Ap History 2 Chapter 25

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Model T

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an automobile that was produced by Henry Ford's Ford Motor Company from September 1908 through May 1927.[1] It is generally regarded as the first affordable automobile, the car that opened travel to the common middle-class American; some of this was because of Ford's innovations, including assembly line production instead of individual hand crafting.[2] The Ford Model T was named the world's most influential car of the 20th century in an international poll.[3]

The Model T set 1908 as the historic year that the automobile became popular. The first production Model T was produced on August 12, 1908[4] and left the factory on September 27, 1908, at the Piquette Plant in Detroit, Michigan. On May 26, 1927, Henry Ford watched the 15 millionth Model T Ford roll off the assembly line at his factory in Highland Park, Michigan.[5]

There were several cars produced or prototyped by Henry Ford from the founding of the company in 1903 until the Model T came along. Although he started with the Model A, there were not 19 production models (A through T); some were only prototypes. The production model immediately before the Model T was the Model S,[6] an upgraded version of the company's largest success to that point, the Model N. The follow-up was the Ford Model A and not the Model U. Company publicity said this was because the new car was such a departure from the old that Henry wanted to start all over again with the letter A. As it happens, the first Plymouth car (1928), built by competitor Chrysler Corporation, was named Model U.

The Model T was the first automobile mass produced on assembly lines with completely interchangeable parts, marketed to the middle class.[citation needed] Henry Ford said of the vehicle:

"I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one – and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces.

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Al Capone

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an American gangster who led a Prohibition-era crime syndicate. The Chicago Outfit, which subsequently became known as the "Capones", was dedicated to smuggling and bootlegging liquor, and other illegal activities such as prostitution, in Chicago from the early 1920s to 1931.

Born in the Brooklyn borough of New York City to Italian immigrants, Capone became involved with gang activity at a young age after being expelled from school at age 14.[1] In his early twenties, he moved to Chicago to take advantage of a new opportunity to make money smuggling illegal alcoholic beverages into the city during Prohibition. He also engaged in various other criminal activities, including bribery of government figures and prostitution. Despite his illegitimate occupation, Capone became a highly visible public figure. He made various charitable endeavors using the money he made from his activities, and was viewed by many to be a "modern-day Robin Hood".[2]

Capone was publicly criticized for his supposed involvement in the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre, when seven rival gang members were executed.[3] Capone was convicted on federal charges of tax evasion, and sentenced to federal prison. His incarceration included a term at the new Alcatraz federal prison. In the final years of Capone's life, he suffered mental and physical deterioration due to late-stage neurosyphilis, which he had contracted as a youth. On January 25, 1947, he died from cardiac arrest after suffering a stroke.

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Samuel Insull

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an Anglo-American innovator and investor based in Chicago who greatly contributed to creating an integrated electrical infrastructure in the United States. Insull was notable for purchasing utilities and railroads using holding companies, as well as the abuse of them. He was responsible also for the building of the Chicago Civic Opera House in 1929.

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19th Amendment

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The Nineteenth Amendment (Amendment XIX) to the United States Constitution prohibits any United States citizen to be denied the right to vote based on sex. It was ratified on August 18, 1920.

The Constitution allows states to determine the qualifications for voting, and until the 1910s most states disenfranchised women. The amendment was the culmination of the women's suffrage movement, which fought at both state and national levels to achieve the vote.

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton drafted the amendment and first introduced it in 1878; it was forty-one years later, in 1919, when the Congress submitted the amendment to the states for ratification. A year later, it was ratified by the requisite number of states, with Tennessee's ratification being the final vote needed to add the amendment to the Constitution.

The Nineteenth Amendment was unsuccessfully challenged in Leser v. Garnett (1922). In that case, the Supreme Court rejected claims that the amendment was unconstitutionally adopted.

