UE 402 : Civilisation et histoire de la littrature amricaine Week 6: The Great War/The Roaring Twenties Professor Schnabel

World War I

I Want You for U.S. Army by James Montgomery Flagg

The Road to War June 28, 1914: a car carrying Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Hapsburg throne, made a wrong turn. As the car came to a halt and tried to turn around, a nervous teenager approached from a coffee house, pulled out a revolver, and shot twice, killing the Archduke and his wife.

Gavrilo Princip, the 19-year-old assassin, was a Bosnian nationalist who opposed the domination of the Balkans by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He had received his weapon from the "Black Hand," a secret society that was secretly controlled by the government of Serbia. The assassination provoked outrage in Austria-Hungary. The dual monarchy wanted to punish Serbia for the assassination and to intimidate other minority groups whose struggles for independence threatened the empire's domination. The assassination of the archduke sparked a series of events that would lead to the outbreak of World War I. When the conflict was over, 11 million people had been killed, four powerful European empires had been overthrown, and the seeds of World War II, the Cold War and rampant political paranoia had been planted. A complicated system of military alliances transformed the Balkan crisis into a full-scale European war. Recognizing that any action it took against Serbia would create an international incident, Austria asked for Germany's diplomatic and military support. Meanwhile, Russia, fearful of Austrian and German expansion into the Balkans, strongly supported the Serbs and began to mobilize its army. This move made Germany's leadership fear encirclement by Russia and France. Germany sent an ultimatum to France asking it to declare its neutrality in the event of a conflict between Russia and Germany, which the French government refused. The French were compelled to support Russia because of a treaty it had signed and had not forgotten their defeat by Prussia in 1871. When Russia failed to demobilize its forces, the German Kaiser agreed to war. World War I caught the world by surprise. Lulled by a century of peaceEuropeans had not seen a large-scale war since the defeat of Napoleon in 1815many observers had come to regard armed conflict as a relic of the past, rendered unthinkable by human progress. World War I shattered these dreams. The war would demonstrate the horror of mechanized combat on a large scale. Isolationism The United States originally pursued a policy of isolationism, avoiding conflict while trying to negotiate peace. Britain initially feared that the United States might intervene on the side of Germany and the Central Powers because of anti-colonial feelings against England. This in fact resulted in increased animosity between London and Berlin. When a German U-boat sank the British liner Lusitania in 1915, with 128 Americans passengers aboard, President Woodrow Wilson vowed, America is too proud to fight and demanded an end to attacks on passenger ships. Germany complied, for the time being. Wilson warned the United States would not tolerate unrestricted submarine warfare, in violation of international law and human rights. Wilson was also under pressure from former president Theodore Roosevelt who denounced German acts as "piracy". Wilson's desire to have a seat at negotiations at war's end to advance the League of Nations also played a role in shaping his political stand. William Jennings Bryan, Secretary of State in the Wilson administration, resigned in protest at what he felt was the President's warmongering diplomacy. The fighting begins Faced by Russia to its east and France to its west, Germany believed that its only hope for victory was to strike first. The German military had formulated a blueprint (known as the Schlieffen Plan) for victory in Western Europe in 42 days. The attack would occur before the Russians would have time to advance from the east. The plan also called for a preemptive strike against France through Belgium. Germany's plan clearly was in violation of international law. Belgium was a neutral country and Britain was committed to its defense. Thus, a German invasion was certain to bring Britain into the 2

war. Germany asked for permission to move its troops through Belgium. But King Albert, the country's monarch, refused by saying, "Belgium is a nation, not a road." Germany decided to press ahead anyway; its forces invaded Belgium on August 3. The German military strategy worked better on paper than it did in practice. While fierce resistance by 200,000 Belgian soldiers did not stop the German advance, it did give Britain and France time to mobilize their forces. Meanwhile, Russia mobilized faster than expected, forcing Germany to divert 100,000 troops to the eastern front. German hopes for a quick victory were dashed at the first battle of the Marne in September 1914, when a retreating French army launched a powerful counter-attack, assisted by 6,000 troops transported to the front by 1,200 Parisian taxicabs. After the Allies halted Germany's massive offensive through France and Belgium at the Marne River, the Great War bogged down into trench warfare and a ghastly stalemate ensued. Lines of men, stretching from the English Channel to the Swiss border, formed an unmovable battle front across northern France. Four million troops burrowed into trenches that were 6-to-8 feet deep and wide enough for two men to pass each other. The trenches stretched for 450 miles. The soldiers were ravaged by tuberculosis and plagued with lice and rats. They stared at each other across barren expanses called "no-man's land" and fought pitched battles over narrow strips of blood-soaked earth. Several military innovations were introduced by Germany in 1915 to end the war, though none were decisive: it used submarines to prevent merchant ships from reaching Britain; it added poison chlorine gas to its military arsenal at the second battle of Ypres in northern France; and it dropped incendiary bombs over London from a zeppelin, airplanes, tanks, and hand grenades were other innovations that distinguished World War I from previous conflicts. Yet it was the machine gun killed the most men, firing eight bullets per second.

