Themes in American History

The roaring twenties was the decade for growth and prosperity for many American cities. Some of the cities that flourish was New York City. It was leader of America modernity during the decade. While some cities grew and prospered, others stagnated.

Boston was one of those cities that had trouble during the 1920s. It entered the decade with a great disaster called the Boston Molasses Disaster. At 529 Commercial Street a huge Molasses Tank collapsed which crushed many buildings foundations and washed them away. Some trucks were hurled into the Boston Harbor. Some people were drowned by the Molasses also 151 people were injured. It took 187 000 man hour to clean up the mess but even though the aftermath led to many class action suits against the state. After the event Boston population stagnated, but the Molasses Disaster was just beginning.

As New York was gro

http://edp.org/molasses.htm

wing culturally, Boston experienced a police riot when they wanted to join the AFL union. This led to a clash between the Massachusetts militia and the police. Eventually Governor Calvin Coolidge suppressed the riot. But later this led to the unionization of police forces across the country. Then Boston decides to send anarchist Nicola Sacco and Bartolommeo Vanzetti to the electric chair which caused riots in most of Europe major cities.

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Twentieth-century New York City public schools were characterized by their ability to educate the “whole child” and they had to act as parents, psychologists, doctors, and social workers in order to adjust to the changes of the city. The influx of immigrants in the late nineteenth-century introduced a class of the “immigrant child” – a child who was of the lower class, who did not exhibit the proper health etiquette, and who was certainly not American. Progressive reformers quickly saw the potential of delinquency that these children possessed and through their efforts, public school education became “a fostering, a nurturing, and a cultivating process”. The main purpose of the beneficial changes to the school system was to counter-act the poor living conditions of these children and to ultimately turn immigrant children into American citizens.(www.fordham.edu)

                              On the other hand in the South of Boston around this time School attendance, particularly in rural areas, tended to be erratic, and Virginia had one of the lowest rates of attendance in the nation in the years before World War II. Black schools, however, were so underfunded that most of them were overcrowded.Many whites did not want blacks to become educated, fearing they would challenge white supremacy and not be content with jobs working in the fields or in domestic service. Black schools therefore received far less financial support than did white schools. Black schools had fewer books, worse buildings, and less well paid teachers. Ramshackle, segregated schools marked black Virginians with a stigma of inferiority and the status of second-class citizenship that they would have to endure throughout their lives. (www.vahistorical.org)                                                                       Courtesy Library of Congress.

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