Review World War 1 1920s - Mario G. Valadez Instructor of ...€¦ · • Review World War 1 •...
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Today’s Topics • Review World War 1 • 1920s 1
Review World War 1 1920s - Mario G. Valadez Instructor of ...€¦ · • Review World War 1 • 1920s . 1 ... a film glorifying the Ku Klux Klan as having defended white civilization
The cards arrived at home for each verifying the registration those twenty-one to thirty-one. Good bye Laredo highlighted by yours towers and bells but we shall never forget your beautiful women. They are taking us to fight to some distant land and taking us to fight the German troops. They are taking us to fight in distinct directions and taking us to fight
• The “Race Problem” – 1911 U.S. Immigration Commission list of “immigrant
races” – Eugenics, which studied the alleged mental
characteristics of different races, gave anti-immigrant sentiment an air of professional expertise.
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Progressivism anticipated in many ways major twentieth-century developments, including the New Deal, the Great Society, and the socially active state. But by accepting “race” as a permanent and defining characteristic of individuals and groups, Progressives were more like nineteenth-century thinkers than twentieth-century liberals. What was called the “race problem” was a major subject of debate before World War I, and it referred to more than just relations between blacks and whites. In 1911, the U.S. Immigration Commission listed in one of its publications forty-five different immigrant “races,” each with its own alleged innate characteristics, ranging from Anglo-Saxons at the top of the racial hierarchy down to Hebrews, Northern Italians, and at the bottom, southern Italians—those apparently most violent, undisciplined, and incapable of assimilation. Popular writers asserted that the wave of new immigration and white women’s declining birthrate threatened American civilization. The new science of eugenics, the study of the alleged mental traits of different races, lent scientific legitimacy to the new nativism.
• African Americans largest non-white group excluded from the ideas of freedom.
in federal departments in Washington, D.C. • Birth of a Nation
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The Progressive presidents shared dominant racial attitudes regarding blacks. Theodore Roosevelt’s celebration of Anglo-Saxon supremacy led him to call Indians savages and state that blacks were unfit to exercise the suffrage. Not even Jane Addams, a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), resisted the abandonment of a civil rights plank in the 1912 Progressive Party platform. Woodrow Wilson, a Virginia native, celebrated the South’s “genuine representative government.” He imposed racial segregation in federal agencies in Washington, D.C., fired black federal employees, and screened at the White House the premier of Birth of a Nation, a film glorifying the Ku Klux Klan as having defended white civilization during Reconstruction.
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• W. E. B. Du Bois and the Revival of Black Protest • The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
– Niagara Falls – Du Bois was a cofounder of the NAACP.
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Black leaders in this period tried to renew America’s Reconstruction-era commitment to racial equality. No other leader did more to renew the movement for black freedom than scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois, a Massachusetts native and Harvard graduate. In his book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), he called on blacks to reject the accommodationism of Booker T. Washington.
• The Great Migration and the “Promised Land” – The war opened thousands of industrial jobs to black
laborers for the first time, inspiring a large-scale migration from the South to the North.
• Half a million blacks migrated north.
Table 19.1 The Great Migration
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The war sparked social changes that transformed American race relations. Increased war production and a sharp decline in European immigration made available thousands of industrial jobs to blacks for the first time, inspiring a mass migration from South to North. When the war began, 90 percent of American blacks lived in the South, and most northern cities had small black populations. Between 1910 and 1920, half a million blacks left the South, moving to large cities like New York and Chicago and smaller cities such as Akron, Buffalo, and Trenton. The desire for work and higher wages, education, an escape from the threat of violence, and the vote motivated African Americans to migrate. Yet these migrants encountered considerable disappointments, including limited employment opportunities, exclusion from unions, housing segregation, and outbreaks of violence.
The Great Migration to the North
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• Marcus Garvey • UNIA (United Negro Improvement Association)
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Today’s Topics • The Roaring 20s
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1919 • The Red Scare
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Local police with literature seized from a Communist Party office in Cambridge
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Though many Progressives hoped wartime economic planning would continue after 1918, the Wilson administration rapidly dismantled agencies that controlled industrial production and the labor market. Yet the wartime repression of dissent persisted and peaked in the Red Scare of 1919–1920, which was inflamed by the postwar strike wave and social tensions and fears caused by the Russian Revolution. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, certain that the steel strike was part of a global communist conspiracy, ordered federal raids on radical and labor organizations, led by the young director of the Radical Division of the Justice Department, J. Edgar Hoover. More than 5,000 were arrested, most without warrants, and held for months without charge. The government deported hundreds of immigrant radicals, including Emma Goldman. This assault on civil liberties was so extreme that heavy criticism was leveled at Palmer by Congress and the press, and the scare dissolved. Though it generated a new concern for civil liberties in the 1920s, the Red Scare successfully destroyed radical groups such as the IWW and Socialist Party.
