American History for Truthdiggers: The Decade That Roared, and Wept
A new look for a new day: Models show off the "flapper" dress style in this
circa-1925 photo.
Editors note: The past is prologue. The stories we tell about ourselves and
our forebears inform the sort of country we think we are and help determine
public policy. As our current president promises to make America great
again, this moment is an appropriate time to reconsider our past, look back
at various eras of United States history and re-evaluate Americas origins.
When, exactly, were we great?
Below is the 23rd installment of the American History for Truthdiggers
series, a pull-no-punches appraisal of our shared, if flawed, past. The
author of the series, Danny Sjursen, an active-duty major in the U.S. Army,
served military tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and taught the nations
checkered, often inspiring past when he was an assistant professor of
history at West Point. His war experiences, his scholarship, his skill as a
writer and his patriotism illuminate these Truthdig posts.
Part 23 of American History for Truthdiggers.
See: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9;
Part 10; Part 11; Part 12; Part 13; Part 14; Part 15; Part 16; Part 17; Part
18; Part 19; Part 20; Part 21; Part 22.
The Jazz Age. The Roaring 20s. The Flapper Generation. The Harlem
Renaissance. These are the terms most often used to describe Americas
supposedly booming culture and economy during the 1920s. No doubt there is
some truth in the depiction. Real wages did rise in this period, and the
styles and independence of certain women and African-Americans did blossom
in the 1920sat least in urban centers. Still, the prevailing visions and
assumptions of this era mask layers of reaction, racism and retrenchment
just below the social surface. For if the 1920s was a time of jazz music,
stylishly dressed flappers and lavishly wealthy Wall Street tycoons, it
was also one infused with Protestant fundamentalism, fierce nativism,
lynching and the rise of the new Ku Klux Klan. How, then, should
historians and the lay public frame this time of contradictions? Perhaps as
an age of culture warsvicious battles for the soul of America waged between
black and white, man and woman, believer and secularist, urbanites and rural
folks.
The term culture war is familiar to most 21st century readers. Indeed,
many are likely to remember the common use of the term to describe the
politics of the 1990s, when politicians and common citizens alike argued
about cultural issues such as abortion, gay marriage and prayer in schools.
Those divided times have arguably continued into our present politics with a
new fury. Something similar happened in the often mischaracterized 1920s.
Few eras are truly one thing. Thus, the juxtaposition is what matters and,
perhaps, what links the past to the present. As such, if we are to label the
1920s as a Jazz Age, or a vividly black Harlem Renaissance, then we must
also admit that the era was an age of lynching, nativism and Prohibition. If
the 20s brought modernity and human rights to some, it also suffered from
the reaction of Protestant fundamentalism and sustained gender inequality.
If the 1920s economy began with a roar, we cannot forget that it ended with
a crash.
It is in the contrasts that the historian uncovers larger truths. Cheeky
labels and generalizations conceal as much as they reveal. An honest
assessment of the vital, if misunderstood, 1920s might lead the reader to a
variety of intriguing notions, not the least of which is the uncannyif
imperfectconclusion that the period is connected to our own 21st-century
moment in the Age of Trump.
The Jazz Age or the Age of Lynching?
Blues by Archibald Motley depicts a nightclub in Paris, where he studied
in the late 1920s. Many African-Americans lived as expatriates in France
after World War I, enjoying a freedom denied them in their homeland.
In no era, it seems, has the United States been able to overcome its
original sin of slavery, racism and racial caste. It most certainly failed
to do so in the 20s. There were, of course, early signs that the
renaissance of black culture following the First World War had strict
geographic and temporal limitations. Indeed, the hundreds of thousands of
African-American soldiers who deployed overseas during 1917-18 found that
the racial and social norms in France were far more open and accepting than
those of the United Statesespecially those in the American South. Some
never left France, forming a robust and creative black expatriate community
in Paris. Then, when most black soldiers did return home, proudly adorned in
their military uniforms, they faced political violence and the threat of
lynching at record levels. A number were lynched while still in uniform.
Still, for all these grim intonations, the 1920s was a vibrant era for black
culture. Jazz, made popular in the period, is arguably the only true, wholly
American art form. The Harlem Renaissance formed by black writers,
musicians, poets and critics in New York City would become legendary. The
1920s, in the wake of World War I, was also the start of the First Great
Migration of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban Northone
of the largest and fastest internal movements of a population in modern
history. This shift created the racial pattern and mosaic that modern
Americans take for granted. In 1900, 90 percent of American blacks still
lived in the South. They left to seek war-industry jobs and postwar urban
industrial work. Others hoped to escape the racism, violence and suffocating
caste system of the South. Most settled in urban centers in the Midwest and
Northeast. Detroit, for example, counted some 6,000 black residents in 1910,
but more than 130,000 in 1930.
