public schools, and the revived Ku Klux Klan, an extraordinary success in the early twenties, appealed to a variety of people who resented the pace of social change. Alarmed and angered, millions of Americans joined to defend the customs of an earlier and more orderly time. Throughout the United States, the sound of battles between defenders of the old order and champions of a new order resounded through the schools, the churches, and the governing boards of nearly every county and village.

A Decade of Relative Prosperity By 1922 the economic boom that gave coherence to the twenties was well under way. The industrial accomplishments of the decade provided a real basis for giddy optimism. The wealthy profited most from the boom, but prosperity altered the lives of most Americans and provided an environment for the decade’s social conflicts. Technological improvements continued to increase factory productivity; during the twenties industrial output in the country doubled. While some older industries, such as coal and textiles, declined slightly, dramatic increases occurred in automobile manufacturing, chemicals, and electrical equipment. The chemical industry, under the leadership of such giant corporations as DuPont and Union Carbide, capitalized on the growing market for synthetic fibers and plastics. The expansion of the electrical equipment industry was tied to new consumer products such as household appliances and radios, as well as to increases in the use of industrial electrical equipment. The economic boom of the twenties had profound social consequences. Improvements in transportation and communication continued to break down provincial barriers and speeded the spread of news and new ideas. In addition, the wide array of technological advances provided increased leisure time for the public.

 Welfare Capitalism and the Decline of Unionism The businessman resurfaced as an American hero in the twenties. Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, and Thomas A.

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Edison were names as familiar as those of presidents. Popular magazines were filled with the success sagas of the captains of industry. Furthermore, the names of the wealthy were attached to countless civic and humanitarian projects. In the 1920s and 1930s the huge Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations provided more than 85 percent of the external funding for scientific research in American universities. Ironically, this idealization of the rugged individualist businessman came at a time when American corporations were becoming more managerial in style. In most corporations the sale of vast amounts of stock to the public had separated ownership from management; company executives were experts trained in efficiency and marketing. When Alfred P. Sloan became the head of General Motors in 1924, he challenged the leadership of the still privately held Ford Motor Company by creating a modern corporation featuring team management and an emphasis on research and marketing. The managerial revolution that accompanied the emergence of large, publicly owned corporations did not dramatically change the tactics of American business leaders. A new wave of business concentration raised the share of total corporate income going to the largest 5 percent of the nation’s companies from 79.6 percent in 1918 to 84.3 percent in 1929. Even more portentous was the imbalance in the distribution of national income. The share of national income going to capital rose during the decade from 19.6 percent to 25.5 percent, while the share going to labor slipped from 77.9 percent to 72.9 percent. To some extent, other sectors of the economy, particularly skilled laborers, shared in the prosperity of the 1920s. Wages rose steadily throughout the decade, though never at the rate of increases in business profits, and only a few industrial areas suffered significant unemployment. Per capita income rose from $672 in 1922 to $857 in 1929, and for a majority of the labor force real wages — income measured against the prevailing price level — also rose. For semiskilled and unskilled workers (who filled many factory jobs), the picture was bleaker. Over the decade, the families of most such workers barely clung to their existing standard of living and the income of every potential wage earner had to count, causing some hardship every time there was a short-term layoff — a frequent occurrence even in these good years, as companies tried to keep costs under tight control. Between 1921 and 1929 total union membership dropped by 30 percent, to about 3.5 million. This de-

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cline had complex causes. in a few cases profit-sharThe relative prosperity of ing schemes. But these some American workers improvements touched partly explained it, as did only a small percentage public hostility to unions, of the American labor born of the bitter and disforce. And even for these ruptive postwar strikes. workers, “welfare capiBut much of the detalism” looked better on cline in proportion of paper than it functioned workers belonging to in practice. Its basic unions was caused by purposes were to outthe narrow focus of bid union organizers, to the unions themselves, discourage job-hopping, which remained basand to persuade workers tions of ethnic prejudice to give their loyalty to the — Irish workers dominatcompany rather than to ing transportation; Italethnic, religious, or comians, construction; and munity organizations, Jews, the needle trades. let alone independent Blacks were accepted unions. Employers rarely in only a handful of AFL showed a corresponding locals and accounted loyalty to their workers for less than 2 percent of when it came to layoffs in the membership in 1930. slack times. Nor did most Narrowly focused on betworkers put much faith tering the lot of skilled in their companies’ penworkers, the AFL craft sion plans; in the absence unions generally rejected of Social Security and unpolitical activity, favored employment insurance Advertising the New Electrical Age Ads like this frequently immigration restriction, (which did not exist beappeared in American magazines and newspapers in the 1920s, aimed at both middle- and working-class consumers. Notice the and opposed a minimum fore the 1930s), workers very “wordy” style of advertising copywriting, in contrast to the wage for unskilled laborhad to depend on their use of a few arresting slogans and images today. ers. Indeed, they had no savings, their families, interest in organizing the laborers in the nation’s great and their church and community organizations to take heavy industries such as steelmaking. Unable to orgacare of them in old age or sickness. nize and bargain collectively, these workers were not Not all corporate opposition to unions was so beonly low-paid relative to their productivity, but often nign. Companies employed thousands of spies and lost ground in their living standards over the course of private agents to discourage union organization, and the decade. generally the government could be counted on to Employers, of course, had no reason to favor workerback management in labor disputes. In most company led unions, and every reason to resist them. Many large towns the authority of the government and of the emcorporations short-circuited labor organizers by launchployer became virtually indistinguishable. Companies ing “company unions,” which by the end of the decade circulated “blacklists” that excluded labor activists enrolled around 1.5 million workers. This paternalistic from jobs, and used many other repressive techniques movement, labeled “welfare capitalism” or “industrial to curtail union growth. democracy,” sometimes gave workers real improvements: a five-and-a-half-day workweek and paid vaca-  The Consumer Boom Gathers Steam tions, employee recreation halls and cafeterias, more Prosperity was sufficiently widespread among the midequitable grievance procedures and a curbing of the ardle class and skilled workers in the twenties to support a bitrary power of foremen, stock-ownership plans, and

American Life in the 1920s

Fueling Up On a rainy day in 1927 a man and two women fill their car’s gas tank at a station in New Jersey. Gas stations proliferated across the nation’s landscape during the 1920s, responding to a huge consumer need and inspiring cultural critic H.L. Mencken to rail about Americans’ “libido for the ugly.”

consumer boom, out of which grew a mass culture that tended to homogenize American society in countless ways. Automobiles led the way, but scores of other consumer products dramatically changed millions of lives. Radios and telephones revolutionized communications; ready-made clothing standardized dress; refrigerators, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners reduced the drudgery of housework. Especially for the middle class, installment buying made possible such large purchases as a home or a car, which hitherto most Americans could buy only for cash. By the end of the decade, chain stores catering to mass tastes — the A & P, Safeway, Woolworth, J. C. Penney, and Walgreen — were displacing small merchants in middle-class neighborhoods. The new stores offered nationally advertised brands and were clean and “up-to-date,” but they neither allowed haggling over prices nor extended credit — timehonored practices that kept many ethnic and workingclass families loyal to “mom-and-pop” groceries in the urban neighborhoods that the chains generally ignored. Likewise workers, made cautious by the ever-present

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chance of layoffs, were still inclined to save up and pay cash rather than make major purchases on installment. Thus there was a class and an ethnic dimension to the divisive cultural stresses posed by the twenties’ consumer boom and its homogenizing influence. The engine that drove the consumer boom was advertising, a profession that gained growing respect in the twenties. As the mass consumer culture expanded, the distribution of goods became as important as the production of goods. While selling Americans on the virtues of material comfort and consumption, advertisers softened the impact of change by stressing the traditional values of individualism and community, appealed to buyers to dare to smoke cigarettes or drive an automobile — and to use Listerine mouthwash to avoid social embarrassment. Bruce Barton, an advertising wizard of the twenties, boasted that his profession was responsible for the higher standard of living and more. “Advertising,” he wrote, “sustains a system that has made us leaders of the free world: The American Way of Life.” In 1925, Barton published a best-selling book, The Man Nobody Knows, an interpretation of the New Testament that portrayed Jesus as a master salesman. Barton’s Jesus was not an ascetic prophet but “the most popular dinner guest in Jerusalem,” who “picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.” Needless to say, all Americans did not see advertising as such a blessing. Veteran muckraker Upton Sinclair warned that advertising undermined the will of the press to critique big business advertisers, and many saw advertising as a not-too-subtle attack on all independent thinking.

 Americans on the Road and in the Air The gaudiest business success story of the 1920s was the automobile. The rapid development of the industry was one of the greatest achievements of modern technology, for until Henry Ford designed the Model T in 1908, automobiles had been expensive toys of the rich, built by hand in small quantities. Ford and other

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American inventors simplified automobile construction, and by World War I the United States was producing far more cars than any other nation. Not until the twenties, however, did the industry really burgeon. New car sales, still fewer than 500,000 per year in 1913, reached nearly 2 million in 1920 and 4.5 million in 1929. By that time the nation had more than 26.5 million registered vehicles. The value of the automobile industry, compared to that of other sectors of the economy, rose from 150th place in 1900 to first place in 1925. The industry’s expansion spawned similar growth in related products; for instance, the manufacture of tires and inner tubes doubled, and gasoline refining quadrupled. Cars changed the American landscape, as service stations and garages became landmarks in both town and country. Different oil companies built identifiable structures adorned with symbols such as the Texaco star and Mobile’s flying horse. The acknowledged hero in putting the nation on wheels was Henry Ford. In 1907, Ford made a famous and dramatic announcement: “I will build a motor car for the great multitude. . . . It will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one — and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.” After designing the Model T, Ford began exploring more efficient methods of production. In 1911, he opened an assemblyline plant in Highland Park, Michigan, and began turning out cars at an unprecedented rate. He continued to perfect the assembly-line technique; by 1920 half of the motorcars in the world were Model Ts. By the time the Model T was discontinued in 1927, Ford had sold about 15 million austere but dependable “Tin Lizzies.”



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“Don’t Be a Dust Eater,” 1925 By the mid-twenties so many Americans drove cars that highways and cities were becoming crowded with them. One editor had the following words of encouragement to share with drivers succumbing to an early version of “road rage.” Have you heard the call of the open country? Does the thought of green fields and invigorating breezes stir something in you

As Ford’s manufacturing methods became more efficient and the volume of his output rose, the price of his Model T steadily dropped — from $950 in 1909 to about $260 in 1925. Ford’s frontal assault on the conventional business wisdom that a product should be priced as high as the market would bear revealed his grasp of the potential of mass consumption. Even more stunning was Ford’s action in 1914 doubling his workers’ wages and reducing their workday from nine to eight hours. This bold decision contradicted the long-held assumption that wages must be rigidly tied to productivity. The most dramatic single event in the history of welfare capitalism, Ford’s hike of wages was possible only because his company issued no publicly traded stock and remained his personal property. The canny Ford understood that his workers were also potential customers, but “Fordism” was heatedly debated before being accepted as good business practice. Nor did Ford impress all of his workers as a benevolent boss. Work on his assembly lines was boringly repetitious, high-pressured, and exhausting. One Chicago employee summed up the feelings of many workers: “Ford, that son of a bitch, he’s hard to work for. Soon as work slack, lay off, doesn’t give a damn for men.” And as events a decade later would vividly show (see Chapter 27), Ford was an implacable enemy of the union movement. Ford’s stranglehold on the automobile industry was successfully challenged in the 1920s. Among scores of short-lived companies, two formidable new competitors arose by the middle of the decade: General Motors, the producer of the Chevrolet, and the Chrysler Corpo-

W O R D S

which starts you planning the next weekend away from the city? Then in the midst of your plans does the nightmare of dust-driven highways clotted with slow-moving, complaining traffic take all the joy out of the picture and cause you to leave your car in the garage?… Crowded roads are unpleasant, but, after all, the driver is to blame for not choosing his route more carefully. What American car owners should do is get off the main highways and onto the secondary roads.

The beauty of the back road awaits the driver who will dispense with his inclination to follow the leader over gas-laden, oilsmeared thoroughfares, which carry nearly ninety per cent of our traffic. No wonder the main roads are insufferable. Get away from the wheel-to-wheel procession. Find the byways and lanes of the countryside, where you need not be afraid of overcrowding even on the sunniest of summer Sundays. Don’t be a dust eater.