Poisonous gases were known about for a long time before the First World War but military officers were reluctant to use them as they considered it to be a uncivilized weapon. The French Army was apparently the first to employ it as a weapon when in the first month of the war it fired tear-gas grenades at the Germans. In October 1914 the German Army began firing shrapnel shells in which the steel balls had been treated with a chemical irritant. The Germans first used chlorine gas cylinders in April 1915 when it was employed against the French Army at Ypres. Chlorine gas destroyed the respiratory organs of its victims and this led to a slow death by asphyxiation
In 1917, after two-and-a-half years of fighting, 5 million troops were dead and the western front remained deadlocked. This was the grim situation that awaited the United States. Germany was desperate to break the stalemate and to end the war of attrition. In January 1917, they launched unrestricted submarine warfare, hoping to cripple the British economy. German subs sank a half million tons of Allied shipping each month, leaving Britain with only a six week supply of grain. But these German U-boats risked bringing the United States into the war. The Lusitania On May 7, 1915, the Lusitania, the "fastest vessel afloat," was sunk by a torpedo from a German submarine. The ship sank off the Irish coast in under 20 minutes. A total of 1,198 passengers and crew members lost their lives; only 861 people survived.

The German Embassy had issued a warning that appeared in New York newspapers: Travelers intended to embark for an Atlantic voyage are reminded that a state of war exists between Germany and her allies and Great Britain and her allies.... Vessels flying the flag of Great Britain or any of her allies are liable to destruction. Following the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, Germany would institute a moratorium on unrestricted submarine warfare. However, pressure on the German high command to resume unrestricted submarine warfare was great. It was viewed as the only way to starve Britain and France into submission. This resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare would ultimately bring the United States into the war. The United States Enters the War President Wilson was reluctant to enter World War I. When the War began, Wilson declared American neutrality and demanded that the belligerents respect American rights as a neutral party. He hesitated to embroil the United States in the conflict with good reason. Americans were deeply divided about the European war; involvement in the conflict would certainly disrupt Progressive reforms. In 1914, he had warned that entry into the conflict would bring an end to Progressive reform. "Every reform we have won will be lost if we go into this war," he said. A popular song in 1915 was "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier." In 1916, President Wilson narrowly won reelection after campaigning on the slogan, "He kept us out of war." He won the election with a 4,000 vote margin in California.

Toward Intervention Shortly after war erupted in Europe, President Wilson called on Americans to be "neutral in thought as well as deed." The United States, however, quickly began to lean toward Britain and France. Convinced that wartime trade was necessary to fuel the growth of American trade, President Wilson refused to impose an embargo on trade with the belligerents. During the early years of the war, trade with the allies tripled. This volume of trade quickly exhausted the allies' cash reserves, forcing them to ask the United States for credit. In October 1915, President Wilson permitted loans to belligerents, a decision that greatly favored Britain and France. By 1917, American loans to the allies had soared to $2.25 billion; loans to Germany stood at a paltry $27 million. In January 1917, Germany announced that it would resume unrestricted submarine warfare. This announcement helped precipitate American entry into the conflict. Germany hoped to win the war within five months. Additionally, they were willing to risk antagonizing Wilson on the assumption that, even if the United States declared war, it could not mobilize quickly enough to change the course of the conflict. Then a fresh insult led Wilson to demand a declaration of war. In March 1917, newspapers published the Zimmerman Note, an intercepted telegram from the German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmerman to the German ambassador to Mexico. The telegram said that if Germany went to war with the United States, Germany promised to help Mexico recover the territory it had lost during the 1840s, including 4

Texas, New Mexico, California, and Arizona. The Zimmerman telegram and German attacks on three U.S. ships in mid-March led Wilson to ask Congress for a declaration of war. Wilson decided to enter the war so that he could help design the peace settlement. Wilson viewed the war as an opportunity to destroy German militarism. "The world must be made safe for democracy," he told a joint session of Congress. Only six Senators and 50 Representatives voted against the war declaration. Over There In 1917, a High German official scoffed at American might: "America from a military point-of-view means nothing, and again nothing, and for a third time nothing." The U.S. Army at the time had only 107,641 men. Within a year, however, the United States raised a five million-man army. By the war's end, the American armed forces were a decisive factor in blunting a German offensive and ending the bloody stalemate. Initially, President Wilson hoped to limit America's contribution to supplies, financial credits, and moral support. But by early 1917, the allied forces were on the brink of collapse. Ten divisions of the French army had begun to mutiny. In March 1917, the Bolsheviks, who had seized power in Russia in November, accepted Germany's peace terms and withdrew from the war. Then, German and Austrian forces routed the Italian armies. The United States was forced to quickly assume an active role in the conflict. As a preliminary step, American ships relieved the British of responsibility for patrolling the Western Hemisphere, while another portion of the U.S. fleet steamed to the north Atlantic to combat German submarines. To raise troops, President Wilson insisted on a military draft. More than 23 million men registered during World War I, and 2,810,296 draftees served in the armed forces. To select officers, the army launched an ambitious program of psychological testing. In March 1918, the Germans launched a massive offensive on the western front in France's Somme River valley. With German troops barely 50 miles from Paris, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the leader of the French army, assumed command of the allied forces. Foch's troops, aided by 85,000 American soldiers, launched a furious counteroffensive. By the end of October, the counterattack pushed the German army back to the Belgian border. American entry into the war quickly overcame the German military's numerical advantage. In June 1918, some 279,000 American soldiers crossed the Atlantic; in July over 300,000; in August, 286,000 more. All told, 1.5 million American troops arrived in Europe during the last six months of the war. By the end of the conflict, the allies could field 600,000 more men than the Germans. The influx of American forces led the Austro-Hungarian Empire to ask for peace, Turkey and Bulgaria to stop fighting, and Germany to request an armistice. President Wilson announced that he would negotiate only with a democratic regime in Germany. When the military leaders and the Kaiser wavered, a brief revolution forced the Kaiser to abdicate, and a civilian regime assumed control of the government. At 11:00 a.m., November 11, 1918, the guns stopped.

