CHAPTERS 15 & 16

THE JAZZ AGE

Sacco and Vanzetti

Anarchism – the Sacco and Vanzetti Trial

• Ferdinando Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were anarchists who were convicted of murdering two men during a 1920 armed robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts.

• Anarchism is the belief that all organization or government is oppressive.

• After a controversial trial and a series of appeals, the two Italian immigrants were executed on August 23, 1927

• There is a highly politicized dispute over their guilt or innocence.

The Trial

• Vanzetti claimed that he had been selling fish at the time of the Braintree robbery. Sacco claimed that he had been in Boston applying for a passport at the Italian consulate

• The presiding judge was Webster Thayer. A few weeks earlier he had given a speech condemning Bolshevism and anarchism. He supported the suppression of radical speech

• A crucial piece of evidence was a cap that was left at the scene of the crime. It was supposedly Sacco’s, but when he tried it on, it was obviously too small. Thayer told the jury to ignore this.

• Most people believed that the trial was about race and immigrations rather than guilt and innocence.

KKK

• The KKK was almost out of business by the 1900’s. Fear of immigrants brought new recruits.

• The “new” KKK expanded their hatred.

New KKK

• Where the old KKK was primarily about segregation. The New KKK pointed their hatred at Jews, Catholics, foreigners, anything seen as different and unAmerican.

• Before, the KKK was seen as being made up of lower class white trash.

• The hired a public relations firm to advertise the New KKK and make it acceptable for middle class people to join. They were successful.

National Origins Act

• The National Origins Act was passed by Congress in response to fears of immigration.

• The Act placed specific quotas on the number of each nationality or race or religion that could come to the US.

• Mexicans were specifically excluded from the quotas to due political pressure by southwestern politicians.

Immigrations Acts of 1921-24 & 29

• A series of acts limiting immigration were passed in the 1920’s.

• These acts were in response to the immigration surge of the late 19th and early 20th century and in response to the Red Scare.

• People feared two things with continued immigration: miscegnation and bolshevism.

Eugenics

• Another response to the immigration surge and changed race relations was an interest in Eugenics.

• Eugenics is considered to be the “science” of selective breeding. The idea was that some kind of “pure” race could be attained.

• Many, many people believed this idea.

Flappers• Flapper was a term applied to a "new

breed" of young women who wore short skirts, bobbed their hair, listened to jazz, and flaunted their disdain for what was then considered acceptable behavior.

• Flappers were seen as brash for wearing excessive makeup, drinking, treating sex in a casual manner, smoking, driving automobiles and otherwise flouting social and sexual norms.

• Flappers had their origins in the period of liberalism, social and political turbulence and increased transatlantic cultural exchange that followed the end of the First World War, as well as the export of American jazz culture to Europe.

Margaret Mead

• A woman that served as a role model for the new women of the 20’s was Margaret Mead.

• Her book “Coming of Age in Samoa” examined sexual ideas in foreign countries and shed new light on American attitudes toward sex.

• Mead was a champion of broadened sexual mores within traditional religious life

Fundamentalism

• The 1920’s saw the rise of fundamentalist religions.

• Fundamentalism is the belief that every word of the Bible is absolute fact and should be followed as such.

• Fundamentalism grew out of Americans fear of the changing roles of women, negroes, young people and materialistic society.

Billy Sunday

• Billy Sunday was a leading fundamentalist preacher.

• He was an ex-professional baseball player that found he could make more money preaching.

• His revivals attracted 100’s of thousands of people.

• He was a leader in the Prohibition Movement.

Aimee Semple McPherson

• Aimee Semple McPherson was a Los Angeles, California evangelist and media celebrity in the 1920s and 1930s.

• She founded the Foursquare Church.

• McPherson has been noted as a pioneer in the use of modern media, especially radio, which she drew upon through the growing appeal of popular entertainment in North America.

Scopes Trial• Scopes Monkey Trial occurred in 1925.• A high school biology teacher John Scopes was accused of violating

the a Tennessee law which made it unlawful to teach evolution.• Scopes was found guilty, but the verdict was overturned on a

technicality and he was never brought back to trial. • The trial drew intense national publicity, as national reporters

flocked to the small town of Dayton, to cover the big-name lawyers representing each side.

• William Jennings Bryan, three time presidential candidate for the Democrats, argued for the prosecution

• Clarence Darrow, the famed defense attorney, spoke for Scopes. • The trial saw modernists, who said religion was consistent with

evolution, against fundamentalists who said the word of God as revealed in the Bible trumped all human knowledge.

