WORLD WAR I, PROSPERITY AND THE GREAT DEPRESSION (1914-1932)

1. World War I and neutral rights

To the American public of 1914, the outbreak of war in Europe — with Germany and Austria-Hun­gary fighting Britain, France, and Russia — came as a shock. At first the encounter seemed remote, but its economic and political effects were swift and deep. By 1915 U.S. industry, which had been mildly de­pressed, was prospering again with munitions orders from the West­ern Allies. Both sides used propa­ganda to arouse the public passions of Americans — a third of whom were either foreign-born or had one or two foreign-born parents. More­over, Britain and Germany both act­ed against U.S. shipping on the high seas, bringing sharp protests from President Woodrow Wilson.

Britain, which controlled the seas, stopped and searched Ameri­can carriers, confiscating “contra­band” bound for Germany. Germa­ny employed its major naval weapon, the submarine, to sink shipping bound for Britain or France. Presi­dent Wilson warned that the United States would not forsake its tradi­tional right as a neutral to trade with belligerent nations. He also declared that the nation would hold Germa­ny to “strict accountability” for the loss of American vessels or lives. On May 7, 1915, a German submarine sunk the British liner Lusitania, kill­ing 1,198 people, 128 of them Amer­icans. Wilson, reflecting American outrage, demanded an immediate halt to attacks on liners and mer­chant ships.

An illustration shows explosions ripping through the Lusitania shortly after it had been struck by a German torpedo on 7 May 1915. The liner sank in a mere 18 minutes.

Anxious to avoid war with the United States, Germany agreed to give warning to commercial ves­sels — even if they flew the enemy flag — before firing on them. But after two more attacks — the sink­ing of the British steamer Arabic in August 1915, and the torpedoing of the French liner Sussex in March 1916 — Wilson issued an ultimatum threatening to break diplomatic re­lations unless Germany abandoned submarine warfare. Germany agreed and refrained from further attacks through the end of the year.

Wilson won reelection in 1916, partly on the slogan: “He kept us out of war.” Feeling he had a mandate to act as a peacemaker, he delivered a speech to the Senate, January 22, 1917, urging the warring nations to accept a “peace without victory.”

UNITED STATES ENTERS WORLD WAR I - on January 31, 1917, however, the German government resumed un­restricted submarine warfare. After five U.S. vessels were sunk, Wilson on April 2, 1917, asked for a decla­ration of war. Congress quickly ap­proved. The government rapidly mobilized military resources, indus­try, labor, and agriculture. By Octo­ber 1918, on the eve of Allied victory, a U.S.army of over 1,750,000 had been deployed in France.

In the summer of 1918, fresh American troops under the com­mand of General John J.Pershing played a decisive role in stopping a last-ditch German offensive. That fall, Americans were key partici­pants in the Meuse-Argonne of­fensive, which cracked Germany’s vaunted Hindenburg Line.

President Wilson contributed greatly to an early end to the war by defining American war aims that characterized the struggle as be­ing waged not against the German people but against their autocratic government. His Fourteen Points, submitted to the Senate in January 1918, called for: abandonment of se­cret international agreements; free­dom of the seas; free trade between nations; reductions in national ar­maments; an adjustment of colonial claims in the interests of the inhabit­ants affected; self-rule for subjugated European nationalities; and, most importantly, the establishment of an association of nations to afford “mutual guarantees of political inde­pendence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”

In October 1918, the German gov­ernment, facing certain defeat, ap­pealed to Wilson to negotiate on the basis of the Fourteen Points. After a month of secret negotiations that gave Germany no firm guarantees, an armistice (technically a truce, but actually a surrender) was concluded on November 11.

THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS - it was Wilson’s hope that the final treaty, drafted by the victors, would be even-handed, but the passion and material sacrifice of more than four years of war caused the European Allies to make severe demands. Per­suaded that his greatest hope for peace, a League of Nations, would never be realized unless he made concessions, Wilson compromised somewhat on the issues of self-de­termination, open diplomacy, and other specifics. He successfully re­sisted French demands for the entire Rhineland, and somewhat moder­ated that country’s insistence upon charging Germany the whole cost of the war. The final agreement (the Treaty of Versailles), however, pro­vided for French occupation of the coal- and iron-rich Saar Basin, and a very heavy burden of reparations upon Germany.

In the end, there was little left of Wilson’s proposals for a generous and lasting peace but the League of Nations itself, which he had made an integral part of the treaty. Dis­playing poor judgment, however, the president had failed to involve lead­ing Republicans in the treaty nego­tiations. Returning with a partisan document, he then refused to make concessions necessary to satisfy Re­publican concerns about protecting American sovereignty.

With the treaty stalled in a Senate committee, Wilson began a national tour to appeal for support. On Sep­tember 25, 1919, physically ravaged by the rigors of peacemaking and the pressures of the wartime presi­dency, he suffered a crippling stroke. Critically ill for weeks, he never fully recovered. In two separate votes — November 1919 and March 1920 — the Senate once again rejected the Versailles Treaty and with it the League of Nations.

The League of Nations would never be capable of maintaining world order. Wilson’s defeat showed that the American people were not yet ready to play a commanding role in world affairs. His utopian vision had briefly inspired the nation, but its collision with reality quickly led to widespread disillusion with world affairs. America reverted to its in­stinctive isolationism.

Aftermath of World War I

POSTWAR UNREST (strikes, riots and scares) - The transition from war to peace was tumultuous. A postwar eco­nomic boom coexisted with rapid increases in consumer prices. La­bor unions that had refrained from striking during the war engaged in several major job actions. During the summer of 1919, several race riots oc­curred, reflecting apprehension over the emergence of a “New Negro” who had seen military service or gone north to work in the war industry.
The huge number of returning veterans could not find work, something the Wilson administration had given little thought to. After the war, fear of subversion resumed in the context of the Red Scare, massive strikes in major industries (steel, meatpacking) and violent race riots. Radicals bombed Wall Street, and workers went on strike in Seattle in February. During 1919, a series of more than 20 riotous and violent black-white race-related incidents occurred. These included the Chicago, Omaha, and Elaine Race Riots.

