American Civil Liberties Union established

1919 Schenck v. United States

1920 American Civil Liberties Union established

1921 Trial of Sacco and Vanzetti

1922 Washington Naval Arms Conference

Hollywood adopts the Hays code

Cable Act

Herbert Hoover’s American Individualism

1923 Meyer v. Nebraska

1924 Immigration Act

Congress grants all Indians born in the United States American citizenship

1925 Scopes trial

Bruce Barton’s The Man Nobody Knows

1927 Charles Lindbergh flies nonstop over the Atlantic

1927– President Coolidge vetoes 1928 McNary-Haugen farm bill

1928 Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem

1929 Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown

Stock market crashes

Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921 repealed

1930 Hawley-Smoot Tariff

1932 Bonus march on Washington

Reconstruction Finance Corporation organized

C H A P T E R 20

 

 

From Bus iness Cu l ture to Great Depress ion : The Twent ies , 1920–1932

Blues, a 1929 painting by Archibald Motley Jr., depicts one side of the 1920s: dance halls, jazz bands, and drinking despite the advent of Prohibition.

THE BUSINESS OF AMERICA A Decade of Prosperity A New Society The Limits of Prosperity The Farmers’ Plight The Image of Business The Decline of Labor The Equal Rights Amendment Women’s Freedom

BUSINESS AND GOVERNMENT The Retreat from Progressivism The Republican Era Corruption in Government The Election of 1924 Economic Diplomacy

THE BIRTH OF CIVIL LIBERTIES The “Free Mob” A “Clear and Present Danger” The Court and Civil Liberties

THE CULTURE WARS The Fundamentalist Revolt The Scopes Trial The Second Klan Closing the Golden Door Race and the Law Pluralism and Liberty Promoting Tolerance The Emergence of Harlem The Harlem Renaissance

THE GREAT DEPRESSION The Election of 1928 The Coming of the Depression Americans and the Depression Resignation and Protest Hoover’s Response The Worsening Economic

Outlook Freedom in the Modern World

 

 

n May 1920, at the height of the postwar Red Scare, police arrested two Italian immigrants accused of participating in a robbery at a South Braintree, Massachusetts, factory in which a security guard was killed. Nicola Sacco, a shoemaker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, an itinerant unskilled laborer, were anarchists who dreamed of a society in which government, churches, and private property had been abolished. They

saw violence as an appropriate weapon of class warfare. But very little evidence linked them to this particular crime. One man claimed to have seen Vanzetti at the wheel of the getaway car, but all the other eyewitnesses described the driver quite differently. Disputed tests on one of the six bullets in the dead man’s body suggested that it might have been fired from a gun owned by Sacco. Neither fingerprints nor possession of stolen money linked either to the crime. In the atmosphere of anti-radical and anti- immigrant fervor, however, their conviction was a certainty. “I have suffered,” Vanzetti wrote from prison, “for things that I am guilty of. 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.”

Although their 1921 trial had aroused little public interest outside the Italian-American community, the case of Sacco and Vanzetti attracted international attention during the lengthy appeals that followed. There were mass protests in Europe against their impending execution. In the United States, the movement to save their lives attracted the support of an impressive array of intellectuals, including the novelist John Dos Passos, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Felix Frankfurter, a professor at Harvard Law School and a future justice of the Supreme Court. In response to the mounting clamor, the governor of Massachusetts appointed a three-member commission to review the case, headed by Abbott Lawrence Lowell, the president of Harvard University (and for many years an official of the Immigration Restriction League). The commission upheld the verdict and death sentences, and on August 23, 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti died in the electric chair. “It is not every prisoner,” remarked the journalist Heywood Broun, “who has a president of Harvard throw the switch for him.”

The Sacco-Vanzetti case laid bare some of the fault lines beneath the surface of American society during the 1920s. The case, the writer Edmund Wilson commented, “revealed the whole anatomy of American life, with all its classes, professions and points of view and . . . it raised almost every fundamental question of our political and social system.” It demonstrated how long the Red Scare extended into the 1920s and how powerfully it undermined basic American freedoms. It reflected the fierce cultural battles that raged in many communities during the decade. To many native-born Americans, the two men symbolized an alien threat to their way of life. To Italian-Americans, including respectable middle-class organizations like the Sons of Italy that raised money for the defense, the

• Who benefited and who suffered in the new con- sumer society of the 1920s?

• In what ways did the government promote busi- ness interests in the 1920s?

• Why did the protection of civil liberties gain impor- tance in the 1920s?

• What were the major flash points between fun- damentalism and plural- ism in the 1920s?

• What were the causes of the Great Depression, and how effective were the government’s responses by 1932?

FOC U S QU E ST I O N S ©lI

 

 

Who bene f i t ed and who su f f e r ed in the new consumer soc i e ty o f the 1920s? 8 1 9

outcome symbolized the nativist prejudices and stereotypes that haunted immigrant communities. To Dos Passos, the executions underscored the success of the anti-radical crusade: “They are stronger. They are rich. They hire and fire the politicians, the old judges, . . . the college presidents.” Dos Passos’s lament was a bitter comment on the triumph of pro-business conservatism during the 1920s.

In popular memory, the decade that followed World War I is recalled as the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties. With its flappers (young, sexually liberated women), speakeasies (nightclubs that sold liquor in violation of Prohibition), and a soaring stock market fueled by easy credit and a get- rich-quick outlook, it was a time of revolt against moral rules inherited from the nineteenth century. Observers from Europe, where class divisions were starkly visible in work, politics, and social relations, marveled at the uniformity of American life. Factories poured out standardized consumer goods, their sale promoted by national advertising campaigns. Conservatism dominated a political system from which radical alternatives seemed to have been purged. Radio and the movies spread mass culture throughout the nation. Americans seemed to dress alike, think alike, go to the same movies, and admire the same larger- than-life national celebrities.

