The Nineteen-Twenties, 1919–1929

This is Unit Nine, part one, on the nineteen-twenties: the car, the new media, and the old America's answer. Unit Eight closed with the war ended by resolution, outside the treaty, and turned to the decade that followed. Carry one conflict through this part. Digital History calls the decade a struggle between an old and a new America. Watch the new culture spread by car, screen and radio, and watch the old answer it, with quotas, trials, and a revived Klan. At the last entry the course asks how large and how respectable that Klan was. By the end you will be able to explain how a consumer economy was built, and why it was fragile. To explain how mass culture united and divided audiences. To explain what moving the quota base year did. To separate the two questions about Sacco and Vanzetti. And to describe the second Klan, keeping its size as a range.

Three entries on the car: how it was built, what its builders were paid, and how many Americans came to own one.

Henry Ford's Model T.

USH2 1201 Henry Ford's Model T

Henry Ford's assembly line cut the price of a Model T from eight hundred fifty dollars in nineteen oh eight to three hundred dollars by nineteen twenty-four, and the Yawp says that by nineteen twenty-five a Model T rolled off the line every ten seconds. The car came within reach of average Americans, as mass production intended.

What Ford paid the men who built it.

USH2 1202 The Five-Dollar Day

Ford paid his workers five dollars a day and set an eight-hour workday, shorter than most factories then required, paying White and Black workers equally, the anchor says. Seeking those wages, many African Americans left the South for Detroit and other northern factory cities.

How many cars Americans came to own.

USH2 1203 A Nation on Wheels

More than twenty-three million cars were on American roads by nineteen twenty-nine, the anchor says; the Yawp counts registered cars at slightly more than nine million in nineteen twenty and nearly twenty-seven million by the decade's end. The two counts differ. Both show the car reshaping industry, from glass to steel.

Six entries on the decade's entertainment: the movies, sound, radio, and the heroes they made.

The decade's great entertainment.

USH2 1204 The Movies

Weekly movie attendance reached ninety million by the end of the nineteen twenties, with a double feature costing twenty-five cents, from studios such as Warner Brothers, Paramount and MGM. Silent stars Rudolph Valentino, Clara Bow and Charlie Chaplin became national figures, and the Yawp says palatial theatres drew audiences that had once shunned film.

The arrival of sound.

USH2 1205 The Talkies

The Jazz Singer of nineteen twenty-seven, starring Al Jolson, was the first feature film with synchronised sound, the first talkie, and the Yawp says the Warners spent half a million dollars to equip two theatres for sound. Digital History notes that immigrants formed much of film's early audience, and that The Jazz Singer dramatised the immigrant experience.

The medium that entered every home.

USH2 1206 Radio

Radio reached homes across the country in the nineteen twenties, with hundreds of stations and nationally syndicated programmes by the decade's end, families gathered around one set hearing what millions heard. Commercial radio and magazines, the anchor says, made national celebrities of athletes and actors, and sports broadcasts carried games into millions of homes.

The heroes radio made.

USH2 1207 Sports Heroes

Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs in nineteen twenty-seven, and a year earlier Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim the English Channel. Helen Wills won eight Wimbledon singles titles between nineteen twenty-seven and nineteen thirty-eight, and Big Bill Tilden took the national tennis championship every year from nineteen twenty through nineteen twenty-five, the anchor says.

One of the era's greatest athletes.

USH2 1208 Jim Thorpe

Jim Thorpe, raised in Oklahoma as a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, ranked among the most celebrated athletes in the world, with Olympic medals in nineteen twelve, Major League Baseball, and a place among the founders of the National Football League. Radio, the anchor says, helped make such athletes household names.

The pilot who crossed the Atlantic alone.

USH2 1209 Lindbergh

On May twenty-first, nineteen twenty-seven, Charles Lindbergh completed the first nonstop solo flight from New York to Paris, the Yawp says, crossing the Atlantic in thirty-three hours in the Spirit of St. Louis with only a few sandwiches and some bottles of water. Unit twelve meets him again, on the eve of another war.

Three entries on how Americans paid for the new goods, the economy that built, and the national culture that came with it.

How Americans paid for the new goods.

USH2 1210 Buying on Credit

By nineteen twenty-seven, the Yawp says, more than sixty percent of American cars were sold on credit, and installment plans covered nearly every large purchase, while household appliance spending grew by more than one hundred twenty percent between nineteen nineteen and nineteen twenty-nine. Unit three built the mechanism of store credit; the nineteen twenties spread it across the country.

The economy these pieces built.

USH2 1211 The Consumer Economy

Mass production, advertising, radio and credit together built what the Yawp calls a new economy and new standards of living, with cars, appliances, films and radio programmes produced and consumed on a national scale. The automobile industry promoted buying on credit, and by nineteen twenty-seven most cars were bought that way. Advertising, the anchor says, became a central institution of the new consumer economy. Read the boom and its fragility together. The Yawp notes that by the decade's end the well-to-do had no need for more cars and radios, inventories piled up, and manufacturers cut back. An economy running on consumer credit depended on buyers who could keep buying, and unit ten shows what happened when they could not.

The national culture the new media created.

USH2 1212 Mass Culture

The anchor sets itself the task of explaining how radio nationalised and homogenised American culture. Movies, radio and spectator sports reached every region at once: ninety million moviegoers a week, hundreds of stations, and games broadcast into millions of homes. The same stars, songs and slogans reached city and farm. The confusion to avoid is seeing only uniformity. A shared national culture carried the new morality of the cities into the countryside, and Digital History describes the decade as one of deep conflict between an urban, modernist culture and a rural, traditionalist one. Mass culture united audiences and divided them at the same time.

Three entries on the decade's immigration laws, and on why the second moved its census year.

The first of the decade's immigration laws.

