1K - Social, regional and ethnic divisions: countryside versus city
Learn why the USA remained divided between 1920 and 1945, how regional and racial divisions overlapped, and why migration and national crises changed them without creating equality.
Rural and urban America
The 1920 census was the first to record a majority of Americans living in urban places. This did not mean that rural society disappeared: almost half the population remained rural, and the census category included smaller towns as well as great cities. The important development was the growing influence of industrial employment, commercial entertainment and culturally diverse urban populations.
Many farmers had expanded production and borrowed during the First World War. After European production recovered, agricultural prices fell, while debt and the cost of manufactured goods remained burdensome. Thus the consumer boom experienced by a salaried household in a city could coexist with a farmer's economic insecurity. Rural discontent was about prices and political power as well as religion or dislike of change.
Cities offered cinemas, jazz clubs, immigrant neighbourhoods and greater opportunities for women to work outside the home. To some conservative Protestants, these represented a threat to family authority and established moral standards. Prohibition, in force from 1920, became a contested attempt to impose a national rule on very different communities. It received substantial rural and Protestant support, while immigrant communities and urban consumers often resisted it. Neither all city dwellers nor all rural Americans shared one set of values.
Cultural conflict
A struggle over accepted beliefs, behaviour and authority, such as who should determine school teaching or whether alcohol should be prohibited.
The countryside–city division therefore joined unequal economic experiences to disagreements over whose values should define the nation. Roads, radio and mail-order shopping connected rural households to national culture, even while some opposed what those connections brought.
The Scopes trial and cultural authority
The Scopes trial of 1925 made conflict over education a national spectacle. Tennessee prohibited the teaching of human evolution in state-supported schools. John Scopes was prosecuted in Dayton in a deliberately arranged test case. William Jennings Bryan assisted the prosecution and Clarence Darrow the defence. Scopes was convicted; a later appeal overturned the conviction on a technicality, rather than establishing a general right to teach evolution.
The conflict concerned scientific knowledge, religious interpretation and the authority of a state legislature over teachers. Some fundamentalist Christians defended a literal reading of the Bible; opponents argued that public education should admit scientific explanations. Newspapers and radio allowed urban commentators to present Dayton as backward. However, the town's promoters also hoped that publicity would stimulate its economy. A supposedly isolated rural community was using modern media to attract national attention.
Use the trial carefully as evidence. It demonstrates a conspicuous cultural dispute, but one event cannot prove that every American was divided into two hostile camps. Nor did public ridicule immediately remove restrictive laws. The distinction between publicity and a lasting change in policy matters when judging the significance of the trial.
Different regional economies and political power
Regional differences extended beyond a simple contrast between farms and cities. The industrial North and Midwest contained major manufacturing centres, organised labour and large immigrant populations. Northern cities also had unemployment, poverty and racial discrimination. Their industrial prosperity did not make them uniformly tolerant or affluent.
Much of the South remained dependent on agriculture, including cotton and sharecropping, with comparatively low incomes. Jim Crow laws enforced racial segregation, and disfranchisement excluded most African-Americans from effective political participation. White Southern Democrats dominated many state governments and congressional seats. Long-serving members acquired influence on congressional committees, allowing a region with extensive poverty to exercise considerable national political power.
The West contained commercial agriculture, mining, oil and growing Pacific cities. Federal water and electricity projects were particularly important where aridity limited settlement and farming. During the 1930s, drought and soil erosion in the Great Plains, together with the Depression, pushed families towards California. Migrants could encounter hostility and insecure agricultural work there. The Dust Bowl was a Great Plains crisis, not a description of every western state's environment.
The New Deal and war changed these regional relationships. The Tennessee Valley Authority brought electricity and development to parts of the South; federal investment and wartime aircraft and shipbuilding enlarged western cities. Movement towards jobs reduced some geographical isolation, but it also generated disputes over housing, wages and who belonged in a community. Regional development and regional equality are different measures of change.
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