The Great Migration, 1910s to 1930s2 million African Americans left the U. S. South.Before 1910 80% of African Americans lived in South.After 1930 50% of African Americans lived in the South.

Fled “Jim Crow” segregation laws and racial discrimination.Marginal economic advances facilitated relocation.

Where do they go? Sought agricultural work in the American West and industrial work in urban northern centers.

What do they find? “Jim Crow” followed north. “Race issues” became national, no longer regional, if race was ever solely a southern issue.

1917: 26 race riots in the North. 1918: 25 race riots in the North. 1919: 70 race riots including 13 day riot in Chicago after murder of Eugene

Williams

African American Uplift

W. E. B. DuBois (1868-1963)Booker T. Washington (1865-1915)

Marcus Garvey (1887-1940)

African American Responses to Racism in the Progressive Era

Accommodation: Focus on self-improvement and economic advancement, become useful to society, and discrimination will fade.

Confrontation: Assert political rights in order to protect economic gains, demand recognition as fully human, as equals, as a matter of dignity.

Separatism: Reject white society and values, acknowledge white racism as insurmountable, build African American institutions, perhaps even nations.

W.E.B. DuBois

Northern, Massachusetts born.Mixed race of Dutch and Haitian ancestry, “light

skinned” Educated at Fisk College in Tennessee in 1888. First

African American to earn PhD from Harvard in 1895.Wrote over 30 books in his 95 years on race issues.Argued in 1890s to 1930s that African Americans should

struggle for political equality.Joined Communist Party in 1940s, moved to Ghana in

1960s.

Booker T. Washington

Born into slavery in Virginia.Educated at Hampton Institute and Wayland Seminary.In 1881 Washington founded the Tuskegee Institute, a school which

trained African American teachers in Alabama.As Tuskegee Institute director Washington toured the South

promoting a message of education and economic self improvement.

1895 Atlanta Address: Controversial call for African Americans to “cast down your bucket where you are”

Wealthy and politically connected support Washington: Andrew Carnegie, Presidents McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft.

Published Up from Slavery (1901)

Marcus GarveyJamaican born.Founded Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).Edited Negro World newspaper, 1910s.Black Star Line- a yacht and cruise company providing service from

USA to Caribbean.Established store fronts in Harlem NYC for his press and steamship

line.1920s- Promoted back to Africa movement and black nationalism1927- U.S. government charged Garvey with mail fraud and

deported him.Garveyism inspired 1940s and 1950s Civil Rights leaders such as

Malcolm X; UNIA still in existence.

Jazz Age: Jazz

Mississippi River origins: Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, New Orleans

Dixieland in 1910s, Big Band in 1920s, Swing and Bop in 1930s and 1940s, international influences in 1950s.

White musicians and audiences embrace jazz.Mixed audiences and integrated bands provoke

backlash.Jazz associated in 1920s with defiance against

Prohibition.

Jazz Age: Harlem Renaissance

Harlem booms during Great Migration, 1910-1930s

Flourishing African American arts community: jazz, painting, poetry, fiction, journalism

• Langston Hughes• Zora Neale Hurston• Paul Robeson“New Negro” Pan-Africanism

Palmer HaydenAaron Douglas, 1925

William Johnson

Archibald Motley

NAACP and Urban League

NAACP:Founded 1909.Embodies DuBois’s notions of confrontation.Pledges to use legal systems and courts to challenge

individuals and institutions which violate Civil Rights laws.

Urban League:Founded in 1910.Embodies Washington’s notions of accommodation.Focused on job training, education, and employment.

Early Women’s Suffrage

1848: Women’s rights convention held in upstate New York.1850s: Women’s rights and antislavery groups agitated for

women’s right to vote.1868 and 1870: Amendments granted citizenship and the

vote to freedmen, alliance between abolitionists and feminists unsettled.

Stanton: “Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung who do not know the difference between a Monarchy and a Republic, who never read the Declaration of Independence . . . making laws for Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott, or Fanny Kemble.”

Susan B. Anthony Elizabeth Cady Stanton

• 1870s and 1880s: two organization focused on Woman’s suffrage.• National WSA sought federal amendment. Led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Stanton.• American WSA sought state level reforms. Led by Lucy Stone and others.• NWSA and AWSA merge in 1890

Continued both campaigns at state and national level.

Wyoming, territory, 1869Utah, territory, 1870 to 1887Wyoming, state, 1890Colorado, state, 1893Utah, state, 1895Idaho, state, 1896Washington, state, 1910California, state, 1911Arizona, Oregon, states, 1912Illinois, state, 1913Montana, state, 1914New York, state, 1917 !!!

Jeannette Rankin, 1st Woman in Congress

Amendment 19

1915, Defeated in House 1918, President Wilson urges passage of law1919, Fails in Senate1919, Wilson calls special session and leans on Congress

to solve this before 1920 electionsJune 1919 passes Congress and goes to states for

ratificationAugust 1920 36th state (Tennessee, in a 50 to 49 vote)

ratifies it and Women’s Suffrage becomes national law.

