In this painting by American artist Guy Pene du Bois, a group of people crowd into a nightclub, yet their loneliness is deafening.

Rapid urban ization, technological innovation, widespread prosperity, social rebellion, cultural upheaval, and political conservatism marked the period.

The Nineteenth Amendment made it possible for women to vote and experience many of the same rights as men.

Jim Crow laws prevented most African Americans in the South from voting.

For the first time in the nation's history, more people lived in cities than in rural areas.

While the urban middle class prospered, farmers suffered as the wartime boom in exports of grains and livestock to Europe ground to a halt.

Four million people moved from farms to cities because of the better quality of life and the economic downturn.

As a national entertainment culture emerged, the scope and pace of societal changes were confusing.

Radio networks and motion pictures, mass ownership of automobiles, and national chain stores, combined with the rise of mass marketing and advertising, transformed America into the world's leading consumer society.

The growth of middle class urban life was stimulated by the culture of mass consumption.

Many pro gressives were skeptical of any politician who claimed to be a reformer or an idealist by 1920.

The desire to restore traditional values and social stability led to the election of Warren G. Harding president in 1920.

The impulse for social reform shifted into a drive for moral righteousness as the demand for honest, efficient government and public services remained strong.

New York, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia are the ten largest cities in the US.

Wage workers enjoyed record-breaking increases in average income as the nation's total wealth almost doubled and jobs were plentiful.

The rapid growth of the automotive industry created an immediate need for roads, highways, service stations, and motor hotels.

Technology played a key role in the prosperity by allowing mass pro duction through the assembly- line process.

Powerful new machines and more efficient ways of operating generated dramatic increases in productivity.

Hundreds of thousands of people, mostly north erners, invested in Florida real estate sight unseen, but what they were told was prime property often turned out to be swamp land.

Railroads were no longer transporting construction supplies, leaving thousands of unfinished homes in the state.

Dead subdivisions line the highway, their names are half- obliterated on crumbling stucco gates, as described by a journalist.

There are white- way lights that guard over miles of cement sidewalks, where grass and palmetto trees take the place of homes that were to be.

The great stock market bubble that would burst at the end of 1929 was caused by the Florida land boom.

The middle class was changed by the explosion of new consumer goods made available through a national marketplace.

converting once- frugal people into enthusiastic shoppers is needed to keep factory production humming.

During the Great War, the government urged Americans to work long hours, conserve resources and live simply.

Businesses developed new ways for consumers to finance purchases over time, instead of paying cash up front.

The number of households with indoor plumbing, washing machines, and automobiles increased as well.

Among the urban middle class, creature comforts and conveniences such as flush toilets, electric irons and fans, hand held cameras, wristwatches, cigarette lighters, vacuum cleaners, and linoleum floors became more widely available.

They read the same magazines, listened to the same radio programs, loved the same sports stars and celebrities, drove the same cars, and watched the same movies.

As the international center of movie production, Hol ywood, California, was known for grinding out Westerns, crime dra mas, murder mysteries, and the comedies of Mack Sennett's Keystone Com pany.

The consumer culture was expanded by setting stan dards and tastes in fashion, music, dancing, and hair.

At night after dinner, fam ilies gathered to listen to music, speeches, news broadcasts, weather forecasts, and comedy shows.

Calvin Coolidge was the first president to address the nation by radio, and his monthly talks paved the way for Franklin Delano Roosevelt's influential "fire side chats" during the thirties.

Radio players act out 'Rip Van Winkle' in a sound effects studio during a broadcast.

American pilots flew British or French warplanes when the United States entered the war.

Airmail delivery contracts were subsidized by the federal government under the Kel y Act of 1925.

A handsome, daring college dropout, Lindbergh oversaw a fanatical effort to reduce the weight of his plane to accommodate the 2,500 pounds of fuel needed for the crossing.

He used a wicker basket for a seat, removed the radio, and made the plane hard to control so that he wouldn't fall asleep.

The celebration of the end of the Great War was overshadowed by the New York City parade honor ing his accomplishment.

A new dance, the Lindy Hop, was named for him, and a popular song celebrated his "peerless, fearless" feat.

The promoter began looking for a female pilot to equal his feat after Lindbergh returned to America.

After flying solo from Canada to Northern Ireland in fifteen hours, she became one of the most famous women in the world.

In 1937, Earhart and a male navigator set out to fly around the globe, long before radar was developed.

The emergence of a car- centered culture was the most significant economic and social development of the early twentieth century.

Selling millions of identical cars at a small profit allowed Ford to keep prices low and wages high.

