Day 4-us History Eoc Review the Roaring Twenties

The 1920s heralded a dramatic break between America's past and future. Before World War I the country remained culturally and psychologically rooted in the nineteenth century, simply in the 1920s America seemed to break its wistful attachments to the recent past and usher in a more than mod era. The well-nigh vivid impressions of that era are flappers and trip the light fantastic halls, motion-picture show palaces and radio empires, and Prohibition and speakeasies. Scientists shattered the boundaries of infinite and time, aviators made men wing, and women went to piece of work. The country was confident—and rich. Just the 1920s were an age of extreme contradiction. The unmatched prosperity and cultural advocacy was accompanied past intense social unrest and reaction. The same decade that bore witness to urbanism and modernism likewise introduced the Ku Klux Klan, Prohibition, nativism, and religious fundamentalism. America stood at a crossroads betwixt innovation and tradition. Many Americans were looking boldly ahead, merely just as many were gazing astern, to cherished memories of a fabled national innocence.

Age of Convergence

Many of the trends that converged to make the twenties singled-out had been edifice for years, and in some cases, decades.

Nosotros call up of the twenties as an era of liberation for women. Indeed, the decade gave rise to the flapper, described by Webster'southward Collegiate Dictionary every bit "a young girl, esp. one somewhat daring in conduct, spoken communication and clothes," immortalized in the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald and by silent moving-picture show stars like Clara Bow, Colleen Moore, and Louise Brooks. But women had been breaking downwards the split spheres of Victorian culture for quite some time. A powerful women's political movement demanded and won the right to vote in 1920. Spurred on by the growth of an urban, industrial economy that required a larger female labor forcefulness, and by the emergence of public amusements that defied the quondam nineteenth-century courting system, many young women now had the wherewithal and bulldoze to atomic number 82 contained lives. Past the dawn of the decade, anywhere betwixt ane-quarter and one-tertiary of urban adult female workers lived alone in individual apartments or boardinghouses, free from the watchful eyes of their parents, and as early as 1896, newspaper columnist George Ade used the term "date" to describe a new convention by which boys and girls paired off to frolic at dance halls, amusement parks, and other public spaces, free from adult supervision.

Closely associated with the rise of the flapper, the twenties gave ascent to a frank, national word about sexual practice. Merely this trend, too, had been building over time. As early as 1913, the Atlantic Monthly appear that the clock had tolled "Sex o'clock in America," indicating a "Repeal of Reticence" most issues that had once been considered taboo. To exist certain, these trends accelerated afterwards Earth War I: surveys suggest that 14 pct of women born earlier 1900 engaged in pre-marital sexual activity past the age of 25, while as many equally 39 pct of women who came of historic period in the 1910s and 1920s lost their virginity before union. Merely the fundamental structural changes that were at play in before decades—namely, urbanization and industrialization—long predated the twenties. Between 1800 and 1920 the number of children borne past the average American woman barbarous from 7 to three. Americans were not necessarily having less sex. Rather, in an urbanizing lodge, where more children were a cost rather than an asset, they stepped up their apply of birth command, and in so doing, redefined sexual practice every bit something to engage in for pleasance rather than procreation.

We think of the twenties as an era of prosperity, and in many respects, Americans had never lived then well. Simply this trend, too, claimed before roots. As factories and shops mechanized, the work week of the urban blue-collar worker fell from 55.9 hours in 1900 to 44.ii in 1929, while his or her real wages rose by 25 percent. Past the dawn of the twenties, Americans had more than time and coin to spend on new kinds of public amusements like trip the light fantastic toe halls, movie theaters, fun parks, and baseball stadiums. They besides had more than opportunities to buy competitively priced durable items, thanks to new methods of production and distribution. The prosperity of the mail service-war menstruation greatly accelerated this tendency. By 1929, American families spent over xx percent of their household earnings on such items as phonographs, factory-made piece of furniture, radios, electric appliances, automobiles, and "entertainment." What people couldn't afford, they borrowed. Past the mid-'20s Americans bought over three-quarters of all furniture, phonographs, and washing machines on credit.