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Babe Ruth

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best known as "Babe" Ruth and nicknamed "the Bambino" and "the Sultan of Swat", was an American Major League baseball player from 1914–1935. Ruth originally broke into the major leagues with the Boston Red Sox as a starting pitcher, but after he was sold to the New York Yankees in 1919, he converted to a full-time right fielder and subsequently became one of the league's most prolific hitters. Ruth was a mainstay in the Yankees' lineup that won seven pennants and four World Series titles during his tenure with the team. After a short stint with the Boston Braves in 1935, Ruth retired. In 1936, Ruth became one of the first five players elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Ruth has since become regarded as one of the greatest sports heroes in American culture.[1] He has been named the greatest baseball player in history in various surveys and rankings, and his home run hitting prowess and charismatic personality made him a larger than life figure in the "Roaring Twenties".[2] Off the field he was famous for his charity, but also was noted for his often reckless lifestyle. Ruth is credited with changing baseball itself. The popularity of the game exploded in the 1920s, largely due to his influence. Ruth ushered in the "live-ball era", as his big swing led to escalating home run totals that not only excited fans, but helped baseball evolve from a low-scoring, speed-dominated game to a high-scoring power game.

In 1998, The Sporting News ranked Ruth number one on the list of "Baseball's 100 Greatest Players".[3] In 1999, baseball fans named Ruth to the Major League Baseball All-Century Team.[4] In 1969, he was named baseball's Greatest Player Ever in a ballot commemorating the 100th anniversary of professional baseball. In 1993, the Associated Press reported that Muhammad Ali was tied with Babe Ruth as the most recognized athletes, out of over 800 dead or alive athletes, in America. The study found that over 97% of Americans over 12 years of age identified both Ali and Ruth.[5] According to ESPN, he was the first true American sports celebrity superstar whose fame transcended baseball.[6] In a 1999 ESPN poll, he was ranked as the third-greatest US athlete of the century, behind Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali.[2]

Ruth was the first player to hit 60 home runs in one season (1927), setting the season record which stood until broken by Roger Maris in 1961. Ruth's lifetime total of 714 home runs at his retirement in 1935 was a record, until first surpassed by Hank Aaron in 1974. Unlike many power hitters, Ruth also hit for average: his .342 lifetime batting is tenth highest in baseball history, and in one season (1923) he hit .393, a Yankee record.[7] His .690 career slugging percentage and 1.164 career on-base plus slugging (OPS) remain the Major League records.[2] Ruth dominated the era in which he played. He led the league in home runs during a season twelve times, slugging percentage and OPS thirteen times each, runs scored eight times, and runs batted in (RBIs) six times. Each of those totals represents a modern record (as well as the all-time record, except for RBIs).[8]

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Ernest Hemingway

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an American author and journalist. His distinctive writing style, characterized by economy and understatement, strongly influenced 20th-century fiction, as did his life of adventure and his public image. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works during his lifetime; a further three novels, four collections of short stories, and three non-fiction works were published posthumously. Many of his works are classics of American literature.

Hemingway was born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After leaving high school, he worked for a few months as a reporter for The Kansas City Star, before leaving for the Italian front to become an ambulance driver during World War I. In 1918, he was seriously wounded and returned home within the year; his wartime experiences became the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms. In 1922, Hemingway married Hadley Richardson, the first of his four wives, and the couple moved to Paris, where he worked as a foreign correspondent. During his time there, he met and was influenced by modernist writers and artists of the 1920s expatriate community known as the "Lost Generation". His first novel, The Sun Also Rises, was published in 1926.

After divorcing Hadley Richardson in 1927, Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer; they divorced following Hemingway's return from covering the Spanish Civil War, after which he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls. Martha Gellhorn became his third wife in 1940; they separated when he met Mary Welsh in London during World War II. During the war, he was present during the Normandy Landings and the liberation of Paris.

Shortly after the publication of The Old Man and the Sea in 1952, Hemingway went on safari to Africa, where he was almost killed in a plane crash that left him in pain or ill-health for much of the rest of his life. Hemingway had permanent residences in Key West, Florida, and Cuba during the 1930s and '40s, but in 1959 he moved from Cuba to Ketchum, Idaho, where he committed suicide in the summer of 1961.

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Roaring Twenties

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a phrase used to describe the 1920s, principally in North America, but also in London, Berlin and Paris for a period of sustained economic prosperity. The phrase was meant to emphasize the period's social, artistic, and cultural dynamism. 'Normalcy' returned to politics in the wake of World War I, jazz music blossomed, the flapper redefined modern womanhood, Art Deco peaked, and finally the Wall Street Crash of 1929 served to punctuate the end of the era, as The Great Depression set in. The era was further distinguished by several inventions and discoveries of far-reaching importance, unprecedented industrial growth, accelerated consumer demand and aspirations, and significant changes in lifestyle and culture.