Many Americans, however, did not welcome the new secular, commer- cial culture. They resented and feared the ethnic and racial diversity of America’s cities and what they considered the lax moral standards of urban life. The 1920s was a decade of profound social tensions—between rural and urban Americans, traditional and “modern” Christianity, partici- pants in the burgeoning consumer culture and those who did not fully share in the new prosperity.

A 1927 photograph shows Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti outside the courthouse in Dedham, Massachusetts, surrounded by security agents and onlookers. They are about to enter the courthouse, where the judge will pronounce their death sentence.

 

 

T H E B U S I N E S S O F A M E R I C A

A D E C A D E O F P R O S P E R I T Y

“The chief business of the American people,” said Calvin Coolidge, who became president after Warren G. Harding’s sudden death from a heart attack in 1923, “is business.” Rarely in American history had economic growth seemed more dramatic, cooperation between business and govern- ment so close, and business values so widely shared. After a sharp postwar recession that lasted into 1922, the 1920s was a decade of prosperity. Productivity and economic output rose dramatically as new industries— chemicals, aviation, electronics—flourished and older ones like food pro- cessing and the manufacture of household appliances adopted Henry Ford’s moving assembly line.

The automobile was the backbone of economic growth. The most cele- brated American factories now turned out cars, not textiles and steel as in the nineteenth century. Annual automobile production tripled during the 1920s, from 1.5 to 4.8 million. General Motors, which learned the secret of marketing numerous individual models and stylish designs, surpassed Ford with its cheap, standardized Model T (replaced in 1927 by the Model A). By 1929, half of all American families owned a car (a figure not reached in England until 1980). The automobile industry stimulated the expan- sion of steel, rubber, and oil production, road construction, and other sec- tors of the economy. It promoted tourism and the growth of suburbs (already, some commuters were driving to work) and helped to reduce rural isolation.

During the 1920s, American multinational corporations extended their sway throughout the world. With Europe still recovering from the Great War, American investment overseas far exceeded that of other countries. The dollar replaced the British pound as the most important currency of international trade. American companies produced 85 percent of the world’s cars and 40 percent of its manufactured goods. General Electric and International Telephone and Telegraph bought up companies in other countries. International Business Machines (IBM) was the world’s leader in office supplies. American oil companies built new refineries overseas. American companies took control of raw materials abroad, from rubber in Liberia to oil in Venezuela.

One of the more unusual examples of the global spread of American cor- porations was Fordlandia, an effort by the auto manufacturer Henry Ford to create a town in the heart of Brazil’s Amazon rain forest. Ford hoped to secure a steady supply of rubber for car tires. But as in the United States, where he had compelled immigrant workers to adopt American dress and diet, he wanted to bring local inhabitants up to what he considered the proper standard of life (this meant, for example, forbidding his workers from using alcohol and tobacco and trying to get them to eat brown rice and whole wheat bread instead of traditional Brazilian foods). Eventually, the climate and local insects destroyed the rubber trees that Ford’s engi- neers, lacking experience in tropical agriculture, had planted much too close together, while the workers rebelled against the long hours of labor and regimentation of the community.

8 2 0 C h . 2 0 F r o m B u s i n e s s C u l t u r e t o G r e a t D e p r e s s i o n T H E B U S I N E S S O F A M E R I C A

Advertisements, like this one for a refrigerator, promised that consumer goods would enable Americans to fulfill their hearts’ desires.

The spread of the telephone network hastened the nation’s integration and opened further job opportunities for women. Lewis Hine photographed this telephone operator in the 1920s.

 

 

A N E W S O C I E T Y

During the 1920s, consumer goods of all kinds proliferated, marketed by salesmen and advertisers who promoted them as ways of satisfying Americans’ psychological desires and everyday needs. Frequently pur- chased on credit through new installment buying plans, they rapidly altered daily life. Telephones made communication easier. Vacuum clean- ers, washing machines, and refrigerators transformed work in the home and reduced the demand for domestic servants. Boosted by Prohibition and an aggressive advertising campaign that, according to the company’s sales director, made it “impossible for the consumer to escape” the product, Coca- Cola became a symbol of American life.

Americans spent more and more of their income on leisure activities like vacations, movies, and sporting events. By 1929, weekly movie atten- dance had reached 80 million, double the figure of 1922. Hollywood films now dominated the world movie market. Movies had been produced early in the century in several American cities, but shortly before World War I filmmakers gravitated to Hollywood, a district of Los Angeles, attracted by the open space, year-round sunshine for outdoor filming, and varied scenery. In 1910, two French companies, Pathé and Gaumont, had been the world’s leading film producers. By 1925, American releases out- numbered French by eight to one. In the 1920s, both companies aban- doned film production for the more profitable business of distributing American films in Europe.

Radios and phonographs brought mass entertainment into Americans’ living rooms. The number of radios in Americans’ homes rose from 190,000 in 1923 to just under 5 million in 1929. These developments helped to cre- ate and spread a new celebrity culture, in which recording, film, and sports stars moved to the top of the list of American heroes. During the 1920s, more than 100 million records were sold each year. RCA Victor sold so many recordings of the great opera tenor Enrico Caruso that he is sometimes called the first modern celebrity. He was soon joined by the film actor Charlie Chaplin, baseball player Babe Ruth, and boxer Jack Dempsey. Ordinary Americans followed every detail of their lives. Perhaps the decade’s greatest celebrity, in terms of intensive press coverage, was the aviator Charles Lind- bergh, who in 1927 made the first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic.

