Welcome to Module 15! In this module, we'll start by examining the economic and cultural effects of the end of WWI. With the cancellation of most war contracts after the war’s end, the American economy entered into a sharp recession.
Economic uncertainty coincided with a growing fear of Bolshevism abroad and at home. As mentioned in Module 14, Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, seized power in Russia in 1917. Some Americans believed that Communist agents either caused labor unrest in the US or planned to take advantage of it to seize power.
In 1919, after major employers cut workers’ wages and hours, a nationwide wave of labor unrest unfolded.
Labor was just one issue that caused great conflict in the 1920s. We'll also examine some of the most significant incidents which represented the "culture wars" of the decade.
Two questions will guide this module blog post:
How did labor, business, and prosperity change in the last years of the 1910s?
What were the culture wars of the 1920s?
Let's get started!
Part I: 1919
In January 1919, unions in Seattle called for a general strike that briefly shut down the city. During May and June, several prominent government officials and financiers received bombs in the mail, apparently sent by an anarchist group. Several exploded, killing innocent bystanders, which further spread assumptions that labor activists and Communists were terrorists.
In 1919, nearly 4 million workers engaged in strikes—the greatest wave of labor unrest in American history. They were met by unprecedented mobilization of employers, the government, and private patriotic organizations.
The greatest labor uprising was the steel strike. Nearly 350,000 workers, mostly immigrants, demanded union recognition, higher wages, and an eight-hour work day. In response to the strike, steel magnates launched a counterattack which appealed to anti-immigrant sentiment, and conducted a propaganda campaign that associated the strikers with the International Workers of the World (IWW), communism, and disloyalty.
Red Scare
The large wave of strikes in 1919 and the Russian Revolution convinced Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer that strikes and immigrant radical organizers were part of a worldwide communist conspiracy. He appointed a young J. Edgar Hoover to lead the intelligence division within the Justice Department, to track radicals.
Between November 1919 and January 1920, Palmer dispatched federal agents to raid the offices of radical and labor organizations throughout the country, arresting more than 5,000 people, most of them without warrants.
The government then deported hundreds of radicals, including those who belonged to the IWW and the Communist Party. As a result, the IWW was effectively destroyed, and the Socialist Party’s presence in the US also crumbled. The Palmer Raids represented an intense identification of patriotic Americanism with support for the status quo.
The crackdown on labor organizations and radicals occurred because society felt threatened from within. Think back to the slacker raids during WWI, mentioned in Module 14 — people were at odds with each other, wanting to defend America from any “enemies” or “subversives” that might be lurking within.
In the spring of 1920, Palmer claimed to have uncovered a “Red” plot to seize national power on May 1 and deployed troops to protect government officials and buildings. When the day passed with no action, Palmer’s credibility was badly shaken. On September 16, 1920, an actual terror attack did occur. An anarchist group exploded a large bomb in front of the offices of J.P. Morgan Company on Wall Street in New York. The explosion killed 38 people and wounded 400 others. It was the deadliest terror incident on American soil until the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. The attack helped shift national politics in a more conservative direction.
Poll #1:
Consider all we’ve explored about immigration and labor organizing up to this point. In your opinion, what about the 1919 wave of strikes was more threatening to US employers and government? The connection to immigrants? Or the connection to socialism and communism? Answer the poll below, or access it here.
Changes to Labor and Business after 1919
During the 1920s, organized labor lost more than 2 million members. As unions agreed to more demands to prevent their complete elimination, employers gained more power.
Most companies wanted to disempower unions, except, in some cases “company unions” created and controlled by the management. Many employers embraced the "American Plan," the open shop—a workplace free of governmental regulation and unions.
However, many corporations incorporated a new style of management in the 1920s, providing their employees with private pensions, medical insurance plans, job security, and greater workplace safety. They spoke of “welfare capitalism,” a more socially conscious kind of business leadership.
