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A. Mitchell Palmer |
Attorney General in 1920s; earned the title of the "fighting Quaker" by his excess of zeal in rounding up suspects of Red Scare; ultimately totaled about six thousand; This drive to root out radicals was redoubled in June 1919, when a bomb shattered his home |
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Sacco/Vanzetti |
anti-redism and antiforeignism were reflected in a notorious case regarded by liberals as "judicial lynching". Sacco, a shoe-factory worker, and Vanzetti, a fish peddler, were convicted in 1921 of the murder of a Massachusetts paymaster and his guard; jury and judge prejudiced against defendants because they were Italians, atheists, anarchists, and draft dodgers; case dragged on for six years until 1927, when the men were electrocuted; became martyrs in the "class struggle" for communists and other radicals; liberals upset and ashamed; evidence not enough for death sentence |
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John Scopes |
a high school biology teacher who was indicted for teaching evolution in the "Monkey Trial" of 1925; defended by nationally known attorneys; clash between theology and biology proved inconclusive; found guilty and fined $100; Tennessee supreme court set fine aside on a technicality |
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William Jennings Bryan |
an ardent Presbyterian Fundamentalist; joined the prosecution against John Scopes in the "Monkey Trial" of 1925; took the stand as an expert on the Bible, he was made to appear foolish by criminal lawyer Clarence Darrow; five days after trial, he died of a stroke, probably from heat and stress |
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Al Capone |
grasping and murderous booze distributor; known as "Scarface"; from Chicago; in 1925, he began six years of gang warfare that netted him millions of blood-splattered dollars; branded "Public Enemy Number One"; could not be convicted of the cold-blooded massacre, on St. Valentine’s Day in 1929, of seven disarmed members of a rival gang; after serving most of an eleven year sentence in a federal penitentiary for income-tax evasion, he was released as a syphilitic wreck |
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Clarence Darrow |
famed criminal lawyer; worked in "Monkey Trial"; made William Jennings Bryan appear foolish |
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Andrew Mellon |
Treasury Secretary whose tax policies favored the rapid expansion of capital investment; thought that the burdensome taxes inherited from the war were distasteful; his theory was that such high levies forced the rich to invest in tax-exempt securities rather than in the factories that provided prosperous payrolls; also argued that high taxes not only discouraged business but, in doing so, also brought a smaller net return to the Treasury than moderate taxes; friend of millionaires; helped engineer a series of tax reductiuons from 1921 to 1926; Congress followed his lead by reducing taxes as well; his spare the rich policies thus shifted much of the tax burden from the wealthy to the middle-income groups; lionized by conservatives as the "greatest secretary of the Treasury since Hamilton"; remains a controversial figure; reduced the national debt by $10 billion, but some say he could’ve reduced it even more due to the country’s time of prosperity; also accused of indirectly encouraging the bull market; if he had absorbed more of the national income in taxes, there would have been less money left for frenzied speculation; his refusal to do so typified the single-mindedly probusiness regime that dominated the political scence throughout the postwar decade |
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Bruce Barton |
a prominent New York partner in a Madison Avenue firm; was a founder of advertising; in 1925, he published a best seller, The Man Nobody Knows, setting forth the provocative thesis that Jesus was the greatest adman of all time |
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Margaret Sanger |
a fiery feminist; she led the organized birth-control movement, openly championing the use of contraceptives |
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Frederick W. Taylor |
a prominent inventor, engineer, and tennis player; sought to eliminate wasted motion; the motorcar industry owed much to the stopwatch efficiency techniques that he created; his epitaph reads "Father of Scientific Management" |
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H.L. Mencken |
a patron saint of many young authors; the "Bad Boy of Baltimore"; had an acidic wit; wrote a monthly American Mercury, where he assailed marriage, patriotism, democracy, prohibition, Rotarians, and the middle-class American "booboisie"; contemptuously dismissed the South as "the Sahara of the Bozart" (a bastardization of beaux arts, French for the "fine arts"), and scrathingly attacked do-gooders as "Puritans"; called Puritanism "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy" |
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Sigmund Freud |
a Viennese physician; justified the new sexual frankness in his writings; appeared to argue that sexual repression was responsible for a variety of nervous and emotional ills; thus not pleasure alone but also health demanded sexual gratification and liberation |
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Ernest Hemingway |
was among the writers most affected by the war (he had seen action on the Italian front in 1917); he responded to pernicious propaganda and the overblown appeal to patriotism by devising his own lean, word-sparing but word-perfect style; in The Sun Also Rises (1926), he told of disillusioned, spiritually numb American expatriates in Europe; in A Farewell to Arms (1929), he crafted one of the finest novels in any language about the war experience; a troubled soul, he finally blew out his brains with a shotgun blast in 1961 |
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Louis Armstrong |
African American jazz artist who took part in the Harlem Renaissance |
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nativism |
anti-foreign movement; large movement in 1850s; KKK seemed nativist |
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Albert Einstein |
a German Jew who managed to escape from Hitler’s racist juggernaut; his plea to Franklin Roosevelt initiated the top-secret atmoic bomb project; Nobel laureate; (1930s) |
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Volstead Act |
implemented prohibition when passed by Congress in 1919 |
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