The Home Front Approximately one-third of the nation (32 million people) were either foreign-born or the children of immigrants, and more than 10 million Americans were derived from the nations of the Central Powers. Furthermore, millions of Irish Americans sided with the Central Powers because they hated the English. The Wilson administration was convinced that it had to mobilize public opinion in support of the war. To influence public opinion, the federal government embarked on its first ever domestic propaganda campaign. Wilson chose muckraking journalist George Creel to head the government agency, the Committee on Public Information (CPI). The CPI placed pro-war advertisements in magazines and distributed 75 million copies of pamphlets defending America's role in the war. Creel also launched a massive advertising campaign for war bonds and sent some 75,000 Four-Minute Men to whip up enthusiasm for the war by rallying audiences in theaters. The CPI also encouraged filmmakers to produce movies, like The Kaiser: the Beast of Berlin, which greatly exaggerated alleged German atrocities. For the first time in international affairs, the federal government demonstrated its ability to use propaganda. Anti-German Propaganda German American and Irish American communities came out strongly in favor of neutrality. The groups condemned massive loans and arms sales to the allies as they saw the acts as violations of neutrality. Theodore Roosevelt raised the issue of whether these communities were loyal to their mother country or to the United States: Those hyphenated Americans who terrorize American politicians by threats of the foreign vote are engaged in treason to the American Republic. Once the United States entered the war, a search for spies and saboteurs escalated into efforts to suppress German culture. Many German-language newspapers were closed down. Public schools stopped teaching German. Lutheran churches dropped services that were spoken in German. Germans were called "Huns." In the name of patriotism, musicians no longer played Bach and Beethoven, and schools stopped teaching the German language. Americans renamed sauerkraut "liberty cabbage"; dachshunds "liberty hounds"; and German measles "liberty measles." Cincinnati, with its large German American population, even removed pretzels from the free lunch counters in saloons. More alarming, vigilante groups attacked anyone suspected of being unpatriotic. Workers who refused to buy war bonds often suffered harsh retribution, and attacks on labor protesters were nothing short of brutal. The legal system backed the suppression. Juries routinely released defendants accused of violence against individuals or groups critical of the war. A St. Louis newspaper campaigned to "wipe out everything German in this city," even though St. Louis had a large German American population. Luxembourg, Missouri became Lemay; Berlin Avenue was renamed Pershing; Bismark Street became Fourth Street; Kaiser Street was changed to Gresham. Perhaps the most horrendous anti-German act was the lynching in April 1918 of 29-year-old Robert Paul Prager, a German-born bakery employee, who was accused of making "disloyal utterances." A mob took him from the basement of the Collinsville, Illinois jail, dragged him outside of town, and hanged him from a tree. Before the lynching, he was allowed to write a last note to his parents in Dresden, Germany: 6

Dear Parents: I must on this, the 4th day of April, 1918, die. Please pray for me, my dear parents. In the trial that followed, the defendants wore red, white, and blue ribbons, while a band in the court house played patriotic songs. It took the jury 25 minutes to return a not-guilty verdict. The German government lodged a protest and offered to pay Prager's funeral expenses. The Espionage and Sabotage Act In his war message to Congress, President Wilson had warned that the war would require a redefinition of national loyalty. There were "millions of men and women of German birth and native sympathy who live amongst us," he said. "If there should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with a firm hand of repression." In June 1917, Congress passed the Espionage Act. The piece of legislation gave postal officials the authority to ban newspapers and magazines from the mails and threatened individuals convicted of obstructing the draft with $10,000 fines and 20 years in jail. Congress passed the Sedition Act of 1918, which made it a federal offense to use "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the Constitution, the government, the American uniform, or the flag. The government prosecuted over 2,100 people under these acts. Political dissenters bore the brunt of the repression. Eugene V. Debs, who urged socialists to resist militarism, went to prison for nearly three years. Another Socialist, Kate Richards O'Hare, served a year in prison for stating that the women of the United States were "nothing more nor less than brood sows, to raise children to get into the army and be made into fertilizer." In July 1917, labor radicals offered another ready target for attack. In Cochise County, Arizona, armed men, under the direction of a local sheriff, rounded up 1,186 strikers at the Phelps Dodge copper mine. They placed these workersmany of Mexican descenton railroad cattle cars without food or water and left them in the New Mexico desert 180 miles away. The Los Angeles Times editorialized: "The citizens of Cochise County have written a lesson that the whole of America would do well to copy." The radical labor organization, the International Workers of the World (IWW), never recovered from government attacks during World War I. In September 1917, the Justice Department staged massive raids on IWW officers, arresting 169 of its veteran leaders. The administration's purpose was, as one attorney put it, "very largely to put the IWW out of business." Many observers thought the judicial system would protect dissenters, but the courts handed down stiff prison sentences to the radical labor organization's leaders. Radicals were not the only one to suffer harassment. Robert Goldstein, a motion picture producer, had made a movie about the American Revolution called The Spirit of '76, before the United States entered the war. When he released the picture after the declaration of war, he was accused of undermining American morale. A judge told him that his depiction of heartless British redcoats caused Americans to question their British allies. He was sentenced to a 10 year prison term and fined $5,000.
Source: 2006 Digital History

