Chapter 23 Flashcards
Warren Harding
Harding had been a newspaper publisher in Ohio before entering politics.
He was handsome and well-liked among the Republican political cronies with whom he regularly played poker. His abilities as a leader, however, were less than presidential. When the Republican national convention of 1920 deadlocked, the party bosses decided “in a smoke-filled room” to deliver the nomination to Harding as a compromise choice.
Albert Fall
Curiously, Harding’s postwar presidency was marked by scandals and corruption similar to those that had occurred under an earlier postwar president, Ulysses S. Grant. Having appointed some excellent officials, Harding also selected a number of incompetent and dishonest men to fill important positions, including Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall and
Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty. In 1924, Congress discovered that Fall had accepted bribes for granting oil leases near Teapot Dome, Wyoming. Daugherty also took bribes for agreeing not to prosecute certain criminal suspects.
Teapot Dome
Curiously, Harding’s postwar presidency was marked by scandals and corruption similar to those that had occurred under an earlier postwar president, Ulysses S. Grant. Having appointed some excellent officials, Harding also selected a number of incompetent and dishonest men to fill important positions, including Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall and Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty. In 1924, Congress discovered that Fall had accepted bribes for granting oil leases near Teapot Dome, Wyoming. Daugherty also took bribes for agreeing not to prosecute certain criminal suspects.
Calvin Coolidge
Harding’s vice president and successor, Calvin Coolidge, had won popularity in 1919 as the Massachusetts governor who broke the Boston police strike. He was a man of few words who richly deserved the nickname “Silent Cal.” Coolidge once explained why silence was good politics. “If you don’t say anything,” he said, “you won’t be called on to repeat it.” Also unanswerable was the president’s sage comment: “When more and more people are thrown out of work, unemployment results.” Coolidge summarized both his presidency and his era in the phrase: “The business of America is business.”
Herbert Hoover
Coolidge declined to run for the presidency a second time. The Republicans therefore turned to an able leader with a spotless reputation, self-made millionaire and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. Hoover had served three
presidents (Wilson, Harding, and Coolidge) in administrative roles but had
never before campaigned for elective office. Nevertheless, in 1928, he was made the Republican nominee for president.
Alfred E. Smith
Hoover’s Democratic opponent was the governor of New York, Alfred E. Smith. As a Roman Catholic and an opponent of prohibition, Smith appealed to many immigrant voters in the cities. Many Protestants, however, were openly prejudiced against Smith.
Henry Ford
In 1914, Henry Ford had perfected a system for manufacturing automobiles by means of an assembly line. Instead of losing time moving around a factory as in the past, Ford’s workers remained at one place all day and performed the same simple
operation over and over again at rapid speed. In the 1920s, most major industries adopted the assembly line and realized major gains in worker productivity.
Assembly Line
In 1914, Henry Ford had perfected a system for manufacturing automobiles by means of an assembly line. Instead of losing time moving around a factory as in the past, Ford’s workers remained at one place all day and performed the same simple
operation over and over again at rapid speed. In the 1920s, most major industries adopted the assembly line and realized major gains in worker productivity.
Impact of the Automobile
More than anything else, the automobile changed the pattern of American life. By 1929, a total of 26.5 million automobiles were registered, compared to 1.2 million in 1913. The enormous increase
in automobile sales meant that, by the end of the decade, there was an average of nearly one car per American family. In economic terms, the production of automobiles replaced the railroad industry as the key promoter of economic growth. Other industries—steel, glass, rubber, gasoline, and highway construction—now depended on automobile sales. In social terms, the automobile
affected all that Americans did: shopping, traveling for pleasure, commuting to work, even courting (or “dating”) the opposite sex. Of course, there were new problems as well: traffic jams in the cities, injuries and deaths on roads
and highways.
Jazz Age
The Jazz Age resulted from the broad popularity among whites and African Americans of jazz music and artists such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. African American artists received acclaim in many areas, including the
great blues singer Bessie Smith, and the multitalented singer and actor Paul Robeson. Yet while they might perform before integrated audiences in Harlem, they often found themselves and their audiences segregated in much of the rest of the nation.High school and college youth expressed their rebellion against their elders’ culture by dancing to jazz music. Brought north by African American musicians, jazz became a symbol of the “new” and “modern” culture of the cities. The proliferation of phonographs and radios made this new style of music available to a huge (and chiefly youthful) public.
Hollywood
Only Yesterday
Even to writers and historians of the time, the 1920s seemed
to be a unique decade—a period of social fun and business boom wedged between two calamities, World War I and the Great Depression. Frederick Lewis Allen wrote about the decade as soon as it ended. In his popular history Only Yesterday (1931), Allen gave
support to the ideas of the leading social critics of the 1920s, H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis. He portrayed the period as one of narrow-minded materialism in which the middle class abandoned
progressive reforms, embraced conservative Republican policies, and either supported or condoned reactionary forces: nativism, racism, and fundamentalism. The historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., generally accepted this view of the twenties, seeing it within the framework of his cyclical view of history. Schlesinger argued that the politics of the decade represented a conservative reaction to the liberal reforms of the Progressive era
F. Scott Fitzgerald
He belonged to the Lost Generation of Writers. He wrote the famous novel “The Great Gatsby” which explored the glamour and cruelty of an achievement-oriented society. Scorning religion as hypocritical and bitterly condemning the sacrifices
of wartime as a fraud perpetrated by money interests were the dominant themes of the leading writers of the postwar decade. This disillusionment caused the
writer Gertrude Stein to call these writers a “lost generation.”
Ernest Hemingway
Scorning religion as hypocritical and bitterly condemning the sacrifices
of wartime as a fraud perpetrated by money interests were the dominant themes of the leading writers of the postwar decade. This disillusionment caused the
writer Gertrude Stein to call these writers a “lost generation.” He wrote “The Sun Also Rises” and “A Farewell To Arms”
Gertrude Stein
The name “lost generation” was coined by Gertrude Stein to describe post-World War 1 writers and artists who had lost their illusions about romance and heroism- prominent Lost Generation figures included F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Dos Passos.
