Teapot dome scandal political cartoon explanation

Essay: WWI and the 1920s, 1914-1929

Introduction When the United States entered World War I, the nation abandoned its historic aloofness from European affairs and plunged into the unfamiliar morass of global power politics. On the home front, economic mobilization for World War I rapidly accelerated the prewar progressive trend toward more government control over the economy. Both of these changes were wrenching transformations for Americans because they seemed to contradict the nation's cherished traditions of diplomatic isolation and unregulated markets. And yet, both tossed-off traditions came back with a vengeance in the postwar years as the nation returned to isolation abroad and minimal government at home. Women's suffrage political cartoon, Judge, March 17, 1917, and Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 campaign button for the progressive Bull Moose Party

Americans in the 1914-1929 period oscillated back and forth between opposite poles of foreign and domestic policy, seemingly unable to agree on what should be the nation's role in the world or the government's role in the economy. These were years when the United States accepted, but then rejected the mantle of world leadership. Similarly, government regulation of business was drastically increased, but then almost completely abandoned. The failure of Americans to solve key problems of security and governance in World War I and the 1920s would lead directly to a major depression in the 1930s and another world war in the 1940s. Hence for Americans these years tell a cautionary tale about the consequences of too little government at home and too much isolation abroad.

Section 1: America at War and Peace Focus Questions: • Section Question: 


How did America’s intervention in WWI change the country domestically and internationally?

• Question: 
 According to Glen Gendzel, why did America finally enter WWI, and how did the Federal Government attempt to control and influence Americans?
 Terms:

• US neutrality

• America drawn into war by business pressure and submarine warfare

• "Safe for democracy" • American Expeditionary Force • Casualties in the Great War • American losses • Committee on Public Information (CPI) • Anti-German campaign • Espionage and Sedition Acts

American neutrality in World War I lasted for almost 3 nerve-wracking years as the nation slid ever closer toward intervention in Europe. President Woodrow Wilson's lofty proclamation of strict impartiality toward both sides at war, issued in 1914, proved to be an empty promise by 1917. US neutrality did not prevent American farms and factories from supplying the growing needs of Britain and France, paid for with credit from American banks. Yet at the same time, Wilson insisted that Germany must abandon submarine warfare, which threatened American supply lines to the Allies, even though he tolerated Britain's naval blockade against Germany.

"Steering Clear of the Rocks," 1916, political cartoon demonstrating the difficulties that Wilson had in trying to keep the nation out of war.

Not all Americans backed Wilson's skewed policy of "neutral rights," but after Germany started sinking American ships with unrestricted submarine warfare in January of 1917, and after the Zimmerman Telegram suggested that Germany might threaten US homeland security, public opinion began to shift in favor of war. Disavowing any interest in "conquest" or "dominion," President Woodrow Wilson announced that the time had come for the United States to make the world "safe for democracy" by vanquishing Germany. Congress went along and voted to declare war in April of 1917.

Watch this video :

https://glpro.s3.amazonaws.com/ah/10/ess/a/10a42v05.mp4

American entry into World War I made an Allied victory possible, but not inevitable. "The Yanks are coming," proclaimed a stirring popular song of the day, but Americans were ill prepared for modern total war and not yet ready to make a difference on Europe's battlefields. The Wilson administration would need over a year to draft, train, and equip a sizeable army and send it to France. In the interim, Germany nearly won the war.

https://glpro.s3.amazonaws.com/ah/10/ess/a/10a42v05.mp4
General John Pershing of the US Army led the American Expeditionary Forces, which would ultimately number over 2 million. But these "Doughboys," as American troops were called, trickled across the Atlantic with agonizing slowness, and few of them were prepared for the rigors of trench warfare right away. General Pershing rebuffed Allied demands for incorporating American troops directly into British and French units, further delaying their impact.

Consequently, a massive German offensive in the spring of 1918 had to be turned back by exhausted British and French troops. Largely on their own, they had relatively little help from U.S. forces that were just beginning to enter the front lines. Not until months later, in the fall of 1918, were enough "Doughboys" on hand to lead the giant Allied counter-offensive that drove the Germans out of France.

! Victory thus came to the Allies courtesy of a small, but at the same time decisive military contribution from the United States. There was nothing small about the $35 billion spent by US taxpayers on behalf of the Allied cause, but American losses of 115,000 dead paled in comparison to over 4 million dead British, French, Russians, and Italians on the Allied side.

