Bills which rolled back the income tax increases that were passed during world war i. And the leading social movements on the left, labor unions and the socialist party, both lost members during the war. In fact, the socialist party was never really a factor in american politics again after the 1920 election. And people on the left, whether people we consider to be liberals, former progressives or radicals were all on the offensive during the 1920s. The most popular president in the 1920s, Calvin Coolidge who took office in 1923, when harding died of a heart attack and then was reelected by a landslide in 1924 famously said in the mid1920s, the business of america is business. It was a prosperous time for a lot of americans, though certainly not all. Stock prices were fairly high. Wages were either stable or going up, depending on what occupation you were in. Farmers are not doing as well as theyve done during world war i when farm prices went really high as they often do in wars but nevertheless, in many places in the country they were not doing so badly. There was one piece of legislation passed in 1924, one of actually a number of pieces of legislation on the issue of immigration. Which gave a sense both of the power of what you might call the old stock americans, americans from mostly western european backgrounds, white in every case. But also gave a sense i think of the vulnerability that those people felt, because so many catholics and eastern orthodox and jewish people had moved into the United States beginning in the 1880s and 1890s. So many africanamericans had moved to the north and big cities and big cities in the south, as well during the war. As you know. This bill was passed 1924. Its called the johnson reed act named after two of the people who were the key senator and key congressman who put their names to the legislation and got it through congress. What this bill did is it restricted immigration in the United States after that point to 2 of the number of people from any foreign nation who had been in the United States according to the 1890 census. This sounds a little abstract. What it basically means is that the percentage of immigrants allowed to come in the country was dependent on the percentage of immigrants from that country, from that particular country in 1890. 1890 was just at the beginning of the socalled new immigration, just the beginning of the influx of people from places like italy, greece, russia, poland, hungary, syria, other places in eastern and southern europe. And the 1924 law completely excluded immigrants from east asia, except for filipinos who came from an american colony. So basically, the quotas and they were called quotas set down from 1924 on to 1965, this law lasted roughly more than 40 years. It was much easier to come to the country if you were from ireland, if you were from new england, if you were from norway, for example, because the number of those people in the United States was pretty high in 1890, much harder if you were from russia, poland, or finland. Impossible if you are from japan, china, or korea. So the United States was supposed to remain an anglosaxon and predominantly protestant nation forever on ward. That was the idea, that was the hope of the people who passed this bill. The republican majority in congress and some southern democrats voted for it, as well. The only votes against this law really were from people from the ethnic cities, from new york and from chicago and from philadelphia. Places like that. Many of them catholic and jewish. But they didnt have enough votes in congress to stop the bill from being passed and certainly not enough political clout to stop president Calvin Coolidge from signing it. As i said, this law was a sign of a certain fear and weakness i think among the whiting and grow white anglosaxon majority, as well. And the weakness can be glimpsed in what was going on in American Culture in the 1920s. Which is the main topic of the lecture today. The 20s saw a number you have fierce conflicts between supporters of an older white, mostly protestant and very deeply religious and mostly rural order. The majority, but a majority that was felt itself in peril. And the other side, those both immigrant and native born who had a more tolerant or at least a looser sense of personal morality and who lived mostly in modern cosmopolitan cities with a mix of church goers and secularists. You can see echoes of the split in our own time in arguments between those who support gay marriage and those who support, those who think it Sex Education in schools is great and those who dont think it is all, between those who think teaching evolution in science classes is part of science and those who is think that creationism or intelligent design should it be taught the along with teaching evolution, this is not an accident. Cultural clashes and conflicts have a way of lasting a long time and even when the specific issues that are were fought over in the 20s dont necessarily last as long, legacy of those battles does last a long time. In many ways if youre in some parts of the country today, these culture clashes dont seem quite so much in the past at all. What i want to do today is discuss in specifics is three sites of this conflict. First the battles of over prohibition which was the law in the 1920s. Second, clashes over the content of movies, Motion Pictures which became in the 1920s the most popular art in america. And lastly, the conflict over whether the darwinian theory of evolution should be taught in Public Schools. Because laws were being passed in certain states in the 1920s to actually forbid the teaching of evolution in Public Schools. And as well see, the rationale for that in part was that the parents in Many School Districts didnt want evolution taught in their kids schools. So youve got an issue of free speech and the claims of science versus the claims of democracy if you will. But first prohibition, which youve heard something about already. But not since