Economic growth in the 1920s was dramatic. New industries, such as chemicals, aviation, and electronics flourished. Older industries like food processing and manufacturing of household appliances adopted Henry Ford’s moving assembly line, raising productivity levels.
Annual automobile production tripled during the 1920s, stimulating steel, rubber, and oil production. By 1929, half of all Americans owned a car.
Additionally, after WWI, there was an increased presence of American products and corporations overseas. The dollar replaced the British pound as the most important currency of international trade. American companies produced 85% of the world’s cars and 40% of its manufactured goods.
Part II: Culture Wars
In Part II, consider how the "culture wars" were shaped by clashes over patriotism and definitions of “true” American identity. Who was a “true” American? What was the “best” way for American society to function?
Prohibition
Prohibition was supported by a variety of groups in the Progressive Era. Women reformers emphasized the role of morality and women’s safety. They asserted that outlawing alcohol would protect wives and children from drunk husbands who squandered their wages or engaged in domestic violence.
Some urban reformers believed it would promote a more orderly city environment. Others saw it as a way of imposing “American” ways onto immigrants. Alcohol was associated with certain immigrant groups. For example, most breweries were owned by German Americans.
In 1895, the Anti-Saloon League was formed. It became a major ally for Prohibitionists, because it maintained the largest “Prohibition press” in the world, allowing the anti-alcohol message to reach the masses. The Prohibition movement gained steam in the early twentieth century, although reformers and organizers had been agitating for Prohibition since the middle of the 19th century. By 1916, twenty-six states had already gone “dry.” The women’s suffrage movement’s gains in momentum also helped the Prohibitionist cause. A large population of women were opposed to alcohol. [1]
Congress passed the Volstead Act over President Wilson’s veto on October 28, 1919. The Act provided the enforcement apparatus for the 18th Amendment, which forbade the manufacture, transport, and sale of alcoholic beverages.
Prohibition brought the brewing and liquor industry to its knees. Before it was implemented in 1920, there were approximately 1,400 breweries in the United States. Once the country became dry, less than 200 remained, manufacturing “near-beer.” Not all were successful. Some breweries were able to figure out a way to manufacture a drink that compared in taste to full-strength beer without the alcohol. One company, the M.K. Goetz Brewing Company of Missouri, figured it out—when the “near-beer” was spiked with pure alcohol, it made for a beer with 4.5 to 6 percent alcohol by volume. [2]
Enforcement of Prohibition was difficult. People smuggled alcohol across the Canadian and Mexican borders, prepared their own “moonshine” at home, or stole alcohol that had been reserved for medical or religious purposes. The Prohibition Bureau was understaffed and prone to corruption. Prohibition also coincided with the rise of organized crime, as criminal gangs made their chief source of revenue through bootleg liquor.
The attempt to regulate and enforce a “moral code” to which many Americans did not adhere led to widespread disrespect for Prohibition. Prohibition reveals how battles in the “culture wars” of the 1920s demonstrate the conflict between the exercise of individual freedom and the desire to impose order or morality onto a wide group of people.
Although the goal of Prohibitionists was to stop “immoral” behavior, Prohibition initiated a turning point in what was deemed morally acceptable—more people wanted to drink illegal alcohol because it was glamorized. Speakeasies sprang up with the sole motive being the consumption of alcohol.
Health concerns also arose. As Ed Sipos writes in Brewing Arizona, no government standards were set in place for bottling, manufacturing, and distributing alcohol and unsanitary conditions became rampant. Many bootleggers used whatever vessel they found to make and carry alcohol—leading to more lead poisoning because various containers utilized lead-based glaze or paints. Some mixed their alcohol with lye, in some cases resulting in booze that contained deadly amounts of lye. [3]
Prohibition's Effect on the US-Mexico Border
After Prohibition took effect, border towns such as Juárez and Tijuana developed entertainment industries popular with many American visitors. Juárez was known in Texas and all over the US as a “Mecca for criminals and degenerates from both sides of the border” because of its popular saloons, dance halls, and casinos. [4] After Prohibition, Juárez achieved even more notoriety, as bars, cabarets, gambling houses, brothels, honky-tonks and dope parlors proliferated.
