I. Conflicted Legacies of World War I |
|
A. |
Racial
Strife |
|
|
1. |
Many African Americans emerged from the war
determined to stand up for their rights and contributed to a spirit of
resistance to oppression that characterized the early 1920s. |
|
|
2. |
Blacks who had migrated to the North and blacks
who had served in the war had high expectations that exacerbated white racism;
lynching nearly doubled in the South, and race riots
broke out in the North. |
|
|
3. |
A variety of tensions were present in northern
cities where violence erupted: black voters determined the winners of close
elections, and blacks competed with whites for jobs and housing. |
|
B. |
Erosion of Labor Rights |
|
|
1. |
The war effort, overseen by a Democratic administration sympathetic to labor,
had temporarily increased the size and power of labor unions. |
|
|
2. |
The National War Labor Board (NWLB), formed in April 1918, established an
eight-hour day for war workers, with time and a half pay for overtime, and
endorsed equal pay for women. |
|
|
3. |
In return for a no-strike pledge, the NWLB also supported workers’ right to
organize. |
|
|
4. |
Membership in the American Federation of Labor (
AFL)
grew by a third, reaching over 3 million by war’s end. |
|
|
5. |
Workers’ expectations rose as the war economy brought higher pay and better
working conditions. |
|
|
6. |
Workers of all races had hopes for a better life, but after the war employers
resumed attacks on union activity, and rapidly rising inflation threatened to
wipe out wage increases. |
|
|
7. |
As a result of workers’ determination and
employers’ resistance, one in every five workers went on strike in 1919;
strikes were held by steelworkers, shipyard workers in
Seattle,
and policemen in
Boston. |
|
|
8. |
Governor Calvin Coolidge of
Massachusetts
fired the entire
Boston
police force, and that strike failed; Coolidge was rewarded with the Republican
vice presidential nomination in 1920. |
|
|
9. |
A crucial factor in organized labor’s failure to
win many of its strikes in the postwar period was the pervasive fear of
radicalism in
America
,
which coincided with a long-standing anxiety about unassimilated immigrants, an
anxiety that had been made worse by the war. |
|
|
10. |
Antilabor decisions by the Supreme Court were an important factor in labor’s
decline. In Colorado Coal Company v.
United Mine Workers (1925), the Court ruled that a striking union could be
penalized for illegal restraint of trade. |
|
|
11. |
The Court also struck down federal legislation regulating child labor; in Atkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923), it
voided a minimum wage for women workers in the
District of Columbia, reversing many of the
gains that had been achieved before World War I through the groundbreaking
decision in Muller v. Oregon. |
|
|
12. |
Such decisions and aggressive antiunion campaigns caused membership in labor
unions to fall from 5.1 million in 1920 to 3.6 million in 1929—only 10 percent
of the nonagricultural workforce. |
|
|
13. |
The 1920s marked the heyday of welfare capitalism, a system of labor relations
that stressed management’s responsibility for employees’ well-being. Employers
hoped this would build a loyal workforce and head off strikes and labor unrest.
At a time when government unemployment compensation and Social Security did not
exist, General Electric, U.S. Steel, and other large corporations offered
workers health insurance and old-age pensions. But such plans covered only
about 5 percent of the industrial workforce. |
|
C. |
The Red
Scare |
|
|
1. |
The Russian Revolution of 1917 so alarmed the
Allies that Wilson sent several thousand troops to
Russia
in hopes of weakening the
Bolshevik regime. |
|
|
2. |
American fears of communism deepened as the labor
unrest coincided with the founding of the Bolsheviks’ Third International (or
Comintern) to export Communist doctrine and revolution to the rest of the
world. |
|
|
3. |
Ironically, as public concern about domestic
Bolshevism increased, the U.S. Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party
were rapidly losing members and political power. |
|
|
4. |
Tensions mounted with a series of bombings in the
early spring of 1919; in November, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer staged
the first of what were known as “Palmer raids,” in which federal agents stormed
the headquarters of radical organizations. |
|
|
5. |
Lacking the protection of
U.S.
