The Nineteen-Twenties, 1919–1929

This is Unit Nine, part two, on the new woman, Harlem, the Harding scandals, and whose twenties they were. Part one closed on the second Klan, and turned to the young women who defied their parents' rules. Carry one question through this part: whose twenties? The Jazz Age image belongs to some Americans, and the last entry asks whether the decade was prosperous at all. Collect the evidence for each side as you go. And at Coolidge, learn one habit for every quotation: check it before you build on it. By the end you will be able to describe the new morality and how the women's movement divided after the vote. To compare Du Bois's and Garvey's strategies. To explain what Coolidge actually said. To describe the Harding scandals. And to answer whether the twenties were prosperous.

Five entries on the new woman: the flapper, the ideas behind her, birth control, and a movement that divided after winning the vote.

The young women who defied their parents' rules.

USH2 1224 The Flapper

Young women called flappers wore shorter skirts and bobbed hair, used makeup, and smoked and drank alongside men, and the Yawp calls the decade the Age of the Flapper. The anchor says many young city dwellers embraced a new morality, far looser than their parents', and novelists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald portrayed them.

The ideas behind the new morality.

USH2 1225 A New Morality

The writings of Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis, which treated sex as a natural part of human experience, shaped the decade's new morality, alongside jazz in Harlem's nightclubs and bootleggers thriving despite Prohibition. Digital History calls the popular image of the decade, flappers and bathtub gin, profoundly misleading: the decade was one of deep cultural conflict.

The campaign for birth control.

USH2 1226 Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger launched a campaign of information about birth control, to give women choices within the family, bringing contraception into public debate in the decade women first voted nationally. The anchor calls her the founder of Planned Parenthood, and notes that suffrage had changed little inside the family.

How the women's movement divided after the vote.

USH2 1227 Women After the Vote

After winning the vote, women's organisations divided over what came next, the Yawp says: protective laws for women and children, or full legal equality. Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party sought to abolish all legal distinctions on account of sex through an Equal Rights Amendment.

That amendment.

USH2 1228 The Equal Rights Amendment

Alice Paul drafted the Equal Rights Amendment in nineteen twenty-three, guaranteeing women and men equal rights everywhere in the country, and the Yawp records that it was introduced but defeated in Congress. Congress would pass it in nineteen seventy-two, and unit fifteen follows the ratification fight.

Four entries on Harlem: its renaissance, its writers, the leader of the largest mass movement, and how he differed from Du Bois.

The cultural movement centred on Harlem.

USH2 1229 The Harlem Renaissance

Harlem became what James Weldon Johnson called the Culture Capital, home to the Harlem Renaissance and what was then termed the New Negro Movement, named in Alain Locke's nineteen twenty-five book The New Negro. Digital History calls it the first self-conscious literary and artistic movement of its kind among African Americans, and the Yawp ties it to race pride and wartime service.

Its writers.

USH2 1230 Writers of Harlem

Claude McKay wrote If We Must Die in response to the Red Summer of nineteen nineteen, and Langston Hughes wrote The Colored Soldier. The Yawp counts women such as Jessie Redmon Fauset and Zora Neale Hurston as the authors of nearly a third of the movement's novels, though Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God appeared in nineteen thirty-seven, after this decade.

The leader of the largest mass movement.

USH2 1231 Marcus Garvey

Marcus Garvey led the Universal Negro Improvement Association, preaching racial pride, the celebration of Blackness, and a return to Africa, and drew thousands of mainly working-class followers to the movement and its Black Star steamship line. Convicted of mail fraud, Garvey was imprisoned and deported. Digital History says his message of racial pride struck a responsive chord.

How Garvey and Du Bois differed.

