AP United States History

## Learning Outcomes

- Explain why the 1920s are often described as a struggle between **traditionalism** and **modernism**
- Identify how the **Scopes Trial**, **Prohibition**, immigration restriction, and the **Second Ku Klux Klan** reflected that conflict
- Understand how mass media, consumer culture, flappers, and the **Harlem Renaissance** changed American society
- Analyze the 1920s through the **urban-rural divide** without oversimplifying it
- Evaluate the extent to which the 1920s were an era of liberation, backlash, or both
- Use specific evidence from the 1920s in SAQs, LEQs, and multiple-choice questions

## AP United States History Syllabus

For the AP United States History, you are expected to understand 1920s debates over modern culture, with a focus on the following syllabus points:

- Know that the central conflict of the decade was **traditionalism versus modernism**
- Identify how the **urban-rural divide** shaped disputes over religion, gender, morality, and immigration
- Explain the significance of the **Scopes Trial (1925)**, including the **Butler Act**, **John T. Scopes**, **Clarence Darrow**, and **William Jennings Bryan**
- Understand how **Prohibition** under the **Eighteenth Amendment** and **Volstead Act** reflected moral reform but also produced resistance, bootlegging, and organized crime
- Recognise how the **Second Ku Klux Klan** expanded beyond anti-Black violence to include anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, and nativism
- Identify the **Emergency Quota Act (1921)** and **National Origins Act of 1924** as legal expressions of nativist backlash
- Understand how mass culture, flappers, radio, movies, and the **Harlem Renaissance** represented major cultural change
- Evaluate how the decade showed both expanded freedom and strong conservative reaction

## Test Your Knowledge

_Attempt these questions before reading this article. If you find some difficult or cannot remember the answers, look more closely at that area during your revision._

1. Why is the 1920s often described as a conflict between traditionalism and modernism?
2. What did the **Scopes Trial** reveal about religion, science, and education in the United States?
3. How did **Prohibition** both reflect traditional values and strengthen resistance to them?
4. Name two groups targeted by the **Second Ku Klux Klan** besides African Americans.
5. How did the **National Origins Act of 1924** express nativist fears?

## Introduction

The 1920s are easy to remember as the decade of jazz, cars, movies, and prosperity. That picture is only half right. For APUSH, the more useful view is that the decade was a fierce argument over what America should become after World War I. New forms of culture spread quickly through cities, radio, advertising, and consumer goods. At the same time, many Americans reacted against these changes with religious fundamentalism, moral reform, nativism, and racism.

This makes the decade important for several AP themes, especially **American and National Identity (NAT)**, **American and Regional Culture (ARC)**, and **Politics and Power (PCE)**. The best answers do not treat the 1920s as either pure liberation or pure repression. They show that both happened at once.

> **Key Term: modernism**
> A broad set of ideas and cultural changes associated with urban life, scientific thinking, new media, consumer culture, and changing social norms in the 1920s.

### Traditionalism versus modernism

The main argument of the decade was not simply old versus young. It was a deeper conflict about authority. Should Americans trust the Bible literally or accept modern science? Should moral behavior be enforced by law? Should immigrants and minorities reshape American culture, or should the nation defend an older Protestant identity?

> **Key Term: traditionalism**
> The defense of older religious, moral, and social values, often linked in the 1920s to rural Protestant culture and suspicion of rapid change.

Students often use the phrase **urban-rural divide**, and that is useful, but it needs care. Cities were more likely to support cultural experimentation, ethnic diversity, secular attitudes, and consumer culture. Rural areas were more likely to support Protestant moral reform, anti-evolution laws, and immigration restriction. But this was not absolute. Many urban Americans were conservative, and many rural Americans accepted modern life in some forms.

> **Key Term: urban-rural divide**
> A cultural and political split in the 1920s in which urban areas tended to favor newer social attitudes while rural areas more often defended older religious and moral values.

Why did this conflict become so sharp in the 1920s? Several causes came together:

- **Urbanization** had shifted population and influence toward cities
- **Mass immigration** from southern and eastern Europe had changed the social makeup of the country
- **World War I** had intensified nativism and fear of outsiders
- **Mass media** spread new fashions, music, and ideas across the nation
- **Women’s suffrage in 1920** made changing gender roles more visible
- **Scientific ideas**, especially evolution and psychology, challenged older beliefs

This is why AP questions on the 1920s often connect different events. The Scopes Trial, immigration laws, Prohibition, and the Klan were not isolated topics. They were different expressions of the same national struggle over identity.

