History11 - Capitalism: The American Experience 1907-1941: Society & Culture

The 1920s were an age of dramatic social and political change. For the first time, more Americans lived in cities than on farms. The nation’s total wealth more than doubled between 1920 and 1929, and this economic growth swept many Americans into an affluent but unfamiliar “consumer society.”

There was a brief economic recession at the start of the 1920s, but, as the decade moved on, the economy boomed and America began the age of consumerism

In May 1920 Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested and accused of armed robbery on a shoe factory, during which two people were killed. They had radical anti-government pamphlets in the car when they were arrested and they could not prove where they had been on the day of the murders.

Many Americans were frightened by the Communist Revolution that had happened in Russia in October 1917. The American Socialist Party and the American Communist Party were established during this period. Some believed that a communist revolution was going to happen in America, and the immigrants in America were under suspicion of being, perhaps, involved in plotting a revolution.

Today, many historians believe that Sacco may have been guilty, and that Vanzetti was probably innocent. But in either event, it is thought that the evidence was insufficient to support conviction. In 1977, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts signed a proclamation that recognized the faults of the trial and cleared the names of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Crime and corruption were rife in the 1920s as a result of Prohibition, organised crime and Warren Harding's corrupt government.

Chicago Race Riot of 1919, most severe of approximately 25 race riots throughout the U.S. in the “Red Summer” (meaning “bloody”) following World War I; a manifestation of racial frictions intensified by large-scale African American migration to the North, industrial labour competition, overcrowding in urban ghettos, and greater militancy among black war veterans who had fought “to preserve democracy.”

Disbanded after Reconstruction, the KKK returned to national prominence in the 1920s to direct its hatred against African Americans, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants.

Jim Crow law, in U.S. history, any of the laws that enforced racial segregation in the South between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the beginning of the civil rights movement in the 1950s. Jim Crow was the name of a minstrel routine (actually Jump Jim Crow) performed beginning in 1828 by its author, Thomas Dartmouth (“Daddy”) Rice, and by many imitators, including actor Joseph Jefferson. The term came to be a derogatory epithet for African Americans and a designation for their segregated life.

Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960s. Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid anti-black laws. It was a way of life.