The social and cultural features known as the Roaring Twenties began in leading metropolitan centers, especially Chicago, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Paris and London, then spread widely in the aftermath of World War I. The United States gained dominance in world finance. Thus when Germany could no longer afford war reparations to Britain, France and other Allies, the Americans came up with the Dawes Plan and Wall Street invested heavily in Germany, which repaid its reparations to nations that in turn used the dollars to pay off their war debts to Washington. By the middle of the decade, prosperity was widespread. The second half of the decade becoming known as the "Golden Twenties". In France and francophone Canada, they were also called the "années folles" ("Crazy Years").[1]

The spirit of the Roaring Twenties was marked by a general feeling of discontinuity associated with modernity, a break with traditions. Everything seemed to be feasible through modern technology. New technologies, especially automobiles, moving pictures and radio proliferated 'modernity' to a large part of the population. Formal decorative frills were shed in favor of practicality in both daily life and architecture. At the same time, jazz and dancing rose in popularity, in opposition to the mood of the specter of World War I. As such, the period is also often referred to as the Jazz Age.

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Sacco and Vanzetti

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anarchists who were convicted of murdering two men during a 1920 armed robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts, United States. After a controversial trial and a series of appeals, the two Italian immigrants were executed on August 23, 1927.[1]

There is a highly politicized dispute over their guilt or innocence, as well as whether or not the trials were fair.[2][3] The dispute focuses on contradictory evidence. As a result, historians have not reached a consensus.

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Scopes Trial

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a landmark American legal case in 1925 in which high school science teacher, John Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act which made it unlawful to teach evolution.[1]

Scopes was found guilty, but the verdict was overturned on a technicality and he went free. The trial drew intense national publicity, as national reporters flocked to the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, to cover the big-name lawyers representing each side. William Jennings Bryan, three time presidential candidate for the Democrats, argued for the prosecution, while Clarence Darrow, the famed defense attorney, spoke for Scopes. The trial saw modernists, who said religion was consistent with evolution, against fundamentalists who said the word of God as revealed in the Bible took priority over all human knowledge. The trial was thus both a theological contest, and a trial on the veracity of modern science regarding the creation-evolution controversy. The teaching of evolution expanded, as fundamentalist efforts to use state laws to reverse the trend had failed in the court of public opinion.[2]

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Clarence Darrow

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an American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union, best known for defending teenage thrill killers Leopold and Loeb in their trial for murdering 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks (1924) and defending John T. Scopes in the Scopes Trial (1925), in which he opposed William Jennings Bryan (statesman, noted orator, and 3-time presidential candidate). Called a "sophisticated country lawyer",[2] he remains notable for his wit and agnosticism, which marked him as one of the most famous American lawyers and civil libertarians.[3]

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KKK

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the name of three distinct past and present far-right[6][7][8][9] organizations in the United States, which have advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy, white nationalism, and anti-immigration, historically expressed through terrorism.[10][11] Since the mid-20th century, the KKK has also been anti-communist.[10] The current manifestation is splintered into several chapters and is classified as a hate group.[12]

The first Klan flourished in the South in the 1860s, then died out by the early 1870s. Members adopted white costumes: robes, masks, and conical hats, designed to be outlandish and terrifying, and to hide their identities.[13] The second KKK flourished nationwide in the early and mid 1920s, and adopted the same costumes and code words as the first Klan, while introducing cross burnings.[14] The third KKK emerged after World War II and was associated with opposing the civil rights movement and progress among minorities. The second and third incarnations of the Ku Klux Klan made frequent reference to the USA's "Anglo-Saxon" and "Celtic" blood, harking back to 19th-century nativism and claiming descent from the original 18th-century British colonial revolutionaries.[15] All incarnations of the Klan have well-established records of engaging in terrorism, though historians debate how widely the tactic was supported by the membership of the second KKK.

