24

=Chapter 24: The New Era=

** Main Ideas: **

 * 1) The effect of the automobile boom and various technological breakthroughs on the economic expansion and agricultural malaise of the 1920s.
 * 2) The attempt by businesses to craft a system of "welfare capitalism," and the reasons for its ultimate failure.
 * 3) The emergence of a nationwide consumer-oriented and communication-linked culture, and its effect on society and the "new woman."
 * 4) The disenchantment of many artists and intellectuals with postwar life, and the broad cultural conflicts over ethnic and religious concerns that plagued the New Era.
 * 5) The ardently pro-business administrations of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, which, despite their dissimilar personalities, followed a very similar course.

** Text Resources: **
Julia C. Ott, //"The Free and Open People's Market": Political Ideology and Retail Brockerage at the New York Stock Exchange, 1913-1933//, Journal of American History, Vol. 96 No. 1, June 2009. As the stock market roils and the recession deepens, Americans agonize over their financial futures and policy makers struggle to shore up teetering financial institutions. How did stock market investment—once perceived as disreputable and dangerous—become a mass practice? How did financial markets and institutions—broadly understood as marginal at the beginning of the twentieth century—come to be seen as the foundation of American capitalism? Julia C. Ott examines the efforts of the New York Stock Exchange ( nyse ) to transform Americans’ perceptions of and relationships with the stock market in the 1910s and 1920s. As nyse publicists promoted stock ownership as a supremely democratic practice, they established many of the basic economic precepts of modern political conservatism.

=
**Further Reading:** Rebecca L. Davis, “Not Marriage at All, but Simple Harlotry”: The Companionate Marriage Controversy, Journal of American History, Vol. 94 No. 4, March 2008. The phrase “companionate marriage” figures prominently in historians’ descriptions of the middle-class marital norms that accompanied the emergence of sexual modernism in the early twentieth-century United States. Rebecca L. Davis shows that rather than characterizing an accepted social ideal, the term “companionate marriage” provoked widespread outrage. By focusing on how the term was popularized and interpreted following the publication of Judge Ben B. Lindsey’s book The Companionate Marriage in 1927, Davis shows how the era’s anticommunist politics, gender conservatism, and religious tensions constrained companionate marriage’s meanings and limited its reformist scope. Debates over what companionate marriage implied contributed to a rhetorical tradition, well-established today, that links marital reform to godless, antidemocratic radicalism. =====

**FRQs:**
Historians have argued that Progressive reforms lost momentum in the 1920s. Evaluate this statement with respect to TWO of the following -Regulation of business -labor -immigrants (2006 Q4, 2006 AP Workshop Materials anchor packet p.81)

Analyze the emergence of the "new woman" between 1900 and 1930 and discuss whether this phenomenon was more myth or reality. (AP Achiever sample Q p 428, advice p 435)

Describe and account for the rise of nativism in American society from 1900 to 1930. (2001 FRQ5)