1920s: Cultural and Political Controversies

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Describe the cultural and political fault lines that divided the United States during the 1920s, including Prohibition, immigration restriction, fundamentalism versus modernism, and the urban-rural argument made visible by the 1920 Census.
• Account for the rise and reach of the second Ku Klux Klan and explain how the second Klan differed from the Reconstruction-era organization in geography, membership, and political program.
• Explain the legislative architecture of immigration restriction in the 1920s, including the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, the National Origins Act of 1924, and the racial assumptions that produced the country-by-country quota system.
• Account for the cultural significance of the Harlem Renaissance, the Jazz Age, the figure of the New Woman, and the Lost Generation writers, and explain why these movements ran in parallel with, rather than apart from, the decade's nativist and fundamentalist controversies.
• Describe Republican-era pro-business policy under Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, including the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922, the Mellon tax cuts, and the Teapot Dome scandal.
• Use Skill 4.B (Contextualization) and the Causation reasoning process to defend a claim about why the cultural and political controversies of the 1920s clustered into one decade.

The 1920s were the first decade in American history in which more than half the population lived in cities, and almost every controversy that defines the decade in popular memory grew out of that demographic fact. The 1920 Census reported an urban majority of 51.2 percent (KC-7.1.I.B), and the rural Protestant majority that had supplied the country's cultural defaults for a century could see, in the same set of figures, that its position was slipping. The political fights of the 1920s were the rural majority's campaign to hold the line through federal law, state law, and at the immigration gate, while the urban country produced the literature, music, and journalism that argued back. The College Board CED treats the topic under two themes because it has two arguments running in parallel: a Migration and Settlement (MIG) thread about who counts as American, and an American and Regional Culture (ARC) thread about the nation's modernist and fundamentalist visions of itself.

The decade's first signature controversy was Prohibition. The Eighteenth Amendment, ratified in January 1919 and operationalized through the Volstead Act, banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors. Prohibition was the policy victory of a long Progressive coalition of rural Protestant temperance advocates, the Anti-Saloon League, urban social reformers worried about working-class drink, and women's-suffrage organizations that saw alcohol as a threat to the family wage. In practice, the amendment failed to suppress demand. The illicit alcohol trade migrated to organized criminals such as Chicago's Al Capone, whose Prohibition-era earnings have been estimated in excess of one hundred million dollars per year by 1927. Speakeasies multiplied, federal enforcement was understaffed, and the urban-rural split over the policy hardened. The Twenty-First Amendment, ratified in December 1933 in the depths of the Great Depression, repealed the Eighteenth and remains the only constitutional amendment to repeal another. Prohibition is best read as the first of the decade's culture wars and as a case study in the limits of constitutional moralism (KC-7.2.I.D).

The decade's second signature controversy was immigration restriction. The new wave of southern and eastern Europeans had been arriving since the 1880s, and a Republican Congress moved decisively to close the gate. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 capped annual immigration from each European country at three percent of the foreign-born of that nationality recorded in the 1910 Census. The National Origins Act of 1924 then tightened the quota to two percent and pushed the base-year Census back to 1890, before most southern and eastern European immigration had arrived (KC-7.2.II.A.ii). The 1924 act also imposed a near-total Asian Exclusion provision, barring almost all immigration from Asia outside a small allotment for the Philippines. The architecture was openly racial. Albert Johnson, the House sponsor, framed the law as a defense of the country's "Anglo-Saxon" character, and the eugenic theories of Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard supplied the science the law claimed to follow. The 1924 act produced an immigration regime that would last, with one large pro-Western Hemisphere exception, until the Hart-Celler Act of 1965.

Running alongside the immigration debate was the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan. The Reconstruction-era Klan had been suppressed by federal action in the 1870s. The second Klan was refounded near Atlanta in 1915 and reached an estimated peak membership of roughly five million by the mid-1920s, a figure that included sitting governors, members of Congress, and a strong delegation at the 1924 Democratic National Convention. The second organization was anti-Black in the southern tradition of the first, but added strong currents of anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, anti-immigrant, and pro-Prohibition activism, and reached its largest memberships in Indiana, Oregon, and Colorado rather than in the former Confederacy. Its self-described program of "one-hundred-percent Americanism" made it a cultural and political home for the rural Protestant defense of the prewar American order. The second Klan declined sharply after 1925 when its Indiana Grand Dragon, D.C. Stephenson, was convicted of second-degree murder, but the political project the Klan articulated migrated into other organizations through the rest of the decade.