Blacks still suffered violence and discrimination in their new Northern
settingslife above the Mason-Dixon Line was no picnic in the 1920s. For the
most part, though, they faced isolation. White families simply moved away
when blacks filtered into a neighborhood. Though tragic and racially
repugnant, this isolation did indeed usher in a period of African-American
cultural rebirth in pockets of the 1920s North, Harlem being the most
famous. Jazz performers such as Fats Waller, Duke Ellington and Louis
Armstrong perfected their craft, and jazz poets such as Langston
Hugheswhose work pioneered and presaged the rap scene of the late 20th
centurypaved the way for a new, vibrant black literature. In perhaps the
biggest surprise of all, African-American artists, musicians and writers
became wildly popular with white American audiences and even respected on an
international level. Whites devoured black music and culture in a manner,
and with a cultural appropriation, that would continue into the present day.
Even so, the Harlem Renaissance had strict racial and spatial limits. The
most famous jazz venue, New York Citys Cotton Clubwhich boasted a house
band fronted by Duke Ellingtonremained whites-only throughout the era.
While well-to-do white audiences flocked to the club nightly, the
African-American talent was forbidden to drink in the club, linger or
interact with the white guests. They had to relax and seek their pleasures
in neighboring buildings and other clubs in Harlem.
Black political leaders were divided, and they often clashed with each other
during the period. Some followed Booker T. Washington in claiming that
blacks must temporarily accept segregation in exchange for education and
community improvement. Others favored W.E.B. Du Bois, who argued that a
talented tenth of black leaders must lead the masses in a fight for civil
rights. Du Bois helped co-found the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP), which would play a prominent role in the black
struggle for equal rights for the next century. Still another segment of
blacks supported Marcus Garvey, who preached Africa for the Africans and
cultural/political separation from white America.
Ultimately, the black civil rights movement of the 1920s stalled. Though the
NAACP managed to convince the House to pass the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill in
1921, this seemingly simple legislation was rejected by the Senate on more
than one occasion and never became law.
A poster advertising a Ku Klux Klan rally in Poultney, Vt., during the 1920s
boasts that a state representative will deliver the lecture. The KKK had a
resurgence in the period and was popular on both sides of the Mason-Dixon
Line.
If the 1920s was an age of jazz and flourishing black cultural expression,
it was also an age of racial reaction. Unsettled by the growth and
popularity of black culture, and incensed by the return of uppity
uniformed blacks from the war, some whites unleashed a new wave of lynching
during the decade. Indeed, the 1920s was also the high tide of popularity
for a new manifestation of the Ku Klux Klan. The new or second KKK
emerged in 1915 after a long dormancy after the end of Reconstruction in
1877. This klan expanded its message of hate from a sole focus on
African-Americans to a preoccupation with and aversion to Jews, Catholics
and certain immigrants. The new klan was also larger and more public than
its earlier secretive Southern manifestation. By 1924, it had perhaps 5
million members nationally and undoubtedly many more sympathizers.
The 1920s klan also expanded geographically, becoming extraordinarily
powerful and popular in the North. Indeed, during the 1924 Democratic
National Convention in New Yorka convention that refused to include an
anti-lynching plank in the party platformthousands of uniformed KKK members
marched in the streets of the city. The klan was particularly powerful in
the Midwest, in Indiana alone counting more than 250,000 members, including
the governor. Local klan chapters operated like fraternal orders or social
clubs and held public barbecues and rallies throughout the country. The new
KKK was also more politically palatable, winning control of several
statehousesIndiana, Texas, Oklahoma and Oregonnorth and south of the
Mason-Dixon Line, and with some public officials openly flaunting their klan
affiliation.
Perhaps it should come as little surprise that the klans numbers exploded
during a period of negative eugenics, social Darwinism and scientific
racism. Best-selling books like Lothrop Stoddards The Rising Tide of Color
Against the White World-Supremacy posited that the discontent and malaise
in America and Europe were due to the influx of the darker races. Many White
Americans, and not only those belonging to the KKK, were highly influenced
by these pervasive arguments. Indeed, when Stoddard debated W.E.B. Du Bois
on a stage in Chicago, thundering that [w]e know that our America is a
White America, his words carried much popular weight. Thus, while Du Bois
handily won the intellectual debatepresciently asking Stoddard, Your
country? How came it yours? Would America have been America without her
Negro people?it became increasingly clear that philosophical blacks such
as himself were definitively not winning the popular contest for the racial
soul of the country.
Racializing America: The Immigration Acts of 1917-24
A 1921 political cartoon depicting the U.S. governments tightening of
immigration during the 1920s, especially from Southern and Southeastern
Europe. The governmental and popular demands for the restriction were
centered on notions of racial purity and the idea that white Anglo-Saxon
Protestants were the only real Americans.
The power of the new klan, the most substantial social movement of the
1920s, was apparent in the strict immigration restrictions imposed
throughout the decade. This was something new. For over a century, open
immigrationespecially from Europehad been the avowed policy of the United
States, a nation that had long prided itself on accepting the worlds
tired, poor, and hungry. The klan, which was at root a backward-looking
organization pining for a time when America was great (sound familiar?),
influenced a significant segment of the nonmember population, which agreed
that the U.S. should beand allegedly always wasa white Protestant nation.
