Period 7B Part I (Chapters 8-10) Flashcards
Modernism
Modernists took a historical and critical view of certain passages in the Bible and believed they could accept Darwin’s theory of evolution without abandoning their religious faith.
Fundamentalism
Fundamentalists condemned modernists and taught that every word in the Bible was true literally. A key fundamentalist doctrine was that creationism (the belief that God had created the universe in seven days, as stated in the Bible) explained the origin of all life. Fundamentalists blamed modernists for causing a decline in morals.
Scopes Trial
To challenge the constitutionality of laws banning the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution in public schools, the American Civil Liberties Union persuaded a Tennessee biology teacher, John Scopes, to teach the theory of evolution to his high school class. In a case with Clarence Darrow defending Scopes and William Jennings Bryan defending fundamentalists, Scopes was convicted, but the conviction was later overturned on a technicality. Laws banning the teaching of evolution remained on the books for years, although they were rarely enforced.
Prohibition
A movement attempting to ban the consumption of alcoholic beverages, culminating in the 18th Amendment, the Volstead Act, and defiance from many.
18th Amendment
Strictly prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, including liquors, wines, and beers.
21st Amendment
Repealed the 18th Amendment.
Quota Laws
The first quota act of 1921 limited immigration to 3% of the number of foreign-born persons from a given nation counted in the 1910 Census (a maximum of 357,000). The second quota act in 1924 set quotas of 2% based on the Census of 1890 (before the arrival of most of the “new” immigrants). By 1927, the quotas for all Asians and eastern and southern Europeans had been limited to 150,000, with all Japanese immigrants barred.
Ku Klux Klan
Unlike the original Klan of the 1860s and 1870s, the new Klan founded in 1915 was as strong in the Midwest as in the South. The new Klan became popular because of Birth of a Nation and modern advertising techniques, growing to 5 million members by 1925. It drew most of its support from lower-middle-class White Protestants in small cities and towns. This revival of the KKK directed hostility not only against African Americans but also against Catholics, Jews, foreigners, and suspected Communists. The Klan would burn crosses and apply vigilante “justice”, punishing their victims with whips, tar and feathers, and lynching.
Lost Generation
Scorning religion as hypocritical and bitterly condemning the sacrifices of wartime as fraud perpetrated by money interests were two dominant themes of the leading writers, artists, and composers of the postwar decade, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Eugene O’Neill, Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and George Gershwin. This disillusionment caused the writer Gertrude Stein to call these individuals a “lost generation.”
Harlem Renaissance
Due to continued African American migration to the North from the South, the largest African American community developed in the Harlem section of New York City. With a population of almost 200,000 by 1930, Harlem became famous in the 1920s for its concentration of talented actors, artists, musicians, and writers.
Black Pride
A charismatic Jamaican immigrant, Marcus Garvey brought the UNIA to Harlem and advocated individual and racial pride for African Americans and developed political ideas of Black nationalism. He was eventually convicted of fraud, and W. E. B. Du Bois and other African American leaders disagreed with his back-to-Africa idea, but his emphasis on racial pride and self-respect was endorsed, helping to inspire a later generation to embrace the cause of Black pride and nationalism.
Black Tuesday
Five days after the panic on Black Thursday, millions of panicked investors ordered their brokers to sell, but almost no buyers could be found.
Buying on Margin
Allowed people to borrow most of the cost of a stock, making down payments as low as 10%. Investors depended on the price of the stock increasing so that they could repay the loan.
Bank Failures
Instead of trying to stabilize banks, the money supply, and prices, the Federal Reserve tried to preserve the gold standard. Without depositors’ insurance, people panicked and sought to get their money out of the banks, which caused more bank failures.
Hawley-Smoot Tariff
Set tax increases ranging from 31% to 49% on foreign imports.
Reconstruction Finance Corporation
This federally funded, government-owned corporation was created by Congress early in 1932 as a measure for propping up faltering railroads, banks, life insurance companies, and other financial institutions.
