Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course US History, and today we're gonna learn about one of the best eras ever:
the 1920s.
The 20s gave us jazz, movies, radio, making out in cars, illegal liquor,
and the 20s also gave us prosperity--although not for everybody--
and gangsters, and a consumer culture based on credit,
and lots of prejudice against immigrants,
and eventually the worst economic crisis the US has ever seen.
Mr. Green, Mr. Green, but what about Gatsby?
Yeah, me from the past, it's true that Gastby turned out all right in the end,
but what preyed on Gatsby,
what foul dust trailed in the wake of his dreams,
did temporarily close out my interest in the aborted sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
*theme music*
So there's a stereotypical view of the 1920s as "The Roaring 20s,"
a decade of exciting change and new cultural touchstones,
as well as increased personal freedom and dancing.
And it really was a time of increased wealth--
for some people.
The quote of the decade has to go to our famously taciturn president from Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge, who said,
Jay-Z would later update this for the 21st century noting,
But anyway, during the 1920s, the government helped business grow like gangbusters,
largely by not regulating it much at all.
This is known as “laissez-faire” capitalism.
Or “laissez-faire” capitalism if you’re good at speaking French.
The Republican Party dominated politics in the 1920s,
with all the presidents elected in the decade being
staunch conservative Republicans.
The federal government hewed to the policies favored by business lobbyists,
including lower taxes on personal income and business profits,
and efforts to weaken the power of unions.
Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover stocked the boards of the Federal Reserve
and the Federal Trade Commission with men
who shared their pro-business views,
shifting the country away from the economic regulation that had been favored by Progressives.
And that was very good for the American economy,
at least in the short run.
The 1920s were also marked by
quite a bit of government corruption,
most of which can be pinned to the
administration of Warren G. Harding. Now,
Harding himself wasn't terribly corrupt,
but he picked terrible friends. They
included Attorney General Harry
Daugherty who accepted money to not
prosecute criminals, and Interior
Secretary Albert fall, who took half a
million dollars from private business in
exchange for leases to government oil
reserves at Teapot Dome. Fall later
became the first cabinet member ever to
be convicted of a felony, but on the
other hand, business, man! Productivity rose
dramatically largely because older
industry's adopted Henry Ford's assembly
line techniques and newer industries
like aviation, chemicals, and electronics
grew up to provide Americans with new
products and new jobs. During the 1920s
annual production of cars tripled to 4.8
million, and automobile companies were
gradually consolidated into the big
three that we know today: Ford, Chrysler,
and Harley-Davidson. What? General Motors.
By 1929 half of all American families
owned a car and thus began the American
love affair with the automobile, which is
also
where love affairs were often
consummated, which is why in the 1920s
cars came to be known as Scootaloo
pooping chariots. What's that? They were
called brothels on wheels? And the
economy also grew because American
corporations were extending their reach
overseas, and American foreign investment
was greater than that of any other
country. The dollar replaced the pound as
the most important currency for trade
and by the end of the decade America was
producing eighty-five percent of the
world's cars and forty percent of its
overall manufactured goods. Stan can I
get a Libertage?
And companies turned out
all kinds of labor-saving devices like
vacuum cleaners, toasters, refrigerators,
and not having to spend all day washing
your clothes, or turning over your own
toast like some kind of common or meant
that Americans had more time for leisure.
