APUSH 7.7 to 7.11 — APUSH Notes and Study Guides

In the last set of notes, we talked about World War I and its aftermath. Now, we’re going to be moving on to the interwar period! Basically, after World War I, there was a World War II, and so in this, we’re going to be focusing on the time period between those two wars.

Innovations and Assembly Lines

So let’s start off with innovations in technology! One of the most important names to know here is Henry Ford, who mass-produced automobiles. However, while cars were certainly a big deal, his biggest contribution during this time was the assembly line. In 1913, Ford opened his manufacturing plant and in it, there was a large conveyor belt that would transport the partially built car from worker to worker. Each worker had one specific job and as unfinished cars slowly came to them, they would do the same thing over and over again. One worker would turn the same wrench in the same spot for each car, one would put the same bolt in the same hole, and so on and so forth. This assembly line method allowed Ford and his company to produce so many cars quickly that it drove the price extremely low and drove all of his other competitors out of business. Soon, other companies followed this model and the use of unskilled assembly line workers quickly replaced skilled workers in the manufacturing industry.

Communications and Cinema

During this time, new innovations in communication also spready across the nation. By the end of the 1920s, almost every home in America had a radio in them. Corporations such as the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company established radio and television stations across the country. Through these radios and televisions, popular culture was able to grow and spread throughout the United States. Shows such as the Amos n’ Andy Show were broadcasted through radios into every house. During this time, cinema and movie theaters were also created. In 1927, the first movie to have synchronized sound, the Jazz Singer, was released. This ended the era of silent films. Because of these innovations, people were now all listening to the same shows, the same radios, the same people, and the same news. These films and radios exposed people to different parts of the United States and the lives of different ethnic groups that some people may have never encountered before. Additionally, a celebrity culture began emerging as people became familiar with and interested in the lives of people such as actors and baseball players.

Women

After World War I, many new opportunities began opening up for women, immigrants, and migrants. For women, many new job opportunities opened up for them in urban areas during this period, such as in nursing and teaching. Previously, many women had worked in factories where they received much lower wages than men. Even as many people expected women to just stay home and raise children, some women began leaving the house for jobs and to make money. Additionally, a group of women known as flappers began rebelling against social norms about women. They did this by doing things such as cutting their hair, smoking, drinking, and showing their ankles in public.

Mass-Production, Advertising, and Consumerism

Because people were now able to move around more easily and more quickly on their own, many began settling outside of cities in suburbs. Cities started building larger roads to accommodate these new cars, especially newer cities such as Los Angeles and Houston.

These manufacturing techniques were not limited to just automobiles, and were also used to mass-produce a lot of other goods as well. For example, during this time we saw the mass production of furniture, vacuums, fridges, toasters, radios, health and beauty products, and many more. The American standard of living rose and with the rise in manufacturing, quality of life, and wages, we also see the birth of the advertising industry too. It was around this time that psychology also became a serious field of science so now, advertisers used psychology to influence people to buy products not necessarily because they needed it, but because they wanted it. During this time, new products were also created to solve newly invented problems, such as Listerine for bad breath.

With the rise of more production and advertising, consumerism increased, and now, people could buy things on credit (take on loans), which more and more people did during the 1920s to live beyond their means. Additionally, many Americans began investing in the stock market during this time in hopes of more profit and more money in the future to buy more things.

Continuation of Racism

However, new communication technologies also allowed for the continuation of discrimination and racism between races. For example, the radio shows and movies produced rarely ever depicted any black people. Racist films such as The Birth of a Nation, released in 1915, continued fears and stereotypes of black people. Despite this, a new black culture began emerging in New York City called the Harlem Renaissance, in which a community of black authors, musicians, artists, and actors was developed. Rural people also felt a similar alienation from popular culture, since films and shows almost always depicted urban life in cities, instead of rural farm life. In the South, these films resulted in the birth of the Second KKK. Like the first Ku Klux Klan, they targeted African Americans in their attacks. However, they also targeted Jews, immigrants, and Catholics. In response, some African Americans, such as Marcus Garvey, wanted black people to leave the United States and return “back to Africa”. Garvey advocated for separatism and organized many African Americans from the United States to be moved to Liberia in Africa. However, he also often worked with the KKK because the KKK also supported this segregation.