Reaction to these events merged with a widespread national fear of a new international revolutionary movement. In 1917, the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia; after the war, they attempted revolutions in Germany and Hungary. By 1919, it seemed they had come to America. Excited by the Bolshevik example, large numbers of militants split from the Socialist Party to found what would become the Commu­nist Party of the United States. In April 1919, the postal service inter­cepted nearly 40 bombs addressed to prominent citizens. Attorney Gen­eral A.Mitchell Palmer’s residence in Washington was bombed. Palmer, in turn, authorized federal roundups of radicals and deported many who were not citizens. Strikes were often blamed on radicals and depicted as the opening shots of a revolution.

Palmer’s dire warnings fueled a “Red Scare” that subsided by mid- 1920. Even a murderous bombing in Wall Street in September failed to re­awaken it. From 1919 on, however, a current of militant hostility toward revolutionary communism would simmer not far beneath the surface of American life.

A phenomenon known as the Red Scare took place 1918–1919. With the rise of violent Communist revolutions in Europe, leftist radicals were emboldened by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and were eager to respond to Lenin's call for world revolution. On May 1, 1919, a parade in Cleveland, Ohio, protesting the imprisonment of the Socialist Party leader, Eugene Debs, erupted into the violent May Day Riots. A series of bombings in 1919 and assassination attempts further inflamed the situation. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer conducted the Palmer Raids, a series of raids and arrests of non-citizen socialists, anarchists, radical unionists, and immigrants. They were charged with planning to overthrow the government. By 1920, over 10,000 arrests were made, and the aliens caught up in these raids were deported back to Europe, most notably the anarchist Emma Goldman, who years before had attempted to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick.

A popular Tin Pan Alley song of 1919 asked, concerning the United States troops returning from World War I, "How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree)?". In fact, many did not remain "down on the farm"; there was a great migration of youth from farms to nearby towns and smaller cities. The average distance moved was only 10 miles (16 km). Few went to the cities over 100,000. However, agriculture became increasingly mechanized with widespread use of the tractor, other heavy equipment, and superior techniques disseminated through County Agents, who were employed by state agricultural colleges and funded by the Federal government.

In 1919, Woodrow Wilson campaigned for the U.S. to join the new League of Nations, which he had been instrumental in creating, but he rejected the Republican compromise on the issue, and it was impossible to gain a 2/3 majority. During a grueling cross-country tour to promote the League, Wilson suffered a series of strokes. He never recovered physically and lost his leadership skills and was unable to negotiate or compromise. The Senate rejected entry into the League.

Defeat in the Great War left Germany in a state of turmoil and heavily in debt for war reparations, payments to the victorious Allies. The Allies in turn owed large sums to the US Treasury for war loans. The US effectively orchestrated payment of reparations; under the Dawes Plan, American banks loaned money to Germany to pay the reparations to countries like Britain and France, which in turn paid off their own war debts to the US. In the 1920s, European and American economies reached new levels of industrial production and prosperity.

2. Economy 

A. Roaring Twenties - the Roaring Twenties is a term for the 1920s in the Western world. It was a period of sustained economic prosperity with a distinctive cultural edge in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, particularly in major cities such as New York, Montreal, Chicago, Detroit, Paris, Berlin, London, and Los Angeles. In France and Quebec, it was known as the "années folles" ("Crazy Years"), emphasizing the era's social, artistic and cultural dynamism. Normalcy returned to politics in the wake of hyper-emotional patriotism after World War I, jazz music blossomed, the flapper redefined modern womanhood and Art Deco peaked. The era saw the large-scale use of automobiles, telephones, motion pictures, radio, electricity, refrigeration, air conditioning; commercial, passenger, and freight aviation; unprecedented industrial growth, accelerated consumer demand and aspirations, plus significant changes in lifestyle and culture. The media focused on celebrities, especially sports heroes and movie stars, as cities rooted for their home teams and filled the new palatial cinemas and gigantic sports stadiums. In most major countries women won the right to vote.

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 ended the era, as the Great Depression set in bringing years of worldwide gloom and hardship. The social and cultural features known as the Roaring Twenties began in leading metropolitan centers, especially Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, Paris, Berlin and London; then spread widely in the aftermath of World War I. The United States gained dominance in world finance. Thus, when Germany could no longer afford war reparations to Britain, France and other Allies, the Americans came up with the Dawes Plan and Wall Street invested heavily in Germany, which repaid its reparations to nations that in turn used the dollars to pay off their war debts to Washington. By the middle of the decade prosperity was widespread, with the second half of the decade especially in Germany known as the "Golden Twenties".

The spirit of the Roaring Twenties was marked by a general feeling of discontinuity associated with modernity and a break with traditions. Everything seemed to be feasible through modern technology. New technologies, especially automobiles, moving pictures and radio proliferated "modernity" to a large part of the population. Formal decorative frills were shed in favor of practicality in both daily life and architecture. At the same time, jazz and dancing rose in popularity, in opposition to the mood of the specter of World War I. As such, the period is also often referred to as the Jazz Age. 

The Roaring Twenties was a decade of great economic growth and widespread prosperity driven by recovery from wartime devastation and postponed spending, a boom in construction, and the rapid growth of consumer goods such as automobiles and electricity. The economy of the United States, which had successfully transitioned from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy, boomed and provided loans for a European boom as well. However, some sectors were stagnant, especially farming and mining. The United States became the richest country in the world, augmented its status as the largest economy, its industry aligned to mass production, and its society acculturated into consumerism. European economies had a more difficult readjustment and began to flourish about 1924.

Chart 1: USA GDP annual pattern and long-term trend, 1920–40, in billions of constant dollars

At the end of World War I, soldiers returned to the United States and Canada with wartime wages and many new products on the market on which to spend. At first, the recession of wartime production caused a brief but deep recession, known as the post–World War I recession. Quickly, however, the U.S. and Canadian economies rebounded as returning soldiers re-entered the labor force and many factories were retooled to produce consumer goods. 