• Economic expansion • Partnership between business & government • Business values
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Table 18.5 Sales of Passenger Cars
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The Business of America • A Decade of Prosperity
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The Business of America • A New Society
– Consumer goods of all kinds proliferated.
18 Electric washing machines and Hoover vacuum cleaners
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In the 1920s, consumer goods for the first time became attainable by most Americans. Goods made available by credit and installment buying plans like vacuum cleaners, telephones, washing machines, and refrigerators transformed daily life. Advertising and marketing professionals found new ways to compel Americans to purchase items from the new industrial cornucopia. Americans spent more time on leisure activities, from vacations to sports and movies. Radios and phonographs brought mass entertainment into private homes and birthed a new celebrity culture. A French visitor, André Siegfried, wrote in 1928 that a “new society” had emerged in which Americans valued their “standard of living” above all else. Americans’ willingness to amass enormous debts in order to purchase consumer goods seemed to replace nineteenth-century values of thrift and self-denial. Work, once seen as a point of pride in skill or collective empowerment in trade unions, now seemed only a means to pursue individual fulfillment through consumption and entertainment.
The Business of America • The Farmers’ Plight
– Farmers did not share in the prosperity of the decade.
• California received many displaced farmers.
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A family of potato growers in rural Minnesota
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Farmers were also excluded from prosperity. American agriculture had reached its zenith in World War I, when Europe’s need for food and government policies had kept farm prices high. But increasing mechanization and use of fertilizer and pesticides elevated output even as world demand stagnated, steadily reducing farm incomes and forcing tens of thousands of farm foreclosures. In the 1920s, for the first time in U.S. history, the number of farms and farmers declined. Extractive industries like mining and lumber also suffered from overproduction in the world market. Even before the 1930s, rural America was suffering from economic depression.
1920 The Flapper http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDgJ79PetAQ
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Prewar feminism’s emphasis on personal freedom blossomed in a growing consumer society, and women’s liberation became a lifestyle promoted by advertisers and mass entertainment, detached from political or social radicalism. Sexual freedom now meant individual autonomy or personal rebellion. The young, single “flapper” who smoked and danced, sported short hair and skirts, and used new birth-control devices, came to symbolize the “new woman.”
Advertisers marketed cigarettes to women as symbols of female independence. (left)
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The Flapper
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Bobbed Hair Blues: A Mexican-American Song Laments “Las Pelonas” Flappers
• Los tengo aborrecidos, • Y ahora las pelonas • Los usan de vestidos. • Las muchachas de San Antonio • Son flojas pa’l metate. • Quieren andar pelonas • Con sombreros de petate. • Se acabaron las pizcas, • Se acabó el algodón. • Ya andan las pelonas • De puro vacilón
• I detest, • And now the flappers • Use them for their dress. • The girls of San Antonio • Are lazy at the metate. • They want to walk out bobbed-haired, • With straw hats on. • The harvesting is finished, • So is the cotton. • The flappers stroll out now • For a good time. Source: "Las Pelonas" in Manuel Gamio, The Life Story
of the Mexican Immigrant (New York: Dover, 1971), 308.
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Tipsy, a 1930 painting by the Japanese artist Kobayakawa Kiyoshi
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Jazz Singer 1927 • First movie with sound • Talkies • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KD_Y
– Government policies reflected the pro-business ethos of the 1920s.
• Lower taxes • Higher tariffs • Anti-unionism
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In the 1920s, Walter Lippman published two incisive critiques of democracy, Public Opinion and The Phantom Public, in which he repudiated Progressive beliefs that “intelligence” could solve social problems in a mass democracy. Lippman argued that American voters were ill-informed, irrational, and failed to scrutinize policies or candidates; most problems, he argued, were beyond the understanding of ordinary men and women. The independent citizen was a myth. The government, journalists, and advertisers, he suggested, had perfected the art of creating and manipulating public opinion—what Lippman called the “manufacture of consent.” In 1929, sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd published Middletown, a study of life in Muncie, Indiana, a typical Midwestern community. They found that leisure and consumption had replaced politics as the center of public life, and declining voter participation, among other indicators, confirmed their observations.
1921-1923 President: Warren G. Harding
•Promised “normalcy” = no more war, no more progressivism •Teapot Dome scandal
– “A Watch and Ward Committee” banned books – Film industry adopted the Hays Code.
• No nudity, long kisses, and adultery in films
– The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was established in 1920.
