Unit 7: Standing at Armageddon

Question 1

Attorney general during the height of the Red Scare (1919-1920) who led raids against suspected radicals; reacting to terrorist bombings, fear of Bolshevism, and his own presidential aspirations, Palmer arrested 6,000 people and deported over 500.

Answer 1

A. Mitchell Palmer

Question 2

Influential black leader; his “Atlanta Compromise” speech (1895)
proposed blacks accept social and political segregation in return for economic opportunities in
agriculture and vocational areas. He received money from whites and built Tuskegee Institute
into a powerful educational and political machine.

Answer 2

Booker T. Washington

Question 3

Taciturn, pro-business president (1923-1929) who took over after Harding’s
death, restored honesty to government, and accelerated the tax cutting and antiregulation
policies of his predecessor; his laissez-faire policies brought short-term prosperity from 1923 to 1929.

Answer 3

Calvin Coolidge

Question 4

President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association; Catt
led the organization when it achieved passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 and later
organized the League of Women Voters.

Answer 4

Carrie Chapman Catt

Question 5

Mail service pilot who became a celebrity when he made the first flight
across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927; a symbol of the vanishing individualistic hero of the frontier
who was honest, modest, and self-reliant, he later became a leading isolationist.

Answer 5

Charles Lindbergh

Question 6

Prohibited the sale, transportation, and manufacture of alcohol;
part of rural America’s attempt to blunt the societal influence of the cities, it was called the “Noble
Experiment” until it was repealed by the Twenty-first Amendment (1933).

Answer 6

Eighteenth Amendment (1919)

Question 7

Established a national banking system for the first time since the
1830s; designed to combat the “money trust,” it created 12 regional banks that regulated interest
rates, money supply, and provided an elastic credit system throughout the country.

Answer 7

Federal Reserve Act (1913)

Question 8

Movement of southern, rural blacks to northern cities starting around 1915 and
continuing through much of the twentieth century; blacks left the South as the cotton economy
declined and Jim Crow persisted. Thousands came north for wartime jobs in large cities during
World Wars I and 11.

Answer 8

Great Migration

Question 9

Black artistic movement in New York City in the 1920s, when writers,
poets, painters, and musicians came together to express feelings and experiences, especially
about the injustices of Jim Crow; leading figures of the movement included Countee Cullen,
Claude McKay, Duke Ellington, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes.

Answer 9

Harlem Renaissance

Question 10

Crusading journalist who wrote The History of the Standard Oil Company a critical
expose that documented john D. Rockefeller’s ruthlessness and questionable business tactics.

Answer 10

Ida Tarbell

Question 11

Revolutionary industrial union founded in 1905
and led by “Big Bill” Haywood that worked to overthrow capitalism; during World War I, the
government pressured the group, and by 1919, it was in serious decline.

Answer 11

Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies)

Question 12

Social worker and leader in the settlement house movement; she founded Hull
House in 1889, which helped improve the lives of poor immigrants in Chicago, and in 1931 shared
the Nobel Peace Prize.

Answer 12

Jane Addams

Question 13

Reconstruction-era organization that was revived in 1915 and rose to political
power in the mid-1920s when membership reached 4 to 5 million; opposed to blacks, Catholics,
Jews, and immigrants, its membership was rural, white, native-born, and Protestant.

Answer 13

Ku Klux Klan

Question 14

Leading literary figure of the Harlem Renaissance who wrote verse, essays,
and 32 books; he helped define tie black experience in America for over four decades.

Answer 14

Langston Hughes

Question 15

A leading muckraking journalist who exposed political corruption in the cities;
best known for IUs The Shame of Cities (1904), he was also a regular contributor to McClure’s
magazine.

Answer 15

Lincoln Steffens

Question 16

Black leader in early 1920s who appealed to urban blacks with his program of
racial self-sufficiency / separatism, black pride, and pan-Africanism; his Universal Negro
Improvement Association ran into financial trouble, however. He was eventually arrested for mail
fraud and deported to his native Jamaica in 1927.

Answer 16

Marcus Garvey

Question 17

Theodore Roosevelt’s progressive platform in the election of 1912; building
on IUs presidential “Square Deal,” he called for a strong federal government to maintain
economic competition and social justice but to accept trusts as an economic fact of life.

Answer 17

New Nationalism

Question 18

Granted women the right to vote; its ratification capped a
movement for women’s rights that dated to the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. Although
women were voting in state elections in 12 states when the amendment passed, it enabled 8
million women to vote in the presidential election of 1920.

Answer 18

Nineteenth Amendment (1920)

Question 19

Law that regulated the food and patent medicine industries;
some business leaders called it socialistic meddling by the government.

Answer 19

Pure Food and Drug Act (1906)

Question 20

Period of hysteria after World War I over the possible spread of Communism to the
United States; aroused by the Russian Revolution (1917), the large number of Russian immigrants
in the United States, and a series of terrorist bombings in 1919, it resulted in the denial of civil
liberties, mass arrests and deportations, and passage of the restrictive Immigration Act of 1920.