Bonus Army March
A thousand unemployed WWI veterans marched to Washington, D.C., to demand immediate payment of the bonuses promised to them at a later date. They were eventually joined by thousands of other veterans who brought their wives and children and camped in improvised shacks near the Capitol. Congress failed to pass the bonus bill they sought. After two veterans were killed in a clash with police, General Douglas MacArthur, the army’s chief of staff, used tanks and tear gas to destroy the shantytown and drive the veterans from Washington.
Three R’s
Relief for people out of work, recovery for business and the economy as a whole, and reform of American economic institutions.
Bank Holiday
To restore confidence in the banks that were still solvent, the president ordered the banks closed for a bank holiday on March 6th, 1933. He went on the radio to explain that the banks would be reopened after allowing enough time for the government to reorganize them on a sound basis.
Fireside Chats
Roosevelt went on the radio on March 12th, 1933, to present the first of many fireside chats to the American people. The president assured his listeners that the banks which reopened after the bank holiday were safe.
PWA
The Public Works Administration, directed by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, allotted money to state and local governments for building roads, bridges, dams and other public works. Such construction projects were a source of thousands of jobs.
CCC
The Civilian Conservation Corps employed young men on projects on federal lands and paid their families small monthly sums.
TVA
The Tennessee Valley Authority was a huge experiment in regional development and public planning. As a government corporation, it hired thousands of people in one of the nation’s poorest regions, the Tennessee Valley, to build dams, operate electric power plants, control flooding and erosion, and manufacture fertilizer. The TVA sold electricity to residents of the region at rates well below those previously charged by a private power company.
FDIC
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation guaranteed individual bank deposits.
SEC
The Securities and Exchange Commission was created to regulate the stock market and to place strict limits on the kind of speculative practices that had led to the Wall Street crash in 1929. The SEC also required full audits of, and financial disclosure by, corporations to protect investors from fraud and insider trading.
FHA
The Federal Housing Administration gave both the building industry and homeowners a boost by insuring bank loans for building, repairing, and purchasing houses. It provided many families with their first chance to buy a home and build wealth that they could pass on to their children. However, the FHA used “redlining” to define neighborhoods where African Americans lived, and did not make loans in those areas. Nearly all FHA loans made during the first thirty years of the program went to White applicants.
WPA
Much bigger than the relief agencies of the first New Deal, the Work Progress Administration spent billions of dollars between 1935 and 1940 to provide people with jobs. After its first year of operation under Hopkins, it employed 3.4 million men and women who had formerly been on the relief rolls of state and local governments. It paid them double the relief rate but less than the going wage for regular workers. Most WPA workers were put to work constructing new bridges, roads, airports, and public buildings. Unemployed artists, writers, actors, and photographers were paid by the WPA to paint murals, write histories, and perform in plays. One part of the WPA, the National Youth Administration (NYA), provided part-time jobs to help young people stay in high school and college or until they could get a job with a private employer.
Social Security
The Social Security Act created a federal insurance program based upon the automatic collection of payments from employees and employers throughout people’s working careers. The Social Security trust fund would then be used to make monthly payments to retired persons over the age of 65. Also receiving benefits under this law were workers who lost their jobs (unemployment compensation), persons who were blind or otherwise disabled, and dependent children and their mothers.
Court Packing
President Roosevelt did not have an opportunity to appoint any justices to the Supreme Court during his first term. He hoped to remove the Court as an obstacle to the New Deal by proposing a judicial-reorganization bill in 1937. It proposed that the president be authorized to appoint to the Supreme Court an additional justice for each current justice who was older than 70.5 years of age. In effect, the bill would have allowed Roosevelt to add up to six more justices to the Court - all of them presumably of liberal persuasion. Critics called it a “Court-packing” bill.
Dust Bowl
A severe drought in the early 1930s ruined crops in the Great Plains. This region became a dust bowl, as poor farming practices coupled with high winds blew away millions of tons of dried topsoil. With their farms turned to dust, and their health often compromised, thousands of “Okies” from Oklahoma and surrounding states migrated westward to California in search of farm or factory work that often could not be found.