And this was provided by radios and
baseball games boxing matches vacations
dance crazes. I mean before Gangnam style
there was the windy and the Charleston
but probably the most significant
leisure product was movies and I'm not
just saying that because I'm staring
into a camera. The American film industry
moved out to Hollywood before World War
one because land was cheap and plentiful
all that sunshine meant that you could
shoot outside all year round and it was
close to everything: desert, mountains,
ocean, plastic surgeons. And by 1925 the
American film industry had eclipsed all
of its competitors and become the
greatest in the world, especially if you
count by volume and not quality, and more
and more people had money to go see
those movies thanks to consumer debt. The
widespread use of credit and lay away
buying plans meant that it was
acceptable to go into debt to maintain
what came to be seen as the American
standard of living and this was a huge
change in attitude. These days we don't
even think of credit cards as debt,
really. But they are. And that was a
relatively new idea as was another
feature of American life in the 20s that
is still with us: celebrity. Opera singer
Enrico Caruso has often been called the
first modern celebrity but now he's a
lot less famous than Charlie Chaplin or
Rudolph Valentino or Babe Ruth but
probably the biggest celebrity of the
decade was Charles Lindbergh whose claim
to fame was flying across the Atlantic
Ocean by himself without stopping
although he did use an airplane which
makes it slightly less impressive. Now
Lindbergh wasn't a truly contemporary
celebrity in the sense of being famous
for being famous, but he was
a business more than a businessman. High
culture also flourished. This was the age
of the lost generation of American
writers, many of whom lived and worked in
Europe but America had its own version
of Paris in New York. The decade of the
1920s saw continued migration of African
American people from the South to cities
in the nNorth, and Harlem became the
capital of Black America. And speaking of
migration, let us now migrated to the
chair for the Mystery Document.
The rules here
are simple: I guess the author of
the mystery document, I'm either right or
I get shocked with the shock pen.
Alright let's see we got here.
“If we must die would it not be like hogs hunted and
penned in an inglorious spot, while round
us bark the mad and hungry dogs, making
their market are a curse a lot... Like men
we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
pressed to the wall, dying but fight back.”
Stan thank you for the poetry I
appreciate that it's not some obscure
document from 18th century blah blah blah
It's Claude McKay Harlem Renaissance
poet, the poem is called “If We Must Die.”
Ah, it's the only thing in the world I'm
actually good at. Now I know this from the
imagery alone, especially the line about
“mad and hungry dogs” that would
figuratively and literally make up the
mobs at the lynchings, but the giveaway
here is the ultimate sentiment that we
will fight back. This was part of the
spirit of the Harlem Renaissance which
rejected stereotypes and prejudice and
sought to celebrate African-American
experience. Meanwhile, things for changing
for women as well, as they found new ways
to express autonomy. Flappers kept their
hair and skirts short, smoked and drank
illegally in public, and availed
themselves of birth control. And
marketers encouraged them to buy
products like cigarettes christened
torches of freedom by Edward Bernays.
Liberation had its limits though; most
women were still expected to marry, have
children, and find their freedom at home
through the use of washing machines, but
the picture of prosperity is as usual
more complicated than it at first
appears. The fact that so many Americans
were going into debt in order to pursue
the American dream meant that if the
economy faltered, and it did, there was
going to be lots of trouble. Let's go to
the Thought Bubble. Prosperity in the 1920s
wasn't equally distributed through the
population. Real industrial wages rose by
a quarter between 1922 and 1929 but
corporate profits rose at twice that
rate. By 1929,
one percent of the nation's banks
controlled fifty percent of the nation's
financial resources and the wealthiest
five percent of Americans share of
national income exceeded that of the
bottom sixty percent. An estimated forty
percent of Americans lived in poverty.
Now many Americans celebrated big
business, and Wall Street was often seen
as heroic possibly because by 1920 about
1.5 million Americans owned some kind of
stock, but big business also meant that
smaller businesses disappeared. During
the 1920s the number of manufacturing
workers declined by 5%, the first time
this class of workers had seen its
numbers drop, but not the last. Now some
of these jobs were made up for by new
jobs in retail finance and education, but
as early as the 1920s New England was
beginning to see unemployment in
deindustrialization as textile companies
moved their operations to the south
where labor was cheaper and
working-class people still made up the
majority of Americans and they often
couldn't afford these newfangled devices,
like in 1930, seventy-five percent
of american homes didn't have a
washing machine, and only forty percent
of them had a radio. Farmers were even
worse off many had prospered during
World War One when the government
subsidized farm prices in order to keep
farms producing for the war effort, but
when the subsidies ended, production
didn't subside, largely due to
mechanization and increased use of
fertilizer. Farmers incomes dropped
steadily and many saw banks foreclose
upon their property. For the first time
in American history the number of farms
declined during the 1920s. For farmers
the Great Depression began early.