Interwar Culture

Outside of the Harlem Renaissance, a lot of other writers proliferated during this time period such as Francis Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby) and Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises), both of which were authors who wrote pessimistic views about American materialism, consumerism, and the waste of life and resources during World War I. Other writers left the country for Paris in search of meaning in the world and this became known as the Lost Generation.

In 1917, before World War I fully ended, the 18th Amendment was passed which banned the production and selling of alcoholic beverages, ushering in the era of Prohibition. Bootleggers were people who smuggled in beverages from Canada and as a result of the ban, the rural and urban poor, who couldn’t afford this smuggled bootleg liquor, stopped drinking. On the other hand, the rich and middle class kept drinking. Rival gangs developed, including one led by Al Capone, fighting over the bootlegging trade. Organized crime became big and the money these gangs made from booze allowed them to expand into other activities such as prostitution, gambling, and distributing drugs.

Immigration

As for immigrants, after World War I, there was a large influx of them from Europe and Asia. This led to yet another strong Nativist anti-immigrant reaction from the American population. Much like the previous decades, the Nativists feared that the immigrants would take their jobs, reduce wages, and would harm American culture. This led to the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the National Origins Act of 1924. The Emergency Quota Act limited the number of immigrants allowed from a country to 3% of their population in 1910 annually. The National Origins Act reduced this further to just 2% of their population in 1890.

After the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, nearly all Asians were excluded from immigration to the Untied States. Additionally, new acts were passed to place further restrictions. The Gentlemen’s Agreement with Japan in 1907 was a Japanese ban on people leaving Japan for the United States. The Immigration Act of 1917 continued to ban Asians from immigrating to the United States.

However, one group of immigrants did not receive as many restrictions. These were Latin Americans, because the United States were using them in the American Southwest as a source of free migrant labor and farm workers.

Migration

On the other hand, a lot of migration occurred during this period, such as the Great Migration in the 1920s. This was essentially a continuation of the Exodusters movement in previous decades. In the Great Migration, a lot of black southerners migrated away from the South towards the North and gathered in places such as New York, especially in Harlem. It was there that the Harlem Renaissance was created. This was a revival of music, dance, art, literature, theater, politics, and more among the black population. During the Harlem Renaissance, jazz as a music genre was born under musicians like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. Famous black writers such as Langston Hughes and Claude McKay wrote about the black experience in America.

In addition, for culture, there was a religious division that happened during this time. Urban and rural Protestants during this time began to have differing beliefs and began to separate from each other in many ways. One reason was that urban Protestants were much more modern and accepting of change compared to rural Protestants. Rural Protestants were mostly fundamentalists who took every word of the Bible seriously. For example, fundamentalists took the six-day creation story in the Bible extremely literally. This belief led to the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925.

In Tennessee, as it was in several other states, it was illegal to teach Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, but a teacher named John Scopes decided to teach it anyways. As a result, he was arrested and in the end, while Scope was convicted, his conviction was overturned. This trial led to people believing that modernists had succeeded over fundamentalism.

Presidents Harding and Coolidge

Now let’s talk about some politics! The following presidents are relatively minor in our study of the United States’ history but it’s still important to know roughly who they were.

After Wilson’s presidency, President Warren Harding became the 29th President after the Election of 1920. Under his presidency, there was a reduction in income tax, an increase in tariffs, and the establishment of the Bureau of the Budget. The Bureau of the Budget established a single budget for all government expenditures, a bureau to create the yearly budget, and procedures for Congress to hold the budget accountable. But his presidency was filled with scandal. For example, in 1924, it was revealed that his Secretary of the Interior had been accepting bribes for oil leases in the Teapot Dome Scandal. Additionally, Harding’s Attorney General had been taking bribes to not prosecute certain criminals. And then Harding died.

