Throughout American history, wartime necessity has often opened new political and social avenues for marginalized groups. This was certainly the case after the United States intervened in the First World War in April 1917. By participating in the war effort, women suffrage activists made a compelling, and ultimately successful, case for voting rights: After all, how could America protect democracy abroad without extending it to half the population at home? Likewise, African Americans furthered their claim for racial equality at home by their contributions on European battlefields and on the home front filling industrial jobs. Show
Congress passed the Selective Service Act on May 10, 1917, which required all able-bodied men ages 21 to 31 to register for military duty.113 On registration day, July 5, 1917, more than 700,000 black men enrolled. By war’s end, nearly 2.3 million had answered the call. In less than two years, more than 4 million draftees swelled the ranks of the U.S. military. Of these, 367,000 were African Americans who were drafted principally into the U.S. Army. On the battlefield, many infantry units in the all-black 92nd U.S. Army Division distinguished themselves.114 But the segregation they experienced in military service reflected the segregation in civilian life. African Americans were barred from the Marine Corps and the Army Air Corps, and in the U.S. Navy, they were assigned only menial jobs. African Americans had to fight to establish a black officer training program.115 Emigration from the South gained more traction with the advent of several important and largely economic developments beginning in the second decade of the 20th century.117 In the South the depressed cotton market and a series of natural disasters reduced even the rare independent black landowner to sharecropping or tenant farming, trapping more and more people in a cycle of indebtedness. Military conscription and the slackening of European immigration caused massive labor shortages in the North, just as war production created an insatiable demand for industrial goods. Those labor shortages provided black Southerners with jobs in the steel, shipbuilding, and automotive industries as well as in ammunition and meat packing factories. Many found the promise of economic opportunity irresistible, though this was not the only element pulling people northward. Contemplating departure from the South, Representative George White said to the Chicago Daily Tribune, “I cannot live in North Carolina and be a man and be treated as a man.” In an interview with the New York Times, he encouraged southern black families to migrate west, “los[ing] themselves among the people of the country.”118 Historian Steven Hahn has suggested that a “pronounced self-consciousness” encompassed both social and political motivations for emigrating, “searches for new circumstances in life and labor, new sites of family and community building, new opportunities to escape economic dependence.” Hahn explained that the movement not only created new political vistas but “also served as a large and powerful political transmission belt that moved and redeployed the experiences, expectations, institutions, and networks” forged in the black community during slavery and Reconstruction, which would fundamentally shape emerging centers of African-American culture and thought in the North.119 This massive demographic shift dramatically altered African-American society, history, culture, and politics. During the 1920s it produced a revolutionary period of black artistic expression in literature, music, and thought known as the Harlem Renaissance. Among those who participated in this cultural moment in northern Manhattan, which raised black consciousness nationally, were poet Langston Hughes, writer Zora Neale Hurston, and scholar and intellectual W. E. B. DuBois. A new sense of African-American culture emerged, stoked by such leaders as Marcus Garvey, an advocate for black separatism and repatriation to Africa. Garvey had emigrated from Jamaica to New York City in 1916 and, within a few years, founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), enlisting thousands of members.120 UNIA found much support in the recently transplanted community of southern blacks, who helped establish many UNIA chapters in the South by sharing the organization’s literature with their relatives back home.121 No longer subject to ubiquitous voter suppression like they were in the South, skyrocketing black populations in northern cities created new opportunities for political activism. Slowly, African Americans won election to important political offices, including Oscar De Priest, a native Alabamian and future Member of Congress, who became a member of the Chicago city council in 1915. What major scandal in Harding's administration was named after the National Oil Reserves it involved?Harding from 1921 to 1923. Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall had leased Navy petroleum reserves at Teapot Dome in Wyoming, as well as two locations in California, to private oil companies at low rates without competitive bidding. The leases were the subject of a seminal investigation by Senator Thomas J.
Which prominent politician led the assault on domestic radicalism after a bomb exploded outside his home in 1919?Alexander Mitchell Palmer (May 4, 1872 – May 11, 1936), was an American attorney and politician who served as the 50th United States attorney general from 1919 to 1921. He is best known for overseeing the Palmer Raids during the Red Scare of 1919–20. White Haven, Pennsylvania, U.S. Washington, D.C., U.S.
How did American consumers respond to the economic situation in the early 1930s?How did American consumers respond to the economic situation in the early 1930s? Facing the possibility of hard times and unemployment, most Americans cut back. believed that voluntary cooperation between government and business could replace regulation.
How did the Great Depression affect women's participation in the workforce in the early 1930s quizlet?How did the Great Depression affect women's participation in the workforce in the early 1930s? campaigns against hiring married women were common, but female employment ultimately increased.
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