Seeing Red

• Fear of Russia spread across the country in the years after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917

  The “red scare” (1919-1920) led to a nationwide crusade against people whose sense of “Americanism” was suspected

• Some states passed criminal syndicalism laws that made it illegal to advocate for the use of violence in order to obtain social change with traditional ideals of freedom of speech being restricted

• Any employees who went on strike were seen as un-American

• Anti-redism and anti-foreignism were reflected in the criminal case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in which the two men were convicted in 1921 of the murder of a Massachusetts paymaster and his guard with the Jury and Judge being biased since the men were Italians, atheists, anarchists, and draft dodgers, leading to them being electrocuted in 1927

Hooded Hoodlums of the KKK

• The Ku Klux Klan expanded in the early years of the 1920s due to the growing intolerance and prejudice of the U.S. public with it being popular in the Midwest and the South

  • The Ku Klux Klan was anti-foreign, anti-Catholic, anti-black, anti-black, anti-Jewish, anti-pacifist, anti-Communist, anti-internationalist, anti-evolutionist, anti-bootlegger, anti-gambling, anti-adultery, and anti-birth control while being pro-Anglo-Saxon, pro-”native” American, and pro-Protestant

• The KKK fell apart in the late 1920s after it was found that KKK officials were embezzling money

Stemming the Foreign Blood

• Isolationist Americans of the 1920s felt that there was no use for immigrants

• Emergency Quota Act of 1921 placed a quota on the number of European immigrants who could come to America in each year (set at 3%)

• Immigration Act of 1924 replacing the Quota Act of 1921 with the quotas for foreigners being cut from 3% to 2%

• The Japanese were banned from coming to America with CAnadians and Latin Americans being exempt from the act due to their closeness to the U.S.

• Overall the quota system significantly reduced immigration with the Immigration Act of 1924 ending the era of unrestricted immigration to the U.S.

The Prohibition "Experiment"

• The 18th Amendment was passed in 1919 with it banning alcohol and being enforced by the Volstead Act

• Prohibition was popular in the South

• Federal government had a weak track record when it came to enforcing laws that controlled personal lives

• Salons were replaced by “speakeasies” with prohibition causing bank savings to increase and for absenteeism in the industry to decrease

The Golden Age of Gangsterism

• Gangs fought over control of the illegal alcohol market

• “Scarface” Al Capone began 6 years of gang warfare with Capone eventually being tried and convicted of income-tax evasion

  • Was sent to prison for 11 years

• Gangsters started to move into other profitable and illicit activities such as prostitution, narcotics, gambling, and kidnappings

• Congress passed the Lindbergh Law in 1932, which made interstate abduction in specific circumstances a death-penalty offense

Monkey Business in Tennessee

• States had started to focus more on education in the 1920s

• John Dewey set the principles of “learning by doing” which ended up creating the foundation of progressive education centered in the belief that “education for live” should be a teacher’s primary goal

• Healthcare and science improved during the 1920s

• Fundamentalists claimed that the teachings of Darwinism evolution was destroying faith in God and the Bible

The Mass-Consumption Economy

• WWI and the Treasury Secretary Mellon’s tax policies brought prosperity in the mid 1920s

• Sports became a large business in the consumer economy

• Prosperity led to an increased personal debt with the economy increasingly vulnerable to disruptions of the credit structure

Putting America on Rubber Tires

• The automobile industry started an industrial revolution in the 1920s with the new industrial system being based on assembly-line methods and mass-production techniques

• Henry Ford came to be known as the father of the moving assembly line with him having created the Model T

  • By 1930, there were more than 20 million Model Ts being driven in the U.S.

The Advent of the Gasoline Age

• Automobile industry was thriving with it creating millions of jobs and related industries causing America’s standard of living to rise

• The petroleum business grew

• Railroad industry was hit due to its competition being automobiles

  • Automobiles allowed for women to not needing to be dependent on men and allowed for the suburbs to spread

  • Automobiles caused millions of death but were convenient and brought pleasure and excitement into the lives of the people

Humans Develop Wings

• Gasoline engines led to the invention of the airplane with Orville and Wilbur Wright making their first flight on December 17, 1903 (the flight lasted 12 seconds at 120 feet)

• Private companies started to work passenger airlines with airmail contracts due to the success of airplanes in WWI

• In 1927, Charles A. Lindberg became the first man to fly by himself across the Atlantic Ocean

The Radio Revolution

• The first voice-carrying radio broadcasts were being transmitted in the 1920s

• Radios made contributions in terms of culture and education and brought Americans back home

Hollywood's Filmland Fantasies

• Motion picture began in the 1890s with the true birth being in 1903, when the first story sequence was released

  • Hollywood became the movie capital of the world

  • Motion picture was used as a form of anti-German propaganda in WWI

• The increased assimilation of immigrants was fueled by the expansion of motion picture

The Dynamic Decade

• Most Americans had moved to the urban areas by the 1920s

• Margaret Sanger led a birth-control movement

• Alice Paul created the National Women’s Party to campaign for an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution

• Fundamentalists lost ground to Modernists

• Modernists believed God to be a “good guy” and the universe being a friendly place

• In the 1920s, sex appeal in the U.S. grew

• Flappers were young women who were expressive of their dislike towards traditional womanly behavior by wearing short skirts, drinking, driving cars, and smoking

• Dr. Sigmund Freud argued that sexual repression was to blame for many emotional problems

• Racial pride grew in the black communities in the North with Garvey founding the United Negro Improvement Association to promote the resettlement of blacks in Africa

Cultural Liberation

• A new generation of writers emerged, approximately 10 years after WWI with them giving American literature new life, artistic quality, and such

• Modernism was the philosophical movement that took place during the 1920s with an important part of this movement being the questioning regarding social conventions

• Mencken attacked marriage, patriotism, democracy, and prohibition in his monthly American Mercury

• Hemingway was among the writers most affected by the war with him responding to propaganda and the appeal to patriotism

• The Harlem Renaissance was a black cultural movement that spread out of Harlem

• Architecture became popular due to materialism and functionalism becoming popular

Wall Street's Big Bull Market

• The Stock Market in the 1920s became really popular to the average citizen

• The federal government didn’t do much to manage the national debt after WWI

• The Republican Congress created the Bureau of the Budget to help the president submit an annual budget to Congress in 1921

• Mellon believed that taxes forced the rich to invest in tax-exempt securities rather than in factories which hurt business