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African American - Marcus Garvey
The United Negro Improvement Association was brought to Harlem by Garvey, an immigrant who advocated black nationalism and racial pride, and even a back-to-Africa movement. He jailed for fraud. -
Prohibition - Bootlegging
Bootlegged/smuggled liquor was common in city bars and clubs called speakeasies. City police were paid off to do nothing about it, and organized crime/gangsters fought for control of the lucrative illegal industry. -
Prohibition - 18th Amendment
The 18th Amendment banned the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages and was enforced by the Volstead Act. -
Immigration - Nativism
Immigration skyrocketed post-WWI. Again, these immigrants were largely eastern/southern European and Catholic or Jewish. Nativism returned among Protestants and workers fearing competition, and isolationist sentiment was popular in this era as well. -
Politics-Republican Policy
The Republican Party was in control of both the executive and legislative branches during the 1920s. It was a more conservative period, with an end to Progressive activism in government, and in economics they largely believed in limited regulation and were more sympathetic to business. -
Politics - Warren Harding
The 29th president was elected in the 1920 election as the Republican candidate; he called for a return to normalcy after WWI but didn't do much of note. -
Economy- Energy Technologies
Use of electricity and oil also increased, appliances, factories, and automobiles; this resulted in new ways to make and use goods, thus boosting business. -
Economy - Assembly Line
Though Henry Ford invented the assembly line method of factory work, it wasn't widely implemented by most major industries until the 1920s. It increased efficiency and productivity. -
Economy - Government Policy
The government largely favored big business and its growth, as the theory was that it would bring national prosperity. They offered corporate tax cuts and ended/did not enforce most antitrust or monopoly restrictions of the Progressive era. -
Economy - Labor
Union membership declined. Many companies used an open shop policy that favored hiring nonunion employees over union ones. They also began to offer benefits to decrease the need for unions. Strikes in this era were typically unsuccessful. -
Culture - Popular Heroes
Politicians were no longer the cultural heroes, but big personalities from sports or movies. These included boxer Jack Dempsey, swimmer Gertrude Ederle, football player Jim Thorpe, baseball player Babe Ruth, golfer Bobby Jones, and aviator Charles Lindbergh. -
Culture - Consumerism
In-home electricity allowed for a booming appliance industry, and automobiles were big as well. Advertising was bigger than ever, stores offered credit, chains grew and often beat out the smaller neighborhood stores. -
Culture - Entertainment
Radios became a new method of mass communication and entertainment and expanded rapidly throughout households, providing broadcasts on news, sports, soap operas, quiz shows, and comedies. The film industry in Hollywood also finally boomed. -
Culture - Automobile
By the end of the 1920s, most American families owned at least one car. It changed the way people got around and did most things social, and economically is replaced the railroad industry in growth and made the rubber, gasoline, steel, glass, and highway construction industries reliant on it. -
Culture - Jazz
Jazz was brought north by African Americans and made popular by phonographs and radios, jazz was a symbol for new culture and often listened to by younger people as a sign of rebellion against older culture. -
African American - Harlem Renaissance
As many African Americans moved north, a large community developed in Harlem. Harlem soon became known for its concentration of artists, actors, musicians, writers, and etc. -
African American - Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong was one of the most influential jazz musicians who popularized the scat style of singing. -
Literature - Sinclair Lewis
Sinclair Lewis wrote a number of novels in the 1920s, including Main Street and Babbit, which satirized middle-class America and chronicled Midwestern life. -
Literature - T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot wrote a number of plays, poetry, and non-fiction works throughout the 1920s. As part of the modernist movement, he often wrote about the emptiness of modern life. -
Literature - Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound wrote many 1920s poems, and was another big figure in the modernist movement; he, too, expressed disillusionment with modern culture. -
Literature - F. Scott Fitzgerald
In the 1920s, Fitzgerald wrote This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, and The Great Gatsby. He was considered a member of the "lost generation" and captured society and the jazz age in his novels. -
Religion - Fundementalism
More traditional/rural protestants condemned modernism. These fundamentalists accepted the Bible's word as the end-all-be-all truth, believed in creationism, and blamed modernists for declining morals. -
Religion - Modernism
As a protestant philosophy split occurred, many took the changing American life in stride. Modernists were historical and critical in their view of the bible and incorporated Darwin's evolution into their beliefs. -
African American - Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes was a popular African American poet, activist, novelist, and playwright during the 1920s and was a lead figure in the Harlem Renaissance. He wrote largely on the richness of African American culture, such as in his poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers. -
Immigration - Quota Laws