The discovery of oil fields in Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, and California helped propel the automobile revolution.

The mass production of automobiles was made possible by gravity slides and chain conveyors.

It employed 68,000 workers and used a moving conveyor system that pulled the car down a line of sequential workstations.

As the car- in- process moved down the line, each worker performed a single task, such as installing a fender or wheel.

In the words of one male driver, young people viewed the car as an incredible engine of escape from parental control and a safe place to take a girl and hold hands, neck, pet, or.

Cars helped fuel the economic boom of the 1920s by creating tens of thousands of new jobs and a huge demand for steel, glass, rubber, leather, oil, and gasoline.

The car culture stimulated road construction, and dotted the landscape with gasoline stations, traffic lights, bil boards, and motor hotels.

People spent their leisure time differently because of car ownership and rising incomes.

Americans fell in love with watching sports in stadiums, bal parks, and boxing rings, as well as visiting friends and relatives in the countryside.

Baseball teams attracted huge crowds and had larger than life heroes such as George Herman "Babe" Ruth and Henry Louis "Lou" Gehrig.

In 1927, Ruth set a record by hitting sixty home runs, and more than 20 million people attended professional games.

Negro Leagues were formed for African Americans because baseball was a different sport.

Grange made professional football competitive with baseball as a spectator sport when he signed a contract with the Chicago Bears.

Jess Wil ard was a giant of a man who stood six and a half feet tall and weighed 300 pounds.

Dempsey became a dominant force in boxing after Wil ard gave up in the fourth round.

The man was popular with working class men because he had been poor and lived as a hobo for many years.

Ten state governors, 1,000 reporters, and numerous Hol ywood celebrities attended the victory party for James Joseph "Gene" Tunney in 1927.

The Piedpiper of jazz was an inventive and freewheeling performer who reshaped the American music scene.

He delighted audiences with his passionate trumpet performances and open- hearted personality when he moved to Chicago in 1922.

Wild "petting parties," free love, speakeasies, "joyriding," and skinny dipping were some of the things Americans learned about during the twenties.

The influence of Sigmund Freud, the Austrian founder of modern psychoanalysis, resulted in the frank treat ment of sex.

Freud explored the human psyche, deter mined to legitimize psychoanalysis as a professional field anchored in clinical research.

He relied upon a number of questionable clinical cases to justify his insis tence that the mind is baffling in its opaqueness and unpredictability.

Freud created a new vocabulary for mapping the inner lives of people, explaining the complex dynamics of the ego, the id, and the superego after 1914.

He claimed that dreams give the "royal road to the unconscious" by revealing the psyche as a roiling snake pit of "repressed" sexual yearnings and aggressions, many of which result from early childhood experiences with repressed erotic feel ings toward our parents.

The role of psychother apy was to help patients discover their hidden desires.

Freud argued that women and men are endowed with equal sexual energy, and that human behavior is driven by a variety of intense sexual desires, repressed memories, and efforts to release aggression.

Psychoanalysis, which explains activities in the mind, became the world's most celebrated technique for helping troubled people come to grips with the psychic demons haunting them.

Many young mothers in the working class tenements of Manhattan were struggling to provide for their families because of Margaret Sanger, a nurse and midwife.

The home of Sanger and her husband became a gathering place for journalists, labor leaders, and reform ers after they joined the Socialist party.

Birth control supporters were angered by the endorsement of sterilization for the mentally incompetent and for people with certain hereditary conditions.

The distribution of contraceptive information through the mail was not legalized by Sanger, but she laid the groundwork for such efforts.

The rebellion against traditional female roles was reflected in the new clothing fashions.

Emancipated "new women" took the right to vote, but 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 800-361-3020 In 1919 skirt hems were six inches above the ground, and by 1927 they were at the knee.

They joined young men in smoking cigarettes, drinking, gambling, and shaking and shimmying to jazz music.

The daughter of a strict Alabama Supreme Court justice, who was celebrated for her beauty and charm, was wild to the point of exhaustion, flirting with men and drinking her self into a haze.

Stimulated by bootleg gin and her mischievous personality, she loved dancing in New York City fountains, stripping off her clothes in the middle of Grand Central Station, and greeting the dawn in all- night cafes.

The conservative political mood helped steer women who had worked for the war effort back into their traditional roles as homemakers.

A female student at Smith College in Massachusetts expressed frustration that a woman must choose between a home and her work when a man may have both.

Accounting assis tants and department store clerks are some of the new vocations that some moved into.

"supermarkets" offered year-round access to fruits, vegetables, and meats, which greatly reduced the traditional tasks of food preparation-- canning, baking bread, and plucking chickens.