citizenship, thousands of
aliens who had committed no crime but were suspect because of their anarchist
or revolutionary beliefs or their immigrant backgrounds faced deportation
without formal trial or indictment. |
|
|
6. |
Palmer predicted that a conspiracy attempt to
overthrow the government would occur on May Day in 1920; when the incident
never occurred, the hysteria of the Red Scare began to abate. |
|
|
7. |
At the height of the Red Scare, Nicola Sacco and
Bartolomeo Vanzetti—alien draft evaders—were arrested for robbery and murder,
were denied a new trial even though evidence surfaced that suggested their
innocence, and were executed in 1927. |
II. Politics in the 1920s |
|
A. |
Women in Politics |
|
|
1. |
At the start of the 1920s, many progressive women hoped that the achievement of
full voting rights would offer women new leverage to tackle industrial poverty.
They created new organizations like the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee,
a Washington-based advocacy group. The committee’s greatest accomplishment was
the first federally funded health-care legislation, the Sheppard-Towner Federal
Maternity and Infancy Act (1921). |
|
|
2. |
Sheppard-Towner provided federal funds to subsidize medical clinics, prenatal
education programs, and visiting nurses. Though opponents warned that the act
would lead to socialized medicine, Sheppard-Towner improved health care for the
poor and significantly lowered infant mortality rates. It also marked the first
time that Congress designated federal funds to the states and encouraged them
to administer a social welfare program. |
|
|
3. |
Moved by the immense scale of suffering caused by World War I, some women
joined a growing international peace movement. Treaty-makers ignored them, but
the activists organized for sustained opposition to war. In 1919, they created
the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), whose leading
members included Jane Addams. Through the 1920s and beyond, the League
denounced imperialism, proposed social justice measures, and stressed the
suffering caused by militarism. |
|
|
4. |
Despite such work, women’s activism suffered major setbacks in the 1920s. The
WILPF came under fierce attack during the Red Scare, based on the presence of
Socialist women among its ranks. |
|
|
5. |
Many congressmen initially supported the Sheppard-Towner Act because they
feared the voting power of women, but by the late 1920s, Congress ended the
program. |
|
|
6. |
Though women proved to be effective lobbyists, they had difficulty gaining
access to posts in the Republican and Democratic parties. Finding that women
did not vote as a bloc, politicians in both parties began to take their votes
for granted. |
|
B. |
Republican “Normalcy” |
|
|
1. |
With President
Wilson ailing in 1920, Democrats
nominated Governor James M. Cox of
Ohio for
president, on a platform calling for
U.S.
participation in the League of Nations and continuation of
Wilson’s progressivism. |
|
|
2. |
Republicans, led by their pro-business wing, tapped genial Ohio Senator Warren
G. Harding. In a dig at
Wilson’s
sweeping idealism, Harding promised “not nostrums but normalcy.” On Election
Day, he won in a landslide, beginning an era of Republican dominance that
lasted until 1932. |
|
|
3. |
Harding’s most energetic appointee was Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover.
Under
Hoover’s
direction, the Commerce Department helped to create 2,000 trade associations
representing companies in almost every major industry. Government officials
worked closely with the associations, providing statistical research,
suggesting industry-wide standards, and promoting stable prices and wages. |
|
|
4. |
Hoover hoped
that through voluntary business cooperation with government—an “associated
state”—he could achieve what progressive reformers had sought through
governmental regulation. |
|
|
5. |
When President Harding died suddenly of a heart attack in August 1923, evidence
was just coming to light that parts of his administration were riddled with
corruption. The worst scandal concerned the secret leasing of government oil
reserves in
Teapot Dome,
Wyoming,
and
Elk Hills,
California, to private companies. |
|
|
6. |
Assuming office after Harding’s death, President Calvin Coolidge maintained Republican
dominance while offering a contrast to his predecessor’s cronyism. |
|
|
7. |
Campaigning in 1924, Coolidge called for limited government, isolationism in
foreign policy, and tax cuts for business. |
|
|
8. |
Rural and urban Democrats, deeply divided over such issues as prohibition and
immigration restriction, deadlocked at their national convention; delegates
cast 102 ballots before finally choosing John W. Davis, a Wall Street lawyer. |
|
|
9. |
Coolidge easily defeated
Davis and staved off a
challenge by Senator Robert M. La Follette of
Wisconsin, who tried to resuscitate the
Progressive Party. In the end, Coolidge received 15.7 million votes to
Davis’s 8.4 million and La
Follette’s 4.9 million. |
|
|
10. |
For the most part, Republicans declined to carry forward progressive
initiatives from the pre-war years. The Republican-dominated Federal Trade
Commission (FTC) failed to enforce antitrust laws. |
|
|
11. |
With the agricultural sector facing hardship, Congress sought to aid farmers
with the McNary-Haugen bills of 1927 and 1928, which proposed a system of
federal price supports for major crops. But President Coolidge opposed the
bills as special-interest legislation and vetoed them both. |
|
C. |
Dollar Diplomacy |
|
|
1. |
Political campaigns emphasized domestic issues in the 1920s, but the
United States
nonetheless remained deeply engaged in foreign affairs. The Harding, Coolidge,
and
Hoover administrations all sought to advance
U.S.
