APUSH Review: The 1920s

[MUSIC]

Hey, what's going on APUSH people?

We have a good one for you today.

This one is on the entire

decade of the 1920s.

I'm continuing my decade series here.

And the 1920s, a very important time

in US history, so let's get started.

All right.

Pre-1920s.

Let's start off with the Progressive Era,

which was from the 1890s to 1920.

And this is when we saw a lot

of government regulation involvement

in the United States economy.

World War I ended just prior to 1920,

and the US entered the war in 1917 due

to the Zimmermann Note and German

unrestricted submarine warfare.

Now, here is the Zimmermann Note.

We notice that a German ambassador

sent a telegram to Mexico urging them

to attack the United States,

and that really helped draw

the United States into war.

During World War I,

we also see restriction on freedom

of speech, in which during times

of crisis, your rights as an American do

go down. And this was upheld by the court

case, Schenck versus

the United States in 1919.

I have a video in the description,

lots of videos in the description,

for you to check out.

At the conclusion of the 19 teens (1919),

we have the First Red Scare.

It's called the first one because there is

a second one.

And this was caused by a couple different

things, the Russian Revolution in Russia,

in which that country turns communist,

emergence of radical ideas in the country,

and immigration as well.

And unions and immigrants were associated

with radical ideas and communism.

So, let's take a look at these

two political cartoons.

We have a European anarchist.

An anarchist is somebody

who's against government.

We see this European immigrant

with a knife and a bomb in his hand,

sneaking up behind the Statue of Liberty.

So, he, according to the cartoon,

is going to come and do

damage to the United States.

Now, labor unions, what begins as strikes

can lead to disorder, can lead

to Bolshevism, can lead to chaos.

That is the point of view

of this political cartoon.

So, these two political

cartoons portray unions

and immigrants in a negative light.

We also have Sacco and Vanzetti,

two immigrants which we'll talk about.

They're not necessarily during

the Red Scare but a continuation of this

fear of immigrants and radical ideas.

Let's jump on over

to the Election of 1820.

We have Warren G.

Harding versus James Cox,

the Democrat, and Harding is a Republican.

Harding campaigned

on a return to normalcy.

What does this mean?

Well, it's reverting to

isolationism or neutrality

and less government involvement.

He's promoting the ideas of laissez-faire,

and essentially, this is a turning away

or an undoing of the Progressive Era.

And as we can tell by this electoral

college map, Harding wins in a landslide.

He pretty much wins every state except

those in the South,

and he beats Cox, 404 to 127.

And Republicans would hold the presidency

throughout the rest of the '20s

until the election of 1932.

All right, US foreign policy in the 1920s,

important to understand.

Well, really in the beginning,

we have the defeat of the Treaty

of Versailles,

and that's because of Article X

and the creation of the League of

Nations, which the US did not join.

Now, we see here, this political cartoon,

this bridge is

missing a piece in the middle,

and the keystone or the most

important part is the USA.

So, the League of Nations

was designed by the president of the US,

Woodrow Wilson, but the US did not join.

So, what was the US relations

with other countries like?

Well, they followed a unilateral foreign

policy, which really means one-sided or

pursuing their own interests,

not really getting into alliances

or agreements with other countries.

They had selective military interventions,

and this really was

mostly in Latin America,

Nicaragua, for example.

The US sent troops in-between 1912

and 1938 to restore order and kind

of invoke that Roosevelt corollary.

International investment,

we see a continuation of dollar diplomacy

or banks and businesses investing

in foreign countries,

and the US maintained isolationism as

well. And that will really

be the foreign policy theme

carrying over to World War II.

All right, let's talk about some social

issues of the 1920s,

with the first Great Migration, and this

is occurring during and after World War I.

Again, it's called the First

because we'll have a second one.

And this is when African-Americans are

leaving the South to the North

and Midwest, and they're leaving due

to segregation or Jim Crow laws,

racial violence, such as lynchings,

and limited economic opportunities,

because really farming and sharecropping

was the major source of income for many

African-Americans in the South.

So, they move to the North and West,

so if we could see this political cartoon,

they're moving to cities like Chicago

in the North, New York, and then St.

Louis out in the West.

Now, they did find economic opportunities

in these places, but they

still faced discrimination.

They also encountered lower-paying jobs

such as janitors, dishwashers,

a lot of manual labor jobs.

And an effect of the Great Migration

is the Red Summer of 1919,

which were race riots in many Northern

cities, especially in Chicago.

So, these were race riots between

African-Americans and Whites in cities

as a result of the Great Migration.

Now, the well-known W.E.B Du Bois during

that time wrote about coming back

from World War I and these race riots,

and he wrote, "This country of ours,

despite all its better should have done

and dreamed, is yet a shameful land...

We return. We return from fighting.

We return fighting."

Now, let's jump on over to immigration.

We have the Emergency Quota Act of 1921.

This restricted the number of immigrants

from a country to three percent of the total people

from that country living

in the US in 1910.

So, if for example,

there's 100 people living

in the United States from Italy in 1910,

then they would only be allowed to have

three immigrants come

to the country in 1921.

Now, the National Origins Act of 1924

signed by Calvin Coolidge here,

this restricted immigration even further,

and it cut the quota from three percent to two percent, and he

used the 1890 census instead of the 1910.

And the purpose of these acts was to put

an end to unrestricted immigration.

Sacco and Vanzetti were two Italian

immigrants that were charged with robbery

and murder. And they were anarchists,

atheists, and draft dodgers.

So, this really was a big fear in America

during the 1920s,

the ideas that they represented.

Now, their trial really focused on their

beliefs more than the evidence of whether

or not they actually committed the crime.

