Didvided Society Flashcards
What was the prohibition?
When any American was prohibited from selling, making or carrying around any drink containing over 0.5% alcohol
How long did the prohibition last?
From 1920 to 1933
What was strange about the prohibition?
It wasn’t actually illegal to buy or drink alcohol
Why was there a prohibition?
The government wanted to reduce alcohol related crime (many immigrants were committing this)
What did anti saloon leagues want?
Get rid of alcohol in public
What was bootlegging?
Where alcohol was being made in Canada and smuggled into the USA
What where some problems with the prohibition?
There were higher numbers of violent crime and bootlegging occured
How many saloons were banned due to what movement?
Temperance movement caused 21 saloons to be banned by 1961
What did the dries claim?
3000 infants were smothered in bed yearly by drunk parents
Who where the dries?
People who were for the prohibition
Who were the wets?
People against the prohibition
What did the anti saloon league allow?
Churches and considerable political influence to elect many ‘dry’ politicians
Who where Isidor Einstein and Moe Smith?
Agents that helped to reinforce the prohibition
How many arrests did Isidor Einstein and Moe Smith make, how much liquor did they confiscate?
Made 4932 arrests and confiscated 5 million gallons of liquor
How did Isidor Einstein and Moe Smith arrests so many?
Claimed they used over 100 disguises
Who brought down Al Capone?
Elliot Ness
What was Elliot Ness able to do within six months?
Seized breweries worth over $1 million
How much did Al Capone earn per year from what?
$60 million dollars a year from illegally selling alcohol
What was the most money Al Capone was making a week from illegally selling alcohol?
$2 million
How was Al Capone making his money?
Illegal gambling dens, bootlegging, brothels and racketeering
Where and when was Al Capone born?
17th January 1899 in Brooklyn New York
Why was Al Capone excluded from school?
For hitting a female teacher aged 14
Who did Al Capone join?
A young street gang called ‘The Five Pointers’ who terrorised his neighbourhood
What did Al Capone supposedly do In 1919?
Beat a police man to death
Where and who with did Al Capone make a fortune with?
Terrible Jonny Torrio in Chicago
When did Al Capone get married?
1918
Who destroyed Al Capone’s boot legging business?
Elliot Ness
When did Al Capone die?
5th January 1947 aged 48
Al Capone used to be to .
Generous to charities
What did Al Capone drive in?
A bullet proof Cadillac that could reach speeds of 120 mph
By what % did levels of alcohol fall due to the prohibition?
30%
Why did speakeasies lead to the prohibition fail?
By 1925, there were more speakeasies than saloons in 1919
In what short time did it take Izzy Einstein to find alcohol where?
17 minutes in Atlanta
How many speakeasies did New York have?
100,000
What club in New York was a speakeasy that housed how much in alcohol secret?
The 21 Club houses 2000 cases of alcohol
What lead the prohibition to fail?
Illegal speakeasies, corrupt law enforcers, bootleggers and violent gangsters
How were law enforcers corrupt?
They were prepared to direct people to speakeasies and 1/2 of prohibition agents were dismissed for corruption
How were bootleggers supplying alcohol?
From speakeasies like Al Capone who earned $60 million and by smuggling 2/3s of alcohol from Canada
How did violent gangsters get worse during the prohibition?
Organised gangs made $2billion from illegal alcohol sale and there were 130 gang led murders in Chicago in 1926 and 1927
How do speakeasies and bootleggers link?
Speakeasies only had alcohol due to the bootleggers
How do law enforcement and bootleggers link?
The law enforcers couldn’t control bootleggers
How did people and bootleggers link?
People bought from the bootleggers who then gained money
How did bootleggers and corrupt law enforcers link?
Bootleggers could corrupt them when selling them alcohol
When was immigration to the USA highest?
Between 1901 and 1910
Where were immigrants mainly from?
Mainly Jews from Eastern Europe, Russia and Italy
How did large groups of immigrants begin to cause tension from the 1900s on?
As White Anglo Saxon Protestants began to lead attempts in restricting immigration
Why were people scared of immigrants?
That they would try to spread communism and take their jobs
How many Europeans emigrated to the USA in 1850?
40 million
What caused immigration to drop?
WWI in 1914
What happened to immigration once WWI ended in 1917?
Immigration picked up again causing congress to pass and immigration law requiring all immigrants to prove they could read English
Why did all immigrants have to read English?
To not form separate groups among themselves away from American society
When was the Immigration Quota Act introduced and what was it for?
In 1921 kept Eastern European’s out of America and limited the number of immigrants to 357,000 per year
What did the National origins Act do and when?
In 1924, reduced the quota to 2% of the population
What happened to immigrants in 1929?
No. of immigrants each year was reduced to 150,000 and immigration from Asia was blocked altogether
What was the red scare?