business interests, especially by encouraging private banks to make foreign
loans. They hoped such loans would stimulate growth and increase demand for
U.S.
products in developing markets. |
|
|
2. |
In 1922, when American banks offered an immense loan to
Bolivia
, at a hefty profit, the State Department
pressured
Bolivia
to accept it. It also forced
Bolivia
to agree to financial oversight by a commission under the banks’ control. A
similar arrangement was reached with
El Salvador
’s
government in 1923, though efforts to broker such deals in
Honduras
and
Guatemala
fell through. |
|
|
3. |
Where stronger action was needed, the
United States
intervened
militarily, often to force repayment of debt. The U.S.
Marines occupied
Nicaragua
almost continuously from 1912 to 1933, the
Dominican
Republic
from 1916 to 1924, and
Haiti
from 1915 to 1934. |
|
|
4. |
In these lengthy military deployments, Americans came to think of these
occupied countries as essentially
U.S.
possessions, much like Puerto Rico and the
Philippines
. |
|
|
5. |
At home, critics denounced both loan guarantees and military interventions as dollar diplomacy. African American
leaders also denounced the Haitian occupation. On behalf of the Women’s
International League for Peace and Freedom and the International Council of
Women of the Darker Races, a delegation conducted a fact-finding tour of
Haiti
in 1926. Their report exposed, among other things, the sexual exploitation of
Haitian women by
U.S.
soldiers. |
|
|
6. |
By the late 1920s, dollar diplomacy was on the defensive, in keeping with a
broader mood of isolationism and disgust with international affairs. |
|
|
7. |
At the same time, political leaders became frustrated with their poor results.
Dollar diplomacy usually managed to get loans repaid, securing bankers’
profits. But the loans often ended up in the pockets of local elites;
U.S.
policy had failed to build broad-based prosperity overseas. |
|
|
8. |
Military intervention could have even more dire results. In
Haiti
, the Marines crushed peasant
protests and helped the Haitian elite consolidate its power.
U.S.
occupation thus helped create
the conditions for harsh future dictatorships that Haitians endured through the
rest of the twentieth century. |
|
D. |
Culture Wars |
|
|
1. |
By 1929, ninety-three
U.S.
cities had populations over 100,000.
New York City
exceeded 7 million, and the population of
Los
Angeles had exploded to 1.2 million. |
|
|
2. |
The lives and beliefs of urban Americans—including millions of recent
immigrants—often differed dramatically from those in small towns and farming
areas. |
|
|
3. |
Native-born rural Protestants, faced with a dire perceived threat, mobilized in
the 1920s to protect what they saw as “American values.” This antiforeign
sentiment is termed nativism. |
|
|
4. |
Rural and native-born Protestants started the decade by achieving a longtime
goal: prohibition of liquor. The nation’s decades-long prohibition campaign
culminated with Congress’s passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1917.
