The Roaring Twenties
Copyright © 2005-6, Henry J. Sage
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The 1920s. The “Roaring Twenties” were a decade in which nothing big happened—no major catastrophes of large events—at least until the stock market crash of 1929—yet it is one of the most significant decades in U.S. history because of the great changes that came about in American society. The Twenties were known by various images and names: the Jazz Age, the age of the Lost Generation, flaming youth, flappers, radio and movies, bathtub gin, the speakeasy, organized crime, confession magazines, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, Bobby Jones, the Great Crash, Sacco and Vanzetti, AL Smith, cosmetics, Freud, the "New" woman, the Harlem Renaissance, consumerism —all these images and more are part of the fabulous twenties!
In fact, the 1920s may have been the decade of the greatest social change in American history. Reacting perhaps to both the disillusionment from the First World War and against the strictures of Victorian culture, Americans abandoned old ideas with a vengeance and adopted new concepts wholesale. It was also a time of deep divisions: wets (for repeal of prohibition) against drys, town against country, nativists versus foreigners, Catholics against Protestants; the decade also saw a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and an American sense of alienation from the rest of the world.
The decade began amidst the ashes of the Great War, blossomed into a riotous age of spending and profit making, cheap automobiles and new consumer products. Everybody seemed to be on a roll. Then in 1929 the Crash hit the stock market, and for many complicated reasons the Great Depression followed. The 1930s became a time of unimaginable economic hardship for millions of Americans. Thus the "roaring twenties" ended with the bleak prospect of lessened expectations and strange new challenges—and for many the challenge was simply to stay alive.
Into the midst of the chaos of that Depression came the next imposing figure we will study: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His New Deal program was the most ambitious legislative program ever taken by a President to that time, and while it did not really end the Depression, Roosevelt's New Deal changed the face of American government forever.
The Twenties were in a sense a reactionary decade—a reaction against Victorian ideas of morality that saw young men and women openly defy what their parents still viewed as proper behavior for relationships between the sexes. Young people went wild, in the eyes of some, though studies have suggested that there was more talk than action. It was also a rebellious age, in which women continued the process of breaking out of older social patterns as they had begun to do during World War I. They changed their dress styles, cut their hair short, smoked in public and were not above taking a nip from a flask of prohibition whiskey. That phenomenon led to changes in family relationships, as birth rates fell and young people had more freedom, provided in part by the automobile, but also by shifting cultural practices.
The twenties were also a time of reaction against war—the Great War in particular and war in general—for although the Americans suffered relatively few casualties in 1918, they came during a very short period of time—over 100,000 men died from all causes in about 6 months of actual fighting. From that disillusionment the Twenties also brought a reaction against the expansionist ideas that had gotten America an Empire and embroiled her in the Great War.
Although Americans wanted to be left alone at peace, there were may internal struggles in the 1920s. The decade saw city divided against country, the resurgence of the KKK, a rebellion against the open-door immigration policy that had gone on since the Civil war. There was a fight for law and order as prohibition made technical criminals out of many otherwise law-abiding citizens.
It was a decade of huge figures—heroes of the kind we don’t see any more, or not often: Charles Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, Bobby Jones and others. Americans started going to the movies and listening to the radio in enormous numbers, and they found themselves becoming more affluent as the markets rose, seemingly without end. If was a time of new awakening for African-Americans, many of whom had fought in France, and the Harlem Renaissance opened Americans to Black literature, poetry, music and other arts of a quality never seen before. Literary figures like Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe brought white American literature to a new plane as well. The Progressive movement was not dead in the twenties—a Progressive Presidential candidate got almost 5 million votes in 1924—but it was not an activist decade. Everybody knew what Harding meant when he called for a return to "normalcy," even though there was no such word in the dictionary.
The Twenties began on a somber note, rose to great heights of excitement and then, on Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929, it all came crashing down. Things were never the same again, but then again, they never are.
The Red Scare of 1919: Americans knew about Communism, because Communists had been at large in the country for years—often associated with radical labor organizations such as the I.W.W., and Communist Party meetings were held in New York and other major cities more or less openly. (See Warren Beatty’s film Reds for an interesting story about all that.) Most of all Americans accepted and wanted to preserve the American way of doing things, which meant capitalism, private ownership of business, free-market competition and the Horatio Alger myth that with enough pluck and a little luck, anyone could become a millionaire.
When the Bolshevik revolution succeeded in Russia, however, it sent a shock wave through the western world, and it was felt in America. Americans have never been sympathetic to radicalism in any from, and this was no different. Some radical activity clearly justified a response, as when a bomb was placed on the front door of the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. (It exploded prematurely, killing the bomber and frightening the children of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, who lived across the street.)
Under the direction of Attorney General Palmer, the U.S. government in 1919 set about rounding up “undesirables,” many of whom were innocent persons, and deported hundreds from the country. Others associated with radicalism, rightly or wrongly, were harassed, lynched, jailed and subject to all sorts of bigotry. Thousands were arrested in 1919 and 1920 and often held for long periods without trial. The “Red Scare” lasted only about two years, but it showed how frightening it could be to be the “wrong sort of person” in America at that time. Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants, felt the sting of the anti-anarchist feelings when they were executed in the electric chair in 1927. The Red Scare of 1919-1920 was a precursor of McCarthyism, the anti-Communist witch hunt led by the Wisconsin Senator during the 1950s.
Recovering from World War. As it had done typically after every war it ever fought, the United States disarmed rapidly after World War I.
- Naval cargo vessels were sold off, millions of men were discharged and the Army was reduced to about 100,000 soldiers. The services did their best with what they had and began looking ahead to the next war, often very perceptively.
- In 1920 the railroads were returned to private control, but the I.C.C. was strengthened to make them both more responsive to people’s needs and more efficient.) A Railroad Labor Board was established for labor disputes.
- Businesses set out to meet the demands of consumers, producing household appliances, automobiles and other goods on record-breaking quantities. The strong government control of business during the war had set a precedent for further involvement later, and made control of businesses after war easier to sustain.
- Government very tough on labor during the 1920s—public opinion supported that course. Legislation supports open shops; union membership 5.1 million in 1920, 3.6 million in 1929.
Because of the growth of cities brought by immigration and internal migration, a sharpening divide grew between urban and rural areas. Sophisticated city dwellers began to look at their country cousins as hicks or bumpkins, while those in the farm belts viewed the cities as places of degradation, immorality and "foreign" influences. For example, Prohibition was probably followed more in what was called the “Bible Belt” than in New York and Chicago, although moonshining prospered in the rural woods.
Fundamentalism. Much of the difference between town and country was rooted in religion, as many in rural areas gravitated towards various brands of religious fundamentalism. Fundamentalists insisted that the book of Genesis was the actual story of creation, and that theories such as Darwin’s evolution were the work of the devil. This conflict was dramatized by one of the most famous trials of the century—the Scopes or “Monkey” trial in Tennessee in 1925.