its been law. Whoops. This is a glimpse here of revenue agents busting a still somewhere in one of the cities in the northeast. Together with these mason jars you see here that were about to be filled by this bootleg liquor. The 18th amendment to the constitution goes into effect january 1920. It was ratified by enough states in 1919. By the way, Congress Passed it vito of president woodrow wilson. So you can see how popular it was. Printed the sale and manufacture but not the consumption of alcohol. Thats interesting, by the way, to note. The 18th amendment did not stop individuals who actually had liquor in their hands from drinking it. The idea was to stop the business of alcohol. The manufacture of it. The sale of it. The commerce in alcohol, the traffic, as it was known. The thought was that if you stop people from being able to manufacture it and distribute it and an sell it, eventually people will stop drinking it, as well. But congress didnt want to pillory an individual who might have gotten liquor. In fact, before the amendment was ratified, people would stock up as much liquor as they could if they could afford to so theyd be able to drink it legally after the amendment was ratified. Contrary to conventional wisdom, prohibition, even though at the it did institute a regime of a lot of lawlessness, a lot of people broke the law, especially in big cities, did actually reduce drinking overall in america. Places where prohibition was popular and there are many of them, drinking did go down. There was a sort of a informal prohibition, if you will. Neighbors would enforce it against other neighbors, for example. So in Rural America in, small town america, in the south, for example, parts of the west, drinking did go down and quite dramatically. But it went up in big cities. The act that was passed of along with the prohibition amendment when it was ratified to enforce the act was called the volstead act. It was named after a minnesota congressman who authored it from granite falls, minnesota. On one hand, it was a tremendous increase in the power of government. Government, after all, was given the power to go in and bust up any place where liquor was sold anywhere in the country. And also to have Border Agents across the border to canada , especially, and the coast guard was empowered to stop boats from coming in to florida and other places where it could offload liquor. But on the other hand, the congress did not appropriate enough funds to hire enough people to do all that the volstead act was supposed to be doing. Only 1600 agents were hired. In a country of over 100 Million People, it was probably not enough. Yet, as i said, it was informally enforced by many protestant americans. And they continued to support prohibition. Not just because they thought it was a good idea for people not to drink, not because they believed that the liquor business ways an sinful enterprise driving people to do terrible things, but also because they thought of it as a symbolic stand against the supposedly hedonistic libertarian values of the modern cities against the alien custom of catholic and eastern orthodox immigrants, many of whom took drinking as just part of their culture. There were older arguments given, which continued to have a lot of salience during the time prohibition was law. One of the arguments youve heard about before was that a drunken man was an abusive human being, that he would beat up his wife, that he would neglect his children, that he would be a terrible worker. This is one of the more popular illustrations of this attitude. Also, attitude was the , also, added to it was the antiimmigrant side of it. Here you see two of men surreptitiously unloading liquor from europe, from russia, going across the border from canada to the u. S. This was an immigrant invasion, an alien invasion not of individuals so much but of immigrant alien commerce. Yes . [inaudible question] yeah. Good point. Tongs from china, exactly. Tongs were supposedly gangs of chinese who terrorized the chinese immigrant population, also employed chinese gangsters. Ill talk a little bit more about how the fear of gangsters becomes part of this. So, you had an urban immigrant split. You had older arguments about protecting women and children. You had a sense of the fear of immigrants being married with the fear of prohibition, with the fear of prohibition not being enforced the way it should be enforced. Youve got a combustible mix here. Now, of course, what made this combustible mix so much apparent to Many Americans was the fact that in the bigger cities, in the more cosmopolitan places among the very wealthy people, where there are immigrants and the elite sort of mixing, you now we think of it as speakeasies which operated almost openly in many of these places, places like new york and chicago, where the prohibition law was pretty much a dead letter. One example of this was a place called the 300 club in manhattan , which was run by this woman, texas gyneen her name was. Who was a former silent movie star. Her club was one of the more famous clubs in america. Everyone would have heard of the 300 club. It was famous for being able to sell liquor at very high prices, for having a troupe of scantily clad fan dancers and she was a hip, charming charismatic woman, too. And people wanted to drink at her club. There are many clubs they could drink at, but her club was one of the more popular ones. She was arrested several times for serving alcohol and providing entertainment. She always claimed, and successfully so, that her patrons had brought the liquor in with them, she hadnt sold it to them. Bringing liquor in with you was not illegal. And it was pretty hard to prove that they had actually bought it there. There were no receipts. The club was pretty small. It served an elite clientele. She said, well the girls werent really touching the customers on purpose. It was so small, they had to dance close to the customers because otherwise there was no space. She claimed