Thanks, Thought Bubble. So in general the federal
government did little to nothing to help
farmers or workers. The Supreme Court was
the only segment of the government that
kept any progressive ideas alive as they
began to craft a system of ideas that we
call the jurisprudence of civil
liberties. Now the court still voted to
uphold convictions of left-wing critics
of the government but gradually began to
embrace the idea that people had the
right to express dissonant views in what
Oliver Wendell Holmes called the
“Marketplace of ideas.” In Near vs. Minnesota,
the Supreme Court struck down
censorship of newspapers and by 1927
Justice Brandeis was writing that
“Freedom to think as you will and to
speak as you think are indispensable to
the discovery and spread of political truth.”
But despite increased free speech
and torches of liberty and flappers and
the Harlem Renaissance the 1920s was in
many ways a reactionary
period in American history. For instance
the decade saw the resurgence of the
Ku Klux Klan in a new and improved form and
by improved I mean much more terrible.
Spurred on by the hyper patriotism that
was fostered during World War One, the
Klan denounced immigrants and Jews and
Catholics as less than one hundred
percent American, and by the mid 20s the
Klan claimed more than 3 million members
and it was the largest private
organization right here in my home state
of Indiana. And with more immigrants
coming from Southern and Eastern Europe
who were often Catholic and Jewish,
White Protestants became more and more
concerned about losing their dominant
position in the social order.
Spoiler alert: it turns out okay for you, White Protestants
The first immigration
restriction bill was passed in 1921,
limiting the number of immigrants from
Europe to 357,000. In 1924, a new
immigration law dropped that number to
150,000 and established quotas based on
national origin. The numbers of
immigrants allowed from Southern and
Eastern Europe were drastically reduced
and Asians except for Filipinos were
totally forbidden. The quota for
Filipinos was set at 50 per year
although they were still allowed to
emigrate to Hawaii because their labor
was needed there. There were no
restrictions, however, on immigration from
the Western Hemisphere because
California's large-scale farms were
dependent upon seasonal laborers from
Mexico. These immigration restrictions
were also influenced by fear of radical
anarchists and pseudo scientific ideas
about race; whites were seen as
scientifically superior to people of
color and as President Coolidge himself
declared when he signed the 1924
immigration law, “America must be kept American”
Tell me Calvin Coolidge about
how American you are. Are you Cherokee, or
Cree, or Lakota? The 1920s also saw
increased tension between science
education in the United States and
religious beliefs. The best known example
is of course the trial of John Scopes in
Tennessee in 1925. Scopes was tried for
breaking the law against teaching
evolution which he had been encouraged
to do by the ACLU as a test case for
freedom of speech. Scopes was prosecuted
by William Jennings Bryan whom you will
remember as having recently resigned as
Secretary of State and who had become a
leader of the Fundamentalist Movement.
And Scopes was defended by Clarence
Darrow, that famous defense attorney who
contemporary defense attorneys always
point to to argue that defense attorneys
aren't all scum. Scopes and Darrow
actually lost the trial but the case
drew national attention and ultimately led to
evolution being taught in more American
schools. The Scopes trial is often seen
as a victory for free thinking and
science and modernism, and I suppose it
was, but for me it's more a symbol of the
contradictions of the 1920s. This is the
decade that gave us mass consumer
culture and celebrity worship, which are
important and very complicated legacies.
And it also saw the birth of modern
conceptions of civil liberties. It was a
period when tolerance became an
important value, but at the same time it
saw a rise in lynchings. Immigrants were
necessary for the economic boom of the
1920s, but at the same time their numbers
were restricted, as they were seen as a
threat to traditional American value, and
that raises a question that we're still
struggling with today: What are those
values? I don't mean that rhetorically
let me know in comments.
Thanks for watching. I'll see you next week.
Crash Course is produced and directed by
Stan Muller, our script supervisor is
Meredith Danko, the Associate Producer is
Danica Johnson to show is written by my high
school history teacher Raoul Meyer
Rosianna Rojas and myself and our
graphics team is Thought Cafe.
I nailed that.
Every week there's a new caption
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own in comments or ask questions about
today's video that will be answered by
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And as we say in my hometown:
Don't Forget to be Awesome.