Chapter 24 Objectives

1. After the recession of 1921-1922, the United States began a long period of almost
uninterrupted prosperity and economic expansion. One of the most important reasons for
the boom was the advancements in technology. The automobile industry, as a result of the
assembly line and other innovations became one of the most important industries in
America.

2. Many laborers continued to regard an effective, independent union movement as their

best hope. But the New Era was a bleak time for labor organization, in part because the
unions themselves were generally conservative and failed to adapt to the realities of the
modern economy.

3. Like industry, American agriculture in the 1920s was embracing new technologies for
increasing production. The number of tractors on American farms, for example,
quadrupled during the 1920’s, especially after they began to be powered by internal
combustion engines. Many farmers were in support of “Parity”, which assured that
farmers would earn back at least the cost of production for their product.

4. During the 1920’s, among the many changes that industrialization produced in the
United States was the creation of a mass consumer culture, a society in which people
could but items not just because they needed them but because they wanted to. The most
important communications vehicle was the only one truly new to the 1920s: radio. By
1923 there were more than 500 radio stations, covering virtually every area of the
country. The most influential spokesman for liberal Protestantism was Harry Emerson
Fosdick, the pastor of Riverside Church in New York. The basis pf the religion he
claimed was not unexamined faith, but a fully developed personality.

5. To other groups of intellectuals, the solution to contemporary problems lay in an

exploration of their own cultural or regional origins. Nowhere was that clearer than in
New York City’s Harlem, once an affluent white suburb in northern Manhattan that had,
by the end of World War I, become on of the nation’s largest and most influential African-
American communities.

6. When the prohibition of the sale and manufacture of alcohol went into effect in
January 1920, it had the support of most members of the middle class and most of those
who considered themselves progressives. Within a year, however, it had become clear
that the “Noble Experiment” was not working well.

7. Like prohibition, agitation for a curb on foreign immigration to the United States had
begun in the nineteenth century; and like prohibition, it had gathered strength in the years
before the war largely because of the support of the Middle Class progressives. Such
concerns had not been sufficient in the first years of the century to win passage of curbs
on immigration; but in the troubled and repressive years immediately following the war,
many old-stock Americans began to associate immigration with radicalism.
8. Harding was elected to the presidency in 1920, having spent many years in public life
doing little of note. An undistinguished senator from Ohio, he had received the
Republican presidential nomination as a result of an agreement among leaders of his
party, who considered him as a good “Second Rater”. Harding lacked the strength to
abandon the party hacks that had helped create his political success. The men that
Harding elected as his officials were corrupt and involved in scandals.

9. Andrew Mellon was a wealthy steel and aluminum tycoon; he devoted himself to
working for substantial reductions in taxes on corporate profits and personal incomes and
inheritances. Largely because of his efforts, Congress cut them all by more than half.
Mellon also worked closely with President Coolidge after 1924 on a series of measures to
trim dramatically the already modest federal budget.