On the home front, Progressives like President Wilson saw wartime mobilization as an opportunity to increase government regulation of business. The results were mixed: the War Industries Board coordinated manufacturing efforts under government supervision and the Railroad Administration operated the nation's

vast rail network as a single unit under federal control. The Food Administration, on the other hand, relied entirely on voluntary participation and market incentives, with no resort to government coercion or rationing.

Labor unions thrived under the protection of the government's War Labor Board, but wartime gains were quickly stamped out once the war was over and government protection was removed. Wages failed to keep pace with inflation so workers suffered a significant loss of real income. Moreover, the Wilson Administration's decision to rely more on borrowing than taxes to fund the war placed the burden of payment squarely upon the shoulders of future generations rather than on the rich. None of these outcomes was very faithful to the spirit of progressive reform.

The most remarkable government agency to emerge from World War I was the Committee on Public Information (CPI), created by President Wilson in April of 1917. Wilson feared that the American public was not sufficiently committed to the war effort. He knew that pockets of doubt and resistance persisted among radicals, intellectuals, farmers, workers, and certain ethnic and religious communities. Hence the CPI was put in charge of selling the war to the American people, using the latest techniques from public relations, advertising, and psychology to "fight for the minds of men" with official propaganda.

"Under Four Flags," CPI Film Poster, 1917; "America's Answer," CPI Film Poster, 1918; "Four Minute Men," CPI Poster, 1917; "Germany's Confession," CPI Pamphlet, c. 1917, "Destroy this Mad Brute--Enlist," H.R. Hopps, US Army Enlistment Poster, 1917; "Official United States War Films," CPI Poster, 1917

The result was a rather crude but effective anti-German campaign conducted throughout the nation by 75,000 public speakers and by mass distribution of books, pamphlets, newspaper columns, billboards, posters, and silent films. It was an unprecedented expansion of government activity into new ways and means of public persuasion, and it did not exactly bode well for the future of democracy. After all, in a democracy, the people are supposed to influence the government, but during World War I, the government began trying to influence the people--and not for the last time. This, too, was hardly in the spirit of progressivism.

An ugly side effect of the CPI's massive propaganda effort was that pacifists and critics of the war, especially German Americans, suffered abuse at the hands of private citizens who fancied themselves patriots enforcing "100% Americanism" on the home front. President Wilson worried that Americans at war might embrace "the spirit of ruthless brutality" and forget about the need for democratic

tolerance. But his own administration's efforts to drum up national unity and support for the war effort were at least partly responsible for this outcome. CPI propaganda drowned out dissenting voices against the war or cowed them into silence, because few Americans dared to provoke the wrath of vigilante patriots by expressing a preference for peace.

Eugene Debs arrested for speaking out against the war, Atlanta Prison, Georgia, 1920; Anti-German Sign, Chicago, 1917

Even more damaging to freedom of expression were the Espionage and Sedition Acts. Passed by Congress in 1917 and 1918, they criminalized wartime dissent. These laws, upheld by the Supreme Court, made a mockery of civil liberties and constitutional rights. Nonetheless, thousands of Americans were arrested merely for daring to speak out publicly against the war. This was surely not the sort of enhanced government authority that Progressives had in mind at the war's outset, but it would not be the only ironic outcome of the war.

• Question: 
 According to Glen Gendzel, why were Wilson’s Fourteen Points and his concept of a League of Nations visionary but ultimately failures?
 Terms:

• League of Nations • Treaty of Versailles • Wilson's stroke • "Reparations" President Wilson revealed his vision of a new world order to be plucked from the ashes of war in his "Fourteen Points" address of January 8, 1918. Wilson described a fair peace without revenge for either side, without forced payments of indemnities, and with only modest territorial adjustments based on democratic principles of national self-determination. He also called for free trade, freedom of the seas, dismantling of empires, and an end to military alliances. He wanted to replace these alliances with "a general association of nations" that would prevent future wars through the magic mechanism of "collective security.”

Wilson was certain that no leaders of nations would ever dare to start wars in the future if they knew in advance that they would face the wrath of the entire global community sworn to fight in unison against aggressors. Wilson's ambitious "guarantee of peace" through an international alliance against war itself became known as the League of Nations. All the major non-Communist world powers would eventually join the League--except the United States.