The Roaring Twenties The popular image of the 1920s, as a decade of prosperity and riotous living and of bootleggers and gangsters, flappers and hot jazz, flagpole sitters, and marathon dancers, is indelibly etched in the 7

American psyche, but this image is misleading. The 1920s was a decade of profound cultural conflict. The pre-Civil War decades had fundamental conflicts in American society that involved geographic regions. During the Gilded Age, conflicts centered on ethnicity and social class. Conversely, the conflicts of the twenties were mainly cultural, pitting a more cosmopolitan, modernist, urban culture against a more provincial, traditionalist, rural culture. The decade witnessed a titanic struggle between an old and a new America. Immigration, race, alcohol, evolution, gender politics, and sexual moralityall became major cultural battlefields during the 1920s. Wets battled drys, religious modernists battled religious fundamentalists, and ur ban ethnics battled the racist Ku Klux Klan. The 1920s was a decade of profound social changes. The most obvious signs of change were the rise of a consumer-oriented economy and of mass entertainment, which helped to bring about a "revolution in morals and manners." Sexual mores, gender roles, hair styles, and dress all changed profoundly during the 1920s. Many Americans regarded these changes as liberation from the country's Victorian past. But for others, morals seemed to be decaying, and the United States seemed to be changing in undesirable ways. The result was a thinly veiled "cultural civil war." The Red Scare On May 1, 1919May Daypostal officials discovered 20 bombs in the mail of wealthy capitalists, including John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, Jr., as well as government officials like Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Bombs exploded several weeks later in eight American cities. On September 16, 1920, a bomb left in a parked horse-drawn wagon exploded near Wall Street in Manhattan's financial district, killing 30 people and injuring hundreds. The bomb was suspected to have been the work of alien radicals. Authorities came up with a list of subjects, but no one was charged with the crime. The end of World War I was accompanied by paranoia over political radicalism. Fear of bombs, communism, and labor unrest produced a "Red Scare." In Hammond, Indiana, a jury took two minutes to acquit the killer of an immigrant who had yelled "To Hell with the United States." At a victory pageant in Washington, D.C., a sailor shot a man who refused to stand during the playing of the StarSpangled Banner, while the crowd clapped and cheered. A clerk in a Waterbury, Connecticut clothing store was sentenced to jail for six months for remarking to a customer that the Russian revolutionary Lenin was "the brainiest" or "one of the brainiest" world leaders. In November 1919, in the Washington State lumber town of Centralia, American Legionnaires stormed the office of the International Workers of the World (IWW), also known as Wobblies; four attackers died in a gunfight before townspeople overpowered the IWW members and arrested them. A mob broke into the jail, seized one of the IWW members, and hanged him from a railroad bridge. Federal officials subsequently prosecuted 165 IWW leaders, who received sentences of up to 25 years in prison. Congress and state legislatures joined in the attack on left-wing politics. In May 1919, in total violation of the Constitution, the House of Representatives actually refused to seat Victor Berger, a Socialist from Milwaukee, after he was convicted of sedition in a bogus trial. The House again denied him his seat following a special election in December 1919. Not until he was re-elected again in 1922, after the government dropped the sedition charges, did Congress finally seat him. In 1920, the New

