1920s: Cultural and Political Controversies in two minutes
- The 1920 census found most Americans in urban places, and the Great Migration swelled Harlem, where Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and other writers helped create the Harlem Renaissance.
- Quota acts in 1921 and 1924, the latter using the 1890 census, sharply cut immigration from southern and eastern Europe, and the 1924 act barred nearly all Asians.
- Eugenics and fear of radicals fed the mood: Buck v. Bell (1927) upheld forced sterilization, and Massachusetts executed Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti after a trial many thought unfair.
- The Klan, revived in 1915, grew to millions of members by 1924, in the Midwest as in the South, and targeted Black Americans, Catholics, Jews and immigrants before scandal shrank it.
- Prohibition, enforced from January 1920 under the Volstead Act, cut drinking at first but fed bootlegging and gangs, and divided dry small towns from wet immigrant cities.
- Flappers and the proposed Equal Rights Amendment challenged traditional gender roles, and the 1925 Scopes trial over teaching evolution in Tennessee set fundamentalists against modernists.
- On the exam: Topic 7.8 tests contextualization, placing the Scopes trial, the quotas, the Klan or the Harlem Renaissance in 1920s tensions; compare with Gilded Age nativism.
Topic 7.8 key terms
- Scopes Trial (1925)
The 1925 trial in Dayton, Tennessee, of a high-school teacher charged with teaching evolution in violation of the Butler Act. Reporters called it the “Monkey Trial.” It became a national argument over science, religion and who decides what public schools teach.
- Installment buying
Buying on credit: a down payment, then monthly payments while you use the product. It put cars and appliances within reach of families who couldn’t pay all at once, and it left them owing money.
- Urbanization
The growth of cities and the move of Americans from farms and villages to urban places. In 1920 the census counted a majority of the population, 51.2 percent, as urban for the first time.
- Great Migration
The movement of about six million Black Americans out of the rural South to cities in the North, Midwest and West, from 1916 to 1970. Its first wave came during World War I. A second, larger wave followed in the 1920s.
- Harlem Renaissance
The flowering of Black literature, music and art centered in Harlem in the 1920s. Writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, and musicians such as Duke Ellington and Bessie Smith, drew on Black life and pride.
- Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)
Marcus Garvey's organization, which grew rapidly in Harlem after 1917. It promoted Black pride, Black-owned businesses and emigration to Africa, and its red, black and green flag became a symbol of the movement.
- Nativism
Favoring native-born Americans over immigrants. After World War I it drove the Red Scare, a revived Ku Klux Klan, and laws to restrict immigration.
- Immigration Act of 1924 (National Origins Act)
Capped immigration at 2 percent of each nationality living in the U.S. in 1890, favoring northern and western Europe. It barred immigrants "ineligible to citizenship" (in effect, all Asians) and set no quotas for the Western Hemisphere.
- Ozawa v. U.S. (1922) and U.S. v. Thind (1923)
Supreme Court rulings that only "free white persons" could become naturalized citizens. First "white" meant Caucasian, so a Japanese immigrant did not qualify. Then it meant "white" as the common man understands it, so an Indian immigrant did not either.
- Eugenics
The belief that people could be "improved" through selective breeding. It was used to justify immigration limits and laws forcing people to be sterilized.
- Buck v. Bell (1927)
The Supreme Court upheld Virginia's forced-sterilization law, 8 to 1, in an opinion by Justice Holmes. The ruling let states sterilize people they called "unfit."
- The Birth of a Nation (1915)
D. W. Griffith's blockbuster silent film. It shows the Reconstruction-era Klan as heroes and Black Americans as villains, and its history is false. The NAACP protested it, and many historians link its success to the Klan's revival in 1915.
- Second Ku Klux Klan
The Klan revived in 1915. It was open only to native-born, white, Protestant men (a women's order followed in 1923) and it targeted Black Americans, Catholics, Jews and immigrants. It peaked around 1924–25 with an estimated 3 to 5 million members.
- Invisible Empire
What the Klan called itself. Members swore secrecy and wore hoods, yet in the 1920s the order recruited openly, marched in public and backed candidates for office.
- Volstead Act (1919)
The federal law that enforced the 18th Amendment. Passed over President Wilson's veto, it banned making, selling and transporting drinks with more than 0.5 percent alcohol.
- Flapper
The 1920s image of a young woman with bobbed hair and a short skirt who smoked, drove and went out unchaperoned. Magazines and movies made it famous; most women lived very differently.
- Comstock Act (1873)
A federal law that banned mailing 'obscene' material. It classed birth-control information as obscene, so Sanger's work risked prosecution.
- Equal Rights Amendment
A proposed amendment guaranteeing equal legal rights regardless of sex. First introduced in 1923, it did not pass Congress until 1972 and never became part of the Constitution.