The road to this paradoxical outcome began with the war's abrupt end in November of 1918, when Germany, its armies in full retreat, suddenly surrendered. Wilson met with the other Allied leaders to draw up the final peace treaty at the Paris Peace Conference, which dragged on for months as the president tried to defend his vision of a fair and equal peace against Allied leaders bent on all-out revenge. In the end, Wilson was able to secure Allied participation in the League of Nations--but in return, Wilson had to accept a punitive peace settlement that confiscated vast territories and colonies from Germany and the other Central Powers. 60 The Treaty of Versailles, signed in June of 1919, also forced Germany to accept full responsibility for the war and to pay billions in future "reparations" to the Allies. This was hardly the sort of equitable, beneficent, non-vengeful peace that Wilson had promised Americans when he led the nation into Europe's war. Disillusionment and resentment were bound to follow. Months of intense debate over the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations began in the United States once Wilson returned from France and submitted the treaty to the US Senate for ratification. Most senators seemed inclined to approve Wilson's treaty in some form, including US membership in the League of Nations. But Republicans refused to vote for ratification without amendments, and Democrats, at the president's insistence, refused to accept any changes to the deal he had so painstakingly hammered out with the Allies. "The Senate must take its medicine," Wilson stubbornly decreed.

"Still in the Dark," Evening Public Ledger, 1920; "Interrupting the Ceremony," The Chicago Tribune, 1918; "Seein' Things," Brooklyn Eagle, 1919

To break the partisan stalemate, the president began a national speaking tour, hoping to rally public opinion in favor of the treaty and thereby put pressure on senators to ratify it. Wilson had to allay fears raised by hard-core isolationists that American involvement in collective security would drag the US into endless future wars. Wilson criss-crossed the country and delivered dozens of speeches in a valiant effort to defend his treaty and the League of Nations.

But after 3 weeks of nonstop traveling and speaking, Wilson collapsed from exhaustion. Then he suffered a severe stroke in October of 1919. The president was severely disabled for the next few months, during which time he was secluded away from the press, senators, and even his own staff. Without leadership from the White House, the Treaty of Versailles went down to final defeat in the Senate, and consequently, the United States never joined the League of Nations.

• Question: 
 How and why did the abrupt end to WWI lead to recession and race riots across the United States?
 Terms:

• Red Summer • Influenza epidemic • Russian Revolution • The Palmer Raids

By then Americans were preoccupied with the traumatic transition from war to peace on the home front following the unexpectedly swift cessation of hostilities in Europe. Billions of dollars in government war orders were abruptly cancelled, throwing 5 million people out of work all at once and sending the economy into a severe recession. Thousands of strikes erupted in numerous industries as workers tried to recoup wages lost to wartime inflation.

Race riots broke out in 2 dozen cities during the summer of 1919 as competition between blacks and whites for scarce housing during the war turned into competition for scarce jobs afterwards. White residents attacked the newly enlarged black neighborhoods of northern cities, causing much bloodshed and fiery destruction, while a wave of lynchings swept the South.

Watch this video :

https://glpro.s3.amazonaws.com/ah/10/ess/a/10a42v20.mp4

Meanwhile, a hundred US soldiers died in Russia fighting the Bolsheviks after Wilson ordered military intervention against the Russian Revolution. Half a million Americans lost their lives in an influenza epidemic that ravaged the United States along with many other countries around the world. For Americans, the aftermath of World War I proved far more deadly than the war itself.

American civil liberties, already damaged by wartime repression of dissent, suffered further injury from the Red Scare of 1919-1920. The hysterical anti- German hatred whipped up during the war by CPI propaganda mutated into anti- radical hysteria after the war. Leftists, socialists, anarchists, labor leaders, and intellectuals now loomed as menacing "Reds" in the eyes of Americans who wondered if the Russian Revolution was about to spread to the United States.

"Come Unto Me Ye Opprest!," Anti-communism political cartoon, Memphis Commercial Appeal, 1919 ; A. Mitchell Palmer, organized the Palmer Raids which directed federal agents to round up aliens and arrest them without trial; Political Cartoon showing US Army Machine Gunner holding back Reds and Wobblies, New York Herald, 1919; I.W.W. Headquarters after Palmer Raid, 1919; Headline in Boston Evening, 1920

Such fanciful fears were enflamed by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer after his house was mysteriously bombed in June of 1919, a crime that was blamed on radicals. Six months later, Palmer organized mass arrests of 6 thousand suspected radicals across the country, while on their own, war veterans returning from Europe attacked radical and labor groups. For some Americans, the war had seemingly ended too soon, causing wartime passions to spill over into the first years of peace.