In response to a recent influx of lesser Catholic and Eastern Orthodox
Southern and Eastern Europeans, WASP America sought to shut the immigration
valveat least for some types of immigrants. This restriction, disturbingly,
was wildly popular and easily passed a sympathetic Congress, making the
1920s one of American historys most intense eras of nativism and
immigration control.
White Protestants of the time, and their elected representatives, became
obsessed with a cultural program known as Colonial Revival. This movement
celebrated the nations distant pasta time, supposedly, when Anglo-Saxon
Protestantism was the dominant force in American life. Colonial Revival was
more than an architectural and fashion phenomenon, and became linked with
nativism and anti-immigration sentiment. As the esteemed historian Jill
Lepore has noted, both the style and political nativism of the era looked
inward and backward, inventing and celebrating an American heritage, a
fantasy world of a past that never happened. Such reactionary social and
political frameworks remain potent forces even today.
Politically, the nativists were victorious and the outcome was a series of
increasingly stringent immigration laws, along with the introduction of a
new legal category, the illegal alien, into the national discourse. All
told, the immigration acts of 1917, 1918, 1921 and 1924 reduced the overall
level of immigration by 85 percent, slowed immigration from Southern and
Eastern Europe to a trickle, and virtually eliminated migration from Asia
and Africa. Then, as now, according to historian Gary Gerstle, immigration
became a policy site onto which Americans projected their fears. The first
act, in 1917, began by excluding any immigrant who could not reada
backhanded method of targeting and limiting the so-called new immigrants,
primarily Catholics and Jews from Southern and Eastern Europe, who tended to
have lower literacy rates than Northern European migrants. The next act, in
1918, shut out radical immigrantssocialists, communists and
anarchistswho also tended to make up a larger portion of the new
immigrants. As Democratic U.S. Rep. Charles Crisp of Georgia put it, Little
Bohemia, Little Italy, Little Russia, Little Germany, Little Poland,
Chinatown
are the breeding grounds for un-American thought and deeds.
Much of the new nativist sentiment was also openly anti-Semitic, as Jews
were commonly associated with radicalism and communism because Russian Jews
were initially overrepresented in the Bolshevik ranks during that countrys
1917 Red Revolution. One U.S. consular official in Romania described the
Jewish refugees in Bucharest as economic parasites, tailors, small
salesmen, butchers, etc.
[with] ideals of moral and business dealings
difficult to assimilate to our own. Italians, too, were suspected of having
radical ties, which helps explain the controversial trial and execution of
the Italian-born anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in a
robbery-murder case that captured the nations attention in 1920. (They were
found guilty even though most of the arguments brought against them were
disproved in court. ) Fear of radicals swept the country, becoming most
potent, ironically, among congressmen from the South, which had the fewest
new immigrants in the entire nation. For example, Democratic Sen. Thomas
Heflin of Alabama told Congress, You have it in your power to do the thing
this day that will protect us against criminal agitators and red anarchists
you have it in your power to build a wall against bolshevism
to keep out
the criminal hordes of Europe (emphasis added).
The result was the emergency Immigration Act of 1921, the first open attempt
to exclude certain ethnic and racial groups from the U.S. The method was to
limit annual immigration from any one country to 3 percent of that countrys
population in the U.S. as of the 1910 census. By this calculation, which
obviously favored Nordics and Anglo-Saxons, there would be an estimated 80
percent reduction of Eastern and Southern Europeans from the prewar average.
President Woodrow Wilson, to his credit, refused to sign the bill, but
President Warren G. Harding, Wilsons successor, would do so in May 1921.
And the act worked. The number of immigrants from Southern and Eastern
Europe dropped from 513,000 in 1921 to 151,000 in 1923.
But the nativists running the government werent satisfied. Still obsessed
with the menace of Jews, Italians and Slavs, Congress passed the seminal
Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, a bill that openly touted the new
scientific racism of this social Darwinist era. Indeed, the star witness
before the House Committee on Immigration was Harry Laughlin, a prominent
eugenicist. The committee asked him to study the degeneracy and social
inadequacy of certain immigrant groups, and Laughlin gleefully did just
that. Racialist language permeated the debate in Congress, as when Indiana
Republican Fred Purnell exclaimed, We cannot make a heavy horse into a
trotter by keeping him in a racing stable. We cannot make a well-bred dog
out of a mongrel by teaching him tricks. West Virginia Democrat R.E.L.
Allen doubled down, claiming that the strength of the law lay in purifying
and keeping pure the blood of America.
The new bill changed the relevant census to that of 1890, a time when even
fewer Southern and Eastern Europeans had been in the country. Three percent
of that number lowered the annual immigration limit of these ethnic groups
to just 18,400, down from the prewar annual average of 738,000. Furthermore,
the act, and two Supreme Court decisions, held that all Japanese, Indian and
other East and South Asian immigrants must be barred from the United States;
the basis of all this was, supposedly, a 1790 law that reserved citizenship
for free white immigrants. Meanwhile, African nations and colonies were
allowed only 100 immigrants each per year. Interestingly, Mexican laborers
were exempt from the restrictions, though not for lack of prejudice against
them. Rather, corporate and agrobusiness interests lobbied against limiting
the migration of Mexican peasants and laborers, who were seen as vital to
business.
