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Politics of the Roaring 20s
The Roaring 20’s 1920-29• Post War Issues
– Economy – had to adjust from making guns to making butter again
• Cost of living had doubled
– Harding campaigns for President “Return to Normalcy”
– Labor troubles• Jobs taken away from women and African Americans – given
back to returning GIs
Isolationism
• Did not want to get involved in another war like WWI – pulled away from world affairs– Feelings of nativism (prejudice against foreign born
people) increased
Communism• Russian revolution – Lenin’s Bolsheviks overthrew
tsar - established communist government
Red Scare
• Fear of Communism led to the Red Scare– Palmer Raids – suspected
communists hunted down
• Rights were taken away
• Not one single credible threat was found
– Young J Edgar Hoover predicts May 1, 1920 Communist Rebellion in US – nothing happens
Sacco and Vanzetti
• Italian anarchists• Charged with robbery and
murder – convicted even though evidence was circumstantial
• Executed• Example of discrimination
against radical beliefs during the Red Scare
Ku Klux Klan• Grows over Red Scare and anti-immigrant feelings
• By 1924, the Klan had 4.5 million members
• Didn’t like; – foreigners, – immigrants, – unions, – Catholics, – Jews, – or alcohol
Eugenics
• A pseudoscience that claimed to improve society through selective breeding
• 60,000 people were forcibly sterilized (“feeble minded, epileptic, insane, inebriate, blind, deaf, deformed, orphans, tramps, homeless, paupers”)
• 28 states made interracial marriage illegal
Better Baby Contests
http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/topics_fs.pl?theme=43&search=&matches=
Congress Limits Immigration• Limited immigration from southern and eastern
Europe
• The Emergency Quota Act of 1921
• In 1924 amended – groups were limited to 2% of their US pop. In 1890
Race in the 1920’s – Who is “white?”Ozawa v. U.S.
• A Japanese immigrant, Takeo Ozawa, attempted to become a full U.S. citizen, despite a 1906 policy limiting naturalization to whites and Africans.
• Rather than challenging the constitutionality of the statute himself (which, under the racist Court, would have probably been a waste of time anyway), he simply attempted to establish that Japanese Americans were white. The Court rejected this logic.
United States v. Thind 1923
• An Indian-American U.S. Army veteran named Bhagat Singh Thind attempted the same strategy as Takeo Ozawa
• His attempt at naturalization was rejected in a ruling establishing that Indians, too, are not Caucasian.
• Three years later he was quietly granted citizenship in New York; he went on to earn a Ph.D. and teach at the University of California at Berkeley.
http://www.bhagatsinghthind.com/about.html
Warren G. Harding Administration
– Kellogg-Briand Pact - renounced war as a means of national policy
– Tariffs raised - made it hard for foreign countries to sell in U.S. (will contribute to Great Depression)
– Reduces taxes on Americans– Dawes Plan - solved problem of post-war debt - provided
loans to Germany to pay France/Britain who then paid the U.S
TEAPOT DOME SCANDAL • government set aside oil-rich public land in Teapot,
WY
• Secretary of Interior Albert Fall secretly leased the land to two oil companies
• Fall received $400,000 from the oil companies and a felony conviction from the courts
THE BUSINESS OF AMERICA
• Coolidge - “The chief business of the American people is business . . .the man who builds a factory builds a temple – the man who works there worships there”
President Calvin Coolidge 1924-1928
Life in the 1920s• Age of consumption
• Increased production efficiency (like assembly line) leads to…
Automobile• Henry Ford’s Model T
• altered American landscape and society
• 80% of all registered motor vehicles in the world were in the U.S.
• Urban sprawl – people could live farther from work
AMERICAN STANDARD OF LIVING SOARS
• Americans owned 40% of the world’s wealth
• The average annual income rose 35% in 1920’s
• Discretionary income increased
MODERN ADVERTISING EMERGES
• Ad agencies no longer sought to merely “inform” the public about their products
• They hired psychologists to study how best to appeal to Americans’ desire for youthfulness, beauty, health and wealth
• “Say it with Flowers” slogan actually doubled sales between 1912-1924
A SUPERFICIAL PROSPERITY
• Many during the 1920s believed the prosperity would go on forever
• Wages, production, GNP, and the stock market all rose significantly
• But. . . .
PROBLEMS ON THE HORIZON?• Businesses expanded recklessly• Iron & railroad industries faded• Farms were overproducing• Too much was bought on credit (installment plans)
including stocks