U . S . H I S T O RY

CHAPTER 15

TODAY’S QUESTION

• What was the Fundamentalist Movement?• A religious movement that rejected Darwin’s

theory of evolution and believed in creationism- that God created the world as described in the Bible.

SECTION 15-1 A CLASH OF VALUES, PP. 482-488

• Objectives:• 1. Explain the rise in racism and nativism in

the 1920s.• 2. Describe the clash of values in the 1920s

and the changing status of women.

• Did You Know? During the 1920s, cosmetic sales soared as women tried to copy the look of Hollywood movie stars. The average American woman used about one pound of face powder a year.

NATIVISM RESURGES (PAGES 482-484)

• In the 1920s, racism and nativism increased. Immigrants and demobilized military men and women competed for the same jobs during a time of high unemployment and an increased cost of living.

• Ethnic prejudice was the basis of the Sacco and Vanzetti case, in which the two immigrant men were accused of murder and theft. They were thought to be anarchists, or opposed to all forms of government. Sacco and Vanzetti were sentenced to death, and in 1927 they were executed still proclaiming their innocence.

• Nativists used the idea of eugenics, the false science of the improvement of hereditary traits, to give support to their arguments against immigration. Nativists emphasized that human inequalities were inherited and said that inferior people should not be allowed to breed. This added to the anti-immigrant feeling of the time and further promoted the idea of strict immigrant control.

• The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) led the movement to restrict immigration. This new Klan not only targeted the freed African Americans but also Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and other groups believed to have "un-American" values.• Because of a publicity campaign, by 1924 the Ku

Klux Klan had over 4 million members and stretched beyond the South into Northern cities.• Scandals and poor leadership led to the decline of

the Klan in the late 1920s. Politicians supported by the Klan were voted out of office.

• What led to a resurgence of racism and nativism in the United States after World War I? • (During the early 1920s, an economic recession,

an influx of immigrants, and racial and cultural tensions led to an atmosphere of disillusionment and intolerance. Many Americans saw immigrants as a threat to the status quo of traditional American values. Immigrants and demobilized military men and women competed for the same jobs during a time of high unemployment and an increased cost of living.)

CONTROLLING IMMIGRATION (PAGE 484)

• In 1921 President Harding signed the Emergency Quota Act, limiting immigration to 3 percent of the total number of people in any ethnic group already living in the United States. This discriminated heavily against southern and eastern Europeans.

• The National Origins Act of 1924 made immigrant restriction a permanent policy. The act lowered the quotas to 2 percent of each national group living in the U.S. in 1890. This further restricted immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. The act exempted immigrants from the Western Hemisphere from the quotas.

• The immigration acts of 1921 and 1924 reduced the labor pool in the United States. Employers needed laborers for agriculture, mining, and railroad work. Mexican immigrants began pouring into the United States between 1914 and the end of the 1920s. The immigrants fled their country in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution of 1910.

• How did the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902 help bring Mexican immigrants to the United States? • (This act provided funds for irrigation projects in

the Southwest. This led to a need for large numbers of agricultural laborers for factory farms. Since the National Origins Act of 1924 limited immigration from southern and eastern Europe but not from the Western Hemisphere, Mexican immigrants looking for jobs and political freedom poured into the United States.)

THE NEW MORALITY (PAGES 484-486)

• A "new morality" challenged traditional ideas and glorified youth and personal freedom. New ideas about marriage, work, and pleasure affected the way people lived. Women broke away from families as they entered the workforce, earned their own livings, or attended college. The automobile gave American youth the opportunity to pursue interests away from parents.

• Women's fashion drastically changed in the 1920s. The flapper, a young, dramatic, stylish, and unconventional woman, exemplified the change in women's behavior. Professionally, women made advances in the fields of science, medicine, law, and literature.

• How did the automobile encourage the new morality? • (The automobile led to the independence of many

youths. As a result, many American youths spent time away from family to socialize with friends.)

THE FUNDAMENTALIST MOVEMENT (PAGES 486-487)

• Some Americans feared the new morality and worried about America's social decline. Many of these people came from small rural towns and joined a religious movement called Fundamentalism.• The Fundamentalists rejected Darwin's theory of

evolution, which suggested that humans developed from lower forms of life over millions of years. Instead, Fundamentalists believed in creationism—that God created the world as described in the Bible.