Ratified by nearly every state and effective in January 1920, the amendment
prohibited “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors”
anywhere in the
United
States
. |
|
|
5. |
Though widely circumvented in urban “speakeasies” and other illegal drinking
sites, the law remained in force until its repeal in 1933. Defenders hailed it
as a victory for health, morals, and Christian values. |
|
|
6. |
At the state and local levels, controversy erupted as fundamentalist Protestants
sought to mandate school curricula based on Biblical creation. |
|
|
7. |
In 1925,
Tennessee’s
legislature outlawed the teaching of “any theory that denies the story of the
Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, [and teaches] instead that man
has descended from a lower order of animals.” The American Civil Liberties
Union (ACLU), which had been formed during the Red Scare to protect free speech
rights, challenged the law’s constitutionality. It intervened in the trial of
John T. Scopes, a high school biology teacher who taught evolution to his class
and faced a jail sentence for doing so. |
|
|
8. |
The case attracted national attention because Clarence Darrow, a famous
criminal lawyer, defended Scopes, while William Jennings Bryan, the three-time
Democratic presidential candidate, spoke for the prosecution. |
|
|
9. |
The press dubbed the Scopes case the “monkey trial.” The label referred both to
Darwin’s
argument that human beings and other primates share a common ancestor and to
the circus atmosphere at the trial, which was broadcast live over a
Chicago radio station. |
|
|
10. |
Such conflicts created the climate for a stormy presidential election in 1928.
Democrats had traditionally drawn strength from white voters in the South and
immigrants in the North. In the 1920s, however, these groups divided over
prohibition, immigration restriction, and the Klan. |
|
|
11. |
By 1928, the northern urban wing gained firm control. Democrats nominated
Governor Al Smith of
New York,
the first presidential candidate to reflect the aspirations of the urban
working class. The grandson of Irish peasants, Smith had risen through
New York City’s Democratic
machine and become a dynamic reformer. |
|
|
12. |
But Smith offended many small-town and rural Americans. He spoke in a heavy
New York accent and
sported a brown derby that highlighted his ethnic working-class origins.
Middle-class reformers questioned his ties to Tammany Hall; temperance
advocates opposed him as a “wet.” The governor’s greatest handicap was his
religion. Although Smith insisted that his Catholic beliefs would not affect
his duties as president, many Protestant leaders opposed him. |
|
|
13. |
Smith proved no match for the Republican nominee, Secretary of Commerce Herbert
Hoover. Enjoying the benefit of eight years of Republican prosperity,
Hoover promised voters
that individualism and cooperative endeavors would banish poverty. |
|
|
14. |
He won a major victory, receiving 58 percent of the popular vote to Smith’s 41
percent and an overwhelming 444 electoral votes to Smith’s 87. |
III. Intellectual Modernism |
|
A. |
Harlem in Vogue |
|
|
1. |
As
New York’s black population tripled in the
decade after 1910, during the Great Migration,
Harlem
stood as a symbol of hope to African American people. Talented black artists
and writers flocked to the district, where they broke with older genteel
traditions and asserted ties to
Africa. |
|
|
2. |
Writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance championed race pride. Claude
McKay, Jean Toomer, and Jessie Fauset explored the black experience and
represented in fiction what philosopher Alain Locke called the “New Negro.”
This creative work embodied the ongoing struggle to find a way, as the
influential black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois explained, “to be both a Negro and an American.” |
|
|
3. |
To millions of Americans, the most visible part of the
Harlem
revolution was jazz. As a musical form, jazz coalesced in
New Orleans and other parts of the South
before World War I. Borrowing from blues, ragtime, and other popular forms,
jazz musicians developed an ensemble style in which individual performers,
keeping a rapid ragtime beat, improvised over and around a basic melodic line. |
|
|
4. |
The majority of early jazz musicians were black, but white performers, some of
whom had more formal training, injected elements of European concert music. |
|
|
5. |
As jazz spread, it generally followed the routes of the Great Migration of
blacks from the South to northern and western cities, where it met consumers
primed to receive it. |
|
|
6. |
Before World War I, ragtime and other forms of dance music had created broad,
enthusiastic audiences for African American music. Most cities had plentiful
venues where jazz could be featured. |
|
|
7. |
By the 1920s, radio also helped popularize jazz, as the emerging record
industry churned out records of the latest tunes.
