Outline Chapters 31-32

Chapter 31

I. Seeing Red

1. After World War I, America started a policy of “isolationism.” 
2. The “Red Scare” of 1919-20 resulted in Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer using a series of
   raids to round up and arrest about 6,000 suspected Communists.
3. The Red Scare severely cut back free speech for a period, since the hysteria caused many people to want to eliminate any Communists and their ideas.
4. In 1921, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were convicted of murdering a Massachusetts paymaster and his guard. The two accused were Italians, atheists, anarchists, and draft dodgers, and the courts may have been prejudiced against them.
5. In this time period, anti-foreignism was high.
6. Liberals and radicals rallied around the two men, but they were executed.

II. Hooded Hoodlums of the KKK

1. The new Ku Klux Klan was anti-foreign, anti-Catholic, anti-black, anti-Jewish, anti-pacifist, anti-Communist, anti-internationalist, anti-revolutionist, anti-bootlegger, anti-gambling, anti-adultery, and anti-birth control. (basically anti everything)
2. At its peak in the 1920s, it had 5 million members, most from the South
3. The KKK employed the same tactics of fear, lynchings, and intimidation.
4. It was stopped not by the exposure of its horrible racism, but by its money fraud.

III. Stemming the Foreign Flood

1. In 1920-21, some 800,000 European “New Immigrants” (mostly from the southeastern Europe regions) came to the U.S.
2. Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, in which newcomers from Europe were restricted at any year to a quota, which was set at 3% of the people of their nationality who lived in the U.S. in 1910.
3. A replacement law was found in the Immigration Act of 1924, which cut the quota down to 2% and the origins base was shifted to that of 1890, when few southeastern Europeans lived in America. This act also slammed the door against Japanese immigrants.
4. By 1931, for the first time in history, more people left America than came here.

IV. The Prohibition “Experiment”

1. The 18th Amendment prohibited the sale of alcohol, but this law never was effectively enforced because so many people violated it.
2. Prohibition was particularly supported by women and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

V. The Golden Age of Gangsterism

1. Prohibition led to the rise of gangs that competed to distribute liquor.
2. In the gang wars of Chicago in the 1920s, about 500 people were murdered, but captured criminals were rare, and convictions even rarer, since gangsters often provided false alibis for each other.
3.  “Scarface” Al Capone, and his St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Capone was finally caught for tax evasion. 

VI. Monkey Business in Tennessee

1. Education improved 
2.  John Dewey, a professor at Columbia University who set forth principles of “learning by doing” and believed that “education for life” should be the primary goal of school.
3. Evolutionists were also clashing against creationists, and the prime example of this was the Scopes “Monkey Trial,” where John T. Scopes, a high school teacher of Dayton, Tennessee, was charged with teaching evolution. William Jennings Bryan was among those who were against him, but the one-time “boy orator” was made to sound foolish and childish by expert attorney Clarence Darrow, and five days after the end of the trial, Bryan died. The trial proved to be inconclusive.

VII. The Mass-Consumption Economy

1. Prosperity took off in the “Roaring 20s,” despite the recession of 1920-21, and it was helped by the tax policies of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellons, which favored the rapid expansion of capital investment.
2. Henry Ford perfected the assembly-line production allowing for automobiles to be created cheaply and efficiently
3. Advertising boomed, which used persuasion, ploy, seduction, and sex appeal to sell merchandise.
4. Buying on credit became popular

VIII. Putting America on Rubber Tires

1. People like Henry Ford and Ransom E. Olds developed the auto industry.
2. Early cars stalled and weren’t too reliable, but eventually, cars like the Ford Model T became cheap and easy to own.

IX. The Advent of the Gasoline Age

1. The automobile spurred 6 million people to new jobs and took over the railroad as king of transportation.
2. New roads were constructed, the gasoline industry boomed, and America’s standard of living rose greatly.
3. However, accidents killed lots of people, and by 1951, 1,000,000 people had died by the car—more than the total of Americans lost to all its previous wars combined.
4. Cars brought adventure, excitement, and pleasure.