York State Legislature expelled five members after they were told that they had been elected on a platform "absolutely inimical to the best interests" of the state. In 1919 and 1920, President Wilson's attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, led raids on leftist organizations such as the Communist Party and the radical labor union, the International Workers of the World. Palmer hoped to use the issue of radicalism in his campaign to become president in 1920. He created the precursor to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which created illegal files on suspected communists, many of whom were not. In November 1919, Palmer ordered government raids that resulted in the arrests of 250 suspected radicals in 11 cities. The Palmer Raids reached their height on January 2, 1920, when government agents made raids in 33 cities. Overall, more than 4,000 alleged communists were arrested and jailed without bond, and 556 aliens were deportedincluding the heroic patriot Emma Goldman. Palmer claimed that he was doing his country a favor by getting rid of "moral perverts and hysterical neurasthenic women who abound in communism." In truth, his police-state tactics and unprecedented violations of civil liberties divided opinion in the United States. Postwar Labor Tensions The years following the end of World War I were a period of profound social turmoil, aggravated by high wartime inflation. Food prices more than doubled between 1915 and 1920; clothing costs more than tripled. A steel strike that began in Chicago in 1919 became much more than a simple dispute between labor and management. The Steel Strike of 1919 became the focal point for profound social anxieties, especially fears of Bolshevism. Organized labor had grown in strength during the course of the war. Many unions won recognition, and the 12-hour workday was abolished. An 8-hour day was instituted on war contract work, and by 1919, half the country's workers had a 48-hour work week. The war's end, however, was accompanied by labor conflict as labor demanded union recognition, shorter hours, and raises exceeding the inflation rate. Over 4 million workers one fifth of the nation's workforceparticipated in strikes in 1919, including 365,000 steelworkers and 400,000 miners. The number of striking workers would not be matched until the Depression year of 1937. The year began with a general strike in Seattle. Police officers in Boston went on strike, touching off several days of rioting and crime. But the most tumultuous strike took place in the steel industry. About 350,000 steelworkers in 24 separate craft unions went on strike as part of a drive by the American Federation of Labor to unionize the industry. From management's perspective, the steel strike represented the handiwork of radicals and professional labor agitators. The steel industry's leaders regarded the strike as a radical conspiracy to get the company to pay a 12-hour wage for 8 hours' work. At a time when communists were seizing power in Hungary and were staging a revolt in Germany, and workers in Italy were seizing factories, some industrialists feared that the steel strike was the first step toward overturning the industrial system. The strike ended with the complete defeat of the unions. From labor's perspective, the corporations had triumphed through espionage, blacklists, and the denial of freedom of speech and assembly and through the complete unwillingness to recognize the right of collective bargaining with the workers' representatives.

During the 1920s, many of labor's gains during World War I and the Progressive era were rolled back. Membership in labor unions fell from 5 million to 3 million. The U.S. Supreme Court outlawed picketing, overturned national child labor laws, and abolished minimum wage laws for women.

Prohibition At midnight, January 16, 1920, the United States went dry; breweries, distilleries, and saloons were forced to close their doors. Led by the Anti-Saloon League and the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the dry forces had triumphed by linking Prohibition to a variety of Progressive era social causes. Proponents of Prohibition included many women reformers who were concerned about alcohol's link to wife beating and child abuse and industrialists, such as Henry Ford, who were concerned about the impact of drinking on labor productivity. Advocates of Prohibition argued that outlawing drinking would eliminate corruption, end machine politics, and help Americanize immigrants. Even before the 18th Amendment was ratified, about 65 percent of the country had already banned alcohol. In 1916, seven states adopted anti-liquor laws, bringing the number of states to 19 that prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. America's entry into World War I made Prohibition seem patriotic since many breweries were owned by German Americans. In December 1917, Congress passed the 18th Amendment. A month later, President Woodrow Wilson instituted partial prohibition to conserve grain for the war effort. Beer was limited to 2.75 percent alcohol content and production was held to 70 percent of the previous year's production. In September, the president issued a ban on the wartime production of beer. National Prohibition was defended as a war measure. The amendment's proponents argued that grain should be made into bread for fighting men and not for making liquor. Anti-German sentiment aided Prohibition's approval. The Anti-Saloon League called Milwaukee's brewers "the worst of all our German enemies," and dubbed their beer "Kaiser brew." The wording of the 18th Amendment banned the manufacture and sale (but not the possession, consumption, or transportation) of "intoxicating liquors." Many brewers hoped that the ban would not apply to beer and wine. But Congress was controlled by the drys, who advocated a complete ban on alcohol. A year after the ratification, Congress enacted the Volstead Act, which defined intoxicating beverages as anything with more than 0.5 percent alcohol. This meant that beer and wine, as well as whiskey and gin, were barred from being legally sold. Enforcing the law proved almost impossible. Smuggling and bootlegging were widespread. Prohibition failed because it was unenforceable. By 1925, half a dozen states, including New York, passed laws banning local police from investigating violations. Prohibition had little support in the cities of the Northeast and Midwest. Prohibition also fostered corruption and contempt for law and law enforcement among large segments of the population. Harry Daughtery, attorney general under Warren Harding, accepted bribes from bootleggers. George Remus, a Cincinnati bootlegger, had a thousand salesmen on his payroll, many of them police officers. He estimated that half his receipts went as bribes. Al Capone's Chicago organization reportedly took in $60 million in 1927 and had half the city's police on its payroll.

