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Effects of Urbanization on Opportunities
By 1920, more than half of the population of the United States lived in cities. This led to new opportunities for different groups of people. Women began to work in low-level office jobs, later known as “pink-collar jobs,” in the 1920s. Examples of these types of jobs included secretary, typist, or telephone operator. Groups such as African Americans, Japanese Americans, Filipinos, and Latinos continued to face hostility and were often limited to jobs that no one else wanted to do.
Nativist Immigration Legislation
Between 1880 and 1920, the number of immigrants to the United States had grown from about 7 million to about 14 million. As a result, Congress decided to limit immigration by people from certain countries, especially from Central and Eastern Europe, which were associated with radical political ideologies (anarchism, socialism, and communism). Two examples of this nativist legislation included the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, which established the maximum number of people who could enter the United States from each foreign country. Additionally, the National Origins Act of 1924 limited immigration from each European nation even further.
Sacco-Vanzetti Trial
The Red Scare that followed World War I fed nativist suspicions of foreigners and immigrants; radical political ideas such as anarchism, socialism, and communism were associated with Central and Eastern Europe. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were anarchist Italian immigrants who had evaded the U.S. draft in World War I. In 1920, they were accused of robbing a shoe factory and murdering a guard and office worker at the factory. Though the evidence showed otherwise, because of popular suspicion of anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti were quickly pronounced guilty and sentenced to death. Their trial, conviction, and execution serve as an example of the destructive impact of the nativism (anti-immigrant sentiment) that occurred in the 1920s.
New Cultural Ideas
The Great Migration, which had begun with the increased demand for factory workers during World War I, resulted in the migration of large numbers of African Americans from the South to cities in the North and West. This migration continued throughout the 1920s, and some historians argue that it even lasted through the 1970s. One result was the spread of African American culture to Northern cities. The Harlem Renaissance was a movement of writers, musicians, and artists, such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, and Josephine Baker who created works focused on expressing pride in the African American community.
Another new cultural element developing in the South at the same time was the birth of jazz—a uniquely American form of music associated with African American musicians from New Orleans. Jazz quickly became very popular with performers and audiences of all races and spread around the world, reflecting new ideas about social order.
The Lost Generation was a group of American writers and artists who were disillusioned about World War I and felt alienated and depressed about social norms at the beginning of the 1920s. They wondered what the point was of all those people dying, when really very little had been accomplished. Some writers associated with the Lost Generation were F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway.
New Moral Ideas for Women
New and controversial ideas about the roles of women also developed in the 1920s. Young women who embraced new fashions and urban attitudes of the day were called “flappers” because of the way they waved their arms while dancing and the fringe on their dresses moved. They wore shorter skirts, makeup, bare arms, and short hair—all ways of embracing freedom in contrast to the confining female fashion of the prewar years. Additionally, they smoked and drank in public, talked openly about sex, and danced suggestively. The wider availability of birth-control information (thanks to Margaret Sanger) led to a drop in the birth rate. This, combined with social and technological innovations, simplified household labor and family life and made it easier for women to work outside the home.
Conflict Between Modernism and Religion
Another cultural conflict of the 1920s was between traditional religious beliefs and modern ideas. For example, fundamentalism, a Protestant movement grounded in a literal interpretation of the Bible, tended to be skeptical of some scientific discoveries. Fundamentalists argued that all important knowledge could be found in the Bible and rejected the idea of evolution because it went against the Bible’s account of creation.
One specific example of the clash between traditional and modern ideas was the Scopes Trial. Tennessee made it a crime to teach evolution in the state in 1925. John T. Scopes was a Tennessee teacher who agreed to teach evolution in class and was then put on trial.
Clarence Darrow (who supported the teaching of evolution) was Scopes’s defender, and William Jennings Bryan (fundamentalist) was the prosecutor. The American population was able to follow the trial through the media, and the trial essentially became a contest between fundamentalism and modern science. Though Clarence Darrow made strong arguments against the fundamentalist stance, Scopes was found guilty and had to pay a nominal fine. Though technically and legally the fundamentalists won, in the minds of many Americans, it was really a victory for supporters of modern science.
Prohibition
The culmination of the temperance movement was officially enacted in the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Prohibition made the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages illegal across the country. During the 1920s, however, many people found ways around the law to continue to access alcohol. For example, people could go to a speakeasy, a hidden saloon, or a nightclub where it was important to be fairly quiet (“speak easy”) so they wouldn’t get caught. Bootleggers smuggled liquor in from other places. People also obtained alcohol during Prohibition by distilling their own alcohol at home and making use of exceptions for sacramental wine.
Prohibition not only generated disrespect for the law but also contributed to the rise of organized crime in nearly every major city to satisfy a demand for liquor. For example, Al Capone was a Chicago gangster who made over $60 million a year by bootlegging (illegally selling alcohol). Through his crime organization, developed to protect his alcohol sales, he was responsible for the murder of 522 people. Though the government was never able to prosecute him for the murders or bootlegging, they were eventually able to arrest him because of tax evasion.
In the end, Prohibition failed, in part, because the government did not budget enough money to enforce it. In 1933, the Twenty-First Amendment repealed Prohibition in part as a hope that alcohol sales would help the United States recover from a disastrous economic downturn that began in 1929.
