The Roaring 20s

Politics in the 1920s

With the end of World War I and the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, Americans entered the distinctive 1920s an
era of Republican leadership, nationalistic and fundamentalist movements, and changing social conventions. Electing
Republican presidents who favored business expansion rather than regulation, the American public enjoyed apparently
unlimited prosperity, while fear of radicals and foreigners combined to almost completely close off America to immigration
and contributed to the resurgence of hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Religious fundamentalism revived as new moral
and social attitudes came into vogue. Additionally, the first radio broadcasts and motion pictures expanded Americans'
access to news and entertainment.
During the 1920s, three Republicans occupied the White House: Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover.
Harding was inept, Coolidge was mediocre, and Hoover was overcome by circumstances he neither understood nor could
control. Harding's campaign slogan, A return to normalcy, aptly described American politics for the entire period. The
nation turned away from the reforming zeal of the Progressive Era and the moral vision of Wilson's wartime leadership
toward a government whose domestic economic policies opposed federal regulation and encouraged business expansion.
The Harding administration. Although he was affable and popular, Harding's naivete made him a disaster as president.
Mindful of his own weaknesses, he tried to select the best men possible for his cabinet, with Charles Evans Hughes as
Secretary of State, Henry C. Wallace as Secretary of Agriculture, Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce, and Andrew
Mellon as Secretary of the Treasury. These men were responsible for the accomplishments of Harding's brief administration,
which included stimulating business growth, cutting taxes, and negotiating disarmament treaties.
Several of Harding's other appointments left much to be desired, however, and resulted in major scandals that rocked the
government. Charles Forbes, for example, headed the newly formed Veteran's Bureau, even though he had carefully avoided
the draft. He was convicted of fraud and related felonies involving the agency's hospital construction funds. Meanwhile,
Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall was at the center of the Teapot Dome scandal, in which he secretly leased naval oil
reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and Elk Hills, California, to private companies headed by Edward Doheny and Harry F.
Sinclair in return for no-interest, noncollateral loans. After resigning his office, Fall was convicted of bribery, and the
government canceled the leases. The administration was further disgraced when Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty was
implicated in a bribery case involving an official in the Alien Property Office and indicted but acquitted for taking money from
liquor dealers evading Prohibition. Harding was not directly involved with the corruption, and he died in office (August 2,
1923) before the charges against his appointees became public.
Coolidge and the election of 1924. Harding's vice president, Calvin Coolidge, came to national attention in 1919 when,
as governor of Massachusetts, he ended the Boston police strike. Coolidge did not believe the president should take an
activist role in government, and he was as opposed to the regulation of business as Harding had been. His famous quip The
business of America is business summed up the Republican creed of the 1920s. An honest if taciturn man who had no
connection with the scandals of his predecessor's cronies, Coolidge was the Republican choice for president in 1924. The
Democrats found it harder to choose a candidate.
The two main Democratic contenders mirrored the split in American society that existed during the '20s. William Gibbs
McAdoo represented the rural, Protestant, and dry (pro-Prohibition) parts of the country, while the urban, immigrant, and
wet (anti-Prohibition) population supported Alfred E. Smith, the Irish-American, Roman Catholic governor of New York.
With neither candidate able to sway enough votes, the Democratic convention compromised on the conservative Wall Street
lawyer, John W. Davis on the 103rd ballot. The election picture was complicated somewhat by Robert LaFollette's revival of
the Progressive party, which organized a coalition of farm groups and unions, such as the American Federation of Labor
(AFL). Davis was strong only in the South and LaFollette took his own state of Wisconsin; Coolidge won decisively in both
the popular and electoral vote.
The election of Hoover. When Coolidge decided not to run for a second term in 1928, the Republicans nominated Herbert
Hoover. Even though he had never held elective office, Secretary of Commerce Hoover had a distinguished career in public
service and was well regarded for his work with the Food Administration and in relief efforts after the war. The Democrats,