The decade's most theatrical confrontation between rural fundamentalism and urban modernism arrived in the summer of 1925. The Tennessee legislature had passed the Butler Act in March of that year, making it unlawful for any teacher in a state-funded school to teach any theory denying the divine creation of humanity as taught in the Bible. The American Civil Liberties Union solicited a test case, a young Dayton high-school biology teacher named John Scopes agreed to be charged, and the country's two most famous attorneys, William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution and Clarence Darrow for the defense, met at the Rhea County courthouse in what the press named the Scopes Monkey Trial. Carried on the new medium of national radio, the trial was a public showdown between Protestant fundamentalism and modernist science. Scopes was convicted and fined one hundred dollars; the conviction was later overturned on a technicality. Bryan died five days after the trial ended. The Butler Act remained on the books in Tennessee until 1967. The Scopes case is remembered as a turning point not because it changed the law but because it dramatized for a national audience the cultural argument the law expressed (KC-7.2.I.B).

The xenophobia of the decade also produced the case of Sacco and Vanzetti. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants and self-described anarchists, were arrested in May 1920 for the armed robbery and murder of a paymaster and a guard at a shoe factory in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Their 1921 trial, conducted in the lingering atmosphere of the postwar Red Scare and amid open hostility toward Italian and anarchist immigrants, produced a guilty verdict that an international protest movement spent the next six years trying to overturn. They were executed at Charlestown State Prison on August 23, 1927. Whatever the underlying facts of the robbery, contemporaries on both sides understood the case as a referendum on whether the country could give Italian anarchist immigrants a fair trial. Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis posthumously vindicated the two men in 1977.

The same decade that produced the Klan and the National Origins Act also produced the Harlem Renaissance. The Great Migration of African Americans out of the rural South to northern cities had been under way since the First World War, and by 1920 the Harlem neighborhood of upper Manhattan had become the largest concentration of Black professionals, artists, and writers anywhere in the country. The poet Langston Hughes, the novelist Zora Neale Hurston, the bandleader Duke Ellington, the cornetist Louis Armstrong, the painter Aaron Douglas, the journalist James Weldon Johnson, and the editor W.E.B. Du Bois were among its central figures. Jazz, recorded for the first time in the early 1920s and broadcast on radio after 1922, became the decade's American export to the world and gave the period its other name, the Jazz Age. The cultural production of Harlem was, among other things, a sustained argument that Black Americans were a creative and modern people, full citizens of the country whose immigration and cultural policy was at the same moment ranking nations by perceived racial fitness.

The decade's gender politics produced the figure of the New Woman. The Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in August 1920, made woman suffrage the law of the land. Younger women in the cities cropped their hair, raised their hemlines, drove automobiles, smoked in public, drank in speakeasies, and took office work in numbers no previous generation had matched. The flapper was a magazine creation as much as a sociological one, but the underlying shift was real: married women's labor force participation had reached eleven percent by 1930, divorce rates rose, and the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921 wrote a federal interest in maternal and infant health into law for the first time. The decade's modernist literature, written by the so-called Lost Generation of writers, took stock of the disenchantment that followed the First World War. Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926), F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929), and Gertrude Stein's salon in Paris produced the strand of American modernism that the rest of the world recognized.

National politics during the decade were dominated by the Republican Party. The presidential elections of 1920, 1924, and 1928 produced three consecutive Republican victories under Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. The decade's economic policy, supervised in large part by Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, combined four large income-tax cuts with the high Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922 (which raised average duties on dutiable imports above thirty-eight percent), business-friendly federal regulation, and a constricted role for organized labor. The Harding administration produced the Teapot Dome scandal, in which Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall accepted secret payments from oil men to lease federal petroleum reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and Elk Hills, California. Fall was convicted in 1929, becoming the first sitting U.S. cabinet officer to be convicted of a felony. Coolidge's pro-business consensus, captured in his often-quoted observation about the chief business of the American people, held until the October 1929 stock-market crash that opens the next lesson on the Great Depression.

The cultural and political controversies of the 1920s are best read together rather than apart. Prohibition, immigration restriction, the second Klan, the Scopes trial, and the Sacco and Vanzetti case were the rural Protestant majority's defense of the prewar American order against the urban, immigrant, modernist country the 1920 Census had just certified. The Harlem Renaissance, the Jazz Age, the New Woman, and the Lost Generation were that urban country's argument back. Both threads ran through the same ten years, supplied each other's energy, and ended together when the 1929 crash and the Great Depression of the 1930s rewrote the country's political agenda from the top.

The four excerpts below sample the legal, the literary, and the rhetorical bookends of the decade's controversies, drawn from federal statute, trial transcript, and Library of Congress holdings.

1. (Causation) Account for the legislative path from the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 to the National Origins Act of 1924. What political and intellectual currents produced the choice of 1890 as the base Census year?
2. (Comparison) Compare the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan with the second Klan of the 1920s. Identify two important continuities and two significant shifts in geography, membership, and political program.
3. (Continuity and Change) Was Prohibition a Progressive reform or a cultural reaction? Defend a position with reference to the coalition that produced the Eighteenth Amendment and the experience of the 1920s.
4. (Causation) Account for why the Harlem Renaissance and the second Klan flourished in the same decade. What demographic and cultural forces produced both at once?
5. (Comparison) The Scopes trial and the Sacco and Vanzetti case both became national arguments about American identity. Compare what each was about and what each ultimately decided.

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.