Political restriction of immigrants also influenced cultural norms and laws.
Fearing the scourge of mongrelization and miscegenation, many states
hardened laws against interracial marriage. This movement culminated with a
1924 Virginia law that prohibited a white from marrying a black, Asian,
American Indian, or Malay. Furthermore, this law changed the definition
of black from anyone with one-sixteenth African ancestry to any individual
with at least one black ancestor, regardless of how remote.
When we imagine the cosmopolitan and open-minded Jazz Age of the 1920s, it
is important, too, to recall its hardening of racial lines and the litigious
attempts to make America white and Protestant again.
The First Culture Wars: Battles Over the Bible, Alcohol and Modernity
A prevailing mental picture of the 1920s is that of the flapper, sporting a
bob haircut, exposed knees and a plethora of jewelry. This New Woman drove
automobiles, smoked cigarettes and drank alcohol. Surely, we imagine, these
female Americans were in every sense modern, and representative of an
entire era. Only it isnt so. For every free-spirited flapper, there was a
traditionalist wife. And, if there was much imbibing in the 20s, we must
remember this was also the decade of the national prohibition of alcohol
manufacture and sales. For every modernist infused with scientific truths,
there was more than one Protestant fundamentalist. This, the apposition of
the modern and traditional, is the real story of the 1920sone often omitted
from the history books but vital to any comprehensive understanding of the
decade.
Prohibition had been a goal of temperance activists (especially women in the
movement) for at least three-quarters of a century. The old arguments held
that sober citizensmen were the primary targetswere more likely to be
diligent workers, faithful husbands, dutiful fathers and better servants of
the nation. By the later part of the second decade of the 20th century,
prohibitionists had the necessary power in Congress and the state
legislatures to push throughover President Wilsons vetothe Constitutions
18th Amendment, which outlawed the production and sale (but not the
consumption) of alcoholic drinks. This new, powerful wave of sentiment
against alcohol spoke to cultural battlefields in America. Pro- and
anti-prohibition attitudes tended to cohere with the nations growing
rural-urban divide. Rural folk tended to support the ban while city dwellers
found it intrusive. Prohibition also linked directly to religion and
immigration. Many temperance activists favored the ban as an attack on the
un-American values and mores of immigrant communities, which tended to
drink more heavily. It was a matter of social control and another way to
make the nation greatand white and Protestantagain.
Known as the Noble Experiment, Prohibition created more problems than it
solved and lasted only a dozen or so years before its repeal through the
21st Amendment. It was almost impossible to enforce, and bootleggers and
speak-easies proliferated around the nation, especially in the urban North.
Prohibitionsimilar to what is happening in todays war on drugsalso
turned the production and distribution of alcohol over to criminal elements
and syndicates. Organized crime ran rampant in the wake of the 18th
Amendment, ushering in a wave of shootings and bombings among rival
bootlegging gangs. The most famous gangster was Chicagos Al Capone, who
made tens of millions of dollars and ruled with an iron fist. In one famous
incident, the St. Valentines Day Massacre, his men executed nine rival gang
members in a busy district in Chicago. The federal government responded,
eventually putting Capone away for tax evasion, but Washington never had the
resources or ability to enforce the alcohol ban in a meaningful way. The
Noble Experiment was ultimately a bloody failure. Still, it too reflected
the culture wars of the 1920s.
A Washington, D.C., policeman measures the distance between knee and suit at
the Tidal Basin bathing beach in 1922. The New Woman might be able to
display more skin, but only so much.
Battles were also fought over the role and scope of womens public sphere in
American life. While many (mostly urban) women shook off the mores of their
mothers and embraced the flapper lifestyle, other Americans(generally
rural) men and womencontinued to insist the womans place was in the home.
Though women did finally get the vote in 1920, they did not vote as a
blocas some had expected or, alternatively, fearedbut rather divided along
the same political and cultural lines as the male population. Struggles over
the role of women were inseparably tied to arguments between country and
city, between religion and secularism, and between modernism and
traditionalism. So, while more women entered the public sphere and altered
their styles, they were still constricted by local decency laws that could
go so far, as in Washington, D.C., as to regulate the length of bathing
suits and dresses down to the nearest inch. Furthermore, after a wartime
surge, there were still relatively few women working outside the home.
Indeed, contrary to popular imagination, the womens labor force grew by
only 2 percent in the 1920s.
Sheet music for a 1925 song that pointed to the national division over
evolution.
Perhaps the most famous front in the 1920s culture war revolved around the
role of religion in American life. Indeed, one can hardly overestimate the
power of organized religion in America, from the nations very inception.