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Popular culture glamorized bootleggers like Chicago's Capone. These symbols served as the model for the central characters in such films as Little Caesar and Scarface. In rural areas, moonshiners became folk heroes. The fashion of the flapper, dancing the Charleston in a short skirt, was incomplete without a hip flask. Prohibition created a huge consumer market unmet by legitimate means. Organized crime filled that vacuum left by the closure of the legal alcohol industry. Homicides increased in many cities, partly as a result of gang wars, but also because of an increase in drunkenness. Prohibition devastated the nation's brewing industry. St. Louis had 22 breweries before Prohibition. Only nine reopened after Prohibition ended in 1933. Anheiser-Busch made it through Prohibition by making ice cream, near beer, corn syrup, ginger ale, root beer, yeast, malt extract, refrigerated cabinets, and automobile and truck bodies. The noble experiment ended at 3:32 p.m., December 5, 1933, when Utah became the 36th state to ratify the 21st Amendment, repealing Prohibition. Sacco and Vanzetti During the 20th century, a number of trials have excited widespread public interest. One of the first cause celebrities was the case of Nicola Sacco, a 32-year-old shoemaker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a 29-year-old fish peddler, who were accused of double murder. On April 15, 1920, a paymaster and a payroll guard carrying a factory payroll of $15,776 were shot to death during a robbery in Braintree, Massachusetts, near Boston. About three weeks later, Sacco and Vanzetti were charged with the crime. Their trial aroused intense controversy because it was widely believed that the evidence against the men was flimsy, and that they were being prosecuted for their immigrant background and their radical political beliefs. Sacco and Vanzetti were Italian immigrants and avowed anarchists who advocated the violent overthrow of capitalism. It was the height of the post-World War I Red Scare, and the atmosphere was seething with anxieties about Bolshevism, aliens, domestic bombings, and labor unrest. Revolutionary upheavals had been triggered by the war, and one-third of the U.S. population consisted of immigrants or the children of immigrants. U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer had ordered foreign radicals rounded up for deportation. Just three days before Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, one of the people seized during the Palmer raids, an anarchist editor, had died after falling from a 14th floor window of the New York City Department of Justice office. The police, judge, jury, and newspapers were deeply concerned about labor unrest. No witnesses had gotten a good look at the perpetrators of the murder and robbery. The witnesses described a shootout in the street and the robbers escaping in a Buick, scattering tacks to deter pursuers. Anti-immigrant, anti-radical sentiment led the police to focus on local anarchists. Sacco and Vanzetti were followers of Luigi Galleani, a radical Italian anarchist who had instigated a wave of bombings against public officials just after World War I. Carlo Valdinoci, a close associate of Galleani, had blown himself up while trying to plant a bomb at Attorney General Palmer's house. Palmer's house was largely destroyed; the powerful blast hurled several neighbors from their beds in nearby homes. Though not injured, Palmer and his family were thoroughly shaken by the blast.

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After the incident Sacco and Vanzetti acted nervously, and the arresting officer testified that Sacco and Vanzetti were reaching for weapons when they were apprehended. But neither man had a criminal record. Plus, a criminal gang had been carrying out a string of armed robberies in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Police linked Sacco's gun to the double murder, the only piece of physical evidence that connected the men to the crime. The defense, however, argued that the link was overstated. In 1921, Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted in a trial that was marred by prejudice against Italians, immigrants, and radical beliefs. The evidence was ambiguous as to the pairs' guilt or innocence, but the trial was a sham. The prosecution played heavily on the pairs' radical beliefs; the men were kept in an iron cage during the trial. The jury foreman muttered unflattering stereotypes about Italians. In his instructions to the jury, the presiding judge urged the jury to remember their "true American citizenship." The pair was electrocuted in 1927. As the guards adjusted his straps, Vanzetti said in broken English: I wish to tell you I am innocent and never connected with any crime... I wish to forgive some people for what they are now doing to me. Their execution divided the nation and produced uproar in Europe. Harvard Law Professor and later U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Felix Frankfurter, condemned the prejudice of the presiding judge (who reportedly said in 1924, "Did you see what I did with those anarchistic bastards the other day?") and procedural errors during the trial. These errors included the prosecution's failure to disclose eyewitness evidence favorable to the defense. A commission that included the presidents of Harvard and MIT defended the trial's fairness. Today, we know that the evidence was insufficient to convict either one. Immigration Restriction Before World War I, American industry, steamship companies, and railroads promoted immigration and financed groups opposed to immigration restriction. The United States did institute registration and literacy requirements for immigrants; yet, opponents of restriction succeeded in blocking efforts to establish immigration quotas. World War I revealed that the economy could function effectively without foreign immigration; opposition to immigration restriction withered away. Not only had World War I demonstrated that immigrants had become "Americanized," but with the establishment of new European nation states, interest in European politics faded away. While some opponents of immigration argued that it threatened the nation's culture, most of the arguments advanced against immigration were economic. Among the chief proponents of immigration restriction were the unions of the American Federation of Labor. Organized labor feared that American workers' wages would decline if unskilled immigrant workers flooded the labor market. Meanwhile, many businessmen feared dangerous foreign radicals. During the 1920s, most ethnic groups agreed that the overall volume of immigration should be reduced. The issue remained: how to distribute the immigration quotas. A compromise was easily reached: make the quotas proportionate to the current population, so that future immigration would not change the balance of ethnic groups.

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In 1924, Congress reduced the number of immigrants allowed into the United States each year to two percent of each nationality group counted in the 1890 census. It also barred Asians entirely.

