Nation of Nations 3/e Davidson, Gienapp, Heyrman, Lytle, and Stoff
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THE CHAPTER IN PERSPECTIVE

The "New Era" of the 1920s, as contemporaries called it, was far more important than old stereotypes of a frivolous and self-absorbed "Jazz Age" imply. The decade witnessed the birth of modern America, as the transforming forces of modern life--technology, bureaucratization, suburbanization, and consumerism--vastly accelerated. Yet modernism did not mix easily with more traditional values. The decade, therefore, looked simultaneously back toward a cherished past of neighborliness, small communities, and comfortable sameness and forward toward a glorious future of machines, consolidated organization, and middle-class urban living.

OVERVIEW

The chapter begins with a panoramic view of the 1920s that features evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, Frederick Lewis Allen's fictional Smiths, and some real-life examples of changing times. Together they stress old and new, confidence and insecurity, modernism and traditionalism, all existing side by uncomfortable side.

The Roaring Economy

If anything roared in the "Roaring Twenties," it was industry and commerce. The economy experienced the greatest peacetime growth rate ever. Several factors accounted for it: technological advances; booming construction and automobile industries; corporate consolidation; new techniques of business and personnel management (called "welfare capitalism"); and the spread of advertising and the consumer culture. A modern ethic of high spending and high consumption worked its way into American society.

A Mass Society

New systems of mass distribution and mass marketing led not simply to a higher standard of living but increasingly to a mass culture and a mass society. Traditional institutions that had bound Americans together weakened. Local communities and churches, which had often been the arbiters of morality and propriety, found their authority undercut by new tastemakers in Hollywood and New York. Automobiles gave people new mobility and independence and so undermined the family and the community. Public education also undermined family control by creating competing centers of authority for children, including a new peer culture of students. Modern life emerged, complete with more independent women, the new mass media of radio and film, a standardized culture, impersonal cities, spectator sports, jazz music, alienated intellectuals, and a rising tide of black nationalism.

Defenders of the Faith

Mass society sharpened awareness of the differences between modern and traditional America. As modernism transformed the country, traditional culture hardened, looking on change with suspicion and diversity with dismay. The unspent antiradicalism of World War I combined with growing fear of foreigners to produce the most restrictive immigration laws in history. The National Origins Acts specifically reduced the flow of eastern and southern European immigrants, deemed most different (and therefore most threatening) to native Protestant America.

Prohibition, best understood as class and cultural legislation, rested on a similar antiurban and antiforeign bias and drew its strongest support from embattled Protestant evangelical churches. A resuscitated Ku Klux Klan fought to revive a lost America, free from "aliens," blacks, and uppity women, while a fundamentalist crusade succeeded in enacting legislation to prevent the teaching of modern theories of evolution. By the middle of the decade the defenders of an older faith had begun to falter, the victims of their own corruption and their own successes.

Republicans Ascendant

In government, the administration of Warren G. Harding ushered in a return to "normalcy," which was anything but normal. For the first time since Reconstruction a single party--the Republicans--ruled Washington. Dedicated to cautious, business-led policies, Harding and his successor, Calvin Coolidge, reversed the reformist trends of the previous two decades.

Government became the handmaiden of private enterprise. Lower taxes, higher tariffs, fewer antitrust suits, and more support for private collaboration and consolidation characterized public policy in the 1920s. Promoted by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, "associationism" encouraged trade associations and other business organizations to order and stabilize the economy, spreading a gospel of efficiency and cooperation among businesses. Oligopolies dominated nearly every basic industry, and by limiting competition, they helped to coordinate industrial policy and increase productivity. Meanwhile the interests of laborers and farmers received scant attention from Washington as prosperity soared.

In the election of 1928 a divided Democratic party swung from its rural to its urban wing and nominated former New York governor Al Smith. The majority Republicans ran Herbert Hoover, a Quaker, a "dry," and an enormously popular cabinet member. Hurt by his urban roots, his Catholicism, and his advocacy of Prohibition repeal, Smith won only 8 states. Buried in the returns were the stirrings of a major political realignment. The 12 largest cities, solidly Republican in 1924, went to Smith, moved to the Democratic column by their growing immigrant populations. Together with western farmers, urban immigrants would form the tangible nucleus of a powerful coalition that would transform the Democrats into the normal majority party in 1932.

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