They checked into a hotel and walked to the courthouse to apply for a marriage license, but were told there was a five day waiting period.

After being turned down several times, the betrothed couple found a minister willing to marry them.

The nation that Wilson led into war to make the world safe for democracy was still unsafe for those bold enough to cross the color line.

Almost a million African Americans boarded trains for what they called the "promised land" up north in the 1920s.

Richard Wright wrote that they were lured by the warmth of other suns-- better living conditions and better paying jobs.

In populous states like New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois, blacks gained more political leverage.

Oscar De Priest, a Chicago Republican, became the first black elected to Congress since Reconstruction in 1928, and the first from a northern district.

African Americans leave the South for jobs in New York, Chicago, and St. Louis in Jacob Lawrence's paintings.

In densely populated northern cities, blacks who moved into established neighborhoods clashed with local ethnic groups who feared that the newcomers would take their jobs.

Many southern blacks were taken advantage of by white landlords and were often forced into substandard and segregation housing.

The NAACP focused on legal action to bring the Four teenth and Fifteenth Amendments back to life.

The bill to make mob murder a federal crime was defeated by southerners in the Senate.

The "great, dark city" of Harlem has more blacks per square mile than any urban neighborhood in the nation.

Harlem writers and artists were ready to express their dark skinned selves without fear or shame.

The first black Rhodes Scholar was the guiding spirit of the new African American culture.

Locke was less than five feet tall and weighed 95 pounds, but he was the champion of the Harlem Renaissance.

In 1925, he announced that the Harlem Renaissance was led by a self- confident "new Negro" who no longer felt inferior to white culture or imprisoned by a sense of grievance against the Jim Crow system of white supremacy.

Harlem Renaissance writers celebrated American culture, including jazz and the blues, which had deep emotional roots in black history.

The writer "Dean" of the Harlem lem Renaissance was active in the Har and the philosopher Women.

Black artists in the Harlem Renaissance used their African roots and collective history as inspiration.

Augusta Savage wanted to challenge negative views of African Americans.

An aspiring writer and inventive storyteller, she was the first African American to enroll at the women's college of Columbia University, where she majored in cultural anthropology.

Within a few months, she was acting as the queen of the Harlem Renaissance, writing short stories and plays, and positioning herself at the center of the community's rowdy social life.

In the face of white bigotry and violence, African Americans in the Lower South forged cohesive communities.

African Americans for three centuries had shared the same cultural background, the same system, and the same standard of beauty as whites.

Harlem Renaissance writers produced dozens of novels and volumes of poetry, several Broadway plays, and a flood of short stories, essays, and films by 1930.

Gar vey started the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Jamaica two years before he brought it to Harlem.

Intellectuals, writers, and artists who used new modes of expression and behavior to cope with an era of confusion and possibility were called the postmoderns.

The start of the twentieth century was seen as a historical hinge that opened the way for a new world view that rejected notions of reality and values.

The Modernists claimed that they were acknowledging the arrival of a new way of viewing life and expressing its rowdy energy.

Albert Einstein was one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, and he was responsible for a fundamental change in understanding the operations of the universe.

His theories about the fluid interplay of space, time, matter, energy, and gravity caused traditional notions of a sta ble universe to wobble.

Einstein published papers in 1905 that changed science forever while at the same time being contrary to common sense.

Einstein was one of the most influential scientists of the twentieth century and he received a prize for his work.

The theoretical basis for quantum physics would lead to new electronic technologies such as television, laser beams, and Semiconductor used to make computers and cell phones.

In his second paper, Einstein confirmed the existence of mole cules and atoms by showing how their random collisions explained the motions of minute particles in water.

Einstein's theory of relativity states that the light beam will appear the same regardless of how fast one is moving or how far away from it.

The general theory of relativity maintains that the fundamental concepts of space, time, matter, and energy are not distinct, independent enti ties with stable and permanent dimensions.

There was less faith in absolutes during the twenties as the idea of "relativity" emerged in discussions of topics such as sexu ality.

In 1920, an American journalist said that Einstein's theories had moved physics into the area of metaphysics, where paradoxes and magic take the place of solid fact.

The scientific breakthrough associated with Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and others helped to inspire and shape a "modernist" cultural revolution.

By the second decade of the twentieth century, cultural modernism had spread to the United States.

Modernity was the widespread awareness that new ideas and ways of doing things were making a sharp break with tradition, and that new technologies, modes of transportation and communication, and scientific discoveries were transforming the nature of everyday life.