American Life in the 1920s

ration, which built Dodges and Plymouths. Massive GM posed a particularly dangerous threat to Ford. Catering to new demands for comfort and style (it was the first to offer cars in colors other than black), GM’s market share rose from 12.7 percent in 1921 to 43.9 percent in 1931. Faced with this challenge, in 1927 Ford stopped producing the Model T, closed the assembly line for a year, and returned to the market only in 1929 with the more luxurious Model A. Such was the Ford legend that 500,000 people made down payments on the new model before seeing the car or knowing the price. Nonetheless, Ford’s market share fell from 55.7 percent in 1921 to 24.9 percent in 1931. Automobiles became virtual necessities for the upper and middle classes in the 1920s, though most families only had one car. (Two-car families would not become common until the 1950s.) Probably a majority of the nation’s skilled workers and better-off farmers also bought cars. By the end of the decade, even 24 percent of the lower-income families in the typical industrial city of Joliet, Illinois, were reported to own an automobile. The popularity of automobiles created a pressing demand for better roads. At the beginning of World War I, the American highway system was still a patchwork of disconnected and muddy roads. The Progressive Era had spawned a “Good Roads Movement,” and by 1917 every state had a Highway Department. In 1921, the Federal Highway Act expanded the availability of federal matching funds for highway construction, and as early as 1923 a system of national highways was planned. (One of the first federal officials to study the problem was a young army officer assigned by the War Department to assess transportation needs from the perspective of national defense: Dwight D. Eisenhower.) Still, in 1930 less than 25 percent of the nation’s roads were “surfaced,” and only about 5 percent were paved by modern standards. Not until the 1950s, during the Eisenhower presidency, would there be a massive federal program to construct a network of high-speed roads. Automobiles changed American society in a variety of ways. Skilled workers could live farther from their jobs, and the middle class continued its migration to the suburbs that had been begun in the late nineteenth century with the building of streetcar lines. Early symptoms of urban flight included a sharp decline of interest in public transportation and declining incomes in central cities. No class was affected more by the transportation revolution than farmers. Rural isolation eroded as Model Ts chugged in from the farm to the city, and

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Henry Ford’s Great Innovation In 1923 Ford introduced the first moving assembly line, on a conveyor belt, at his automobile plant in Dearborn, Michigan. It greatly speeded up production, even as it also reduced work to a mind-numbing series of repetitive motions from which the worker could not take even a moment’s break.

rural mail carriers regularly brought the outside world to farm families. Although they had less immediate impact on the average American’s daily life, airplanes symbolized the promise of technology. The successful flights of Orville and Wilbur Wright near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903, put the United States in the vanguard of aviation. In 1909, the Wright brothers received a contract from the United States Army to manufacture airplanes. World War I greatly stimulated interest in the military potential of airplanes, and for a while Europeans became the leaders in aircraft development. (All the planes flown by Allied fighters, including famed American “aces” such as Eddie Rickenbacker, were British or French machines.) In the early twenties, however, the United States passed several aviation milestones. The first airmail flight was made in 1918 from New York to Washington, and only two years later transcontinental airmail service commenced, using short city-to-city hops. By 1926, when the Air Commerce Act began federal supervision of air traffic, such improvements as radio beacons at airports had begun to appear. An enchanted moment in the history of global aviation came on May 21, 1927, when Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., completed the first solo trans-Atlantic flight from New York to Paris in the Spirit of St. Louis. ”Lucky Lindy’s” carefully planned flight of more than 2,000 miles

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took him thirty-three and a half hours. After receiving a hero’s welcome and a prize of $25,000 in Paris, Lindbergh returned home to an outpouring of affection. He became the foremost celebrity of a hero-worshiping decade, embodying much that Americans valued in the twenties — mechanical precision and skill, a disciplined personality, and commercial success.

 A Leisure Society While air travel was for the few, huge numbers of Americans were affected by developments in the field of radio. Although radio had been invented around the turn of the century, KDKA in Pittsburgh, the first commercial station, was not launched (by Westinghouse) until 1920. In November 1920, WWJ, another Westinghouse station in Detroit, broadcast national election returns, introducing Americans to live news coverage with its announcement of Warren G. Harding’s elevation to the White House. Hundreds of stations were built in the next few years; by the end of the decade approximately 10 million American homes had radios. Radio in the early 1920s was often a hobby, popular in working-class families. Cheap kits were sold widely, allowing any reasonably dexterous person to build a simple crystal set. Often not-for-profit, stations were mostly low-powered and local, oriented toward au-

Valentino, “the Sheik” In 1926 Rudolph Valentino appeared in his last and most popular silent film, The Sheik, costarring the swooning Vilma Banky.

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diences defined by social class, ethnicity, or religion. Fraternal lodges and union locals often maintained stations, and in large cities many national associations filled the airwaves with foreign-language broadcasts. Fundamentalist ministries such as Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute became an important presence on the air, and so did Catholic organizations reaching out to Italian, Polish, Hispanic, and other non-WASP audiences. This essentially local, amateurish approach to radio broadcasting began to succumb to homogenizing national and commercial interests by the mid-twenties. A new strategy of selling advertising time to pay for entertainment became well entrenched, greatly expanding the scope of commercialization, turning performers into employees of business sponsors, and encouraging a trend toward the development of independent religious radio ministries. In 1926, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) became the first major network, followed the next year by the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). Both figuratively and literally, the big national networks overpowered local broadcasting, although some special-interest stations remained on the air until the Great Depression (and a few even later). With its relentless advertising of national brands and its attractive programming, network broadcasting became one of the most powerful instruments of cultural homogenization by the end of the twenties, and its influence would grow even mightier during the Depression (see Chapter 28). The direction taken by the American radio industry owed much to Herbert Hoover, who, as Secretary of Commerce in the early twenties, claimed regulatory powers over the medium. In the mid-1920s Hoover coordinated a series of conferences that defined broadcasting as a business enterprise rather than a government service, as many European nations defined the medium. In 1927, the Federal Radio Commission was established to regulate the expanding industry. Its influence greatly strengthened national, as opposed to local and special-interest, broadcasting. Paralleling the rise of commercial radio, the motion picture industry flourished in the twenties, and American filmmakers became the world’s leaders. The growing demand for movies required larger and larger capital investment, and by 1920 a film industry, centered in Hollywood, California, was well established. The giant production companies that would dominate the industry in future years, including Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Warner Brothers, and Columbia were in existence by 1929. By the end of the

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decade, 28,000 movie theaters were scattered throughout the nation; average weekly attendance at the movies had risen from 40 million in 1922 to 90 million in 1930. The Hollywood studios fostered a star system that catered to an insatiable public appetite for news of the romances, marriages, divorces, and extravagant lifestyles of such legends of the silent screen as Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Clara Bow, Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino, and Greta Garbo. In theaters across the nation, these superstars competed for audiences with Tom Mix and other cowboy heroes of the Western movies. In 1927 Warner Brothers’ The Jazz Singer, the first movie featuring synchronized speech and music, assured the success of the “talkies.” Both radio and the movies reflected the nation’s love of music and did much to form public tastes. It was fitting that the first widely viewed talkie featured jazz; musically, the twenties belonged to jazz, and the decade was appropriately labeled “The Jazz Age.” In many ways the most significant contribution of African Americans to culture in the twentieth century, jazz was neither African nor American; it was distinctly African American, a product of the melting pot. The precedents for jazz can be found in the blues, sad songs that fea-

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The Jazz Age In this photograph, from about 1922, the great young jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong poses with “King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band.” Groups such as this regularly performed in Harlem’s Cotton Club, but (apart from those who waited on tables and washed dishes) they were the only black people who could enter such clubs with their all-white audiences.

tured “blue” notes that were deviations from the tempered scale; and in ragtime, the heavily syncopated music of the early twentieth century that imposed African motifs on the American brass band tradition. A musical form characterized by improvisation and a syncopated rhythm, the word “jazz” most likely began as a euphemism for sexual intercourse. It captured liberated youth’s free spirit and lust for life, as did the decade’s most popular dances such as the Charleston. Born before the turn of the century in New Orleans (where talented black musicians found work performing in brothels patronized by well-to-do white men), the closing of that city’s famed red-light district known as Storyville as a wartime “purity” measure in 1917 hastened the spread of jazz up the Mississippi River to Memphis and St. Louis, and from there to the cities of the North — above all, to Chicago and to New York’s Harlem. Enthusiasm for jazz throughout the American population was also spread by another of the great con-

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sumer-oriented machines of the era, the phonograph. Jazz recordings, which the white businessmen who ran the industry disparagingly called “race records” until they realized how much money they brought in, sold equally well among whites and blacks, giving a strong boost to African American racial pride. A generation of creative black musicians — including W. C. Handy, Joe “King” Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, and Louis Armstrong — became musical legends in the twenties. Oliver’s allblack Creole Jazz Band made its recording debut in 1923. The band’s featured cornetist, Armstrong, was the quintessential jazz soloist, and during his long life became known as the jazz ambassador to the world. Harlem’s Cotton Club became a magnet for affluent whites excited by jazz’s exuberant, “primitive” vigor — although it was a bitter commentary on the era’s racism that the only African Americans allowed in the Cotton Club were the great performers themselves and the menial service personnel. (It was, incidentally, run by the Mafia.) Many of the most popular songs of the decade were introduced in Broadway musicals. Russian-born Irving Berlin collaborated with the Marx Brothers to produce his first great musical hit, The Coconuts (1925), but the most prolific and talented musical writer of the decade was George Gershwin. Gershwin’s greatest hit was probably the song “Suwannee,” sung by Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer. But he teamed with his brother, Ira, to write a steady stream of hit musicals, including Lady Be Good (1924), American in Paris (1925), Funny Face (1927), and Strike Up the Band (1927). Gershwin displayed his virtuosity by writing a highly acclaimed semiclassical symphony in jazz style, Rhapsody in Blue (1924). A number of white performers, including Benny Goodman and Bix Beiderbecke, became accomplished jazzmen by playing alongside black performers. The popular dancing boom of the early twentieth century expanded into a full-blown craze in the twenties. Enterprising entrepreneurs built dance halls all over the country, ranging from the elegant Roseland and Savoy in New York City to rural juke joints in the South. Civic groups and social clubs sponsored dances; some public dance halls attracted stag men by selling tickets for dances with female partners. Variety magazine estimated that more than 60,000 dance bands performed throughout the nation during the twenties. Almost without exception, black performers introduced the decade’s new dances — the Black Bottom, the Shinny, and the Varsity Drag, in addition to the Charleston. Increased leisure time induced a voracious appetite for news. The New York Daily News, established in 1919,

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quickly became the nation’s leading tabloid, reporting sensational crime and sex stories. True Story magazine, begun by Bernarr McFadden in 1919, had 300,000 readers in 1923 and more than two million by 1926, titillating readers with articles such as “The Confessions of a Chorus Girl” and “What I Told My Daughter the Night Before Her Marriage.” Americans embraced one fad after another — mah-jongg, crossword puzzles, contract bridge, the Charleston, beauty contests, roller skating, dance marathons, and flagpole sitting, in which intrepid publicity-seekers vied to see who could remain perched atop a flagpole the longest. Most of all, the twenties was the golden age of American sports, peopled by a generation of legendary heroes. Robert Tyre (“Bobby”) Jones, winner of golf ’s “grand slam” in 1926, and “Big Bill” Tilden, the first great American tennis champion, piqued popular interest in those formerly aristocratic sports. At the other end of the social spectrum, in 1921 draft-dodging American Jack Dempsey drew boxing’s first million-dollar gate (and loud boos) in defending his heavyweight championship by knocking out the French war hero Georges Carpentier. Dempsey’s second loss to Gene Tunney in 1927 was witnessed by over 100,000 spectators and grossed well over $2 million. Heroes abounded — not only Tunney but also Harold “Red” Grange, the “Galloping Ghost” of the University of Illinois and the Chicago Bears; Johnny Weissmuller, who set scores of world swimming records before retiring to portray Tarzan in the movies; and even Man-o’-War, the magnificent chestnut horse that was unbeatable in 1920. There were also sports heroines, reflecting the changing image of women in the twenties. Helen Wills sparked an interest in women’s tennis, and in 1926 Gertrude Ederle shocked the world by breaking the male record for swimming the English Channel. The undisputed king of sports in the twenties was baseball. Automobiles, radios, and leisure time helped secure its place as “the national pastime.” The decade had begun horribly for baseball following the Black Sox scandal in 1919, but better times were just ahead. That same year the New York Yankees paid a record $100,000 to purchase the contract of young pitcher-outfielder George Herman Ruth, Jr., from the financially troubled Boston Red Sox (bringing down, so Sox fans believed, a curse on the team. It did not win another World Series until 2004). The “Babe” became the supreme sports idol of the twenties, a man whose larger-than-life talent and personality made him instantly recognizable throughout the nation. He hit over forty home runs in eleven sea-

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sons between 1920 and 1932 and a record sixty home runs in 1927. His offensive skills — which were aided by the introduction of the “live ball” — changed the basic strategy of baseball, from a game of pitchers’ duels and strategic singles to a contest of muscular sluggers, swinging for homers. A child of recent immigrants who had learned the game while being brought up in a Baltimore home for wayward boys, Ruth was a funloving, affable, bighearted man with awesome appetites for food, alcohol, and sex. When the Babe collapsed in 1925 from a reported attack of influenza and indigestion (apparently the real cause was syphilis), the nation waited expectantly for reports on the state of his health. Throughout the decade, between nine and ten million baseball fans each year flocked to see Ruth and a long list of heroes only slightly less formidable.