operating with a stronger urban wing than in the previous election, nominated Governor Al Smith for a second time. With
the country still riding the high tide of prosperity that the Republicans took full credit for, Hoover was nearly impossible to
beat, especially with Smith's serious drawbacks as a candidate. The Democratic Party's platform supported Prohibition, but
Smith favored the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. Additionally, anti-Catholicism remained a factor in American politics.
Many Protestant churches, both fundamentalist and mainstream denominations, urged their parishioners to vote their faith.
The combination of Prohibition and religion cost Smith several states in the Deep South and contributed to Hoover's
landslide victory.
A closer look at the election results gave the Democrats some hope for the future. Although they did not add any electoral
votes to his column, Western farmers abandoned their traditional home in the Republic party and supported Smith.
Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and the nation's 12 largest cities that voted Republican in 1924 also switched allegiance four
years later. This trend suggested that with a candidate who did not have Smith's obvious weaknesses, the Democrats might
be able to forge a winning coalition by holding on to the Deep South and building a stronger base in the urban Northeast
and Midwest.

Domestic Economic Policy

Throughout the '20s, the government's pro-business policies were reflected in tax cuts, a reduction in federal spending, and
high tariffs. Under Secretary of the Treasury Mellon, who served all three Republican presidents, the maximum rate on
personal income was significantly lowered, as were estate taxes and taxes on excess profits. Mellon's tax program directly
benefited the rich based on the assumption that they would invest their money and stimulate the economy. The economy
was also aided by the decrease in government expenditures; Mellon managed to balance the budget, and his programs
helped to lower the national debt by nearly $10 billion between 1919 and 1929. The government also tried to shield
domestic interests from foreign competition through the Fordney-McCumber Tariff (1922) which increased rates, removed
items from the free list, and raised duties on farm products. However, high tariffs had several unintended consequences.
They made it more difficult for Europeans to pay their war debts to the United States, and farmers, while protected from
foreign imports, found themselves paying more for their machinery.
Regulatory enforcement was lax during the 1920s, but the government did promote new industries. Civil aviation, for
example, was helped by the government's putting U.S. airmail contracts up for private bids (1925). The Air Commerce Act of
1926, which included federal funding for airport construction, also aided the expansion of this new form of transportation.
Agriculture did not share in the prosperity of the rest of the economy. The boom years for farmers came to an end in 1920,
when grain and commodity prices fell sharply. The cause of the crisis was the same as it had been in the late nineteenth
century overproduction. The McNary-Haugen Bill, first introduced in 1924, attempted to deal with the problem by
proposing that the government purchase farm surpluses of such staples as corn, cotton, and wheat, and either keep them
off the market until prices rose or sell them on the world market. Congress finally passed the legislation in 1927, but
President Coolidge vetoed it twice. Neither the McNary-Haugen Bill or the more modest Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929
provided farmers with incentives to limit production, which later experience would show to be the only way out of the price
spiral.

Change and Reaction in the 1920s

The 1920s were a period of dramatic changes. More than half of all Americans now lived in cities and the growing
affordability of the automobile made people more mobile than ever. Although the decade was known as the era of the
Charleston dance craze, jazz, and flapper fashions, in many respects it was also quite conservative. At the same time as
hemlines went up and moral values seemed to decline, the nation saw the end of its open immigration policy, the revival of
the Ku Klux Klan, and the trial of a Tennessee high-school teacher for teaching evolution.