USH2 1232 Du Bois and Garvey

Du Bois and Garvey both spoke for Black pride and both looked beyond America's borders, which is why they are confused. Du Bois pursued integration and equal rights at home through the NAACP, and his Pan-Africanism linked people of African descent across the world. Garvey preached separation: racial pride, Black enterprise and a return to Africa, and he drew thousands of mainly working-class followers. Ask whether each sought a place inside American society or a future outside it. This pair extends unit six's pairing of Washington and Du Bois: three strategies now stand side by side.

Two entries: the writers who questioned the decade, and the illegal trade Prohibition created.

The writers who questioned the decade.

USH2 1233 The Lost Generation

Writers of the Lost Generation questioned the decade's values: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby of nineteen twenty-five, Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt of nineteen twenty-two, and Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises of nineteen twenty-six and A Farewell to Arms of nineteen twenty-nine. Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence appeared in nineteen twenty.

The trade Prohibition created.

USH2 1234 Prohibition and Organised Crime

Prohibition created a vast illegal trade, and Al Capone's Chicago organisation grew rich on it until he was imprisoned for tax evasion in nineteen thirty-one. The anchor puts Capone's income at more than one hundred million dollars a year by nineteen twenty-seven; Digital History gives sixty million, and says half the city's police were on his payroll.

Five entries on Harding: the able men he appointed, the friends he rewarded, and the scandals they made.

The men Harding brought to Washington.

USH2 1235 Harding's Cabinet

President Warren G. Harding appointed Herbert Hoover, the engineer who had run Belgian relief, as Secretary of Commerce, and Andrew Mellon, who held that government should be run on business principles, at the Treasury. The Yawp says the Treasury post satisfied business interests. Harding's appointment of friends caused the trouble that followed.

Those friends.

USH2 1236 The Ohio Gang

Harding also rewarded friends and poker companions from his home state, the group the Yawp and the anchor both call the Ohio Gang, placing old friends in offices they would use for private gain. Digital History says the largest scandal came to light after Harding's sudden death in nineteen twenty-three.

The largest scandal.

USH2 1237 Teapot Dome

Interior Secretary Albert Fall leased naval oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and two California sites to private companies without competitive bidding. Fall was convicted, fined one hundred thousand dollars and sentenced to a year in prison, the first cabinet officer sent to prison; he took about three hundred thousand dollars by the anchor's count, three hundred sixty thousand by Digital History's.

A second scandal.

USH2 1238 The Veterans' Bureau

Charles Forbes, head of the Veterans' Bureau, made off with much of the two hundred fifty million dollars in the bureau's care, and was tried, convicted and sent to Leavenworth for two years. The bureau existed to serve the soldiers of unit eight. Its money went to its director instead.

Harding's death.

USH2 1239 Harding's Death

In July nineteen twenty-three Harding suffered a heart attack in Seattle, and on August second he died of a stroke in San Francisco, mourned by crowds while his scandals had not yet fully surfaced. Digital History also gives a stroke as the cause. Vice President Calvin Coolidge became president.

Three entries on Coolidge: what he said, what people remember him saying, and the policies of business government.

The new president.

USH2 1240 Silent Cal

Calvin Coolidge, known as Silent Cal, told newspaper editors that the chief business of the American people is business, a sentence later compressed in memory to the business of America is business. Coolidge had earlier broken a Boston police strike as governor of Massachusetts, the Yawp says.

Why the misquotation matters.

USH2 1241 What Coolidge Said

Coolidge's sentence is one of the most quoted in American history, and it is usually quoted wrong. The anchor gives both forms. What he said was that the chief business of the American people is business. What people remember is that the business of America is business. The remembered version sounds like a creed about government; the original describes what occupied the American people. The difference is small in words and real in meaning. Coolidge's policies did favour business, as the next entry shows, but the misquotation alone does not prove it. Check a quotation before you build an argument on it.

Those policies.

USH2 1242 Business Government

Republican administrations of the decade cut taxes, introduced a formal budget process, and paid down the war debt, and the Emergency Tariff of nineteen twenty-one protected American producers. The Yawp says low taxes, easy credit and low interest rates overwhelmingly favoured wealthy investors, a divide that unit ten follows into the crash.