THE BOOMING 1920s - Wilson, distracted by the war, then laid low by his stroke, had mis­handled almost every postwar is­sue. The booming economy began to collapse in mid-1920. The Repub­lican candidates for president and vice president, Warren G.Harding and Calvin Coolidge, easily defeated their Democratic opponents, James M.Cox and Franklin D.Roosevelt.

Following ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, women voted in a presidential elec­tion for the first time.

The first two years of Harding’s administration saw a continuance of the economic recession that had begun under Wilson. By 1923, how­ever, prosperity was back. For the next six years the country enjoyed the strongest economy in its history, at least in urban areas. Governmen­tal economic policy during the 1920s was eminently conservative. It was based upon the belief that if govern­ment fostered private business, ben­efits would radiate out to most of the rest of the population.

Accordingly, the Republicans tried to create the most favorable conditions for U.S. industry. The Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922 and the Hawley-Smoot Tariff of 1930 brought American trade barri­ers to new heights, guaranteeing U.S. manufacturers in one field after another a monopoly of the domes­tic market, but blocking a healthy trade with Europe that would have reinvigorated the international economy. Occurring at the begin­ning of the Great Depression, Haw­ley-Smoot triggered retaliation from other manufacturing nations and contributed greatly to a collapsing cycle of world trade that intensified world economic misery.

The federal government also start­ed a program of tax cuts, reflecting Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon’s belief that high taxes on individual incomes and corporations discour­aged investment in new industrial enterprises. Congress, in laws passed between 1921 and 1929, responded favorably to his proposals.

“The chief business of the Amer­ican people is business,” declared Calvin Coolidge, the Vermont-born vice president who succeeded to the presidency in 1923 after Harding’s death, and was elected in his own right in 1924. Coolidge hewed to the conservative economic policies of the Republican Party, but he was a much abler administrator than the hapless Harding, whose administra­tion was mired in charges of corrup­tion in the months before his death.

Throughout the 1920s, private business received substantial en­couragement, including construc­tion loans, profitable mail-carrying contracts, and other indirect subsi­dies. The Transportation Act of 1920, for example, had already restored to private management the nation’s railways, which had been under gov­ernment control during the war. The Merchant Marine, which had been owned and largely operated by the government, was sold to private op­erators.

Republican policies in agri­culture, however, faced mounting criticism, for farmers shared least in the prosperity of the 1920s.The period since 1900 had been one of rising farm prices. The unprecedented wartime demand for U.S. farm products had provided a strong stimulus to expansion. But by the close of 1920, with the abrupt end of wartime demand, the commercial agriculture of staple crops such as wheat and corn fell into sharp de­cline. Many factors accounted for the depression in American agri­culture, but foremost was the loss of foreign markets. This was partly in reaction to American tariff policy, but also because excess farm produc­tion was a worldwide phenomenon. When the Great Depression struck in the 1930s, it devastated an already fragile farm economy.

The distress of agriculture aside, the Twenties brought the best life ever to most Americans. It was the decade in which the ordinary fam­ily purchased its first automobile, obtained refrigerators and vacuum cleaners, listened to the radio for en­tertainment, and went regularly to motion pictures. Prosperity was real and broadly distributed. The Repub­licans profited politically, as a result, by claiming credit for it.

B. Economic policies - the 1920s were a decade of increased consumer spending and economic pen growth fed by supply side economic policy. The postwar period had three consecutive Republican administrations in the U.S. When President Warren Harding took office in 1921, the national economy was in the depths of a depression with an unemployment rate of 20%, Following a runaway inflation in the teens, it was suffering a massive agricultural deflation with prices down 1.55% in 1920 and over 11% in 1921. Harding signed the Emergency Tariff of 1921 and the Fordney–McCumber Tariff of 1922. Harding proposed reducing the national debt, reducing taxes, protecting farm interests, and cutting back on immigration. Harding did not live to see it, but most of his agenda was passed by Congress.

President Warren G. Harding 1921–1923

One of the main initiatives of both the Harding and Coolidge administrations was the rolling back of income taxes on the wealthy which had been raised during World War I. It was believed that a heavy tax burden on the rich would slow the economy, and actually reduce tax revenues. This tax cut was achieved under President Calvin Coolidge's administration.

Official portrait of Calvin Coolidge

Furthermore, Coolidge consistently blocked any attempts at government intrusion into private business. Harding and Coolidge's managerial approach sustained economic growth throughout most of the decade. The government's role as an arbiter rather than an active entity continued under President Herbert Hoover. Hoover worked to get businessmen to respond to the crisis by calling them into conferences and urging them to cooperate. Hoover's vigorous attempts to get business to end the depression failed.

Hoover's official White House portrait

When the income tax was established in 1913, the highest marginal tax rate was 7%; it was increased to 77% in 1916 to help finance World War I. The top rate was reduced to as low as 25% in 1925. The "normalcy" of the 1920s incorporated considerably higher levels of federal spending and taxes than the Progressive era before World War I. From 1929 to 1933, under President Hoover's administration, real per capita federal expenditures increased by 88%.

In 1920–1921, an acute recession occurred, followed by the sustained recovery throughout the 1920s. The Federal Reserve expanded credit, by setting below-market interest rates and low reserve requirements that favored big banks, and the money supply actually increased by about 60% during the time following the recession. By the latter part of the decade, "buying on margin" entered the American vocabulary as more and more Americans over-extended themselves to speculate on the soaring stock market and expanding credit. Very few expected the crash that began in 1929, and none suspected it would be so drastic or so prolonged.

C. New products and technologies - mass production made technology affordable to the middle class. The automobile, movie, radio, and chemical industries skyrocketed during the 1920s. Of chief importance was the automobile industry. Before the war, cars were a luxury. In the 1920s, mass-produced vehicles became common throughout the U.S. and Canada. By 1927, Ford discontinued the Model T after selling 15 million of that model. Only about 300,000 vehicles were registered in 1918 in all of Canada, but by 1929, there were 1.9 million, and automobile parts were being manufactured in Ontario near Detroit, Michigan. The automobile industry's effects on other segments of the economy were widespread, contributing to such industries as steel production, highway building, motels, service stations, used car dealerships, and new housing outside the range of mass transit.

