"Return to Normalcy" ? 1919-20 - The Red Scare: Provoked by fear that labor violence after World War I was associated with the communist revolution in Russia
- Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer led raids against suspected left-wing radicals
A new K.K.K. arose in the early 1920's expressing the intolerance and prejudice common during this period
Immigration Act of 1924 - Imposed immigration quotas based on national origins: 2% of pop. base in 1890 - designed to discriminate against Southern and Eastern Europeans
- Total exclusion of the Japanese
1919 - Volstead Act implemented the 18th Amendment (prohibition)
- Opposed in the larger eastern cities - Why it failed?
Education - High School Graduation rate: 25%
- John Dewey-The " Father of Progressive Education"
1925 - John T. Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee: Fundamentalists v. Darwin's Theory of Evolution, William J. Bryan v. Clarence Darrow
Mass Consumption Economy: Buying on credit introduced advertising came into its own
Bruce Barton - The Man Nobody Knows
Henry Ford introduced the first cheap car - $260
1920 - First transcontinental airmail route
1927 - Charles Lindberg's solo flight across the Atlantic
1920 - First news broadcast on radio KDKA in Pittsburg
1927 - First "Talkie" motion picture: "The Jazz Singer"
Note - The automobile, radio, and motion picture all contributed to the "Standardization" of American life
Life Style Changes: By 1920 most Americans lived in cities
Sargarent Sanger led the first organized birth-control movement in the U.S.
A period of Sexual Liberation - The "Flappers"
- "Knecking" & "Petting"
New Generation of Writers: Social critics of materialism and the loss of idealism
Earnest Hemingway - The Sun Also Rises
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
Sinclair Lewis - Main Street
Black cultural renaissance took root in Harlem led by writers like Langston Hughes and jazz artists like Louis Armstrong
Throughout the 1920's the stockmarket was "Booming!" While little was done by Washington to curb money-mad speculators Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon reduced the national debt by $10 billion but could have reduced it much more if he had not reduced the taxes on the rich