X. Humans Develop Wings

1. On December 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright flew the first airplane for 12 seconds over a distance of 120 feet at Kitty Hawk, N.C.
2.  they were used a bit in World War I, but afterwards they were used for mail which mad ehtem popular
3. Charles Lindbergh became the first person to fly solo across the
   Atlantic Ocean when he did it in his Spirit of St. Louis, going from
   New York to Paris.

XI. The Radio Revolution

1. In the 1890s, Guglielmo Marconi had already invented wireless telegraphy and his invention was used for long distance communication in the Great War.
2. Then, in November of 1920, the first voice-carrying radio station began broadcasting when KDKA (in Pittsburgh) told of presidential candidate Warren G. Harding’s landslide victory.
3. the radio brought people into their homes 
4. Sports were further stimulated while politicians had to adjust their speaking techniques to support the new medium, and music could finally be heard electronically.

XII. Hollywood’s Filmland Fantasies

1. Thomas Edison was one of those who invented the movie, but in 1903,
   the real birth of the movie came with The Great Train Robbery.
2. Propaganda movies of World War I boosted the popularity of movies.
3. Critics, though, did bemoan the vulgarization of popular tastes wrought by radio and movies.
4. These new mediums led to the loss of old family and oral traditions. Radio shows and movies seemed to lessen interaction and heighten passivity.

XIII. The Dynamic Decade

1. For the first time, more Americans lived in urban areas, not the rural countryside.
2. A brash new group shocked many conservative older generation. The
   “flaming youth” who lived this modern life were called “flappers."
3. Jazz was the music of flappers, and Blacks
4. Black pride spawned such leaders as Langston Hughes of the Harlem Renaissance

XIV. Cultural Liberation

1. By the 1920s Many of the new writers hailed from different backgrounds 
2. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby, both of which captured the society of the “Jazz Age,” including odd mix of glamour and the cruelty.
3. Ernest Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises, and A Farewell to Arms, and became a voice for the “Lost Generation”—the young folks who’d been ruined by the disillusionment of WWI.
4. Other famous writers included Claude McKay and Zora Neale Hurston.
5. Architecture also made its marks with the designs of Frank Lloyd Wright, Wright was an understudy of Louis Sullivan (of Chicago skyscraper fame) and amazed people with his use of concrete, glass, and steel and his unconventional theory that “form follows
   function.”
6. The Empire State Building debuted in 1931.

XV. Wall Street’s Big Bull Market

1. There was  over-speculation in the 1920s and even during
   times of prosperity, many, many banks failed each year.
2. The whole system was built on fragile credit.
3. Whatever the case, the prosperities of the 1920s was setting up the
   crash that would lead to the poverty and suffering of the 1930s.

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Chapter 32

I. The Republican “Old Guard” Returns

1. New president: Warren G. Harding was tall, handsome, and popular, but he had a mediocre mind and he did not like to hurt people’s feelings.
2. He was also surrounded by corruption

II. GOP Reaction at the Throttle

1. Harding was the perfect front for politicians to  use him as a puppet. 
2. In the early 1920s, the Supreme Court killed a federal child-labor law. 
3. In the case of Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, the court reversed its ruling in the Muller v. Oregon case by invalidating a minimum wage law for women.
4. Under Harding, corporations could expand again, and anti-trust laws were not as enforced or downright ignored.
5. Men sympathetic to railroads headed the Interstate Commerce Commission.

III. The Aftermath of the War

1. Wartime government controls disappeared and Washington returned control of railroads to private hands by the Esch-Cummins Transportation Act of 1920.
2. The Merchant Marine Act of 1920 authorized the Shipping Board, which controlled about 1,500 vessels, to get rid of a lot of ships at bargain prices, thus reducing the size of the navy.
3. In 1921, the Veterans’ Bureau was created to operate hospitals and provide vocational rehabilitation for the disabled.