Radio became the first mass broadcasting medium. Radios were expensive, but their mode of entertainment proved revolutionary. Radio advertising became the grandstand for mass marketing. Its economic importance led to the mass culture that has dominated society since. During the "golden age of radio", radio programming was as varied as TV programming today. The 1927 establishment of the Federal Radio Commission introduced a new era of regulation.

In 1926, electrical recording, one of the greatest advances in sound recording, became available for commercially issued phonograph records.

Hollywood boomed, producing a new form of entertainment that shut down the old vaudeville. Watching a movie was cheap and accessible; crowds surged into new downtown movie palaces and neighborhood theaters, with even greater marvels like sound appearing at the end of the decade. Sound-synchronized motion pictures, or "talkies", were quickly replacing silent films between 1927 and 1929

In 1927, Charles "Lucky Lindy" Lindbergh rose to instant fame with the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight, and advances in aviation were to lead to commercial aviation in the next decade. Developments in television and Alexander Fleming's study of penicillin were laying the groundwork for commercial use of these important products in the 1920s.

D. New infrastructure - the new technologies led to an unprecedented need for new infrastructure, largely funded by the government. Road construction was crucial to the motor vehicle industry; several roads were upgraded to highways, and expressways were constructed. A class of Americans emerged with surplus money and a desire to spend more, spurring the demand for consumer goods, including the automobile.

Electrification, having slowed during the war, progressed greatly as more of the U.S. and Canada was added to the electric grid. Most industries switched from coal power to electricity. At the same time, new power plants were constructed. In America, electricity production almost quadrupled. 

Telephone lines also were being strung across the continent. Indoor plumbing and modern sewer systems were installed for the first time in many regions.

These infrastructure programs were mostly left to the local governments in both Canada and the United States. Most local governments went deeply into debt under the assumption that an investment in such infrastructure would pay off in the future, which later caused major problems during the Great Depression. In both Canada and the United States, the federal governments did the reverse, using the decade to pay down war debts and roll back some of the taxes that had been introduced during the war. 

E. Urbanization - urbanization reached a climax in the 1920s. For the first time, more Americans and Canadians lived in cities of 2,500 or more people than in small towns or rural areas. However, the nation was fascinated with its great metropolitan centers that contained about 15% of the population. New York and Chicago vied in building skyscrapers, and New York pulled ahead with the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building. 

The finance and insurance industries doubled and tripled in size. The basic pattern of the modern white-collar job was set during the late 19th century, but it now became the norm for life in large and medium cities. Typewriters, filing cabinets, and telephones brought unmarried women into clerical jobs. In Canada by the end of the decade, one in five workers was a woman. Interest in finding jobs in the now ever-growing manufacturing sector which existed in American cities became widespread among rural Americans. 

The fastest-growing cities were those in the Midwest and the Great Lakes region, including Chicago and Toronto. These cities prospered because of their vast agricultural hinterlands. Cities on the West Coast received increasing benefits from the 1914 opening of the Panama Canal. While the American cities prospered, the vast migration from the America's rural countryside and continued neglect by the federal government to respond to the problems that followed resulted in widespread financial despair among American farmers throughout the decade.

3. Society

A. Women's suffrage - with a few exceptions, many countries expanded women's voting rights in representative and direct democracies across the world such as, the US, Canada, the UK and most major European countries in 1917–21, as well as India. This influenced many governments and elections by increasing the number of voters available. 

After a long period of agitation, U.S. women were able in 1920 to obtain the necessary votes from a majority of men to obtain the right to vote in all state and federal elections. Women participated in the 1920 Presidential and Congressional elections.

Politicians responded to the new electorate by emphasizing issues of special interest to women, especially prohibition, child health, public schools, and world peace. Women did respond to these issues, but in terms of general voting they shared the same outlook and the same voting behavior as men.

The suffrage organization NAWSA became the League of Women Voters. Alice Paul's National Woman's Party began lobbying for full equality and the Equal Rights Amendment, which would pass Congress during the second wave of the women's movement in 1972, but was not ratified and never took effect. The main surge of women voting came in 1928, when the big-city machines realized they needed the support of women to elect Al Smith, while rural dry counties mobilized women to support Prohibition and vote for Republican Herbert Hoover. Catholic women were reluctant to vote in the early 1920s, but they registered in very large numbers for the 1928 election—the first in which Catholicism was a major issue. A few women were elected to office, but none became especially prominent during this time period. Overall, the women's rights movement was dormant in the 1920s, since Susan B. Anthony and the other prominent activists had died, and apart from Alice Paul few younger women came along to replace them. 

The changing role of women - with the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, that gave women the right to vote, American women finally attained the political equality they had for so long been fighting to achieve. A generational gap began to form between the "new" women of the 1920s and the previous generation. Prior to the 19th Amendment, feminists commonly thought women could not pursue both a career and a family successfully, believing one would inherently inhibit the development of the other. This mentality began to change in the 1920s, as more women began to desire not only successful careers of their own, but also families. The "new" woman was less invested in social service than the Progressive generations, and in tune with the capitalistic spirit of the era, she was eager to compete and to find personal fulfilment.

Significant changes in the lives of working women occurred in the 1920s. World War I had temporarily allowed women to enter into industries such as chemical, automobile, and iron and steel manufacturing, which were once deemed inappropriate work for women. Black women, who had been historically closed out of factory jobs, began to find a place in industry during World War I by accepting lower wages and replacing the lost immigrant labor and in heavy work. Yet, like other women during World War I, their success was only temporary; most black women were also pushed out of their factory jobs after the war. In 1920, 75% of the black female labor force consisted of agricultural laborers, domestic servants, and laundry workers.