Answer 20

Red Scare

Question 21

Progressive governor (1900-1904) and senator (1906-1925); he established 
the "Wisconsin idea" that reformed the state through direct primaries, tax reform, and 
anticorruption legislation. La Follette was the Progressive Party's presidential nominee in 1924.

Answer 21

Robert La Follette

Question 22

Italian radicals who became symbols of the Red Scare of the 1920s; arrested
(1920), tried, and executed (1927) for a robbery/murder, they were believed by many to have
been innocent but convicted because of their immigrant status and radical political beliefs.

Answer 22

Sacco and Vanzetti

Question 23

“Monkey Trial” over John Scopes’s teaching of evolution in his biology
classroom in violation of a Tennessee law; it pitted the Bible, fundamentalism, and William
Jennings Bryan against evolution, modernism, and Clarence Darrow. Scopes was convicted, but
fundamentalism was damaged and discouraged by the trial.

Answer 23

Scopes Trial (1925)

Question 24

Movement that began in Protestant churches in the late nineteenth century to
apply the teachings of the Bible to the problems of the industrial age; led by Washington Gladden
and Walter Rauschenbusch, it aroused the interest of many clergymen in securing social justice
for the urban poor. The thinking of Jane Addams, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and
other secular reformers was influenced by the movement as well.

Answer 24

Social Gospel

Question 25

Biggest scandal of Harding’s administration: Secretary of Interior
Albert Fall illegally leased government oil fields in the West to private oil companies; Fall was
later convicted of bribery and became the first Cabinet official to serve prison time (1931-1932).

Answer 25

Tea Pot Dome Scandal

Question 26

Socialist muckraker who wrote The Jungle (1906), in which he hoped to indict the
capitalist system but instead helped convince Congress to pass the Meat Inspection Act (1906),
which cleaned up the meat industry.

Answer 26

Upton Sinclair

Question 27

Black intellectual who challenged Booker T. Washington’s ideas on combating
Jim Crow; he called for the black community to demand immediate equality and was a founding
member of the National Association for the Advancement of Color People (NAACP).

Answer 27

W.E.B. DuBois

Question 28

Weak but affable president (1921-1923) who allowed his appointees to loot
and cheat the government; after his death, political and personal scandals tarnished his
presidency. Harding is rated as a failure as president by most historians.

Answer 28

Warren Harding

Question 29

Successful Democratic presidential nominee in 1912 and his
progressive program that viewed trusts as evil and called for their destruction rather than their
regulation; his social and political philosophy drew heavily on the ideas of Louis Brandeis. As
president (1931-1921), Wilson led the nation through World War I.

Answer 29

Woodrow Wilson (New Freedom)

Question 30

Ended World War I; it was much harder on Germany than Wilson
wanted but not as punitive as France and England desired. It was harsh enough, however, to set
stage for Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in the 1930s.

Answer 30

Treaty of Versailles (1919)

Question 31

The leaders who constructed the Treaty of Versailles: Woodrow Wilson, Georges
Clemenceau (France), David Lloyd George (Britain), and Vittorio Orlando (Italy)

Answer 31

Big Four

Question 32

Woodrow Wilson’s vision for the world after World War I; it called for
free trade, self-determination for all peoples, freedom of the seas, open diplomacy, and a League
of Nations. Wilson hoped his Fourteen Points would be the basis for a negotiated settlement to
end the war. However, they were not harsh enough on Germany for the other Allies to accept.
Only a few of them were incorporated into the treaty.

Answer 32

Fourteen Points (1918)

Question 33

Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who accepted the
Treaty of Versailles and membership in the League but demanded reservations to the League to
maintain congressional authority in foreign affairs; Wilson’s unwillingness to accept these
conditions caused the Senate to reject the treaty.

Answer 33

Henry Cabot Lodge

Question 34

American commander in France during World War I; his nickname of “Black
Jack” resulted from his command of black troops earlier in his career. Before being dispatched to
France, Pershing led an American incursion into Mexico in 1916 in a failed attempt to capture
Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa.

Answer 34

John Pershing

Question 35

British passenger liner sunk by a German submarine in May 1915; among the 1,200
deaths were 128 Americans. This was the first major crisis between the United States and
Germany and a stepping-stone for American involvement in World War I.

Answer 35

Lusitania

Question 36

Led a group of senators who were irreconcilably opposed to joining the League
of Nations; he promoted ideals of traditional isolationism and believed the League was “an
entangling foreign alliance.”

Answer 36

William Borah

Question 37

A secret German proposal to Mexico for an alliance against the
United States; Germany offered to help Mexico get back territories it lost to the United States in
1848. Britain alerted the Wilson administration to the plan, and Mexico refused the idea.

Answer 37

Zimmermann Note (1917)