The Red Scare and immigration policy. In the first few years after World War I, the country experienced a brief period of
antiradical hysteria known as the Red Scare. Widespread labor unrest in 1919, combined with a wave of bombings, the
Communists in power in Russia, and the short-lived Communist revolt in Hungary, fed the fear that the United States was
also on the verge of revolution. Under the direction of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, thousands of suspected radicals
were arrested in 1919 and 1920; those that were aliens were deported. Although the Red Scare faded quickly after 1920, it
strengthened the widespread belief in a strong connection between foreigners and radicalism. The bias against foreigners
was exemplified in the Sacco and Vanzetti trial. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian-born, self-admitted
anarchists who, in 1920, were indicted for robbery and murder in Massachusetts; they were found guilty and sentenced to
death in July 1921. Their supporters claimed that they were convicted for their ethnic background and beliefs rather than on
conclusive evidence. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in August 1927 after all their appeals were exhausted.
Hostility toward foreigners was also reflected in a fundamental change in American immigration policy. In 1920, the flow of
new immigrants approached pre-war levels. Congress responded in 1921 with the Quota Act, which set the maximum
number of immigrants entering the United States annually at 350,000, apportioned at 3 percent of each nationality living in
the country in 1910 (based on the 1910 census). However, this act still allowed for a significant immigration from southern
and eastern Europe, alleged hotbeds of radicalism. Consequently, the National Origins Act of 1924 reduced the total
number of immigrants to 150,000 a year, with quotas set at 2 percent of each nationality's population in the United States in
1890. Under this formula, the quota was less than 4,000 for Italy and around 6,000 for Poland, while the quotas for Great
Britain and Germany were 34,000 and 50,000 per year, respectively. In addition to limiting immigration as much as possible,
the intent of the legislation was to allow the more desirable immigrants from northern and western Europe to come into
the United States in higher numbers.
The Ku Klux Klan. The Ku Klux Klan, an organization formed by white southerners during Reconstruction, was revived in
Georgia in 1915. The new Klan was particularly strong in the Midwest and Southwest as well as in cities such as Atlanta,
Chicago, Detroit, and Indianapolis. According to its supporters, it stood for law and order, old time religion and the moral
values associated with it, immigration restriction, and opposed groups who were not 100 percent American foreigners,
Catholics, Jews, and African-Americans. The KKK was open only to native-born white Protestants and drew its strongest
support from the working class members of that group who were in competition with blacks and new immigrants for jobs
and housing. A potent force in American politics in the mid-1920s with between three and eight million members, the Klan
controlled the legislatures in Indiana, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Texas and was key to the election of several governors and
numerous local officials. The Klan declined rapidly after 1925 due to scandals involving its leadership and the drop in
immigration numbers caused by the National Origins Act.
Prohibition was one of the programs the Klan supported. When the Eighteenth Amendment became effective in January
1920, Congress passed the Volstead Actto implement it. Although alcohol consumption in the United States did drop by as
much as half during the '20s, people who wanted to drink found it easy to do so either by brewing their own alcohol (which
was legal, as long as it was not sold) or by buying bootleg liquor in illegal saloons known as speakeasies that had sprung
up everywhere. Enforcement of Prohibition was never adequately staffed or funded, and the illicit trade in alcohol
contributed to the growth of organized crime. By the end of the decade, many Americans recognized that Prohibition may
well have caused more problems than it solved. A national debate was joined during the 1928 presidential campaign when
Smith called for an end to the noble experiment. Prohibition was finally repealed in December 1933 with the ratification of
theTwenty-first Amendment.
The fundamentalist revival. Fundamentalist Protestants felt their beliefs challenged in the 1920s. Secular culture of the
time seemed to have little place for religion, and church attendance was in decline. A movement to defend traditional
religion by emphasizing a literal interpretation of the Bible gained momentum in the '20s and especially targeted Darwin's
theory of evolution as a symbol for what was wrong in modern society. By the mid-1920s, a number of states had enacted
laws prohibiting the teaching of evolution. The law was challenged in Tennessee by a young high school biology teacher
named John Scopes.
Popularly known as the monkey trial, Scopes's trial was the first ever broadcast over radio and became a national event
primarily because of the notoriety of the attorneys representing each side. The American Civil Liberties Union brought in
Clarence Darrow, the most famous defense lawyer in the country, for Scopes, while the World Christian Fundamentalist
Union engaged William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential candidate and the former secretary of state, to assist the
prosecution. The trial was a clash between these two men and the beliefs they represented. The high point came when
Darrow called Bryan, a recognized lay authority on the Bible, as a witness, and Bryan admitted on the stand that it was
possible that creation may not have taken place in six, 24-hour days, thereby refuting a literal interpretation of the Bible.
Nonetheless, the jury found Scopes guilty of violating the state's anti-evolution statute and fined him $100.