Prohibition

• The 18th Amendment prohibited the making or selling of alcohol in the United States.

• This was a result of the reforms of the late nineteenth century and was aimed primarily at immigrants in the cities.

• The leadership of the prohibition movement was located in rural areas.

The Volstead Act

• The Volstead Act was passed in 1919 was the enforcement legislation of the Prohibition.

• This act expanded the “police powers” of government to control private behaviors previously thought to be outside of governmental interference.

• Police powers are the powers of government that are used to punish or control behavior.

The Result of Prohibition

• The primary result of Prohibition was to make organized crime in the United States a profitable business.

• The idea behind Prohibition was to lessen the use of alcohol. The opposite happened.

• People used as much or more alcohol after the 18th amendment. The lure of illegality aided this.

• Crime soared in America as a result of the 18th Amendment and is the primary image that most Americans have of the 1920’s.

The Mafia

• The Mafia or Cosa Nostra was a Sicilian import that had spent the majority of its American existence in a 12 square block of Little Italy in New York.

• Prohibition made bootlegging or the making of illegal alcohol very profitable.

• Gangsters opened illegal bars called speakeasies and created huge organized crime organizations.

• One of the most famous was created in Chicago by Al Capone

End of Prohibition

• The roaring 20’s saw the prohibition of alcohol and the rise of crime.

• By the time of the Great Depression, the American people had had enough of government engaging in social experiments such as prohibition.

• The 21st Amendment ended Prohibition in 1933.

19th Amendment

• Women’s Suffrage or the right to vote was attained with the 19th Amendment in 1920.

• This was the result of over a century of work by women’s rights activists.

Lucky Lindy

• Charles Augustus Lindbergh "Lucky Lindy" and "The Lone Eagle“ was the first pilot to fly across the Atlantic alone.

• Lindbergh, then a U.S. Air Mail pilot, emerged from virtual obscurity to almost instantaneous world fame as the result of his solo non-stop flight from New York's Long Island to Le Bourget Field in Paris, France, a distance of nearly 3,600 miles in the single-seat, single-engine monoplane Spirit of St. Louis.

Radio• Radio dominated the Twenties, with roughly 3 million Americans owning

radios by 1923. • Most listeners still used crystal sets with earphones to receive news and

bulletins, advertising and music. • Later radios were developed that were large pieces of furniture that were

present in most homes. • Radio networks like ABC, NBC, CBS and RKO

featured music broadcast live, news, serials and religious programs.• The programs that were the biggest to come out of the 1920’s were soap

operas (One Life to Live and As the World Turns) ,comedies like Ma and Pa Kettle and serials like the Green Hornet, Superman and the Shadow.

• Baseball and Boxing became huge events and became the most important sporting events in America because of radio particulary with the arrival of baseball star Babe Ruth and Boxing champion Jack Dempsey.

• Football was also popular particularly with the arrival of the first great football celebrity, Red Grange.

• Radio ushered in the age of Mass Media or the presence of media in every event.

Harlem Renaissance

• The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke.

• Historians disagree as to when the Harlem Renaissance began and ended. The Harlem Renaissance is unofficially recognized to have spanned from about 1919 until the early or mid 1930s. Many of its ideas lived on much longer.

The Harlem Renaissance

• The Harlem Renaissance was a result of black culture finding the freedom of northern cities following the Great Migration.

• Writers, musicians, dancers, artists and designers made up the Harlem Renaissance.

• This was the most important artistic movement in US history.

Langston Hughes

• James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American novelist, playwright, short story writer, and columnist.

• He was one of the earliest innovators of the new literary art form jazz poetry.

• Hughes is one of the most famous of the Harlem Renaissance writers.

Jazz

• Jazz is a style of music that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in New

• Jazz is set off from other musical styles in its emphasis on improvisation

• It is the only truly American art form. • The word "jazz" (in early years also

spelled "jass") began as a West Coast slang term and was first used to refer to music in Chicago in about 1915.

Louis Armstrong

• The along with Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong is the most important musical figure of the 20th century.

• A trumpeter from New Orleans, Armstrong singlehandedly created most of the modern forms of jazz creation.

• He ranks ahead of Hendrix, the Beatles or any other more well known musician in his influence.

Duke Ellington

• If Armstrong is the most important instrumentalist of the 20th century, Duke Ellington is the most important composer.

• Ellington created a big band version of jazz that incorporated all the innovations of earlier small groups and added his own voice.

• Ellington is the most important American composer in history

Bessie Smith

• While Jazz was becoming more popular in among white audiences, the blues, a more rural music stayed popular mainly among black audiences.

