'20s

• Warren Harding:

  • "A return to normalcy"
  • Republican, makes Republican party the party of big business
• After the war their is a recession as the economy shifts from wartime to consumerism
• Ohio Gang - group or Harding and businessmen that were very corrupt


  Teapot Dome, WY - oil reserve

  • Controlled by Secretary of Interior, controls all of the land
  • No one is supposed to drill on the land but Sec. of Interior lets people do it anyway and pockets the cash
  • Warren gets flamed because he's either corrupt or dumb
• Secretary of Treasure - Andrew Mellon

  • Laissez-faire policies
  • Raises tariffs, lowers shipping costs

  Undoes work of Progressive Era
• • Harding allows big businesses to go unchecked
  • When businesses go unregulated it harms consumers

  Leads to Great Depression
• Washington Naval Disarmament Conference - US invites everyone to Washington and they all agree to shrink their navy
• Kellogg-Braind Pact - Agreement that there will never be war again, the consequence is war
• Harding dies in office from a heart attack so Calvin Coolidge (VP) becomes president.
• Germany doesn't have the money to pay reparations so US comes up with Dawes Act


  Dawes Act - US gains some money from interest and it keeps circulation of funds

  A) loans

  B) reparations

  C) war loans repaid

  
• • US government needs farmers to create more and more product during the war
  • Farmers take out loans to build more land and get more supplies
  • War ends and demand plummets
  • Farmers ask Congress to pass a bill to help them, Congress agrees but Coolidge vetoes it
• Russian/Bolshevik Revolution:

  • Bolshevik - Russian Communist Party
  • Murder the royal family and Vladimir Lennon takes control (USSR)
  • First fully Communist country
• Red Scare

  • US thinks that everyone that emigrates from Eastern Europe are secret Russian spies
  • Palmer Raids - Unlawful search and seizure of Eastern European homes, found 0 spies


  American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) - Helped Russian immigrants

  • Tinker v. Des Moines
  • Travel Bans (2020)
• Sacco and Vanzetti Trial

  • Italian Immigrants and Anarchists
  • Represented by the ACLU
  • Accused of robbing a shoe store and killing a clerk
  • No evidence, they had alibis


  But the court found them guilty and had them executed
• People are moving out of war torn countries and to the US
• Original KKK

  • South
  • Only men
  • Prevent Black people and associates from voting


  Second KKK

  • Big cities/Urban areas
  • Men and women
  • Don't like people who aren't White Protestant Christians
• The KKK had influence with politicians, some politicians were in the KKK

  This led to anti-immigrant laws

  • National Origins Act - allows 2% of the previous years amount of immigrants
  • Emergency Quota Act - sets restrictions (quotas) on how many people can emigrate from a country

  ^^ Both intensely restrict immigration
• Stock - essentially, a measure of how much a stock is worth, the consumers public view of a company

  • The price of stock is based on the investors 


  Stockbrokers guess (stock speculation) what businesses are good to convince their investors to invest
• The introduction of personal credit so people could pay for expensive items in installment


  Didn't know the rules of credit so they ended up in debt
• Bubble - a company could say they sold 1000 fridges but if the did it on credit then they didn't make the profit of 1000 fridges 


  Stock prices rise
• Margin Buying - buying stocks with credit 


  Can't sell stocks until you pay them off
• Conspicuous Consumerism - people buying things to look wealthier than they are
• Henry Ford

  • First car he created was the Model T
  • Invents the assembly line to reduce production prices
  • Created 40 hour weeks and weekends
  • Payed Black and White employees the same


  With the assembly line the Model T changed in price from thousands to 300
• The price of alcohol went up because it was illegal

  Speakeasy - illegal bar, other crimes occurred her because it was a secret

  • Al Capone - ran speakeasys, turned into a mafia boss
  • Most groups like this were comprised of ethnic gangs
• Lucky Luciano copied Al Capone and made the five families (mob) of New York
• Elliot Ness (FBI) wants to prosecute Al Capone, so he charges him for tax evasion


  Al Capone is arrested and sent to Alcatraz, he went dumb from syphilis, was released a few years later and died shortly after
• NASCAR - people had fast cars and nothing to drive them for so they started racing
• Fundamentalism - the literal interpretation of a religious text
• When the Red Scare comes, fundamentalism increases


  People believed that all communists were athiests
• Christians disagreed with science and Darwin's theory of evolution


  TN passed Butler Act which only allowed the Creation Story to be taught at schools
• The ACLU disagreed with the Butler Act, separation of church and state

  Scopes Monkey Trial

  John Scopes - PE teacher that was pulled to teach science, ACLU convinced him to teach about evolution

  • Scopes gets arrested and Clarence Darrow represents him, William Jennings Bryan represents the state
  • Case of century, people listened on the radio
  • The judge won't let Darrow bring any experts to the stand so he buts Bryan on the stand instead and humiliated him
  • Bryan wins the case because Scopes did break the law but he is embarrassed and dies (from diabetes) 2 weeks later
• Talkies - movies where people talked, started to replace silent films

  • Charlie Chaplin - good at silent films but bad at talkies, thought they were a fad

  Radio - fuels consumerism, advertising, news, can listen to it in the background

  • War of the World - book about aliens, advertised on the radio but people thought it was a news channel and they were being attacked by aliens

  Celebrities

  • Charles Lindbergh - flew the Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic, his baby was kidnapped and killed
• Harlem Renaissance - blending ancestry with current experience of being a Black American

  • Novelists: Zora Neal Hurston
  • Musicians: Billy Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington (Cotton Club)
  • Josephine Baker - choreographer, Civil Rights Activist
• Marcus Garvey

  • UNIA - United Negro Improvement Association
  • Back-to-Africa movement
  • Segregation as a defense mechanism
• "A Lost Generation" - WWI veterans and writers who had a hard time moving on after the war, saw society as fake

  • Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • The Great Gatsby - nothing is real, it's all about appearances
• Margaret Sanger - witnessed the cause of numerous and dangerous pregnancies

  • Wrote Birth Control Review, went against Comstock Law so she had to flee to Europe
  • Her husband kept publishing the Review
  • In Europe she met a rich woman who helped her; she smuggled BC into the US
• Comstock Law - can't write about obscene things (Birth Control)
• Repeal Comstock

  • People claim it goes against free speech
  • Doctors become exempt from it
  • Government propaganda about safe sex
• Soldiers are getting STDs from French prostitutes, government starts making propaganda about safe sex


  The world doesn't end when they talk about sex