The proliferation of advertising—aslope the maturation of the publishing, music, and pic industries—exposed citizens to a new gospel of fun that was intimately associated with the purchase of goods and services. "Sell them their dreams," a prominent ad-human intoned. "Sell them what they longed for and hoped for and virtually despaired of having. Sell them hats by splashing sunlight across them. Sell them dreams—dreams of country clubs and proms and visions of what might happen if only. After all, people don't purchase things to have them. . . . They purchase hope—hope of what your merchandise might do for them."[1]

Historic period of Wonders

If many of the social trends that we associate with the twenties had long been building, the decade was indeed unique in many ways.

It was a decade of firsts. For the first time ever, more Americans (51 percent) lived in cities than in villages or on farms.

It was a decade of economic expansion. Between 1919 and 1929 horsepower per wage earner in manufacturing skyrocketed by 50 percent, signaling a robust wave of mechanization that increased productivity by 72 percent in manufacturing, 33 percent in railroads, and 41 percent in mining.

And it was a decade of technological wonder.

In 1912, only 16 percent of American households had electricity; by the mid-20s, almost two-thirds did. Overnight, the electric vacuum cleaner, the electric fridge and freezer, and the automatic washing machine became staples in middle-class homes.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, automobiles were nevertheless unreliable and deficient, but in the years just prior to World State of war I, pioneers similar Ransom Olds, Henry Leland, and Henry Ford revolutionized design and production methods to make the car affordable and trustworthy. When the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd interviewed high school students in Muncie, Indiana, in the mid-20s, they found that the nigh common sources of disagreement between teenagers and their parents were 1) "the number of times you get out on school nights during the week"; two) "the hour you lot get in at night"; 3) "grades at school"; 4) "your spending money"; and v) "use of the automobile."[2]

Another pre-war applied science that came of age in the twenties was film. By the mid-1920s movie theaters were selling l million tickets each week, a sum equal to roughly one-half the United states population! And the generation that came of age in the twenties learned things at the movie palace that they couldn't learn in school. "The only benefit I ever got from the movies was in learning to love and the knowledge of sex," a young woman confided to an interviewer in the mid-20s. "If we didn't run across such examples in the movies," explain some other, "where would nosotros become the idea of being 'hot?' We wouldn't."[3] These young informants might take been thinking of the 1923 blockbuster Flaming Youth, which one reviewer described as "intriguingly risqué, merely non necessarily offensively and so. The flapperism of today, with its jazz. . . . and its utter disregard of the conventions, is daringly handled in this film. And it contains a bathing scene in silhouette that must have fabricated the censors blink."[four]

Like film, radio was invented in the late nineteenth century just experienced its determinative era of commercial expansion in the twenties. On November ii, 1920, radio station KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, broadcast the presidential election returns. It was the kickoff-e'er live radio transmission for a pop audience, and although few Americans that evening had the necessary engineering science to hear the results, by 1922 more than than three million households had acquired radio sets. Seven years afterwards more than twelve million households endemic radios, fuelling an industry that saw $852 one thousand thousand in annual sales.

Americans living in the 1920s could heed to Roxy and His Gang, the Clicqot Club Eskimos, and the Ipana Troubadours. They could hear Gartland Rice announce the Earth Series—live—or heed to Floyd Gibbons relate the day's news. Radio proved a highly autonomous medium, and by mid-decade local stations helped bring "race music," "hillbilly" sounds, and ethnic recordings into living rooms across the land. In the late 1920s enterprising American businessmen built powerful "X-stations" just across the border in northern United mexican states to evade federal radio frequency regulations. From this vantage point they were able to beam the music of "Fiddlin' John Carson," the Carter Family, and Jimmie Rodgers to every destination from California to New York Metropolis.