- Society for Human Rights (1924)
The first documented gay rights group in the United States, chartered by Illinois in December 1924. It fell apart after police arrested its founder in 1925.
- Fundamentalism
A movement of conservative Protestants in the 1920s who held that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. They fought teachings, such as evolution, that seemed to contradict it.
- Modernism (in religion)
The view, common among liberal Protestants, that the Bible should be read in light of modern science and scholarship, so that faith and evolution could fit together. Fundamentalists fought it.
- Prohibition
The ban on making and selling alcohol under the 18th Amendment, in force from 1920 to 1933. "Wet" meant against the ban and "dry" meant for it. The fight split cities from small towns and immigrants from native-born Protestants.
- Solid South
The Democratic Party's dependable hold on the former Confederate states after Reconstruction. In 1928 Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Florida and Texas voted Republican. All five returned to the Democrats in 1932.
- Election of 1928
Republican Herbert Hoover beat Democrat Al Smith in a landslide. The vote followed the decade's fault lines: Prohibition, religion, immigration, and city against country.
- Mass culture
Shared entertainment and news carried by radio, movies and mass-circulation magazines to a national audience. It spread common habits and brands. It did not end the country's arguments over religion, race and immigration.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
The City Decade
1920–1926
Key terms: Urbanization, Great Migration, Harlem Renaissance, Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)
The 1920 census found something new. For the first time, most Americans lived in cities and towns. It counted any place with 2,500 people as urban. Dayton, Tennessee, didn't make the cut.
Cities meant jobs. Young women went to work as typists, clerks, telephone operators and shop girls. Most were expected to quit when they married.
Nearly half a million Mexicans came north legally in the 1920s, to farms, railroads and steel mills.
Black Southerners kept heading north. The Great Migration didn't stop when the war did.
Langston Hughes
Well, son, I'll tell you: Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
By 1930 more than 160,000 Black New Yorkers lived in Harlem. Its writers, artists and musicians called themselves the New Negro. Historians call the movement the Harlem Renaissance.
Zora Neale Hurston came to Harlem from Eatonville, Florida, a town Black residents ran themselves.
Zora Neale Hurston
But I am not tragically colored.
Marcus Garvey, from Jamaica, led the biggest Black mass movement of its day: race pride, Black-owned business, a return to Africa. Convicted of mail fraud in 1923, he entered prison in 1925 and was deported in 1927.
Langston Hughes
The rhythm of life is a jazz rhythm, Honey.
Langston Hughes
The gods are laughing at us.
Langston Hughes
The broken heart of love, the weary, weary heart of pain,
Langston Hughes
Overtones, undertones,
Langston Hughes
To the rumble of street cars,
Langston Hughes
To the swish of rain.
Langston Hughes
Lenox Avenue, Honey. Midnight,
Langston Hughes
And the gods are laughing at us.
Up the avenue, at the Cotton Club, Black musicians played for white-only audiences. Harlem's own people couldn't buy a ticket.
Whose Country Is This?
1919–1927
Key terms: Nativism, Immigration Act of 1924 (National Origins Act), Ozawa v. U.S. (1922) and U.S. v. Thind (1923), Eugenics, Buck v. Bell (1927)
Calvin Coolidge, soon to be vice president, asked it in a 1921 magazine article.
Calvin Coolidge
Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend.
He wrote in a frightened time: strikes, bombs blamed on anarchists, a Red Scare. More than a million immigrants arrived between 1919 and 1921.
Historians call this context. It explains what came next. It doesn’t excuse it.
In 1924 Congress gave each nationality a quota, pegged to the census of 1890.
That census came before most Italians, Poles and Jews arrived. Italy’s quota fell to under 4,000 a year.
The act barred anyone “ineligible to citizenship.” Naturalization law had a racial test. Nearly every Asian failed it.
The Supreme Court ruled a Japanese immigrant wasn’t white, because he wasn’t Caucasian. Three months later it ruled an Indian immigrant, though Caucasian, wasn’t white either.
Eugenics, then a respected science, backed the quotas.
Harry Laughlin advised Congress on immigration. He also wrote a model law for sterilizing people the state judged unfit.
Virginia passed such a law in 1924. Its test case was a young woman named Carrie Buck.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
The Court upheld it, eight to one. Carrie Buck’s daughter, Vivian, made her school’s honor roll in 1931.
Massachusetts convicted two Italian anarchists of a payroll robbery and murder. Many around the world believed they were tried as foreigners and radicals.
I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian.
Bartolomeo Vanzetti
I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian.
August 23, 1927 Charlestown State Prison, Massachusetts
Both men were executed in August 1927. Historians still argue about their guilt. Few defend their trial.
The Invisible Empire
1915–1930
Key terms: The Birth of a Nation (1915), Second Ku Klux Klan, Nativism, Invisible Empire
In 1915 the blockbuster The Birth of a Nation made heroes of the Reconstruction Klan. The NAACP picketed it. Crowds packed the theaters anyway.
