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Labor Militancy, Recession and Recovery
The largest strikes—a General Strike of all workers in Seattle, and a strike of the entire American steel industry—affected hundreds of thousands of workers and consumers, and the radical rhetoric used by some workers' leaders seemed to raise the prospect of full-fledged class warfare. -
Red Scare
Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer encouraged J. Edgar Hoover, an aggressive young agent of the Bureau of Investigation (today's FBI), to arrest thousands of radicals around the country. -
Prohibition
The Eighteenth Amendment, which made it illegal to manufacture, sell, or transport alcoholic beverages, went into effect in January 1920. Enforcement of prohibition, however, was sporadic and underfunded and faced opposition in many states and cities, especially northern cities, where many prohibition laws were repealed. -
The End of Wilsonianism
The Republican politics of the 1920s sprung from the repudiation of Woodrow Wilson, the only Democrat elected to the presidency between 1892 and 1932. Wilson had never governed with the support of a majority of voters, winning office in 1912 only because two Republicans (popular ex-President Teddy Roosevelt and incumbent William Howard Taft) split the vote by running against each other, then barely retaining the presidency with less than half the popular vote in 1916. -
Warren G. Harding's Pro-Business "Normalcy"
In 1920, they elected to the presidency, by a landslide, Republican Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio. Harding, who might best be described as an affable simpleton, campaigned on the simple promise of a "return to normalcy." Normalcy, under the Harding administration, meant a government that was pro-business, anti-tax, and anti-regulation. -
Roaring Twenties
The decade marked the flourishing of the modern mass-production, mass-consumption economy, which delivered fantastic profits to investors while also raising the living standard of the urban middle- and working-class. -
Rural America: Left Behind
From 1920 to 1921, farm prices fell at a catastrophic rate. The price of wheat, the staple crop of the Great Plains, fell by almost half; the price of cotton, still the lifeblood of the South, fell by three-quarters. -
Mass Consumption
The 1920s were the heyday of broadcast radio and Hollywood cinema; for the first time, consumers across the country tuned in to the same radio programs and bought tickets to the same films. Advertising became a crucial industry in its own right, cultivating mass demand for the products of mass consumption. -
Intellectuals Attack the "Booboisie"
Much of the great American literature of the 1920s represented an intellectual backlash against the perceived materialism, conformity, and inauthenticity of the new mass culture -
The Jazz Age
The 1920s is often called the Jazz Age because jazz flourished and gained widespread appeal during the decade. The improvisational character of the music was often associated with the “loose” morals and relaxed social codes of the time. Among the famous jazz performers of the period were Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, and Duke Ellington. -
The “Lost Generation”
One reason it is difficult to separate stereotypes about the 1920s from reality is the attention paid to these stereotypes by American authors and the media. -
The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
The ultimate indictment of the modern world's loss of personal, moral, and spiritual values. -
The New Negro by Alain Locke
A hopeful look at the negro in America -
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The American dream that anyone can achieve anything. -
Strange Interlude by Eugene O'Neill
A look at 30 years in the life of a modern woman -
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
The lost generation of expatriates -
National Association of Wage Earners
Worked to standardize and improve living conditions for women, particularly migrant workers, and to develop and encourage efficiency among African American workers. -
National Negro Business League
Directed during the 1920s by Robert Russa Moton, was a national network of African American entrepreneurs and small businessmen. -
National Urban League
Developed training programs intended to help African Americans migrating from the South to the North and to this end published several surveys of black populations in northern cities. -
Universal Negro Improvement Association
Had over a million members; it advocated racial separatism and provided self-help and self-improvement services and was a source of start-up assistance for small businesses. -
The Messenger
Featured articles, fiction, poetry, and advertisements for African American-owned businesses. The back covers of many of its issues feature full-page advertisements for entrepreneur Madam C. J. Walker's famous hair- and skin-care products. -
Modernists Protestants
The modernists were mostly urban, middle class people who tried to accept religion and modern science together, realizing that the world was growing more and more secular. They moved toward a more flexible and rational Christianity. -
Prohibition
Both federal and local government struggled to enforce Prohibition over the course of the 1920s. Enforcement was initially assigned to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and was later transferred to the Justice Department. In general, Prohibition was enforced much more strongly in areas where the population was sympathetic to the legislation–mainly rural areas and small towns–and much more loosely in urban areas. -
Fundamental Protestants
Fundamentalists, the "defenders of traditional faith." This group mostly consisted of rural men and women who were trying to keep religion at its traditional level of importance in American life. They called for literal interpretation of the Bible and were furious with the modernists for their "betrayal" of the Gospels. -
A Great Time to be Rich
But the Roaring Twenties were, in fact, a great time to be rich. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, himself an extremely successful investment banker, lowered the top marginal income tax rate for the wealthiest Americans from 73% to just 25% while investors enjoyed one of the greatest bull markets in American history. -
25 Million "New Immigrants"
More than 80% of the arrivals after 1890 were so-called "New Immigrants," natives of Southern and Eastern Europe, culturally and ethnically perceived to be quite different from the Germans and Britons who had embodied the bulk of the immigration into the United States in earlier periods. Italians, Poles, Jews, and Slavs—ethnic groups rarely encountered en masse earlier in American history—arrived in large numbers. -
The Great Migration
The patterns of migration and settlement common to the New Immigrants were in some ways mirrored by those of American blacks. Employment opportunities created by World War I spurred the "Great Migration," the mass movement of African-Americans out of the rural South and into the urban North -
Silent Cal Coolidge