André Siegfried, a Frenchman who had visited the United States four times since the beginning of the century, com- mented in 1928 that a “new society” had come into being, in which Americans considered their “standard of living” a “sacred acquisition, which they will defend at any price.” In this new “mass

Who bene f i t ed and who su f f e r ed in the new consumer soc i e ty o f the 1920s? 8 2 1

During the 1920s, radio penetrated virtually the entire country. In this photograph, a farmer tunes in to a program while milking his cow.

 

 

civilization,” widespread acceptance of going into debt to purchase con- sumer goods had replaced the values of thrift and self-denial, central to nineteenth-century notions of upstanding character. Work, once seen as a source of pride in craft skill or collective empowerment via trade unions, now came to be valued as a path to individual fulfillment through con- sumption and entertainment.

T H E L I M I T S O F P R O S P E R I T Y

“Big business in America,” remarked the journalist Lincoln Steffens, “is pro- ducing what the socialists held up as their goal—food, shelter, and clothing for all.” But signs of future trouble could be seen beneath the prosperity of the 1920s. The fruits of increased production were very unequally distrib- uted. Real wages for industrial workers (wages adjusted to take account of inflation) rose by one-quarter between 1922 and 1929, but corporate profits rose at more than twice that rate. The process of economic concentration continued unabated. A handful of firms dominated numerous sectors of the economy. In 1929, 1 percent of the nation’s banks controlled half of its financial resources. Most of the small auto companies that had existed ear- lier in the century had fallen by the wayside. General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler now controlled four-fifths of the industry.

At the beginning of 1929, the share of national income of the wealthiest 5 percent of American families exceeded that of the bottom 60 percent. A majority of families had no savings, and an estimated 40 percent of the population remained in poverty, unable to participate in the flourishing consumer economy. Improved productivity meant that goods could be produced with fewer workers. During the 1920s, more Americans worked in the professions, retailing, finance, and education, but the number of manufacturing workers declined by 5 percent, the first such drop in the nation’s history. Parts of New England were already experiencing the

8 2 2 C h . 2 0 F r o m B u s i n e s s C u l t u r e t o G r e a t D e p r e s s i o n T H E B U S I N E S S O F A M E R I C A

Figure 20.1 HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES, 1900–1930

telephone

vacu um

clea ner

refriger ator

1900 1910

Pe rc

en ta

ge of

ho us

eh ol

ds ha

vi ng

an ap

pl ia

nc e

1920 Year

1930

ele ctr

ici ty

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

wash ing m

achin e

Electric washing machines and Hoover vacuum cleaners (demonstrated by a salesman) were two of the home appliances that found their way into many American homes during the 1920s. The woman on the right is a cardboard cutout.

 

 

chronic unemployment caused by deindustrialization. Many of the region’s textile companies failed in the face of low-wage competition from southern factories, or shifted production to take advantage of the South’s cheap labor. Most advertisers directed their messages at businessmen and the middle class. At the end of the decade, 75 percent of American house- holds still did not own a washing machine, and 60 percent had no radio.

T H E F A R M E R S ’ P L I G H T

Nor did farmers share in the decade’s prosperity. The “golden age” of American farming had reached its peak during World War I, when the need to feed war-torn Europe and government efforts to maintain high farm prices had raised farmers’ incomes and promoted the purchase of more land on credit. Thanks to mechanization and the increased use of fertilizer and insecticides, agricultural production continued to rise even when gov- ernment subsidies ended and world demand stagnated. As a result, farm incomes declined steadily and banks foreclosed tens of thousands of farms whose owners were unable to meet mortgage payments.

For the first time in the nation’s history, the number of farms and farmers declined during the 1920s. For example, half the farmers in Montana lost their land to foreclosure between 1921 and 1925. Extractive industries, like mining and lumber, also suffered as their products faced a glut on the world market. During the decade, some 3 million persons migrated out of rural areas. Many headed for southern California, whose rapidly growing econo- my needed new labor. The population of Los Angeles, the West’s leading industrial center, a producer of oil, automobiles, aircraft, and, of course, Hollywood movies, rose from 575,000 to 2.2 million during the decade, largely because of an influx of displaced farmers from the Midwest. Well before the 1930s, rural America was in an economic depression.

Who bene f i t ed and who su f f e r ed in the new consumer soc i e ty o f the 1920s? 8 2 3

Farmers, like this family of potato growers in rural Minnesota, did not share in the prosperity of the 1920s.

 

 

T H E I M A G E O F B U S I N E S S

Even as unemployment remained high in Britain throughout the 1920s, and inflation and war reparations payments crippled the German economy, Hollywood films spread images of “the American way of life” across the globe. America, wrote the historian Charles Beard, was “boring its way” into the world’s consciousness. In high wages, efficient factories, and the mass production of consumer goods, Americans seemed to have discovered the secret of permanent prosperity. Businessmen like Henry Ford and engineers like Herbert Hoover were cultural heroes. Photographers like Lewis Hine and Margaret Bourke-White and painters like Charles Sheeler celebrated the beauty of machines and factories. The Man Nobody Knows, a 1925 best-seller by advertising executive Bruce Barton, portrayed Jesus Christ as “the greatest advertiser of his day, . . . a virile go-getting he-man of business,” who “picked twelve men from the bottom ranks and forged a great organization.”

