Chapter 20 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.
2. Americans spent more and more of their income on leisure activities like
vacations, movies, and sporting events.
3. Americans considered their standard of living a “sacred acquisition.”
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
2. Propaganda campaigns linked unionism and socialism as examples of
the sinister influence of foreigners on American life.
3. During the 1920s, labor lost over 2 million members.
G. The Equal Rights Amendment
1. The achievement of suffrage in 1920 eliminated the bond of unity
between various activists.
2. Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party proposed the ERA.
H. Women’s Freedom
 1. Female liberation resurfaced as a lifestyle, the stuff of advertising and
mass entertainment.
a. The flapper
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”
2. In 1929, the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd published Middletown.
3. Voter turnout declined dramatically.
B. The Republican Era
1. Government policies reflected the pro-business ethos of the 1920s.
a. Lower taxes
b. Higher tariffs
c. Anti-unionism
2. The Supreme Court remained strongly conservative.
a. Repudiated Muller v. Oregon
C. Corruption in Government
1. The Harding administration quickly became one of the most corrupt in
American history.
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 in 1924.
E. Economic Diplomacy
1. Foreign affairs also reflected the close working relationship between
business and government.
a. Washington Naval Arms Conference
2. Much foreign policy was conducted through private economic
relationships rather than through governmental action.
a. Bankers loaned Germany large sums of money.
3. The government continued to dispatch soldiers when a change in
government in the Caribbean threatened American economic interests.
a. Somoza and Nicaragua
IV. The Birth of Civil Liberties
A. The “Free Mob”
1. Wartime repression continued into the 1920s.
2. In 1922, the film industry adopted the Hays Code.
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.
2. In its initial decisions the Supreme Court gave the concept of civil
liberties a series of devastating blows.
a. Oliver Wendell Holmes
C. The Court and Civil Liberties
1. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis began to speak up for
freedom of speech.
2. The new regard for free speech went beyond political expression.
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
3. Much of the press portrayed fundamentalism as a movement of
backwoods bigots.
4. Fundamentalists supported Prohibition, while others viewed it as a
violation of individual freedom.
5. Prohibition also raised questions about the balance between federal
authority and local law, the virtue of legislating morality, and it split the
Democratic Party.
B. The Scopes Trial
1. John Scopes was arrested for teaching evolution in school.
2. The Scopes trial reflected the enduring tension between two American
definitions of freedom.
3. The renowned labor lawyer Clarence Darrow defended Scopes.
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.
2. The Klan was reborn in Atlanta in 1915 after the lynching of Leo Frank,
a Jewish factory manager accused of killing a teenage girl.
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.
2. Efforts to restrict immigration made gains when large employers
dropped their traditional opposition.
 3. In 1924, Congress permanently limited immigration for Europeans and
banned it for Asians.
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.
5. The law did establish a new category of “illegal alien” and a new
mechanism for enforcement, the Border Patrol.
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.
3. The 1924 immigration law also reflected the Progressive desire to
improve the quality of democratic citizenship and to employ scientific
methods to set public policy.
F. Pluralism and Liberty
1. Cultural pluralism described a society that gloried in ethnic diversity
rather than attempting to suppress it.
a. Horace Kallen
b. Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict
2. The most potent defense of a pluralist vision of American society came
from the new immigrants themselves.
G. Promoting Tolerance
1. Immigrant groups asserted the validity of cultural diversity and
identified toleration of difference as the essence of American freedom.
2. In landmark decisions, the Supreme Court struck down laws that tried to
enforce Americanization.
H. The Emergence of Harlem
1. The 1920s also witnessed an upsurge of self-consciousness among
black Americans, especially in the North’s urban ghettos.
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.
2. Hoover’s opponent in 1928 was Alfred E. Smith of New York.
3. Smith’s Catholicism became the focus of the race.
B. The Coming of the Depression
1. On October 21, 1929, Hoover gave a speech that was a tribute to
progress, and especially to the businessmen and scientists.
 2. The stock market crash did not, by itself, cause the Depression.
3. The global financial system was ill-equipped to deal with the crash.
4. In 1932, the economy hit rock bottom.
C. Americans and the Depression
1. The Depression transformed American life.
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.
2. Milo Reno led the National Farmers’ Holiday Association.
3. Only the minuscule Communist Party seemed able to give a political
focus to the anger and despair.
E. Hoover’s Response
1. Businessmen strongly opposed federal aid to the unemployed.
2. Hoover remained committed to “associational action.”
F. The Worsening Economic Outlook
1. Some administration remedies made the economic situation worse.
a. Smoot-Hawley Tariff
2. Hoover created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the
Federal Home Loan Bank System in 1932, in 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.