Render to Normalcy

Since the dawn of the twentieth century, American politics had been dominated by Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, two presidents whose outsized personalities and dueling visions of the progressive spirit divers the tenor and tone of public life. After 1920, Americans seemed to aspire to "normalcy." In Warren K. Harding, they got exactly what they bargained (and voted) for.

Harding's all-time qualities were his extreme affability and hitting adept looks. Both got him in trouble regularly. Fifty-fifty as a young boy, the future president seemed all too inclined to please everyone and offend no ane. As a successful newspaper publisher, local pol and, after, US senator from Ohio, Harding joined the Rotary Club, the Elks, the Odd Fellows, the Hoo Hoos, the Red Men, and the Moose. He relished poker games and excelled at public speaking. He played the b-flat trumpet in the boondocks marching band. Indeed, Warren Harding was the very embodiment of Sinclair Lewis'south Babbit—and proud to exist so.

The ever-genial Harding stacked his Chiffonier with cronies from Ohio. He let his attorney general sell pardons and pledges of government non-interference to the highest bidders. He looked the other way while his secretary of the interior accustomed well-nigh $400,000 in kickbacks in exchange for a long-term lease on oil-rich federal lands at Teapot Dome, Wyoming. All the while, he adhered to a limited and conservative vision of government, pressing for lower taxes and less regulation and issuing an implicit repudiation of Wilsonian reformism.

Despite—or peradventure even because of—his limitations, Warren Harding was widely admired past the American electorate. When he died halfway through his term, the public offered up a great outpouring of sorrow and sympathy. It was only in the post-obit months that Warren Harding'due south countrymen learned of their late president's extramarital affairs and scandal-ridden administration. But by then, information technology hardly seemed to matter. Everything was back to normal.

Silent Cal

Harding's successor, Calvin Coolidge, may take been the most reticent man ever to occupy the White Business firm. Ascetic, laconic, and conservative to a error, "Silent Cal" perfectly embodied the laissez-faire ethic that governed American politics throughout the "Jazz Age." He slept eleven hours each 24-hour interval, vetoed far more bills than he proposed, and claimed that his just hobby was "holding public part." He had little to say. When a elective bet that she could "get more than two words" out of him, the President replied but: "You lose." Upon hearing that Coolidge had passed away in 1933, the famous wit Dorothy Parker asked: "How could they tell?"

Coolidge slashed the federal budget by almost one-half, eliminated the gift revenue enhancement, sliced the estate taxation past 50 percentage, and lowered the maximum federal surtax from 60 per centum to 20 percent. The president disavowed anything beyond minimal regulation of concern and commerce. He denied a federal role in labor relations and repeatedly affirmed his accented organized religion in market place forces. What was "of real importance to wage-earners," he claimed, "was not how they might quarrel with their employers but how the business of the country might then be organized every bit to insure steady employment at a fair charge per unit of pay."[5]

In 1928 Coolidge announced unexpectedly and without fanfare that he did "non choose to run for president" again. His wife was as surprised as anyone. "Isn't that merely like the human!" she exclaimed. "I had no idea."

The Engineer

When Herbert Hoover took the oath of office as the nation's thirty-first president in 1929, the New York Times sounded an enthusiastic notation of approval, applauding the new principal executive for his "versatile ability," "sterling character," and "Progressive leanings."

Orphaned at the tender age of ix, Hoover was raised by austere Quaker relatives in Iowa. He worked his style through Stanford University, where he earned a degree in technology and graduated starting time in his course. Over the next twenty years he ascended steadily up the corporate ladder, etching out a brilliant career as a mine operator, engineer, and man of affairs. During World War I he served every bit US food administrator and masterminded voluntary production and consumption standards that kept the American Expeditionary Force well nourished and domestic prices steady. After the war he headed upward the American relief effort in Kingdom of belgium, where he was widely credited with feeding and clothing several hundred thousand European refugees. Afterwards saving Belgium, Hoover served every bit secretary of commerce nether Warren Yard. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. In that office he greatly expanded the government's collection and dissemination of industrial data, organized dozens of voluntary corporate councils, and brought the executive co-operative into close cooperation with business and labor.

