If you’ve been reading along in my series of posts about the 1920s, you’ve realized that a great deal happened in America. (This link will take you to the first post.) Between automobiles, the revolution in consumer goods, Prohibition, and changes to pop culture, the 1920s were busy.

One thing I’ve not discussed yet, however, is the 1920s culture wars. Change is hard for some people. Often, it’s met with backlash. The 1920s were no different. Lets take a look at some of the ways the 1920s culture wars played out.

1920s Culture Wars and Immigration

United States president Calvin Coolidge once said, “The unassimilated alien child menaces our children, as the alien industrial worker, who has destruction rather than production in mind, menaces our industry. It is only when the alien adds vigor to our stock that he is wanted.”

The quote spoke to the fears of many about immigration. For decades, anti-immigrant campaigns had warned of the dangers of immigrants. Immigrants were anarchists, socialists, desperadoes, unable to assimilate, and so forth. They even degraded bloodlines. Coolidge, it would seem, agreed.

In his first address to Congress, Coolidge also said, “New arrivals should be limited to our capacity to absorb them into the ranks of good citizenship. America must be kept American.” One insinuation was that new arrivals from certain areas were not likely to become good citizens. Another was that their culture and traditions were inferior to American ones.

In 1920, Warren Harding campaigned on limiting immigration—“America First.” A 1921 law limited yearly immigration to three percent of a nation’s immigrants to the U.S. as of 1910.

In 1923, Harding died and Coolidge became president. The next year, Congress passed National Origins Act. This lowered the quotas to how many immigrants could enter the country from Southeastern Europe, those people being deemed less desirable. (It was also known as the Johnson-Reed Act. Johnson was Albert Johnson of Wisconsin, a hardcore nativist and eugenics supporter.)

1920s Culture Wars and Religion

The big religious event of the 1920s was the Scopes Trial. John Scopes, a Tennessee high school teacher, intentionally broke a state law prohibiting teaching evolution in public schools. The case became a national event, the media flocking to Tennessee for this round of the 1920s culture wars.

The attorneys were the celebrities of their time. Clarence Darrow was the defense, William Jennings Bryan, former presidential candidate and Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, the prosecution.

Soon, Scopes himself became an afterthought. (The jury eventually found him guilty. He had to pay a $100 fine.) The judge, not quite an unbiased interpreter of the law, opened each day with a prayer. He also ruled scientific evidence about evolution inadmissible for the defense.

So, Darrow called Bryan to the stand and attempted to show how ridiculous a literal interpretation of the Bible could be. According to most observers, he succeeded. This caused some to see the Scopes Trial as a last gasp of fundamentalist religion. (Although, given the number of fundamentalist denominations present in the U.S. today, if this was truly a last gasp, fundamentalists took a deep breath indeed.)

The term fundamentalist itself is an interesting one. It comes from a series of twelve booklets (The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth) published by conservative Christian authors between 1910 and 1915, and these pamphlets circulated during the 1920s. Many people are surprised to know, therefore, that the term fundamentalist religion is American in origin.

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Urban-Rural Culture Wars of the 1920s

I’ve already described some of the differences between rural and urban people in the 1920s culture wars in previous posts in this series. Urban people were more hostile to Prohibition while rural people tended to like it. In addition, urban people were more likely to partake in the consumer culture of the 1920s, rural people less so.

This is interesting because the United States crossed an important threshold during the 1920s. When the decade began, more than half of its population engaged in farming. That had always been true in American history. But by 1930, that percentage dropped below fifty for the first time, and it’s never gone back. For the first time, the U.S. was more urban than rural.

Rural people, perhaps understandably, saw their children leaving farms for cities too often for their tastes. Railing against perceived city vices, therefore, became a way to keep their worldview intact.

Growth of the Klan

The 1920s were the high water mark for the Ku Klux Klan in the U.S. National membership drives sent participation soaring. The growth was not limited to the South, either. Detroit had 35,000 Klansmen in 1924, Chicago, 50,000. Estimates of national membership range from 4 to 6 million. In 1925, another 50,000 Klansman paraded in front of the White House.

This 1920s KKK was anti-Black, as it always had been. But it found new sources for its hatred in the 1920s culture wars. Immigrants were a popular target, Jewish ones in particular. (The Klan was a major supporter of the immigration acts described above.) So were Roman Catholics. Officially, at least, the Klan also supported Prohibition and Protestant Christianity in the name of moral purity.

Some Republicans introduced a resolution condemning Klan intolerance at their 1924 convention. It failed.

The Democrats did no better. At their 1924 convention, New York’s Al Smith was a possible presidential candidate for the party. Smith was a quality politician. But he was also from an Irish family, a Catholic, and from a working-class background. Southerners at the convention could not conceive of such a man as the party’s candidate for president. William Jennings Bryan addressed Smith’s supporters at one point in the convention. “You do not represent the future of our country.”

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Slumming

Another important part of 1920s culture was the Harlem Renaissance. (If you don’t know anything about the Harlem Renaissance, this post will give you a short background.) But one thing I find interesting about the Harlem Renaissance is that many White people liked it, but not purely for the love of the talent it produced. Instead, many Whites participated in slumming.

Whites would go to jazz clubs, dance new dances like the Charleston, and so forth. Partly, they did so for the enjoyment. But, sadly, part of the enjoyment was that Whites considered such things primitive and exotic. The attraction was the strangeness, the primal vitality of the music, not the talent and originality of the musicians.

This way, Whites could escape the formal strictures of middle-class life. They could be rebels of a sort. (Avant-garde is a popular term for this.) But it was more a fad than anything else. Even though he supported the Harlem Renaissance, Carl Van Vechten, a White man, said in 1924, “Jazz, the blues, Negro spirituals, all stimulate me enormously. Doubtless, I shall discard them too in time.”

Thank you for reading my post about the 1920s culture wars. I hope I’ve given you some knowledge about some key cultural developments during this decade in American history.

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