After the Ludlow Massacre of 1914, discussed in Chapter 18, John D. Rockefeller himself had hired a public relations firm to repair his tarnished image. Now, persuaded by the success of World War I’s Committee on Public Information that it was possible, as an advertising magazine put it, to “sway the minds of whole populations,” numerous firms established public relations departments. They aimed to justify corporate practices to the public and counteract its long-standing distrust of big business.

They succeeded in changing popular attitudes toward Wall Street. Congressional hearings of 1912–1914 headed by Louisiana congressman Arsène Pujo had laid bare the manipulation of stock prices by a Wall Street “money trust.” The Pujo investigation had reinforced the widespread view

8 2 4 C h . 2 0 F r o m B u s i n e s s C u l t u r e t o G r e a t D e p r e s s i o n T H E B U S I N E S S O F A M E R I C A

River Rouge Plant, by the artist Charles Sheeler, exemplifies the “machine-age aesthetic” of the 1920s. Sheeler found artistic beauty in Henry Ford’s giant automobile assembly factory.

 

 

of the stock market as a place where insiders fleeced small investors—as, indeed, they frequently did. But in the 1920s, as the steadily rising price of stocks made front-page news, the market attracted more investors. Many assumed that stock values would rise forever. By 1928, an estimated 1.5 mil- lion Americans owned stock—still a small minority of the country’s 28 million families, but far more than in the past.

T H E D E C L I N E O F L A B O R

With the defeat of the labor upsurge of 1919 and the dismantling of the wartime regulatory state, business appropriated the rhetoric of Americanism and “industrial freedom” as weapons against labor unions. Some corpora- tions during the 1920s implemented a new style of management. They pro- vided their employees with private pensions and medical insurance plans, job security, and greater workplace safety. They established sports programs to occupy their employees’ leisure time. They spoke of “welfare capitalism,” a more socially conscious kind of business leadership, and trumpeted the fact that they now paid more attention to the “human factor” in employment.

At the same time, however, employers in the 1920s embraced the American Plan, at whose core stood the open shop—a workplace free of both government regulation and unions, except, in some cases, “company unions” created and controlled by management. Collective bargaining, declared one group of employers, represented “an infringement of person- al liberty and a menace to the institutions of a free people.” Prosperity, they insisted, depended on giving business complete freedom of action. This message was reinforced in a propaganda campaign that linked unionism and socialism as examples of the sinister influence of foreigners on American life. Even the most forward-looking companies continued to employ strikebreakers, private detectives, and the blacklisting of union organizers to prevent or defeat strikes.

During the 1920s, organized labor lost more than 2 million members, and unions agreed to demand after demand by employers in an effort to stave off complete elimination. In cities like Minneapolis, New Orleans, and Seattle, once centers of thriving labor movements, unions all but dis- appeared. Uprisings by the most downtrodden workers did occur sporadi- cally throughout the decade. Southern textile mills witnessed desperate strikes by workers who charged employers with “making slaves out of the men and women” who labored there. Facing the combined opposition of business, local politicians, and the courts, as well as the threat of violence, such strikes were doomed to defeat.

T H E E Q U A L R I G H T S A M E N D M E N T

The idealistic goals of World War I, wrote the young Protestant minister Reinhold Niebuhr, seemingly had been abandoned: “We are rapidly becom- ing the most conservative nation on earth.” Like the labor movement, fem- inists struggled to adapt to the new political situation. The achievement of suffrage in 1920 eliminated the bond of unity between various activists, each “struggling for her own conception of freedom,” in the words of labor reformer Juliet Stuart Poyntz. Black feminists insisted that the movement must now demand enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment in the South,

Who bene f i t ed and who su f f e r ed in the new consumer soc i e ty o f the 1920s? 8 2 5

This graph illustrates the rapid rise and dramatic collapse of stock prices and the number of shares traded during the 1920s and early 1930s.

30 Index of common

stock prices, 1919–1939

Year

25

15

5

0

10

20

Pr ic

e in

de x

1919 1923 1927 1931 1935 1939

Figure 20.2 THE STOCK MARKET, 1919–1939

Volume of sales on the New York Stock Exchange (in millions of

shares)

 

 

but they won little support from white counterparts. A few prominent fem- inists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s daughter Harriot Stanton Blatch, joined the rapidly diminishing Socialist Party, convinced that women should support an independent electoral force that promoted governmen- tal protection of vulnerable workers.

The long-standing division between two competing conceptions of woman’s freedom—one based on motherhood, the other on individual autonomy and the right to work—now crystallized in the debate over an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution promoted by Alice Paul and the National Women’s Party. This amendment proposed to elimi- nate all legal distinctions “on account of sex.” In Paul’s opinion, the ERA fol- lowed logically from winning the right to vote. Having gained political equality, she insisted, women no longer required special legal protection— they needed equal access to employment, education, and all the other opportunities of citizens. To supporters of mothers’ pensions and laws lim- iting women’s hours of labor, which the ERA would sweep away, the pro- posal represented a giant step backward. Apart from the National Women’s Party, every major female organization, from the League of Women Voters to the Women’s Trade Union League, opposed the ERA.

In the end, none of these groups achieved success in the 1920s. The ERA campaign failed, and only six states ratified a proposed constitutional amendment giving Congress the power to prohibit child labor, which farm groups and business organizations opposed. In 1929, Congress repealed the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921, a major achievement of the maternalist reformers that had provided federal assistance to programs for infant and child health.