In addition to ordinary tourists, the town also drew hundreds of bootleggers from Dallas, Kansas City, St. Louis, and Chicago. Smuggling contraband liquor became a prominent activity, and gun battles involving US customs agents and smugglers occurred frequently. Tijuana also drew large numbers, and was similarly known, according to the Board of of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals of the Methodist Church, 1920, as a “mecca of prostitutes, booze sellers, gamblers, and other American vermin.”[5]
Prominent movie stars like Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle frequented Tijuana. On July 4, 1920, it was reported that 65,000 people visited Tijuana. Supposedly there were so many cars on the road in San Diego that the city had to ration fuel. So many people crossed the border from El Paso to Juárez that two new international bridges replaced old ones in a ten year period.
El Paso boosters started to publicize the attractions in Juárez as a way to get people to come to their city. The president of the Sheldon Hotel Company wrote in 1921, “High class tourists from the East on their way to California stop just to see Juárez. They have money to spend and they want to find a good time our neighbor across the river can give them—a dinner with liquor and other amusements.”
American business interests also played a large role in the Juárez economy. Two prominent distilleries, the D&H and D&W moved their plants from Kentucky to Juárez when the 18th Amendment was enacted. A US newspaper reported that nearly all of the bars which were formerly in El Paso relocated to Juárez. In Tijuana, a similar situation developed. Fourteen foreigners operated most of Tijuana’s establishments, and employed mostly non-Mexicans.
Criminal activity did increase as a result of Prohibition. Both Mexicans and Americans acted individually or formed gangs or rings, sometimes bribing government officials and the police. The most profitable enterprise was smuggling illicit merchandise into the US—the liquor produced in Mexico was the number one product trafficked across the Río Grande.
Organized networks of US collaborators made huge profits by buying alcohol at wholesale prices in Juárez and delivering them to clandestine “speakeasies” in larger cities in the US. Supposedly, Juárez was one of Al Capone’s supply centers.
US law enforcement tried to stem the tide of contraband liquor entering the country, but smugglers always found a way around them. The policing of the border often got violent. Over a three-year period, US law enforcement engaged in 1,000 gunfights with bootleggers in the El Paso area.
Smugglers also introduced other drugs, including opium, marijuana, and cocaine into the US. El Paso passed the first city anti-marijuana ordinance in 1915.
Despite the presence of organized crime and violence at the border, Juárez also benefited economically from Prohibition. Oscar Martinez writes in Ciudad Juárez that due to the substantial taxes the entertainment district contributed to all levels of the government, the city built and paved new roads, installed street lamps, constructed playgrounds, planted trees, and instituted new sanitation efforts. [6]
An increase in organized crime built on illegal alcohol, increasing worries about alcohol-related injuries and death, and corruption of public officials pushed more people to increasingly advocate for repealing Prohibition in the 1930s. Additionally, violations of the Volstead Act and other Prohibition laws accounted for the total number of felons in the US rising by 561 percent from 1920 to 1932. During the Great Depression, unemployment had reached new heights, and the government sought to find new ways to create jobs. Some believed that repealing Prohibition would create those jobs. Prohibition was officially repealed in December 1933.
Poll #2:
In your opinion, which of the following contributed most to Prohibition’s repeal in 1933? An increase in crime and corruption? Health concerns, including the use of other drugs? Or the closing of American businesses and widespread unemployment? Answer the poll below or access it here.
Consumerism in the 1920s
During the 1920s, consumer goods of all kinds proliferated, marketed by salespeople and advertisers who promoted them as a way of satisfying psychological desires and everyday needs. These consumer goods altered daily life. Telephones made communication easier. Vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and refrigerator transformed work in the home.