That is still up for debate,

but historians pretty much agree they did

not get a fair trial, and they were

both executed in 1927 in Massachusetts.

Okay.

Let's focus on the 1920s economy.

The government took a laissez-faire

approach, as I mentioned earlier,

and Calvin Coolidge gave a famous quote

that said, "The business

of government is business."

And that really kind of summed up his

view of the purpose of the government

was to help out businesses.

Secretary of Treasury Andrew Mellon, who

was the treasury secretary for Warren G.

Harding, Calvin Coolidge,

and Herbert Hoover, so from 1921 to 1932,

he advocated tax cuts for the wealthy.

And this is very similar

to Ronald Reagan and George W.

Bush's tax plans of the 1980s

and early 2000s respectively.

Farmers during the 1920s continued

to produce at very high rates

that outweighed demand,

and this would lower crop prices.

When in doubt,

throughout American history,

when farmers are in debt,

they end up producing more in the hopes

of making money,

but that drops the price further.

That will be the case

until we get to the New Deal.

The stock market experienced a bull market

for much of the decade,

which means it continued to rise,

but on October 29th, 1929,

we have Black Tuesday,

the stock market crash, which many people

point to as the start

of the Great Depression.

It's not the cause, but it's the start.

And banks closed throughout the early

1930s as a result, and many people

ended up losing their money.

Jumping on over to cultural issues,

we have gender roles are a very

big topic during this time.

Flappers, they would challenge gender

norms, and these were women that drank,

danced, smoked, cut their hair short,

and wore shorter dresses.

And when I say shorter dresses,

that's for that time.

These dresses are below the knee, and they

were considered short for that time.

Margaret Sanger emerged as a Women's

Rights Advocate and advocated birth

control, which was very

controversial during the 1920s.

And we also had the proposed

Equal Rights Amendment that was introduced

in the 1920s but does not get

approved by Congress until 1972.

But even then, it does not

get added to the Constitution.

You'll see in future videos.

Modernism with the 1920 Census,

more Americans are living in cities

for the first time in US history.

And many workers will lose autonomy

in factories due to things like scientific

management and the assembly line.

Science versus religion is a hot topic,

and this is evident through

the John Scopes trial.

Here is a biology teacher.

I don't know about you.

This guy just screams he's a science

teacher to me, and he taught evolution

in a Tennessee school,

which was illegal to do in that state.

And this trial really focused on the literal interpretation

of the Bible versus evolution.

Okay, technology in the 1920s,

we have emergence of very popular media

such as the radio, which is

a huge source of entertainment.

The playing of the,

the novel War of the Worlds occurred

in 1938, and we also had the emergence

of soap operas and fireside chats

under FDR when he becomes president.

The cinema or movies develop.

Motion pictures become more popular.

You have nickelodeons,

which cost a nickel to get into.

Movies during the Great Depression would

be a huge source of cheap entertainment,

and The Jazz Singer in 1927 was

the very first movie with sound.

And also, of course, you can't talk about

the 1920s in technology

without automobiles.

The mass production was popularized

and pioneered by Henry Ford.

He did not invent the car,

but he pioneered the mass production

of it, and this allowed for vacations

or personal mobility, and later,

the growth of suburbs.

Okay, the Harlem Renaissance,

this focuses in Harlem, New York.

This was a celebration of African American

culture through writing, music, art,

you name it,

and many African Americans flocked

to Harlem during the 1920s from the South.

Again, that's part of the Great Migration.

Some key figures you should be familiar

with, you have Langston Hughes,

this incredibly well-known writer.

Here is a, one of his poems.

It says, "The night is beautiful,

so the faces of my people.

The stars are beautiful,

so the eyes of my people.

Beautiful, also, is the sun.

Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people."

And the Harlem Renaissance really

celebrated African American culture and

African Americans, as evident by this poem.

Zora Neale Hurston was an author,

a very well-known author during the time,

and Duke Ellington was a jazz musician.

And these are just three of the many,

many people that took part

in the Harlem Renaissance.

Okay, other 1920s info,

we have the Lost Generation.

This is a group of writers that criticized

1920s culture and materialism.

You see that in people like F.

Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby,

T.S. Eliot, James Joyce,

a bunch of other authors.

And this will be similar

to the Beat Generation of the 1950s,

many authors that also

criticize middle class culture.

We'll come back to that in the 1950s.

Marcus Garvey is an influential leader,

and he advocated Black nationalism,

or really Black separatism from

White culture.

And he founded

the Universal Negro Improvement

Association, the UNIA,

and he promoted a Back-to-Africa movement,

that people from all over the world

of African descent should

move back to Africa.

And he will inspire

Malcolm X in the 1960s.

So, his ideas will carry through

to the Civil Rights Movement

of the 1950s and 1960s.

The KKK reemerges during this time.

It's a reaction to new immigrants

and the movie of Birth of a Nation,

which glorified the KKK.

And in addition to targeting

African Americans, the KKK went after

immigrants, Jews, and Catholics.

All right, let's talk about

some test tips for the 1920s.

For multiple choice and short answer,

be able to identify and describe

the causes and effects of the first

Red Scare, the Great Migration,

nativism and immigration quotas,

and, of course, know the Harlem Renaissance.

When it comes to essays,

you could see a topic on comparing

and contrasting, for example,

the 1920s and the 1950s,

or comparing and contrasting

the Red Scares, the Post-World Wars,

culture of these decades,

something like that.

So this, to me, lends itself to a compare

and contrast type of an essay.

All right, guys.

Thank you very much for watching.

I do appreciate it.

Check out my decades playlist

and other videos in the description.

I wish you nothing but the best of luck

on all your exams, especially

the one in May, and have a good day.