Section 2: The Jazz Age Focus Questions: • Section Question: 


How did American society change during the Jazz Age? What saw the most marked change?

• Question: 
 Who were the “New Woman” and the “New Negro” of the 1920s?
 Terms:

• Women's suffrage • The "New" Woman • Harlem Renaissance • The Great Migration

Prohibition of alcohol would be the most lasting and controversial home front legacy of World War I in the United States. The 18th Amendment, which prohibited the manufacture, sale, and transportation of "intoxicating liquors," grew out of the temperance crusade of the 19th century. The movement gained strength after 1900 by appealing to a wide variety of reformers who expected that banning alcohol consumption by force of law would be a shortcut to other goals they had long pursued.

To Progressives, prohibition would help to assimilate immigrants and shut down saloons. Saloons were considered cesspools of corruption, immorality, and machine politics. To employers, prohibition promised to increase labor productivity and cut down on factory accidents, while adding to workers' take- home earnings without any raise in pay. To social workers, prohibition seemed an

easy way to reduce crime, poverty, and family violence all at once. To nativists and country folks, prohibition served as a handy club with which to bash foreigners and city-slickers.

Watch this video :

https://glpro.s3.amazonaws.com/ah/10/ess/a/10a43v10.mp4

Woman suffrage advocates followed the example of prohibitionists and used World War I to push their reform agenda toward final approval, after many years of agitation. Only 11 states had enacted suffrage by the time the war broke out because it was still widely believed by Americans of both sexes that women would neglect their private responsibilities toward home and family if they were allowed to participate in the public world of politics.

Once the United States entered World War I, however, American women played vital public roles by working on farms, and in offices and factories, and by volunteering for war service as nurses, clerks, recruiters, and recreation workers. President Wilson had always opposed woman suffrage, but women's wartime service convinced him that it was time to recognize their contributions. Enacting suffrage, he felt, would demonstrate the nation's commitment to democracy. Perhaps he was also influenced by dozens of militant women in Alice Paul's National Women's Party. They had chained themselves to the White House fence and, when arrested, staged hunger strikes in order to shame a president who claimed to fight for democracy.

Watch this video :

https://glpro.s3.amazonaws.com/ah/10/ess/a/10a43v20.mp4

The decade also saw major changes in the lives of African Americans. Jim Crow segregation remained the law in the southern states, and so did disfranchisement, while racial discrimination in jobs and housing still prevailed across the land. But the first stirrings of change came during World War I, when half a million African Americans left the rural South for the urban North. Close to a million more would follow in the 1920s, beckoned by the lure of a better life.

Deprived of their usual source of cheap labor from European immigrants, northern employers recruited poor southern blacks to work in northern factories during World War I. Many black sharecroppers and their families were eager to escape from the endless cycle of debt, poverty, and racist terror in the South. By joining the Great Migration, as this epic shift of population was called, African Americans could not escape racism. Even in the North they had to live in

https://glpro.s3.amazonaws.com/ah/10/ess/a/10a43v20.mp4
proscribed ghetto areas and put up with low-wage jobs, everyday hatred, and de facto segregation. Black migrants to northern cities did, however, escape from the degrading heritage of slavery in the South. The men, at least, even gained the right to vote, which began the process of building up African American political power for the future.

Watch this video :

https://glpro.s3.amazonaws.com/ah/10/ess/a/10a43v30.mp4

• Question: 
 How did conservative candidates and policies in the 1920s negate some of the reforms implemented in the Progressive Era?
 Terms:

• Warren Harding • "Normalcy" • Isolationism • Republican progressives • Calvin Coolidge • "Red Scare" • Wealth concentration • Teapot Dome Scandal

The 1920 election disappointed those who wanted a popular referendum on US membership in the League of Nations. Governor James Cox of Ohio, the Democratic nominee, endorsed the League--but Senator Warren Harding, the Republican nominee, also from Ohio, did not. All of the leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination in 1920 had been outspoken opponents of the League, but delegates to the party's national convention decided to dodge the issue by nominating Senator Harding, a "dark horse" candidate who avoided saying much in public about it.

https://glpro.s3.amazonaws.com/ah/10/ess/a/10a43v30.mp4
1920 Presidential Race

!