The fear of both immigrants and communism together
Give two reason was there was a red scare
American belief in isolationism caused distrust and intolerance of immigrants
What happened in the Russian Revolution of 1917 scared Americans
When was the Massachusetts robbery and how much was stolen?
In April 1921, $5000 form a shoe factory and two staff shot dead
What do anarchists believe?
Countries should not be ruled by organised governments with set rules and laws but by a system where everyone rules themselves
Who were Sacco and Vanzetti?
Italian immigrants living in America who were accused of the Massachusetts robbery and murder
What lead Sacco and Vanzetti to be sentenced?
They admitted to being anarchists and who where a group that sacred Americans after a series of attempted bombing incidents and they were confirmed by 61 eye witnesses
How long was Sacco and Vanzetti’s trial and what was their sentence?
45 days and were sentenced to death by electric chair
Why weren’t Sacco and Vanzetti guilty?
107 people confirmed they were somewhere else in the night of the robbery
how were Sacco and Vanzetti wrongly sentenced to death?
A top American lawyer said the judge in charge of the trial was narrow minded, unintelligent and prejudice so he probably didn’t like Sacco and Vanzetti for being immigrants
What made Vanzetti look guilty?
He was previously convicted of robbery in December 1919
How many were hurt in the Wall Street bomb of September 1920?
30 killed and 300 injured
Who was most likely the cause of the Wall Street bomb?
An Italian Anarchist Luigi Galleani
Which anarchist group became very prominent and why?
American Anarchist Fighters due to the Russian Revolution when Russia became a communist country
What % of Americans were black and when?
1920 10%
Where did most black Americans live?
South USA states
What did the Plessy v Ferguson decision do in 1896?
When the US Supreme Court gave legal approval to segregation making blacks further fro, achieving equality
Why did many black peoples move from the south to the North?
As industrial expansion after WWI created new job opportunities so the black people could migrated to growing cities
How many black Americans moved from the south?
Between 1920 and 1930, 824,000
How did the number of black people in the North change with the boom?
By 1940, 22% of blacks lived in the North compared to only 10% in 1910
How did racism affect black workers?
They were usually the last to be given a job, the lowest paid and the first to be fired
What were the segregation laws in the South called and why?
‘Jim Crow’, a term taken from nineteenth century comedian’s act that ridiculed black people
Give an example where black people had unfair housing
In Harlem New York, they lived in poorer housing than whites but still paid higher rent
Which state were black people highest?
Indiana
How many KKK members were there in 1924?
6 million
What kind of acts did the KKK carry out?
Acts of violence like beatings, hanging for anyone who wasn’t a white Anglo Saxon Protestant
How did the members of the KKK drop?
By 1930, there were only 30,000 members and leaders became convicted of murder
How did the KKK earn money?
Sold robes
entry fee of 10 dollars
Sold ‘the Kluxers Knifty knife, a real 100% knife for real 100% Americans!’
Who were the KKK against?
Anyone who wasn’t a white Anglo Saxon Protestant
Who revived the KKK?
A clergy man called William Simmons who believed immigrants had ‘outlandish beliefs’
What was significant about Darwin’s theory of evolution?
By 1924, six states in the Midwest passed a law forbidding the teaching of Darwin’s theory
Who was Jonny Scopes?
A teacher who agreed to teach the Darwin Theory in 1924 and then allow his friend to sew him for breaking the law which then got out of had leading to scopes’ arrest
Who was William Jennings Bryan?
A leading fundamentalist who was the prosecutor at Scopes’ trial
Who was hired to defend Scopes?
Clarence Darrow
Why was Darwin’s theory a problem in America?
As it was a religious country and people were meant to be made by god, not descents of apes
Name some Bible Belt states
Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia and Kansas
Who were the bible belts?
Those that regularly went to church and believed everything in the bible to be true
What did the ‘World’s Christian Fundamentals Association’ aim for?
To make Darwin’s theory illegal which did happen in six Bible Belt states by 1924
What was occurring in lessons by 1920?
Darwin’s theory was being taught as part of Biology lessons in classrooms
What did many American Protestants think?
Darwin’s theory was an attach to the bible
How did people try to fix falling church attendances? give examples
With revivalist groups trying to revive interest in Christianity for example, billy Sunday, a revivalist who specialised in preaching hell fire sermons from the pulpit who became very rich from collections from his audience
What did the Tennessee anti evolution law on 1925 state?
It shall be unlawful for any teacher… to teach…that man has descended from a lower order of animals
Who were fundamentalists?
People who literally believe in the bible creation story
Who were revivalists?
People who wanted to bring back old religious beliefs
What was most significant about the monkey trial?
Demonstrated how deeply religious much of America was as people made a big deal of Scopes’ actions by putting him in jail and fining him
