7.8: Cultural and Political Controversies

Question 1

WOMEN

Answer 1

• Fashion used to express greater independence
• Flappers = symbols of women’s liberation = cut hair, drank, smoked and showed ankles
• Most middle class expected to be housewives
• Work opened up in urban centers like teaching, nursing and factory work [discriminatory wages]
• Sanger advocated for contraception to allow women more time for work and education
• Push for states to universalize high school education

Question 2

IMMIGRANTS

Answer 2

• Influx from Southern and Eastern Europe and Asia
• Rise in nativism
• Fear of losing jobs to lower-wage immigrants
• Fear of pollution of white race
• 1921 and 1924 Acts
• KKK reformed at Stone Mountain due to “The Birth of A Nation”
• KKK expanded immigrant intimidation
• Saco and Vanzetti trial whereby Italian immigrants and anarchists convicted and executed for murder with weak evidence
• Mexicans began seasonal immigration to fill in gaps in agriculture and manufacturing

Question 3

MIGRANTS

Answer 3

• Great Migration = Harlem Renaissance = birth of Jazz [Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington] and black-experience literature [Langston Hughes and Claude McKay]
• Back-to-Africa movement created by black Marcus Galley on basis of African pride

Question 4

NEW ART AND LITERATURE

Answer 4

• Modernism led to Art Deco architecture and art
• Lost Generation = writers affected by disillusionment of WWI and writing about it’s waste of life and resources and US culture = F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway

Question 5

1920S DEBATES

Answer 5

• Modernism = shed of traditional thought for progress and embrace of change in culture
• Fundamentalism = condemned urban degradation of morals
• Conservative Republican Presidents favoured lowering taxes and raising tariffs
• Teapot Dome Scandal: political corruption
• Scopes Monkey Trial [1925]
• Teaching Darwin’s evolution theory illegalized in Tennessee
• Scopes taught it and arrested
• Case = highly publicized
• Clarence Darrow [Modernist] v. William Jennings Bryan [Fundamentalist]
• Darrow used incisive questioning to embarrass Bryan and leave him unable to answer
• Scopes = convicted but overturned
• Darrow = Modernist = victor = Americans believed in Modernist triumph