New York became the hub of this commercially
lucrative jazz. White listeners—who hailed “primitive” black music and seldom
suspended their racial condescension when they went “slumming” to mixed-race
clubs—flocked to theaters, ballrooms, and expensive clubs to hear the “Harlem
sound” from the orchestras of Duke Ellington and other stars. |
|
|
8. |
Through jazz, the recording industry began to develop products specifically
aimed at urban working-class blacks. While its marketing reflected the
segregation of American society at large, jazz brought black music to the
center stage of American culture. It became the era’s signature music, so much
so that novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald dubbed the 1920s the “Jazz Age.” |
|
|
9. |
It was no accident that the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which
arose in the 1920s to mobilize African American workers, was based in
Harlem. Led by Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey, the UNIA
championed black separatism. |
|
|
10. |
The charismatic Garvey urged followers to move to
Africa,
arguing that peoples of African descent would never be treated justly in
white-run countries. |
|
|
11. |
The UNIA grew rapidly in the early 1920s and soon claimed 4 million followers,
including many recent migrants to northern cities. It published a newspaper, Negro World, opened “liberty halls” in
northern cities, and solicited funds for the Black Star Line steamship company,
to trade with the West Indies and carry American blacks back to
Africa. |
|
|
12. |
But the UNIA declined as quickly as it had arisen. In 1925, Garvey was
imprisoned for mail fraud because of his solicitations for the Black Star Line.
President Coolidge commuted his sentence but ordered his deportation to
Jamaica
.
Without Garvey’s leadership, the movement collapsed. |
|
|
13. |
The UNIA left a legacy of activism, especially among working-class blacks.
Garvey and his followers represented an emerging pan-Africanism: they argued that people of African descent, in all
parts of the world, had a common destiny and should cooperate in political
action. |
|
|
14. |
Black men’s military service in Europe during World War I, the Pan-African
Congress that sought representation at the treaty table, the
U.S.
occupation of
Haiti
, and modernist experiments in
literature and the arts all contributed to this emerging transnational
consciousness. |
|
B. |
Critiquing American Life |
|
|
1. |
Other American artists and intellectuals of the 1920s registered bitter
dissents. Some had experienced firsthand the shock and devastation of World War
I, an experience so searing that American writer Gertrude Stein dubbed those
who survived it the the “Lost Generation.” |
|
|
2. |
Novelist John Dos Passos railed at the obscenity of “Mr. Wilson’s war” in The Three Soldiers (1921). Ernest
Hemingway’s novels The Sun Also Rises (1926)
and A Farewell to Arms (1929)
portrayed the futility and dehumanizing consequences of war. |
|
|
3. |
In a broad sense, the cataclysm of World War I challenged intellectuals’ belief
in human progress. In his poem The Waste
Land (1922), T. S. Eliot evoked the shattered fragments of a civilization
in ruins. |
|
|
4. |
The war accelerated a literary trend of exploring the dark side of the human
psyche. Playwright Eugene O’Neill, for example, offered a Freudian view of
humans’ raw, ungovernable sexual impulses, in such dramas as Desire Under the
Elms. O’Neill first made his mark with The
Emperor Jones (1920), which appealed to Americans’ fascination with
Haiti
. |
|
|
5. |
In a decade of conflict between traditional and modern worldviews, many writers
exposed what they saw as the hypocrisy of small-town and rural life. |
|
|
6. |
The most savage critic of conformity was Sinclair
Lewis, whose novel Babbitt (1922)
depicted the disillusionment of an ordinary small-town salesman. Babbit was widely denounced as
un-American; Elmer Gantry (1927), a
satire of a greedy evangelical minister on the make, provoked even greater
outrage. |
|
|
7. |
But critics found Lewis’s work superb, and in 1930 he became the first American
to win the Nobel Prize for literature. |
|
|
8. |
Even more famous was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The
Great Gatsby (1925), which offered a scathing indictment of Americans’
mindless pursuit of pleasure and material wealth. |
IV. From Boom to Bust |
|
A. |
Business after the War |
|
|
1. |
By the 1920s, large-scale corporations headed by chief executive officers
(CEOs) had replaced individual- or family-run enterprises as the major form of
American business organization. |
|
|
2. |
Through successive waves of consolidation, the two hundred largest businesses
came to control almost half the country’s nonbanking corporate wealth by 1929.
The greatest number of mergers occurred in rising industries such as chemicals
(in which Dupont emerged as the leader) and electrical appliances (General
Electric). |
|
|
3. |
Rarely did any single corporation monopolize an entire field; rather, an oligopoly of a few major producers
tended to dominate each market. At the same time, mergers between Wall Street
banks enhanced the role of
New York as the
financial center of the
United
States
and, increasingly, the world.