Church attendance and religious adherence in the U.S. is, and has always
been, among the highest in the world. For all the sweeping social changes of
the 20s, that remained a salient fact. During the Progressive Era (roughly
from the 1890s to the 1920s) and in the decade that followed the end of
World War I, an increasingly urbanized, modernized and immigrant population
(read: Catholic and Jewish) seemed threatening to many rural, Anglo-Saxon
Protestants who saw themselves as the only real Americans. In response to
the unsettling changes in American society, a new wave of Protestant
fundamentalismspecifically the view that the words of the Bible were
inerrantly true and were meant to be taken literallytook hold in rural
America.
Fundamentalists battled against immigrants, flappers, drinkers and all sorts
of modernists throughout the decade. One of the first and most famous
battlesone not yet settled, even todayrevolved around the question of
public education and whether or not teachers should impart the scientific
theories of Darwinian evolution to the nations students. The battle lines
were drawn; all that was needed was a spark to begin the war, and it came in
the little town of Dayton, Tenn., in 1925. Tennessee had become the first
state to prohibit the instruction of evolution in public schools. The
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), founded in 1917 to defend
conscientious objectors, then located a high school biology teacher in
Dayton, John Scopes, who was willing to challenge the law and teach
evolution. Scopes was charged with a crime, and the ensuing trial gained
national attention, perhaps the first such case to be dubbed the trial of
the century.
The trial quickly moved beyond the narrow bounds of whether Scopes had
violated the lawhe clearly hadand became, instead, a battle between the
theories of evolution and creationism, between secularism and
fundamentalism. And there were other issues, themes and questions raised by
the case. First, there was the strong urban-rural divide that tended to
cleave along religious and secular lines. And, more saliently, a question of
democracy: Could the people of a community ban the teaching of credible
scientific theory if a clear majority, such as in most Southern states,
didnt adhere to that science? The secularists framed the case around a
question of free speech: Did a teacher have the right to impart a scientific
theory that he or she found credible? These were tough issues and still are.
The Monkey Trial, as it came to be known, was a national sensation, the
first to be broadcast nationwide on radio. Both sides hired celebrity
lawyers: for the prosecution, William Jennings Bryan, a three-time
Democratic presidential candidate; for the defense, Clarence Darrow, a famed
radical litigator who had defended Eugene Debs. For Bryan the trial was all
about the great need of the world today to get back to God, a question of
faith and local (especially rural) sovereignty. For Darrow, perhaps the
nations most famous litigator, the case was all about reason, science and
free speech. Darrow explained his reasons for taking on the case by saying,
I knew that education was in danger from the source that has always
hampered itreligious fanaticism.
The climax of the trial came when Darrow put none other than Bryan himself
on the stand for a cross-examination regarding the Bible itself. Bryan was
deeply religious but no theologian. The crafty Darrow peppered Bryan with
tough questions about the supposed infallibility of the Bible and asked
whether its words were to be taken literally. Bryan, sweating and confused,
struggled through the questioning and seemed to contradict himself with some
regularity. Consider just one famous exchange from the trial record that
demonstrates the conflict between the two men and their worldviews:
Darrow: You have given considerable study to the Bible, havent you, Mr.
Bryan? Do you claim that everything should be literally interpreted?
Bryan: I believe everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given
there.
Darrow: You believe the story of the flood [Noah] to be a literal
interpretation?
Bryan: Yes, sir.
Darrow: When was that flood? About 4004 B.C.?
Bryan: That is the estimate accepted today.
Darrow: You believe that all the living things that were not contained in
the ark were destroyed?
Bryan: I think the fish may have lived.
Darrow: Dont you know that the ancient civilizations of China are 6-7,000
[6,000 to 7,000] years old?
Bryan: No, they would not run back beyond the creation, according to the
Bible, 6,000 years.
Darrow: You dont know how old they are, right?
Bryan: I dont know how old they are, but you probably do. [Laughter] I
think you would give preference to anybody who opposed the Bible.
Everyone knew that Scopes would be found guilty, and indeed he was; his fine
was $100, paid by the renowned journalist H.L. Mencken. Still, the trial had
much grander, more consequential results. Modernity and science had battled
traditionalism and dogma. Though Darrow seemed to get the better of Bryan in
their exchanges, there was no clear winner. The cities and the major
national newspapers lauded the victory of Darrow, but rural America
remained stalwart and resistant to evolution and still is. Evangelical
Protestant Christianity, after all, remains one of the most potent forces in
American political and cultural life.
Normalcy, Laissez Faire and the Road to the Crash
A campaign button for Calvin Coolidge, one of three Republican presidents
who served between 1921 and 1933. They opposed the progressive reforms that
had come earlier and sought to keep the nation on what they considered to be
a normal course. Their administrations helped lay the foundation for the
Great Depression, which began in 1929.