"Silent Cal" Coolidge exhibited zero personal charisma, but his strong reputation for personal respectability helped the Republicans to avoid electoral consequences for Harding's indiscretions. Coolidge—most famous for declaring that "the business of America is business"—easily won election for a second term in 1924, ensuring that the pro-business, free-market policies of Andrew Mellon, whom Coolidge retained as Treasury Secretary, would define the political economy of the entire decade. -
Dysfunctional Democrats
On the burning issues of the day—economic policy, immigration, Prohibition—the Democratic Party was a house divided. The results were congressional minorities and disastrous presidential candidates—in 1924, Democrats nominated Wall Street lawyer John W. Davis, a man just as conservative as Calvin Coolidge but much less popular; in 1928, they nominated anti-Prohibitionist New York Governor Al Smith, the first Catholic presidential candidate, who became the first Democrat since the Civil War. -
Herbert Hoover's Promise: "Triumph Over Poverty"
Hoover might be considered the last Progressive, a believer in the potential of the private market to achieve beneficial results through voluntary cooperation encouraged (but not enforced) by the government. As Commerce Secretary in 1920, Hoover had helped to stave off a postwar depression by successfully encouraging leading businessmen voluntarily to pursue policies of growth rather than retrenchment. -
Prohibition
In addition, the Prohibition era encouraged the rise of criminal activity associated with bootlegging. The most notorious example was the Chicago gangster Al Capone, who earned a staggering $60 million annually from bootleg operations and speakeasies. Such illegal operations fueled a corresponding rise in gang violence, including the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago in 1929. -
1929 Stock Market Crash and Great Depression
After October 29, 1929, stock prices had nowhere to go but up, so there was considerable recovery during succeeding weeks. Overall, however, prices continued to drop as the United States slumped into the Great Depression, and by 1932 stocks were worth only about 20 percent of their value in the summer of 1929. -
Stock Market Crash
Black Tuesday hit Wall Street as investors traded some 16 million shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day. Billions of dollars were lost, wiping out thousands of investors. In the aftermath of Black Tuesday, America and the rest of the industrialized world spiraled downward into the Great Depression (1929-39), the deepest and longest-lasting economic downturn in the history of the Western industrialized world up to that time. -
Hoover Signs the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act
This act raised tariffs on foreign goods so high that other nations passed tariffs against American products in retaliation. Rather than protecting American industry, it stifled global trade and made the global depression even worse. This will increase international tensions and the propensity of nationalist dictators to rise to power. -
Hoover Dam
As an effort to put people to work, Hoover received money from Congress to build public works projects – unfortunately this will be “too little and too late”. This dam in Las Vegas would finally be completed in 1936, helping with flood control and supplying hydro-electric power. -
Dust bowl
Three million people left their farms on the Great Plains during the drought and half a million migrated to other states, almost all to the West. But the Dust Bowl drought was not meteorologically extreme by the standards of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. -
Dust bowl
There had never been dust storms like these in prior droughts. In the worst years of the 1930s on as many as a quarter of the days dust reduced visibility to less than a mile. More soil was lost by wind erosion than the Mississippi carried to the sea. Although the numbers are not known, hundreds if not thousands of Plains residents died from 'dust pneumonia', a euphemism for clogging of the lungs with dirt. -
Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA)
Purpose was to provide government subsidies to farmers to decrease crop production, getting rid of the crop surplus, therefore raising prices for crops -
Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC)
Organized to utilize the nation's unemployed youth by building roads, planting trees and improving parks. -
Emergency Banking Act
Shut down of the nations banks, which allowed the government to examine all banks and allow those that were financially sound to open back up. Roosevelt wanted this done in order rebuild confidence in the nation's banking system. -
Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC)
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) preserves and promotes public confidence in the U.S. financial system by insuring deposits in banks and thrift institutions for at least $250,000. Created by the Glass Steagall Banking Reform Act. -
Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA)
An attempt by Franklin Roosevelt under his New Deal to provide recovery and relief from the Depression. This was the first of his major relief operations. It provided state assistance for the unemployed and their families. This program provided work for over 20 million people. FERA's main goal was alleviating household unemployment by creating new unskilled jobs in local and state government. -
National Recovery Act (NRA)
Authorized the President to regulate industry in an attempt to raise prices after severe deflation and stimulate economic recovery. It also established a national public works program known as the Public Works Administration (PWA, not to be confused with the WPA of 1935). The National Recovery Administration (NRA) portion was widely hailed in 1933 but by 1934 business' opinion of the act had soured. -
National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act)
Congress enacted the National Labor Relations Act ("NLRA") in 1935 to protect the rights of employees and employers, to encourage collective bargaining, and to curtail certain private sector labor and management practices, which can harm the general welfare of workers, businesses and the U.S. economy. -
Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC)
The mission of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is to protect investors, maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitate capital formation. As our nation's securities exchanges mature into global for-profit competitors, there is even greater need for sound market regulation -
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)
Hired people to build dams to prevent flooding and solid electricity -
Works Progress Administration (WPA)
Employed 85 million people in construction and other jobs. Established under the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act. -
Civil Works Administration (CWA)
Employed 4 million people for 15 dollars a week. Construction and repair jobs. Provided temporary employment. -
Federal Securities Act (FSA)
Requires corporations to provide all information on stocks. Securities and Exchange. -
Social Security Act of 1935
Permanent agency designed to ensure that the older segment of society always would have enough money to survive. Old age benefits. -
The Legendary Sweater Vest
Only seen once every 15 sweater vest seasons, the horizontal sweater vest is the rarest of them all.
