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CHAPTER 20 From Business Culture to Great
Depression: The Twenties, 1920–1932
This chapter concentrates on the history of the 1920s. The chapter opens with the Sacco-Vanzetti case, which
encapsulated divisions within the larger society. Nativists dwelled on the defendants’ immigrant origins.
Conservatives insisted that these alien anarchists must die, despite the lack of evidence. By contrast, prominent
liberals, such as future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter and socialist Eugene Debs, rallied around the
convicted men. Despite these divisions, the 1920s was a decade of economic prosperity for many, as the business of
America became business. Illustrating the meaning of freedom as linked to prosperity is Andre Siegfried’s Atlantic
Voices provides the anti-immigrant sentiment of Texas representative Lucian Parrish to the U.S. Congress in 1921.
Who Is an American? (Primary Source document feature) presents a numerical analysis of immigration quotas from
various nations under the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Introduction: The Sacco-Vanzetti Case
II. The Business of America
A. A Decade of Prosperity
1. The business of America was business.
2. The automobile was the backbone of economic growth.
a. It stimulated the expansion of steel, rubber, and oil production, road construction, and other sectors
of the economy.
3. American multinational corporations extended their reach throughout the world.
a. American companies produced 85 percent of the world’s cars and 40 percent of its manufactured
goods.
b. Henry Ford’s Fordlandia
B. A New Society
1. Consumer goods of all kinds proliferated, marketed by salespeople and advertisers who promoted them as
ways of satisfying Americans’ psychological desires and everyday needs.
C. The Limits of Prosperity
1. The fruits of increased production were very unequally distributed.
2. By 1929, an estimated 40 percent of the population still lived in poverty.
D. The Farmers’ Plight
1. Farmers did not share in the prosperity of the decade.
a. California received many displaced farmers.
2. New technology impacted farming.
a. Immigrant labor
E. The Image of Business
1. Businesspeople like Henry Ford and engineers like Herbert Hoover were cultural heroes.
2. Numerous firms established public relations departments.
F. The Decline of Labor
1. Business appropriated the rhetoric of Americanism and industrial freedom as a weapon against labor
unions.
a. Welfare capitalism
3. During the 1920s, labor lost over 2 million members.
G. The Equal Rights Amendment
2. Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party proposed the ERA.
H. Women’s Freedom
2. Sex became a marketing tool.
3. New freedom for women only lasted while they were single.
III. Business and Government
A. The Retreat from Progressivism
1. Public Opinion and The Phantom Public repudiated the Progressive hope of applying intelligence to
social problems in a mass democracy.
a. “Manufacture of consent”
B. The Republican Era
1. Government policies reflected the pro-business ethos of the 1920s.
2. The Supreme Court remained strongly conservative.
a. Repudiated Muller v. Oregon
C. Corruption in Government
2. Harding surrounded himself with cronies who used their offices for private gain.
a. Teapot Dome scandal
D. The Election of 1924
1. Coolidge exemplified Yankee honesty.
2. Robert La Follette ran on a Progressive platform.
E. Economic Diplomacy
1. Foreign affairs also reflected the close working relationship between business and government.
a. Washington Naval Arms Conference
threatened American economic interests.
a. Somoza and Nicaragua
IV. The Birth of Civil Liberties
A. The “Free Mob”
3. Even as Europeans turned in increasing numbers to American popular culture and consumer goods,
some came to view the country as a repressive cultural wasteland.
B. A Clear and Present Danger
1. The ACLU was established in 1920.
C. The Court and Civil Liberties
3. Anita Whitney was pardoned by the governor of California on the grounds that freedom of speech was
the “indispensable birthright of every free American.”
V. The Culture Wars
A. The Fundamentalist Revolt
1. Many evangelical Protestants felt threatened by the decline of traditional values and the increased
visibility of Catholicism and Judaism because of immigration.
2. Convinced that the literal truth of the Bible formed the basis of Christian belief, fundamentalists
launched a campaign to rid Protestant denominations of modernism.
a. Billy Sunday
B. The Scopes Trial
a. Darrow examined William J. Bryan as an expert on the Bible.
4. Fundamentalists retreated for many years from battles over public education, preferring to build their
own schools and colleges.
C. The Second Klan
1. Few features of urban life seemed more alien to small-town, native-born Protestants than immigrant
populations and cultures.
3. By the mid-1920s, the Klan spread to the North and West.
D. Closing the Golden Door
1. Some new laws redrew the boundary of citizenship to include groups previously outside of it.
4. To satisfy the demands of large farmers in California who relied heavily on seasonal Mexican labor, the 1924
law established no limits on immigration from the Western Hemisphere.
6. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature) features the anti-immigrant sentiment delivered
by Texas representative Lucian Parrish to the U.S. Congress in 1921.
E. Race and the Law
1. By the early 1920s, political leaders of both North and South agreed to the relegation of blacks to
second-class citizenship.
2. James J. Davis commented that immigration policy must now rest on a biological definition of the ideal
population.
quotas from various nations under the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924.
F. Pluralism and Liberty
1. Cultural pluralism described a society that gloried in ethnic diversity rather than attempting to suppress
it.
2. The most potent defense of a pluralist vision of American society came from the new immigrants
themselves.
G. Promoting Tolerance
2. In landmark decisions, the Supreme Court struck down laws that tried to enforce Americanization.
3. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature) features Justice James McReynolds’s majority
opinion in favor of civil liberties in Meyer v. Nebraska (1923).
H. The Emergence of Harlem
2. New York’s Harlem gained an international reputation as the “capital” of black America.
3. The 1920s became famous for slumming.
I. The Harlem Renaissance
1. In art, the term “New Negro” meant the rejection of established stereotypes and a search for black
values to put in their place.
a. Claude McKay
VI. The Great Depression
A. The Election of 1928
1. Hoover seemed to exemplify what was widely called the new era of American capitalism.
B. The Coming of the Depression
2. The stock market crash did not, by itself, cause the Depression.
4. In 1932, the economy hit rock bottom.
C. Americans and the Depression
2. The image of big business, carefully cultivated during the 1920s, collapsed as congressional
investigations revealed massive irregularities among bankers and stockbrokers.
D. Resignation and Protest
1. Twenty thousand unemployed World War I veterans descended on Washington in the spring of 1932 to
demand early payment of a bonus due in 1945.
3. Only the minuscule Communist Party seemed able to give a political focus to the anger and despair.
E. Hoover’s Response
2. Hoover remained committed to “associational action.”
F. The Worsening Economic Outlook
2. Hoover created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the Federal Home Loan Bank System in
1932, signaling a dramatic departure from previous federal economic policy.
3. Hoover was still opposed to offering direct relief to the unemployed.
G. Freedom in the Modern World
1. In 1927, the definition of freedom celebrated the unimpeded reign of economic enterprise yet tolerated
the surveillance of private life, and individual conscience reigned supreme.
2. By 1932, the seeds had already been planted for a new conception of freedom.
SUGGESTED DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
• Discuss and analyze the significance of the Sacco-Vanzetti case.
• How did consumer goods, consumer credit, and the rise of advertising shape American lives and ideas of
freedom?
• How did the automobile change American life?
• Debate the merits of the ERA. Why did Alice Paul see it as a logical extension of the Nineteenth Amendment?
• Discuss what the Supreme Court and Congress did during the 1920s to reverse some of the achievements of the
Progressive era. How was freedom used to justify these actions?
• How was the fundamentalist revolt a reaction to the modernization of American society in the 1920s?
• As reflected in Voices of Freedom, how was the meaning of freedom transformed during the 1920s?
• In what ways did blacks express their freedom through the Harlem Renaissance?
• Discuss how and why the new immigration law reflected the heightened emphasis on race as a determinant of
public policy.
• What is the role of the American Civil Liberties Union? How important is its function in society? Discuss the
importance of Meyer v. Nebraska regarding civil liberties.
• Why did the stock market crash in 1929? How did President Hoover and Congress respond to the onset of the
Great Depression?
• How did the early years of the Great Depression impact the United States and the American people?
SUPPLEMENTAL WEB AND VISUAL RESOURCES
ACLU
www.aclu.org
This is the official website of the American Civil Liberties Union, providing useful information about who they are, what they
are doing today, and the various causes they have taken up in recent years.
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/eaa/
This Duke University site includes 9,000 advertising items and publications dating from 1850 to 1920, illustrating the rise of
consumer culture and the birth of a professionalized advertising industry in the United States.
The Great Depression
http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/
The digitized collection of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum offers a variety of original documents,
chronologies, and graphics to explore the Great Depression and the New Deal.
The Dust Bowl (PBS, American Experience, Ken Burns, 2 hrs.)
www.pbs.org/kenburns/dustbowl/
This website provides access to the PBS documentary and gives further primary and secondary source information.
The National Humanities Center. Teacher Serve: Divining America.
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/twenty/tkeyinfo/tscopes.htm
This site offers pedagogical information on how to teach the Scopes trial. Links on this site lead to similar collections on
the teaching of environmental history and the history of African-Americans.
