The 1920s, the Great Depression, and the New Deal
The New Era
The 1920s mixed prosperity with reaction: the Red Scare and Palmer Raids, Sacco and Vanzetti, the National Origins Act (1924), a revived Klan, and the Scopes Trial. Prohibition under the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act produced bootlegging and organized crime until the Twenty-first Amendment (1933). Mass production, installment credit, radio, movies, and the Harlem Renaissance reshaped culture, while scandals such as Teapot Dome damaged Harding.
Crash and Depression
Causes included unequal income distribution, overproduction, speculative buying on margin, weak banks, and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff (1930). Hoover relied on voluntarism and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and the dispersal of the Bonus Army in 1932 deepened his unpopularity.
New Deal
FDR's Hundred Days produced the bank holiday and Emergency Banking Act, fireside chats, the AAA, NRA, CCC, TVA, and FDIC. The Social Security Act (1935) created old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, and aid to dependent children; the Wagner Act protected collective bargaining; the WPA provided jobs. Critics on the left such as Long, Coughlin, and Townsend demanded more, and the Supreme Court struck down the AAA and NRA, prompting the 1937 court-packing plan. The New Deal built a coalition of labor, urban ethnic voters, African Americans, and southerners.
Traps. Relief, recovery, and reform are not interchangeable, and Social Security initially excluded farm and domestic workers.
Rule of thumb. Label each agency as a jobs program, a regulation, or an income-support program.
Worked example. The Wagner Act protects union organizing; the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) sets wages, hours, and child-labor rules.