Four entries on the decade's diplomacy, Coolidge's exit, and the election of nineteen twenty-eight.

The decade's diplomacy.

USH2 1243 The Washington Naval Conference

Harding's administration joined the Washington Naval Conference of nineteen twenty-one and twenty-two, which reduced the navies of the nine signatory nations, and in the Four Power Treaty the United States, Britain, France and Japan renounced territorial expansion in Asia. The anchor says the agreements collapsed in the nineteen thirties, and unit twelve shows the Japanese expansion that ended them.

The pact that outlawed war.

USH2 1244 Kellogg-Briand

In nineteen twenty-eight the Kellogg-Briand Pact, signed by the United States and fourteen other nations, outlawed war as a crime among nations, and more nations signed on later. It failed, the anchor says, because none of its signers committed to act against a violator; Digital History says it lacked any means of enforcement.

Coolidge's decision not to run.

USH2 1245 Coolidge Declines

On August second, nineteen twenty-seven, Coolidge announced in one sentence that he would not seek another term: I choose not to run, a popular president stepping aside at the height of prosperity. The Republican nomination for nineteen twenty-eight went to Herbert Hoover, Harding's and Coolidge's Secretary of Commerce.

The election that followed.

USH2 1246 The Election of 1928

In nineteen twenty-eight Herbert Hoover defeated the Democrat Alfred E. Smith, governor of New York, twenty-one million votes to fifteen million. Smith was an Irish Catholic who opposed Prohibition and spoke for the cities, and the Yawp says his faith and immigrant background aroused nativist suspicion. Hoover claimed credit for the decade's growth.

Two entries on the Americans the boom passed by, and on whether the twenties were prosperous at all.

The Americans the boom passed by.

USH2 1247 Who Missed the Boom

Farmers' bankruptcy rates, already severe, skyrocketed in the nineteen twenties, the Yawp says, amid what Digital History calls a post-war depression in agriculture, with foreclosure notices in farm towns while city stock prices climbed. The Yawp says that for farmers, racial minorities and unionised workers, the booming economy had always been a fiction.

Whether the twenties were prosperous at all.

USH2 1248 Whether the Twenties Were Prosperous

It depends on whose twenties the question asks about. The case for prosperity is real: a Model T fell from eight hundred fifty dollars to three hundred, cars on the road passed twenty-three million, Ford paid five dollars a day, household appliance spending more than doubled, and movies, radio and sport gave Americans new leisure. The case against is equally real. The Yawp says farmers' bankruptcies skyrocketed, that the decade saw stubborn poverty and unparalleled inequality, and that low taxes, easy credit and low interest rates overwhelmingly favoured wealthy investors. It lists what lay beneath the boom: flailing European economies, high tariffs, wealth inequality, a construction bubble, and a flooded consumer market. Two misreadings sit on either side. One takes the Jazz Age image as the whole decade, which Digital History calls profoundly misleading. The other treats the prosperity as an illusion, which cannot account for the cars, the wages and the new leisure millions really enjoyed. Aggregate growth and widely shared prosperity are different things. The decade had the first far more than the second, and the gap between them is where unit ten begins.

Look at what you can now do. You can describe the new morality, flappers, Freud and Sanger, and how the women's movement divided after the vote, between protective laws and Alice Paul's Equal Rights Amendment. You can compare Du Bois and Garvey by asking whether each sought a place inside American society or a future outside it, beside Washington from unit six. You can explain what Coolidge actually said: that the chief business of the American people is business, not that the business of America is business. You can describe the Harding scandals: the Ohio Gang, Teapot Dome and the first cabinet officer jailed, and the veterans' money taken by the bureau's own director. And you can answer whether the twenties were prosperous. The decade had aggregate growth, far more than widely shared prosperity, and the gap is where unit ten begins.