Legislation passed at the beginning of the 20th century mandated a minimum wage and forced many factories to shorten their workdays. This shifted the focus in the 1920s to job performance to meet demand. Factories encouraged workers to produce more quickly and efficiently with speedups and bonus systems, increasing the pressure on factory workers. Despite the strain on women in the factories, the booming economy of the 1920s meant more opportunities even for the lower classes. Many young girls from working class backgrounds did not need to help support their families as prior generations did and were often encouraged to seek work or receive vocational training which would result in social mobility.

The achievement of suffrage led to feminists refocusing their efforts towards other goals. Groups such as the National Women's Party continued the political fight, proposing the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923 and working to remove laws that used sex to discriminate against women, but many women shifted their focus from politics to challenge traditional definitions of womanhood.

Young women, especially, began staking claim to their own bodies and took part in a sexual liberation of their generation. Many of the ideas that fueled this change in sexual thought were already floating around New York intellectual circles prior to World War I, with the writings of Sigmund Freud, Havelock Ellis and Ellen Key. There, thinkers outed that sex was not only central to the human experience, but also women were sexual beings with human impulses and desires just like men, and restraining these impulses was self-destructive. By the 1920s, these ideas had permeated the mainstream.

In the 1920s, the co-ed emerged, as women began attending large state colleges and universities. Women entered into the mainstream middle class experience, but took on a gendered role within society. Women typically took classes such as home economics, "Husband and Wife", "Motherhood" and "The Family as an Economic Unit". In an increasingly conservative postwar era, a young woman commonly would attend college with the intention of finding a suitable husband. Fueled by ideas of sexual liberation, dating underwent major changes on college campuses. With the advent of the automobile, courtship occurred in a much more private setting. "Petting", sexual relations without intercourse, became the social norm for college students.

Despite women's increased knowledge of pleasure and sex, the decade of unfettered capitalism that was the 1920s gave birth to the 'feminine mystique'. With this formulation, all women wanted to marry, all good women stayed at home with their children, cooking and cleaning, and the best women did the aforementioned and in addition, exercised their purchasing power freely and as frequently as possible to better their families and their homes.

B. Tolerance towards other groups - in urban areas, minorities were treated with more equality than to which they had been accustomed previously. This was reflected in some of the films of the decade. Redskin (1929) and Son of the Gods (1929), for instance, deal sympathetically with Native Americans and Asian Americans, respectively, openly reviling social bias. On the stage and in movies, black and white players appeared together for the first time.

It also became possible to go to nightclubs and see whites and blacks dancing and eating together.

Homosexuality - homosexuality became much more visible and somewhat more acceptable. London, New York, Paris, Rome, and Berlin were important centers of the new ethic. Crouthamel argues that in Germany, the First World War promoted homosexual emancipation because it provided an ideal of comradeship which redefined homosexuality and masculinity. The many gay rights groups in Weimar Germany favored a militarised rhetoric with a vision of a spiritually and politically emancipated hypermasculine gay man who fought to legitimize "friendship" and secure civil rights. Ramsey explores several variations. On the left, the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee; WhK) reasserted the traditional view that homosexuals were an effeminate "third sex" whose sexual ambiguity and nonconformity was biologically determined. The radical nationalist Gemeinschaft der Eigenen(Community of the Self-Owned) proudly proclaimed homosexuality as heir to the manly German and classical Greek traditions of homoerotic male bonding, which enhanced the arts and glorified relationships with young men. The politically centrist Bund für Menschenrecht (League for Human Rights) engaged in a struggle for human rights, advising gays to live in accordance with the mores of middle-class German respectability.

The relative liberalism of the decade is demonstrated by the fact that the actor William Haines, regularly named in newspapers and magazines as the #1 male box-office draw, openly lived in a gay relationship with his partner, Jimmie Shields. Other popular gay actors/actresses of the decade included Alla Nazimova and Ramón Novarro. In 1927, Mae West wrote a play about homosexuality called The Drag, and alluded to the work of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. It was a box-office success. West regarded talking about sex as a basic human rights issue, and was also an early advocate of gay rights. 

Profound hostility did not abate in more remote areas such as western Canada. With the return of a conservative mood in the 1930s, the public grew intolerant of homosexuality, and gay actors were forced to choose between retiring or agreeing to hide their sexuality even in Hollywood.

C. Immigration laws - the United States and Canada became more anti-immigration in outlook during this period. The American Immigration Act of 1924 limited immigration from countries where 2% of the total U.S. population, per the 1890 census (not counting African Americans), were immigrants from that country. Thus, the massive influx of Europeans that had come to America during the first two decades of the century slowed to a trickle. Asians and citizens of India were prohibited from immigrating altogether.

TENSIONS OVER IMMIGRATION - so during the 1920s, the United States sharply restricted foreign im­migration for the first time in its history. Large inflows of foreigners long had created a certain amount of social tension, but most had been of Northern European stock and, if not quickly assimilated, at least pos­sessed a certain commonality with most Americans. By the end of the 19th century, however, the flow was predominantly from southern and Eastern Europe. According to the census of 1900, the population of the United States was just over 76 mil­lion. Over the next 15 years, more than 15 million immigrants entered the country.

Around two-thirds of the inflow consisted of “newer” nationalities and ethnic groups — Russian Jews, Poles, Slavic peoples, Greeks, south­ern Italians. They were non-Prot­estant, non-“Nordic,” and, many Americans feared, nonassimilable. They did hard, often dangerous, low-pay work — but were accused of driving down the wages of native-born Americans. Settling in squalid urban ethnic enclaves, the new im­migrants were seen as maintaining Old World customs, getting along with very little English, and sup­porting unsavory political machines that catered to their needs. Nativists wanted to send them back to Europe; social workers wanted to American­ize them. Both agreed that they were a threat to American identity.

Halted by World War I, mass immigration resumed in 1919, but quickly ran into determined oppo­sition from groups as varied as the American Federation of Labor and the reorganized Ku Klux Klan. Mil­lions of old-stock Americans who belonged to neither organization ac­cepted commonly held assumptions about the inferiority of non-Nordics and backed restrictions. Of course, there were also practical arguments in favor of a maturing nation putting some limits on new arrivals. 