Winds of Change Political reform languished in the twenties, but there was no moratorium on debate about American society. A majority of the decade’s social activists, like most

Babe Ruth Playing against the now-defunct Washington Senators, “the Babe” crosses home plate after slugging another home run. Ruth was the most beloved baseball player of the 1920s.

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of its politicians, worried about the changes that had been wrought during the Progressive Era and sought a return to an earlier, more orderly time. The dangers that frightened these embattled conservatives were not illusions. Protestant American culture had fallen under siege, beset by a science that undermined its most cherished beliefs, taunted by a young intelligentsia who flaunted a new morality (and successfully peddled it to the younger generation), and overwhelmed in the burgeoning cities by immigrants with cultural values far different from those of the nation’s earlier settlers. In short, the cultural clash of the 1920s was not contrived — it was real. Some of the decade’s debates would appear trivial in the years of depression and war that followed, but most of the cultural quarrels of the twenties would resurface throughout the twentieth century.

 The New Science Perhaps the most curious folk hero of the twenties was Albert Einstein. From the moment of his first visit to the United States in 1921, the mild-mannered and eccentric physicist captivated the American public. The disheveled, odd-looking Einstein became synonymous with the word genius. Few scientists, much less the general public, understood Einstein’s theories of relativity, made public in 1905 and 1916 and formulated in the deceptively simple equation E = mc2. When the scientist visited President Harding in 1921, the New York Times reported in a comically understated headline: “Einstein Idea Puzzles Harding.” Einstein’s theory of relativity illustrated that time, space, and motion are not absolute, but rather are relative to the observer and the observer’s motion. Relativity posited a radically different universe from the orderly machine described by Isaac Newton more than two hundred years earlier. The Einsteinian universe made possible predictions, however, that Newtonian theory failed to anticipate. In May 1919, British astronomers at the Palomar Observatory in California confirmed that the mass of the sun

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caused light rays to curve as they passed, thus slowing time and bending space as predicted by the general theory of relativity. Newton’s clocklike and orderly universe was being replaced by a universe that seemed shockingly relativistic to nonscientists. Even more unsettling, though at first little known, was the new theory of the quantum, first formulated in 1900 by Max Planck, a German physicist. Planck demonstrated that energy is emitted discontinuously in certain discrete amounts, or quanta. Based on Planck’s finding, a mathematical theory called quantum mechanics was worked out beginning in the 1920s that permitted a widening inquiry into the nature of the atom and of subatomic matter. Quantum mechanics uncovered a world of particles whose movement is unpredictable and not bound by the rules that were assumed to govern all matter. Einstein was troubled by the randomness of the theory; convinced that God “does not play dice” with the universe, he would spend the last thirty years of his life (he died in 1955) unsuccessfully seeking a “unified field theory” to explain both the behavior of subatomic particles and the geometry of gravity. If physicists were undermining older understandings in profound ways, other intellectual challenges came with stunning rapidity as the twentieth century began. Nowhere were they more disturbing than in the field of psychology. The guru of the intellectuals of the twenties was the Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud, who explored the influence of hidden drives and sexual repression on behavior. Freud and his colleague Carl Jung (who later broke with Freud) both lectured in the United States in 1909, but psychoanalysis gained its first broad hearing — and acceptance among influential segments of the public — in the twenties. The idea that areas of human behavior lie outside of conscious control suggested that humans were not primarily rational beings — a sentiment shared by many in the wake of the horrors of World War I. The rise of behavioral psychology was more important in the universities than psychoanalysis was, but it was no less unsettling to older understandings of human conduct. As explained by the American experimenter John B. Watson, the human personality responded predictably to clear stimuli, and Watson boasted that, given a free hand, he could bend any child’s personality in whatever direction he chose. The irrational, conditioned response of the human personality, as asserted by behaviorists like Watson, opened new vistas for advertisers and propagandists, but it deeply troubled those who believed in a world of rea-

An Exhilarating Decade

son and absolute truth. As the new findings in science and psychology became popularized, all time-honored values were increasingly subject to reexamination. Novelist Willa Cather wrote, “The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts.”

 The Literature of Revolt American literature in the twenties launched a withering attack on formalism, the idea that eternal verities and natural laws governed society. The decade’s artistic modernism was sweeping, embracing new forms of writing such as free verse poetry and streamof-consciousness novels. The intellectuals of the twenties viewed themselves as a generation liberated from the constraints of culture, and they were relentless critics of the foibles of the times — the dehumanizing effects of modern life, the evils of big business and factory working conditions, the reign of materialism and greed, the American fascination with success. Coining a memorable expression, writer Gertrude Stein termed the disenchanted artists of the postwar years a “lost generation,” groping for meaning in a collapsing world. Several avant-garde American cultural centers flourished during the decade, including the South Side in Chicago and Greenwich Village in New York City. But a number of important American writers felt more at home (and found that they could live more cheaply) in Europe than in America. Gertrude Stein, who moved to Paris in 1903, and Ezra Pound, who lived successively in London, Paris, and Italy, were the Lost Generation’s mentors, championing experimentation in poetry and prose. The foremost expatriate poet was St. Louis-born T. S. Eliot, who eventually became a British citizen. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1922) lamented the shattering of Western civilization by the ravages of World War I. Increasingly recognized as the most talented of the expatriates was Ernest Hemingway, who was encouraged by Gertrude Stein while he was working in Paris as a reporter for the Kansas City Star. Hemingway wrote of American expatriates in Paris in his first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926). His second novel, A Farewell to Arms (1929), portrayed the irrationality of wartime life. Hemingway’s characters struggled to find meaning in a world filled with capriciousness and tragedy. While many authors in the twenties wrestled with the intellectual unraveling of the world, others challenged the American character. Baltimore journalist H. L. Mencken raised the art of criticism to new heights

American Life in the 1920s

of elegant, witty vitriol. From 1914 to 1923 Mencken edited The Smart Set, an avant-garde magazine with a small circulation, but in 1925 he and drama critic George Jean Nathan founded and began editing The American Mercury, a large-circulation magazine designed, in his words, for the “civilized minority.” Walter Lippmann judged Mencken to be “the most powerful influence on this whole generation of educated people.” Mencken’s iconoclasm and criticism of middle-class America and its “booboisie” betrayed an undiscriminating elitism that reflected both his social-Darwinist view of life and his libertarian opposition to any restrictions on free thought and expression. An outspoken agnostic, he jeered at religious faith as “an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable,” and he denounced democracy because it put power into the hands of “dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, and cads.” Puritanism, long a revered part of the American past, became in Mencken’s words “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere might be happy.” Mencken and his fellow debunkers viewed “Puritanism” as a repugnant part of the nation’s heritage, so distorting the word that decades passed before it regained any resemblance to historical reality. Asked why he continued to live in an America that he ridiculed so relentlessly, Mencken retorted: “Why do men visit zoos?” In the pages of The American Mercury and his Baltimore Sun newspaper columns, Mencken lustily championed iconoclastic writers such as Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, and Eugene O’Neill, and hammered with caustic wit at Prohibition, the South, fundamentalism, and practically everything else except German music and Chesapeake Bay cuisine. Sinclair Lewis’s 1920 best-seller, Main Street, depicted the monotony and meanness in a small Minnesota town. This he followed with a series of novels laying bare other American duplicities. Babbitt (1922) mercilessly attacked boosterism and the hollowness of success, and Arrowsmith (1924) caricatured the medical profession. Elmer Gantry (1927), Lewis’s most unforgiving exposé, skewered revivalistic religion. It was the story of a brazen ex-football player who became a successful evangelist by flaunting his physical attractiveness, preaching half-plagiarized sermons, and shamelessly promoting himself. Denounced by church leaders, the novel captured the religious hypocrisy and materialistic greed that the intellectuals of the twenties labeled philistinism. Lewis insisted that his books were not muckraking and that they underscored the strengths of American character, as well as the weak-

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nesses. In 1930, he became the first American to receive a Nobel Prize for literature. Probably the best-known American writer in the twenties was F. Scott Fitzgerald; his third novel, generally considered his best, The Great Gatsby, won critical acclaim in 1925. The story of Jay Gatsby’s quest for wealth and social standing, the book described the hero’s defilement by the hypocrisy and greed that characterized the decade’s seemingly carefree high society. Fitzgerald’s books earned him sufficient fame and money to make him a part of the hedonistic but hauntingly empty society he chronicled. He and his glamorous wife, Zelda, came to be symbols of the Jazz Age — extravagant, rebellious, and haunted by his alcoholism and financial failures and by her mental illness. Playwright Eugene O’Neill explored psychological and sociological uncertainties. O’Neill won a Pulitzer Prize in 1920 for his play Beyond the Horizon; he wrote seventeen other plays during the decade. O’Neill’s work was deeply influenced by Freud, and his critics agreed that he was at his best when his characters were tragic or at least unhappy. He introduced expressionism to the American stage in The Emperor Jones (1921), a tour de force of imaginative theater. Other talented writers were ending and beginning careers during the twenties. Theodore Dreiser, already acknowledged as a master of literary realism, produced his most ambitious novel in 1925, An American Tragedy. Other authors wrote penetrating novels with regional settings: Edith Wharton studied New York society in The Age of Innocence (1920); Ellen Glasgow wrote of Virginia in Barren Ground (1925); and Willa Cather, whose earlier books had described the frontier experience, wrote movingly about the Catholic culture of the Southwest in Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).

 The New Morality and the New Woman Some of the titles given to the 1920s — ”The Age of the Flapper,” “The Era of Flaming Youth,” “The Roaring Twenties” — reflected a perception that the basic values of American society were changing and that the rebellion was being led by the young and by women. Among the popular songs of the decade were “Hot Lips,” “I Need Lovin’,” and “Burning Kisses,” and Flaming Youth was a popular film. While the actual “flaming youth” were never more than a small minority in American society, they were visible and, to some extent, emulated. The 1920s’ image of the assertive young woman, or flapper (Mencken coined the word), seriously challenged

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traditional moral values. She smoked cigarettes, danced the Charleston, listened to jazz, took joyrides in automobiles, and flaunted her sexuality. By the end of the twenties, flapper styles were featured in the Sears catalog as well as on the cover of The Smart Set. Conservatives saw symptoms of moral decay everywhere around them. One preacher warned that if skirts climbed at the same rate for two more decades, the hem line would be “fifteen feet above the head.” Older Americans deplored the sensuous jazz music, the wild dancing, and the petting parties favored by the younger generation. The moral revolution of the twenties was tied to the broad social transformation of the decade. As a majority of Americans became city dwellers, they discovered that the urban environment weakened the ties of the extended family. In addition, the ever-expanding public school system came to assume many of the child-training duties that had formerly been family responsibilities. High school enrollment doubled in the 1920s, as more working-class teenagers remained in school rather than entering the workforce early to help support their families, and increasingly young people were introduced to ideas and values at odds with their parents’. Of course, most public school teachers in the 1920s were themselves quite conservative, but many parents for the first time came to sense that school was displacing family authority in some realms, and religious conservatives made their first concerted effort to control the intellectual content of the classroom by passing laws banning the teaching of evolution. Women led the dramatic change in lifestyle in the twenties. The availability of consumer goods helped emancipate women from the drudgery of housework. The automobile was an ideal laboratory for sexual experimentation, and in it one could escape the community-enforced moral code of the small town. Perhaps most important, the dissemination of information about birth control, promoted vigorously by Margaret Sanger, somewhat undermined the pillar of the double standard of morality, woman’s fear of pregnancy. Birth control gave women new sexual freedom and also contributed to a declining national birth rate and the lengthening of women’s life expectancy. The intellectual oracle of the new morality was Sigmund Freud. To be sure, few Americans really understood Freud, but psychoanalysis encouraged uninhibited discussions of sex that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. At the popular level, the lesson read into Freud was the urgency of escaping from sexual repressions.