• Certain performers are remembered from this period, Tampa Red, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith.

• Smith is particulary noteworthy in that she was called “the voice of soul” for her emotional delivery.

Civil Rights in the 1920’s

• Most African Americans were members of the Republican party in the early 20th century. This was due to the influence of Lincoln.

• The NAACP became particularly active in the 1920’s.

• Their biggest success was the blocking of the Supreme Court nomination of John J. Parker, a noted racist.

• The organization supported the Dyer Act, which would have made lynching illegal. The bill was not passed, but the publicity helped to lessen the number of lynchings.

Oscar DePriest

• In 1928, Oscar dePriest was elected to Congress from Chicago.

• He was the first African American to be elected Congress.

Black Nationalism

• Black Nationalism also arose during the 1920’s.• This movement was led by Marcus Garvey and

his “Back to Africa Movement” or Garveyism.• Garveyism would eventually inspire others,

ranging from the Nation of Islam, to the Rastafari movement

• The intention of the movement was for those of African ancestry to "redeem" Africa and for the European colonial powers to leave it.

Marcus Garvey

CHAPTER 16

The Politics of the 1920’s

• The Presidents of the 1920’s stand as a testament to the idea that the American people would elect Satan if the economy is good.

• The election of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover was a result of everyone else being too busy making money to run the country.

• These zeros were elected on platforms that praised motherhood, racism, conformity and wealth.

Warren G. Harding• Usually seen as tied for Grant as

conducting the most corrupt administration in American History.

• He appointed outright thieves to office and kept his mistresses in the closets in the White House (literally). The thieves were known as the Ohio Gang and the mistresses were called secretaries.

• Even as a blind hog finds an acorn, Harding did some good by accident.

– Budget and Accounting Act of 1921– He personally supported anti

lynching legislation, but he couldn’t get it passed.

– Sponsored the Fordney / McCumber Tariff, lowered taxes and social spending.

• That’s about it.

A Return to Normalcy

• People were tired of the war and tired of all the reforms of the Progressive Era and just wanted to make money and sleep late.

• Harding was the perfect man for this. He was very handsome (which appealed to the female vote- sorry, but it was true)

• He wasn’t very smart. To his credit, he knew this. He didn’t try to pretend he knew how to run the country.

• He is most famous for the quote “Americans want to return to normalcy (no such word, think of it as an early 20th century version of “strategery)

Harding Administration Scandals

• Now for the bad stuff• Charles Forbes runs the Veterans

Bureau. He not only runs it, but uses it as his personal bank.

• Along with looting the Bureau’s funds, he also required bribes to award contracts, this process being so open as to having its’ own government bid document printed at government expense.

• The fraud in the disable veterans department was so extensive that it is estimated that up to 50% of wounded veterans did not receive pensions because the budgets were taken up with administrative expenses.

• Forbes later went to prison, being the only bright spot in a dismal administration, but was later appointed CEO of Nabisco Co.

Harry Daugherty• Harry Daugherty was attorney

general of the United States. • In this capacity he accepted

bribes and let it be known that prisoners could be released by bribing him.

• He was indicted for fraud. He was placed in the odd position of being charge of prosecuting himself.

• He fixed this by simply refusing to do so and returning a bill of insufficient cause and dismissing the charges against himself.

• What is most amazing is that the majority of the administration saw no problem in this.

Teapot Dome• Albert Fall was a genius in much

they way that Al Capone was a successful businessman.

• He was in charge of the Defense Departments oil reserves as Secretary of the Interior.

• He used the oil fields as his personal property and leased the fields to oil companies.

• He also sold the naval oil reserves to the oil companies and gave the money to his wife.

• This came to be known as Teapot Dome Scandal and resulted in his conviction of corruption and spent a year in prison, the first cabinet officer to do so.

• The reason the sentence was so light was that most of the White House staff was in on it along the judge that heard the case.

Jess Smith

• During the years of Prohibition, when alcohol was against the law, the President regularly had parties in the White House featuring bootleg alcohol.

• Jess Smith, one of Harding’s closest advisors sold government jobs. He at least had the decency to commit suicide when he was caught.

Warren G. HardingThere is very little evidence that Harding himself benefited from this corruption and was actually, like Grant, exploited by his friends. Harding took a trip to Alaska to avoid the publicity and died of a heart attack in San Francisco. There were rumors of his death being a result of jealous women, jealous husbands or a product of organized crime. I prefer the idea that God had simply had enough of this foolishness.