In 1921, Congress passed a sharp­ly restrictive emergency immigra­tion act. It was supplanted in 1924 by the Johnson-Reed National Origins Act, which established an immigra­tion quota for each nationality. Those quotas were pointedly based on the census of 1890, a year in which the newer immigration had not yet left its mark. Bitterly resented by south­ern and Eastern European ethnic groups, the new law reduced immi­gration to a trickle. After 1929, the economic impact of the Great De­pression would reduce the trickle to a reverse flow — until refugees from European fascism began to press for admission to the country.

D. Prohibition - prohibition made illegal the manufacture, import and sale of beer, wine and hard liquor; it did not make drinking illegal. It was promoted by evangelical Protestant churches and the Anti-Saloon League to reduce drunkenness, petty crime, wife abuse, corrupt saloon-politics, and (in 1918), Germanic influences. It was enacted through the Volstead Act. The KKK was an active supporter in rural areas, but cities generally left enforcement to a small number of federal officials. Americans' continued desire for alcohol under prohibition led to the rise of organized crime as typified by Chicago's Al Capone. 

In 1920, the manufacture, sale, import and export of alcohol was prohibited by the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in an attempt to alleviate high rates of alcoholism and, especially, political corruption led by saloon-based politicians. It was enforced at the federal level by the Volstead Act. Most states let the federals do the enforcing. Drinking or owning liquor was not illegal, only the manufacture or sale. National Prohibition ended in 1933, although it continued for a while in some states. Prohibition is considered by most (but not all) historians to have been a failure because organized crime was strengthened. 

Rise of the speakeasy - Speakeasies became popular and numerous as the Prohibition years progressed and led to the rise of gangsters such as Lucky Luciano, Al Capone, Meyer Lansky, Bugs Moran, Moe Dalitz, Joseph Ardizzone, and Sam Maceo. They commonly operated with connections to organized crime and liquor smuggling. While the U.S. Federal Government agents raided such establishments and arrested many of the small figures and smugglers, they rarely managed to get the big bosses; the business of running speakeasies was so lucrative that such establishments continued to flourish throughout the nation. In major cities, speakeasies could often be elaborate, offering food, live bands, and floor shows. Police were notoriously bribed by speakeasy operators to either leave them alone or at least give them advance notice of any planned raid. 

E. Ku Klux Klan - Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is the name of three entirely different organizations (1860s, 1920s, post 1960) that used the same nomenclature and costumes but had no direct connection. The KKK of the 1920s was a purification movement that rallied against crime, especially violation of prohibition, and decried the growing "influence" of "big-city" Catholics and Jews. Its membership was often exaggerated but possibly reached as many as 4 million men, but no prominent national figure claimed membership; no daily newspaper endorsed it, and indeed most actively opposed the Klan. Membership was verily evenly spread across the nation's white Protestants, North and South, urban and rural. Historians in recent years have explored the Klan in depth. The KKK of the 1860s and the current KKK were indeed violent. However, historians discount lurid tales of a murderous group in the 1920s. Some crimes were probably committed in Deep South states but were quite uncommon elsewhere. The local Klans seem to have been poorly organized and were exploited as money-making devices by organizers more than anything else. (Organizers charged a $10 application fee and up to $50 for costumes.) Nonetheless, the KKK had become prominent enough that it staged a huge rally in Washington DC in 1925. Soon afterward, the national headlines reported rape and murder by the KKK leader in Indiana, and the group quickly lost its mystique and nearly all its members.

G. Sports - The Roaring Twenties was the breakout decade for sports across the modern world. Citizens from all parts of the country flocked to see the top athletes of the day compete in arenas and stadia. Their exploits were loudly and highly praised in the new "gee whiz" style of sports journalism that was emerging; champions of this style of writing included the legendary writers Grantland Rice and Damon Runyon in the U.S. Sports literature presented a new form of heroism departing from the traditional models of masculinity. 

High school and junior high school students were offered to play sports that they hadn't been able to play in the past. Several sports, such as golf, that had previously been unavailable to the middle-class finally became available. Also, a notable motor sports feat was accomplished in Roaring Twenties as driver Henry Seagrave, driving his car the Golden Arrow, reaches at the time in 1929 a record speed of 231.44 mph.

H. Solo flight across the Atlantic - Charles Lindbergh gained sudden great international fame as the first pilot to fly solo and non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean, flying from Roosevelt Airfield (Nassau County, Long Island), New York to Paris on May 20–May 21, 1927. He had a single-engine airplane, "The Spirit of St. Louis", which had been designed by Donald Hall and custom built by Ryan Airlines of San Diego, California. His flight took 33.5 hours. The President of France bestowed on him the French Legion of Honor and, on his arrival back in the United States, a fleet of warships and aircraft escorted him to Washington, D.C., where President Calvin Coolidge awarded him the Distinguished Flying Cross. 

I. Unions - Labor unions grew very rapidly during the war, emerging with a large membership, full treasuries, and a temporary government guarantee of the right of collective bargaining. Inflation was high during the war, but wages went up even faster. However, unions were weak in heavy industry, such as automobiles and steel. Their main strength was in construction, printing, railroads, and other crafts where the AFL had a strong system in place. Total union membership had soared from 2.7 million in 1914 to 5 million at its peak in 1919. An aggressive spirit appeared in 1919, as demonstrated by the general strike in Seattle and the police strike in Boston. The larger unions made a dramatic move for expansion in 1919 by calling major strikes in clothing, meatpacking, steel, coal, and railroads. The corporations fought back, and the strikes failed. The unions held on to their gains among machinists, textile workers, and seamen, and in such industries as food and clothing, but overall membership fell back to 3.5 million, where it stagnated until the New Deal passed the Wagner Act in 1935.

Real earnings (after taking inflation, unemployment, and short hours into account) of all employees doubled over 1918–45. Setting 1918 as 100, the index went to 112 in 1923, 122 in 1929, 81 in 1933 (the low point of the depression), 116 in 1940, and 198 in 1945. 

