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| A new type of young woman: rebellious, energetic, fun-loving, and bold. |
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| The statistics that describe a population, such as data on race or income. |
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| Spanish-speaking neighborhood. |
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| The mass media are print, film, and broadcast methods of communicating information to large numbers of people. |
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| Jazz grew out of the African American music of the South, especially ragtime and blues. Soon jazz became a nationwide craze. Younger people in particular loved to dance to the new music. By 1929, a survey of stations showed that two thirds of all radio air time was devoted to jazz. The 1920s came to be called the Jazz Age. |
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| American society in the 1920s troubled one group of important writers. This group rejected the quest for material possessions that seemed to occupy so many Americans. A group of people disconnected from their country and its values. They liked to imagine themselves as rebels against the culture of their time, living a fast and dangerous life. |
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| The number of African Americans living in Harlem grew from 50,000 in 1914 to about 200,000 in 1930. Not just a national center for jazz, Harlem also became the home of an African American literary awakening of the 1920s known as the Harlem Renaissance. |
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| In the old days, bootleggers merely had been drinkers who hid flasks of liquor in the leg of their boots. Now the term was used to describe suppliers of illegal alcohol. Some bootleggers operated stills—devices used to produce alcohol from corn, grain, potatoes, or other fruit and vegetable sources. Others smuggled liquor overland from Canada or by ship from the Caribbean. A smuggler's ship might anchor far off the coast, where its illegal cargo would be loaded onto speedboats fast enough to outrace Coast Guard cutters. The boats would then head to secluded harbors where trucks were waiting to carry the liquor to warehouses. From there, it would be transported to retail outlets. Those outlets included restaurants, nightclubs, and speakeasies. |
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| Speakeasies were bars that operated illegally. These bars flourished in the cities. |
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| In addition to supporting traditional Christian ideas about Jesus, fundamentalists argued that God inspired the Bible, so it cannot contain contradictions or errors. They declared that the Bible is literally true and that every story in it actually took place as described. |
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| When Tennessee passed such a ban in 1925, a science teacher named John T. Scopes agreed to challenge it as unconstitutional, thus denying him personal and religious freedom. He defied the law and was arrested for teaching evolution. Thus began the case popularly known as the Scopes trial. |
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The government owned all land and property.
A single political party controlled the government.
The needs of the country always took priority over the rights of individuals.
If isolated, a Communist country could be open to attack. For communism to survive, Lenin believed that it would have to be spread throughout the world. |
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| Soon the United States was in the grip of a Red Scare, an intense fear of communism and other politically radical ideas. Americans called for known Communists to be jailed or driven out of the country. |
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| After the war, many Americans wished to avoid political or economic alliances with foreign countries, a policy called isolationism. Harding's opposition to American membership in the League of Nations reflected those wishes, and he made no attempt to join. |
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| One road to peace and stability involved finding ways to prevent war. Harding called for disarmament, a program in which the nations of the world would voluntarily give up their weapons. He convened the Washington Conference in 1921 to discuss this plan. At the conference, several major military powers signed a treaty limiting the size of their navies. |
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| In 1921, at Harding's request, Congress passed a law restricting immigration. Although only a temporary measure, the law included an important feature whose impact would long be felt: a quota, or numerical limit, imposed on immigrants representing certain ethnic groups or nations. According to the law, a group's numerical limit equaled 3 percent of that group's total United States population as of the 1910 census. |
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| The worst Harding scandal came to be known as the Teapot Dome scandal. In 1921 and 1922, Harding's Secretary of the Interior, Albert B. Fall, secretly gave oil-drilling rights on government oil fields in Elk Hills, California, and Teapot Dome, Wyoming, to two private oil companies. In return, Fall received more than $300,000 in illegal payments and gifts disguised as loans. |
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| 15 nations pledged not to use the threat of war in their dealings with one another. More than 60 nations eventually joined the pact. Outlawing war seemed to be a good idea, but the pact was unrealistic and unworkable because it had no provisions for enforcement. By 1941, many of the nations that had signed the pact would be at war. |
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| the 1920s saw the development of a consumer economy, one that depends on a large amount of spending by consumers—individuals who use, or consume, products. Increased spending leads to larger profits for businesses, which in turn pushes up wages and encourages even more spending. |
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| To increase their profits, manufacturers developed and financed buying on the installment plan. On an installment plan, the customer makes partial payments (installments) at set intervals over a period of time until the total debt is paid. Installment plans fueled the growth of consumer spending. |
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| GROSS NATIONAL PRODUCT (GNP) |
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| The total value of goods and services a country produces annually. From 1921 to 1929, the GNP grew at an average rate of 6 percent per year. The preceding decade had seen a growth rate of less than 1 percent. |
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| An assembly line is a manufacturing process in which each worker does one specialized task in the construction of the final product. |
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| Employers raised wages and provided such benefits as paid vacations, health plans, recreation programs, and English classes for recent immigrants, all in the interest of strengthening company loyalty and morale. |
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| Fed by the optimism of the age, a “get-rich-quick” attitude prevailed during the 1920s. The dizzying climb of stock prices encouraged widespread speculation, the practice of making high-risk investments in hopes of getting a huge return. |
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| Many small investors entered the market, often spending their life savings. To attract these less wealthy investors, stockbrokers encouraged a practice called buying on margin. This option allowed investors to purchase a stock for only a fraction of its price (10 to 50 percent) and borrow the rest. |
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