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Wartime and postwar repression, Prohibition, and pro-business policies in wartime and the 1920s damaged Progressives’ belief that the federal government could represent national purpose and enhance freedom. Progressives gained a new appreciation of civil liberties—rights that an individual may assert even against democratic majorities—as fundamental features of American freedom. Reformers now encouraged open and democratic debate and in the 1920s, and a coherent concept of civil liberties and legal protections for freedom of speech against the government began to emerge. Wartime and postwar repression persisted in the 1920s. Lynchings continued, and people endorsing free speech or radical doctrines were arrested and attacked by authorities and private citizens. Government agencies such as the Postal and Customs Services censored books considered obscene. A “Watch and Ward Committee” in Boston excluded dozens of books from bookstores, including works by novelists Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, and Ernest Hemingway. Movie producers feared that scandals involving actors might reinforce beliefs that movies promoted immorality, and in 1922 the film industry adopted the Hays code, which barred movies from depicting nudity, adultery, and long kisses. Only in 1951 would the Supreme Court offer First Amendment protections for film. Though more and more Europeans consumed American popular culture, some began to see America as culturally vapid. The British novelist D. H. Lawrence, who lived briefly in the United States, said that America might take pride in being the “land of the free,” but “the free mob” had destroyed the right to dissent. American artists dissatisfied with America’s conservatism and materialism (and wanted to drink legally) migrated to Paris. Concern for civil liberties grew from the arrests of anti-war dissenters under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, which inspired the formation of a group in 1917 that three years later became the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). For the rest of the twentieth century, the ACLU took on many of the important legal cases that established the “rights revolution” in America. The ACLU helped inject meaning into traditional liberties such as freedom of speech, and invented new rights such as the right to privacy. But the ACLU began as a coalition of pacifists, Progressives, and lawyers outraged by the violation of Americans’ rights by the government during World War I.
Table 20.1 Selected Annual Immigration
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• Closing the Golden Door – In 1924, Congress permanently limited immigration for
Europeans and banned it for Asians. • The law established a new category of “illegal alien.”
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In 1924, Congress imposed a permanent limitation on European immigration to 150,000 per year, distributed according to a series of national quotas that sharply restricted the numbers from southern and eastern Europe—intended to ensure that the descendants of the old immigrants would always outnumber those of the new. The 1924 law barred entry of all those ineligible for naturalized citizenship—all Asians, except for Filipinos, who were designated “American nationals.” But Congress in 1934 established a timetable for the Philippines’ independence, largely as a way to end immigration. The 1924 law for the first time effectively created the category of the “illegal alien.”
The Culture Wars • The Fundamentalist Revolt
– Many evangelical Protestants felt threatened by the decline of traditional values.
– Billy Sunday
A 1923 lithograph by George Bellows
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y
kn8YcIbmfo&feature=related
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Not all Americans embraced modern urban culture and its religious and ethnic pluralism, mass entertainment, and sexual liberation. Evangelical Protestants felt threatened by an apparent decline in traditional values and the increased visibility of Catholicism and Judaism caused by immigration. They also opposed “modernists” within Protestant denominations who wanted to integrate science and religion and adapt Christianity to the new secular culture. Fundamentalists, convinced that the Bible’s literal truth was the basis of Christian doctrine, started campaigns to exorcise modernism from Christianity and restrict individual freedoms. Billy Sunday, a professional baseball player who became a revivalist preacher, was perhaps the best known of the fundamentalists, and he may have preached to as many as 100 million people with messages damning Darwinism and drink.
Federal agents pour confiscated liquor into a sewer in 1920
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• The Scopes Trial (The Monkey Trial) – John Scopes was arrested for teaching evolution in
school. – The Scopes defended by ACLU.
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m0e00NNy5I
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A 1925 trial in Tennessee exposed the division between traditionalism and modern, secular culture. John Scopes, a public school teacher, was arrested for violating a state law that prohibited the teaching of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. His trial attracted national attention, and was carried live on national radio. To fundamentalist Christians, the idea that humans had evolved over millions of years from simian ancestors contradicted the Bible’s account of creation. To Scope’s defenders, including the ACLU, freedom meant the right to independent thought and self-expression, and Tennessee’s law showed the dangers of mixing church and state.
• The Emergence of Harlem – New York’s Harlem gained an international reputation as
the “capital” of black America.
• The Harlem Renaissance – In art, the term “New Negro” meant the rejection of
established stereotypes and a search for black values to put in their place.
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The decade also saw a rising black self-consciousness, especially in the North’s urban ghettoes. Almost 1 million blacks had left the South in the Great Migration, moving to New York, Chicago, and countless smaller cities. Harlem in New York became a center of African-American life, attracting migrants from the South and the West Indies, among whom were many well-educated professional and white-collar workers who were shocked by American racism. Whites “slummed” in Harlem, visiting its dance halls, jazz clubs, and speakeasies, contributing to depictions of Harlem as a place of primitive passions. But the real Harlem was a place of poverty and low-wage work created and reinforced by housing discrimination.
