AMSCO 7.8 1920s: Cultural and Political Controversies

Overview

AMSCO Topic 7.8, "1920s: Cultural and Political Controversies," covers the deep cultural fault lines of the decade: religious modernists vs. fundamentalists, prohibitionists vs. drinkers, nativists vs. immigrants, and old-fashioned morals vs. flappers and Freud. By 1920, for the first time, most Americans lived in urban areas (then defined as places with more than 2,500 residents), and nearly every fight in this chapter is really an urban-vs-rural fight. The chapter also walks through the conservative Republican politics that ran alongside the cultural chaos: the presidencies of Harding, Coolidge, and the election of Hoover in 1928. It pairs with AMSCO 7.7 on 1920s innovations (the technology side of the decade) and sets up the crash in AMSCO 7.9 on the Great Depression.

Religion, Science, and the Scopes Trial

The biggest religious divide of the decade was between Protestant modernists and fundamentalists, and the Scopes trial of 1925 put that divide on national display.

• Modernists (mostly urban) took a historical, critical view of the Bible. Influenced by changing roles for women, the Social Gospel, and scientific knowledge, they believed you could accept Darwin's theory of evolution without abandoning Christian faith.
• Fundamentalists (mostly rural) taught that every word of the Bible was literally true. A core doctrine was creationism, the belief that God created the universe in seven days. They blamed modernists for a decline in morals.
• Radio revivalists preached the fundamentalist message using the era's new mass medium. Billy Sunday attacked drinking, gambling, and dancing. Aimee Semple McPherson condemned communism and jazz from her Los Angeles pulpit.

The Scopes Trial (1925)

Tennessee, like several southern states, banned teaching evolution in public schools. The ACLU recruited biology teacher John Scopes to teach evolution anyway so the law could be challenged in court. The whole country followed the trial by newspaper and radio. Clarence Darrow, a famous Chicago lawyer, defended Scopes. William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic presidential candidate, argued for the fundamentalist side and testified as an expert on the Bible.

Scopes was convicted (the conviction was later overturned on a technicality), and anti-evolution laws stayed on the books for years but were rarely enforced. The northern press claimed Darrow had discredited fundamentalism. The real takeaway for the exam: the trial dramatized two opposing worldviews, science vs. religious tradition, city vs. country.

Prohibition and Organized Crime

The 18th Amendment (ratified 1919) banned the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, and the Volstead Act (1919) enforced it. Wartime pressure to conserve grain and keep a sober workforce, plus decades of temperance crusading, pushed it through. Then almost nobody followed it.

• Drinking moved to speakeasies, illegal clubs selling bootleg (smuggled) liquor. City police and judges took bribes to look the other way. Even President Harding served alcohol to guests.
• Bootlegging became big business. Rival gangs, most famously Al Capone's Chicago gang, fought over the trade, and the profits funded organized crime expansion into prostitution, gambling, and narcotics.
• Politics split along familiar lines. Republicans publicly backed the "noble experiment." Democrats divided: southerners supported Prohibition, northern city politicians wanted repeal.
• Supporters pointed to real declines in alcoholism and alcohol-related deaths, but rising crime and public resentment wore support down. Once the Great Depression hit, economic arguments for repeal sealed it. The 21st Amendment repealed Prohibition in 1933.

Nativism: Quota Laws, Sacco and Vanzetti, and the KKK

After World War I, immigration surged. More than a million people, mostly Catholics and Jews from southern and eastern Europe, arrived between 1919 and 1921. Nativist fears (job competition, radicalism, "too much" contact with Europe) pushed Congress to act fast.

The Quota Laws

• The 1921 quota act capped immigration at 3 percent of each nationality's foreign-born population in the 1910 Census (maximum 357,000 total).
• The 1924 quota act tightened it to 2 percent based on the 1890 Census, deliberately chosen because it predated most "new" immigration from southern and eastern Europe.
• By 1927, quotas for all Asians and eastern and southern Europeans were limited to 150,000 total, and Japanese immigrants were barred entirely.
• These laws ended the traditional U.S. policy of unlimited immigration. One big exception: Canadians and Latin Americans were exempt. Almost 500,000 Mexicans migrated legally to the Southwest during the 1920s.

Sacco and Vanzetti

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants and anarchists, were convicted of robbery and murder in Massachusetts in 1921. Liberal artists and intellectuals protested that they were convicted for being poor Italians and anarchists rather than on solid evidence. After six years of appeals and international debate, both were executed in 1927. The case became a symbol of nativist prejudice in the justice system.

The Second Ku Klux Klan

The new Klan, founded in 1915, was the decade's most extreme expression of nativism. Key facts AMSCO emphasizes:

• Unlike the Reconstruction-era Klan, it was as strong in the Midwest as in the South, fueled by the film Birth of a Nation (which portrayed the KKK as heroes) and White backlash to the 1919 race riots.
• It used modern advertising techniques to reach 5 million members by 1925, drawing mostly lower-middle-class White Protestants in small cities and towns.
• It targeted not just African Americans but also Catholics, Jews, foreigners, and suspected Communists, using cross burnings, whippings, tar and feathers, and lynching. The overwhelming number of those killed were African American men.
• It had real political power in states like Indiana and Texas, then collapsed after press exposés of fraud and corruption beginning in 1923 and the 1925 murder conviction of Indiana Grand Dragon David Stephenson.

