American history from 1920 through 1945 divides itself into three distinct segments, and from a distance it might seem as though each segment represents a different country. The changes in America from 1920 through 1945 would have been impossible to imagine at the beginning of that era—going from the time of the Model T Ford, silent movies, the infancy of radio and telephone to the age of the jet plane and the atomic bomb was a huge leap. The economic and technological growth, interrupted by the Great Depression, moved at a dizzying pace, and cultural and social changes reflected that progress.

The “Roaring Twenties” seem in retrospect a time of careless abandon, when anything seemed possible, when the troubles of the world belonged to somebody else, when the American blood shed in France in 1918 had demonstrated nothing more than mankind's eternal folly. Americans were wrapped up in themselves.

Then came the crash of 1929 and the Depression years, when the Twenties, which had actually seen many troubling events—the resurgence of the Klan, the sins of prohibition, a rampant xenophobia—were “the good old days.” During most of the thirties for huge segments of the population, nothing seemed possible except dreariness and toil with scant hope of reward in this life. Federal, state and local governments heaved and struggled to make things better, but the Depression was stubborn and unwieldy and too immense for any set of schemes or remedies to cure.

Next came armed conflict once more, worldwide and terrible, and by 1945 the United States stood alone atop the rubble of the most destructive war in history—some 50 million human beings having been ground up by man's inhumanity to man. Once again, anything seemed possible, though the America of the 1920s and 1930s was but a distant memory.

Sage History Home | History 122 Part 3 | Updated October 13, 2006