W O M E N ’ S F R E E D O M

If political feminism faded, the prewar feminist demand for personal free- dom survived in the vast consumer marketplace and in the actual behav-

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Tipsy, a 1930 painting by the Japanese artist Kobayakawa Kiyoshi, illustrates the global appeal of the “new woman” of the 1920s. The subject, a moga (“modern girl” in Japanese), sits alone in a nightclub wearing Western clothing, makeup, and hairstyle, accompanied by a cigarette and a martini. The title of the work suggests that Kiyoshi does not entirely approve of her behavior, but he presents her as self- confident and alluring. Japanese police took a dim view of “modern” women, arresting those who applied makeup in public.

Many American authorities were no more welcoming to “new women.” The superintendent of public buildings and grounds in Washington, D.C., decreed that women’s bathing suits must fall no higher than six inches above the knee. Here, in 1922, he enforces his edict.

 

 

ior of the decade’s much-publicized liberated young women. Female liber- ation resurfaced as a lifestyle, the stuff of advertising and mass entertain- ment, stripped of any connection to political or economic radicalism. No longer one element in a broader program of social reform, sexual freedom now meant individual autonomy or personal rebellion. With her bobbed hair, short skirts, public smoking and drinking, and unapologetic use of birth-control methods such as the diaphragm, the young, single “flapper” epitomized the change in standards of sexual behavior, at least in large cities. She frequented dance halls and music clubs where white people now performed “wild” dances like the Charleston that had long been pop- ular in black communities. She attended sexually charged Hollywood films featuring stars like Clara Bow, the provocative “ ‘It’ Girl,” and Rudolph Valentino, the original on-screen “Latin Lover.” When Valentino died of a sudden illness in 1926, crowds of grieving women tried to storm the funeral home.

What had been scandalous a generation earlier—women’s self-con- scious pursuit of personal pleasure—became a device to market goods from automobiles to cigarettes. In 1904, a woman had been arrested for smoking in public in New York City. Two decades later, Edward Bernays, the “father” of modern public relations, masterminded a campaign to per- suade women to smoke, dubbing cigarettes women’s “torches of freedom.” The new freedom, however, was available only during one phase of a woman’s life. Once she married, what Jane Addams had called the “family claim” still ruled. And marriage, according to one advertisement, remained “the one pursuit that stands foremost in the mind of every girl and woman.” Having found a husband, women were expected to seek freedom within the confines of the home, finding “liberation,” according to the advertisements, in the use of new labor-saving appliances.

Who bene f i t ed and who su f f e r ed in the new consumer soc i e ty o f the 1920s? 8 2 7

(Left) Advertisers marketed cigarettes to women as symbols of female independence. This 1929 ad for Lucky Strike reads: “Legally, politically and socially, woman has been emancipated from those chains which bound her. . . . Gone is that ancient prejudice against cigarettes.” (Right) An ad for Procter & Gamble laundry detergent urges modern women to modernize the methods of their employees. The text relates how a white woman in the Southwest persuaded Felipa, her Mexican- American domestic worker, to abandon her “primitive washing methods.” Felipa, according to the ad, agrees that the laundry is now “whiter, cleaner, and fresher.”

 

 

B U S I N E S S A N D G O V E R N M E N T

T H E R E T R E A T F R O M P R O G R E S S I V I S M

In 1924, a social scientist remarked that the United States had just passed through “one of the most critical ten-year periods” in its history. Among the changes was the disintegration of Progressivism as a political movement and body of thought. The government’s success in whipping up mass hys- teria during the war seemed to undermine the very foundation of demo- cratic thought—the idea of the rational, self-directed citizen. Followers of Sigmund Freud emphasized the unconscious, instinctual motivations of human behavior; scientists pointed to wartime IQ tests allegedly demon- strating that many Americans were mentally unfit for self-government. “The great bulk of people are stupid,” declared one advertising executive, explaining why advertisements played on the emotions rather than pro- viding actual information.

During the 1920s, Walter Lippmann published two of the most pene- trating indictments of democracy ever written, Public Opinion and The Phantom Public, which repudiated the Progressive hope of applying “intelli- gence” to social problems in a mass democracy. Instead of acting out of careful consideration of the issues or even individual self-interest, Lippmann claimed, the American voter was ill-informed and prone to fits of enthusiasm. Not only were modern problems beyond the understanding of ordinary men and women (a sentiment that had earlier led Lippmann to favor administration by experts), but the independent citizen was nothing but a myth. Like advertising copywriters and journalists, he continued, the government had perfected the art of creating and manipulating public opinion—a process Lippmann called the “manufacture of consent.”

In 1929, the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd published Middletown, a classic study of life in Muncie, Indiana, a typical community in the American heartland. The Lynds found that new leisure activities and a new emphasis on consumption had replaced politics as the focus of public con- cern. Elections were no longer “lively centers” of public attention as in the nineteenth century, and voter participation had fallen dramatically. National statistics bore out their point; the turnout of eligible voters, over 80 percent in 1896, had dropped to less than 50 percent in 1924. Many fac- tors helped to explain this decline, including the consolidation of one- party politics in the South, the long period of Republican dominance in national elections, and the enfranchisement of women, who for many years voted in lower numbers than men. But the shift from public to pri- vate concerns also played a part. “The American citizen’s first importance to his country,” declared a Muncie newspaper, “is no longer that of a citizen but that of a consumer.”

T H E R E P U B L I C A N E R A

Government policies reflected the pro-business ethos of the 1920s. Recalling the era’s prosperity, one stockbroker later remarked, “God, J. P. Morgan and the Republican Party were going to keep everything going forever.” Business lobbyists dominated national conventions of the

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The policies of President Calvin Coolidge were music to the ears of big business, according to one 1920s cartoonist.