For the most part the 1920s are remembered as a boom time, an era of
unparalleled prosperity and conspicuous consumption. Even the middle and
lower classes are thought to have benefited from the soaring economy. And,
in a sense, this was trueat least for a while. Between 1922 and 1928,
industrial production rose 70 percent, the gross national product 40 percent
and per capita income 30 percent. Still, lurking under the surface were
troubling signs that prosperity was uneven and, in many ways, little more
than a shiny facade. Throughout the decade, some 40 percent of the working
class remained mired in poverty, 75 percent of Americans did not own a
washing machine and 60 percent couldnt afford a radio. Forty-two percent of
families lived on less than $1,000 a year. Whats more, income inequality
reached record highs (which are being matched in the present day), with
one-tenth of 1 percent of the families at the top earning as much income
annually as the bottom 40 percent of all families.
Furthermore, unions were losing ground throughout the country as newly
empowered corporations broke strikes with the backing of government, and,
sadly, the public. This occurred despite the fact that working conditions
remained deplorable in many industries. Each year in the 1920s, 25,000
workers were killed on the job and an additional 100,000 became permanently
disabled because of work-related causes. Given these stunning facts, why was
much of the public then so hostile to labor? Partly this reflected an
outgrowth of the 1919-21 fear of radicalism known as the Red Scarethe
Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) were destroyed
in the postwar yearsbut it also tied to race and ethnicity. Labor issues
became associated with immigrant issues, and, as demonstrated, nativism and
anti-immigration sentiments ran rampant in the Roaring 20s.
Despite these under-the-surface realities of gripping poverty, enough
Americans were doing well to such an extent that they could shut out the
picture of struggling sharecropping farmers (black and white) and
impoverished immigrant industrial workers in the big cities. These suffering
people, then as now, were invisibleso long, at least, as general prosperity
was the order of the day.
By the presidential election of 1920, the Progressive Era was dead. Sick of
centralized government social reforms and soured by the experience of war, a
majority of Americans turned their backs on liberal revisionism. What these
citizens wanted most of all was to turn the clock backward to what they
imagined was a simpler time, before the war, and even before the progressive
turn in American politicsa time, they imagined, of liberty, autonomy and
freedom from government interference. The Republican candidate in 1920,
Warren G. Harding, rode to victory on this tide of conservatism and
anti-progressivism. On the campaign trail, Harding promised a return to
normalcy, by which he meant the retreat of the federal government from a
reform agenda and a reintroduction of laissez faire economics. In Boston in
May 1920, Harding summed up his view of the future by asserting, Americas
present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not
revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment
not submergence
in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality. And it was
precisely this reactionaryand ultimately corruptagenda that Harding would
pursue in the White House.
Harding and his two Republican successorsCalvin Coolidge and Herbert
Hooverwould cozy up to big business and corporations. Harding made clear
his intentions in his inaugural address. I speak for administrative
efficiency, for lightened tax burdens
for the omission of unnecessary
interference of government with business, for an end to the governments
experiment in business, Harding proclaimed in a clear repudiation of the
progressive agenda. His successor, Coolidge, who famously proclaimed that
the business of America is business, bragged toward the end of his term,
One of my most important accomplishments
has been minding my own
business.
Civilization and profits go hand in hand. An older brand of
Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, would have probably been disappointed in his
partys new agenda. T.R., the famous trust-buster, had always believed that
spreading out economic opportunity and avoiding the monopoly of wealth was
essential to the long-term prosperity of the nation. But that was a
different time; T.R. was a progressive, of sortsand most Americans now
rejected such government activism. They would pay the price.
Harding appointed Andrew Mellon, the fourth richest man in America, as his
secretary of the treasury. Mellon, who served for many years, including
under Coolidge, would upend the entire edifice of progressive social and
economic reformism. During his tenure, Congress would exempt capital gains
from the income tax and cap the top tax ratean early form of what is now
labeled trickle-down economics, in which the wealthiest Americans receive
the lions share of tax cuts. The top income brackets would see their tax
rates lowered from 50 percent to 25 percent, while the lowest bracket was
given a much smaller cut, from 4 percent to 3 percent. Hoover, who was
secretary of commerce before serving as president (1929-33), believed in
voluntary associationalism, the theory that government should encourage
corporations to work together and reform working conditions, all absent
federal regulation. It didnt work. (It rarely does. Consider the 2008
financial crash as exhibit A.) What the reign of Mellon and Hoover did do
was tie federal power to private corporate interests. The Wall Street
Journal summed up the situation: Never before, here or anywhere else, has a
government been so completely fused with business.
Indeed, in a contemporary landmark study, The Modern Corporation and
Private Property (1932), the authors concluded that a corporate system
had superseded the state as the dominant form of political organization.
Big business liked it that way and launched new publicity campaigns intended
to demonstrate that corporations had a strong social conscience, and that
government-provided social welfare was unnecessary and ill-advised. With
money came immense advertising power, on a scale that could not be matched
by working-class interests. It remained to be seen whether profit-driven
corporations could responsibly guide the massive U.S. economy in the absence
of federal oversight. Its an experiment that has been triedand has
failedthroughout American history and remains popular among certain
political factions.