A New Society: Economic & Social Change

A tide of economic and social change swept across the country in the 1920s. Nicknames for the decade, such as the Jazz
Age or the Roaring Twenties, convey something of the excitement and the changes in social conventions that were taking
place at the time. As the economy boomed, wages rose for most Americans and prices fell, resulting in a higher standard of
living and a dramatic increase in consumer consumption. Although most women's lives were not radically transformed by
labor-saving home appliances or gaining the right to vote, young American women were changing the way they dressed,
thought, and acted in a manner that shocked their more traditional parents. These changes were encouraged by the new
mass media that included radio and motion pictures.
Booming economy and consumerism. The American economy's phenomenal growth rate during the '20s was led by the
automobile industry. The number of cars on the road almost tripled between 1920 and 1929, stimulating the production of
steel, rubber, plate glass, and other materials that went into making an automobile. Henry Ford pioneered the two key
developments that made this industry growth possible standardization and mass production. Standardization meant
making every car basically the same, which led to jokes that a customer could get a car in any color as long as it was
black. Mass production used standardized parts and division of labor on an assembly line (introduced by Ford before the
war) to produce cars more quickly and efficiently. Both innovations had a dramatic impact on price: the Model T that sold for
$850 in 1908 sold for $290 in 1924. Ford also created new management techniques that became known as welfare
capitalism. To build worker loyalty and blunt the development of unions, Ford paid the highest wages in the industry and
established the 5-day, 40-hour workweek. Other companies followed suit, improving working conditions, setting up company
unions, offering health insurance and profit-sharing plans, and developing recreational programs. These tactics, along
with yellow dog contracts, through which employees agreed not to join a union, worked; union membership dropped by
almost two million between 1920 and 1929.
American industry produced thousands of consumer goods in the 1920s, everything from automobiles to washing machines
to electric razors. Mass consumption was encouraged through a combination of advertising, which created a demand for a
particular product, and installment buying, which enabled people to actually purchase the product. The power of advertising
to shape public attitudes had been demonstrated through the Committee on Public Information's use of media to marshal
public support during World War I. When peace came, ad agencies used newspapers, mass circulation magazines, and radio
to effect consumption patterns. They were able to blur the distinction between want and need by creating a fantasy
world in which love, youth, or elegance was available to anyone who bought a brand of toothpaste, a model car, or a new
perfume. The power of advertising even influenced religion. Bruce Barton's 1925 bestseller, The Man Nobody Knows,
portrayed Jesus Christ as a master salesman and the spread of Christianity as a successful advertising campaign. Providing
the opportunity to buy on credit was also a powerful marketing tool. Businesses exhorted consumers to put a small amount
down and pay off the balance in monthly installments, instead of saving money for an item and purchasing it with cash. As a
result, Americans' savings rate dropped sharply in the '20s, and their personal debt rose.
The new woman and minorities. One of the most enduring images of the 1920s is that of the flapper, a young woman
with short hair, wearing a knee-length dress, rolled-up stockings, and unbuttoned rain boots that flapped (hence the name)
when she walked. With a new look came new viewpoints and values, including a more open attitude toward premarital sex.
Margaret Sanger, who had first promoted birth control before World War I as a means of sparing poor women from
unwanted pregnancies, argued that the diaphragm gave women more sexual freedom. The new woman's mystique was
exemplified by the heroines of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Great Gatsby (1925) and
film stars such as Gloria Swanson.
But the flapper represented only a small percentage of American women; for the overwhelming majority, life did not change
that much. The sharp increase in the number of women in the labor force during World War I ended abruptly with the
armistice. Female employment grew slowly in the 1920s, mostly in occupations traditionally identified with women office
and social work, teaching, nursing, and apparel manufacturing and women who worked were usually single, divorced, or
widowed. Even with more women in the workplace, no progress was made on issues such as job discrimination or equal pay.
At home, despite claims of creating increased leisure time, the myriad of electrical appliances on the market actually did
little to alleviate the amount of housework women had to do. After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, women's
political progress also slowed. When given the vote, for example, women cast their ballot much the same way that men did,
basing their decisions on class, regional, and ethnic loyalties rather than gender. Furthermore, although the Equal Rights
Amendment was first introduced in Congress in 1923, and Nellie Ross became the first woman elected the governor of a
state (Wyoming) in the following year, there were still parts of the country were women could not hold public office. During