Americans spent more and more of their income on leisure activities like vacations, movies, and sports. By 1929, weekly movie attendance had reached 80 million, double the figure in 1922.
Additionally, mass entertainment came directly into American living rooms through radios and phonographs. These developments helped to create and spread a new celebrity culture, celebrating recording, film, and sports stars.
In order to purchase consumer goods, more and more Americans were willing to go into debt, as many new appliances and goods were purchased on credit through new installment buying plans.
Although there was economic growth in the 1920s, it was unequally distributed. Real wages for industrial workers rose by one quarter between 1922 and 1929, but corporate profits rose at more than twice that rate. In the auto industry, General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler controlled four-fifths of the industry.
At the beginning of 1929, a majority of families had no savings, and an estimated 40 percent of the population lived in poverty, unable to participate in the consumer economy. One side effect of improved productivity was that goods could be produced with fewer workers. Even the new consumer appliances meant that less families justified employing a domestic servant.
Scopes Trial
One key example of the “culture wars” is the 1925 trial of John Scopes, a teacher in Tennessee who was arrested for violating a state law that prohibited the teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. His trial became a national sensation.
The early twentieth century saw a surge of Fundamentalism. Fundamentalists launched campaigns to rid Protestant denominations of modernism, and to combat new freedoms that seemed to undermine traditional morality.
Fundamentalists believed in Prohibition, and preached against Darwinism, which contradicted the biblical account of creation. Scopes and his defenders argued that freedom in the US meant the right to independent thought and self-expression.
Scopes’ lawyer Clarence Darrow placed William Jennings Bryan, the lawyer for the prosecution, on the witness stand. Bryan was humiliated by Darrow’s questions about modern science. Ultimately the jury did find Scopes guilty, and he was fined $100. The fine was overturned on appeal, and the issue never made it to federal courts.
Word Cloud #1:
Think about the political cartoon below, published in the Chicago Defender, an African American newspaper. What do you notice/what do you wonder? Answer in the word cloud embedded below the cartoon, or access it here.
Sacco and Vanzetti
Fear of immigrants’ political radicalism continued throughout the 1920s. In 1920, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants with anarchist sympathies, were arrested for participating in a robbery in Massachusetts where a security guard was killed. There was very little evidence linking the two to the crime, however, they were convicted and sentenced to death easily in the context of anti-radical and anti-immigrant fervor.
In 1927, as the execution date approached, it was revealed that the judge who had sentenced them to death had remarked at the time of their trial, “Did you see what I did with those anarchist bastards the other day? I guess that will hold them for awhile. Let them go to the Supreme Court now and see what they can get out of them.”
Their appeals trials attracted considerable attention. To many native-born Americans, the two men symbolized an alien threat to their way of life. To many immigrants, the outcome symbolized prejudice and persistent stereotypes that haunted immigrant communities. Mass protests took place in the US and around the world. They were executed on August 23, 1927.
Public Women
In order to achieve the milestone of suffrage, many American women had united in their political cause. After suffrage, that unity changed. There were some major achievements for women after 1920. In 1921, Congress passed the Sheppard-Towner Act, the first federal money allotted for health care. It provided federal matching funds to states to improve prenatal care and infant health. It lapsed in 1929.
In the 1920s, women entered into public office. However, the gains they made have to be viewed in context. In 1924, there were 84 women legislators in thirty states. In 1929, there were two hundred (an increase of almost 250%). But while there were 200 women in office, there were ten thousand men. It was difficult for women politicians to prove to men that they could mobilize voters and could be loyal to the party to serve in higher offices.
However, women did not vote as a bloc. Some activists had pictured the vote as a miracle cure for social ills, including the inferior status of women. It wasn’t.
