-
Henry Ford have perfected the system for manufacture automobiles by means of an assembly line.
-
United Negro Improvement Association: Brought to Harlem from Jamaica by Marcus Garvey, advocated individual/racial pride for African Americans, and developed political idea of black nationalism.
-
The Jazz Age: brought North by African American musicians and became a symbol of the new and modern culture of the Cities.
-
18th amendment: Wartime concerns to conserve grain and maintain a sober workforce moved congress to pass this amendment which strictly prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages.
-
Frederick W. Taylor's time-and-motion studies and principles of scientific management led to greater use of research.
-
New technology such as chemical fertilizers and gasoline tractors help farmers increase their production, but productivity increased their debts.
-
Membership in unions declined by 20% so some companies began the practice welfare capitalism: offering their employees improved benefits and higher wages in order to remove the need for organizing unions.
-
Compulsory School Laws had widespread belief in the value of education/economic prosperity and the number of high school graduates had doubled to over 25% of the school age young adults.
-
Fundamentalism: Protestant preachers in rural areas condemned the modernist and taught the everywhere in the Bible must be accepted as literally true.
-
Harlem Renaissance: Largest African American community in the Harlem section of NYC that was famous for concentration of talented actors, artists, musicians, and writers.
-
Leading Harlem poets: Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and Claude McKay had poems that expressed a range of emotions.
-
Blues singers: Bessie Smith, Paul Robeson who performed before integrated audiences but found their audiences segregated in rest of the nations.
-
Modernist took a historical and critical view of certain passages in the Bible and believed they could accept Darwin's theory of evolution without abandoning their religious faith.
-
The use of contraceptives for birth control was against the law in almost every state, but the work of Margaret Sanger and other advocates of birth control achieved growing acceptance.
-
Prohibition didnt stop people from drinking… led to them defying the law by going to speakeasies where smuggled liquor was sold.
-
Canadians and Americans were exempt from restrictions which enabled almost 500,000 Mexicans to immigrate illegally to the Southwest.
-
The Roaring Twenties was a period of literary creativity and works of notable authors such as Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Elliot who expressed disillusionment with the ideals of earlier time in the materialism of a business-oriented future.
-
American writer part of the Lost Generation, F. Scott Fitzgerald, rose to prominence as a chronicler of the Jazz Age with the success of his first novel, This Side of Paradise.
-
Ernest Hemingway is among the most prominent of the "Lost Generation' with his style that he called the Iceberg Theory.
-
The American writer, William Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays, and screenplays.
-
The Lost Generation: Leading writers of the post-war decade who scorn religion as hypocritical and bitterly condemned the sacrifice of wartime as a fraud perpetrated by money interest.
-
Warring Harding: Approved a reduction in the income tax, an increase in tariff rates under the Fordney-McCumber Tariff Act of 1922, and an establishment of the bureau of the budget.
-
Republican leadership did not preach laissez-faire economics but accepted the idea of limited government regulation as an aid to stabilizing business..
-
First Quota Act: limited immigration to 3% of the number of foreign-born person from a given Nation counted in the 1910 census.
-
Congress discovered that Albert B. Fall had accepted bribes for granting oil leases near Teapot Dome, Wyoming.
-
Calvin Coolidge: Believed that silence was good in politics and in limited government that stood aside while business conducted its own affairs.
-
Columbia Broadcasting System: provided works of radio stations that enabled people from one another country to the other to listen to the same programs.
-
Herbert Hoover: Republican candidate in election of 1928 who suggested poverty would end and took a large number of electoral votes in south.
-
Black Thursday October 24: unprecedented volume of selling on wall street and stock prices plunged.
-
Buying on Margin: Instead of investing their money to share in the profits of the company, people were speculating that the price of the stock will go up and they could sell it for profit.
-
The Securities and Exchange Commission: created to regulate the stock market and place strict limits on the kind of speculative practices that led to a Wall Street crash.
-
Oil used to power factories and to provide gasoline for the rapidly increasing numbers of automobiles and in 1930 oil would account for 23% of US Energy.
-
Divorce: Women suffragists demanded changes in the divorce laws to permit women to escape abusive and incompatible husbands, so liberalized divorce laws led to 1 in 6 marriages ending in divorce.
-
Almost 20% of African Americans lived in north and still faced discrimination in housing and jobs, but there was some improvement in earning and standard of life.
-
Hawley-Smoot Tariff: President signed into law a schedule of tariff rates that was highest in history with the purpose to satisfy US business leaders who thought a higher tariffs or protector markets from foreign competition.
-
With their farms turned to dust, thousands of Okies from Oklahoma and surrounding states migrated westward to California in search of farm or factory work.
-
Reconstruction Finance Corporation: Created by Congress for propping up faltering railroads, banks, life insurance companies, and other financial institutions.
-
The Civil Works Administration: hired laborers for temporary construction projects sponsored by the federal government.
-
The Emergency Banking Relief Act: Authorized the government to examine the finances of banks closed during the bank holiday and reopen those judged to be sound.
-
The Farm Credit Administration: provided low interest farm loans and mortgages to prevent foreclosures on the property of indebted farmers.
-
The National Recovery Administration: an attempt to guarantee reasonable profits for business, fair wages, and hours for labor that could help each industry.
-
The Agricultural Adjustment Administration: encouraged farmers to reduce production (boost prices) by offering to pay government subsidies for every acre they plowed under.
-
The Federal Emergency Relief Administration: offered grants of federal money to States and local governments that were operating soup kitchens in other forms of relief for the jobless and homeless.
-
The Tennessee Valley Authority: a huge experiment in regional development and public planning that hired thousands of people in one of the nation's poorest regions to build dams, operate electric power plants, control flooding and erosion, and manufacture fertilizer.
-
The Civilian Conservation Corps: employed young men on projects on federal lands and paid their family small monthly sums.
-
The Public Works Administration directed by Harold Ickes: a lot of money to State and local governments for building of roads, bridges, dams, and other public works.
-
The Home Owners Loan Corporation: Providing refinancing of small homes to prevent foreclosures.
-
The Federal Housing Administration: gave the construction industry and homeowners a boost by ensuring bank loans for building new houses and repair old ones.
-
Works Progress Administration: Employed 3.4 million men and women who had formerly been on the relief roles of state and local governments and paid them double the relief rate but less than the going wage for regular workers.
-
John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath: wrote about hardships of this time in his classic study of economic heartbreak.
