The price of Ford's Model T fell sharply over time, putting cars within reach of many ordinary families.
Correct Answer
True
True. Mass production let Ford lower the Model T's price again and again, and by the end of the decade tens of millions of cars were on American roads. Used cars made ownership possible for even more people.
Category: Automobile Age
Question 2
The growth of the auto industry in the 1920s hurt the steel, rubber and oil industries.
Correct Answer
False
False. The auto boom increased demand for steel, glass, rubber and petroleum, and it spurred road building, gas stations and motels. It was one of the main engines of 1920s prosperity.
Category: Automobile Age
Question 3
The 1927 film The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, helped launch the era of talking pictures.
Correct Answer
True
True. The Jazz Singer included synchronized songs and spoken lines and was a huge hit for Warner Brothers. Within a few years most studios had switched from silent films to sound.
Category: Mass Entertainment
Question 4
During the 1920s the center of American movie production was Chicago.
Correct Answer
False
False. By the 1920s filmmaking had shifted to Hollywood in southern California, drawn by sunny weather, cheap land and distance from Edison's patent enforcers in the East. Large studios there produced most American films.
Category: Mass Entertainment
Question 5
In 1926 Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim the English Channel.
Correct Answer
True
True. Ederle crossed the Channel faster than any of the men who had done it before her. Like other sports stars of the decade, she was celebrated in radio and newspaper coverage.
Category: Mass Entertainment
Question 6
The immigration laws of the early 1920s were designed to increase immigration from southern and eastern Europe.
Correct Answer
False
False. The quota laws of 1921 and 1924 were designed to sharply reduce immigration from southern and eastern Europe. They favored immigrants from northern and western Europe.
Category: Nativism and Immigration
Question 7
Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in 1927 despite protests in the United States and abroad.
Correct Answer
True
True. After years of appeals, the two Italian anarchists were executed in Massachusetts in August 1927. Many intellectuals and immigrant groups believed prejudice had shaped their trial.
Category: Nativism and Immigration
Question 8
The second Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s drew its members almost entirely from the Deep South.
Correct Answer
False
False. The revived Klan had large memberships in the Midwest and West as well as the South, and Indiana was one of its strongholds. It presented itself as a defender of white Protestant values nationwide.
Category: Ku Klux Klan
Question 9
The murder conviction of a top Klan leader in Indiana in 1925 helped speed the Klan's decline.
Correct Answer
True
True. The conviction of Indiana Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson exposed the hypocrisy of a group that claimed to defend morality. Membership fell rapidly in the late 1920s.
Category: Ku Klux Klan
Question 10
The jury in the Scopes trial found the teacher not guilty of teaching evolution.
Correct Answer
False
False. Scopes was found guilty and fined $100. The Tennessee Supreme Court later overturned the fine on a technicality but left the law in place.
Category: Fundamentalism and Science
Question 11
Many rural Americans in the 1920s saw city life and modern ideas as threats to traditional religious values.
Correct Answer
True
True. Rural Protestants often viewed cities as places of immigrants, drinking and loose morals, while city dwellers mocked rural people as backward. This divide shaped fights over evolution, Prohibition and immigration.
Category: Fundamentalism and Science
Question 12
The popular evangelist Billy Sunday campaigned against Prohibition.
Correct Answer
False
False. Billy Sunday, a former professional baseball player, was a fiery supporter of Prohibition. He preached old-time fundamentalist religion to huge crowds.
Category: Fundamentalism and Science
Question 13
In 1923 Alice Paul proposed an Equal Rights Amendment to ban discrimination based on sex.
Correct Answer
True
True. Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party drafted the Equal Rights Amendment, and members of Congress introduced it in December 1923. Paul saw it as the next step after suffrage, since the vote alone did not end legal discrimination against women. Congress did not pass it and send it to the states until 1972.
Category: New Morality and Women
Question 14
After the Nineteenth Amendment took effect, voter turnout in the 1920 and 1924 presidential elections rose above prewar levels.
Correct Answer
False
False. Overall turnout in the 1920 and 1924 presidential elections fell below prewar levels, partly because many newly enfranchised women did not vote at first. Many reformers considered their goal won once suffrage passed, and the Progressive movement lost momentum.
Category: New Morality and Women
Question 15
Harlem in New York City became a center of African American art, music and literature in the 1920s.
Correct Answer
True
True. Migration from the South helped make Harlem a hub of Black culture, home to writers, musicians and political thinkers. This flowering is known as the Harlem Renaissance.
Category: Harlem Renaissance
Question 16
W. E. B. Du Bois strongly supported Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa movement.
Correct Answer
False
False. Du Bois sharply criticized Garvey and considered him a charlatan. Du Bois pursued civil rights and Pan-African ideas through the NAACP and scholarly work instead.
Category: Harlem Renaissance
Question 17
Chicago gangster Al Capone was sent to prison for tax evasion.
Correct Answer
True
True. Federal prosecutors could not convict Capone for his bootlegging and violence, so they convicted him of income tax evasion in 1931. He served part of his sentence at Alcatraz.
Category: Prohibition
Question 18
Ernest Hemingway's novel A Farewell to Arms is set during the American Civil War.
Correct Answer
False
False. A Farewell to Arms is set in Italy during World War I and draws on Hemingway's own service as an ambulance driver there. Like other Lost Generation works, it reflects disillusionment after the war.
Category: Lost Generation
Question 19
Calvin Coolidge became president in 1923 after Warren Harding died in office.
Correct Answer
True
True. Harding died in San Francisco in August 1923, and Vice President Coolidge took the oath of office. Coolidge then won a full term in 1924.
Category: Republican Politics
Question 20
In the 1928 presidential election, Democrat Al Smith, a Catholic governor of New York, defeated Herbert Hoover.
Correct Answer
False
False. Republican Herbert Hoover defeated Al Smith easily in 1928. Smith's Catholic faith and opposition to Prohibition hurt him with many rural Protestant voters.
Category: Republican Politics