Welcome back, APUSH crew.
Today, we're taking
a look at the Roaring 20s.
If you're studying the periods 1919
to around 1929 in your APUSH class,
or using any of these textbook,
this video is gonna help you
get a five on that APUSH exam.
And important to keep in mind is even
before the Roaring 20s,
there was a fear following World War I.
It actually begins during the war.
If you recall, in 1917, the
Communist Party came to power in Russia.
This is the Bolshevik Revolution,
and many Americans were concerned
that perhaps this was the start of a
communist movement all over the globe.
Strikes actually occur also in 1919.
This is a completely separate issue.
Even though some people blame these
strikes on radical movements,
most of them were about increasing
workers' wages, reducing hours,
and improving safety conditions.
But you get strikes going down
in many important industries.
You have this great steel strike in 1919,
the Boston Police strike, where
police officers actually go on strike.
And one of the important outcomes of these
strikes is very often,
the National Guard was called out to break
up these strikes.
And public opinion throughout
the 1920s is gonna be very anti-union.
Race riots also occur following and,
in fact, during the war.
This was a result of American
cities changing demographically.
There was a lot of resentment over
competition for jobs between White
and Black residents and over housing.
In fact, some of the worst racial rioting
takes place in 1919 in Chicago, where over
40 people are killed during the riots.
And then you have bombs go off in 1919-1920
in eight American cities.
And many people in the country
think that this is the start of a radical
movement, a revolution
going to take place in America,
and this becomes known as the Red Scare.
And it's important to keep in mind
that these events you see,
these four things,
are not necessarily connected,
but when all of them are happening around
the same time, you have the bombings,
you have this Red Scare developing.
And the guy who's gonna play a key role
during this is the Attorney General
of the United States, A.
Mitchell Palmer, and he's going to lead
a series of raids of suspected
radicals in the United States.
And thousands of people are going to be
arrested during these Palmer Raids
during the first Red Scare.
Another thing that kind of continues going
into the 1920s is, once again,
a rise of nativism.
You know, the Palmer Raids led to the mass
arrest of socialists, anarchists,
union organizers,
or other suspected radicals.
And very often these people,
these individuals were being arrested
for their ideas. And in many cases,
there was very little evidence, if any,
because these people were just guilty
of believing in things that were
unpopular during the decade.
And with this Red Scare,
there is going to be a continued hatred
towards new immigrants in the 1920s.
In fact, in 1921, the Quota Act will be
passed signed into law by President Harding,
and it's gonna limit immigration
numbers to three percent of those living
in the U.S. as of 1910.
Add another law to immigration policy
called the National Quota Act of 1924.
This one sets the quota at two percent
of the immigrants in the U.S., and they use
the year 1890, and they use
the numbers of the 1890 Census.
And the reason why they switch that year
to 1890 is they're trying to limit
the new immigrants that were largely
coming in from Southern
and Eastern Europe.
These immigrants were considered
undesirable, and they want to cut off
that immigration from those
countries in particular.
And 1890's kind of the year where
there were less of those
immigrants than in years following.
The Quota Act of 1924 is also gonna
severely restrict Asian immigrants.
In fact, no Japanese immigrants
are allowed to come at all.
But it's important to keep in mind,
during the 1920s,
you're gonna have an unrestricted
immigration from the Western hemisphere.
So, lots of immigrants coming in,
especially from Mexico,
working in jobs in the Southwest,
predominantly in agriculture.
And one of the most important cases,
and really symbolic of the anti-immigrant
feeling of the 1920s,
is the case of Sacco and Vanzetti.
And there they are, Sacco and Vanzetti.
And what happens is these two men are
Italian immigrants who are charged
with robbery and murder in 1921, Boston.
And they're found guilty
and sentenced to death.
And this trial really demonstrates
the tensions of the era.
Many people felt that Sacco
and Vanzetti were not receiving justice.
And what occurs, and the reasons why they
say this is very often during the case,
it's the fact that they're Italian
immigrants, they're radicals,
they're anarchists,
and they're World War I draft dodgers.
Those become the issues in the case.
And ultimately, both men will be executed
in 1927, in spite of the fact that there's
a lot of people around the world
calling for their release.
Another thing about the 1920s that occurs
kind of connected to the issue
of immigration and anti-radical
feelings is the resurgence of the KKK.
If you recall, the KKK is created
following the Civil War during
Reconstruction. And in the '20s,
the Klan broadens its influence
throughout the decade.
They expand their influence not just
in the South, but also in the Midwest
and in other regions of the country.
And their hatred isn't confined to African
American people exclusively any longer.
They are going to speak out and be against
not only African Americans,
but immigrants, especially those Southern
and Eastern European immigrants,
Catholics, radicals,
and any other people that were not White,
Anglo-Saxon, Protestant.
In fact, just before the 1920s,
a popular film, a very pro-KKK film,
The Birth of a Nation is extremely
popular in the United States,
and in the film it is the Klan
that are the heroes of Reconstruction.