to the ends of her life sheep had never sold an alcoholic drink in her life. Her club was the hangout for some of the citys wealthy elite and also for many of the most important entertainment celebrities in the country. The great composer george ger the great composer George Gershwin used to go there a lot and play his piano there impromptu. Some of the guests were the biggest film stars friends of guinenans from her film days, people like gloria swanson, rudolph valentino, and al jolson. Wealthy guests with names like vanderbilt and chrysler who used to come to the club. She made a very good living one way or another, whether legally or illegally. When she died, it turned out she had earned 700,000 in one year in 1926. And lesser amounts in other years. Even though her clubs were routinely raided by the police. Her famous greeting to people who came to the club was hello, suckers. But she was obviously no sucker. Now this kind of behavior repelled a good Many Americans, those who supported probation and thought it should be enforced as strictly as possible. They thought people who didnt enforce probation were evil , immoral people. The most popular probationists in the 1920s was not a Government Official or certainly not a Treasury Department agent trying to enforce the law, it was the most popular protestant eadvantagestist in the country, in the United States, until billy graham later in the 1950s. Billy graham is still alive today but no longer preaching a lot. Name of this evangelist was billy sunday. That was his real name, by the way. Heres billy sunday, a very aggressive, fit guy. Whoops. Got ahead of myself here. Billy sunday was a former Major League Baseball player for the pittsburgh pirates, not very gad not very good, but at least he was good enough to play Major League Baseball for a while. He lectured on many different issues. He was a fundamentalist. He believed all the bible was written by people who understood the will of god, if not, god himself. But his leading cause in the 1920s was prohibition. And he took direct aim at people. He called them the diamond wearing bunch, the big gang, the silk gowned. He condemned the low down whiskey soaked, beer guzzling, bull necked, foul mouth hypocrite who beat his wife and neglected his work. Sunday was a very physical of evangelist. He would bound around the stage, he would get down on his knees. He would jump up, like mick jagger or something except, of course, he would have hated mick jaggers style of life. Nevertheless, this was an entertaining evangelist. But he was very much in ernest when he talked about of prohibition or any subject he lectured on. His most famous talk was what he called the blues booze s ermon. This is where he urged people before prohibition became law and very much after it became law to get rid of liquor in their lives. He compared liquor to a rattlesnake and a voracious mon goose. He described in very graphic detail what alcohol does to the flesh, the face, and the liver. Most of all, he challenged men in his audience and most of his audience was male, to do what he said was their moral duty. You have a chance to show your manhood, by abolishing the curse of your wife and the poor innocent children that climb up on your lap and put their arms around your neck. Tens of thousands heard his sermon and swore an oath to vote for and then enforce prohibition. With a supporter like sunday and there were smaller sundays all over the country and a very powerful lobby behind them too, there was a group called the Anti Saloon League which had begun in the 190s but really comes into its own in the 1920s , where ministers all over the country, mostly from evangelical churches, methodists, especially, are encouraging their parishioners to make sure that they not just dont purchase liquor or drink liquor themselves, but that they put the onus on anybody they know who is breaking the law. So this was a Big Government program with a lot of people supporting it behind it, yet a lot at the same time, a lot of people who believed that this was ridiculous, that people could drink without destroying their lives, without beating their wives, and of course, not surprisingly, the rhetoric of the antisaloon league, the rhetoric of billy sunday was very much antiimmigrant, sometimes also anticatholic. So catholics, immigrants in general, took it almost as their duty to disobey the law and certainly to lobby against it. And throughout the 20s, there was a big attempt to actually repeal the prohibition amendment which actually did happen in 1933. But even during this time, texas guinans club was just one sign of the weakness of prohibition in the big cities. In San Francisco, for example, there were just nine agents to enforce the volstead act, nine agents in a city of about 300,000 people. The mayor of San Francisco, a man named sunny jim rolf , was seen drinking at speakeasies. This is the republican mayor of one of the major cities in the country. So you can see what a dead thethe vos that act volstead act was in the cities. So the laut proved difficult to enforce. But and the enforcement of it was left more to citizens themselves. And a new social movement sprang up in part to help enforce it. And also to preserve the supremacy of white protestant native born citizens which of course, was always one of the aims. If implicitly of most prohibitionists. And this new social movement was one that took the name of an older social movement, the ku klux klan. The klan was revived in 1915 by an entrepreneur from the south named William Simmons who got people to sign up for the klan and then took a proportion of their membership fees. He made a lot of money doing it. And one of the reasons he was the klan, even though the klan from the reconstruction years had been suppressed by the u. S. Army, its memory had lived on in Popular Culture in the south and elsewhere, as well, but as ive mentioned before, it came back in a big way when this film was released in 1915. Birth of a nation. This