Review Notes for the test on Wednesday

Review Notes for the 1920’s – Mr. Pecunia

Harding and Coolidge—Absolute trust in business and hands off for government


In 1920, President Warren G. Harding’s election heralded a new age of political and economic conservatism. The Republican Congress, for example, passed the Esch-Cummins Transportation Act in 1920 to deregulate the railroads and return them to private control. Also under Harding, Congress passed the 1922 Fordney-McCumber Tariff, which raised the average protective tariff rate to a new high of nearly 40 percent. Furthermore, the conservative Supreme Court reversed their previous Adkins v. Children’s Hospital ruling, stripping women workers of all special labor protection. This reversal came just after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, which granted women the right to vote.

As a result of the resurgence of political and economic conservatism, big business reigned supreme once again, and labor movements dwindled. Instances of government corruption, such as the Teapot Dome scandal, were relatively frequent during Harding’s presidency, and in some cases the money trail led all the way to the president himself. When Harding died unexpectedly in 1923, the even more conservative Calvin Coolidge became president and continued to push his predecessor’s conservative policy. Coolidge was then elected to another term in the three-way election of 1924.


Isolationism – We worry about us and stay out of the worlds business

Harding’s and Coolidge’s stances on foreign policy were a reflection of Americans’ isolationist attitudes, and both presidents worked hard to reduce the United States’ influence abroad. Harding, for example, negotiated the Five-Power Naval Treaty in 1922 to reduce the number of American, British, and Japanese battleships in the Pacific. The same year, France, Britain, Japan, and the United States signed the Four-Power Treaty to guarantee the territorial status quo in the Pacific region and joined other European and Asian powers in signing the Nine-Power Treaty to uphold the Open Door policy in China. Furthermore, Coolidge’s secretary of state rather naively signed the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact (along with sixty other nations) to outlaw aggressive warfare. Coolidge’s vice president also drew up the Dawes Plan, which arranged a new timetable for impoverished Germany to pay off its World War I reparations to Britain and France.

The Roaring Twenties – Social Change and economic good times

The Roaring Twenties ushered in an exciting time of social change and economic prosperity, as the recession at the end of World War I was quickly replaced by an unprecedented period of financial growth. The stock market soared to unimaginable heights, buoyed by the so-called second Industrial Revolution of the turn of the twentieth century, which saw the development of new inventions and machines that changed American society drastically. For example, industry leader Henry Ford developed the assembly line, which enabled mass production of the automobile—the invention that changed the nation more than any other during the era. The car helped give rise to suburban America, as thousands of middle-class Americans left the congested cities for nicer communities in the city outskirts. The airplane, radio, and motion picture ranked with the automobile as popular new inventions of the time. At the same time, a new age of American literature blossomed in the 1920s.

The Red Scare and Immigration Restrictions – We are afraid of Communism

This social revolution of the 1920s was not without its darker side. Sudden changes in the social fabric spawned a reactionary backlash in the name of preserving American heritage, tradition, and culture. The Red Scare of 1919–1920, in which hundreds of socialists were persecuted, was just the first instance. The more sweeping Emergency Quota Act and Immigration Act of 1924 effectively slammed the door shut on all “undesirable” and “unassimilable” immigrants.

Anticommunist and anti-immigration sentiments notoriously culminated in the infamous Sacco-Vanzetti Trial of 1921. In the trial, two Italian-born Americans, both atheists and anarchists, were convicted of murder and executed even though there was no hard evidence that they had committed the crime.


Prohibition and Fundamentalism

Around the same time, conservative “drys” scored a major victory when in 1919 the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified and the Volstead Act was passed. These new laws began fourteen years of Prohibition, in which the consumption, sale, and manufacture of alcohol were made illegal under U.S. law. Not until 1933, when the Twenty-First Amendment repealed Prohibition, was alcohol once again legal.

Also during this period, Christian fundamentalists rallied together against Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which they saw as heresy. These fundamentalists lost a great deal of credibility, however, after being humiliated on national radio during the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925. Furthermore, the revamped Ku Klux Klan reemerged as a powerful new conservative, Protestant force while still continuing to intimidate and preach hatred against blacks, Jews, Catholics, and immigrants.

Hoover and the Crash of 1929
Elected president in 1928, Herbert Hoover, a popular administrative hero of World War I, promised more prosperity and more boons for big business. Hoover tried to remain true to his word even after the stock market crashed on Black Tuesday in October 1929. He promised that the recession resulting from the Crash of 1929 would be brief and that prosperity was just around the corner. Rather than offer a helping hand, however, Hoover and congressional Republicans passed the even higher Smoot-Hawley Tariff in 1930, driving the average tariff rate up to almost 60 percent