Arts, Literature, and Changing Lives for Women

Postwar writers were deeply disillusioned, scorning religion as hypocritical and condemning the war's sacrifices as a fraud sold by money interests. Gertrude Stein called them the "lost generation": novelists F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Sinclair Lewis; poets Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot; playwright Eugene O'Neill. Eliot and Hemingway went into exile in Europe. In art, Edward Hopper painted urban loneliness while regionalists Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton celebrated rural America. On Broadway, Show Boat broke ground with a serious treatment of race, and George Gershwin blended jazz and classical music in Rhapsody in Blue.

Women, Morals, and Education

The 19th Amendment gave women the vote, but it changed less than reformers hoped. Women did not vote as a bloc in 1920; most shared the party preferences of their husbands or fathers. Other key points:

• Most middle-class women remained homemakers. Labor-saving devices (washing machines, vacuum cleaners) eased routines but didn't transform them. Working women were concentrated in jobs like clerk, nurse, teacher, and domestic, at lower wages than men.
• The "revolution in morals" was the decade's biggest generational shift. Sigmund Freud's ideas about sexual repression, plus movies, cars, jazz, and new dances (the foxtrot, the Charleston), loosened sexual taboos. Margaret Sanger advanced acceptance of birth control even though contraceptives were illegal in almost every state.
• The flapper look (knee-length dresses, bobbed hair, smoking, driving) marked young women's independence, though married women were expected to drop it and settle into domestic life.
• Liberalized divorce laws helped push the divorce rate from one in eight marriages (1920) to one in six (1930). Compulsory school laws doubled the share of high school graduates to over 25 percent of school-age young adults by decade's end.

The Harlem Renaissance and Marcus Garvey

Migration from the South continued, and by 1930 almost 20 percent of African Americans lived in the North. Harlem, with nearly 200,000 residents by 1930, became the center of the Harlem Renaissance, an explosion of Black artistic achievement.

• Leading poets: Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay. Their work expressed everything from bitterness and resentment to joy and hope about African American heritage.
• Jazz musicians Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong were so popular across racial lines that the 1920s is often called the Jazz Age. Blues singer Bessie Smith and performer Paul Robeson were also major figures, though outside Harlem they often faced segregated venues.

Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant, brought the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) to Harlem in 1916. He preached racial pride, Black nationalism, economic self-sufficiency, Black separatism, and a back-to-Africa movement. Federal fraud charges over his Black Star Steamship stock sales led to his 1925 conviction and later deportation, collapsing the movement. W. E. B. Du Bois rejected the back-to-Africa idea but endorsed Garvey's emphasis on racial pride, which later inspired the Black pride movement of the 1960s.

Republican Politics: Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover

Three Republican presidents controlled the executive branch through the 1920s, with a solidly Republican Congress. These weren't Gilded Age laissez-faire Republicans; they accepted limited regulation as a way to stabilize business, but staffed the Progressive Era's regulatory commissions with business-friendly appointees.

Harding (1921-1923)

Harding, an Ohio newspaper publisher picked by party bosses "in a smoke-filled room" at the deadlocked 1920 convention, made some excellent appointments: Charles Evans Hughes (State), Herbert Hoover (Commerce), Andrew Mellon (Treasury), and former president William Howard Taft as Chief Justice. He signed an income tax cut, the Fordney-McCumber Tariff Act of 1922 (higher tariffs), and created the Bureau of the Budget. He also pardoned Socialist Eugene Debs, who had received 920,000 votes from prison in 1920.

The downside: corrupt appointees. Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall took bribes for oil leases near Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty took bribes not to prosecute suspects. Harding died of a heart attack in August 1923, before the scandals broke publicly, and was never personally implicated.

Coolidge (1923-1929)

"Silent Cal" had become famous breaking the 1919 Boston police strike as Massachusetts governor. His philosophy fit one line: "The business of America is business." He won the 1924 election easily over Democrat John W. Davis, while Progressive Party candidate Robert La Follette pulled nearly 5 million votes from discontented farmers and laborers. Coolidge believed in standing aside while business ran itself, cut spending hard, and vetoed veterans' bonuses and the McNary-Haugen farm relief bill of 1928.

The Election of 1928

With Coolidge declining to run again, Republicans nominated Herbert Hoover, a self-made millionaire who had served Wilson, Harding, and Coolidge but never held elective office. Democrats ran New York governor Alfred E. Smith, a Roman Catholic and Prohibition opponent who appealed to urban immigrant voters but faced open anti-Catholic prejudice. Hoover ran on "Coolidge prosperity," even suggesting poverty would soon end, and won in a landslide that cracked the Democratic South (Texas, Florida, Virginia). That promise turned bitterly ironic when the economy collapsed in fall 1929, the subject of Topic 7.9.

Key Terms to Know

Practice and Next Steps

Reinforce this chapter with Fiveable's Topic 7.8 course study guide, which frames the same material the way the AP exam tests it. Then browse the rest of the APUSH AMSCO notes to keep your Period 7 timeline straight, especially 7.7 on 1920s innovations for the consumer-culture context behind these controversies.

To check yourself, run guided practice questions on Unit 7 and drill vocabulary in the APUSH key terms glossary. The urban-rural divide, nativism, and the Harlem Renaissance show up constantly in Period 7 multiple-choice sets and SAQ prompts, so make sure you can explain causes and effects, not just name the events.