Divided Society Flashcards
All 14 cards in this deck
What was Prohibition?
The ban on making, selling and transporting alcohol in the USA, introduced by the 18th Amendment in 1920 and enforced by the Volstead Act.
Who was Al Capone?
A Chicago gangster who made millions from bootlegging during Prohibition, bribing police and officials and using protection rackets and violence.
True or false? Prohibition was effectively enforced across America.
False. People drank in speakeasies, bootleggers smuggled alcohol and moonshine was made at home; there were too few agents and police were often bribed.
What was the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s?
A white supremacist organisation, revived in 1915, that used violence and lynching against African Americans, and also hated Catholics, Jews and immigrants.
What did the Immigration Acts of the 1920s do?
They limited immigration using quotas, aimed especially at reducing arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe.
Give one reason immigrants from Eastern Europe faced prejudice in 1920s America.
They spoke different languages and had different cultures from earlier Northern European immigrants, and were accused of working for low wages and stealing jobs.
What were the Palmer Raids (1919–20)?
Raids ordered by Attorney General Mitchell Palmer during the Red Scare: thousands of suspected communists and anarchists, many of them immigrants, were arrested and hundreds deported, though no revolutionary plot was found.
Who were Sacco and Vanzetti?
Two Italian immigrant anarchists executed in 1927 for robbery and murder despite a lack of conclusive evidence, showing prejudice against immigrants and radicals.
Give one reason Prohibition was introduced.
Temperance campaigners such as the Anti-Saloon League, backed by many Protestant churches, argued that drink caused crime, poverty and family breakdown.
When and how did Prohibition end?
In December 1933, when the 21st Amendment repealed the 18th. Roosevelt had promised repeal in 1932; supporters argued Prohibition had failed and that legal alcohol could be taxed and would create jobs.
What helped revive the Ku Klux Klan from 1915?
The film The Birth of a Nation (1915), which portrayed Klansmen as heroes defending white families. It drew huge audiences, and the revived Klan had several million members by the mid-1920s.
Give one reason the Ku Klux Klan declined after 1925.
Indiana Klan leader D.C. Stephenson was convicted in 1925 of murdering a young woman he had abducted and assaulted; the scandal, and the Klan corruption it exposed, made membership collapse in the late 1920s.
What was the Harlem Renaissance?
The flowering of African-American writing, music and art in Harlem, New York, in the 1920s, which encouraged black pride and culture.
Why did many African Americans move from the South to Northern cities?
To escape Jim Crow segregation, violence and rural poverty, and for better-paid factory work in the North, though there they still met discrimination in jobs and housing.