the '20s, the Great Migration of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North continued. The black population
of Chicago grew from less than 50,000 in 1910 to almost a 250,000 by 1930. The 1920s were also the time for new political
and cultural developments within the African-American community. Marcus Garvey, who advocated black pride and
supported a back to Africa movement among American blacks, founded theUniversal Negro Improvement Association
(UNIA), which espoused black economic cooperation and established black-owned grocery stores, restaurants, and even a
steamship company known as the Black Star Line. Although Garvey was arrested and convicted of fraud, the UNIA had more
than 80,000 members at its height and was the country's first mass African-American organization. At the same time, New
York's preeminent black neighborhood, Harlem, became a magnet for African-American artists, writers, scholars, and
musicians. The creative exploration of the black experience by men and women such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay,
Countee Cullen, and Nella Larsen became known as the Harlem Renaissance.
Blacks were not the only minority on the move in the 1920s. Neither the Quota Act nor the National Origins Act limited
immigration from countries in the Western Hemisphere, and nearly 500,000 Mexicans entered the United States between
1921 and 1930. Although most of the Spanish-speaking population lived in the Southwest and California and worked as farm
laborers, a small percentage found factory jobs in the Midwest and were sometimes recruited by American companies.
Popular culture. Commercial radio began in 1920 when Pittsburgh station KDKA broadcast the results of the presidential
election. As the number of homes with radios rapidly increased (from 60,000 in 1922 to more than 10 million in 1929), the
airwaves became the medium over which Americans got their news and entertainment. The business of radio was simple
and supported the growing consumer culture: local radio stations affiliated themselves with national networks, such as NBC
(1926) or CBS (1927), which provided programming underwritten by companies who bought air time for their commercials.
Motion pictures also became a major entertainment industry during the '20s, and the leading stars of the time Mary
Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, and Rudolph Valentino became popular icons. Studios built
theaters that resembled palaces, featuring mirrors, lush carpeting, and grand names such as the Rialto and the Ritz. Going
to the movies became a social occasion and one of the main activities for young people and turned into an even greater
phenomenon with the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927, the first talking motion picture. As the plots and themes of
movies grew more suggestive and after Hollywood experienced a series of scandals, government censorship seemed likely if
the industry did not clean up its act. In 1922, the studios established the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors
Association, better known as the Hays Office (after its first president Will H. Hays), to control the content of films.
The print media also expanded during the '20s. The exploits of celebrities were splashed across the pages of the new tabloid
newspapers such as New York City'sDaily News and Daily Mirror or were covered more sedately in Henry Luce's weekly
newsmagazine Time (1923). Reader's Digest, founded in 1921, made it easy to keep up with current events because its
contents were condensed versions of articles from a variety of magazines. The Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary
Guild, both started in 1926, revolutionized publishing by offering significant discounts on the best books that they declared
everyone should read. The bestseller lists of the 1920s featured novels that were destined to become classics, such as
Sinclair Lewis's Main Street (1920), a critique of small town life and society, and Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also
Rises (1926), the story of expatriate Americans in France and Spain after World War I. On the stage, playwrights turned
their attention to topics that had not been addressed before. All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924) by Eugene O'Neill dealt with
the relations between an African-American man and a white woman; the black actor and tenor Paul Robeson played the
male lead.
In This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald wrote that his generation, labeled by writer Gertrude Stein as the lost generation, had
grown up to find all gods dead. Although many of Fitzgerald's disillusioned contemporaries claimed that there were no
heroes in post-war America, the '20s actually produced heroes of a new type. Sports figures like baseball's Babe Ruth,
boxing heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, and football's Red Grange were household names whose exploits were
followed by millions in newspapers and on the radio. Daring feats could also turn people into instant celebrities, as in the
case of Gertrude Ederle in 1926 when she became the first woman to swim the English Channel. Richard Byrd's 1926 flight
over the North Pole earned him the Congressional Medal of Honor, and he received international renown for his explorations
of Antarctica. Similarly, following his solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean in March 1927, Charles Lindbergh became without
question the most famous person in America and perhaps the world.