What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s?FOCUS QUESTIONS
• Who benefited and who suffered in the new consumer society of the 1920s?
• In what ways did the government promote business interests in the 1920s?
• Why did the protection of civil liberties gain importance in the 1920s?
• What were the major flash points between fundamentalism and pluralism in
the 1920s?
• What were the causes of the Great Depression, and how effective were the
government’s responses by 1932?FROM BUSINESS CULTURE
TO GREAT DEPRESSION
★ CHAPTER 20 ★
THE TWENTIES, 1920–1932
I
n May 1920, at the height of the postwar Red Scare, police arrested two
Italian immigrants accused of participating in a robbery at a South Brain-
tree, Massachusetts, factory in which a security guard was killed. Nicola
Sacco, a shoemaker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, an itinerant unskilled laborer,
were anarchists who dreamed of a society in which government, churches,
and private property had been abolished. They saw violence as an appropriate
weapon of class warfare. But very little evidence linked them to this partic-
ular crime. One man claimed to have seen Vanzetti at the wheel of the get-
away car, but all the other eyewitnesses described the driver quite differently.★^779