Congress passed a law to limit immigration to 3% of the number of citizens also from the given country. Thus, the quota for northern Europeans was much higher than the "undesirable" southern Europeans. The second quota act further restricted this for select groups. Japanese were pretty much barred entirely. -
Economy - Business Prosperity
The economy boomed as politics took a backseat to business; unemployment was below 4%, standard of living rose, and income for the middle and working classes increased. -
African American - Bessie Smith
Bessie Smith was an influential jazz/blues singer (nicknamed the "empress of blues") who made many recordings during the Harlem Renaissance. -
Politics - Calvin Coolidge
Coolidge won the 1924 presidential election. He believed in limited government, especially in terms of the economy, and did little himself and vetoed much from Congress. -
Politics - Teapot Dome Scandal
Under the Harding administration, secretary of the interior Fall was found to be accepting bribes to grant rights to federal oil reserves in Teapot Dome, Wyoming to private oil companies. -
Literature - Ernest Hemingway
In the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway wrote Indian Camp, The Sun Also Rises, and A Farewell to Arms. His novels reflected American disillusionment with patriotism and propaganda post-war. -
Politics - Herbert Hoover
Republican control continued with Hoover's win in the 1928 election. He promised continued prosperity and was favored over his opponent by Protestants, as Smith was a Roman Catholic. He was in office during the beginning of the Great Depression. -
Stock Crash - Black Thursday
Black Thursday was marked the beginning of the 1929 stock market crash. The day before the Dow Jones had fallen and the trading volume was 12.9 million. A crash seemed imminent; multiple banks stepped in and bought stocks to restore confidence and keep the whole thing from coming down. -
Hoover's Policies - Federal Farm Board
Farmers were some of the hardest hit in the depression. The board tried to help farmers stabilize prices by holding surplus product in storage, but it turned out there was way too much overproduction for the program to handle. -
Stock Crash - Black Tuesday
For a bit the ploy the bankers' ploy to buy stocks in effort to keep the market afloat worked, but a massive fall in the Dow Jones on Monday prompted all-out panic. On black Tuesday share prices collapsed, and everyone frantically tried to sell their stocks, but no one wanted to buy. Confidence in the economy was destroyed, and many tried to withdraw all of their savings from banks - money those banks did not have on hand, forcing them to close. -
Dust Bowl - Drought
Much of the Midwest suffered a severe drought, ruining farmers' crops. In addition, high winds created dust storms out of the dried soil, turning the region into a "dust bowl". -
Dust Bowl - Okie Migration
As farming became impossible in the area, thousands of "okies" (people from Oklahoma and the surrounding area) migrated to California in search of work. Often these displaced farmers couldn't find work even after moving. -
Hoover's Policies - RFC
The Reconstruction Finance Corporation was a government-owned company that loaned public money to struggling railroads, banks, insurance companies, and others. The idea was to stabilize these key businesses and let benefits "trickle down". -
New Deal - TVA
The Tennessee Valley Authority was a government corporation that hired thousands in one of the country's poorer areas to build dams, power plants, control flooding, and make fertilizer. It provided cheap electricity and was an exercise in public planning/development. -
New Deal - PWA
The Public Works Administration provided thousands of jobs by giving money to state/local governments to build public work projects such as roads, bridges, dams, and etc. -
New Deal - CCC
The Civilian Conservation Corps was a work relief program that hired young men for federal environment and gave them food, shelter, clothes, and money and sent part of their wage to their families as well. -
New Deal - FDIC
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was meant to ensure trust in the banking system by insuring commercial bank deposits up to a certain amount. -
New Deal - HOLC
The Home Owners' Loan Corporation refinanced homes to prevent foreclosure. -
New Deal - Emergency Banking Relief
The government examined banks during the bank holiday in which they were all closed, and then reopened those they judged to be sound. -
New Deal - Farm Credit Administration
The Farm Credit Administration provided low-interest loans and mortgages to indebted farmers during the depression to prevent foreclosures. -
New Deal - FERA
The Federal Emergency Relief Association gave grants of federal money to state/local governments operating soup kitchens and providing other forms of relief for the homeless. -
New Deal - CWA
The Civil Works Administration was an expansion upon the Public Works Administration to create more jobs by hiring men temporarily for federally-sponsored construction projects. -
New Deal - FHA
The Federal Housing Administration insured bank loans for building new houses and repairing old ones, helping homeowners and the construction industry. -
New Deal - SEC
The Securities and Exchange Commission was meant to prevent this from happening again; it put limits on speculative practices that had caused the stock crash and also regulated the stock market. -
New Deal - WPA
The Works Progress Administration provided even more jobs. It employed people at wages higher than the relief rate to build public projects, bridges, roads, airports, and etc. It even paid artists, writers, and actors to paint murals, write about history, and perform plays. -
New Deal - RA
The Resettlement Administration relocated struggling urban and rural families to federal camps with housing. It also provided loans to sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and other small farmers.