IV. America Seeks Benefits Without Burdens

1. Since America had never ratified the Treaty of Versailles, it was still technically at war with Germany, so in July of 1921, it passed a simple joint resolution ending the war.
2. The U.S. did not cooperate much with the League of Nations, but eventually, “unofficial observers” did participate in conferences. The lack of real participation though from the U.S. proved to doom the League.
3. In the Middle East, Secretary Hughes secured for American oil companies the right to share in the exploitation of the oil riches there.
4. Disarmament was another problem for Harding and he had to watch the actions of Japan and Britain for any possible hostile activities.
5. The Washington “Disarmament” Conference of 1921-22 resulted in a plan that kept a 5:5:3 ratio of ships that could be held by the U.S., Britain, and Japan
6. The Five-Power Naval Treaty of 1922 embodied Hughes’s ideas on ship ratios, but only after Japanese received compensation.
7. Frank B. Kellogg, Calvin Coolidge’s Secretary of State, won
   the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the Kellog-Briand Pact (Pact of
   Paris), which said that all nations that signed would no longer use war
   as offensive means.

V. Hiking the Tariff Higher

1. Businessmen did not want Europe flooding American markets with cheap goods after the war, so Congress passed the Fordney-McCumber Tariff Law, which raised the tariff from 27% to 35%.
2. Presidents Harding and Coolidge, granted with authority to reduce or increase duties, and always sympathetic towards big industry, were much more prone to increasing tariffs than decreasing them.
3. However, this presented a problem: Europe needed to sell goods to
   the U.S. in order to get the money to pay back its debts, and when it
   could not sell, it could not repay.

VI. The Stench of Scandal

1. However, scandal rocked the Harding administration in 1923 when
   Charles R. Forbes was caught with his hand in the money bag and
   resigned as the head of the Veterans’ Bureau.
2. The Teapot Dome Scandal: Albert B. Fall leased land in Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and Elk Hills, California, to oilmen Harry F. Sinclair and Edward L. Doheny, but not until Fall had received a “loan” (actually a bribe) of $100,000 from Doheny and about three times that amount from Sinclair.
3. President Harding, died in San Francisco on August 2,
   1923, of pneumonia and thrombosis

VII. “Silent Cal” Coolidge

1. New president Calvin Coolidge was serious, calm, and never spoke more than he needed to.

VIII. Frustrated Farmers

1. World War I had given the farmers prosperity, as they’d produced much food for the soldiers.
2. New technology in farming, such as the gasoline-engine tractor, had increased farm production dramatically.
3. However, after the war, these products weren’t needed, and the farmers fell into poverty.

IX. A Three-Way Race for the White House in 1924

1. Coolidge was chosen by the Republicans again in 1924, while Democrats nominated John W. Davis after 102 ballots in Madison Square Garden.
2. Senator Robert La Follette led the Progressive Party as the third party candidate
3. Calvin Coolidge won the election.

X. Foreign-Policy Flounderings

1. Isolationism continued to reign in the Coolidge era
2. In the Caribbean and Latin America, U.S. troops were withdrawn from
   the Dominican Republic in 1924, but remained in Haiti from 1914 to
   1934.
3. Coolidge took out troops from Nicaragua in 1925, and then sent them back the next year, and in 1926, he defused a situation with Mexico where the Mexicans were claiming sovereignty over oil resources. However, Latin Americans began to resent the American dominance of them.
4. The European debt to America also proved tricky.

XI. Unraveling the Debt Knot

1. Because America demanded that Britain and France pay their debts, those two nations placed huge reparation payments on Germany, which then, to pay them, printed out loads of paper money that caused inflation to soar.
2. Finally, in 1924, Charles Dawes engineered the Dawes Plan, which rescheduled German reparations payments and gave the way for further American private loans to Germany.
3. Essentially, the payments were a huge circle from the U.S. to Germany to Britain/France and back to the U.S. All told, the Americans never really gained any money or got repaid in genuine.
4. Also, the U.S. gained bitter enemies in France and Britain who were angry over America’s apparent greed and careless nature for others.

XII. The Triumph of Herbert Hoover, 1928

1. Coolidge picked Herbert Hoover as his replacement for presidency 
2. Hoover was opposed by New York governor Alfred E. Smith, a man who
3. Radio turned out to be an important factor in the campaign, and Hoover’s personality sparkled on this new medium (compared to Smith, who sounded stupid and boyish).
4. Hoover had never been elected to public office before, but he had made his way up from poverty to prosperity, and believed that other people could do so as well.
5. There was, once again, below-the-belt hitting on both sides, as the
   campaign took an ugly turn, but Hoover triumphed in a landslide, with
   444 electoral votes to Smith’s 87.