 

 

Republican Party. They called on the federal government to lower taxes on personal incomes and business profits, maintain high tariffs, and support employers’ continuing campaign against unions. The adminis- trations of Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge obliged. “Never before, here or anywhere else,” declared the Wall Street Journal, “has a government been so completely fused with business.” The two presi- dents appointed so many pro-business members of the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Trade Commission, and other Progressive era agen- cies that, complained Nebraska senator George W. Norris, they in effect repealed the regulatory system. The Harding administration did sup- port Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover’s successful effort to per- suade the steel industry to reduce the workday from twelve to eight hours. But it resumed the practice of obtaining court injunctions to sup- press strikes, as in a 1922 walkout of 250,000 railroad workers protest- ing a wage cut.

Under William Howard Taft, appointed chief justice in 1921, the Supreme Court remained strongly conservative. A resurgence of laissez- faire jurisprudence eclipsed the Progressive ideal of a socially active nation- al state. The Court struck down a federal law that barred goods produced by child labor from interstate commerce. It even repudiated Muller v. Oregon (see Chapter 18) in a 1923 decision overturning a minimum wage law for women in Washington, D.C. Now that women enjoyed the vote, the jus- tices declared, they were entitled to the same workplace freedom as men. “This,” lamented Florence Kelley, “is a new Dred Scott decision,” which, in the name of liberty of contract, “fills those words with the bitterest and most cruel mockery.”

C O R R U P T I O N I N G O V E R N M E N T

Warren G. Harding took office as president in 1921 promising a return to “normalcy” after an era of Progressive reform and world war. Reflecting the prevailing get-rich-quick ethos, his administration quickly became one of the most corrupt in American history. A likeable, somewhat ineffectual individual—he called himself “a man of limited talents from a small town”—Harding seemed to have little regard for either governmental issues or the dignity of the presidency. Prohibition did not cause him to curb his appetite for liquor. He continued a previous illicit affair with a young Ohio woman, Nan Britton. The relationship did not become known until 1927, when Britton published The President’s Daughter, about their child to whom Harding had left nothing in his will.

Although his cabinet included men of integrity and talent, like Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, Harding also surrounded himself with cronies who used their offices for private gain. Attorney General Harry Daugherty accepted payments not to prosecute accused criminals. The head of the Veterans’ Bureau, Charles Forbes, received kickbacks from the sale of government supplies. The most notorious scandal involved Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall, who accepted nearly $500,000 from private businessmen to whom he leased government oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming. Fall became the first cabinet member in history to be convicted of a felony.

In what ways d id the government promote bus ines s in t ere s t s in the 1920s? 8 2 9

“This decision affirms your constitutional right to starve.” A 1923 cartoon criticizes the Supreme Court decision declaring unconstitutional a Washington, D.C., law establishing a minimum wage for women. Justice George Sutherland, appointed to the Court the previous year by President Warren G. Harding, wrote the majority decision.

 

 

R E C E N T H 1

!

men may sport like wild horses, but a huge factory of prodigious efficiency. . . .

In the last twenty-five or thirty years America has produced a new civilization. . . . From a moral point of view, it is obvious that Americans have come to consider their standard of living as a somewhat sacred acquisition, which they will defend at any price. This means that they would be ready to make many an intellectual or even moral concession in order to maintain that standard.

From a political point of view, it seems that the notion of efficiency of production is on the way to taking [precedence over] the very notion of liberty. In the name of efficiency, one can obtain, from the American, all sorts of sacrifices in relation to his personal and even to certain of his political liberties. . . .

Mass production and mass civilization, its natural consequence, are the true characteristics of the new American society. . . . Lincoln, with his Bible and classical tradition, was easier for Europe to understand than Ford, with his total absence of tradition and his proud creation of new methods and new standards, especially conceived for a world entirely different from our own.

The French writer André Siegfried in 1928

commented on the rise of an industrial economy

and consumer culture and the changes they

produced in American society.

Never has Europe more eagerly observed, studied, discussed America; and never . . . have the two continents been wider apart in their aspirations and ideals. . . . Europe, after all, is not very different from what it was a generation ago; but there has been born since then a new America. . . .

The conquest of the continent has been completed, and—all recent American historians have noted the significance of the event—the western frontier has disappeared; the pioneer is no longer needed, and, with him, the mystic dream of the West . . . has faded away. Thus came the beginning of the era of organization: the new problem was not to conquer adventurously but to produce methodically. The great man of the new generation was no longer a pioneer like Lincoln . . . but . . . Henry Ford. From this time on, America has been no more an unlimited prairie with pure and infinite horizons, in which free

FR O M AN D R É SI E G F R I E D,

“The Gulf Between,” Atlantic Monthly (March 1928)

V O I C E S O F F R E E D O M

8 3 0

 

 

A landmark in the development of civil liberties,

the Supreme Court’s decision inMeyer v.

Nebraska rebuked the coercive Americanization

impulse ofWorldWar I, overturning a Nebraska

law that required all school instruction to take

place in English.

The problem for our determination is whether the statute [prohibiting instruction in a language other than English] as construed and applied unreasonably infringes the liberty guaranteed . . . by the Fourteenth Amendment. . . .

The American people have always regarded education and acquisition of knowledge as matters of supreme importance which should be diligently promoted. . . . The calling always has been regarded as useful and honorable, essential, indeed, to the public welfare. Mere knowledge of the German language cannot reasonably be regarded as harmful. Heretofore it has been commonly looked upon as helpful and desirable. [Meyer] taught this language in school as part of his occupation. His right to teach and the right of parents to engage him so to instruct their children, we think, are within the liberty of the Amendment.