> **Test Tip:** In an LEQ or SAQ, do not list 1920s events separately. Link them with a line of reasoning such as “rapid urbanization and mass culture provoked a conservative backlash.”

### Mass culture, new freedoms, and why they alarmed many Americans

Modern culture became more national in the 1920s because technology spread it faster than before. Radios entered millions of homes. Movies created shared celebrities and ideals. Advertising persuaded families to buy cars, appliances, and cosmetics. The result was **mass culture**: people in different regions increasingly consumed the same entertainment and products.

> **Key Term: mass culture**
> A shared national culture spread by radio, movies, advertising, and consumer goods rather than by local traditions alone.

The automobile was especially important. It changed where people lived, helped the growth of suburbs, and gave young people more independence from family supervision. That mattered socially as much as economically. A car could mean privacy, mobility, and escape from small-town scrutiny. Traditionalists saw this as a threat because it weakened older forms of community control.

Changing gender roles were another flashpoint. The image of the **flapper** symbolized greater freedom for some women: shorter dresses, bobbed hair, public smoking, dancing, and a more open social life. The **Nineteenth Amendment** had granted women the vote in **1920**, and wage work outside the home had become more common. Yet students should avoid exaggeration. Most women did not become flappers, and most still faced lower pay and limited job choices.

The importance of the flapper is symbolic. She represented the fear that women were moving outside Victorian expectations. That image mattered politically because it gave conservative Americans a visible example of what they believed modern culture was doing to morality.

The **Harlem Renaissance** also showed the modern side of the decade. Fueled by the **Great Migration**, Black writers, musicians, and artists created a major flowering of culture in Harlem, New York. Figures such as **Langston Hughes** and **Zora Neale Hurston** expressed racial pride and challenged racist stereotypes. **Louis Armstrong** and other jazz musicians helped make jazz the defining sound of the age.

> **Key Term: Harlem Renaissance**
> A major flowering of African American literature, music, and art in the 1920s, centered in Harlem and strongly linked to the Great Migration and racial pride.

This movement mattered for APUSH because it was more than entertainment. It reflected a new Black urban identity and a demand for self-definition. It also sharpened backlash. A more visible Black cultural presence in northern cities challenged white ideas about who controlled American culture.

> **Test Tip:** If a prompt asks whether the 1920s were an era of liberation, use flappers and the Harlem Renaissance as evidence, but qualify your answer by noting limits: not all women were flappers, and racism remained powerful.

### Scopes, Prohibition, and the politics of moral control

The most famous symbolic clash of the decade was the **Scopes Trial** in **1925**. Tennessee had passed the **Butler Act**, which banned public school teaching that denied the biblical creation of man. **John T. Scopes** was prosecuted for teaching evolution in Dayton, Tennessee. The prosecution was associated with **William Jennings Bryan**, while **Clarence Darrow** defended Scopes.

> **Key Term: fundamentalism**
> A conservative Protestant movement that insisted on the literal truth of the Bible and often opposed modern secular and scientific ideas, especially evolution.
>
> **Key Term: Scopes Trial**
> The 1925 trial of John T. Scopes in Tennessee for violating the Butler Act by teaching evolution; a national symbol of the conflict between fundamentalism and modernism.

Students often miss the most important AP distinction here: **legal result versus cultural impact**. Legally, the traditionalists won. Scopes was found guilty and fined **$100**, though the verdict was later overturned on a technicality. Culturally, however, many urban Americans thought the trial made fundamentalism look backward and anti-intellectual. That tension makes the trial excellent evidence in essays because both sides can claim a kind of victory.

The trial also mattered because it showed how public education had become a battleground over national values. The question was not just whether evolution was true. It was who had the right to define what American children should learn.

**Prohibition** created a similar conflict. The **Eighteenth Amendment** and the **Volstead Act** launched national Prohibition in **1920**, banning the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol.

