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7.6 The Transitional 1920s - Coggle Diagram
7.6 The Transitional 1920s
Prohibition, Fundamentalism, and Modern American Life
After decades of efforts to combat the use of alcohol, in 1919 the Eighteenth Amendment, banning its manufacture and sale, was ratified. That same year Congress passed the Volstead Act, which set up the legal machinery to enforce the amendment.
The presiding judge, John T. Raulston, ruled that scientists could not take the stand to defend evolution because he considered their testimony “hearsay,” given that they had not been present at the creation.
The Harlam Renaissance and Black Nationalism
These New Negro intellectuals refused to accept white supremacy. They expressed pride in their race, sought to perpetuate black racial identity, and demanded full citizenship and participation in American society.
The greatest challenge to conventional notions about race came from African Americans. The influx of southern black migrants to the North during and after World War I created a black cultural renaissance, with New York City’s Harlem and the South Side of Chicago leading the way.
New Negro: 1920s term for the second generation of African Americans born after emancipation and who stood up for their rights.
The poets, novelists, and artists of the Harlem Renaissance captured the imagination of black and white people alike. Many of these artists increasingly rejected white standards of taste as well as staid middle-class black values.
Culture Wars and Challenges to Social Conventions
Already concerned about the impact of mass culture and corporate capitalism on individualism and free thought, they focused their talents on criticizing what they saw as the hypocrisy of old values and the conformity ushered in by the new.
The most spirited challenge to both traditional values and the modern consumer culture came from a diverse group of intellectuals known as the Lost Generation.
Representing the liberated new woman, flappers wore short skirts, used ample makeup (formerly associated with prostitutes), smoked cigarettes in public, drank illegal alcoholic beverages, and gyrated to jazz tunes on the dance floor.
Resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan
The Sacco and Vanzetti case provides the most dramatic evidence of this nativism. In 1920 a botched robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts resulted in the murder of two employees.
In 1917 reformers succeeded in further restricting immigration. Congress passed legislation to ban people who could not read English or their native language from entering the country.
Before the 1920s, anti-immigrant sentiment often reflected racial and religious bigotry, as reformers concentrated on preventing Catholics, Jews, and all non-Europeans from entering the United States.
Politics and the Fading of Prosperity
Prohibition reflected the surge in nativist (anti-immigrant) and racist thinking that in many ways revealed long-standing fears. In the past, temperance reform was aimed at immigrants
Nativism received its most spectacular boost from the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915.
The Sacco and Vanzetti case provides an extreme example of 1920s nativism, but the anti-immigrant views that contributed to the two men’s conviction and execution were commonplace during the period and shared by Americans across the social spectrum.