An Exhilarating Decade

To some extent, the changing role of women was tied to the perception that women had become financially less dependent on their husbands. Actually, women made few economic gains during the decade. They entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers during World War I, but most of them left again after the war. The image of the economically self-reliant working girl of the twenties is largely a myth. The total number of women in the labor force of the country rose from 8.3 million in 1920 to 10.6 in 1930, but that represented a gain of less than one percentage point — to 23.6 percent of the total labor force. The number of married women working did increase significantly during the decade, from 23 percent of women workers to 28.9 percent. But most women continued to live in traditional families and to work in low-paying female occupations — nurses, teachers, secretaries, sales clerks, waitresses, and domestic servants. Women did make up a majority of those employed in the emerging field of social work, and many held leadership positions in the profession. The triumph of woman suffrage defused the women’s rights movement. Actually, the women’s movement had suffered a bitter split before ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. The moderate National American Woman Suffrage Association, headed by Carrie Chapman Catt, claimed most of the credit for pushing through the suffrage amendment by the narrowest of margins. After ratification the association transformed itself into the League of Women Voters, losing much of its feminist identification. Catt declared that the suffrage amendment had “nearly completed the emancipation of women in America.” A second, more radical feminist movement was led by Alice Paul, who insisted that the women’s movement had “just begun.” Paul’s confrontational tactics antagonized moderate women’s rights reformers. Her group, known after 1915 as the National Woman’s Party, set a new agenda for feminism in 1923 with the demand that Congress pass an Equal Rights Amendment that would eliminate all legal distinctions between the sexes. Her efforts were largely ineffectual, at least partly because many feared that such an amendment would annul hard-won progressive legislation protecting the rights of working women.

 The “New Negro” During the twenties the total African American population grew by more than 1.5 million, but the number of

American Life in the 1920s

rural blacks fell by 300,000. This difference was reflected in the massive migration of blacks out of the South into the cities of the North, which had begun during World War I and accelerated in the twenties. Newly arrived blacks continued to find discrimination in northern cities almost as pervasive as in the South, but they had greater economic opportunity in the North and a new freedom to express rising expectations. The political implications of the black migration were illustrated in 1928 by the election of Republican Oscar DePriest, a black alderman from Chicago, to the House of Representatives. He was the first black elected to Congress since the collapse of Reconstruction and the first ever from outside the South. New leaders and a revised self-image called the “New Negro” emerged in the black community after World War I. Booker T. Washington died in 1915, and political leadership among blacks passed to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and W. E. B. Du Bois, editor of The Crisis and the organization’s unchallenged intellectual leader. The NAACP continued to battle in the courts for the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, but had few successes. Harlem emerged in the twenties as a center of black thought and culture. For the first time, a group of black writers gained national recognition. In Harlem Shadows, poems published in 1922 by Jamaica-born Claude McKay, the themes of black pride and defiance set the tone for a movement labeled the Harlem Renaissance. An anthology published in 1925, entitled The New Negro, introduced a variety of talented writers, including poet Langston Hughes and author Jean Toomer. Toomer’s collection of stories, Cane (1923), told of black life in rural Georgia in the 1880s and was considered by many to be the finest literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance. Marcus Garvey became a symbol of black aspirations in the twenties. A Jamaican, Garvey formed the United Negro Improvement Association two years before coming to the United States in 1916. By 1920, the association had over thirty chapters in the United States, and by 1923, Garvey claimed it had 6 million members. The membership was probably never so large, but Garvey’s newspaper, Negro World, was widely read by blacks, particularly among the urban working classes. Garvey preached black pride and condemned American society as too racist for redemption. Urging blacks to leave America to establish “an African nation for Negroes” in Liberia, he organized the Black

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The Harlem Renaissance African American painter Malvin Gray Johnson, one of the notable talents of the Harlem Renaissance, painted this self-portrait in 1934. Largely dependent on wealthy white patrons, the Harlem Renaissance suffered a severe setback during the hard times of the 1930s, but it left a lasting imprint on American culture and life.

Star Steamship Line and sold stock to thousands of blacks. Garvey was pictured as a charlatan and a buffoon by his detractors, including many black leaders who believed that integration and constitutional equality were the proper black agenda. Garvey’s penchant for uniforms and parading made him an easy target for ridicule. More crippling to his reputation was the collapse of the Black Star Steamship Line. Convicted of mail fraud and confined in a federal penitentiary in 1925, Garvey was deported to Jamaica in 1927. While Garvey remains an enigmatic figure, he clearly tapped an emerging spirit of black pride. In many respects, Garvey and his organization were black counterparts to the fraternal and “booster” organizations in con-

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temporary white society. Groups such as the Shriners, the Odd Fellows, and the UNIA all provided identity, importance, and mission amidst the impersonal bustle of the modern city.

Conservative Backlash As in other periods of rapid social change, defenders of older values fought back. Many of the restrictive measures of the twenties — Prohibition, immigration quotas, antievolution legislation — were tied to the nation’s Protestant heritage, but they were also products of popular democracy. Most intellectuals in the twenties condemned these efforts to regulate society as unwarranted assaults on personal liberty, but to many ordinary Americans they were simply democracy in action. William Jennings Bryan, the old hero of populist democracy, cast his defense of the Tennessee law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in the public schools in just such terms: “The taxpayers must decide what shall be taught. . . . So a man can believe anything he pleases but he has no right to teach it against the protest of his employers.” In one sense, Prohibition was a quintessential example of the majority trying to rule. During his visit to the United States in 1921, Albert Einstein was asked if he found Prohibition an intolerable violation of personal liberty. As naïve an idealist in politics as he was a genius in physics, he replied incredulously, “How could that be in America? You have a republic. . . . Nothing that is done by a democratic Government could be done against freedom.” In the minds of many Americans, moral legislation was the people’s answer to the condescension of intellectuals and the immorality of foreign radicals. The major conservative counterattacks were over by 1925. In some cases, including the efforts to restrict immigration, unions, and booze, conservatives attained their objectives, thus allaying anxieties. On the

Modernism Through Fundamentalist Eyes This caricature, published in a widely read fundamentalist magazine, expressed the alarm and disdain many conservative American Christians of the 1920s felt about the mainstream churches’ embrace of theological and social modernity.

other hand, in 1925 the antievolution campaign permanently stalled.

 Religious Diversity and Confrontation In 1920 the nation held vast reservoirs of people clinging to traditional beliefs and values. A national religious census in 1926 reported that the country had 232,154 congregations claiming nearly 55 million members. But the depth of religious faith in the nation was hardly captured by those statistics. In 1927, President Calvin Coolidge wrote to an Episcopal Sunday School teacher in Washington, D.C., “The foundations of our society and Government rest so much on the teachings of the Bible that it would be difficult to support them if

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faith in these teachings should cease to be practically universal in our country.” The Growing Catholic Church

Though a majority of Americans did not realize it, those values were nowhere more deeply rooted than in the immigrant-swollen American Catholic church. The church passed 20 million members in 1929, making it nearly three times as large as any single Protestant denomination. Still struggling to digest the millions of immigrants of varying nationalities who had arrived in the past twenty-five years, the Catholic Church developed a strong hierarchy. Having survived earlier fears that the church might splinter as a result of “Americanizing” influences, during the twenties American Catholicism was tightly controlled by the clergy. The laity seemed content, in the words of Pope Pius X (19031914), “like a docile flock, to follow the Pastors.” In some Slavic, Italian, and German areas the church remained a bastion of Old World culture, but increasingly the Irish-American hierarchy fostered an English-speaking communion through parochial education. In 1926 the American Catholic church operated nearly 5,500 parochial school systems enrolling 1.8 million students; generally English was the language of instruction. While the expansion of parochial education speeded acculturation, it also provided a buffer against the dominant Protestant culture and, more important as the decade wore on, against secular values. On many controversial social questions, Catholics were more conservative than their Protestant neighbors. For instance, Catholic leaders strongly opposed woman suffrage, fearing that it would alter the traditional role of women. Despite their number, American Catholics remained, to some extent, an alienated minority. Partly, Catholics were separated from their Protestant neighbors by re-



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“The Secret of Success,” 1925 The United American, a popular magazine, had the following advice for immigrants joining the American workforce. The secret of success is not a secret. Nor is it something hard to secure. To become more successful, become

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ligious culture — by homes that were decorated with statues and pictures of saints, by frequent oral confession, by meatless Fridays, and by celebrations of holy days that had been “sanitized” from Protestantism by the Puritans. Partly they were separated by the vast network of institutions that the church had founded — not only schools but also hundreds of hospitals and orphanages. And partly Catholics were isolated by prejudice. Catholics and Protestants continued to rouse mutual suspicions, and the decade’s legislation restricting immigration and prohibiting drinking was aimed at Catholic immigrants and their culture. From their side, many Catholics felt conscience-bound to keep their children out of the “Protestant-dominated” or “secular” public schools. The Catholic Church opposed both immigration restriction and Prohibition, although the slowing of immigration was probably a blessing to the church, allowing it time to digest a century’s growth. However conservative its overall role in American society might be, during the 1920s the Catholic Church was going through its own internal battles over the pace of modernization. “The people of the United States must be Americans or something else. They cannot serve two masters,” declared Chicago’s Archbishop Mundelein — himself a fifth-generation GermanAmerican — in throwing the church’s influence against the ethnic isolation to which many “hyphenatedAmerican” Catholics clung during the twenties. In Chicago and other “melting-pot” cities, church authorities tried to discourage ethnic fragmentation by redrawing parish lines and demanding that English be the language of preaching, teaching, and ordinary parish business. (Latin, of course, was still the liturgical language.) The largely Irish- and German-background episcopate was openly suspicious of the “superstition,” even “paganism,” that they detected in the street processions

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more efficient. Do the little things better. So work that you will require less supervision. The least supervision is needed by the person who makes the fewest mistakes. Do what you can do and what you should do for the institution for which you are working, and do it in the right way, and the size of your income will take care of itself.

Let your aim ever be to better the work you are doing without bettering yourself. The thoughts that you think, the words that you speak, and the deeds you perform are making you either better or worse. Realize with [Victorian poet William] Henley that you are the master of your fate and the captain of your soul. You can be what you will be.

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and saints’-day festivals that many Italian Catholics had brought to America from their native Naples or Sicily, making the Little Italies of American cities noisy and colorful. Church authorities’ attempts to discourage these celebrations caused great bitterness and even the threat of schism in the Italian and Polish communities, and were not entirely successful. Despite these tensions within the church, increasing numbers of American Catholics entered the post– World War I years with a new confidence about their place in American society. When the church’s International Eucharistic Congress was held in Chicago in 1926, for the first time coming to America, it attracted nine cardinals and was attended by an estimated 500,000 Catholics. For five days the display of pageantry received national attention. The church entered a new “brick-and-mortar” period in 1920. Scores of impressive new cathedrals were constructed, and between 1916 and 1926 the value of the average Catholic church building more than doubled. Successes and Challenges for American Judaism

The Jewish community grew from slightly more than 1 million in 1900 to nearly 3.5 million by 1920, with nearly half living in New York City. Between 1916 and 1926 the number of synagogues doubled, to more than 3,100. Jewish congregations were independent, and in the 1920s only about 20 percent of them were formally united with one of the unions representing the three branches of American Judaism — Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox. Nonetheless, the three theological wings of Judaism were defined by networks of synagogues and by social and benevolent organizations that served Jews of diverse ethnic and economic backgrounds. Like Catholics, many American Jews continued to live in insulated enclaves in the twenties. Jewish congregations in the United States operated more than 500 school systems enrolling 70,000 daily students and another 70,000 who received religious training one day a week. Many Jews, regardless of whether they were orthodox, conservative, or reform — and even regardless of how religiously observant they were — felt strong concerns about the homogenizing, assimilationist pressures of modern American society. Their response to these trends echoed the worries of countless Catholics and Protestants, that their young people were being sucked into a secularist, materialistic culture devoid of the anchor of traditional values. “What will become of our children?” asked a Chicago rabbi in 1925, sound-

An Exhilarating Decade

ing much like his conservative Christian peers. “Do we want them to grow up men and women who have an understanding of the problems of life, who know the history of their ancestors, who are proud Jews, and who will be a credit to us? Our children are running away from us. . . . Let us build houses of worship, social centers and Hebrew schools, and let us provide the means for the coming generation to learn and to know.” Zionism — the international movement to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine — continued to flourish in the United States. By 1926 the Zionist Organization of America claimed 71,000 members; between 1918 and 1926 American Jews contributed more than $15 million to support various projects in the Holy Land. In the years after World War I American Jews also contributed more than $67 million to aid European Jews dislocated by the war and by postwar persecution in Russia, Poland, and Romania. Jewish self-consciousness was heightened by the virulent resurgence of anti-Semitism, most visible in Henry Ford’s newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, and in the rise of a frightening new version of the Ku Klux Klan. Anti-Semitism was deep-rooted in Western history, but it was bolstered in 1920s America by nativist prejudice and fears that linked Jews with political radicalism, as well as by the sheer number and visibility of Jews in American society. Protestant Modernism and Fundamentalism

Liberal Protestantism was the segment of American religion most willing to embrace modernism but at the same time most buffeted by the rapid intellectual and social changes of the twenties. The optimistic hopes of the social gospel, like those of progressivism in general, seemed out of place in the postwar world. As theological liberals strove to square their beliefs with scientific thought — the magnificent Riverside Church built in New York City during the twenties included on its west portal the carved figures of Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein — they increasingly found themselves under attack from both the left and the right. By the mid-1920s a growing group of academic agnostics, calling themselves humanists, labeled modernism a “half way reform” that only “flirts with science.” In The Twilight of the Gods, social scientist Harry Elmer Barnes advised that “nothing better could happen to American religion than for progressive young divines in Methodism to forget about Jesus.” In turn, liberal churchmen warned that humanists would find it impossible to preserve hope and a belief in values in a world purged of a personal God.