They're gonna organize
themselves throughout the decade.
They're gonna become very powerful,
up to five million members by 1925,
and what they are saying to the American
people is that they are
a patriotic organizations.
They support
largely, and they're gonna get support
largely, White Protestants,
especially in the small towns and cities.
And the Klan itself will exert
tremendous political influence.
Here you see them marching in Washington,
D.C. So far, this decade's been kind
of a downer, but kind of why
is it called the Roaring 20s?
Well, one of the things that happens is
you have the rise, the development
of the mass consumption economy.
In 1920, it is the first time a majority
of Americans live in urban areas.
You can see that on the
chart right there, 51 percent.
And the economic prosperity as a whole,
the economy is going to roar.
There's a tremendous growth in the stock
market, and very often this growth
was built on people buying on margin.
They're taking out loans to buy stock.
And we're gonna see how
that turns out in the next video.
And the reason they're doing this is
they're investing based on speculation.
They feel this market is going to continue
to go up, and for much of the decade, it
will go up until the great crash in 1929.
The mass consumption economy is really
gonna be dependent upon a large number
of new and affordable consumer goods
becoming available, things like the vacuum
cleaner, the washing machine, and other
goods are going to be purchased by people.
And really, electricity in homes
leads to this increased demand
for consumer appliances.
Once people are moving to cities
and electricity is available in more
and more homes, you can now have these new
consumer goods, and these are gonna save
time in doing things like housework.
Fueling this consumerism
was buying goods on credit.
The installment plan is really kind
of introduced on a wide scale in the 20s,
and the idea is you can
possess today and pay tomorrow.
So, of course now, lots of people are able
to buy things that they
normally could not.
The downside of this, of course, is debt.
And we're gonna see, once again,
the consequences of this debt
in our next video.
And advertising is gonna
play a key role in the 1920s.
You see one of the popular ads in the '20s
right there, bad breath,
halitosis makes you unpopular.
So, brush your teeth, childrens.
And advertising industry is gonna
manipulate consumer demand by increasing
people's desire to have various products.
Another area that's gonna really transform
itself in the 1920s is transportation.
Frederick Taylor's Principles
of Scientific Management,
and his whole idea was that workers can
improve their productivity,
that management can improve
the productivity of workers by having them
eliminate certain motions
in the production process.
And the guy who really kind of adopts
many of these ideas is Henry Ford.
Cars become affordable for the average
American, the famous Model T, you can see
there. And really, the assembly line
introduced by Henry Ford allows for this
mass production to take place
in the automobile history.
Now, while the railroad industry's gonna
be hurt by cars,
there is going to be a huge boom in other
industries, such as steel and rubber
and gasoline, highway construction,
and a whole host of others,
because of the rise of the automobile,
and not just economic impacts of the car,
but also the car becomes
a badge of freedom and equality,
and it's going to have
social consequences as well.
The airplane plays a key role.
In fact, one of the key kinda figures
in this story is Charles Lindbergh,
who becomes the first person
to fly solo across the Atlantic.
He goes from New York to Paris
in a very long journey of over 33 hours in
a single-engine plane, some scary stuff.
And when he comes back,
he becomes a national hero,
an instant celebrity because people are
able to follow his journey with the radio.
And that leads us to the mass media
and the impact of mass media on the '20s.
It's really important
to understand the impact of the radio.
In November of 1920,
we have the first radio broadcast out
of Pittsburgh, and it announces
the election of Warren G.
Harding to the American public.
And really the radio is gonna play
a key role in tying the nation together.
It provides shared experiences.
People are listening to the same
advertisements, the same speeches,
the same forms of entertainment
on a national scale.
You also see in the 1920s the rise
of the movie industry,
and especially in Hollywood, out in Los Angeles.
There is the famous
Hollywood sign as it
looked back in the day.
Innovations in the movie industry itself,
you have The Jazz Singer in 1927.
It becomes the first talkie.
And a part of this rise of mass media like
radio and movies is the celebrity
culture of the 1920s.
You have people that become national
celebrities, people such as Babe Ruth,
the famous New York Yankee.
And the radio and the movie, once again,
fuel the consumption economy
that characterizes the 1920s.
Gender in the 1920s is
another important thing.
This image of the decade was a decade
of social customs being challenged,
not just for women,
but for all different groups.
And it was young women in cities that were
really challenging the social
customs of America.
Jazz music, dancing,
drinking bootleg liquor,
and other challenges to traditional values
do have, for example,
labor-saving devices,
such as the vacuum cleaner,
the washing machine, changing
the roles of homemakers for some women.
If you were a woman who was able
to afford these new appliances,
you now have more free time.
And the ultimate symbol of this kind
of youthful rebellion of young women was,
of course, the flappers.
You have some women who go much further
with their challenging of existing social
customs of the decade,
and one of those women is Margaret Sanger,
who spoke openly in spite of protests
and in spite of her being arrested
for obscenity laws in the support of
birth control and demanding that women
should have the right to have
access to birth control.