Holdouts?• Connecticut, 1920• Vermont, 1921• Delaware, 1923

• Maryland, 1941• Virginia, 1952• Alabama, 1953• Florida, 1969• South Carolina, 1969 • Georgia, 1970• Louisiana, 1970• North Carolina,1971 • Mississippi, 1984

Connecticut, Vermont, and Delaware delayed ratification because of the timetable for their state assemblies to meet, but ratified relatively soon after the Amendment became national law.

Why did the US South resist ratifying the Amendment? Unnecessary effort? A symbolic, anti-Progressivism act? Generally slower to respond to national changes?

What about Arkansas, Texas, and Tennessee?

Rural America, 1920s

“Dries” versus “Wets” battled over prohibition.“Dries” usually rural, native-born Whites,

Protestants.“Wets” usually urban, immigrant or 2nd and 3rd

generation communities.“Dries” and conservative rural Americans often

associated with opposition to alcohol, women’s suffrage, jazz, African American migration, and “modernism” in general.

ProhibitionAmendment 18, 1919 (Repealed in 1933)• Section 1. After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture,

sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.

• Section 2. The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

• Section 3. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.

Loophole?

Valentine’s Day Massacre, 1929

Repeal, 1933

Youth Culture

Flappers– Perceived to be sexually

liberated relative to Victorian era standards

– Women-in-public: dancing, dating, abandoning chaperones, drinking, smoking

– Bobbed hair– Short skirts– Critics associate this “new”

attitude with Women’s Suffrage campaign

A Consumer Economy

Ford vs General MotorsFord Motor Co, Henry Ford

Assembly LineModel T1912 12 ½ hours -> 1914 1 ½ hourHigh WagesCut prices 6 times from 1921 to 1925

General Motors, Arthur SloanSame manufacturing processesDifferentiated models by consumer classMarketed “prestige” and “conspicuous consumption”

A Consumer Economy

• Ready-mades• Catalogs• Department Stores• Psychological Marketing• World War I Propaganda Techniques• Planned Obsolescence• Home, automobile, appliance loans -> more

credit=more consumption and debt

Scopes “Monkey Trial” 1925

Tennessee law prohibited teacher John Scopes from teaching evolution.

Clarence Darrow hired for the defense.William Jennings Bryan hired by prosecution as an expert witness on

the veracity of the Bible.Modernism vs. tradition. Darrow savaged Bryan’s faith, critics

hostile to rural America used this to demonstrate the religious backwardness of the “dries” and rural Americans generally.

Bryan made an unconvincing defense relying on the Bible as factual but made a persuasive case that the logical conclusions of evolution would support “social Darwinism” and capitalistic exploitation of the weak. Bryan instead pled for fraternal, communitarian Christian values.

Win? Lose? Draw?

Immigration Reform, 1920s

1921: Emergency Quota Act3% of 1910 Levels

1924: National Origins Act2% of 1890 Levels

1927: National Origins Act, Revised2% of 1920 Levels

Open immigration closed down. 1930s: Depression + Restriction= End of mass

immigration until postwar period.

Rural America, 1920sKu Klux Klan, Second Phase• Inspired by Birth of a Nation, 1915 film• Based out of Indiana, not former slave holding south.• Began burning crosses.• Catalog sales regularized costume.• Shares and rebates encouraged enlistment in pyramid scheme.• Anti-evolution, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-union, anti-

alcohol, anti-women’s suffrage, embraced “chivalric” defense of womanhood.

• 4 million in 1920, 6 million in 1924, 30 million in 1930• 1930s decline: Immigration curtailed, prohibition failed, women’s

suffrage achieved, Great Depression cut membership drives, leadership convicted of corruption, murder, rapes in late 1920s.

Presidential Elections, 1920s

1920Warren Harding (R) 60%

(Coolidge VP) 16 million404 EC

James Cox (D) 34%(FDR VP) 9 million

127 ECDebs (S) (in prison) 913,000

Presidential Elections, 1920s

1924Calvin Coolidge (R) 54%

15.7 million382 EC

John Davis (D) 29%8.4 million12 EC

Robert LaFollette (P) 17%4.8 million1 EC

Presidential Elections, 1920s

1928Herbert Hoover (R) 58%

21.4 million

444 ECAl Smith (D) 41%

15 million

87 EC

1920

1924

1928

Presidential Elections, 1920s

Three Republican Victories1921 to 1933 Republican White House1920 to 1930 Republican CongressProgressivism of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson

on defensive.Republican Party not committed to Progressivism,

embraced return to “normalcy” with limited government, pro-business approach.

Critics referred to these Presidents as the “Do Nothing” Presidents.