It is said the purpose of the legislation was to promote civil development by inhibiting training and education of the immature in foreign tongues and ideals before they could learn English and acquire American ideals. . . . It is also affirmed that the foreign born population is very large, that

certain communities commonly use foreign words, follow foreign leaders, move in a foreign atmosphere, and that the children are therefore hindered from becoming citizens of the most useful type and the public safety is impaired.

That the State may do much, go very far, indeed, in order to improve the quality of its citizens, physically, mentally, and morally, is clear; but the individual has certain fundamental rights which must be respected. The protection of the Constitution extends to all, to those who speak other languages as well as to those born with English on the tongue. Perhaps it would be highly advantageous if all had ready understanding of our ordinary speech, but this cannot be coerced by methods which conflict with the Constitution. . . . No emergency has arisen which rendered knowledge by a child of some language other than English so clearly harmful as to justify its inhibition with the consequent infringement of rights long freely enjoyed.

Q U E S T I O N S

1. Why does Siegfried feel Europeans no longer find America understandable?

2. How does the decision in Meyer v. Nebraska expand the definition of liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment?

3. How do the two excerpts reflect the changes American society experienced in the 1910s and 1920s?

FR O M Majority Opinion, JU S T I C E JA M E S C. MCRE Y N O L D S ,

in Meyer v. Nebraska (1923)

8 3 1

 

 

T H E E L E C T I O N O F 1 9 2 4

Harding’s successor, Calvin Coolidge, who as governor of Massachusetts had won national fame for using state troops against striking Boston policemen in 1919, was a dour man of few words. But in contrast to his predecessor he seemed to exemplify Yankee honesty. The scandals sub- sided, but otherwise Coolidge continued his predecessor’s policies. He twice vetoed the McNary-Haugen bill, the top legislative priority of con- gressmen from farm states. This bill sought to have the government pur- chase agricultural products for sale overseas in order to raise farm prices. Coolidge denounced it as an unwarranted interference with the free mar- ket. In 1924, Coolidge was reelected in a landslide, defeating John W. Davis, a Wall Street lawyer nominated on the 103rd ballot by a badly divided Democratic convention. (This was when the comedian Will Rogers made the quip, often repeated in future years, “I am a member of no organized political party; I am a Democrat.”)

One-sixth of the electorate in 1924 voted for Robert La Follette, running as the candidate of a new Progressive Party, which called for greater taxa- tion of wealth, the conservation of natural resources, public ownership of the railroads, farm relief, and the end of child labor. Although such ideas had been proposed many times before World War I, Coolidge described the platform as a blueprint for a “communistic and socialistic” America. Despite endorsements from veteran Progressives like Jane Addams and John Dewey and the American Federation of Labor, La Follette could raise no more than $250,000 for his campaign. He carried only his native Wisconsin. But his candidacy demonstrated the survival of some currents of dissent in a highly conservative decade.

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A 1924 cartoon commenting on the scandals of the Harding administration. The White House, Capitol, and Washington Monument have been sold to the highest bidder.

 

 

E C O N O M I C D I P L O M A C Y

Foreign affairs also reflected the close working relationship between busi- ness and government. “Any student of modern diplomacy,” declared Huntington Wilson, a State Department official, “knows that in these days of competition, capital, trade, agriculture, labor and statecraft all go hand in hand if a country is to profit.” The 1920s marked a retreat from Wilson’s goal of internationalism in favor of unilateral American actions mainly designed to increase exports and investment opportunities overseas. Indeed, what is sometimes called the “isolationism” of the 1920s represented a reaction against the disappointing results of Wilson’s military and diplomatic pur- suit of freedom and democracy abroad. The United States did play host to the Washington Naval Arms Conference of 1922 that negotiated reductions in the navies of Britain, France, Japan, Italy, and the United States. But the country remained outside the League of Nations. Even as American diplo- mats continued to press for access to markets overseas, the Fordney- McCumber Tariff of 1922 raised taxes on imported goods to their highest levels in history, a repudiation of Wilson’s principle of promoting free trade.

Much foreign policy was conducted through private economic relation- ships rather than governmental action. The United States emerged from World War I as both the world’s foremost center of manufacturing and the major financial power, thanks to British and French debts for American loans that had funded their war efforts. During the 1920s, New York bankers, some- times acting on their own and sometimes with the cooperation of the Harding and Coolidge administrations, solidified their international position by extending loans to European and Latin American governments. They advanced billions of dollars to Germany to enable the country to meet its World War I reparations payments. American industrial firms, especially in auto, agricultural machinery, and electrical equipment manufacturing, established plants overseas to supply the world market and take advantage of inexpensive labor. American investors gained control over raw materials such as copper in Chile and oil in Venezuela. In 1928, in the so-called Red Line Agreement, British, French, and American oil companies divided oil-produc- ing regions in the Middle East and Latin America among themselves.

As before World War I, the government dispatched soldiers when a change in government in the Caribbean threatened American economic interests. Having been stationed in Nicaragua since 1912, American marines withdrew in 1925. But the troops soon returned in an effort to sup- press a nationalist revolt headed by General Augusto César Sandino. Having created a National Guard headed by General Anastasio Somoza, the marines finally departed in 1933. A year later, Somoza assassinated Sandino and seized power. For the next forty-five years, he and his family ruled and plundered Nicaragua. Somoza was overthrown in 1978 by a popular move- ment calling itself the Sandinistas (see Chapter 26).