Consumerism By the end of the 1920s, Americans were overwhelmed by the rise of a modern consumer culture. In response, many of the bitter cultural tensions that had divided Americans had begun to subside. The growth of exciting new opportunities to buy cars, appliances, and stylish clothing made the country's cultural conflicts seem less significant. The collapse of the new economy at the decade's end would generate economic debates as intense as the cultural conflicts of the early and mid-1920s. Americans in the 1920s were the first to wear ready-made, exact-size clothing. They were the first to play electric phonographs, to use electric vacuum cleaners, to listen to commercial radio broadcasts, and to drink fresh orange juice year round. In countless ways, large and small, American life was transformed during the 1920s, at least in urban areas. Cigarettes, cosmetics, and synthetic fabrics such as rayon became staples of American life. Newspaper gossip columns, illuminated billboards, and commercial airplane flights were novelties during the 1920s. The United States became a consumer society. Two automotive titans, Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan, symbolized the profound transformations that took place in American industry during the 1910s and 1920s. In 1913, the 50-year-old Ford had revolutionized American manufacturing by introducing the automated assembly line. By using conveyor belts to bring automobile parts to workers, he reduced the assembly time for a Ford car from 12 hours in 1912 to just 1 hours in 1914. Declining production costs allowed Ford to cut automobile pricessix times between 1921 and 1925. The cost of a new Ford was reduced to just $290. This amount was less than three months wages for an average American worker; it made cars affordable for the average family. To lower employee turnover and raise productivity, Ford introduced a minimum wage of $5 in 1914twice what most workers earnedand shortened the workday from nine hours to eight hours. Twelve years later, Ford reduced his work week from six days to five days. Ford demonstrated the dynamic logic of mass production: that expanded production allows manufacturers to reduce costs, and therefore, increases the number of products sold; and that higher wages allow workers to buy more products. Alfred Sloan, the president of General Motors from 1923 to 1941, built his company into the world's largest automaker, not by refining the production process, but by adopting new approaches to advertising and marketing. Sloan summed up his philosophy with these blunt words: "The primary object of the corporation was to make money, not just to make cars." Unlike Ford, a farmer's son who wanted to produce an inexpensive, functional vehicle with few frills (Ford said that his customers could have any color that they wanted as long as it was black), Sloan was convinced that Americans were willing to pay extra for luxury and prestige. He advertised his cars as symbols of wealth and status. In 1927, he introduced the yearly model change to convince motorists to trade in old models for newer ones with flashier styling. He also developed a series of automobile divisions, differentiated by status, price, and level of luxury. Hence, Chevrolets were less expensive than Buicks or Cadillacs. He set up the nation's first national consumer credit agency in 1919 to make his cars affordable. If Henry Ford demonstrated the efficacy of mass production, Sloan revealed the importance of merchandising in a modern consumer society.

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Cars were the symbol of the new consumer society that emerged in the 1920s. In 1919, there were just 6.7 million cars on American roads. By 1929, there were more than 27 million carsor nearly one car for every household in the United States. In that year, one American out of every five owned a car compared to one out of every 37 English and one out of every 40 French car owners. Car manufacturers and banks encouraged the public to buy the car of their dreams on credit. Thus, the American love affair with the car began. In 1929, a quarter of all American families purchased a car. About 60 percent bought cars on credit, often paying interest rates of 30 percent or higher. Cars revolutionized the American way of life. Enthusiasts claimed that the automobile promoted family togetherness through evening rides, picnics, and weekend excursions. Critics decried squabbles between parents and teenagers over use of the automobile and an apparent decline in church attendance resulting from Sunday outings. Worst of all, charged critics, automobiles gave young people freedom and privacy, serving as "portable bedrooms" that couples could take anywhere. The automobile also transformed the American landscape, quickly obliterating all traces of the horse and buggy past. During the 1920s, the country doubled its system of roads and highways. The nation spent over $2 billion annually building and maintaining roads. By 1929, there were 852,000 miles of roads in the United States, compared to just 369,000 miles in 1920. The car also brought pollution, congestion, and nearly 30,000 traffic deaths a year. The automobile industry provided an enormous stimulus for the national economy. By 1929, the industry produced 12.7 percent of all manufacturing output, and employed 1 out of every 12 workers. Automobiles, in turn, stimulated the growth of steel, glass, and rubber industries, along with the gasoline stations, motor lodges, camp grounds, and hot dog stands that dotted the nation's roadways. Alongside the automobile, the telephone and electricity also became emblems of the consumer economy. By 1930, two-thirds of all American households had electricity, and half of American households had telephones. As more and more of America's homes received electricity, new appliances followed: refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and toasters quickly took hold. Advertisers claimed that "labor saving" appliances would ease the sheer physical drudgery of housework, but they did not shorten the average housewife's work week. Women had to do more because standards of cleanliness kept rising. Sheets had to be changed weekly; the house had to be vacuumed daily. In short, social pressure expanded household chores to keep pace with the new technology. Far from liberating women, appliances imposed new standards of cleanliness. Ready-to-wear clothing was another important innovation in America's expanding consumer economy. During World War I, the federal government defined standard clothing sizes to help the nation's garment industry meet the demand for military uniforms. Standard sizes meant that it was now possible to mass produce ready-to-wear clothing. Since there was no copyright on clothing designs until the 1950s, garment manufacturers could pirate European fashions and reproduce them using less expensive fabrics. Even the public's eating habits underwent far-reaching shifts. Americans began to consume fewer starches (like bread and potatoes) and to consume more fruit and sugar. But the most striking development was the shift toward processed foods. Instead of preparing food from scratch at home (plucking chickens, roasting nuts, or grinding coffee beans), an increasing number of Americans purchased foods that were ready-to-cook. Important innovations in food processing occurred during World War I, as manufacturers learned how to efficiently produce canned and frozen foods. Processed foods saved homemakers enormous amounts of time in peeling, grinding, and cutting. 14