It was Herbert Hoover's groovy misfortune that the Depression began only months into his term in office. Smart, well educated, well traveled, and enormously capable, Hoover considered himself an activist and a Quaker humanitarian. As an engineer, he embodied the guiding spirit of progressivism, with its faith in rational and informed public policy. The poverty and despair of his countrymen greatly affected Hoover.

Simply similar most public men of his era, Herbert Hoover believed that sound volunteerism was the best remedy for economic distress. Rather than adopt strong federal regulatory and financial measures, he chosen for more studies and for an organized—but voluntary—response on the part of the individual sector.

By 1930, this pattern of inaction fabricated Herbert Hoover one of the almost despised men in America. A popular Vaudeville skit had the straight-man announce that the Depression was over. "Has Herbert Hoover died?" his sidekick would ask. In public appearances, the president seemed thoroughly defeated. "A rose would wilt in his mitt," 1 observer famously remarked.

Civilization Wars

The great revolution in morals, aesthetics, and everyday life that was sweeping through America didn't meet with compatible approval. Though the twenties are remembered primarily as a decade of bold innovation and experimentation, they also witnessed a fierce counter-revolutionary tendency.

In 1925 a group of local boosters in Dayton, Tennessee, persuaded a immature high schoolhouse science teacher, John Scopes, to violate the country'south anti-evolution police force. They merely wanted to draw attending to their economically depressed crossroads town. Instead, what followed was a sensational trial that pitted the famous "lawyer for the damned" Clarence Darrow, a committed civil libertarian and almost fanatical atheist, confronting William Jennings Bryan, the famously eloquent Nebraskan who had thrice failed to attain the presidency but who remained a hero to rural fundamentalists in the Southward and Midwest. The trial's climax came when Darrow called his antagonist to the stand up as a biblical expert and Bryan reluctantly admitted that some scriptural language might be more allegorical than literal.

The trial seemed similar the culmination of a long-simmering clash between liberal and fundamentalist Christians. Although it was technically a win for the prosecution, liberals declared it a dandy victory for their crusade. Bryan, they said, had unintentionally exposed fundamentalism as a simpleton's creed, while Darrow had established the supremacy of scientific discipline over fundamentalist Christianity. In fact, the conservatives were far from beat. They immediately began to regroup and charter missions, publishing houses, and radio stations. Fifty years later on, they would reemerge as a powerful strength in American public life.

More successful in the immediate term was the Ku Klux Klan, a Reconstruction-era paramilitary group that had faded from American life until 1915, when Colonel William Simmons re-founded the arrangement at a small ceremony on Stone Mountain, in Georgia. By 1925 the organization claimed at to the lowest degree five million members and controlled politics in Indiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado; it was enormously powerful in several other states, notably California and Georgia. The Klan'due south greatest legislative accomplishment came in 1924, when it joined a broad coalition of conservative groups that won passage and blessing of a draconian anti-immigration statute. The golden door would remain closed for another forty years.

The new Klan represented various ideas to its polyglot membership. It was avowedly white supremacist, but for good measure it also included Jews, Catholics, Asians, and "new women" amongst its listing of enemies. Its followers could exist found in cities as well every bit in the countryside, merely as a general rule, the arrangement was fundamentalist and bourgeois in both profile and disposition. As one sympathetic observer explained, "The Ku Klux movement seems to be some other expression of the general unrest and dissatisfaction with both local and national weather—the loftier price of living, social injustice and inequality, poor administration of justice, political corruption, hyphenism, disunity, unassimilated and conflicting thought and standards—which are sad all thoughtful men."[6]

In 1924, the arrangement enjoyed sufficient strength to force a deadlock at the Democratic National Convention, where supporters of New York'due south governor, Al Smith—a Catholic—faced off against Klansmen aligned with former Treasury Secretary William McAdoo. While Smith's supporters shouted "Ku Klux McAdoo!"—to which McAdoo supporters taunted their opponents with cries of "Alcohol! Alcohol! Booze!"—the convention came to a deadlock. On the 103rd election, exasperated, and drastic, the convention agreed on a compromise candidate, a lackluster federal estimate named John Due west. Davis, who was resoundingly defeated past the incumbent, Calvin Coolidge. It was the high-h2o marking for the Klan.