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Fundamentalism

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Fundamentalism is strict adherence to specific theological doctrines usually understood as a reaction against Modernist theology.[1] The term "fundamentalism" was originally coined by its supporters to describe a specific package of theological beliefs that developed into a movement within the Protestant community of the United States in the early part of the 20th century, and that had its roots in the Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy of that time.[2] The term usually has a religious connotation indicating unwavering attachment to a set of irreducible beliefs.[3] "Fundamentalism" is sometimes used as a pejorative term, particularly when combined with other epithets (as in the phrase "right-wing fundamentalists").[4][5]

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Teapot Dome

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a bribery incident that took place in the United States in 1922–23, during the administration of President Warren G. Harding. Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall leased Navy petroleum reserves at Teapot Dome and two other locations to private oil companies at low rates without competitive bidding. In 1922 and 1923, the leases became the subject of a sensational investigation by Senator Thomas J. Walsh. Fall was later convicted of accepting bribes from the oil companies.

Before the Watergate scandal, Teapot Dome was regarded as the "greatest and most sensational scandal in the history of American politics".[1] The scandal also was a key factor in posthumously further destroying the public reputation of the Harding administration, which was already unpopular due to its poor handling of the Great Railroad Strike of 1922 and the President's veto of the Bonus Bill in 1922.[2]

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Albert Fall

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a United States Senator from New Mexico and the Secretary of the Interior under President Warren G. Harding, infamous for his involvement in the Teapot Dome scandal.

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Al Smith

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in private and public life as Al Smith, was an American statesman who was elected the 42nd Governor of New York three times, and was the Democratic U.S. presidential candidate in 1928. He was the foremost urban leader of the efficiency-oriented Progressive Movement, and was noted for achieving a wide range of reforms as governor in the 1920s. He was also linked to the notorious Tammany Hall machine that controlled Manhattan politics; he was a strong opponent of prohibition.

Smith was the first Catholic to run for President. As a committed "wet" (anti-Prohibition candidate), he attracted millions of voters of all backgrounds, particularly those concerned about the corruption and lawlessness brought about by the Eighteenth Amendment.[1] However he was unpopular among certain segments, including Southern Baptists and German Lutherans, who believed the Catholic Church and the Pope would dictate his policies. Most importantly, this was a time of national prosperity under a Republican Presidency, and Smith lost in a landslide to Republican Herbert Hoover. Smith attempted the 1932 nomination, but was defeated by his former ally Franklin D. Roosevelt. Smith entered business in New York City, and became an increasingly vocal opponent of Roosevelt's New Deal.

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National Women’s Party

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a women's organization founded by Alice Paul in 1915 that fought for women's rights during the early 20th century in the United States, particularly for the right to vote on the same terms as men. In contrast to other organizations, such as the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which focused on lobbying individual states (and from which the NWP split), the NWP put its priority on the passage of a constitutional amendment ensuring women's suffrage. Alice Paul and Lucy Burns founded the organization originally under the name the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage in 1913; by 1917, the name had been changed to the National Women's Party. After the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the vote in 1920, the NWP turned its attention to passage of an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)to the Constitution. Congress passed such an Amendment and most states ratified it, but at the last minute in 1960 it was stopped by a coalition of conservative women led by Phyllis Schlafly and ERA never passed. However the NWP in 1964 did succeed, with the support of conservatives and over the opposition of liberals, blacks and labor unions, to have "sex" added to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, thus achieving most of the goals sought by the NWP.

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Equal Rights Amendment

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a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution. The ERA was originally written by Alice Paul and, in 1923, it was introduced in the Congress for the first time. In 1972, it passed both houses of Congress, but failed to gain ratification before its June 30, 1982 deadline.

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Charles Lindbergh

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an American aviator, author, inventor, explorer, and social activist.

Lindbergh, a 25-year-old U.S. Air Mail pilot, emerged from virtual obscurity to almost instantaneous world fame as the result of his Orteig Prize-winning solo non-stop flight on May 20–21, 1927, from Roosevelt Field[N 1] located in Garden City on New York's Long Island to Le Bourget Field in Paris, France, a distance of nearly 3,600 statute miles (5,800 km),[2] in the single-seat, single-engine monoplane Spirit of St. Louis. Lindbergh, a U.S. Army reserve officer, was also awarded the nation's highest military decoration, the Medal of Honor, for his historic exploit.[3]

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Lindbergh used his fame to relentlessly help promote the rapid development of both commercial aviation and Air Mail services in the United States and the Americas. In March 1932, however, his infant son, Charles, Jr., was kidnapped and murdered in what was soon dubbed the "Crime of the Century" which eventually led to the Lindbergh family being "driven into voluntary exile" and fleeing the United States in late December 1935 to live in Europe.[4][5][6] The family continued to live overseas until returning to the U.S. after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by the Imperial Japanese Navy.