The idea that God did not exist, that reality was not rational, orderly, or obvious, and that social progress could no longer be taken for granted were some of the assumptions that led to modernity.

Writers, artists, musicians, designers, and architects rebelled against good taste, old fashioned morals, and old- time religion because of these premises.

In her private life, she became famous for hosting in her Paris salon the leading modernists from around the world.

Until the twentieth century, most writers and artists had taken for granted an accessible, identifiable world that could be easily observed, scientifi cal y explained.

Einstein's ideas about relativity were applied to a world in which reality no longer had an objective or recognizable basis.

For artists such as Spanish painter Picasso and Irish writer James Joyce, art involved an unpredictable journey into the realm of individual fantasies and dreams, exploring and expressing the personal, the unknown, the primitive, the abstract.

The representation of recognizable subjects was discarded in favor of vibrant color, simplified forms, and geometric shapes.

The International Exhibition of Mod ern Art opened in New York City in 1913.

"America in spite of its newness is destined to become the center of the modern art movement," said Walt Kuhn, a painter who helped organize the exhibition.

The world's most celebrated collection of avant- garde paintings and sculpture can be found in the Museum of Modern Art.

The leading American authors of modern art and literature lived in England and Europe.

They were self- conscious revolutionaries concerned with strange, new, and often beautiful forms of expression, and they found more inspiration and more receptive audiences in Europe.

One of the young American writers Pound took under his wing was recently graduated from Harvard.

The cul tural salon in Paris was a gathering place for American and European modernists.

Those who had lost faith in the values and institutions of Western civilization were looking for new gods to worship.

He wanders the cafes and nightclubs of postwar Europe with his often- drunk friends, who acknowledge that they are all wounded and sterile in their own way.

Like his fictional characters, Fitzgerald was delighted in the hard- drinking, party- going pace of the Jazz Age, and then flickered out in a fog of drunkenness.

The novel dealt with misfortunes of the fortunate, such as self-destructive wealthy people who drank and partied as a means of medicating themselves to the pointlessness of their shallow lives.

After the stock market crashed in October 1929, Zelda Fitzgerald experienced the first of several nervous breakdowns triggered by schizophrenia and attempted suicide.

At the same time that the world careened into the Great Depression, she and Scott experienced the "crack up" of their hopes and sanity.

The title of one of Fitzgerald's earliest novels seemed to have predicted the hollowness and aimlessness of the Jazz Age.

The American economy grew at its fastest rate in history during the 1920s as mass production and sales of new consumer goods increased.

Millions of Americans were encouraged to purchase automobiles, radios, and other electrical appliances because of innovations in production, advertising, and financing.

Ford Motor Company pioneered mass production using moving assembly lines, a highly efficient method that helped make its cars affordable for a majority of Americans.

Mass culture was brought about by innovations in com munications such as the growth in radio ownership, transportation, finance, and advertising.

To be "modern" meant to break free of tradition, violate restrictions, shock the public, and make one's works difficult to explain or interpret.

Crowds panicked by the stock market plunge take to Wall Street on the morning of October 29, 1929.

The excesses of the Lost Generation and the frivolities associated with the Jazz Age made little sense to Americans during the twenties.

The majority still led traditional lives and were shocked by the decade's social turmoil and cultural rebellion.

Republican efforts to reverse the progressivism of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson mirrored the small- town backlash against modern city life.

Cities with immigrants and foreign ideas such as socialism, communism, anarchism, and labor union militancy were traced by many Americans to the germs of dangerous radicalism.

militant Protestantism sought to restore the primacy of traditional Christian morality during the Reactionary Twenties of western Europe.

More than one million foreigners entered the United States between 1920 and 1921 after the literacy test was added in 1917.

Senator Ellison D. "Cotton Ed" Smith, a South Carolina Democrat, said that it was time to shut the door.

He charged that Immi grants from southern and eastern Europe were being treated as domestic ene mies.

Congress could not raise the quota for European refugees because of Hitler's persecution of Jews.

Congress sought to ensure an adequate supply of low- paid laborers from Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, in response to the lobbying efforts of railroads and commercial farm owners in the West.

Farm owners preferred migrant workers over black or Anglo tenants because they were less likely to have established roots in the United States.

The nativism embedded in the new laws reinforced the connection between European immigrants and radicalism.

Two Italian immigrants were arrested in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 5, 1920, for planning to topple the American government.

The paymaster and a guard of a shoe factory were killed by fish peddler Bartolomeo Vanzetti and his co-conspirators.

The president hosted a special showing of the film at the White House and was reported to have said, "It is like writing history with lightning."

As crusading heroes and newly freed slaves, the Klansmen were working with corrupt state governments.