Accompanying the rise of new consumer-oriented businesses were profound shifts in the ways that businesses operated. To stimulate sales and increase profits, businesses expanded advertising, offered installment credit, and created the nation's first regional and national chains. The nation's first million-dollar advertising campaignfor Uneeda Bisquits in a waterproof box demonstrated advertising's power. Before the 1920s, most advertisements consisted of vast expanses of print. Absent were brand names, pictures, or catch phrases. During the 1920s, advertising agencies hired psychologists (including John B. Watson, the founder of behaviorism, and Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew) to design the first campaigns. They touted products by building-up name brand identification, creating memorable slogans, manipulating endorsements by doctors or celebrities, and appealing to consumers' hunger for prestige and status. By 1929, American companies spent $3 billion annually to advertise their productsfive times more than the amount spent on advertising in 1914. Installment credit soared during the 1920s. Banks offered the country's first home mortgages. Manufacturers of everythingfrom cars to ironsallowed consumers to pay "on time." About 60 percent of all furniture and 75 percent of all radios were purchased on installment plans. In contrast to a Victorian society that had placed a high premium on thrift and saving, the new consumer society emphasized spending and borrowing. A fundamental shift took place in the American economy during the 1920s. The nation's families spent a declining proportion of their income on necessitiesfood, clothing, and utilitiesand an increasing share on appliances, recreation, and a host of new consumer products. As a result, older industries, such as textiles, railroads, and steel, declined, while newer industries, such as appliances, automobiles, aviation, chemicals, entertainment, and processed foods, surged ahead rapidly. During the 1920s, the chain store movement revolutionized retailing. Chains of stores multiplied across the country, like Woolworth's, the five-and-dime chain. The largest grocery chain, A&P, had 17,500 stores by 1928. Alongside drugstore and cigar store chains, there were also interlocking networks of banks and utility companies. These banks and utilities played a critical role in promoting the financial speculation of the late 1920swhich would be one of the causes for the Great Depression.

The New Woman In 1920, after 72 years of struggle, American women received the right to vote. After the 19th Amendment passed, reformers talked about female voters uniting to clean up politics, improve society, and end discrimination. At first, male politicians moved aggressively to court the women's vote, passing legislation guaranteeing women's rights to serve on juries and hold public office. Congress also passed legislation to set up a national system of women's and infant's health care clinics, as well as a constitutional amendment prohibiting child labora measure supported by many women's groups. The early momentum quickly dissipated, however, as the women's movement divided within and faced growing hostility from without. The major issue that split feminists during the 1920s was a proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution outlawing discrimination based on sex. The issue pitted the interests of professional women against those of working class women, many of whom feared that the amendment would prohibit "protective legislation" that stipulated minimum wages and maximum hours for female workers. 15

The women's movement also faced mounting external opposition. During the Red Scare following World War I, the War Department issued the "Spider Web" chart which linked feminist groups to foreign radicalism. Many feminist goals were unachieved in the mid-1920s. Opposition from many Southern states and the Catholic Church defeated the proposed constitutional amendment outlawing child labor. The Supreme Court struck down a minimum wage law for women workers, while Congress failed to fund the system of health care clinics. Women did not win new opportunities in the workplace. Although the American work force included eight million women in 1920, more than half were black or foreign-born. Domestic service remained the largest occupation, followed by secretaries, typists, and clerksall low-paying jobs. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) remained openly hostile to women because it did not want females competing for men's jobs. They received less pay than their male counterparts; moreover, they were concentrated in the so-called "female" occupations: teaching and nursing. During the twenties, the organized women's movement declined in influence, partly due to the rise of the new consumer culture that made the suffragists and settlement house workers of the Progressive era seem old-fashioned. Advertisers tried self-consciously to co-opt many of the themes of pre-World War I feminism, arguing that the modern economy was filled with exciting and liberating opportunities for consumption. To popularize smoking among women, advertisers staged parades down New York's 5th Avenue, imitating the suffrage marches of the 1910s, in which young women carried "torches of freedom"cigarettes.

Sources:
Avrich, Paul, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton University Press, 1991) Chafee, Zechariah, Freedom of Speech (NY: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920) Coben, Stanley, A. Mitchell Palmer: Politician (NY: Columbia University Press, 1963) Digital History Gilbert, Martin (2004), The First World War: A Complete History, Clearwater, Florida: Owl Books, pp. 306 Hagedorn, Ann, Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919 (NY: Simon & Schuster, 2007) Kennedy, David M., Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980) Murray, Robert K., Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955) Pietrusza, David, 1920: The Year of Six Presidents (NY: Carroll & Graf, 2007) Post, Louis F., The Deportations Delirium of Nineteen-twenty: A Personal Narrative of an Historic Official Experience (NY, 1923)

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