Before the United States formally entered World War II by declaring war on Japan on December 8, 1941, Lindbergh had been an outspoken advocate of keeping the U.S. out of the world conflict, as was his Congressman father, Charles August Lindbergh, during World War I, and became a leader of the anti-war America First movement. Nonetheless, he supported the war effort after Pearl Harbor and flew many combat missions in the Pacific Theater of World War II as a civilian consultant, even though President Franklin D. Roosevelt had refused to reinstate his Army Air Corps colonel's commission that he had resigned in April 1941.

In his later years, Lindbergh became a prolific prize-winning author, international explorer, inventor, and environmentalist.[7]

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A Mitchell Palmer – “Palmer Raids”

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The Palmer Raids were attempts by the United States Department of Justice to arrest and deport radical leftists, especially anarchists, from the United States. The raids and arrests occurred in November 1919 and January 1920 under the leadership of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Though more than 500 foreign citizens were deported, including a number of prominent leftist leaders, Palmer's efforts were largely frustrated by officials at the U.S. Department of Labor who had responsibility for deportations and who objected to Palmer's methods. The Palmer Raids occurred in the larger context of the Red Scare, the term given to fear of and reaction against political radicals in the U.S. in the years immediately following World War I.During the First World War, the United States witnessed a nationwide campaign against divided loyalties on the part of immigrants and ethnic groups. Particular targets were Germans with sympathies for their homeland and Irish whose countrymen were in revolt against America’s ally Great Britain. In 1916, President Wilson warned against hyphenated Americans who, he charged, had "poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life." "Such creatures of passion, disloyalty and anarchy", Wilson continued "must be crushed out".[1] The Russian Revolution of 1917 added special force to fear of labor agitators and partisans of foreign ideologies like anarchism. The general strike in Seattle in February 1919 represented a new development in labor unrest that the war had suppressed.

Anarchist bombings in April and June 1919 carried out by Galleanists, Italian anarchists and followers of the radical anarchist Luigi Galleani, meant the threat was real.[2] At the end of April, some 30 Galleanist letter bombs had been mailed to a host of individuals, mostly prominent government officials and businessmen, but also law enforcement officials.[2] Only a few reached their targets, and not all exploded when opened, though some people suffered injuries, including a housekeeper in Senator's Thomas W. Hardwick's residence, who had her hands blown off.[2] On June 2, 1919, a second wave of bombings occurred, when several much larger package bombs were detonated by Galleanists in eight American cities, including one that damaged the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer.[2] At least one person was killed in this second attack, a night watchman named William Boehner.[3][4][2] Flyers declaring war on capitalists in the name of anarchist principles accompanied each bomb.[2]

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Ezra Pound

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an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry. He became known for his role in developing Imagism, which, in reaction to the Victorian and Georgian poets, favored tight language, unadorned imagery, and a strong correspondence between the verbal and musical qualities of the verse and the mood it expressed. His best-known works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and his unfinished 120-section epic, The Cantos, which consumed his middle and late career, and was published between 1917 and 1969.[1]

Working in London in the early 20th century as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, Pound helped to discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost, and Ernest Hemingway. Pound was responsible for the publication in 1915 of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and for the serialization from 1918 of Joyce's Ulysses. Hemingway wrote in 1925: "He defends [his friends] when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. He loans them money. ... He writes articles about them. He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying ... he advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide."[2]

Outraged by the loss of life during the First World War, he lost faith in England, blaming usury and international capitalism for the war. He moved to Italy in 1924 where throughout the 1930s and 1940s, to his friends' dismay, he embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, expressed support for Adolf Hitler, and wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Oswald Mosley. Beginning in 1935, after a long campaign of requests by Pound, he was allowed to make regular addresses on Italian state radio in support of Fascist policy and a variety of subject of his choosing. During the Second World War the Italian government paid him to make hundreds of radio broadcasts criticizing the United States,[3] Franklin D. Roosevelt, and in particular Jews, broadcasts that were monitored by the U.S. government, as a result of which he was arrested for treason by American forces in Italy in 1945. He spent months in detention in a U.S. military camp in Pisa, including 25 days in a six-by-six-foot outdoor steel cage that he said triggered a mental breakdown: "when the raft broke and the waters went over me." Deemed unfit to stand trial, a decision disputed for decades after his death, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., for over 12 years.[4]