U.S.
companies exercised growing international power. |
|
|
4. |
Immediately after World War I, the
United States
experienced a series
of economic shocks. They began with rampant inflation, as prices jumped by
one-third in 1919 alone. Then came a sharp two-year recession in which
unemployment rose to 10 percent. |
|
|
5. |
Finally, the economy began to grow smoothly and more Americans began to benefit
from the success of corporate enterprise. Between 1922 and 1929, the gross
domestic product grew from $74.1 billion to $103.1 billion; per capita income
rose impressively from $641 to $847 (about $11,000 today, one-third of present
per capita income). |
|
|
6. |
Consumer products, particularly the automobile, sparked this expansion. Not
only did the products themselves create growth, but producing cars and
refrigerators also required huge quantities of steel, chemicals, and oil. |
|
|
7. |
Despite the boom, the economy had significant weaknesses throughout the 1920s.
Agriculture, which still employed one-fourth of all workers, never fully
recovered from the postwar recession. Once
Europe’s
economy revived, its farmers flooded world markets with grain and other farm
products, causing prices to fall. Other industries, including coal and
textiles, languished for similar reasons. Many rural Americans shared little of
the decade’s prosperity. The bottom 40 percent of American families had an
average annual income of only $725 (about $9,100 today). |
|
B. |
Consumer Culture |
|
|
1. |
By 1929, 40 percent of American households owned a radio. At the same time,
electric refrigerators and vacuum cleaners came into use in affluent homes. As
early as 1922, ten magazines claimed circulations of over 2.5 million,
including Time, the Saturday Evening Post, and Good Housekeeping. |
|
|
2. |
If one judged from the advertisements in magazines of the 1920s, all Americans
wore fashionable clothes and drove the latest model cars. That, of course, was
not true, but the advertising industry reached new levels of ambition and
sophistication, entering what one historian calls the era of the “aggressive
hard sell.” |
|
|
3. |
In practice, the question of who participated in consumer culture was contested—as
shown vividly in the
Tulsa
race riot, when white mobs plundered furniture and phonograph players from
black homes. |
|
|
4. |
Surrounded by exhortations to indulge in luxuries, millions of working-class
Americans barely squeaked by, with wives and mothers often taking paid work to
provide basic necessities. At times of crisis, some families sold all their
furniture, starting with pianos and phonograph players and moving, if
necessary, to dining tables and beds. |
|
|
5. |
When every dollar counted, the lure of consumer culture often created friction.
Married women resented husbands who spent discretionary cash and expected wives
to “make do.” Generational conflicts emerged, especially when wage-earning
children challenged the long-standing expectation that their earnings should go
“all to mother.” |
|
|
6. |
Poor and affluent families often had one thing in common: they stretched their
incomes by taking advantage of new forms of borrowing, such as auto loans and
installment plans. “Buy now, pay later,” said the ads, and millions did—a
factor that contributed to the country’s broad economic over-extension in the
1920s. Anyone, no matter how rich, could get into debt, but consumer credit was
particularly perilous for those living on the economic margins. Such easy
credit turned out to be a contributing factor to the bust in 1929. |
|
|
7. |
No possession typified national consumer culture better than the automobile, a
showpiece of modern consumer capitalism that revolutionized American economic
and social life. Mass production of cars played a major role in the boom of the
1920s. In a single year, 1929, Americans spent $2.58 billion on automobiles. By
the end of the decade, they owned 23 million cars—about 80 percent of the world’s
automobiles—or an average of one car for every six people. |
|
|
8. |
The exuberant expansion of the auto industry rippled through the economy, with