Arguably, Prohibition was the about successful achievement of anti-modern forces in the 1920s. Writing just after Congress and states ratified the Eighteenth Amendment, which authorized a ban on the production and sale of alcoholic beverages, the not bad urban wit H. L. Mencken attributed such "crazy enactments" to "the yokel's congenital and incurable hatred of the city man—his simian rage against everyone who, as he sees it, is having a improve fourth dimension than he is." In his shrill, visceral response to Prohibition, Mencken may have overstated the intensity of America's rural-urban split up. Over the next decade at that place would exist no shortage of bathtub gin and woodshed stills in the countryside. Yet he was right on one count: passage of the Eighteenth Amendment and its accompanying federal statute, the Volstead Human activity, both of which took outcome in 1920, were the culminating events in a long endeavor by bourgeois forces to bank check the growing ability of America'southward immigrants and urban dwellers—one and the same, in some respects, since beginning- and 2d-generation Americans comprised the overwhelming (75+ percent) part of the population in metropolises like New York, Chicago, and Boston. Though Americans widely flouted the new police (and, accordingly, the twenties are remembered equally a specially liquid era), in fact, per capita alcohol consumption plummeted during Prohibition, lending the decade notwithstanding some other paradoxical trait.

Finish of an Era

The twenties were e'er something of a gilded age. Even amidst the neat prosperity and excess of the decade, America's economic system was fundamentally weak. Over 40 pct of Americans got by on less than $1,500 each yr, which economists cited as the minimum family subsistence level. The income of the elevation 0.one pct of families equaled the income of the bottom 42 percent. Most country folk did not experience the prosperity of the Roaring Twenties. Farm prices hit stone bottom in the aftermath of World War I and widened the gulf between America's (relatively) prosperous cities and impoverished farms.

Such glaring inequality had consequences. Boom times relied on mass consumption, and eventually, working people reached their limit. The very wealthy could only buy and then many cars, washing machines, radio sets, and motion-picture show tickets. When consumer need bottomed out, America'southward economy simply stopped functioning.

When the stock marketplace collapsed in 1929, and when the twin influences of under-consumption and over-speculation began wreaking structural havoc on the American economy, the nation'south revolution in values and aesthetics remained incomplete. The twenties were arguably the nation's kickoff modern decade, but many of its social and cultural revolutions would play themselves out in hereafter years.

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[1] William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York, 1993), 298.

[2] Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Mod American Culture (New York, 1929), 257, 524.

[iii] Garth Due south. Jowett, Ian C. Jarvie, and Katherine H. Fuller, eds., Children and the Movies: Media Influence and the Payne Fund Controversy (New York: Cambridge Academy Press, 1996), 276.

[4] Joshua Zeitz, Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Glory, and the Women Who Made America Modernistic (New York: Crown, 2006), 211.

[five]  William Eastward. Leuchtenberg, The Perils of Prosperity: 1914-1932 (New York, 1958, rev. 1993), 97.

[6] Lynn Dumenil. Mod Temper: American Civilisation and Guild in the 1920s (New York, 1995), 235.

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Joshua Zeitz has taught American history at Harvard Academy and Cambridge University. He is the author of Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Fashion, Celebrity and the Women Who Fabricated American Modern (2006) and White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics, and the Shaping of Mail service-War Politics ( 2007). He is currently writing a articulation biography of John Hay and John Nicolay.

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