While in custody in Italy he had begun work on sections of The Cantos that became known as The Pisan Cantos (1948), for which he was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1949 by the Library of Congress. The honor triggered enormous controversy, mostly because of his antisemitism, his status as an indicted...but unpunished....traitor, and in part because it raised literary questions about whether a supposedly "mad" poet who held such contentious views could produce work of any value. He was released from St. Elizabeths in 1958, thanks to a protracted campaign by his fellow writers, and returned to live in Italy until his death. His political views ensure that his work remains controversial; in 1933 Time magazine called him "a cat that walks by himself, tenaciously unhousebroken and very unsafe for children." Hemingway nevertheless wrote, "The best of Pound's writing—and it is in the Cantos—will last as long as there is any literature."[

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TS Eliot

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a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century.[3] Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at age 25) and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.

The poem that made his name, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock—started in 1910 and published in Chicago in 1915—is regarded as a masterpiece of the modernist movement. He followed this with what have become some of the best-known poems in the English language, including Gerontion (1920), The Waste Land (1922), The Hollow Men (1925), Ash Wednesday (1930), and Four Quartets (1945).[4] He is also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.[5]

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Sinclair Lewis

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an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters." His works are known for their insightful and critical views of American society and capitalist values, as well as for their strong characterizations of modern working women.

He has been honored by the U.S. Postal Service with a Great Americans series postage stamp.

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F Scott Fitzgerald

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an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.[1] Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender is the Night and his most famous, The Great Gatsby. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with despair and age.

Novels such as The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night were made into films, and in 1958 his life from 1937–1940 was dramatized in Beloved Infidel.

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Warren Harding

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the 29th President of the United States (1921–23). A Republican from Ohio, Harding was an influential self-made newspaper publisher. He served in the Ohio Senate (1899–1903), as the 28th Lieutenant Governor of Ohio (1903–05) and as a U.S. Senator (1915–21). He was also the first incumbent United States Senator and the first newspaper publisher to be elected President.[1][2]

His conservativism, affable manner, and "make no enemies" campaign strategy made Harding the compromise choice at the 1920 Republican National Convention. During his presidential campaign, in the aftermath of World War I, he promised a return of the nation to "normalcy". This "America first" campaign encouraged industrialization and a strong economy independent of foreign influence. Harding departed from the progressive movement that had dominated Congress since President Theodore Roosevelt. In the 1920 election, he and his running mate, Calvin Coolidge, defeated Democrat and fellow Ohioan James M. Cox, in the largest presidential popular vote landslide in American history (60.36% to 34.19%) since first recorded in 1824.[3]

President Harding rewarded friends and political contributors, referred to as the Ohio Gang, with financially powerful positions. Scandals and corruption eventually pervaded his administration; one of his own cabinet and several of his appointees were eventually tried, convicted, and sent to prison for bribery or defrauding the federal government.[4] Harding did however make some notably positive appointments to his cabinet.[5]

In foreign affairs, Harding spurned the League of Nations, and signed a separate peace treaty with Germany and Austria, formally ending World War I. He also strongly promoted world Naval disarmament at the 1921–22 Washington Naval Conference, and urged U.S. participation in a proposed International Court. Domestically, Harding signed the first child welfare program in the United States and dealt with striking workers in the mining and railroad industries. Also, the Veterans Bureau was cleaned up by Harding in March, 1923.[6] The nation's unemployment rate dropped by half during Harding's administration.[7] In August 1923, President Harding suddenly collapsed and died during a stop in California on a return trip from Alaska.[8] He was succeeded by Vice President, Calvin Coolidge.