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At the other end of the spectrum, Protestant fundamentalists waged war on liberals for abandoning the doctrine of inerrancy, the belief that the Bible was absolutely precise and free from all factual error. Conservative Princeton scholar J. Gresham Machen argued in his book Christianity and Liberalism (1923) that the liberals’ abandonment of “one Christian doctrine after another” had created a new religion “so entirely different from Christianity as to belong in a distinct category.” Liberal churchmen vigorously defended themselves against fundamentalism. In a famous sermon preached in 1922 that ultimately cost him his pastorate at the First Presbyterian Church of New York, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” Harry Emerson Fosdick, a professor at Union Theological Seminary, warned that fundamentalism was “immeasurable folly.” Arguing that religious faith had nothing to fear from “scientific thought” and specifically embracing evolution, Fosdick called for a progressive Christianity that “saves us from the necessity of apologizing for immature states in the development of the biblical revelation.” The modernist-fundamentalist conflict divided two of the largest northern Protestant denominations, the Northern Baptist Convention and the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. Until 1925, conservatives controlled the denominational boards and agencies in both churches, but there was a growing concern that liberals had undue influence on the missions supported by the churches. In the early twenties conservatives conducted minor purges of liberals.



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An Obituary for William Jennings Bryan, 1925 H. L. Mencken attended the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, and wrote scathing reports for the Baltimore Sun. None of those articles, however, better captured the venom of Mencken’s pen, or the condescension he felt for rural America, than an article he wrote reflecting on the death of William Jennings Bryan. There was something peculiarly fitting in the fact that [Bryan’s] last days were spent in a one-horse Tennessee village, beating off the flies and gnats, and that death found him

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In 1925, moderates disenchanted by the increasingly caustic tactics of the fundamentalists deserted the conservative alliance. Both denominations suffered defections, but by the end of the decade they had joined the Methodists and Episcopalians in tolerating, if not promoting, more modernistic views of Christian theology. The Scopes Trial

Generally taken as symbolic of the routing of fundamentalism in mainstream Protestantism in the twenties was the trial of John T. Scopes in Dayton, Tennessee, in July 1925. The trial contested a newly passed Tennessee law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in the public schools. Five southern states passed antievolution laws in the twenties, and similar bills were introduced in states from Maine to California. Evolution became a public focus for the modernist-fundamentalist controversy after half a century of theological debate because conservative Protestants, many of them uneducated, saw quite correctly that Darwin’s ideas had broad moral consequences. These Bible-believing masses insisted that they were proprietors of the public schools and demanded control of the curriculum. When Scopes, a coach and science teacher at Central High School in Dayton, was charged with violating the Tennessee antievolution law, the American Civil Liberties Union retained several famous trial attorneys to defend him, including Clarence Darrow. Himself a fundamentalist Christian, and alarmed by the elitist and social-Darwinist implications of evolutionary the-

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there. The man felt at home in such simple and Christian scenes. He liked people who sweated freely, and were not debauched by the refinements of the toilet. Making his progress up and down the Main street of little Dayton, surrounded by gaping primates from the upland valleys of the Cumberland Range, his coat laid aside, his bare arms and hairy chest shining damply, his bald head sprinkled with dust — so accoutred and on display, he was obviously happy. He liked getting up early in the morning, to the tune of cocks crowing on the dunghill. He liked the heavy, greasy victuals of the farmhouse kitchen. He liked country lawyers, country

pastors, all country people. He liked country sounds and country smells… …His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the barnyard.

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ory as it was often presented in the 1920s, the aging William Jennings Bryan offered his services to Tennessee as prosecuting attorney. The stage was set for high drama. The nine-day trial was a national spectacle, perfectly calculated to caricature fundamentalism. For the first time, live radio broadcasts reported on the progress of a trial, and scores of reporters, including the acerbic Mencken, roamed the village’s unpaved main street, mingling with rural evangelists like T. T. Martin from Blue Mountain, Mississippi, who had journeyed to Dayton to “drive hell out of the high school.” The scene, Mencken wrote to a friend, was “far worse than anything you can imagine, even under the bowl. Every last scoundrel in sight is a Christian, including the town Jew.” Despite the sideshow surrounding the trial, the outcome was never in doubt. Convicted of violating the law, Scopes received a token sentence. On appeal, the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the decision on a technicality, refusing to rule on the larger question of the constitutionality of the law. But the fundamentalist cause had been subjected to a withering barrage of ridicule from journalists — above all Mencken, whose syndicated daily reports called the residents of Dayton “gaping primates” and “yokels” and described their religious beliefs as “simian gabble.” After Bryan collapsed and died in Dayton on the Sunday following the trial, Mencken wrote an unusually nasty (even for him) obituary: “It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile.” The antievolution movement had lost its celebrity leader, and many felt that both Bryan and the fundamentalist movement had been crushed in Dayton, never to rise again. Enduring Revivalism

Despite its setbacks in the northern churches and the embarrassment of the Scopes trial, fundamentalism was far from dead. Conservative Protestantism remained the folk religion of the nation and continued to show its strength in the revivals of Billy Sunday and other evangelists. Sunday dismissed evolution as “jackass nonsense”: “If a minister believes and teaches evolution, he is a stinking skunk, a hypocrite, and a liar.” Fearful of the fate of the cities, fundamentalists believed that they still controlled the countryside. Wrote preacher John

An Exhilarating Decade

Roach Straton in 1925: “The religious faith and the robust conservatism of the chivalric South and the sturdy West will have to save America from the sins and shams and shames that are now menacing her splendid life.” The most striking new evangelist to appear on the scene in the 1920s was Aimee Semple McPherson. A flamboyant and attractive Pentecostal who held large healing campaigns in the United States and Canada in the early twenties, in 1923 “Sister Aimee” settled in Los Angeles and built a large church, Angelus Temple, which by 1930 had 12,000 members. In 1926 McPherson was allegedly kidnapped, only to reappear mysteriously a month later The press, and others, charged that she spent the time with her lover and business manager, and after an investigation she was charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice and subornation of perjury. The sensational case received more press attention than any other event during the decade, but in 1927 the charges against McPherson were dropped and she emerged more popular than ever. Shortly afterward, she founded a new denomination, the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, and remained a model for later generations of faith-healing revivalists.

 Nativist Fears and Immigration Restrictions World War I slowed to a trickle the flow of European (though not Mexican) immigrants, but the numbers of transatlantic migrants rose again after the war, reaching 805,228 in 1921 and 706,896 in 1924. As before the war, a majority of the Old World immigrants were laborers from the poverty-stricken southern and eastern European countries. Nearly a third were Italians, and Poles constituted the second-largest nationality. Congressional restrictions on immigration prior to the twenties had excluded certain “undesirable” groups such as criminals and had reflected prevailing racist prejudices by targeting Asians. In 1921, a quota system was imposed for the first time, limiting the number of immigrants from any nation to 3 percent of the citizens of that nationality in the population in the census of 1910. The Immigration Act of 1924, culminating half a century of nativist pressure, reduced quotas to 2 percent of a nationality’s numbers in the census of 1890, before millions of southern and eastern Europeans had begun flocking to America. Subsequent modifications changed the quotas slightly and based them on the census of 1920, but, taken together, the acts sharply reduced the tide of immigrants from Europe. The laws excluded

American Life in the 1920s

Aimee Semple McPherson The charismatic evangelist, who combined faith healing and sex appeal, raises her hands and eyes heavenward for this dramatic portrait shot, taken at an evangelistic meeting in London. A media star, long before television she was in effect the first televangelist.

Japanese immigration but, apparently by oversight on the part of nativist radicals, did not establish quotas for the Western Hemisphere. Because of that omission over 1.5 million immigrants from Canada and Mexico made those countries the largest sources of new immigrants in the 1920s. These migrants did something to replace the cheap labor supply cut off by exclusion. The 1924 law highlighted the pervasiveness of racism, anti-Catholic prejudice, anti-Semitism, and fear of political radicalism and signaled that most Americans had lost faith in the ideal of a “melting pot.” Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color (1920) built on the pseudo-scientific racism of Madison Grant’s earlier works (see Chapter 22) in warning against “mongrelization.” Although some scholars challenged popular

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theories advocating racial purity and white supremacy, most notably anthropologist Franz Boas of Columbia University, not until Nazi Germany took this racist thought to its horrifying conclusion of genocide in the 1930s and 1940s did such theories fall into general disrepute in America. In the 1920s, even many people who considered themselves progressives were also racists and scorned non-WASPs.

 The Case against Foreigners On April 15, 1920, two people were killed during a robbery at a shoe factory in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Three weeks later, two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were arrested and charged with the murders. Before being executed on August 23, 1927, the two came to symbolize for conservative Americans the evils of foreign radicalism, and their case became a cause célèbre for liberals in America and indeed all around the world. A body of protest literature grew

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out of the trial, including novels by Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos. The facts of the case are still disputed. Both Sacco and Vanzetti had probably been involved in the anarchist bombings of 1919, and most modern experts think that Sacco was involved in the South Braintree incident, but the evidence against them in the murder trial was mostly circumstantial. Less problematic is the question of whether the defendants received a fair trial. The prosecution case was flimsy, but much more dubious was the conduct of Judge Webster Thayer. In private, the judge referred to the defendants as “those anarchist bastards,” and his charge to the jury sounded like an order to convict. Thayer denied eight appeals before the two died in the electric chair. The compelling question surrounding the Sacco and Vanzetti case is why the trial of two Italian immigrants for murder roused such an international furor. Clearly, at issue was more than the guilt or innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti. The defendants were Italian immigrants, atheists, avowed anarchists, and pacifists. The case stirred the deepest fears and fanned the most ardent prejudices of the twenties. The injustice of their execution (which drew a public apology from Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis in 1977 on the fiftieth anniversary of the pair’s death) was that the defendants were tried on the basis of who they were rather than on the facts of the case.

 The Ku Klux Klan Defines “Pure Americanism” The most flagrant example of the rising tide of “100 percent Americanism” in the twenties was the Ku Klux Klan. Inspired by the Reconstruction organization, but with a wider range of targets, the new KKK was founded on Thanksgiving Night 1915 at Stone Mountain, Georgia. William Joseph Simmons, a salesman, part-time preacher, and promoter of fraternal organizations, was the first Imperial Wizard of the Invisible Empire. The Klan grew slowly at first and in 1920 still had only about 5,000 members. In 1920, Simmons employed as publicity experts Edward Clarke and Elizabeth Tyler, who introduced a pyramid recruiting system based on financial incentives. The KKK membership mushroomed in the early twenties, reaching a peak of around 4.5 million members in 1924. The Klan was strongest in the South, West Coast, and Midwest. Like the Sacco and Vanzetti case, the rise of the KKK defies simple explanation. To some extent, the KKK built on the American love for fraternal organi-

An Exhilarating Decade

zations. During its peak years the Klan had around 500,000 women members, for many of them providing “a way to get together and enjoy.” The Klan’s hierarchy of “wizards,” “kleagles,” and “goblins,” and its robes, hoods, and torchlight parades paralleled the pageantry that attracted Americans to completely harmless and often benevolent secret associations, like the Odd Fellows and Elks. Furthermore, the KKK had been romanticized in the popular movie, The Birth of a Nation, and its overt aims — ”to protect and maintain the distinctive institutions, rights . . . and ideals of a pure Americanism” — unquestionably lured many responsible citizens into membership. In many localities the Klan’s membership was dominated by respectable middle-class citizens (a majority nonfundamentalists) who sincerely wanted to improve their communities. Lurking beneath the surface, however, were more sordid appeals to prejudices that were widely embraced by middle-class white Americans — anti-Catholicism, nativism, anti-Semitism, and racial bigotry. For the most part, the Klan used pressure tactics to gain its objectives, intimidating school boards and politicians and promoting lectures by alleged “escaped nuns” and other rabble-rousers. Such tactics had little real impact on the politics of the nation; almost no laws can be directly traced to the influence of the Klan. More troubling was the Klan’s propensity for violence. In 1921, the New York World published an exposé of Klan violence that included charges of flogging, kidnapping, and murder. Ironically, the series probably helped Klan recruiting by giving the organization its first national publicity. The Klan began to decline in 1925, however, after revelations of a savage rape and murder committed by David Stephenson, a KKK leader in Indiana. Responsible citizens abandoned the organization, and in the last half of the twenties its membership virtually disappeared.

