Culture Wars of the 1920s [View All]

Description: In 1920 Warren G. Harding successfully campaigned on the slogan, "Normalcy, not nostrums." In part this was a repudiation of Wilsonian internationalism, in part a promise to end the economic and political turmoil of the war and immediate postwar years. 1919 had seen a wave of strikes including one, the Steel Strike, led by a member of the new Communist Party. It had seen terrorist bombings, associated with the political left, and the "Great Red Scare," a crackdown on left-wing political groups, labor unions, magazines and newspapers. The "Scare" culminated in the "Palmer Raids" of 1919-20. Federal officials rounded up thousands of immigrants accused of left-wing political sympathies. Hundreds were deported, many to the newly founded Soviet Union. 1919 had witnessed the great "Spanish Flu" pandemic which claimed over 21 million lives wordwide (more than twice as many as WWI) and 450,000+ in the U.S. 1919-20 had also seen a sharp economic turndown, precipitated by the Wilson administration's decisions to terminate all war orders immediately and to demobilize millions of soldiers at the earliest possible moment.

"Normalcy" did not, however, mean a simple return to prewar America. Harding pledged to uphold the newly adopted Prohibition amendment on the sale and use of alcohol. He also supported the campaign to restrict immigration. Restriction had two goals: one was to limit the increase in the workforce, a goal with widespread support even among immigrants; the other was to consolidate the supremacy in the American mix of those whose ancestors came from northern and western Europe. This was an explicitly racist goal. Anglo-Saxons, Teutons, Scandinavians (but not Celts) were members of the "Great Race" whose very survival was threatened by the influx of inferior peoples from southern and eastern Europe. (Click here for Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race, one of the most influential books of the time; be careful, however, since the site in question in a present-day white supremacy site). Harding also supported the outcome of the great strikes of 1919-20, all of which had ended in failure. His would be a solidly pro-business administration, unlike those of his progressive predecessors, both Republican and Democratic, who sought to limit the power of great economic interests.Normalcy included political suffrage for women who voted in large numbers for Harding.

more: http://www.assumption.edu/users/McClymer/his394/

This site seeks to begin this process. It looks at several avenues of influence beyond the state fair exhibits and contests. One is the appropriation of eugenics research by the http://www.assumption.edu/ahc/1920s/Eugenics/Klan.html">Ku Klux Klan to stigmatize Catholics, Jews, African Americans and others. A second is the prevalence of eugenics ideas in movies and popular literature. A third is the use of eugenics themes and motifs in a long-term and highly successful http://www.assumption.edu/users/McClymer/his394/contagion.html">advertising campaign created by the J. Walter Thompson agency for Lifebuoy® soap.