USH2 1213 The Emergency Quota Act

The Emergency Quota Act of nineteen twenty-one limited each nationality's immigrants to three percent of its residents counted in the nineteen ten census, quotas calculated country by country from one census year. The formula looked neutral. The next law showed how a choice of census year could decide who came.

The law that replaced it.

USH2 1214 The Immigration Act of 1924

The Immigration Act of nineteen twenty-four cut each quota to two percent and moved the base to the census of eighteen ninety, and President Coolidge signed it declaring that America must be kept American. Labour unions and the Klan supported it, the anchor says. The Yawp says it made the quota system permanent.

Why the base year moved.

USH2 1215 Why 1890

The two quota laws are often run together, but the change between them is the lesson. The first based quotas on the census of nineteen ten; the second on the census of eighteen ninety. Moving the base year back twenty years moved it to before the great arrivals from southern and eastern Europe. Unit four's census figures show why: Italian-born residents rose from seventeen thousand in eighteen seventy to one point three four million by nineteen ten, Russian-born from under five thousand to nearly one point two million. Lowering the percentage cut numbers; moving the base year chose nationalities. Unit fourteen shows the formula repealed in nineteen sixty-five.

Four entries on two trials: one shaped by fear of immigrants and radicals, and one over teaching evolution.

A trial shaped by fear of immigrants.

USH2 1216 Sacco and Vanzetti

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian-born anarchists, were arrested in May nineteen twenty for a robbery-murder at a factory in Braintree, Massachusetts, convicted in July nineteen twenty-one, and executed on August twenty-third, nineteen twenty-seven. The Yawp says their fate epitomised the Red Scare, and that the case moved leftists and artists to sympathy with the accused.

What was argued about the case.

USH2 1217 Guilt and Fairness

Two questions about Sacco and Vanzetti are still argued, and they are separate. The first is whether they committed the crime. The second is whether their trial was fair. The anchor reports appeals on the ballistics evidence and on testimony that witnesses later recanted, and the Yawp says fear of foreign radicals led to their executions. They were Italian immigrants and anarchists, arrested in the year of the Palmer raids, and executed years after their conviction. The course states what was argued and does not decide it. Keep the two questions apart: a trial can be unfair to guilty men, and fair to innocent ones.

A law against teaching evolution.

USH2 1218 The Butler Act

Tennessee's Butler Act banned the teaching of evolution in public schools, and the American Civil Liberties Union set out to challenge it, with the teacher John Scopes agreeing to be the defendant, saying he may have taught evolution while substituting. Dayton's leaders, the anchor says, saw a chance to promote their shrinking town.

The trial that followed.

USH2 1219 The Scopes Trial

In the nineteen twenty-five Scopes trial, William Jennings Bryan argued for the prosecution and Clarence Darrow for the defence, and Scopes was convicted and fined one hundred dollars. The Yawp quotes Bryan warning that evolution would eliminate love and carry man back to a struggle of tooth and claw. Bryan's earlier roles appear in units five and eight.

Four entries on the old America's answer: a conflict of city and country, a revived Klan, a massacre, and how large and respectable the Klan became.

The conflict the trial dramatised.

USH2 1220 City and Country

The anchor describes the nineteen twenties as a conflict between urban Americans and rural fundamentalists over the meaning of a good life. Digital History lists the decade's battlefields: immigration, race, alcohol, evolution, gender and sexual morality, and calls the decade a titanic struggle between an old and a new America.

The organisation that fed on that conflict.

USH2 1221 The Second Klan

The second Ku Klux Klan was founded at Stone Mountain, Georgia, under William Simmons, months after a popular film revived the Reconstruction Klan's image, and the anchor says it publicly renounced violence and drew mainstream support. It preached Protestantism, anti-Catholicism and antisemitism, and demanded stricter immigration laws. Its members still used intimidation and violence.

A massacre of the same years.

USH2 1222 Tulsa, 1921

In nineteen twenty-one White mobs burned the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a prosperous Black community, the Yawp says: more than a thousand homes burned, and as many as several hundred Black Tulsans killed. The anchor's chapter does not carry Tulsa; the Yawp does. Witnesses later described Klan violence in the city.

How large and how respectable the Klan was.

USH2 1223 The Second Klan's Character

The sources answer these questions differently. The anchor says that by nineteen twenty-four the Klan had six million members in the South, the West and particularly the Midwest, more than the nation's labour unions held. Digital History says two Atlanta publicists built it into a national organisation of three million in three years, paying recruiters part of every ten-dollar induction fee, and that it helped elect sixteen United States senators. The Yawp says only that it had millions of new members. The sources agree on its targets, African Americans, Catholics, Jews and immigrants, and on its causes: a depression in agriculture, Black migration north, and nativism after the war. Two misreadings sit on either side. One treats the second Klan as a southern fringe of hooded terrorists, which cannot account for its Midwestern strength or its elected senators. The other takes its public renunciation of violence at face value, and forgets the intimidation its members used, and the Yawp's account of Klan violence in Tulsa. Keep the size as a range, from millions through three million to six million, and see that respectability was part of its power. Anti-masking laws and scandal broke it within a decade.

Look at what you can now do. You can explain how the consumer economy was built, on the assembly line, advertising and credit, and why it was fragile: it depended on buyers who could keep buying. You can explain how mass culture united and divided. The same films and broadcasts reached city and farm, and carried the city's morality into the countryside. You can explain what moving the quota base year did. Lowering the percentage cut numbers; moving the base year to eighteen ninety chose nationalities. You can separate the two questions about Sacco and Vanzetti: whether they were guilty, and whether their trial was fair. And you can describe the second Klan: millions of members, counted anywhere from three to six million, Midwestern strength, elected senators, and respectability as part of its power.