During the opening of the film in Atlanta, William J. Simmons announced the founding of the second Ku Klux Klan.

The Klan was both strange and mainstream, sponsoring baseball teams, college fra ternities, and county fairs.

African Americans, Roman Catholics, Jews, immigrants, Communists, atheists, prostitutes, and adulterers were all preached hatred against by it.

In the Southwest, Klansmen directed their anger at Mexicans, in the Pacific Northwest, Japanese people were the enemy, and in New York, the targets were Jews and Catholics.

Wilson, Coolidge, and Hoover did not speak out against the Klan during the twenties because it became "respectable" in the eyes of many.

The initiation fee was $10 and members were required to buy an official Klan robe, a pointed hood, and other accessories.

Families attended Klan gatherings while listening to violent speeches, watching fireworks, and burning crosses.

In Texas, Klan members used intimidation, beatings, and "tar and feathers" to discipline alcoholics, gamblers, adulterers, and other sinners.

Most Klan members were small farmers, sharecroppers, or wage workers, but the organization also attracted clergymen, engineers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, business leaders, and teachers.

The man who had grown wealthy by skimming from the dues he collected from Klan members was planning to run for president.

The governor, the Indianapolis mayor, the county sheriff, congressmen, and other officeholders were indicted.

More than a dozen Klan offices and meeting places were bombed, burned, or blasted.

While the Klan fought against the nation's "growing immo rality" and the "alien menace" they also defended old- time religion against dangerous ideas in progressive or liberal Protestant churches.

Charles Darwin's theories of biological evolution were the most threatening of those ideas because they said that the Bible was not a word of God.

Conservative Protestants embraced a militant fundamentalism that was hostile to liberal beliefs and insisted on the truth of the Bible.

A burst of Protestant fundamentalism swept the country, largely as a conservative reaction to the spread of modernity in mainline Protestantism, which sought to accommodate Christian teaching with mod ern science.

The only national leader who had the support, prestige, and eloquence to transform fundamentalism into a popular crusade was William Jennings Bryan, the former Democratic congressman, secretary of state, and three- time presidential candidate.

Bryan was a strange bird, a liberal progressive and pacifist Populist in politics and a right- wing religious crusader who believed in the Bible.

Darwin's theory of evolution suggested that human beings had evolved from monkeys and apes.

The teaching of Darwinian evolution in public schools was banned in many states in the 1920s, but the only victories were in the South.

The first woman governor of Texas banned school text books that included sections on Darwinism.

In 1925 the legislature in Tennessee banned the teaching of evolution in public schools and colleges because of the fundamentalist war on Darwinism.

In the small mining town of Dayton, in east ern Tennessee, civic leaders eager to create money- making publicity for their depressed economy persuaded John T. Scopes, a high- school science teacher.

John T. Scopes clasps his face in his hands and listens to one of his attorneys in this picture.

A tattooed man preached on a street corner while a live piano- playing monkey was paraded around town.

Clarence Darrow, the nation's foremost defense attorney and a defender of the rights of the working class, had volunteered to defend Scopes, as had William Jennings Bryan, a national celebrity who had offered his services to the prosecution.

Bryan was called an expert witness on biblical interpretation by the defense on the seventh day of the trial.

The judge told the jury that they only had to decide if John T. Scopes had taught evolution.

Congress sent the Eighteenth Amendment to the states on December 18, 1917, and William Bryan died in 1925 knowing that one of his crusades had succeeded.

One year later, the Reactionary Twenties amendment banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of liquors.

The cause of prohibition became a test of American patriotism because of the backlash against the majority of beer brewers because of their German background.

Soon to be chief justice of the Supreme Court, William Howard Taft had a different perspective.

The primary goal of the nativists was to police the behavior of the foreign born, the working class, African Americans, and poor whites.

The head of the Women's Christian Temperance Union believed that the war against foreign invaders was necessary.

Neigh Borhood saloons closed, and drinking among the working poor dropped by half.

Commercial bootleggers sprouted like mushrooms when passenger ships anchored just off shore to serve as floating saloons.

During the 13 years of prohibition, the Yale Club in New York City had so much liquor that it never ran out.

Doctors and even veterinarians wrote many prescriptions for "medicinal" brands such as Old Grand- Dad and Jim Beam.

"bathtub gin" was the simplest of alcoholic beverages, requiring little more than a gallon of water and some fruit, grain, or potatoes.

Tens of thousands of people were killed or disabled by batches of illegal liquor that had alcohol content 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 Congress never provided funding to implement the Volstead Act because of the increases in federal power.