Calvin Coolidge, Harding’s vice president, became the 30th President after Harding’s death, and he supported a smaller government and laissez-faire economics. As such, he didn’t govern the nation all that much and did very little of note. He chose to not run in the Election of 1928 and Herbert Hoover became the 31st President after him.

The Great Depression

But while in general, society in America was thriving during the interwar period, it all quickly went downhill in 1929 as a result of the Great Depression, the worst economic disaster in American history.

The Great Depression was caused by several things.

Firstly, for years, during the Roaring Twenties, people had been buying stocks on margin, also known as speculation, meaning that they were buying stocks on borrowed money, and kept buying stocks on the assumption that their value would keep rising, meaning that many Americans had their savings in the stock market.
But then, as the 1920s were coming to a close, the stock market crashed on October 29th, 1929, also known as Black Tuesday.
Additionally, factories and farmers had been overproducing products and crops for years, causing the prices of things to plummet, meaning that now, factories and farmers were barely making a profit and losing money.
With all of this overproduction, companies needed fewer workers and started laying off people, causing unemployment to rise. By 1933, 25% of the population was unemployed.
In addition, 31st President Herbert Hoover passed the Hawley-Smoot Tariff in 1930, which raised tariffs on foreign products by 20%.
In response, other countries set up their own tariffs, causing trade with other countries to slow down to a halt. Now, the global market for goods was much smaller.
Banks were rumored to be failing and as a result, many Americans rushed to take out their savings, which would then actually make the bank go bankrupt.
And finally, Hoover’s response to all of the above problems was near non-existent. He believed in laissez-faire economies and believed that if the economy was left alone for long enough, it would fix itself, and therefore, the government didn’t need to intervene. By the time he started lending money and starting public works projects to start up the economy again, it was too late and the Great Depression was here to stay.

Many Americans fell into the depths of poverty and lost their jobs during the Great Depression. As banks failed and went bankrupt, people began foreclosing on their mortgages as their savings suddenly disappeared. Many moved to shantytowns called Hoovervilles in criticism of President Hoover. People couldn’t pay rent, the unemployed stood in line for relief checks, crops rotted, and service jobs went out of business because people couldn’t afford their services. In the Bonus March, World War I veterans requested to get their bonus a few years early for their service in the war. Hoover refused and many protested by setting up huts near Washington D.C. along the Potomac River.

By the time the Election of 1932 arrived, 32nd President Franklin D. Roosevelt won in a landslide. He won through his promise of heavy government intervention and once he became president, he passed many policies and acts in order to relieve and fix the problems of unemployment and a crashing economy. For example, his policymakers transformed the United States into a limited welfare state, meaning that the government was now going to take responsibility for the welfare of its citizens.

The New Deal

To do this, he created the New Deal, a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations aimed to help the lives of Americans and relieve the effects of the Great Depression. He addressed three main categories of issues and these were: relief, recovery, and reform.

Relief:

Public Works Administration (PWA): Employed Americans to work on public works projects such as building roads, dams, and bridges
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA): Hired people to run electric power plants to control flooding and erosion
Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC): Employed young men to work in national parks and forests
Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA): Paid farmers to plow under more land to reduce crop prices
Works Progress Administration (WPA): Funded workers of the arts to create culture such as artists, playwrights, actors, writers, and photographers

Recovery:

National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA): Established a set of codes agreed upon by laborers and corporations to establish minimum wage levels, shorter working hours, and the regulation of prices for certain petroleum products
National Recovery Administration (NRA): Created an administration to regulate business profits, prices, wages, and hours

Reform:

