AH CH.

20: POLITICS OF THE 1920s

I. Americans Struggle with Post-War Issues

Revolution Abroad and Reaction at Home

1. List 3 trends in American society during the 1920s which resulted from a desire for “normalcy.”

A.

B.

C.

2. Immediately after World War I, Americans were especially concerned about which threat to normalcy?

3. Where did revolutionaries seize control of the government and establish a state based on the social and
economic system of communism in 1917?

4. What did Communist speakers advocate at an international meeting held in Moscow in March 1919?

5. How many radicals joined the newly formed Communist Party in the U.S.?

6. What percentage of Americans joined the Communist Party?

7. What Communist talk frightened many Americans?

8. What added to the fear of many Americans during this period of time?

9. Colorful term for Communists? Term for the fear Communism created?

10. Which U.S. Attorney General decided to take action to combat the “Red Scare”?

11. Palmer was convinced that radicals were…

12. Who did Palmer appoint to head the new antiradical division in the Justice Department (a division later
known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation) in August 1919?

13. List 3 categories of people Palmer targeted.

14. Federal agents invaded private homes, meeting halls, and offices without _______________________,
jailed suspects for weeks at a time without allowing them to see ________________________,arrested
those who came to visit the suspects, and ___________________________ hundreds of alien radicals
without trying them in court.

15. Did Palmer’s raids turn up evidence of revolutionary conspiracy?

16. What did federal agents find in their search for weapons?

17. The public decided Palmer didn’t know what he was talking about after he erroneously warned of a
Communist plot to overthrow the government on ______________________________ (May Day, the
international worker’s holiday).
18. The Red Scare fed people’s suspicions of _______________________ and _____________________.

19. What crimes did Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti allegedly commit in April 1920 in Braintree,
Massachusetts?

20. List 3 factors that may have contributed to the conviction of Sacco and Vanzetti.
A. B. C.

21. List 3 factors that suggest that Sacco and Vanzetti did not receive a fair trial.
A. B. C.

22. When was the Ku Klux Klan (inactive since the 1870s) revived?

23. What was the revived Ku Klux Klan devoted to?

24. Ku Klux Klan membership in 1924?

25. Profile of a Ku Klux Klan member?

26. List several objectives of the Ku Klux Klan.

27. Ku Klux Klan members felt threatened by…

28. The Klan’s power [was increasing/had declined] by the end of the 1920s.

A Time of Labor Unrest

29. How many strikes occurred in 1919?

30. How many workers walked off the job at one point or another in 1919?

31. List 2 concerns workers had in the period following World War I.

A. B.

32. Which city’s police force went on strike to protest low wages in 1919?

33. Which Massachusetts governor called out the National Guard to restore order and fired the striking
Boston police officers?

34. How did Coolidge defend his actions (quote)?

35. The public praised Coolidge for saving Boston, if not the nation, from…

36. Who chose Coolidge as a running mate in the presidential election of 1920?

37. How many workers employed by U.S. Steel Corporation walked off the job in September 1919?

38. The striking steel workers demand the right to bargain with their employer for…

39. How did U.S. Steel Corp. respond to the strike?

40. How many striking steel workers were killed?

41. Steel company executives instituted a widespread propaganda campaign linking the striking workers
to…

42. When was the steel strike finally broken?

43. Who became president of the United Mine Workers in 1919?

44. Why did members of the United Mine Workers strike on November 1, 1919?

45. What did the miners eventually win through arbitration?

46. Many Americans in the 1920s believed labor unions supported…

47. Union membership 1920: end of the 1920s:

48. Why did so few African Americans hold union membership in the 1920s?

49. Who founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters for African Americans in 1925?

II. “Normalcy” and Isolationism

A Return to “Normalcy”

1. Republican candidate and his running mate in the presidential election of 1920?

2. Democratic candidate and his running mate in the presidential election of 1920?

3. Who won the presidential election of 1920? Political party?

4. President Harding promised the American public a “__________________________________”-- a

return to the simpler days before the Progressive Era and World War I.

5. When did Harding invite 4 major naval powers and 4 smaller nations to Washington, D.C. for a
naval conference?

6. At the Washington Naval Conference, Secretary of State ______________________________________

urged a _____-year holiday from the building of warships.

7. Hughes suggested that which 5 nations scrap a significant portion of their existing battleships, cruisers,
and aircraft carriers?

8. In 1929, the U.S. succeeded in urging ______ nations (almost all of the nations then in existence) to sign
the _____________________________________________, which renounced war as an instrument of
foreign policy.