XIII. President Hoover’s First Moves

1. Hoover’s Agricultural Marketing Act, passed in June of 1929, was designed to help the farmers help themselves, and it set up a Federal Farm Board to help the farmers.
2. The Hawley-Smoot Tariff of 1930 raised the tariff to 60%
3. Foreigners hated this tariff that reversed a promising worldwide trend toward reasonable tariffs and widened the yawning trade gaps.

XIV. The Great Crash Ends the Golden Twenties

1. Hoover confidently predicted an end to poverty very soon, but on October 29, 1929, a devastating stock market crash caused by over-speculation and overly high stock prices built only upon non-existent credit struck the nation.
2. By the end of 1930, 4 million Americans were jobless, and two years later, that number shot up to 12 million.

XV. Hooked on the Horn of Plenty

1. The Great Depression might have been caused by an overabundance of
   farm products and factory products. 
2. The nation’s capacity to produce goods had clearly outrun its capacity to consume or pay for
   them.
3. Also, an over-expansion of credit created unsound faith in money, which is never good for business.
4. Britain and France’s situations, which had never fully recovered from World War I, worsened.
5. In 1930, a terrible drought scorched the Mississippi Valley and thousands of farms were sold to pay for debts.
6. By 1930, the depression was a national crisis, and hard-working workers had nowhere to work, thus, people turned bitter and also turned on Hoover.

XVI. Rugged Times for Rugged Individualists

1. Hoover unfairly received the brunt of the blame for the Great Depression, but he also did not pass measures that could have made the depression less severe than it could have been.
2. He did not believe in government tampering with the economic machine and thus moving away from laissez faire, and he felt that depressions like this were simply parts of the natural economic process, known as the business cycle.
3. However, by the end of his term, he had started to take steps for the government to help the people.

XVII. Hoover Battles the Great Depression

1. Finally, Hoover voted to withdraw $2.25 billion to start projects to alleviate the suffering of the depression.
2. Early in 1932, Congress, responding to Hoover’s appeal,
   established the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), which became
   a government lending bank. This was a large step for Hoover away from
   laissez faire policies and toward policies the Democrats (FDR) would
   later employ.
3. However, giant corporations were the ones that benefited most from this, and the RFC was another one of the targets of Hoover’s critics.
4. In 1932, Congress passed the Norris-La Guardia Anti-Injection Act,
   which outlawed anti-union contracts and forbade the federal courts to
   issue injunctions to restrain strikes, boycotts, and peaceful picketing
   (this was good for unions).

XVIII. Routing the Bonus Army in Washington

1. Many veterans, whom had not been paid their compensation for WWI, marched to Washington, D.C. to demand their entire bonus.
2. The “Bonus Expeditionary Force” erected unsanitary camps and shacks in vacant lots, creating health hazards and annoyance. Riots followed after troops came in to intervene (after Congress tried to pass a bonus bill but failed), and many people died.
3. Hoover falsely charged that the force was led by riffraff and reds (communists), and the American opinion turned even more against him.

XIX. Japanese Militarists Attack China

1. In September 1931, Japan, alleging provocation, invaded Manchuria and shut the Open Door.
2. Peaceful peoples were stunned, as this was a flagrant violation of the League of Nations covenant, and a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, was arranged.
3. An American actually attended, but instead of driving Japan out of China, the meeting drove Japan out of the League, thus weakening it further.
4. Secretary of State Henry Stimson did indicate that the U.S. probably would not interfere with a League of Nations embargo on Japan, but he was later restrained from taking action.
5. Since the U.S. took no effective action, the Japanese bombed Shanghai in 1932, and even then, outraged Americans didn’t do much to change the Japanese minds.

XX. Hoover Pioneers the Good Neighbor Policy

1. Hoover was deeply interested in relations south of the border, and during his term, U.S. relations with Latin America and the Caribbean improved greatly.
2. Since the U.S. had less money to spend, it was unable to dominate Latin America as much, and later, Franklin D. Roosevelt would build upon these policies.