New York's mayor said it would require a quarter of a million police officers.

A majority of both houses of Congress were regular customers according to the largest bootlegger in Washington, D.C. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover often went to the Belgian Embassy to buy fine wines.

bootleg liquor was supplied by crime syndicates and sold in saloons called speakeasies, which police often ignored in exchange for bribes.

The entire stream of liquor's production, pricing, distribution, and sales was controlled by organized crime syndicates.

When he was a teenager, he shined shoes on a street corner in New York where he saw mobsters working.

An annual income of $60 million was brought to Capone by his bootlegging, prostitution, and gambling empire.

The worst was when his hit men went to a garage to kill a group of people who were waiting for a shipment of booze.

He dressed in expensive, colorful suits, rode in a custom- built, armor- plated Cadil ac with bulletproof glass, telephoned his mother and wife every day, gave huge tips to waiters, news boys, and hat-check girls, and provided a soup kitchen that served 3,000 of He claimed to be providing the public with the goods and services it demanded when he was criticized for his shady dealings.

After the Great War, most Americans had grown tired of Wilson's crusading ideals and turned their backs on any leader who promoted sweeping reforms.

Theodore Roosevelt died just as he was starting to campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, and Wilson's stroke left him broken physically and mentally.

Farmers in the Great Plains and West thought wartime price controls discriminated against them.

Liberal intel lectuals were disil usioned with grassroots democracy because of popular support for the Ku Klux Klan and religious fundamentalism.

As the nation transitioned from war to peace, most people focused on their own concerns.

Efforts to improve public education, public health, and social- welfare programs gained steam at the state and local levels, as the progressive impulse for honest, efficient government and reg ulation of business remained strong.

Conservative Republicans returned to power at the national level, eager to reduce the size and scope of the fed eral government.

One Republican sena tor said that the party chose Harding because he was from a key state and looked good.

Cox's campaign was disorganized and poorly funded, and the Democrats struggled against the conservative postwar mood.

A farmer's son and newspaper editor, who was "old fashioned and even reactionary in matters of faith and morals", had pledged "total abstinence" from alcohol.

The public believed that Harding was a handsome, charming politician who looked like a leader.

He wanted to reverse the progressive activism of Wilson and Roosevelt and reestablish the authority of Congress over the presidency.

The third richest man in the world behind John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford was the Secretary of the Treasury when he came up with the plan to generate economic growth.

The Gen eral Accounting Office was created to audit spending by federal agencies.

The act fulfilled a long held progressive desire to bring more efficiency and nonpartisanship to the budget preparation process.

The brilliant but cold Mellon was described as a " thin- voiced, thin- bodied, shy and uncommunicative man" by his son.

The Republican policy of high tariffs on imported goods was promoted by Mellon.

The revival of German corporations that had dominated those industries before the Great War was helped by the Fordney- McCumber Tariff of 1922.

Many progressive regulatory laws were sought to be dismantled by the Republican economic program.

Commissioners were appointed to federal agencies who would promote "regulatory capitalism" and policies friendly to business interests.

All true negroes believe that all races should develop on their own social lines.

The president tried to reduce the workday and workweek to give the working class time for leisure and family life, but he ran into stiff opposition in Congress.

The anti- union effort led by businesses that wanted to keep wages low and unions weak helped create a purchasing power crisis where the working poor were not earning enough to buy the goods being churned out by increasingly produc tive industries.

Executives used company profits to pay dividends to stockholders, invest in new equipment, and increase their own salaries, while doing little to help wage earners.

The postwar spirit of isolation was found in the Senate's rejection of American membership in the League of Nations.

The great problems of the world-- social, political, economic and theological-- do not concern George Jean Nathan.

The United States could not ignore its expanding global interests because of the desire to stay out of foreign wars.

The Great War made the United States the world's chief banker, and American investments and loans allowed foreigners to purchase U.S. exports.

In 1917, when France and Great Britain ran out of money to pay for military supplies, the U.S. government advanced them massive loans.

While the United States was raising an army in 1917, the European Allies held off the German invasion.

To get U.S. dol ars with which to pay their war- related debts, Euro pean nations had to sell their goods to the United States.

The British and French insisted that they could not repay their debts until Germany paid them $33 billion in compensation.

Private American bankers were called in by the Reparations Commission to work on rescue plans.

The German economy was propped up by loans from the U.S. banks so that they could repay their debts to the United States.

Many Americans decided after the Great War that the best way to keep peace was to limit the size of armies.

The United States had no intention of maintaining a large army after 1920, but it did build a powerful navy under the shipbuilding program that began in 1916.