Glass-Steagall Act of 1933: Increased regulation of banks and limited the ways banks could invest people’s money
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC): Created as a result of the Glass-Steagall Act; supplied deposit insurance to depositors to protect them from losing money if a bank fails; made to restore people’s faith in banks
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC): Established to regulate the stock market and prevent buying on margin and insider trading (which caused the Great Depression)
Social Security Act of 1935: Established social security, which would withhold part of a person’s income and give it back once they turned 65 so they would have income once they reach retirement age, and also provided grants for welfare payments to those in need
Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA): Provided monetary help to the poor
Federal Housing Administration (FHA): Insured bank loans for building new houses or repairing old ones

In addition, several other things were passed to help people and the economy. In 1933, the Emergency Banking Act was passed, creating a Banking Holiday in which banks would close and the federal government would inspect them. This was done to increase public confidence in banks. In 1933, 21st Amendment was passed, which repealed the 18th Amendment and unbanned alcohol. President FDR also began a series of Fireside Chats. These were a series of presidential radio addresses to the people to help him connect with them, increase their morale, and restore their faith in the economy and government.

Criticisms of the New Deal

Basically, as a result of the New Deal, the United States was turned into a limited welfare state in which the nation provided for the welfare of many of its citizens and also stirred the economy back up to function again. But not everybody was happy about the government’s involvement and this criticism came from both liberals and conservatives. For example, liberals criticized the New Deal for helping big businesses much more than it helped the unemployed and the poor. They argued that the New Deal wasn’t doing enough to help the poor. On the other hand, Conservatives criticized the New Deal due to its overreach of federal power. In some cases, the conservatives took some parts of Roosevelt’s New Deal to the Supreme Court and won, establishing what parts of the New Deal were constitutional and what parts were unconstitutional. Here were some important people that criticized the New Deal:

Huey Long: He and his Share Our Wealth Society said that the New Deal didn’t address wealth inequality enough and wanted a 100% tax rate to all incomes over a million dollars and for that money to be redistributed to poor people
Father Charles Coughlin: In a nationwide radio show, he called the New Deal as the “Pagan Deal” but eventually, his broadcasts stopped when his show started becoming anti-Semitic.
Dr. Francis Townsend: He wanted the Townsend Plan to be passed, which would give everyone over the age of 60 a monthly pension of $200 that they had to spend by the end of the month

The Court-Packing Plan

In response, Roosevelt proposed the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, or the “court-packing plan”, in which he suggested allowing the president to appoint new Supreme court Justices for every justice over the age of 70. This would allow him to, at the time, appoint six more judges to the Supreme Court, and this was proposed with the intent to allow him to pack the court with judges sympathetic to the New Deal. Immediately, both parties of Congress shut down this bill because they saw this as an overreach of power and an attempt to control the Supreme Court.

Political Realignment

Regardless of how people felt about the New Deal at the time though, it still had a major effect on American society and the economy, leaving behind many reforms, regulatory agencies, and programs along with causing the political realignment of black people, the working class, immigrants, and minorities to the Democratic Party, Roosevelt’s party, because they believed that it was his policies that helped relieve their suffering during the Great Depression. Now, the political parties have been aligned to basically what they are today. While this is a huge oversimplification, during the presidency of Lincoln, Democrats had supported slavery and state power while limiting the federal government, while Republicans supported the federal government and social justice. But by the middle of Roosevelt’s presidency, the Democrats were now the supporters of federal power, equality, and rights for minorities, while the Republicans were against heavy government intervention and supported rural interests.