That Thanksgiving night, William Simmons revived the Klan on Stone Mountain, Georgia. The movie helped him find recruits.
In 1920 Simmons hired two publicists. They sold memberships like insurance: ten dollars each, and the salesman kept four.
By 1924 the Klan had millions of members. It was as strong in the Midwest as in the South. Indiana was a stronghold.
It held picnics and parades, and promised to clean up towns. Its enemies were Black Americans, Catholics, Jews and immigrants.
Behind the picnics came threats, whippings and killings. Crosses burned in front yards at night.
Henry Ford's own weekly paper ran years of lies about Jews. He apologized in 1927, after a lawsuit.
In August 1925 about 30,000 Klan members marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, faces uncovered.
The Sunday papers put it on the front page.
That November a jury convicted Indiana's Klan leader, D. C. Stephenson, of murdering Madge Oberholtzer. Members quit by the hundreds of thousands.
By 1930 the Klan was down to about 30,000 members.
Wet and Dry
1920–1928
Key terms: Volstead Act (1919), Flapper, Comstock Act (1873), Equal Rights Amendment, Society for Human Rights (1924)
Prohibition began in January 1920. Drinking fell, especially at first. Then the speakeasies opened.
Two federal agents, Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith, made thousands of arrests in disguise. The Bureau let them go in 1925.
His memoir is dedicated:
To the 4,932 persons I arrested, hoping they bear me no grudge for having done my duty.
The profits went to gangs. In Chicago, Al Capone's outfit made millions from beer and whiskey, and paid police to look away.
It split the country: dry churches and small towns against wet cities full of immigrants. Supporters pointed to fewer deaths from drink. Opponents pointed to the gangsters.
Young women bobbed their hair, wore skirts to the knee, smoked and drove. Magazines called them flappers. Most women never were one.
Margaret Sanger campaigned for birth control, which the law still treated as obscene.
Alice Paul, who led the suffragists' hardest campaign, now wanted this in the Constitution:
Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.
Many women reformers fought it. They feared it would erase laws that protected women workers. Paul's side replied that those laws also kept women out of better-paying jobs.
In Chicago, Henry Gerber founded the first documented gay rights group in the country, in 1924. Months later police arrested him. Charges were dropped, but the post office fired him.
The Courthouse Lawn
July 10–26, 1925
Key terms: Fundamentalism, Modernism (in religion), Eugenics, Scopes trial (1925)
Back to Dayton.
For the prosecution: William Jennings Bryan, three times the Democrats' nominee for president and the country's leading fundamentalist. He argued that Tennessee's voters had the right to decide what their schools taught.
Clarence Darrow
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools…
Tennessee's approved textbook ranked the races, and urged keeping 'degenerate' families from having children.
The judge barred the defense's scientists. On July 20, with the courtroom packed, he moved court outside.
Judge John T. Raulston
I am afraid of the building.
On the lawn, the defense called Bryan himself to the stand.
William Jennings Bryan
I want the Christian world to know that any atheist, agnostic, or unbeliever, can question me any time as to my belief in God, and I will answer him.
The next morning, the judge struck Bryan's testimony from the record. The jury convicted Scopes in nine minutes. Tennessee's supreme court later threw out his $100 fine on a technicality. The law itself stood until 1967.
A Canadian cartoonist drew Bryan and Darrow as mosquitoes trying to cut down two great oaks, Christianity and science. Neither oak fell.
City reporters called the townspeople 'yokels.' The townspeople read the papers too.
Five days after the verdict, Bryan died in his sleep in Dayton.
Science is a magnificent material force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine.
William Jennings Bryan
Science is a magnificent material force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine.
He had written it for a closing speech he never got to give.
Election Night
November 6, 1928
Key terms: Installment buying, Prohibition, Solid South, Election of 1928, Mass culture
Radio announcerDramatized
Indiana for Hoover. Massachusetts for Smith. Tennessee for Hoover.
November 1928. The same parlor, and a new radio, bought on time.
The Democrats had nominated Al Smith of New York: Catholic, wet, and the grandson of immigrants.
He lost badly. Anti-Catholic feeling helped turn five Southern states Republican.
But taken together, the twelve biggest cities went for Smith. Many were immigrants' children, and they were turning out in new numbers.
In 1926 a Lebanese-born poet wrote to young Syrian Americans:
Kahlil Gibran
I believe that you can say to the founders of this great nation,
Kahlil Gibran
Here I am, a youth, a young tree whose roots were plucked from the hills of Lebanon, yet I am deeply rooted here, and I would be fruitful.
The machines made Americans one audience. They never made them one opinion. Within a year the boom would break. The payments on that radio came due anyway.