The British and Americans were concerned about the growth of Japanese power in Asia and the Pacific.

The delegates at the Washington Naval Conference spent months ironing out the final details of the agreement, which took effect in 1922.

The French foreign minister proposed to the U.S. Secretary of State that the two countries never go to war.

The Senate's repeated refusal to approve American membership in the World Court made the isolationist mood in the United States worse.

The Senate refused to approve American membership in the World Court because it did not want the United States to be bound in any way.

The isolationist attitude of the Republican presidents during the 1920s soothed tensions with America's neighbors to the south.

The US agreed to pay $25 million to the repub lic of Colombia after the Panama Canal Zone was seized.

The Coolidge adminstration brought both parties into an agreement for U.S.-supervised elections, but one rebel leader, Cesar Augusto Sandino, held out, and the marines stayed until 1933.

The United States and Mexico had strained relations due to the troubles in Nicaragua.

After Mexican threats to exprocise American oil properties in Mexico, relations soured.

The head of the Veterans Bureau resigned early in 1923 when faced with an investigation for stealing medical and hospital supplies intended for former servicemen.

It was discovered that Jesse Smith was selling federal paroles, pardons, and judgeships from his Justice Department office.

The Teapot Dome scandal is depicted in a political cartoon as Republican officials try to outrun it.

Fall was the first former cabinet official to serve time because of wrongdoing in office, after being convicted of conspiracy and bribery and sentenced to a year in prison.

He helped create the economic boom of the 1920s by leading the nation out of the turmoil of the post war years.

On August 3, 1923, Colonel John Coolidge, a farmer, merchant, and notary public, gave the presidential oath of office to his son by the light of a lamp.

He believed in the ideals of personal integrity and devotion to public service and was an advocate for capitalism and minimal government regulation of business.

He voted for a state income tax, a minimum wage for female workers, and salary increases for public school teachers.

Coolidge continued his efforts to lower tax rates with the help of Treasury secretary Andrew Mellon.

Calvin Coolidge held warring Republican groups together while restoring the dignity of the presidency.

The deep divisions between urban and rural America were highlighted at the Democratic party's nominating convention.

New York governor Al Smith was the leader of the party's anti- Klan, anti- Prohibition wing.

The Democrats took a record 103 ballots over 16 days in the summer and decided on a compromise candidate: John W. Davis, a little-known lawyer from West Virginia.

Robert M. "Fighting Bob" La Follette was nominated by the old Progressive party.

The height of postwar political conserva tism was represented by Coolidge's victory.

The drive for industrial efficiency, which had been a prominent theme among progressives, powered the wheels of mass consumption and became a belief of Republican leaders.

Herbert Hoover, secretary of commerce in the Coolidge cabi nets, was a remarkable success story.

Hoover's ruthless genius for managing difficult oper ations was bred in him a self-confidence that verging on conceit.

Herbert Hoover traded his career in private business for one in pub lic service during the outbreak of war in 1914.

He wanted government officials to encourage business leaders to forgo cutthroat competition and engage in voluntary cooperation in order to increase efficiency and productivity.

Despite President Coolidge's indifference, Hoover organized the massive recovery effort after the Missis sippi River flooded in 1927.

A bumper cotton crop in 1926 resulted in an early taste of depression in the South, where foreclosures and bankruptcies spread.

Crop yields, fertilization, and methods of animal breeding were improved by better plows, harvesters, combines, and other machines.

The goal was to raise prices at home so that farmers would have the same purchasing power that they had in the early 20th century.

The debate over the bill made the farm problem a national issue and defined it as a matter of managing surpluses.

He was worried that critics would say he was pursuing a dictatorship and that he would be the longest serving president in history.

The longest period of sustained prosperity, the government's cost cutting, debt and tax reduction, and the high tariffs are all credited in the party's platform.

Franklin D. Roosevelt called Alfred E. Smith the "Happy Warrior" in his nominating speech.

A professional Irish American politician from New York City's Lower East Side.

Smith was a hero to working class Democrats in northern cities because he was the grandson of an Irish Catholic immigrant who became governor of the most populous state.

Smith was the first Roman Catholic nominated for president by a major party, a product of New York's machine- run politics, and a "wet" on prohibition, and he represented all that was opposed by southern and western rural.

The Ku Klux Klan issued a "Klarion Kall for a Krusade" against him, mailing thousands of postcards proclaiming that "Alcohol" Smith, the Catholic New Yorker, was the Antichrist.

The nation was prosperous and at peace, and Hoover seemed to be the best person to sustain the good times.