Interwar Isolationism

And now as the interwar period comes to an end, we’re going to talk about the foreign policy of the United States between World War I and World War II. Basically, after World War I, the United States entered a period of isolationism, meaning they decided to stop getting involved with foreign countries and foreign politics for the time being. In 1920, they elected 29th President Warren Harding who ran on the promise of a “return to normalcy” after World War I. During his presidency, the Fordney-McCumber Act was passed, which greatly increased tariffs in 1922, taxing imported goods from foreign countries. Similarly, in 1930, the Hawley-Smoot Tariff was passed during Hoover’s presidency which drove up tariffs even more. In response, many foreign countries set up retaliatory tariffs and international trade decreased, making foreign goods more expensive and making Americans more likely to buy domestic goods

The Rise of Fascism and the Lead-In to World War II

Starting in the 1930s, fascist and totalitarian governments began rising in Europe. Fascism, essentially, was an ultra-nationalist ideology that supported heavy militarism and having a dictatorial leader. These fascist leaders came into power by promising to fix the economies of their countries after World War I. In Italy, Benito Mussolini became head of the Fascist Party. In Germany, Adolf Hitler became the leader of the Nazi Party. Similarly, the Empire of Japan became heavily militaristic and authoritarian during this time.

In 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria.

In 1933, Hitler became chancellor of Germany, the head of the government

In 1936, Germany occupied the Rhineland and Italy took over Ethiopia in Africa

In 1937, Germany took over Austria

And then, finally, Hitler invaded Poland in September of 1939, setting off a chain reaction of war declaration that kicked off World War II between the Allied Powers (Great Britain, France, Soviet Union) and the Axis Powers (Germany, Italy, Japan).

Isolationism vs. Interventionism

But even when World War II began, American policymakers continued arguing for neutrality and arguing for the nation to stay out of it. Isolationists argued that over 100,000 Americans had lost their lives during World War I and still, almost nothing had changed for the United States as a result. The world was still unsafe for democracy like it had been decades ago. Additionally, the Senate’s Nye Committee had exposed between 1934 and 1936 that many American corporations had profited off of World War I and that maybe it was greed from these companies that had caused America’s involvement in the war in the first place.

On the other hand, interventionists argued that America should get involved in the war. They argued that America was no longer isolated from Europe and now, with all of the new technology of the 20th century, Europeans could bring the war across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States in just a few days. They argued that if Britain was defeated by Hitler, there would be nothing stopping Germany from then declaring war on America.

In response to both of these views, President FDR (Franklin D. Roosevelt) chose to cater to both sides by getting involved in the war without directly getting involved. He did this by giving aid to the Allies, but not by directly sending soldiers to help them fight. For example, under the Cash and Carry program, the United States allowed any country in the war to purchase armaments from them as long as they paid in cash and used their own ships to transport the weapons. Because Britain controlled the seas, this policy only mainly helped them. And then, when Britain started running out of cash, the two countries negotiated the Destroyers for Bases deal in which the United States would give Britain destroyers in exchange for land rights on British possessions. Then, in 1941, the Lend-Lease Act was passed which allowed Britain to obtain the armaments they needed on credit, meaning that they could pay back the U.S. later instead of immediately in cash. So while the United States was still technically neutral, it was clear that they were supporting Britain.

But on December 7th, 1941, all hopes of continued isolationism from the United States ended. On that morning, Japanese planes bombed the Pearl Harbor naval base in Hawaii, killing over 2,400 Americans. The next day, the United States declared war on Japan, and soon after, Germany declared war on the United States, bringing the United States into the second World War.

Continuing on with isolationism, the Kellogg-Briand Pact was signed in 1928 between 63 nations, including the United States, which made war illegal. But when you think about it, this is basically impossible to enforce. But it was an attempt by the United States to protect itself from getting involved in any more wars. In addition, to prevent Germany from economically collapsing, the U.S. had set up the Dawes Plan in which U.S. banks would make loans to Germany, which would pay their war reparations to the UK and France, which would then return the money to the U.S. to pay their World War I loans. This plan worked in circulating money between the nations until the Great Depression hit.

In 1933, at the Seventh Pan-American Conference in Uruguay, the United States pledged to never intervene in the internal affairs of a Latin American country ever again. But as the 1930s began, isolationism became harder and harder for the United States to maintain, and now, we’re going to talk about the series of events that led all the way up to World War II.