SUPPLEMENTAL PRINT RESOURCES
Best, W. D. Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915–1952. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2005.
Clements, Kendrick. Hoover, Conservation, and Consumerism: Engineering the Good Life. Lawrence: University of Kansas
Press, 2000.
Conkin, Paul. When All the Gods Trembled: Darwinism, Scopes, and American Intellectuals. Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 1998.
Crunden, Robert. Body and Soul—The Making of American Modernism: Art, Music and Letters in the Jazz Age, 1919–1926. New
York: Basic Books, 2000.
Ferrell, Robert. The Presidency of Calvin Coolidge. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998.
Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Great Crash: 1929. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1972.
Goldberg, David. Discontented America: The United States in the 1920s. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
Gordon, Linda. The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition. New
INTERACTIVE INSTRUCTOR ACTIVITIES
1. Group Listening Exercise: The Age of Big-Band Swing
Following the popularization of sheet music, the commercial market for popular music in the United States began with the
mass production of phonographic records in the early twentieth century. With the “electric age” of record players and the
distribution of radio in the 1920s, music became an essential commercial expression of popular culture. At the center of this
commercialization of music was big-band swing, which was part of the emergence of jazz.
The source for this interactive activity is a recording of Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians’ “Any Ice Today, Lady?”
(1926), accompanied by images of ice-making, delivery, and consumption in the 1920s. The director of one of the best-selling
recording bands of the 1920s, Fred Waring increasingly turned to choral arrangements later in his career, which continued on
radio and television into the 1970s.
“Any Ice Today, Lady?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?vz_FotqFR08I&featureyoutube_gdata_player
1. What is the mood and tempo of the music? What was it meant for?
2. Transcribe the lyrics or look them up online. What story does the song tell?
3. What might have made the theme of “ice” appealing to an audience of the 1920s? What does this tell us about the
nature of the new prosperity of the 1920s?
4. Do you think the song contains other, less explicit messages?
5. Who was the primary audience for this music, and for what situations was it most suitable? Does this point to another way
in which this music was typical for the 1920s?
1. Ask students to research Waring’s Pennsylvanians online. What were their origins? How did they rise to prominence?
How does this compare to the success stories of rock and indie bands in the 2000s?
2. Ask students to locate other songs performed by Waring’s Pennsylvanians. What kinds of topics and themes do they
address? Given that Waring’s Pennsylvanians were among the best-selling recording bands of the 1920s, what does this
music tell us about societal values of the 1920s?
3. Ask students to locate African-American jazz bands of the 1920s. How might their success have differed from that of
Fred Waring’s, and why?
4. Ask students to find more information online about the history of household refrigeration. Was ice-making a 1920s
novelty, or were there other consumer trends in the 1920s in which ice played an important role?
C. Group Activities:
1. Divide students into groups of four or five. Ask them to discuss the appeal of “Any Ice Today, Lady?” to college
students. How do they feel about this style of music? Can they identify themes or characteristics that this song might
have with the music they listen to?
2. Ask the students to list as many of the instruments as they can discern. Ask them to look up the typical composition of a
big band and let them share their own experiences with live music. What would it be like to have this number of
musicians play live in a dance hall at a time when radios and record players sounded scratchy and weak? In the absence
of high-powered car stereos and streaming music, does the appeal of live big-band music become more understandable?
2. Group Activity: The Life and Career of Anna May Wong
In the 1920s, the American consumer economy came to maturity. Along with this new society emerged a national popular
culture promoted via radio and the movie industry. Hollywood offered the growing middle-class audience narratives of
romance and adventure, as well as the fantasy lifestyles of celebrities such as Douglas Fairbanks and Clara Bow, the “It” Girl.
A. Discussion Activities:
1. What roles could Anna May Wong play, and which ones could she not play? Why? (Make sure to remind students of
2. What different interpretations of Anna May Wong’s career exist? What positions do students take? Did Wong betray
her Chinese-American community, or serve it?
3. Her first visit to China in the early 1930s earned her a mixed, and even hostile, public reception there. What do you
think may have been the reason?
1. Have students research the biography of Anna May Wong. What hardships did she suffer, and what opportunities did
she experience? How did her Chinese-American identity shape her life and career?
2. Ask students to locate Anna May Wong movies on YouTube and watch at least one. What patterns can they detect in the
narrative? What stereotypes did these movies reproduce? Did Anna May Wong succeed in challenging racial stereotypes
and conventions in these movies?