This calculated indifference toward the leading issue of the day freed Harding to campaign more generally against the past 2 decades of progressive reform, which seemed to have led the country so badly astray in pursuit of impossibly idealistic goals. Postwar voters grown weary of reform crusades at home and abroad found Harding's vague promise of "not nostrums, but normalcy" reassuring somehow. The result was a record landslide: Harding won 60 percent of the popular vote in 1920, a feat that has only been surpassed twice since then (in 1936 and 1964).

Once in office, President Harding steered clear of any further US involvement in European balance-of-power politics. Not only would the League of Nations have to make do without the United States, but so would America's erstwhile allies Britain and France. They had to enforce the Treaty of Versailles against Germany on their own, until eventually they stopped trying.

"The Gap in the Bridge," Punch, 1919

!

Instead of working with Britain and France, US diplomats of the 1920s demanded that the Allies repay their leftover war debts, which aroused tremendous resentment on both sides of the Atlantic. A few international arms control treaties were negotiated in the 1920s at America's behest, and US diplomats also led the way in convincing 62 nations to sign a meaningless pact outlawing war (except in "self-defense"). But otherwise, the United States resumed its traditional posture of isolationism in world affairs.

As usual, however, isolation did not extend to trade. The 1920s saw enormous growth in US trade and foreign investment even as American involvement in world politics and diplomacy shriveled away. The effort by progressive presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson to goad Americans out of their insular indifference to world affairs was now decisively repudiated. Tragically, the demise of Wilson's dream of collective security against aggression would clear the way for the rise of Fascism in Europe and Asia and another world war.

Republican conservatives like President Harding set the pro-business tone for politics and governance in the 1920s. It was clear that the progressive spirit of government activism was now dead. This otherwise quite conservative decade had some insurgent candidacies, a few public hydroelectric power projects, and the beginning of federally subsidized health care for poor mothers and children. But Democrats offered no effective opposition to Republicans as they dissolved into fratricidal warfare between native-born rural Protestants and urban-based ethnic factions. 60

!

Republican progressives never regained any seats of power within their party after having joined the third-party effort of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. Almost all progressive Republicans returned to the G.O.P. within a few years, but they were left without much influence. Hence conservatives were able

to dominate the Republican Party, which in turn dominated national politics all decade long. The result was a decade of retreat from the progressive commitment to government regulation of business and government protection for workers, consumers, small business, and the environment.

President Calvin Coolidge, who replaced Harding upon the latter's death in 1923, famously said, "The chief business of the American people is business." This pithy little phrase served as cover for the effective takeover of government by big business in the 1920s. The carefully constructed progressive regulatory state withered away under conservative Republican administrations more interested in promoting economic growth than protecting the public interest. The abandonment of antitrust law enforcement led to the biggest wave of corporate mergers in the history of American business (until the 1980s).

! Big business, which had terrified so many Americans in the Progressive Era, grew bigger than ever in the 1920s, but now politicians and the press hailed these behemoths of the corporate world as benevolent and public-spirited. Harding and Coolidge pushed through drastic income tax cuts at a time when only the wealthiest Americans paid any income tax at all, while their administrations also raised tariffs to record high levels. The effect was to shift the burden of taxation from a few high-income earners to the masses of consumers, reversing the prewar progressive trend.

Meanwhile, labor unions, weakened by the Red Scare, were forced to surrender their wartime gains, and more, as employers experimented with "welfare capitalism" and other union-busting schemes that sharply reduced union membership and worker protections. By the late 1920s, these policies combined to help make the nation's wealth more concentrated than ever before or since. Indeed, it was as if the Progressive Era had never happened.

The potential for corruption inherent in business-government "cooperation" became apparent following President Harding's death, when the Teapot Dome scandal erupted and several high-ranking members of his administration went to prison for taking bribes from oil companies. Nonetheless, under President Coolidge, the pro-business, anti-progressive policies continued apace. Republican politicians claimed to have inaugurated a "New Era" of permanent prosperity by letting business manage its own affairs free from government interference.

"Who Says a Watched Pot Never Boils?," 1924; "Juggernaut," 1924; Fall and Teapot Dome, 1928

!

Intellectuals disgusted by the nation's low-brow, commercialized culture and self- satisfied politics went into self-imposed exile in Europe. On the other hand, titans of the business world who had once been vilified as "robber barons" were now celebrated as visionary entrepreneurs engaged in noble service to their fellow man.

