Chapter 31 - American Life in the "Roaring Twenties", 1919-1929 Flashcards
Billy Sunday
was an American athlete who, after being a popular outfielder in baseball’s National League during the 1880s, became the most celebrated and influential American evangelist during the first two decades of the 20th century
Red Scare
A Period of time where the whole nation was afraid of communism and the very idea of communism.
A. Mitchell Palmer
He was the Attorney General and accused thousands of people of being communist in order to further his own political agenda.
Sacco and Vanzetti
Two men accused of the 1921 murder of a Massachusetts paymaster, Liberals and radicals from all over the world rallied to their defense.
Emergency Quota Act
Placed a numerical limit on how many people could enter the United states.
Immigration Act
limited the number of people from a specific country who could enter the US to 2% of the total population of that country.
Eighteenth Amendment
Made the sale, consumption, and transportation of alcohol illegal.
Volstead Act
passed to carry out the eighteenth amendment.
Wet and Dry
each side of the prohibition argument
Speakeasies
an illicit establishment that sells alcohol.
Home Brew
Alcohol that is made in the home instead of in a brewery.
Bathtub Gin
any style of homemade spirit made in amatuer conditions
Noble Experiment
the term for prohibition laws
Al Capone
famous gangster and co founder of the Chicago outfit
St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
never officially linked to Capone, a murder of seven men of the Irish Gang.
John Dewey
Education reformer. Famous for the ideology of “learn by doing”
John T. Scopes
Science teacher from Tennessee at the center of the “Monkey Trial” which pitted science/evolution against religious fundamentalism
William Jennings Bryan
Former Populist and Democratic presidential candidate who was the lead prosecutor on the Scopes “Monkey Trial”
Clarence Darrow
Nationally known defense attorney for John Scopes.
Andrew Mellon
Treasury secretary who favored expansion of capital investment, tax policies, and successfully pushed congress to lower taxes.
The Man Nobody Knows
A book written by Bruce Barton which set forth the thesis that Jesus Christ was the greatest adman of all time in an age where advertisements became a pivotal part of the market.
Babe Ruth
George E. Ruth; was a baseball player who played for the Yankees.
Jack Dempsey
A heavyweight boxer who was one of the first mass-media sports stars
Henry Ford
1863-1947. American businessman, founder of Ford Motor Company, father of modern assembly lines, and inventor credited with 161 patents.
Frederick W. Taylor
An inventor and engineer who sought to eliminate wasted motion to whom is owed much of the clockwork efficiency of factories.
Model T
A cheap, rugged, and popular vehicle that the common man could own. Only came in black.
Orville and Wilbur Wright
The inventors behind the first, however feebly engined, plane that stayed aloft for 12 seconds and 120 feet at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
Charles Lindbergh
First person to fly solo across the Atlantic. Became a national star who lost some fame after voicing some anti-Semitic opinions. He flew several missions into Japan during WWII.
The Great Train Robbery
A 1903 American Western film by Edwin S. Porter. Twelve minutes long, it is considered a milestone in filmmaking
The Birth of a Nation
A dramatic silent film directed by D.W. Griffith in 1915. Considered highly controversial for its portrayal of African Americans.
The Jazz Singer
The first movie with sound directed by Al Jolson about Al Jolson and his life. Made in 1927.
Margaret Sanger
Feminist who strongly pushed and supported the birth control movement.
Flappers
Young women of the 1920s that behaved and dressed in a radical fashion. i.e. Wearing short hair.
Sigmund Freud
Know as the Father of Psychoanalysis, had significant influence on modern adoption theory and practice.
Jelly Roll Morton
Known professionally as Jelly Roll Morton, was an American ragtime and early Jazz pianist, bandleader and composer who started his career in New Orleans; Louisiana.
Langston Hughes
A leading poet of the Harlem Renaissance who described the rich culture of african American life using rhythms influenced by jazz music. He wrote of African American hope and defiance in poems such as “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and “My People”
Marcus Garvey
A powerful African American leader during the 1920s. Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and advocated a mass migration of African Americans back to Africa. Garvey was convicted of fraud in 1923 and deported to Jamaica in 1927. While the movement won a substantial following, the UNIA collapsed without Garvey’s leadership.
H. L. Mencken
a patron saint of many young authors; the “Bad Boy of Baltimore”; had an acidic wit; wrote a monthly American Mercury, where he assailed marriage, patriotism, democracy, prohibition, Rotarians, and the middle-class American “booboisie”; contemptuously dismissed the South as “the Sahara of the Bozart” (a bastardization of beaux arts, French for the “fine arts”), and scathingly attacked do-gooders as “Puritans”; called Puritanism “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
a novelist and chronicler of the jazz age. his wife, Zelda and he were the “couple” of the decade but hit bottom during the depression. his novel THE GREAT GATSBY is considered a masterpiece about a gangster’s pursuit of an unattainable rich girl.
Ernest Hemingway
was among the writers most affected by the war (he had seen action on the Italian front in 1917); he responded to pernicious propaganda and the overblown appeal to patriotism by devising his own lean, word-sparing but word-perfect style; in The Sun Also Rises (1926), he told of disillusioned, spiritually numb American expatriates in Europe; in A Farewell to Arms (1929), he crafted one of the finest novels in any language about the war experience; a troubled soul, he finally blew out his brains with a shotgun blast in 1961
Sinclair Lewis
first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature, Main Street (1920) was a satire on the dullness and lack of culture in a typical American town
William Faulkner
He was a writer. In 1926 he wrote a bitter war novel called “Soldier’s Pay”. He also wrote many other powerful books about the lives of Southerners during the Civil War. Author who wrote Soldier’s Pay, The Sound and the Fury, and As I Lay Dying, used a new, choppy “stream of consciousness” form of writing
Ezra Pound
An American expatriate poet, musician and critic who was a major figure in the Modernist movement in poetry
T. S. Eliot
an Anglo-American poet, playwright, and literary critic of the modernist movement; famous for The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
e.e. cummings
(1894-1962) American poet, painter, essayist, playwright. Unorthodox usage of both capitalization and punctuation. Love and nature, satire and the relationship of the individual to the masses and to the world. Many of his poems make little sense until read aloud. He invented odd compound words such as “mud-lucious” and “puddle-wonderful”.
Eugene O’Neill
Supported by the National Organization for Women, this amendment would prevent all gender-based discrimination practices. However, it never passed the ratification process.
Louis Armstrong
Jazz musician known for his virtuosic skills on the cornet and trumpet. Armstrong popularized the scat style of singing and remains one of jazz’s most important and influential musicians. He was a member of King Oliver’s band in the 1920s, and he formed several bands of his own, namely the Hot Fives and Sevens.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Considered America’s greatest architect. Pioneered the concept that a building should blend into and harmonize with its surroundings rather than following classical designs.
Buying on Margin
Allows customers to increase their trading capital by borrowing from banks. Can purchase more securities with a lower initial cash outlay. Leverage the investment by borrowing a portion of the purchase price