both positive and negative results. It stimulated the steel, petroleum,
chemical, rubber, and glass industries and, directly or indirectly, provided
jobs for 3.7 million workers. Highway construction became a
billion-dollar-a-year enterprise, financed by federal subsidies and state
gasoline taxes. Car ownership spurred the growth of suburbs and, in 1924, the
first suburban shopping center: Country Club Plaza outside
Kansas City,
Missouri. |
|
|
9. |
But cars were expensive, and most Americans bought them on credit. This created
risks not only for buyers but for the whole economy. Borrowers who could not
pay off car loans lost their entire investment in their cars; if they defaulted,
banks were left holding unpaid loans. But amid the boom of the 1920s, such a
scenario seemed remote. |
|
|
10. |
Cars changed the way Americans spent their leisure time. Though gasoline was
not cheap, proud drivers took their machines on the road. An infrastructure of
gas stations, motels, and drive-in restaurants soon catered to drivers. |
|
|
11. |
Cars also changed the dating patterns of young Americans. A Model T offered
more privacy than did the family living room or front porch and contributed to
increased sexual experimentation among the young. Though early cars were hardly
comfortable places for sex, manufacturers learned to accommodate the market. |
|
|
12. |
Railroad travel began to fade as automobiles became central to tourism. The
American Automobile Association, founded in 1902, estimated that in 1929 almost
a third of the population took vacations by car, patronizing “autocamps” and
cabins. Already, by 1923, there were 247 autocamps in
Colorado alone. |
|
|
13. |
In rural areas, cars contributed to the consolidation of churches and schools,
which could now be reached over longer distances. The automobile also
stimulated inter-community leagues for softball and other activities—as well as
an insatiable interest in movies and other commercial pleasures. |
|
|
14. |
Rural southern blacks, if they could get use of a car, found they could travel
three counties away and secure a loan that white bankers in their own county
might be reluctant to offer. |
|
|
15. |
Movies, which had their roots in short silent films shown in turn-of-the-century
nickelodeons, formed a second centerpiece of consumer culture. By 1910, the moviemaking industry had
moved to southern
California
to take advantage of cheap land, sunshine, and varied scenery within easy
reach. |
|
|
16. |
The large studios—United Artists,
Paramount,
and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—were run mainly by eastern European Jewish immigrants. |
|
|
17. |
By the end of World War I,
Hollywood
reigned as movie capital of the world, producing nearly 90 percent of all
films. New feature-length movies, exhibited in large, ornate theaters,
attracted middle-class as well as working-class audiences. |
|
|
18. |
Flappers represented only a tiny minority of women, but thanks to the movies
and advertising, they became an influential symbol of women’s sexual and social
emancipation. In cities, young immigrant women eagerly bought American makeup
and the latest flapper fashions and went dancing to jazz. |
|
|
19. |
Jazz stars helped popularize the style among working-class African Americans. Mexican-American
teenagers joined the trend, though they usually found themselves under the
watchful eyes of la dueña, the
chaperone. |
|
|
20. |
American radio and film had an immediate global impact, and politicians quickly
grasped the potential benefits for the
United States
. In 1919, with
government support, General Electric spearheaded the creation of Radio
Corporation of America (RCA), to expand
U.S.
presence in foreign radio
markets. |
|
|
21. |
During the 1920s, RCA—which had a federal appointee on its board of directors—emerged
as a major provider of radio transmission in Latin America and
East Asia. |
|
|
22. |
Meanwhile, by 1925, American films made up 95 percent of the movies screened in
Britain
, 80 percent in Latin
America, and 70 percent in
France
.