This spreading political and social gospel of materialism also affected
American culture. As historian Jill Lepore wrote, During the 1920s,
American faith in progress turned into a faith in prosperity, fueled by
consumption. Americans spent more than they earned, paid with credit and
rode the runaway train of an economy that was sure to crash. Only no one
seemed to see it coming. When Hoover accepted the 1928 Republican nomination
for the presidency, he predictedbarely a year before the stock market
crashthat [w]e in America are nearer to the final triumph over poverty
than ever before in the history of any land. He would soon eat these words.
None of it was sustainablethe mushrooming stock market or the growing
wealth disparity. In a prescient article, Echoes of the Jazz Age, F. Scott
Fitzgerald captured the absurdity of the moment, writing, It was borrowed
time anywaythe whole upper tenth of the nation living with the insouciance
of a grand duc and the casualness of chorus girls. And, as in the first
minutes after the Titanic struck an iceberg, the rich carried on just as
before.
The depression would be the worst in American history. When the crash came,
it came hard and fast. A decades worth of irresponsible, risky financial
speculationaltogether unregulated by the fedshad created a bubble that
that few had recognized. As the expert John Galbraith wrote in his study of
the crisis, The Great Crash, the 1920s economy was fundamentally unsound
and the bad distribution of income contributed to the onset of deep
depression. Over just three weeks after the initial stock market crash, the
Dow Jones Industrial Average fell from 326 to 198 and stocks lost some 40
percent of their value. Hoovers initial, and prevailing, instinct was to
work with business to right the economic ship. Within weeks of the crash he
invited corporate leaders to the White House in an effort to coordinate a
response. Nothing of substance was forthcoming; the corporations still clung
to the profit motive and were unwilling to bend for the good of the country.
As the historians Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle have concluded, All in all,
the corporate rich failed miserably to meet their responsibilities toward
the poor. This fact was readily apparent, but, still, Hoover balked at any
strong federal response.
Hoover tried to reassure Americans, but beyond cajoling corporations to take
responsible (voluntary) actions he was unwilling to meaningfully intervene.
He believed charity was the best way to ameliorate rising poverty but
opposed any form of government relief, arguing that to provide such help
would see the nation plunged into socialism and collectivism. The obtuse
and heartless response of a generation of Republican politicians and
corporate leaders reads today as cruel farce. When, by 1930, half the
280,000 textile workers in New EnglandCoolidges home regionwere jobless,
the former president commented simply, When more and more people are thrown
out of work, unemployment results. Then, in early 1931, Coolidge again
showed his flair for understatement: The country is not in good condition.
Henry Ford, perhaps Americas most famous business leaderand, incidentally,
an anti-Semitic admirer of Adolf Hitlerclaimed in March 1931 that the
Depression resulted because the average man wont really do a days work
unless he is caught and cannot get out of it. There is plenty of work if
people would do it. Weeks later, Ford would lay off 75,000 workers.
Only making matters worse, President Hoover fell back on his protectionist
instincts and severed the U.S. economy from Europe with a new tariff act in
1930. Other nations, predictably, retaliated with trade restrictions of
their own and world trade shrank by a quarter. By 1932, one in five U.S.
banks had failed, unemployment rose from 9 percent to 23 percent, and one in
four Americans suffered a food shortage. The very foundation of
liberal-capitalist democracy seemed to be crumbling. The New Republic
magazine proclaimed, At no time since the rise of political democracy have
its tenets been so seriously challenged as they are today. The Italian
fascist dictator Benito Mussolini predicted that [t]he liberal state is
destined to perish.
These premonitions were understandable at the time. Millions of
Americansout of work and desperate for food and sheltergathered in
temporary outdoor camps, dubbed Hoovervilles, and increasingly became
radicalized, drawn either to the communist left or the fascist right. One
thing seemed certain: The fate of global democracy seemed to hinge on the
ability of the United States, the worlds largest economy and democracy, to
find a middle way that mitigated poverty without a turn toward left- or
right-wing totalitarianism. That would require American voters to send the
likes of Hoover and his failed ideology packing and elect a different sort
of candidate with fresh ideas on how to confront the crisis of the Great
Depression. That man was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When he took power in
1933 it was uncertain whether he, and American liberal capitalism, would
endure.
An American Crime: The Bonus Army March on Washington
A Bonus Marcher, part of a massive demonstration in Washington, D.C., in
1932, displays signs protesting the burial case in which he is forced to
live because of the federal governments refusal to give bonuses to military
veterans. The smaller sign at top declares that 1917-18 has been
forgotten, a reference to the sacrifice of Americans who fought in World
War I.
It is by now the platitude of platitudes: Americans love their military
veterans, adulating them today (though vacuously) at every turn. Only it
wasnt always so. In fact, one could argue that there exists a long, highly
American trenddating back to the underpaid and underfed Continental Army of
the Revolutionary Eraof asking the world of our veterans in war and then,
predictably, ignoring their postwar needs. There is perhaps no better
example than the suppression of the Bonus Marchers in our nations capital
in the spring and summer of 1932. This, to be sure, must count as a great
American crime.