Divisions between women were especially visible in conflicts over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Activist Alice Paul of the National Women’s Party spearheaded the drive for the ERA, viewing it as the next logical step after suffrage. The ERA stated that “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.” The ERA meant that women would have equal access to employment, education, and other opportunities.
Some resistance to the ERA came from those who thought it did not go far enough—for example, on issues of race. Black women activists wanted the support of white suffragists to fight against southern regulations and terrorism which kept black women and men from voting. They were met with resistance on the part of white women who viewed the “race” issue as separate from the “women” issue.
Some resisted the ERA for what it would mean for the gains that women reformers had already made on the part of women. For example, protective legislation like laws that limited women’s hours of labor and mother’s pensions would have been swept away by the ERA. Many women’s organizations did not want to lose these things.
In the 1920s, many women who wanted to succeed in the public world of business or politics felt that they needed to leave behind the idea of “sex-consciousness,” or the notion that women had specific virtues and abilities as a result of their sex. Instead, they opted for individualism and individual success rather than organizing as women who shared common interests with other women.
In a way, this new model of feminism was epitomized by the young, single “flapper.” Characterized by her short skirts, bobbed hair, public smoking and drinking, and use of birth control, she represented changes in women’s behavior and sexual freedom. [7]
Poll #3:
In your opinion, were the 1920s ultimately more progressive or conservative? Answer the poll below, or access it here.
Conclusion:
Economic uncertainty at the end of WWI coincided with heightened fears of radicalism resulting in harsh backlash against a wave of labor unrest in 1919.
The “culture wars” of the 1920s revealed contentious debates about American morals, politics, and education. Americans pushed back against legal restrictions by engaging in illicit activities, challenging accepted gender norms, and agitating for academic freedom.
Citations:
[1] Ed Sipos, Brewing Arizona: A Century of Beer in the Grand Canyon State (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013), 79-81.
[2] Sipos, Brewing Arizona, 92.
[3] Sipos, Brewing Arizona, 94.
[4] Oscar Martinez, Ciudad Juárez: Saga of a Legendary Border City (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018), 60.
[5] Martinez, Ciudad Juárez, 61.
[6] For more see Martinez, Ciudad Juárez, 60-81.
[7] Nancy Cott, ed. No Small Courage: A History of Women in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 413.
What do you notice? What do you wonder? (Scopes cartoon)
I said how humans are more animalistic than animals because humans tend to do more irrational and greed actions than animals, who are just trying to survive.
A concern with morals, and the well being of families. The political agenda was focused on conservative values, and on keeping to a clean lifestyle. This leads to prohibition and the rapid emergence of organized crime. With the void of Brewers being filled by the underground market of booze and vices. The money is pumped into this network of criminals and the strengths of these organizations. Leading to other crimes becoming more common as the fight for power and wealth spreads. The prohibition is an example of forcing involuntary change on the population. Since most of the change was done by those in office. It was more leaning towards conservative values in the 1920s.
Hi everyone! Really enjoyed reading your thoughts on Prohibition and political conflicts during the 1920s. Joseph and Peihong's comments about socialism and communism represented a threat to national security were really interesting--it makes me think about how capitalism is both a political and economic system that was threatened by labor organizing. Prohibition is also both an economic and political issue (as well as a social/moral one). Many of you argued that Prohibition was repealed in part to help American businesses--in the context of the widespread poverty during the Great Depression, this makes a lot of sense!
In your opinion, which of the following contributed most to Prohibition’s repeal in 1933? An increase in crime and corruption? Health concerns, including the use of other drugs? Or the closing of American businesses and widespread unemployment?
I believe the biggest contribution to enact the repeal of Prohibition was that of organized crime. Organized crime prompted corruption in law enforcement and pubic officials pushed Prohibition to it's limits until it was eventually repealed.
In your opinion, which of the following contributed most to Prohibition’s repeal in 1933? Increase in organized crime and corruption. One example would be due to alcohol. The effect of alcohol has raised the number of crimes, violence, injuries, and deaths.