9. What was the weakness of the Kellogg-Briand Pact? Why?

10. What foreign policy did the Harding administration pursue?

11. How much money had Britain and France borrowed from American bankers during World War I?
12. How could Britain and France raise the money necessary to pay off the American bankers?

A. B.

13. Which legislation (passed in 1922) raised tariffs to their highest levels ever (almost 60%)?

14. What effect did the Fordney-McCumber Tariff have on Britain and France?

15. Which economically-ruined nation was unable to make payments on its war debt?

16. Which American banker (soon to be President Coolidge’s vice-president) went to Germany to
negotiate loans from American investors to Germany?

17. Through the _________________________________, U.S. banks loaned Germany $_______B, which
Germany was able to use to pay reparations to ____________________ and ____________________.

18. Britain and France used the war reparations from Germany to pay off their war debts to…

Limiting Immigration

19. Which sentiment had been growing in the U.S. since the 1880s?

20. The demand for unskilled labor (usually filled by immigrants) in the U.S. [increased/decreased] after
World War I.

21. Congressional act passed in 1921 to limit immigration to the U.S.?

22. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 set up a _______________________________, which established
the maximum number of people who would enter the U.S. from any one foreign country.

23. As amended in 1924, the Emergency Quota Act limited immigration from each European nation to
______% of the number of its nationals living in the U.S. in 1890.

24. The Emergency Quota Act discriminated against which groups, who did not start arriving in large
number until after 1890?

25. The National Origins Act of 1929 shifted the base year from 1890 to _____________, but reduced the
total number of people to be admitted in any one year to ___________________________________.

26. The national origins quota system did not apply to immigrants from…

27. During the 1920s, how many Canadians immigrated to the U.S.? Mexicans?

Scandal Hits Harding’s Administration

28. Term for President Harding’s rowdy, poker-playing cronies from back home whom he named to
administrative positions?

29. Like with President ______________________ 50 years earlier, Harding’s corrupt friends used their
offices to become wealthy.

30. Which head of the Veterans Bureau allowed operators of veteran’s hospitals to overcharge the
government by some $250M?
31. Which head of the Office of Alien Property took German chemical patents that the government had
seized during World War I and sold them for far less than their worth?

32. The most spectacular wrongdoing of the Harding administration?

33. During the Progressive Era, where had the government set aside oil-rich land for the use by the U.S.
Navy?

34. Which Secretary of the Interior secretly leased the oil-rich lands to 2 private oil companies?

35. What did Albert Fall receive in exchange for allow the private oil companies to lease the public land?

36. When did Harding suddenly fall ill and die (probably from a heart attack or a blood vessel bursting in
his brain)?

37. Who became president upon Harding’s death in 1923? When was he elected president?

III. The Business of America

One American’s Story

1. Number of the last Model T produce? Year?

2. In 1927, Ford replaced the Model T with the…

3. What became the backbone of the American economy in the 1920s, remaining such until the 1970s?

America’s Standard of Living Soars

1. Complete this quote from President Calvin Coolidge: “The chief business of America is
______________________….The man who builds a factory builds a _______________________, and
the man who works there __________________________ there.”

2. What percentage of the world’s wealth did Americans own in the 1920s?

3. Most visible effect of the automobile on the American landscape?

4. How did the popularity of the automobile change the architecture of American homes?

5. List several businesses that appeared as a result of the automobile.

6. Where did the first automatic traffic signals appear?

7. When did the Holland Tunnel (connecting New York City and Jersey City) open?

8. How did the automobile liberate the rural family?

9. The automobile allowed which peoples to become more independent through increased mobility?

10. Term for the spread of cities in all directions?

11. The automobile industry provided the economic underpinnings for which U.S. cities?

12. The auto industry symbolized the success of the…

13. By the late 1920s, what percentage of the world’s registered automobiles in the U.S.?

14. When did the government first use airplanes to carry mail?

15. What did American factories use to run machines in the 1920s?

16. What development made it possible to distribute electric power by means of a transformer (allowing
electricity to be distributed to more remote areas)?

17. List several electrical appliances that become common in American homes during the 1920s.

18. How did electrical appliance affect the lives of housewives?

A Superficial Prosperity

19. The average factory worker was producing ______% more at the end of the 1920s than at the
beginning of the decade.

20. National income 1921: 1929:

21. What happened as productivity increased?

22. Which 2 industries really weren’t prosperous during the 1920s?

23. Which 2 industries suffered losses during the 1920s?

24. What financial plan allowed consumers to buy goods over an extended period without having to put
much money down at the time of purchase?