Hoover won the election with 21 million popular votes and an electoral college majority of 444 to 87.

The Democrats' Solid South was penetrated by Hoover, winning Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, and Texas.

Coolidge's doubts about Hoover's political abilities would prove correct, as the new president would soon confront an economic earth quake that would test all of his skil s-- and expose his weaknesses.

He was a dedicated public servant with proven organization and business savvy who would ensure continued prosperity.

Andrew W. Mellon's tax reductions gave people more money and a lot of it went into the stock market.

Hoover told his broker to sell many of his stock holdings after he voiced concern about the "orgy of mad speculation" in April 1929.

It was easy to invest in stocks because of the common practice of buying "on margin", where an investor could make a small cash down payment and then borrow the rest from a bank.

If stock prices rose as they did in 1927, 1928, and most of 1929, the investor made enough profits to pay for the "margin loan" and reinvested the rest.

The stock market values fell again the next week, triggering a panic among terrified investors.

People who had borrowed a lot to buy stocks were forced to sell their holdings because they couldn't pay their debts.

The stock market crash created a psychological panic that accelerated the economic decline.

People rushed to banks to withdraw their money as the news of the Great Crash spread.

The economy was turning out more products than consumers could buy, and too many people had been borrowing too much money for useless purposes, such as speculating in the stock market.

Many business owners took large profits while denying wage increases to employees.

Employers created an imbalance between production and consumption because of the Reactionary Twenties stock dividends and business expansion.

Organized labor did not exert as much leverage with management over wage increases because they had plum meted.

factories were shutting down as the stock market crashed U.S. economic output dropped from 1929 to 1933.

During the Great War, the European nations needed American grains, beef, and pork.

Herbert Hoover supported tariffs on imported goods to keep out foreign competition.

Corporate lobbyists convinced Congress to add thousands of nonagricultural items to the tariffs.

More than 1,000 economists petitioned Hoover to veto the bill because it was flawed and would raise prices on most raw materials and consumer products.

Reducing European imports into the United States would make it harder for France, Great Britain, and Germany to repay their war debts.

On June 17, 1930, Hoover signed the bil, causing a steep drop in the stock market.

Other countries retaliated by passing tariffs of their own, making it more difficult for American farms and businesses to sell their products abroad.

The Federal Reserve Board's stance of managing the nation's money supply and adjusting interest rates contributed to the Great Depression.

The Federal Reserve tightened the money supply because they were concerned about inflation in consumer prices.

The chaotic state of the European economy, which had never recovered from the Great War or the Versailles treaty, fueled the Depression.

As their economies began to recover in the late 1920s, Great Britain, France, Spain, and Italy slowed their pursuit of American goods.

Great Britain and France did not have enough money to repay the $11 billion the American government had lent them.

American banks were unable to help the European economies after the stock market crash.

The amount of American money going abroad was slowed by the Federal Reserve's tight monetary policy.

The United States made it more difficult for Euro pean nations to sell their products there.

The Reactionary Twenties stores and angry mobs stopped sheriffs from foreclosing on farms.

Groups of farmers blocked roads and prevented the movement of milk and grains before the Association could mobilize.

On April 27, 1933, angry farmers broke through a line of security and entered the courtroom to demand that the judge stop signing farm eviction orders.

The farm protest movement gave way to hopes for improvement under a new president.

Many struggling business executives and professionals went with out food and medical care to save money and avoid the humiliation of "going on relief."

Churches and charities give out free food and water at soup kitchens.

Millions of Americans were forced to move in with relatives or friends after losing their homes to foreclosure.

People were forced to live in culverts, under bridges, on park benches, and in doorways and police stations.

Depression, numerous shantytowns who you were, and the fact that everybody was emerged in cities across the country to house the homeless are all things that life as a hobo was like.

Hundreds of homeless people lived on subway trains in New York.

Karl Monroe, an unemployed reporter, was able to sleep in his seat on the subway because he was able to pay a nickel.

Immigrants, the elderly, women, children, farmers, the urban unemployed and migrant workers were the hardest hit.

Although the divorce rate dropped because couples couldn't afford to live separately or pay legal fees, many husbands abandoned their wives and children.

More than a million children left their homes to join the growing army of homeless migrants.

20 percent of working women were unemployed by the year 1932, which is slightly lower than men.

Magazines published articles about the challenge of maintaining households when the husband lost his job.

In October of 1938, the federal government opened six custodian positions and 15,000 African American women lined up to apply.

Three fourths of the public school systems fired women teachers who got married during the Great Depression.

Most African American women were limited to working as maids, cooks, or laundresses in the job market.