T H E B I R T H O F C I V I L L I B E R T I E S

Among the casualties of World War I and the 1920s was Progressivism’s faith that an active federal government embodied the national purpose and

In what ways d id the government promote bus ines s in t ere s t s in the 1920s? 8 3 3

A German cartoon inspired by President Calvin Coolidge’s dispatch of American troops to Nicaragua. While Coolidge insisted that the United States acted in the interest of preserving international order, residents of other countries often saw the United States as a grasping imperial power.

 

 

enhanced the enjoyment of freedom. Wartime and postwar repression, Prohibition, and the pro-business policies of the 1920s all illustrated, in the eyes of many Progressives, how public power could go grievously wrong.

This lesson opened the door to a new appreciation of civil liberties— rights an individual may assert even against democratic majorities—as essential elements of American freedom. Building on prewar struggles for freedom of expression by labor unions, socialists, and birth-control advo- cates, some reformers now developed a greater appreciation of the necessi- ty of vibrant, unrestricted political debate. In the name of a “new freedom for the individual,” the 1920s saw the birth of a coherent concept of civil liberties and the beginnings of significant legal protection for freedom of speech against the government.

T H E “ F R E E M O B ”

Wartime repression continued into the 1920s. Under the heading “Sweet Land of Liberty,” The Nation magazine in 1923 detailed recent examples of the degradation of American freedom—lynchings in Alabama, Arkansas, and Florida; the beating by Columbia University students of an undergrad- uate who had written a letter defending freedom of speech and the press; the arrest of a union leader in New Jersey and 400 members of the IWW in California; refusal to allow a socialist to speak in Pennsylvania. Throughout the 1920s, artistic works with sexual themes were subjected to rigorous censorship. The Postal Service removed from the mails books it deemed obscene. The Customs Service barred works by the sixteenth- century French satirist Rabelais, the modern novelist James Joyce, and many others from entering the country. A local crusade against indecency made the phrase “Banned in Boston” a term of ridicule among upholders of artistic freedom. Boston’s Watch and Ward Committee excluded sixty-five books from the city’s bookstores, including works by the novelists Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, and Ernest Hemingway.

Hollywood producers feared that publicity over actress Mary Pickford’s divorce, actor Wallace Reid’s death from a drug overdose, and a murder trial involving actor Fatty Arbuckle would reinforce the belief that movies pro- moted immorality. In 1922, the film industry adopted the Hays code, a spo- radically enforced set of guidelines that prohibited movies from depicting nudity, long kisses, and adultery, and barred scripts that portrayed clergy- men in a negative light or criminals sympathetically. (The code in some ways anticipated recent efforts by television networks, music companies, and video game producers to adopt self-imposed guidelines to fend off gov- ernmental regulation.) Filmmakers hoped that self-censorship would pre- vent censorship by local governments, a not uncommon occurrence since the courts deemed movies a business subject to regulation, not a form of expression. Not until 1951, in a case involving The Miracle, a film many Catholics found offensive, would the Supreme Court declare movies an artistic form protected by the First Amendment.

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. Americans, commented the British novelist D. H. Lawrence, who lived for a time in the United States, prided themselves on being the “land of the free,” but “the free mob” had destroyed the right to

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dissent. “I have never been in any country,” he wrote, “where the individual has such an abject fear of his fellow countrymen.” Disillusionment with the conservatism of American politics and the materialism of the culture inspired some American artists and writers to emigrate to Paris. The Lost Generation of cultural exiles included novelists and poets like Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Europe, they felt, val- ued art and culture, and appreciated unrestrained freedom of expression (and, of course, allowed individuals to drink legally).

A “ C L E A R A N D P R E S E N T D A N G E R ”

During World War I, the Unitarian minister John Haynes Holmes later recalled, “there suddenly came to the fore in our nation’s life the new issue of civil liberties.” The arrest of antiwar dissenters under the Espionage and Sedition Acts inspired the formation in 1917 of the Civil Liberties Bureau, which in 1920 became the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). For the rest of the century, the ACLU would take part in most of the landmark cases that helped to bring about a “rights revolution.” Its efforts helped to give meaning to traditional civil liberties like freedom of speech and invented new ones, like the right to privacy. When it began, however, the ACLU was a small, beleaguered organization. A coalition of pacifists, Progressives shocked by wartime repression, and lawyers outraged at what they consid- ered violations of Americans’ legal rights, it saw its own pamphlets defend- ing free speech barred from the mails by postal inspectors.

Prior to World War I, the Supreme Court had done almost nothing to pro- tect the rights of unpopular minorities. Now, it was forced to address the question of the permissible limits on political and economic dissent. In its initial decisions, it dealt the concept of civil liberties a series of devastating blows. In 1919, the Court upheld the constitutionality of the Espionage Act and the conviction of Charles T. Schenck, a socialist who had distributed antidraft leaflets through the mails. Speaking for the Court, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared that the First Amendment did not prevent Congress from prohibiting speech that presented a “clear and present dan- ger” of inspiring illegal actions. Free speech, he observed, “would not pro- tect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.”

For the next half-century, Holmes’s doctrine would remain the basic test in First Amendment cases. Since the Court usually allowed public officials to decide what speech was in fact “dangerous,” it hardly provided a stable basis for the defense of free expression in times of crisis. A week after Schenck v. United States, the Court unanimously upheld the conviction of Eugene V. Debs for a speech condemning the war. It also affirmed the wartime jailing of the editor of a German-language newspaper whose edi- torials had questioned the draft’s constitutionality.