 The Failure of Prohibition Prohibition seemed to many — liberals, sophisticates, urban dwellers, newly arrived immigrants, and others outside the orbit of evangelical Protestantism — the quintessential expression of twenties repression. Mencken called the Prohibition period ( from 1920 until 1933) “the thirteen awful years.” Yet the “Noble Experiment” (Herbert Hoover’s expression) was a social reform that harked back to the optimistic spirit of the nineteenth century. Taken in its most favorable light, Prohibition represented an early effort to confront a

American Life in the 1920s

A Flapper and Her Flask Long Russian boots became fashionable during Prohibition, for reasons this young woman demonstrates. (The swastika that forms part of the floor tile design is without significance; this image was sometimes used as a decorative motif long before the 1930s, when the German Nazis made it a hated and feared symbol of their movement.)

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major public health problem. Few of Prohibition’s opponents (the “wets”) denied the lamentable personal and social cost of drunkenness, particularly on the poor. Furthermore, Prohibition was a democratic reform. By the time the Volstead Act implemented Prohibition (1919), forty-six out of forty-eight states had ratified the Eighteenth Amendment. To the wets’ charge that Prohibition restricted personal liberty, its supporters (the “drys”) countered that for good reason many other laws regulated individual rights — from traffic ordinances to the prohibition of dueling and the use of narcotics. In spite of such rational defenses, by the end of the decade there was a clear national consensus that the experiment had failed. By the 1920s, prohibitionist rhetoric sometimes appealed to the same prejudices that supported immigration restriction and the KKK. Prohibition, charged some critics, was the vengeance of Protestant farmers on the hordes of Catholic, Jewish, and atheist immigrants in the unruly and ungodly cities. It was, in effect, an exclusion act directed at the cultures of immigrants already in America. It was not true, as wets taunted, that the consumption of alcohol went up during the twenties. Drinking probably fell sharply. But there were massive violations of the law. The Prohibition Bureau, charged with enforcement of the law, never employed more than 3,000 agents, while the nation had more than 18,000 miles of border to patrol. All through the twenties the ships of bootleggers were anchored just outside the twelvemile international limit, and the proximity of many of the nation’s big cities to Canada and Mexico made smuggling impossible to control effectively. In most major cities, hundreds of “speakeasies” (illegal bars and nightclubs) operated almost openly throughout the decade. Furthermore, the production of alcoholic beverages was relatively simple; for $500 anyone could purchase a still capable of producing a hundred gallons a day, and thousands of amateurs learned to make home brew and bathtub gin (sometimes poisoning themselves with the product). In the final analysis, Prohibition failed because the law was openly violated by too many large groups within the American populace. Millions of urban immigrants and their descendants, brought up in cultures where alcohol was a staple of the diet and a symbol of conviviality, were perplexed by Prohibition. They, joined by millions of other Americans who never repudiated their taste for John Barleycorn (as liquor came to be personified), voided the law by disobeying it. Pro-

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hibition proved, for a very brief period, that the political center of gravity in the nation was not in New York City and San Francisco, but in Brown’s Hollow, Smith’s Crossing, and countless other small towns. In the long run, the experiment proved, as have other restrictive laws, that a society rarely can enforce a law that is flaunted by a substantial minority.

An Exhilarating Decade

ing the twenties, including the size of modern cities, technological developments such as the automobile and submachine guns, and the Mafia tradition among Italian immigrants, but Prohibition provided the economic base to support its flowering.

High Republican Politics

 The Spread of Organized Crime The Eighteenth Amendment did not create organized crime in the United States, but it greatly expanded its reach and its profitability. Furnishing major cities with daily supplies of alcohol was a large business enterprise, and because of its bulk, beer running required a huge organization. Crime bosses became major employers, operating caravans of trucks escorted by gangs armed with Thompson submachine guns (nicknamed “Chicago pianos”) to protect them from other mobsters trying to encroach on their territories. The most famous criminal of the twenties was “Scarface” Al Capone. He controlled more than 160 speakeasies in the Chicago area and by the early twenties employed over 700 men. Capone rode in an armored car and quartered his men in a hotel in the suburb of Cicero; at the age of thirty-two he was reputedly worth more than $20 million. Throughout the twenties the Capone gang waged a war with the rival Dion O’Banion gang that featured scores of sensational shootouts. In 1929, the entire nation was shocked when seven O’Banion garage workers were machine-gunned to death by Capone gangsters disguised as policemen. The brutality of this St. Valentine’s Day Massacre shocked a nation that had become accustomed to the violent escapades of gangsters. Unfortunately, organized crime bred worse evils than the operation of speakeasies. The wealth of the mob bosses encouraged payoffs to law enforcement officers. Having hundreds of gunmen on their payrolls, mobsters used intimidation and violence to bully legitimate businessmen. Chicago’s Republican mayor, the demagogic “Big Bill” Thompson (most famous for delighting Irish-American voters with his pledge to punch England’s King George V in the nose if he ever set foot in the city), was Capone’s stooge. In the cities, protection rackets forced businesses to pay commissions to organized crime under the threat of violence, and in a single year Chicago experienced over 150 bombings of business establishments. Many factors contributed to the growth of organized crime dur-

The Republican presidential tickets in the 1920s won overwhelming victories, returning the party to the dominance it had enjoyed before its split over progressivism had allowed Wilson to take the White House. The reasons for this ascendancy were curiously captured in Warren G. Harding’s malapropism when in the 1920 campaign he called for a return to “normalcy.” (He had meant to say “normality.”) The rhetoric of the Republican presidents often sounded like pre-McKinley Republicanism. But in fact Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and most of all Herbert Hoover built on the foundation laid in the Progressive Era. Political dissent did exist in the twenties. Progressives continued to champion old causes, and in some states they remained politically potent. But at the national level progressive successes were few. The Democratic Party seemed permanently divided into a northern wing that was urban, Catholic, and wet and a southern wing that was rural, Protestant, and dry. The conservatism of the electoral majority often led Democratic candidates to sound and act much like Republicans. It was a contented majority that elected the presidents, bought the automobiles, and gave the decade its generally conservative character.

 The Election of 1920 The presidential election of 1920 was the first since the enactment of woman suffrage, so it was hardly surprising that the popular vote was more than double that recorded four years earlier. But neither the issues nor the candidates inspired strong feelings in the electorate. The Democratic convention met in San Francisco in June 1920 and nominated progressive Governor James M. Cox of Ohio on the forty-fourth ballot. The vice-presidential nomination went to Wilson’s young assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Tall, handsome, a distant cousin of TR, and something of a social lion in Washington, the Democratic Roosevelt had the respect of leaders throughout his party, but was not regarded as a political heavyweight.

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American Life in the 1920s

At the Republicans’ Chicago convention, several of the leading presidential contenders (including Herbert Hoover) were eliminated because they seemed to have excessively progressive pasts. With no strong front-runner, Ohio party boss Harry M. Daugherty predicted that the choice would be decided in a hotel by “some fifteen men, bleary-eyed with lack of sleep.” Indeed, after a deadlock on the first day of the convention, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge summoned the party’s most influential leaders to a meeting in the Blackstone Hotel room of editor George Harvey. The gathering in the “smokefilled room,” heavily weighted toward conservative senators, conferred with state leaders all through the evening before deciding to support Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio. Harding was nominated the next day on the tenth ballot. The Ohio senator’s chief strengths were his membership in the Senate (a group still smarting from Wilson’s snubbing), his handsome countenance, and his transparent desire to work the will of his betters in the party. The vice-presidential nomination went to Calvin Coolidge, the governor of Massachusetts who had become something of a national hero by squelching the Boston police strike in 1919. The clearest issue in the election of 1920 was the Democratic endorsement of the Treaty of Versailles, but even on that point, both parties spoke ambiguously. Change was the issue in the election; Republicans ran against Wilson rather than Cox. Harding set the tone of the campaign in an oft-quoted dictum: “America’s present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution but restoration . . . not surgery but serenity.” The only surprise was the size of the Republican victory. Harding received 16,152,200 popular votes to



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“A Few Don’ts,” 1918 Ezra Pound was one of the Lost Generation’s literary mentors. Many poets of the day would have followed the iconoclastic advice he offers here, originally published in the premiere issue of Poetry magazine. An ‘Image’ is that which presents in intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time…

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Cox’s 9,147,353. In the Electoral College the vote was 404 to 127. Republicans won large majorities in both houses of Congress as well. Eugene V. Debs, running for the fifth and final time on the Socialist Party ticket, polled more than 900,000 votes while still incarcerated in the Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta for violating the wartime Espionage Act, a clear signal that dissent had not vanished from the land. But overall the election was a resounding proclamation that a new conservative era had begun.

 Harding and the Return to “Normalcy” Harry Daugherty first encountered Warren G. Harding when the future president was the editor of the Marion (Ohio) Star. Catching a glimpse of the handsome Harding waiting for a shoeshine at the local hotel, Daugherty allegedly mumbled: “Gee, what a President he’d make.” Under the tutelage of Daugherty, Harding was elected to the Senate in 1914 and distinguished himself as a loyal party man. He was fond of making flowery speeches, described by former Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo as “an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea.” An ordinary man, Harding was a member of the Elks, the Odd Fellows, the Hoo Hoos, the Moose, the Masons Lodge, the Red Men, and the Baptist Church. He entered the presidency enjoying widespread public favor. Harding wanted to serve his country well. Several of his cabinet appointees proved to be capable public servants: Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, Secretary of Agriculture Henry C. Wallace, and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover all served with distinction, and so did Harding’s Secretary of the Treasury, the

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It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works. All this, however, some may consider open to debate. The immediate necessity is to tabulate A LIST OF DON’TS for those beginning to write verses. I can not put all of them into Mosaic negative. To begin with, consider the three propositions (demanding direct treatment, economy of words, and the sequence of the musical phrase), not as dogma—never

consider anything as dogma—but as the result of long contemplation, which, even if it is some one else’s contemplation, may be worth consideration. Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work. Consider the discrepancies between the actual writing of the Greek poets and dramatists, and the theories of the Graeco-Roman grammarians, concocted to explain their metres.

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wealthy banker and industrialist Andrew Mellon, who was as adept and competent as he was conservative. Unfortunately, some other appointees betrayed Harding’s compulsion to reward unqualified and unsavory friends. Harding’s Surgeon General was Dr. Charles (“Old Doc”) Sawyer, a homeopathic physician from Marion, and as Superintendent of Prisons he appointed his brother-in-law, Heber H. Votaw, a former missionary. More disastrous were his choices of Harry Daugherty as Attorney General and Senator Albert B. Fall as Secretary of the Interior. Dubbed the Poker Cabinet and the Ohio Gang, these cronies quickly became the president’s closest advisors. Washington was soon adrift with rumors of all-night poker sessions at the White House and carousing presidential visits to Daugherty’s apartment at 1625 K Street. The landslide Republican victory in 1920 marked the return of business leadership to government. The complexities of balancing the rights and interests of business and labor that had held sway since Theodore Roosevelt’s administration gave way to the notion that the health of the nation should be gauged by the prosperity of business. The architect of the decade’s conservative economic agenda was Treasury Secretary Mellon. Mellon’s strategy, most of it enacted after 1925 because of persistent progressive opposition in Congress, called for balancing the budget, reducing the national debt, cutting income taxes, and raising tariffs to protect agriculture and industry. The income tax cuts overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy, but this was because at the time no one but the affluent paid income taxes at all, and rates had been raised considerably to finance World War I. Mellon also urged government efficiency, and in June 1921 Congress passed the Budget and Accounting Act, establishing the Budget Bureau in the Treasury De-



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Coolidge on the Role of Government, 1920 Coolidge delivered this famous “Law and Order” speech while campaigning for vice president; it sums up the view of government he brought to the presidency three years later. . . . . There are strident voices, urging resistance to law in the name of freedom. They are not seeking freedom for themselves, they

partment to prepare an annual budget and the General Accounting Office to audit government accounts. These agencies greatly simplified the task of Congress in allocating money and for the first time allowed the federal government to estimate its total expenditures. Under the leadership of Herbert Hoover the Department of Commerce fostered scientific planning in industry as a means of eliminating waste. Hoover believed that the government’s role in economic planning should be strictly advisory, but he encouraged voluntary cooperation, called associationalism, in the private sector. Hoover’s innovative policies, Mellon’s introduction of efficient budgeting practices, and the resourceful foreign policy of Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes gave a positive cast to the early Harding years. Harding died on August 2, 1923, seized by a sudden convulsion in a San Francisco hotel room while returning from a trip to Alaska. The official cause of death was listed as a cerebral hemorrhage. As Harding’s body was transported across the nation by train, mourners lined the tracks to pay him final honor. He died a beloved man, the public outpouring of sympathy rivaling the mourning that followed the assassination of Lincoln. The New York World (a Democratic paper) praised Harding’s “winning character growing toward greatness under the stern tutelage of experience in office.” Unfortunately, the major legacy of Harding’s presidency was not legislation or lasting public esteem, but a series of scandals uncovered after his death by congressional investigations that began in 1924. Harding had premonitions of what was coming. “My God,” he had confided to journalist William Allen White shortly before his death, “this is a hell of a job! I have no trouble with my enemies. . . . But my damned friends, . . . they’re the ones that keep me walking the floor at night.” Ulti-

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have it. They are seeking to enslave others. Their works are evil. They know it. They must be resisted. The evil they represent must be overcome by the good others represent. Their ideas, which are wrong, for the most part imported, must be supplanted by ideas which are right. This can be done. The meaning of America is a power which cannot be overcome. Massachusetts must lead in teaching it. . . . Laws are not manufactured. They are

not imposed. They are rules of action existing from everlasting to everlasting. He who resists them, resists himself. He commits suicide. The nature of man requires sovereignty. Government must govern. To obey is life. To disobey is death. Organized government is the expression of the life of the commonwealth. Into your hands is entrusted the grave responsibility of its protection and perpetuation.