Yankees, Lou Gehrig, homerun, 1925; Teens dancing the Charleston, 1926; Charles Lindbergh, American pilot who made first solo non- stop flight across the Atlantic; Film premiere in New York, 1926; Mary Pickford, actress and co-founder of United Artists Film Studio

! • Question: 


According to Glen Gendzel, how did American society become divided politically into town or urban areas vs. country or rural areas?
 Terms:

• Henry Ford • Town vs. Country (tradition vs. modern) • Urban nation • Scopes Trial and evolution • "100% Americanism" • Immigration policies • Prohibition • The 18th Amendment • Advocates for prohibition

Henry Ford, who sold millions of dependable, low-priced "Model T" automobiles in the 1920s, became a national folk hero despite his virulent anti-Semitism, eccentric notions, and harsh anti-union tactics. Reporters who had once raised questions about the methods of big businessmen in the Progressive Era now switched to praising their presumptive genius and public usefulness. A popular 1920s bestseller even portrayed Jesus Christ as a "super salesman" and "forceful executive" who achieved success through mastery of modern business techniques.

New Era prosperity did set the tone for the 1920s. Exciting new high-tech industries thrived such as automobiles, consumer appliances, chain stores,

construction, leisure, recreation, and entertainment, especially in big cities. Nearly a hundred million movie tickets were sold each week and Americans flocked to baseball parks, golf courses, and dance halls as well.

Automobile registrations soared over 20 million until by decade's end 3 out of 4 cars in the world were registered in the United States. Owning a car was finally within reach of most American families. The celebrity exploits of movie stars like Mary Pickford, sports heroes like Babe Ruth, and the great trans-Atlantic aviator Charles Lindbergh filled the newsreels, magazines, and newspapers, while radio broadcasts of music, news, sports, soap operas, speeches, sermons, comedies and dramas reached into tens of millions of homes.

Popular fads ranging from "The Charleston" dance craze and mahjong parties to self-improvement books, vitamins, and palm reading preoccupied those Americans who were lucky enough to have leisure time and disposable income for such frivolous pursuits. But cultural interests, access to technology, openness to change, and differences in prosperity often divided Americans along rural vs. urban lines.

Watch this video :

https://glpro.s3.amazonaws.com/ah/10/ess/a/h10a23-40.mp4

In the 1920s immigration became a battlefront between urban modernists and rural traditionalists. New arrivals from southern and eastern Europe rose sharply after World War I. This upset nativists and Protestant old-stock Americans who had never been comfortable with the entry of so many Catholics and Jews into the country during the prewar decades. The wartime spirit of "100% Americanism" and the postwar Red Scare, both which aroused prejudice against foreigners as presumptively disloyal or radical, gave nativists, after decades of trying, a chance to finally enact severe restrictions on immigration in the 1920s.

Responding to public fears of "inundation" and "race suicide," Congress passed the National Origins Act of 1924, which imposed strict quotas on immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and dramatically reduced immigration overall. Asian immigration was banned entirely. "America must be kept American," said President Coolidge upon signing the law.

The nation's traditional welcome to immigrants, or at least to Europeans, now came to an end. The golden door to America was slammed shut in the faces of those yearning to breathe free. Immigration from Mexico and the Philippines, however, rose sharply in the 1920s. This was because no amount of nativist fury

could wean American agriculture and industry away from its reliance on cheap labor from any available source.

Underneath the decade's noisy battles over immigration, Prohibition, and evolution lay a fundamental culture clash between country and city, between Protestant and Catholic, between native-born and immigrant, between religious and secular, between rigidly intolerant values inherited from the 19th century and more flexible modern values of tolerance gaining ascendancy in the 20th. 100

Watch this video :

https://glpro.s3.amazonaws.com/ah/10/ess/a/10a43v50.mp4

Section 3: The Great Crash Focus Questions: • Section Question: 


What was “the Great Crash,” and how does it relate to “the Great Depression?”

• Question: 
 What did the phrase “new era prosperity” mean, and why was it a false promise even before the Great Crash?
 Terms:

• Farm prices crash • Necessity of credit • New advertising

Country folks had much to resent about city folks in the 1920s. Besides the clash of values and lifestyles, there was a tremendous economic disparity between the fates of rural and urban America in a decade that was supposed to be prosperous for all. Farm prices crashed precipitously after World War I, leaving many farmers high and dry because they had borrowed heavily to expand operations during the war. Agricultural surpluses plagued the farm sector throughout the 1920s. Farm prices stayed low and farmers never got a chance to participate in New Era prosperity 10