These changes in the 1920s lead
to a growth of fundamentalism,
and, eventually, you're gonna
see the Scopes Monkey Trial.
So, as the decade is seeing a battle
between the values of the modernizing
cities and the traditional values of rural
areas, you're going to see the growth
of a fundamentalist movement.
And fundamentalists believe that every
word in the Bible should be
considered literally true.
And the radio allows for preachers, such as
Billy Sunday, to reach a mass audience,
and he did so in the '20s when he spoke
out against things like drinking,
and dancing, jazz music, and gambling,
and other things that some
fundamentalists opposed.
And the big moment happens when the ACLU,
the American Civil Liberties Union,
sought to challenge a law in Tennessee,
the Butler Act, that outlawed the teaching
of evolution in public schools.
And they find a teacher, John Scopes,
who will violate the law,
and in 1925 he is arrested for teaching
evolution in a school
in Dayton, Tennessee.
The entire world follows the trial
by listening on the radio,
the famous Scopes Monkey Trial,
because it dealt with evolution.
You have two of the best
lawyers in the country.
The prosecutor is a religious
fundamentalist, also former presidential
candidate William Jennings Bryan,
and the defense attorney is
Clarence Darrow, probably the most famous
defense attorney in this time period.
The trial goes on and Scopes is convicted.
He gets off on a technicality,
and really
the Scopes Trial demonstrated the tensions
between the modern and the traditional
religious values of the 1920s.
Prohibition is a key part of the 1920s.
If you recall, the 18th Amendment was
ratified in 1919, and it prohibited
the manufacture and sale
of alcoholic beverages.
And the Volstead Act is passed,
which was the federal law that would
enforce the 18th Amendment.
The issue of prohibition
was very controversial.
There was fierce opposition,
especially in large cities,
especially amongst immigrant communities
to the banning of alcohol.
Bootleg liquor was served at speakeasies,
illegal clubs where alcohol was sold.
People were making their own alcohol,
and in many cases they were
completely ignoring the law.
Part of the problem was there was
understaffed law enforcement.
There wasn't enough police to police
the borders of the United States to get
all the different areas where alcohol
was being distributed and made.
And the other issue you can see
in the political cartoon
was widespread corruption.
Very often police, politicians, and judges
were paid off to look the other way.
And as a result of prohibition,
you get the rise of organized crime.
The big guy, the famous guy
is of course Al Capone in Chicago.
You have events like the St.
Valentine's Day Massacre
where violence increases.
In spite of all this kind of controversy,
drinking does go down in the 1920s,
but ultimately prohibition will be seen as
a noble experiment that will fail,
and eventually it will be overturned with
the 21st Amendment in the early 1930s.
And the big problem is,
you can make something like alcohol
illegal, but many people still want it
and so they're going to ignore the law.
Great photo, people marching,
not for civil rights,
not for freedom, but for beer.
The decade of the 1920s
for African-Americans was a mixed decade.
Lynchings continued to be a problem.
The KKK was becoming
more and more popular.
Jim Crow laws, Plessy versus Ferguson,
all of that stuff remained a fact of life.
And while those challenges are important,
African-Americans continued to find
ways to resist this injustice.
Recall there was a great migration all
the way before World War I where you had
this mass movement of African-Americans
into Northern cities,
and you have the spread of jazz music out
of New Orleans into cities
such as New York and Chicago.
Harlem becomes kind of the unofficial
cultural center of Black America.
And during the '20s you have a famous
event known as the Harlem Renaissance.
You have writers such as Claude McKay,
Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston,
famous jazz musicians like
Louis Armstrong. And really an important
idea of the Harlem Renaissance
is this idea of the new Negro.
In fact, there was this emphasis on Black
pride, racial pride,
and celebrating the cultural traditions
of that Black community in much
of the Harlem Renaissance's work.
And outside of the Harlem Renaissance, you
have a guy by the name of Marcus Garvey.
He is a immigrant from Jamaica,
which was a British colony.
He comes to the United States, and he
creates the Universal Negro
Improvement Association, the UNIA.
He's gonna call for African-Americans
to go back to Africa.
He believed in separatism.
He felt that African-Americans would not
be able to get justice
and equality in America.
But beyond that,
Garvey's movement is gonna promote Black
pride, Black-owned business,
self-confidence, self-reliance,
self-sufficiency in the African-American
community. And he's gonna play a key role
in mobilizing ordinary African-Americans
who were perhaps not touched
by the writings of the Harlem Renaissance,
they're gonna be touched
by the words of Garvey.
And finally, make sure you
know about the Lost Generation.
This is a group of writers like F.
Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway,
Sinclair Lewis, and their writing is gonna
criticize different aspects of the decade.
They're gonna question the reasons
for fighting World War I;
small town values in places like Dayton,
Tennessee; fundamentalist religious views;
and the materialism of the 1920s.
So, this group of artists are disillusioned
with the old ideals of the past,
as well as the new materialistic culture.
That's gonna close out the Roaring '20s.
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