American Life in the 1920s

President Coolidge In August 1927, Calvin Coolidge donned this Sioux headdress during a celebration in Deadwood, South Dakota.

mately, charges were made against officials in the Departments of Justice, Navy, and the Interior, as well as the Veterans’ Bureau and other smaller agencies. Before he died, Harding probably knew that he and the nation had been betrayed by Harry Daugherty. Daugherty was finally pressured into resigning as attorney

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general in March 1924 by Harding’s successor, Calvin Coolidge. In 1927, he was formally charged with taking bribes and defrauding the government. Daugherty invoked his Fifth Amendment right to refuse to testify, and his conspiracy trial ended in a hung jury. By far the most publicized of the Harding scandals resulted in the conviction of interior secretary Albert Fall in 1927 on charges of conspiracy and bribery. He was sentenced to a year in prison — the first cabinet member to be imprisoned. Fall was found to have accepted bribes from oil moguls Edward L. Doheny and Harry F. Sinclair in return for granting favorable leases to them on government oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and Elk Hills, California. A congressional investigation dragged on for months, uncovering evidence that Fall had received repeated loans and gifts from the two businessmen — about $100,000 from Doheny and more than $300,000 from Sinclair. Doheny and Sinclair were also tried on charges of bribery but were acquitted, although Sinclair was sentenced to nine months in prison for contempt of court. In 1927, as both Harry Daugherty and Albert B. Fall faced trials for conspiracy, Harding’s reputation reached its nadir with the publication of a sensational book, The President’s Daughter. Written by a young woman named Nan Britton, it told of the birth of Harding’s illegitimate daughter, conceived in the Senate cloakroom. The seamy private life of this ordinary man, lurking about Washington’s seedy hotels and carousing with the Ohio Gang, seemed a sorry disgrace to the presidential office. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Theodore Roosevelt’s salty daughter, offered what became the most-quoted appraisal of the departed president: “Harding was not a bad man. He was just a slob.”

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 Calvin Coolidge Rides the Boom On the day that Warren G. Harding unexpectedly died, Vice President Calvin Coolidge was visiting his parents in Plymouth, Vermont. When the news came, his father, a justice of the peace, administered the oath of office with memorable symbolism by the light of an oil lamp. Taciturn and parsimonious, “Silent Cal” Coolidge was a stereotypical Yankee. He had graduated cum laude from Amherst College and practiced law in Northampton, Massachusetts, but his ascent from mayor to governor to president owed more to his uncanny luck than to any superior political instincts. Like everything else in his career, his elevation to the presidency was perfectly timed. Coolidge’s transparent honesty made him a refreshing alternative to the excesses of the Harding era, and he guided the Republican Party through the years of scandalous revelations with dignity, though with little enthusiasm for the investigations. Most historians have judged Coolidge harshly for his inactivity (he worked four hours a day and took long naps), his personal stinginess (he kept close check on the White House servants to see that they did not overstock the pantry), and the banality of some of his comments (“When more and more people are thrown out of work, unemployment results,” he once solemnly intoned). Herbert Hoover summarized Coolidge’s character: “He was a fundamentalist in religion, in the economic and social order, and in fishing.” But it would be a mistake to dismiss Coolidge as a buffoon. Though conservative and conventional, he was no fool. Calvin Coolidge’s flaws as president had less to do with his New England character than with the economic and political assumptions that he shared with many Americans. To him, political radicals were those who believed “that in some way the government was to be blamed because everybody was not prosperous, because it was necessary to work for a living, and because our written constitutions, the legislatures, and the courts protected the rights of private owners.” The business of the government was to support business and to protect society against radicals. He believed that “civilization and profits go hand in hand.” Coolidge was a popular president. To be sure, his popularity rested partly on an economic boom that was careening toward worldwide disaster. Nonetheless, to many Americans “Silent Cal” seemed the epitome of Yankee shrewdness, and he sometimes revealed a wry New England sense of humor. When Mrs. Coolidge

An Exhilarating Decade

was having her portrait painted by Howard Chandler Christy, the president said that he didn’t like the bright red dress she was wearing. Christy insisted that it was needed to add color. With a deadpan expression, the president asked the artist: “Why not paint her in a white dress and paint the dog red?” Riding a tide of public contentment, Coolidge won the Republican nomination in 1924. The Democrats, on the other hand, were hopelessly divided into northern and southern wings, and the requirement that a candidate needed two-thirds of the delegate votes for the nomination gave southerners, as intended, a veto. Catastrophically in this new era of live radio broadcasting, the convention went through two weeks of rambunctious wrangling before nominating John W. Davis, a moderate corporation lawyer from West Virginia whose most important government position had been the ambassadorship to Great Britain. Davis was a bland compromise after the South’s candidate William G. McAdoo (who refused to condemn the KKK) and New York’s “wet” governor Al Smith cancelled each other out in a mind-deadening 103 ballots. Disgruntled progressives formed a third party and nominated the old warhorse Robert La Follette. The pro-labor, pro-farmer Progressive platform called for government ownership of railroads and utilities. In what would be his last political campaign, “Fighting Bob” received the endorsement of both the Socialist Party and the AFL — not normally political bedfellows. The electorate was content to “keep cool with Coolidge.” Electoral participation continued to fall. Fewer than 50 percent of the eligible electorate had voted in 1920, and the rate declined further in 1924. But the Republican victory was overwhelming. Coolidge received 382 electoral votes, and Davis carried only the twelve states of the Democrats’ “Solid South,” for 136 electoral votes. La Follette won nothing but his native Wisconsin, with 13 electoral votes. Coolidge collected over two million more popular votes than his two competitors combined, and the Republicans retained control of both houses of Congress. On succeeding to the presidency, Coolidge had asked Harding’s cabinet to remain, but several members resigned in 1924, including the soon-to-be-disgraced Daugherty. Remarkably little important legislation was passed during Coolidge’s presidency His most notable accomplishment was to cut the budget drastically, partly by reducing military spending. The administration’s financial policies first balanced the budget and

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American Life in the 1920s

then began retiring the national debt at the rate of about $500 million per year. The relatively slight legislative achievements of the Harding and Coolidge years were in part a reflection of the continued strength of progressivism in Congress and in state governments. Old-time progressives continued to press for the regulation of big business, usually unsuccessfully, but they did hinder the dismantling of the regulatory structure that had been created during the Progressive Era. On August 2, 1927, while visiting a South Dakota Indian reservation, Coolidge, in typically terse prose, informed the press that “I do not choose to run for Lindbergh and His Spirit of St. Louis Before he took off on his epoch-making transatlantic flight, Charles A. Lindbergh posed for this photograph beside his frail single-engine airplane, striking a note of calm confidence.

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President in 1928.” Whether Coolidge expected to be drafted by his party or simply wanted to return to private life, most Republicans were delighted to accept the president’s decision. Columnist Heywood Broun exulted: “At last eloquence has gushed from the Vermont granite.”

 The Coolidge Boom America’s prosperity in the twenties was deceptively fragile. A chronic farm depression, regarded by many as a nagging exception to the good times, was only one symptom of a troubled economy. The international creditor status of the United States and the profits of American business in the early 1920s provided vast sums of capital that were used to expand the nation’s productive capacity, as well as to speculate in stocks.

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But because workers and farmers did not share equally in the decade’s prosperity, the nation’s capacity to consume lagged far behind its ability to produce. The skewing of economic regulation in favor of business and the wealthy was obvious in Mellon’s strategy, but the pro-business bias of the era was much more broadly based. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover’s trade associationalism encouraged businesses to pool their expertise for the sake of efficiency, while at the same time purportedly remaining competitive in the marketplace. The federal government contributed to economic development by aiding businesses through conferences and the collection of information. The Supreme Court supported associationalism in the 1920s, holding that it was constitutional for businesses to cooperate so long as some measure of competition survived. Presided over by former president William Howard Taft, who became chief justice in 1921, the court rendered a steady stream of pro-business decisions during the decade. In 1922, the court struck down a federal law curtailing child labor (Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Company), and in 1923, the justices invalidated a law fixing a minimum wage for women in the District of Columbia (Adkins v. Children’s Hospital). At the international level, the huge World War I debts owed to the United States by European nations, the accumulation of gold reserves in America, and the raising of American tariff barriers set the stage for a world economic crisis. The Fordney-McCumber Tariff in 1922 brought rates back to levels as high as those existing before the passage of the Underwood Tariff in 1913 (see Chapter 23). The return of protectionism was predictable in view of the influence of business interests in the conservative Republican administrations, but high tariffs also came to be a leading demand of the powerful congressional Farm Bloc. The most troubling economic issue of the 1920s was declining farm profits, even though many farmers shared in the boom mentality of the twenties. In the first two decades of the century American farmers had prospered, and during World War I, when European agriculture suffered serious disruption, prices had soared — only to crash when these markets were suddenly closed by European tariff barriers beginning in 1919 (see Chapter 24). However, the technological advances of the early twentieth century encouraged ever-larger farms (the number of tractors increased ten times during the twenties), and farmers increasingly identified themselves as businessmen rather than laborers. Cooperative arrangements for buying and marketing expanded

An Exhilarating Decade

during the decade, but European demand for American farm products declined, and prices plummeted. Farm discontent led to the formation of a powerful Farm Bloc in Congress composed of southern and western congressmen. This congressional group lobbied throughout the decade for legislation to aid farmers, and every Republican president recognized the farm depression as the nation’s foremost economic problem. In 1921, an Emergency Tariff raised duties on most agricultural products, and the following year the Fordney-McCumber Tariff granted to the president the power to raise existing tariffs by as much as 50 percent if he deemed foreign competition unfair. Although such tariff legislation generally brought reprisals from abroad, American farmers, facing increased competition from such new agricultural exporters as Canada and Argentina, continued to support tariff hikes. In 1922, the Farm Bloc secured the passage of a Cooperative Marketing Act that exempted agricultural cooperatives from prosecution under antitrust laws. The most sweeping proposal for agricultural reform in the twenties was the McNary-Haugen Farm Relief Bill, first introduced in 1926. The bill proposed the establishment of a Farm Board empowered to buy excess crop production, either storing it for future sale or unloading it in foreign markets at prevailing prices. Essentially, the scheme envisioned dumping excess agricultural products abroad. The prices farmers would receive for these commodities would be determined by a complicated formula that compared farm income with other areas of the economy between 1910 and 1914. Any differential between the price support and the world market price would be covered by an “equalization fee” to be paid by farmers. The bill was defeated in 1926. The Farm Bloc passed it the following year, only to encounter a presidential veto. Coolidge insisted that the McNary-Haugen Act legalized price-fixing and unfairly benefited special groups. Farm conditions continued to deteriorate, and the bill was passed again in 1928, once again being vetoed by Coolidge.

