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Republican party fragmenting
Small-town America feared changes in cities:
- Secular modernism eroding conservative Christianity
- Red Scare, immigrants
An age of "disillusionment":
- Crime pervaded society
- Corrupt politics
- Nativism, Racism
Americans questioned new technologies and big government from WWI.
Questions:
How did the "Red Scare" shape American poltiical culture after WWI?
How did nativism influence immigration laws?
Why did the KKK resurge during the 1920s?
How did the "Scopes Trial" reflect broader cultural changes between
Christian Fundamentalists and Modernists?
How did Americans respond to Prohibition?
What was "The Crime of the Century"?
The war caused a loss of faith in institutions and government
- "What was it all for?"
- Progressivism curtailed by fear that government infringes on rights
- Postwar layoffs (~9million people) --> postwar depression in 1920-21
Bolshevik revolution happened during WWI
- Communist/Leninist state developing (single party system)
- Americans scared of labor unionizers, radicals of potential revolution
- Dynamite bombs mailed to prominent politicians, businessmen.
- Justice Department claimed this was a radical attempt to takeover
- But it was actually an anarchist organization
Jan 2, 1920
- Justice Department arrests, without warrants, 1600 anarchists, aliens
- Detained without bail and didn't allow to contact employers
- Justified with guilt by association
- Although peaks here, persists throughout 1920s
Italian and Mexican Immigrants
- 1/2 of white men and 1/3 of white women were immigrants
- Had more radical ideas about labor organization
- Nativism wanted to exclude foreign radicals
- Emergency Immigration Act of 1921
- Limits to 3% of population of each country
- Immigration Act of 1924
- Ceiling of 2% of population on other countries
- Banned Asian immigrants
- Wanted to keep out Jews, Italians, Turks, Russians
- And wanted to favor Brit, French, German
HL Mencken criticizes Act for treating new immigrants as
domestic enemies despite their benefit to America
- Didn't convince nativist Calvin Coolidge
"America must be kept for Americans"
- No quotas for Western hemisphere
- Wanted Cuban/Mexican/Latin cheap labor
- Sackel and Vans-Eddy's "Crime"
- Arrested with pistols, lied to police
- But people gave them alibis
- Italian immigrants and labor organizers
- Criticized for stealing from a shoe factory and killing guards
- Electrified 6 years after arrest, still claiming innocence
- Debated guilt
"The Birth of a Nation," shown at White House endorsed by W. Wilson
- Most popular movie due to the endorsement
- Rewrote Southern history portraying Klansmen as heroes and slaves
as unscrupulous collaborators.
- Surgeon in Atlanta founds new KKK. Only allowed "natives" (white
Anglo-Sax non-alien) to join.
- Sponsored baseball teams, beauty pageants, frats
- Preached hatred against Blacks, atheists, prostitutes,
immigrants, Jews
- 40% of members were in three midwestern states
- Most clan members were farmers but also attracted pillars of
community: teachers, doctors, accountants
- David C Stevenson, grand Dragon of Indiana bought off state and
local politicians with merch sales and Klan donations
- Kidnapped, raped, and mutilated a 29yo woman on his staffu
- When not pardoned, implicates the polits he bribed
- Klan membership dwindles to 100K mostly southerners
- And anti-Klan laws are passed
- Fun fact: Fred C Trump, DJT's father, detained at a rally
Fundamentalism and The "Scopes-Monkey" Trial
- Fundamentalism = Radical Protestantism
- Anti-Modernist Sect. Modernism is integration of science w/ Christ
- Literal belief in the Bible
- Williams Jennings Bryan, "the Great Commoner", uses fundamentalism
as a popular talking point
- Passed state laws banning teaching of Darwinian evolution.
- These laws only passed in the South
- Tennessee state legislature bans teaching of evolution
- In Dayton, John Scopes becomes a test case to raise publicity
for the depressed Daytonian economy.
- William Jennings Bryan called as an expert witness in biblical
interpretation
- Darrow quizzes Bryan on various biblical stories, asking
him if he "really believes" in, for ex., Eve being Adam's
rib
- Conflict erupted between Darrow and Bryan.
- Scopes is declared guilty but fine not counted
Prohibition and Al Capone
- Temperance became a test of American patriotism
- Brewers were discriminated against for being German
- Many wanted to police African-Americans & foreign-born
- Initially cut drinking in half
- But quickly, floating saloon boats and bootleggers circumvented
- 700 million gallons of home-brewed beer, bathtub gin, and
stockpiling work around the law.
- These liquors were dangerous
- Very few Americans respected it
- Pres. Warren G Harding served bootleg liquor in White House
- Skyrocketing alcohol imprisonments
- Increased income for organized crime (Al Capone)
- Al Capone scarred by man in bar, "Scarface"
- $60 million dollars in revenues
- Hundreds of unsolved murders
- Soup kitchen, good tipper, hero to many
- Convicted on charges of tax evasion. Dies behind bars
"Crime of the Century"
Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb
- Intelligent and wealthy
- Homosexual partners
- Engaged in petty crimes: robberies,
- Believed they were exempt from the law and want to commit a "perfect
crime" of murder
- Kill Bobby Franks
- Send ransom to Franks
- Dump body of boy in marsh; it's discovered
- Leopold's special glasses left next to the boy and the ransom
typewrite style corresponds to his typewriter
- Both confess and blame eachother but also blame Nietzche's
"superman theory" (some people above the law).
- Viewed as a feature of breakdown in American morals
- Clarence Darrow defends Leopold and Loeb
- Has them plead guilty
- Uses Freud's theory: senseless acts of aggression led by desires
out of their control
- Trauma as young boys and basically mentally ill
- Saves them from death sentence and gets them life
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