• In 1925 Tennessee passed the Butler Act, which made it illegal to teach anything that denied creationism and taught evolution instead.• The debate between evolutionists and

creationists came to a head with the Scopes Trial. Answering the request of the ACLU, John T. Scopes, a biology teacher, volunteered to test the Butler Act by teaching evolution in his class. After being arrested and put on trial, Scopes was found guilty, but the case was later overturned. After the trial, many fundamentalists withdrew from political activism.

• How did the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) cause the clash between the evolutionists and the creationists?• (The ACLU raised money to test the Butler Act,

and it asked for a volunteer who would purposely teach evolution in the classroom.)

PROHIBITION (PAGES 487-488)

• Many people felt that the Eighteenth Amendment, which prohibited alcohol, would reduce unemployment, domestic violence, and poverty.• The Volstead Act made enforcement of

Prohibition the responsibility of the U.S. Treasury Department. Until the 1900s, police powers, a governments power to control people and property in the public’s interest had been the job of the state governments.

PROHIBITION

• Prohibition led the nation down the road to its first attempt at social reform at the federal level. • The necessary increase in government agencies

that accompanied the Volstead Act provided the federal government and the American public an avenue for the federal government’s unprecedented foray into major social reform. • This paradigm shift, and the change in attitudes

of the federal governments role, made it possible for people to accept the New Deal policies President Franklin Roosevelt would later enact.

PROHIBITION

• Alcohol has played a historic role in the politics of the nation. As early as the American Revolution the local tavern was a place to meet and discuss the candidates and issues over a drink.

• The taverns also served as polling places, and more often than not, whoever could ply the most alcohol to the voters as they arrived won the election.

• Despite alcohol’s place in politics and social structures, there was a rising concern over the effects about the consumption of alcohol by the 1880s

• Just after the Civil War, several states introduced referenda trying to deal with liquor and the social problems it represented. • While most of these measures failed, by 1890

prohibition proponents known as “drys,” made up primarily of church members and concerned citizen leagues, had managed to pass a statewide prohibition in Maine, Kansas, and North Dakota.•

PROHIBITION

• By 1919, the “dry’s” had garnered enough support to pass the Eighteenth Amendment, Outlawing alcohol.• Americans ignored the laws of Prohibition. They

went to secret bars called speakeasies, where alcohol could be purchased. Crime became big business, and gangsters corrupted many local politicians and Governments.

ENFORCING PROHIBITION

• In 1923, the mayor of Philadelphia brought in Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler from the Marines to enforce the law in that city. • Within the first week, Butler closed 973 liquor

establishments, which made him highly unpopular with the residents. • In a short period, the citizens turned against him,

making his task all but impossible.

PROHIBITION

• General Butler attempted to carry out the letter of the law in Philadelphia for two more years, but at the end of his leave of absence President Coolidge sent him back to the Marine contingent permanently stationed in China. • Before leaving the city, the General remarked,

“Trying to enforce law in Philadelphia was worse than any battle I was ever in.” •

PROHIBITION ON THE WAY OUT

• While the party platform of the three presidential races from 1920 to 1928 all endorsed a strict enforcement of prohibition, a new faction arose during the 1924 Democratic national convention. • In 1929, the Great Depression struck, seriously

compounding the problems the Treasury Department was having enforcing the law.

PROHIBITION ON THE WAY OUT

• The Depression resulted in such a wide spread break down in social structure that poverty, unemployment, and the other social problems that prohibitionists had used as propaganda to pass the Eighteenth Amendment could no longer be blamed solely on alcohol.

PROHIBITION AND THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

• Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the night he accepted Democratic nomination in 1932, set the tone for the race by telling the assemblage, “I say to you that from this date on, the Eighteenth Amendment is doomed!”• Hoover on the other hand, campaigned on the

strict enforcement of Prohibition.

PROHIBITION AND THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

• Pressure by the anti-prohibitionists finally began to tell in Congress. With the backing of the new president, in 1933 the wets pushed the Twenty-First Amendment through Congress. Delivering on his campaign promise, Roosevelt signed the bill and sent it to the states for ratification.

PROHIBITION

• the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment was a defeat for supporters of traditional values and those who favored the use of federal police powers to achieve moral reform.

TODAY’S QUESTION

• What was the Eighteenth Amendment?• The Eighteenth Amendment outlawed the sale

and commercial manufacture of alcohol in the U.S.

SECTION 15-2 CULTURAL INNOVATIONS, PP. 492-495

• Objectives:• 1. Describe the explosion of art and literature

and the disillusionment of 1920s artists.• 2. Summarize the effects of sports, movies,

radio, and music on popular culture.