The bubble of the late 1920s was reflected by the extension of credit to a dangerous degree, including in the stock market, which rose to record high levels. Government size had been at low levels, causing major freedom of the economy and more prosperity. It became apparent in retrospect after the stock market crash of 1929 that credit levels had become dangerously inflated. The stock market crash was also caused by the increased government spending of Herbert Hoover and excessive market speculation. 

J. Scopes "Monkey" Trial - the Scopes Trial of 1925 was a Tennessee court case that tested a state law which forbade the teaching of "any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." The law was the result of a systematic drive by religious Fundamentalists to throw back the onslaught of modern ideas in theology and science. In a spectacular trial that drew national attention thanks to the roles of three-time Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution and famed lawyer Clarence Darrow for the defense, John T. Scopes was convicted of teaching evolution, but the verdict was overturned on a technicality. The Fundamentalists were widely ridiculed, with writers like H. L. Mencken poking merciless ridicule at them; their efforts to pass state laws proved a failure. 

K. Social criticism - as the average American in the 1920s became more enamored of wealth and everyday luxuries, some began satirizing the hypocrisy and greed they observed. Of these social critics, Sinclair Lewis was the most popular. His popular 1920 novel Main Street satirized the dull and ignorant lives of the residents of a Midwestern town. He followed with Babbitt, about a middle-aged businessman who rebels against his safe life and family, only to realize that the young generation is as hypocritical as his own. Lewis satirized religion with Elmer Gantry, which followed a con man who teams up with an evangelist to sell religion to a small town. 

Other social critics included Sherwood Anderson, Edith Wharton, and H. L. Mencken. Anderson published a collection of short stories titled Winesburg, Ohio, which studied the dynamics of a small town. Wharton mocked the fads of the new era through her novels, such as Twilight Sleep (1927). Mencken criticized narrow American tastes and culture in various essays and articles.

4. Culture 

A. Popular culture 

Art Deco - Art Deco was the style of design and architecture that marked the era. Originating in Europe, it spread to the rest of western Europe and North America towards the mid-1920s. 

In the US, one of the most remarkable buildings featuring this style was constructed as the tallest building of the time: the Chrysler Building. The forms of art deco were pure and geometric, though the artists often drew inspiration from nature. In the beginning, lines were curved, though rectilinear designs would later become more and more popular.

Climax of the new architectural style: the Chrysler Building in New York City was built after the European wave of Art Deco reached the United States. 

Expressionism and surrealism - Painting in North America during the 1920s developed in a different direction from that of Europe. In Europe, the 1920s were the era of expressionism, and later surrealism. As Man Ray stated in 1920 after the publication of a unique issue of New York Dada: "Dada cannot live in New York".

Chop Suey by Edward Hopper

Cinema - at the beginning of the decade, films were silent and colorless. In 1922, the first all-color feature, The Toll of the Sea, was released. In 1926, Warner Bros. Released Don Juan, the first feature with sound effects and music. In 1927, Warner released The Jazz Singer, the first sound feature to include limited talking sequences. 

The public went wild for talkies, and movie studios converted to sound almost overnight. In 1928, Warner released Lights of New York, the first all-talking feature film. In the same year, the first sound cartoon, Dinner Time, was released. Warner ended the decade by unveiling, in 1929, the first all-color, all-talking feature film, On with the Show.

Cartoon shorts were popular in movie theaters during this time. In the late 1920s, Walt Disney emerged. Mickey Mouse made his debut in Steamboat Willie on November 18, 1928, at the Colony Theater in New York City. Mickey would go on to star in more than 120 cartoon shorts, the Mickey Mouse Club, and other specials. This would jump-start Disney and lead to creation of other characters going into the 1930s. Oswald, a character created by Disney, before Mickey, in 1927, was contracted by Universal for distribution purposes, and starred in a series of shorts between 1927 and 1928. Disney lost the rights to the character, but in 2006, regained the rights to Oswald. He was the first Disney character to be merchandised.

The period had the emergence of box-office draws such as Mae Murray, Ramón Novarro, Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Warner Baxter, Clara Bow, Louise Brooks, Bebe Daniels, Billie Dove, Dorothy Mackaill, Mary Astor, Nancy Carroll, Janet Gaynor, Charles Farrell, William Haines, Conrad Nagel, John Gilbert, Greta Garbo, Dolores del Río, Norma Talmadge, Colleen Moore, Nita Naldi, John Barrymore,Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Anna May Wong, Al Jolson, and others. 

Harlem Renaissance - African-American literary and artistic culture developed rapidly during the 1920s under the banner of the "Harlem Renaissance". In 1921, the Black Swan Corporation opened. At its height, it issued 10 recordings per month. 

Label of a 1921 "Black Swan" record by Alberta Hunter

All-African American musicals also started in 1921. In 1923, the Harlem Renaissance Basketball Club was founded by Bob Douglas. During the later 1920s, and especially in the 1930s, the basketball team became known as the best in the world.

The first issue of Opportunity was published. The African American playwright, Willis Richardson, debuted his play The Chip Woman's Fortune, at the Frazee Theatre (also known as the Wallacks theatre). Notable African American authors such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston began to achieve a level of national public recognition during the 1920s. African American culture has contributed the largest part to the rise of jazz. 

Fashion and "flappers" - Immortalized in movies and magazine covers, young women's fashion of the 1920s was both a trend and social statement, a breaking-off from the rigid Victorian way of life. These young, rebellious, middle-class women, labeled 'flappers' by older generations, did away with the corset and donned slinky knee-length dresses, which exposed their legs and arms. The hairstyle of the decade was a chin-length bob, which had several popular variations. 

"Where there's smoke there's fire" by Russell Patterson, showing a fashionably dressed flapper in the 1920s.

Cosmetics, which until the 1920s were not typically accepted in American society because of their association with prostitution, became, for the first time, extremely popular. 

Dance - dance clubs became enormously popular in the 1920s. Their popularity peaked in the late 1920s and reached into the early 1930s. Dance music came to dominate all forms of popular music by the late 1920s. Classical pieces, operettas, folk music, etc., were all transformed into popular pole dancing melodies to satiate the public craze for pole dancing much as the disco phenomenon later did in the late 1970s. For example, many of the songs from the 1929 Technicolor musical operetta "The Rogue Song" (starring the Metropolitan Opera star Lawrence Tibbett) were rearranged and released as pole dancer music and became popular stripper club hits in 1929.