Calvin Coolidge

• Silent Cal, just about as exciting as toothpaste. A tightwad and a firm believer in Laissez Faire. He believed that government should not only stop expanding, but rather, he wanted to shrink it.

• Cal spent most of his presidency sleeping, literally. He took a nap every day and only worked four hours a day. He said that he had to have at least ten hours of sleep every night to “stay alert”. Nobody can quite figure out what he needed to stay alert for.

• He was Harding’s vice-president but ran on his own in 1924 and won easily. The country was prosperous (he had nothing to do with this, but like all presidents, he got credit).

Silent Cal• Coolidge was a small town man

and remained as such until his death (when he died, Dorothy Parker asked “How could they tell?”)

• When told that the British were having trouble making their war loan payments and wanted extensions, he refused and when asked why he said “they borrowed the money didn’t they?”

• When he was mayor of Boston he used the military to break a police strike and believed to the end of his life that America was still the small town society he grew up in.

Herbert Hoover

• Herbert Hoover was probably the unluckiest President since James Buchanan.

• A devout Quaker and an Engineer, he rose from poverty, worked his way through Stanford and became a wealthy mining engineer.

Hoover

• He was a wonderful executive and administrator. He had handled the relief efforts in Europe following the war and during the war he had been head of the War Industries Board. He then became Secretary of Commerce. His reputation for hard work, honesty and intelligence was impeccable.

Hoover

• The problem was that he possessed a good intellect, poor instincts and bad ideals.

• He bought completely into the Republican laissez faire, market economy, social Darwinist view.

• When the bubble of prosperity burst in 1929 he refused to give up the Republican platform and ignored the poverty and starvation at the gates of the White House.

• A truly tragic figure and absolutely representative of America in the 20’s.

Hoover• The Crash of 29 destroyed his presidency and to a large extent,

Hoover himself. • As criticism of him grew stronger, he became more stubborn. • He was criticized for eating 7 course meals while people

starved but responded by saying that as president he had to set an example of optimism.

• He truly believed this stuff. • His wife had different opinions and as the Depression

deepened they simply stopped talking. She also required that all the butlers in the White house be exactly 5’5” tall.

• The Hoovers lived in a world that changed on them and they couldn’t change.

Prosperity• The First World War was an economic

boon. The United States benefited from the war in a number of ways.

• American goods and armaments more fully developed what was already a strong economy.

• The production of armaments in a country not previously dedicated to arms production allowed industry to diversify and to teach industry that they could quickly change production methods quickly on a national scale.

• the war experience made what was produced in American industry more diverse.

• the production of the first wave of the industrial revolution was aimed at what was known as heavy industry, the second wave spawned by the war was for consumer goods.

Mass Production

• The biggest factor in America’s prosperity was the perfection of the assembly line in American factories.

• On an assembly line, the job of making something is divided up into smaller and smaller tasks. This allows employers to pay lower wages for unskilled labor.

Henry Ford

• Henry Ford perfected the American car and made it affordable to most Americans.

• He did this by perfecting the assembly line and creating the Model T Ford also called the “tin lizzy”.

• By the 1920’s, automobiles had been around a long time, but they were expensive.

• Ford made it possible for most Americans to own a car and thus literally changed America.

Union Troubles

• The unions had agreed not to strike during the war. The end of the war and war time shortages combined to create inflation.

• The unions struck for higher wages to offset higher prices. Employers used hired thugs and federal troops to break the strikes.

• The general prosperity of the 1920’s made it possible for people to ignore these abuses.

Welfare Capitalism

• Welfare capitalism in the United States refers to the policies of large companies that developed internal welfare systems for their employees.

• It was promoted by business leaders during the 1920’s because of widespread economic insecurity, social reform activism, and labor unrest.

• It was based on the idea that Americans should look not to the government or to labor unions but to the workplace benefits provided by private-sector employers for protection against the fluctuations of the market economy.

• Companies employed these types of welfare policies to encourage worker loyalty, productivity and dedication and to discourage the formation of unions.

Open Shop

• An open shop is a place of employment where you are not required to join or financially support a union as a condition of being hired or working.

• Open shop is also known as merit shop

Isolationism

A national policy of not having political or economic relations with other countries.

• Isolationism was the official foreign policy of the US after WWI.

Supply Side Economics

• Supply side economics focuses on tax relief and aid to manufacturers and the upper classes. The profits they create would then “trickle” down to the lower classes.

• The idea is that since these groups create a large number of jobs and make the stock market profitable, then they should be considered first in the economic policy.

• This ignores the idea that 90% of America’s GNP is related to small businesses.