ART AND LITERATURE

• During the 20’s , American artists, writers, and intellectuals began challenging traditional ideas as they searched for meaning in the modern world.• The artistic and unconventional, or Bohemian, lifestyle of

Manhattan’s Greenwich Village and Chicago’s South Side attracted artists and writers. These areas were considered centers of creativity, enlightenment, and freedom from conformity to old ideas.

ART AND LITERATURE

• The European art movement Influenced American modern artists . The Range in which artist choose to express the modern experience was very diverse.• Writing styles and subject matter varied. Chicago

poet Carl Sandburg used common speech to glorify the Midwest and the expansive nature of American life. Play write Eugene O’Neill’s work focused on the search for meaning in a modern society.

CARL SANDBURG

A Coin     Your western heads here cast on money,

You are the two that fade away together, Partners in the mist.

Lunging buffalo shoulder, Lean Indian face,We who come after where you are gone Salute your forms on the new nickel.

You are To us: The past.

Runners On the prairie: Good-by.

EUGENE O’NEILL

• O'Neill was the first American dramatist to regard the stage as a literary medium and the only American playwright ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Through his efforts, the American theatre grew up during the 1920s, developing into a cultural medium that could take its place with the best in American fiction, painting, and music. Until his Beyond the Horizon was produced, in 1920, Broadway theatrical fare, apart from musicals and an occasional European import of quality, had consisted largely of contrived melodrama and farce.

POPULAR CULTURE(PAGES 494-495)

• The economic prosperity of the 20s afforded many Americans leisure time for enjoying sports, music, theater and entertainment. • Radio, motion pictures and News papers gave rise

to a new interest in sports. Sports figures such as Babe Ruth and heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey, were famous for their abilities but became celebrities as well. • Motion pictures became increasingly popular. The

first talking picture, The Jazz Singer, was made in 1927. the golden age of Hollywood began.

MASS MEDIA

• The mass media- radio, movies, newspapers, and magazines- helped break down the focus on local interests. Mass media helped to unify the nation and spread new ideas and attitudes.

QUESTION• What role did the mass media have in shaping

the nation in the 1920’s?• The mass media- radio, movies, newspapers, and

magazines- helped break down the focus on local interests. Mass media helped to unify the nation and spread new ideas and attitudes

SECTION 15-3 AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE, PP. 498-502

• Objectives:• 1. Describe the Harlem Renaissance and the

rediscovery of African American cultural roots.• 2. Explain the increase in African American

political activism.

• Did You Know? Langston Hughes was a recent graduate from high school when his first poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," was published. He enrolled in Columbia University in 1921, but only stayed a year. While working as a busboy in a Washington, D.C., hotel in 1925, Hughes showed some of his writings to poet Vachel Lindsay, who helped Hughes get his work published.

HARLEM RENAISSANCE 498-500

• The Great Migration occurred when hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the rural South headed to industrial cities in the North with the hope of a better life.• African Americans created environments that

stimulated artistic development, racial pride, a sense of community, and political organization which led to a massive creative out-pouring of African American arts known as the Harlem Renaissance.

HARLEM RENAISSANCE 498-500

• Writer Claude McKay became the first important writer of the renaissance, his work expressed defiance and contempt of racism.• Langston Hughes became a leading voice of

the African American experience in the U.S.• Louis Armstrong introduced Jazz, a style of

music influenced by Dixieland music and ragtime.• Bessie Smith sang about unrequited love,

poverty, and oppression, which were classic themes in blues style music.

AFRICAN AMERICAN POLITICS 501-502

• The Great Migration led to African Americans becoming powerful voting blocs that influence election outcomes in the North. • Oscar DePriest was elected as the First African

American representative in Congress from a Northern State after African Americans voted as a block.• The National Association for the Advancement of

Colored People (NAACP) battled against segregation and discrimination.

AFRICAN AMERICAN POLITICS 501-502

• The NAACP’s efforts led to the passage of anti-lynching legislation in the House of Representatives, but the Senate defeated the bill.

• Jamaican black leader Marcus Garvey’s idea of “Negro Nationalism” glorified black culture and traditions.

• He founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which promoted black pride and unity.

• Garvey encouraged education as the way for African Americans to gain economic and political power; but he also voiced the need for separation and independence from whites.

LIBERIA

• Garvey’s plan to create a settlement in Liberia in Africa for African Americans caused middle class African Americans to distance themselves from Garvey.• His ideas, however, led to a sense of pride and

hope in African Americans that resurfaced during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.