When
Britain
and
Germany
instituted quotas, requiring that the
number of imported films not exceed the number of domestic ones,
Hollywood studios set up European subsidiaries to churn
out hundreds of “quota quickies,” allowing the flow of imports to continue
unchecked. |
|
|
23. |
The
United States
was experimenting with what historians call soft power—the exercise of popular cultural influence—as radio and
movies exuberantly celebrated the American Dream. |
|
C. |
The Coming of the Great Depression |
|
|
1. |
Toward the end of the decade, strains on the economy began to show. By 1927,
consumer lending had become the tenth-largest business in the country, topping
$7 billion a year. Increasing numbers of Americans also bought into the stock
market, often with unrealistic expectations. |
|
|
2. |
Corporate profits were so high that some companies, fully invested in their own
operations, plowed excess earnings into the stock market. Some market players
compounded risk by purchasing on margin. Such a strategy raked in gains as long
as the economy grew, jobs were plentiful, and investments rose in value. But those
conditions did not last. |
|
|
3. |
Yet even when the stock market crashed, in a series of plunges
between October 25 and
November 13, 1929,
few onlookers understood the magnitude of the crisis. Deep, cyclical
depressions had been a familiar part of the industrializing economy since at
least the panic of the 1830s; such depressions had tended to follow periods of
rapid growth and speculation. A sharp downturn had occurred recently, in 1921,
without triggering long-term disaster. |
|
|
4. |
The market rose again in late 1929 and early 1930, and while a
great deal of money had been lost, most Americans hoped the aftermath of the
crash would be brief. |
|
|
5. |
Over the next four years, industrial production fell 37
percent, and construction plunged by 78 percent. Prices for crops and other raw
materials, already low, fell by half. By 1932, unemployment reached a
staggering 24 percent. The nation was experiencing the start of the Great
Depression. |
|
|
6. |
A precipitous drop in consumer spending helped deepen the
crisis. Having bought on credit, and now facing hard times, consumers cut back
dramatically, creating a vicious cycle of falling demand and forfeited loans. |
|
|
7. |
In late 1930, several major banks went under, victims of
overextended credit and reckless management. As industrial production slowed, a
much larger wave of bank failures occurred in 1931. These bank failures caused
an even more severe shock. Since the government did not insure bank deposits,
savings in failed banks simply vanished. |
|
|
8. |
The Great Depression was, in part, a global crisis that emerged
from the aftermath of World War I. By shattering
Europe
politically and economically, the war had destabilized international systems of
trade and finance.
Britain
’s
central bank had long played a key role in managing the international financial
system; the heavy cost of the war prevented it from resuming that role. |
|
|
9. |
In addition, the war disrupted the international gold standard.
The
United States
and most European nations had long tied the value of their currencies to gold.
This system had worked fairly well before the crisis of World War I, but it was
vulnerable during economic downturns, when foreign financiers withdrew their
investments and demanded gold payments. |
|
|
10. |
Faced with economic catastrophe, both
Britain
and
Germany
abandoned the gold standard
in 1931; when they did so, their economies began a modest recovery. A similar
pattern held for other industrialized and developing countries. |
|
|
11. |
But the
Hoover
administration argued that such a move would cause irreparable damage to trade
and the value of the dollar. Thus the Federal Reserve, which many Americans
hoped would mitigate the crisis, was forced to do two contradictory things at
once: try to revive the economy and protect the nation’s gold supply. |
|
|
12. |
The
United
States
finally left the gold standard in
1933, under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration. This, and
Roosevelt’s
resuscitation of banks, stimulated a partial recovery between 1933 and 1937. |
|
|
13. |
But, by that time, the crisis had achieved catastrophic
dimensions. Billions had been lost in bank and business failures, and the
economy had stalled completely. Partial recovery brought unemployment down from
25 to a “mere” 14 percent. |
|
|
14. |
In an effort to ease the depression, President Hoover did take
modest action. He created a Reconstruction Finance Corporation to provide loans
to banks, railroads, and utilities; his administration also slashed taxes, and
Hoover exhorted state and
local governments to employ the jobless on public projects. |
|
|
15. |
Overall, though, Republicans clung to the belief that
depressions were healthy and self-regulating. |
|
|
16. |
Adhering to their long-standing faith in high protective
tariffs, Republicans also enacted the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, hoping to
stimulate domestic manufacturing. Historians are divided on whether the tariff
worsened the depression, but it certainly did not help. It triggered
retaliatory tariffs in other countries, as governments worldwide struggled to
protect their own industries. |
|
|
17. |
Thus while the Great Depression began mere months after
Hoover took office, the
conditions that worsened it unfolded gradually over his presidential term. |
|
|
18. |
By the early 1930s, comprehending the
magnitude of the crisis, Americans looked back wistfully on the previous decade
of prosperity. In the 1920s, business had boomed, and politics had been so
placid that people chuckled when President Coolidge disappeared on extended
fishing trips. |
|
|
19. |
In the following decade, Americans still flocked to the movies
when they could afford it, eager to see lighthearted comedies that would help
them forget their woes. But they now wanted bold action in
Washington. |
|
|
20. |
In 1932, voters would replace Herbert Hoover with Democrat
Franklin D. Roosevelt. Republicans, who had held solid majorities in both
houses of Congress as late as 1931, found themselves swept out of power. |
|
|
21. |
Faced with the cataclysm of the Great Depression, Americans
transformed their government and created a modern welfare state. |