American Pageant Chapter 30 APUSH Review (APUSH Period 7 1920s)

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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Peace.