 The Election of 1928 By 1928 the clear leader of the Republican Party was Herbert Hoover. From impoverished beginnings, Hoover had worked his way through Stanford University and pursued a brilliant career as an international mining engineer, making enough money to retire at 40 in 1914 and become a public servant. His work during World War I as the chairman of the American Re-

American Life in the 1920s

lief Committee in Belgium and as the United States Food Administrator had won widespread acclaim and talk of his presidential candidacy in 1920. During his eight years as Secretary of Commerce in the Harding and Coolidge cabinets he turned the department into a highly visible agency for the promotion of business efficiency and trade associations. Hoover began campaigning immediately after Coolidge’s announcement and was nominated on the first ballot at the Republican convention in Chicago. Although the Democratic Party was still divided into northern and southern wings in 1928, the delegates, meeting in Houston, nominated Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York on the first ballot. A Tammany Hall Democrat who supported the repeal of Prohibition, Smith was the first Roman Catholic ever nominated for the presidency. After the Democrats balanced the ticked by naming Senator Joseph T. Robinson of Lonoke, Arkansas, the emblematic Democratic donkey was said to have a “WET head and a DRY tail.” Nonetheless, Smith’s nomination clearly marked the growing ascendancy of the eastern, urban wing of the party. In the South, Republicans made the most of running against “Alcohol Al.” Once again, the party platforms in 1928 offered few real differences. Hoover insisted that Smith’s support of farm legislation and a government-operated power plant in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, was dangerous radicalism, but Smith was, in fact, a conventional conservative, and the only real campaign issue was Republican prosperity. Noted the liberal New Republic ironically, “Prosperity is a prerogative which God has bestowed, subject to certain limitations, upon the American people if they remain Republican.” Probably more important than the issues, the personalities of the two candidates provided stark contrasts. Smith’s candidacy spawned a vicious anti-Catholic whispering campaign — one rumor reported that plans had already been drafted to construct a tunnel from the White House to the Vatican. Smith insisted that his Catholic faith would not interfere with his execution of the office of the president, and Hoover agreed that the issue was irrelevant. Nonetheless, the nomination of Smith brought Catholic-Protestant tensions into clear focus. Smith’s candidacy affected the American Catholic community in contradictory ways: anti-Catholic attacks exacerbated the alienation felt by many Catholics, but at the same time church leaders celebrated Smith’s nomination as a milestone in the journey of American Catholics into the national mainstream.

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Besides religion, other personal differences also weighed in Hoover’s favor. Smith’s New York brogue was a decided liability. For the first time in American history, radio (“rad-dio,” as Smith pronounced it in his nasal New York accent) was an important factor in the campaign. Smith, a witty and garrulous professional politician, sounded like a foreigner to Midwesterners and was virtually unintelligible to Southerners. Once again, the only surprise in 1928 was the size of the Republican victory. The electoral vote was 444 to 87, with Hoover receiving 21 million votes to Smith’s 15 million. Hoover carried Smith’s home state of New York (although Democratic gubernatorial candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt won). Even more surprising, the Republicans breached the Solid South, carrying Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, and almost winning Alabama. But, though not of much comfort to the Democrats in 1928, there were other symptoms of change in the election that boded well for the future of the party. Smith polled 60 percent more votes than any previous Democratic candidate, won nearly every major city, carried such traditionally Republican states as Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and drew support from the progressives who had supported La Follette in 1924.

 The Great Engineer at the Wheel Herbert Hoover, the ablest of the Republican presidents of the twenties, had a well-developed and coherent philosophy for a cooperative society. In 1922, while serving as Secretary of Commerce, Hoover wrote American Individualism, a book that the New York Times praised as “among the few great formulations of American political theory.” The book is today forgotten, but the ideas it expressed have recurred perennially in the nation’s history. Hoover believed that individualism had reached its most positive form in America. “The ideal of service,” he wrote, was a “great spiritual force poured out by our people as never before in the history of the world.” Hoover’s book called for a rationalized economy that offered equal opportunity to all. He urged voluntary cooperation between government and business as a modern alternative to laissez-faire capitalism and socialism. The government was to be the partner of the trade associations, stimulating the economy by educating and organizing businessmen to respond to expert advice. As secretary of commerce, Hoover sponsored government agencies to bring order to new industries, including the Bureau of Aviation and the Federal Radio

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Advertising a Tractor In 1921 a dealer in Washington, D.C., advertised his tractors with this catchy promotional idea. Tractors driven by internal-combustion engines were still relatively novel in 1921, but many farmers went into debt to acquire them.

Commission. Beginning his presidency in a climate of unbridled optimism, “the Great Engineer of the New Order” set out to collect information and funnel ideas to business leaders. Some progressives viewed Hoover’s election as a ray of hope in the conservative decade. Yet in the end, Hoover’s ideas depended on business prosperity as much as those of his predecessors. During the campaign, Hoover promised to call a special session of Congress to deal with the farm depression. Out of that session came the Agricultural Marketing Act, a compromise measure that established a Federal Farm Board to promote the marketing of farm products through agricultural cooperatives and stabilization corporations. This plan, like others during the period, failed to stabilize farm prices because farmers did not reduce their acreage in production. In 1930, in a

An Exhilarating Decade

further effort to aid farmers, as well as protect American industry, Republicans pushed through the Hawley-Smoot Tariff. The law raised tariffs on agricultural products nearly 50 percent, and also raised tariffs on other commodities. But whether or not the protection of American agricultural products from foreign imports ever held any promise for helping farm prices, by the time the law passed it had a very unfortunate effect on the deepening depression.

 Boom and Bust in the Stock Market American stocks, fueled particularly by the profitability of such new consumer industries as automobiles and communications, rose steadily in the twenties. By the middle of the decade, much corporate capital was being used to purchase stocks, and the American market also attracted large foreign investments. In 1927, just as the American economy was slowing perceptibly, a bull market began. As prices shot up, the mar-

American Life in the 1920s

ket became increasingly speculative. Estimates of the number of Americans who bought stock range as high as 15 million, although only one-tenth of that number were active traders. More important, the boom mesmerized the nation, and its optimistic assumptions were widely accepted. In an article published in the Ladies Home Journal just two months before the crash, John J. Raskob, chairman of the Democratic party and a former General Motors executive, inscribed one of the prime artifacts of the boom: “Everybody ought to be rich.” President Hoover worried that the boom might be getting out of hand, but he felt he could not intervene openly without destroying business confidence and involving the government too closely in the free market. Encouraging buyers’ get-rich-quick hopes, various political and institutional factors fueled the Great Bull Market. In 1927 the Federal Reserve System stimulated speculation by lowering interest rates, while political leaders and leading economists made euphoric predictions about the future. There was much talk that a “new economy” had arrived, supplanting the old “boomand-bust” business cycle and ensuring that economic expansion was on a “high plateau” of unending growth. Margin buying contributed powerfully to the frenzy — the easy credit that allowed buyers to purchase stock with as little as 10 percent down. (The catch was that if the value of shares fell below a certain level, brokers could demand immediate payment in full — and if the buyer could not come up with the cash, the stock was automatically sold. Excessive marginal speculation therefore served as a built-in time bomb in the event of a crash.) Finally, the information on which speculators relied in buying stock was often incomplete, if not deceptive or downright false, and unscrupulous insiders often manipulated the trading in shares. Because of the almost total absence of government regulation in securities markets, ordinary investors had no idea how closely stock speculation now resembled gambling in a crooked casino. The stock euphoria of the late twenties was also foolhardy in the light of economic conditions. In 1926 a highly speculative Florida land boom had burst, ruining many investors, but the disaster did little to restore sanity. Many areas of American industry, particularly housing and automobile production, had slowed markedly by 1927; in almost every industrial area more goods were being produced than could be consumed. As inventories built up, factories closed and workers were laid off, further shrinking the consumer market.

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Ironically, the market continued to climb, pushed partly by investments by businesses with no other outlet for their profits. Against this ominous background, and with the underlying economy moving toward recession, a final market surge began in March 1928. Stocks often rose ten to fifteen points a day, and so many shares were traded that the Wall Street ticker ran minutes behind the bidding. The Standard and Poor’s average of 414 industrial stocks rose from less than 100 in 1927 to above 250 in September 1929. In September 1929 stock prices began to fluctuate wildly; then in October they moved steadily downward. Canny investors began to sell, but others saw the retreat as an opportunity to snap up bargains before the next market ascent. Then, on October 23, the market dropped 50 points, and on the next day — ”Black Thursday” — Wall Street plunged into chaos. Brokers unloaded huge blocks of margin stocks with orders to sell at any price. Bankers formed a pool of $240 million in an effort to restore confidence (a pool of $25 million had stopped a panic in 1907), but Tuesday, October 29, was the worst day in the history of the stock exchange up to that time. By the middle of November 1929, about $30 billion had been erased from the market value of stocks listed on the New York exchange; before the decline stopped in 1932, the loss reached about $75 billion.

Conclusion: A Decade of Prosperity and Self-Analysis Was the twenties a particularly factious and belligerent decade? All of the decade’s disputes had been brewing for years; even the intellectual revolt was well under way in Greenwich Village before World War I. Furthermore, some of the shrillest arguments of the twenties never stirred broad popular response. A majority of Americans were neither members of the KKK nor rebellious flappers nor carousing speakeasy customers nor irresponsible stock market speculators. Most ordinary citizens behaved much like their grandparents. All in all, relatively few people danced the Charleston or read The Great Gatsby; far more sang hymns and read the Bible. On the other hand, few mature adults in 1920 would have denied that the nation had changed dramatically in her or his lifetime. By the end of the decade, writes historian William E. Leuchtenburg, the years before World War I seemed a “lost Acadia.”

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This acute sense of change goes far in explaining why the decade was such fertile soil for extremist ideas. The changes wrought by urbanization, immigration, consumerism, and intellectual relativism were so well defined by 1920 that older Americans joined in lastditch efforts to stem the tide of modernity. Millions drew lines in the sand around the religious, social, and patriotic fundamentals that they would not yield. The “Lost Generation” was not the first group of American young people to challenge traditional values. Nativism predated the KKK by decades; the clash between fundamentalist religion and modern science was half a century old. To understand why these issues reached new levels in the twenties one must consider the sum total of intellectual, economic, and social forces at play during the decade. World War I fostered an illusory view of America’s cultural unity, but then the Red Scare and the treaty debate shattered earlier optimism. Rural-urban tensions reached new heights, highlighted by the report of urban population surpassing rural in the census of 1920. Scientists, ranging from Einstein to Freud, posed new ideas as disconcerting as those of Darwin. Perhaps more than anything else, the stage for the decade’s dramatic debates was set by prosperity. In good times, when most people possess basic economic necessities, social groups become bellicose about power. Freed from threats from abroad, and to a large degree free from extreme economic deprivation, Americans looked inward. On both the left and the right, those with an acute sense of social responsibility set about to remake the nation in their own image. The harsh realities of the thirties would bring the nation’s attention back to the much more basic questions of survival. Neither was the politics of the twenties a sharp disruption from the past. In some ways, the political conservatism of the period marked a reversal of progressivism and the economic planning of the war years, particularly the Republican emphasis on a strictly limited role for government. This bias against regulation encouraged the decade’s uneven economic development. On the other hand, most politicians in the twenties saw a need for greater economic cooperation and standardization. Herbert Hoover’s notion of a planned market economy, albeit a voluntary one, marked the 1920s as a transitional period between progressivism and the New Deal and a stepping-stone on the path to modern liberal capitalism.

An Exhilarating Decade

Suggested Reading Charles C. Alexander, Here the Country Lies: Nationalism and the Arts in Twentieth Century America (1980). A sweeping survey of American art during the early twentieth century that emphasizes the continued search for a national culture. Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday (1931). This venerable book, iconoclastic but good-spirited, remains an entertaining excursion through the twenties. Paul Carter, The Twenties in America (1968) and Another Part of the Twenties (1977). Carter is a judicious and careful scholar who is unwaveringly fair to the decade’s extremists on the right and the left. His sympathetic vignettes of fundamentalists and prohibitionists help balance the caricatures such groups often receive. Morton Keller, Regulating a New Economy: Public Policy and Economic Change in America, 1900-1933 (1990) and Regulating a New Society: Public Policy and Social Change in America, 1900-1933 (1994) provide broad overviews of public policy developments during the 1920s. William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914-1932 (1970). A comprehensive, elegantly written, and sophisticated interpretation of the 1920s. George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (1980). An excellent survey of the fundamentalist-modernist religious clash in the 1920s. Michael Parrish, Anxious Decades: America in Prosperity and Depression, 1920-1941 (1992). A good recent overview of the decade. George Soule, Prosperity Decade: From War to Depression (1947). An excellent survey of economic developments from World War I to the Stock Market Crash.

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