The controversy centered on the redemption of the promised federal bonus
certificates given to the millions of veterans of the First World War. Most
of these bonuses could, by law, be redeemed only far in the future, around
1945. But, for hundreds of thousands of jobless, homeless American combat
vets, that simply wouldnt do. They were hungry now, they were cold now. A
Great Depression was on the land, and many of these vets demanded the payout
immediately. Ironically, later Keynesian economists argued that paying out
this large sum of money would actually have acted as a stimulus to the
depressed American economybut this was decidedly not the prevailing theory
of the day among business-friendly Republicans such as President Hoover. He
flatly refused the payout.
In the spring of 1932, some 20,000 veterans, carrying their bonus
certificates, converged on the national capital. They promised to stay put
until their demands were met, and they set up makeshift camps across
Washington, D.C. On observer, the famous writer John Dos Passos, observed
that the men are sleeping in little lean-tos built out of old newspapers,
cardboard boxes, packing crates, bits of tin or tarpaper roofing, every kind
of cockeyed makeshift shelter from the rain scared together out of the city
dump. It was a sad scene and an embarrassing fall from grace for these
proud war vets. When the bill to pay off the bonus failed in the Senateit
had passed the Housemost of the Bonus Army stalwartly stayed put. In
response, Hoover coldly ordered the active-duty Army to evict thema highly
questionable use of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of the
regular Army to suppress disorder within the nations borders.
The next day, four troops of cavalry, four companies of infantry, a machine
gun company and six tanks gathered near the White House, all under the
command of Gen. Douglas MacArthur. MacArthurs aide de camp that day was
future general and president Dwight Eisenhower, and future general and World
War II hero George Patton commanded one of the cavalry troops. This was not
their finest hour. MacArthur personally led his troopsall wearing gas
masksdown Pennsylvania Avenue as they fired tear gas to clear the vets out
of old buildings, some of which were set on fire by the advancing troopers.
Thousands of Bonus Marchers, along with their women and children,
frantically ran. Soon the entire encampment was ablaze. The whole tragic
affair was over rather quickly. The days toll: two veterans shot to death,
an 11-week-old baby dead, an 8-year-old boy partly blinded, and thousands
more injured by the tear gas.
The brutality was swift, and, make no mistake, it was purposeful. Then Maj.
Patton gave the following instructions to his troops before the assault: If
you must fire do a good joba few casualties become martyrs, a large number
an object lesson.
When a mob starts to move keep it on the run.
Use a
bayonet to encourage its retreat. If they are running, a few good wounds in
the buttocks will encourage them. If they resist, they must be killed. How
quickly Americans would forget this mans despicable role in this national
disgrace in favor of memories of his actions in World War II. The vets did
not get their hard-earned and much-needed bonuses that day. What they
received was the violent rebuke of a government that had abandoned them to
poverty and despair. The famed journalist H.L. Mencken captured the moment
ever so perfectly, writing, In the sad aftermath that always follows a
great war, there is nothing sadder than the surprise of the returned
soldiers when they discover that they are regarded generally as public
nuisances. For an impoverished generation of World War I veterans, this was
the thanks for their service.
* * *
Even at the time, not everyone bought in to the mythology and consumerism of
the Roaring 20s. Some cultural criticsartists and writers in
particularsaw through the hollow facade of American life and society. These
were the men and women of the Lost Generation, those damaged and horrified
by both the horrors of the Great War and disgusted by the materialism of the
proceeding decade. Though their prose remains on the curriculum for students
throughout the nation, their assessment of the dark underbelly of the decade
has not stuck. Americans, it seems, prefer the clichéd labels of Jazz Age
and Harlem Renaissance to the inverse realities of the nativism, lynching,
Prohibition, fundamentalism and social control so prevalent in the decade
that roared.
Ernest Hemingway, a wounded veteran of the First World War, wrote in his
acclaimed novel A Farewell to Arms (1929), The world breaks everyone.
But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very
gentle and the very brave impartially. Indeed, Hemingway, like so many
others in his Lost Generation, chose exile as an expatriate in Paris to
life in consumerist America. His fellow lost author, F. Scott Fitzgerald,
also critiqued the era and expounded upon the disillusionment of many
veterans, writing in This Side of Paradise (1920), Here was a new
generation
dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the
worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all
faiths in man shaken.
Indeed, there was among many Americans (especially urbanites of the middle
or upper class) a worship of success and materialism infusing the 1920s.
This is the way we tend to imagine and reconstruct the decade in our mindsa
time of energy and movement toward modernityforgetting Fitzgeralds
rejoinder: that the period carried a loss of faith, a fear of poverty, a
battle between ideologies and, yes, between competing images of what it
meant to be an American. The 1920s gave birth to a national culture war,
perhaps Americas first. Open a newspaper, flip on the newsno cease-fire
yet.
* * *
To learn more about this topic, consider the following scholarly works:
Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, Ruling America: A History of Wealth and
Power in a Democracy (2005).
Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the 20th Century
(2001).
Jake Henderson, History Brief: Roaring Twenties (2016).
Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (2018).
Howard Zinn, The Twentieth Century (1980).
Maj. Danny Sjursen, a regular contributor to Truthdig, is a U.S. Army