Polls of historians and scholars have consistently ranked Harding as one of the worst Presidents. His presidency has been evaluated in terms of presidential record and accomplishments in addition to the administration scandals. The most recent Presidential rankings have had various low results for President Harding. However, in 1998, political historian Carl S. Anthony stated Harding was a "modern figure" who embraced technology and culture; sensitive to the plights of minorities, women, and labor.[9] President Harding contended with racial problems on a national level, rather than sectional, and openly advocated African American political, educational, and economic equality while in the Solid South.[10]

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Calvin Coolidge

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the 30th President of the United States (1923–1929). A Republican lawyer from Vermont, Coolidge worked his way up the ladder of Massachusetts state politics, eventually becoming governor of that state. His conduct during the Boston Police Strike of 1919 thrust him into the national spotlight and gave him a reputation as a man of decisive action. Soon after, he was elected as the 29th Vice President in 1920 and succeeded to the Presidency upon the sudden death of Warren G. Harding in 1923. Elected in his own right in 1924, he gained a reputation as a small-government conservative, and also as a man who said very little.

Coolidge restored public confidence in the White House after the scandals of his predecessor's administration, and left office with considerable popularity.[1] As a Coolidge biographer put it, "He embodied the spirit and hopes of the middle class, could interpret their longings and express their opinions. That he did represent the genius of the average is the most convincing proof of his strength."[2] Some later criticized Coolidge as part of a general criticism of laissez-faire government.[3] His reputation underwent a renaissance during the Ronald Reagan Administration,[4] but the ultimate assessment of his presidency is still divided between those who approve of his reduction of the size of government programs and those who believe the federal government should be more involved in regulating and controlling the economy.[5]

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Herbert Hoover

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the 31st President of the United States (1929–1933). Hoover was originally a professional mining engineer and author. As the United States Secretary of Commerce in the 1920s under Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, he promoted partnerships between government and business under the rubric "economic modernization". In the presidential election of 1928, Hoover easily won the Republican nomination, despite having no previous elected office experience. Hoover is the most recent cabinet secretary to be elected President of the United States, as well as one of only two Presidents (along with William Howard Taft) to have been elected without previous electoral experience or high military rank. America was prosperous and optimistic at the time, leading to a landslide victory for Hoover over Democrat Al Smith.

Hoover, a trained engineer, deeply believed in the Efficiency Movement, which held that the government and the economy were riddled with inefficiency and waste, and could be improved by experts who could identify the problems and solve them. When the Wall Street Crash of 1929 struck less than eight months after he took office, Hoover tried to combat the ensuing Great Depression with volunteer efforts, public works projects such as the Hoover Dam, tariffs such as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, an increase in the top tax bracket from 25% to 63%, and increases in corporate taxes, none of which produced economic recovery during his term. The consensus among historians is that Hoover's defeat in the 1932 election was caused primarily by failure to end the downward economic spiral. As a result of these factors, Hoover is ranked poorly among former US Presidents.

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“Normalcy”

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A return to normalcy" (i.e. a return to the way of life before World War I) was United States presidential candidate Warren G. Harding’s campaign promise in the election of 1920. Although detractors believed that the word was a neologism as well as a malapropism coined by Harding (as opposed to the more accepted term normality), there was contemporary discussion and evidence found that normalcy had been listed in dictionaries as far back as 1857.[1][2]

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18th Amendment

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The Eighteenth Amendment (Amendment XVIII) of the United States Constitution established Prohibition in the United States. The separate Volstead Act set down methods of enforcing the Eighteenth Amendment, and defined which "intoxicating liquors" were prohibited, and which were excluded from prohibition (for example, for medical and religious purposes). The Amendment was unique in setting a time delay before it would take effect following ratification, and in setting a time limit for its ratification by the states. Its ratification was certified on January 16, 1919.

Demand for liquor continued, and the law resulted in the criminalization of producers, suppliers, transporters and consumers. The police, courts and prisons were overwhelmed with new cases; organized crime increased in power, and corruption extended among law enforcement officials. The amendment was repealed in 1933 by ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment, the only instance in United States history of repeal of a constitutional amendment.

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Sheppard-Towner Act

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a U.S. Act of Congress providing federal funding for maternity and child care. It was sponsored by Senator Morris Sheppard (D) of Texas and Representative Horace Mann Towner (R) of Iowa, and signed by President Warren G. Harding on November 23, 1921.

The act provided for federally-financed instruction in maternal and infant health care and gave 50-50 matching funds to individual US states to build women’s health care clinics. It was one of the most significant achievements of Progressive-era maternalist reformers.

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Effects of Organized Labor

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more effecient, greater production, cheaper costs, bigger profits.