> **Key Term: Prohibition**
> The national ban on alcohol that began in 1920 under the Eighteenth Amendment and was enforced by the Volstead Act.

Prohibition came out of older reform movements, especially temperance and Protestant moral activism. Its supporters believed alcohol caused poverty, domestic violence, and corruption. To them, banning liquor was a moral improvement, not repression.

But the 1920s exposed the weakness of that idea when imposed nationally. In many cities, drinking continued in **speakeasies**. **Bootlegging** became profitable. Organized crime expanded because illegal markets create opportunities for violent groups to supply what people still want. This is why Prohibition is such a strong AP example: it shows that state power can pass a law, but culture may refuse to obey it.

The deeper lesson is that urban consumer culture was too strong to be reshaped easily by rural Protestant morality. Prohibition did not simply fail because Americans were immoral. It failed because the law tried to regulate behavior that many citizens no longer considered wrong.

### Nativism, the Klan, and immigration restriction

The conservative backlash of the 1920s was not just about science and alcohol. It was also about race, religion, and national identity. The **Second Ku Klux Klan** became a mass movement, with membership rising into the millions.

> **Key Term: Second Ku Klux Klan**
> The 1920s revival of the KKK, which promoted white supremacy, nativism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, and “100% Americanism.”

The 1920s Klan was broader than the Reconstruction-era Klan. It still targeted African Americans, but it also attacked Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and urban lifestyles. That matters because students often describe it too narrowly as only a southern anti-Black movement. In fact, the Klan was national, with strength in places far beyond the Deep South.

Its slogan of “**100% Americanism**” captured the decade’s nativist mood. Many Americans feared that newer immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were changing the country too fast. These fears had been intensified by the **First Red Scare**, labor unrest, and stereotypes that associated immigrants with radical politics.

That atmosphere helped produce the **Emergency Quota Act of 1921** and the **National Origins Act of 1924**.

> **Key Term: National Origins Act of 1924**
> An immigration restriction law that set quotas based on 2% of each nationality’s U.S. population in the 1890 census, favoring northern and western Europeans and sharply restricting others.

The 1924 law is especially important because it turned cultural prejudice into federal policy. The quota formula favored older immigrant groups from northern and western Europe because it used the **1890 census**, before the largest wave of southern and eastern European immigration. It also excluded most Asian immigration. So the law was not just about numbers. It was about deciding who counted as desirable Americans.

This is where AP analysis matters. Immigration restriction was caused by several forces at once:

- wartime xenophobia
- fear of radicalism
- pseudo-scientific racial ideas
- religious prejudice
- anxiety about urban change

Do not reduce it to only one cause. The strongest essays explain that immigration laws, the Klan, and Prohibition all reflected the same wish to defend an older image of America.

## Key Point Checklist

_This article has covered the following key knowledge points:_

- The main cultural conflict of the 1920s was **traditionalism versus modernism**
- The **urban-rural divide** helps explain many 1920s controversies, but it should not be treated as absolute
- Mass culture spread through radio, movies, advertising, and automobiles, helping create a more national and consumer-oriented society
- Flappers symbolized changing gender roles, but they did not represent all women
- The **Harlem Renaissance** expressed Black cultural pride and was linked to the **Great Migration**
- The **Scopes Trial (1925)** tested the **Butler Act** and became a symbol of religion-versus-science conflict
- Traditionalists won legally at Scopes, but many observers believed they lost culturally
- **Prohibition** began in 1920 under the **Eighteenth Amendment** and **Volstead Act**, but encouraged speakeasies, bootlegging, and organized crime
- The **Second Ku Klux Klan** targeted not only African Americans but also Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and urban cultural change
- The **Emergency Quota Act (1921)** and **National Origins Act of 1924** turned nativist fears into federal immigration policy
- The 1920s should be understood as both an era of liberation and an era of backlash
- Strong APUSH answers connect these events through broader themes of identity, culture, and power

## Key Terms and Concepts

- modernism
- traditionalism
- urban-rural divide
- mass culture
- Harlem Renaissance
- fundamentalism
- Scopes Trial
- Prohibition
- Second Ku Klux Klan
- National Origins Act of 1924


1920s: Cultural and Political Controversies - 1920s debates over modern culture