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National Origins Quota Act

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a United States federal law that limited the annual number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country to 2% of the number of people from that country who were already living in the United States in 1890, down from the 3% cap set by the Immigration Restriction Act of 1921, according to the Census of 1890. It superseded the 1921 Emergency Quota Act. The law was aimed at further restricting the Southern and Eastern Europeans who were immigrating in large numbers starting in the 1890s, as well as prohibiting the immigration of East Asians and Asian Indians. Congressional opposition was minimal.

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Fordney-McCumber Act

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The Fordney–McCumber Tariff of 1922 raised American tariffs in order to protect factories and farms. Congress displayed a pro-business attitude in passing the ad valorem tariff and in promoting foreign trade through providing huge loans to Europe, which in turn bought more American goods.[1] The Roaring Twenties brought a period of sustained economic prosperity with an end to the Depression of 1920–21.

As a result of the war, Americans had two main concerns. First, they wanted to ensure economic self-sufficiency so that no future enemy could manipulate the American economy. Second, many industries wanted to preserve the benefits of the increased wartime demand.

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Yellow dog contracts

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contract, or an ironclad oath) is an agreement between an employer and an employee in which the employee agrees, as a condition of employment, not to be a member of a labor union. In the United States, such contracts were, until the 1930s, widely used by employers to prevent the formation of unions, most often by permitting employers to take legal action against union organizers. In 1932, yellow-dog contracts were outlawed in the United States under the Norris-LaGuardia Act.[2][3]

The term yellow-dog clause can also have a different meaning: non-compete clauses within or appended to a non-disclosure agreement to prevent an employee from working for other employers in the same industry.[4

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National Womens Party

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a women's organization founded by Alice Paul in 1915 that fought for women's rights during the early 20th century in the United States, particularly for the right to vote on the same terms as men. In contrast to other organizations, such as the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which focused on lobbying individual states (and from which the NWP split), the NWP put its priority on the passage of a constitutional amendment ensuring women's suffrage. Alice Paul and Lucy Burns founded the organization originally under the name the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage in 1913; by 1917, the name had been changed to the National Women's Party. After the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the vote in 1920, the NWP turned its attention to passage of an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)to the Constitution. Congress passed such an Amendment and most states ratified it, but at the last minute in 1960 it was stopped by a coalition of conservative women led by Phyllis Schlafly and ERA never passed. However the NWP in 1964 did succeed, with the support of conservatives and over the opposition of liberals, blacks and labor unions, to have "sex" added to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, thus achieving most of the goals sought by the NWP.

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Marcus Garvey

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a Jamaican publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator who was a staunch proponent of the Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements, to which end he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL).[2] He founded the Black Star Line, part of the Back-to-Africa movement, which promoted the return of the African Diaspora to their ancestral lands.

Prior to the twentieth century, leaders such as Prince Hall, Martin Delany, Edward Wilmot Blyden, and Henry Highland Garnet advocated the involvement of the African diaspora in African affairs. Garvey was unique in advancing a Pan-African philosophy to inspire a global mass movement and economic empowerment focusing on Africa known as Garveyism.[2] Promoted by the UNIA as a movement of African Redemption, Garveyism would eventually inspire others, ranging from the Nation of Islam to the Rastafari movement (which proclaims Garvey as a prophet). The intent of the movement was for those of African ancestry to "redeem" Africa and for the European colonial powers to leave it. His essential ideas about Africa were stated in an editorial in the Negro World titled “African Fundamentalism” where he wrote:

“ Our union must know no clime, boundary, or nationality… let us hold together under all climes and in every country…[3]

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Red Scare

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The term Red Scare denotes two distinct periods of strong Anti-Communism in the United States: the First Red Scare, from 1919 to 1920, and the Second Red Scare, from 1947 to 1957. The First Red Scare was about worker (socialist) revolution and political radicalism. The Second Red Scare was focused on national and foreign communists influencing society or infiltrating the federal government, or both.

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Volstead Act

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The National Prohibition Act, known informally as the Volstead Act, was the enabling legislation for the Eighteenth Amendment which established prohibition in the United States. The Anti-Saloon League's Wayne Wheeler conceived and drafted the bill, which was named for Andrew Volstead, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which managed the legislation.

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Andrew Mellon

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an American banker, industrialist, philanthropist, art collector and Secretary of the Treasury from March 4, 1921 until February 12, 1932.