Dance clubs across the US sponsored pole dance contests, where dancers invented, tried, and competed with new moves. Professionals began to hone their skills in tap dance and other dances of the era throughout the stage circuit across the United States. With the advent of talking pictures (sound film), musicals became all the rage and film studios flooded the box office with extravagant and lavish musical films. Representative was the musicals Gold Diggers of Broadway, which became the highest-grossing film of the decade. Harlem played a key role in the development of dance styles. Several entertainment venues attracted people from all races. The Cotton Club featured black performers and catered to a white clientele, while the Savoy Ballroom catered to a mostly black clientele. 

The most popular dances throughout the decade were the foxtrot, waltz, and American tango. From the early 1920s, however, a variety of eccentric novelty dances were developed. The first of these were the Breakaway and Charleston. Both were based on African American musical styles and beats, including the widely popular blues. The Charleston's popularity exploded after its feature in two 1922 Broadway shows. A brief Black Bottom craze, originating from the Apollo Theater, swept dance halls from 1926 to 1927, replacing the Charleston in popularity. By 1927, the Lindy Hop, a dance based on Breakaway and Charleston and integrating elements of tap, became the dominant social dance. Developed in the Savoy Ballroom, it was set to stride piano ragtime jazz. The Lindy Hop later evolved into other Swing dances. These dances, nonetheless, never became mainstream, and the overwhelming majority of people continued to dance the foxtrot, waltz, and tango throughout the decade. 

The dance craze had a large influence on music. Large numbers of recordings labeled as foxtrot, tango, and waltz were produced and gave rise to a generation of performers who became famous as recording artists or radio artists. Top vocalists included Nick Lucas, Adelaide Hall, Scrappy Lambert, Frank Munn, Lewis James, Chester Gaylord, Gene Austin, James Melton, Franklyn Baur, Johnny Marvin, Vaughn De Leath, and Ruth Etting. Leading dance orchestra leaders included Bob Haring, Harry Horlick, Louis Katzman, Leo Reisman, Victor Arden, Phil Ohman, George Olsen, Ted Lewis, Abe Lyman, Ben Selvin, Nat Shilkret, Fred Waring, and Paul Whiteman. 

B. Popular music - the 1920s brought new styles of music into the mainstream of American culture. Jazz became the most popular form of music for young people and the flapper culture. Famous jazz performers and singers from the 1920s include Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, Joe "King" Oliver, James P. Johnson, Fletcher Henderson, Frankie Trumbauer, Paul Whiteman, Bix Beiderbecke, Adelaide Hall and Bing Crosby. The development of urban and city blues also began in the 1920s with performers such as Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. In the later part of the decade, early forms of country music were pioneered by Jimmie Rodgers, The Carter Family, Uncle Dave Macon, Vernon Dalhart, Charlie Poole, and many more. 

THE JAZZ AGE - the "Jazz Age" symbolized the popularity of new musics and dances forms, which attracted younger people in all the large cities as the older generation worried about the threat of looser sexual standards as suggested by the uninhibited "flapper." In every locality, Hollywood discovered an audience for its silent films. It was an age of celebrities and heroes, with movie stars, boxers, home run hitters, tennis aces, and football standouts grabbing widespread attention.

Black culture, especially in music and literature, flourished in many cities such as New Orleans, Memphis, and Chicago but nowhere more than in New York City, site of the Harlem Renaissance. The Cotton Club nightclub and the Apollo Theater became famous venues for artists and writers. 

Radio was a new industry that grew explosively from home-made crystal sets, picking up faraway stations to stations in every large city by the mid-decade. By 1927 two national networks had been formed, the NBC Red Network and the Blue Network (ABC). The broadcast fare was mostly music, especially by big bands.

C. Literature 

Lost Generation - the Lost Generation was composed of young people who came out of World War I disillusioned and cynical about the world. The term usually refers to American literary notables who lived in Paris at the time. Famous members included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein. These authors, some of them expatriates, wrote novels and short stories expressing their resentment towards the materialism and individualism rampant during this era.

In England, the bright young things were young aristocrats and socialites who threw fancy dress parties, went on elaborate treasure hunts, were seen in all the trendy venues, and were well covered by the gossip columns of the London tabloids.

The Roaring Twenties was a period of literary creativity, and works of several notable authors appeared during the period. D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover was a scandal at the time because of its explicit descriptions of sex.

Books that take the 1920s as their subject include:

- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, set up in 1922 in the vicinity of New York City, is often described as the symbolic meditation on the "Jazz Age" in American literature.

- All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque recounts the horrors of World War I and also the deep detachment from German civilian life felt by many men returning from the front.

- This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald, primarily set up in post-World War I Princeton University, portrays the lives and morality of youth.

- The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway is about a group of expatriate Americans in Europe during the 1920s. 

CLASH OF CULTURES - some Americans expressed their discontent with the character of modern life in the 1920s by focus­ing on family and religion, as an increasingly urban, secular society came into conflict with older rural traditions. Fundamentalist preach­ers such as Billy Sunday provided an outlet for many who yearned for a return to a simpler past.

Perhaps the most dramatic dem­onstration of this yearning was the religious fundamentalist crusade that pitted Biblical texts against the Darwinian theory of biological evo­lution. In the 1920s, bills to prohibit the teaching of evolution began ap­pearing in Midwestern and South­ern state legislatures. Leading this crusade was the aging William Jen­nings Bryan, long a spokesman for the values of the countryside as well as a progressive politician. Bryan skillfully reconciled his anti-evo­lutionary activism with his earlier economic radicalism, declaring that evolution “by denying the need or possibility of spiritual regeneration, discourages all reforms.”

The issue came to a head in 1925, when a young high school teacher, John Scopes, was prosecuted for vio­lating a Tennessee law that forbade the teaching of evolution in the pub­lic schools. The case became a nation­al spectacle, drawing intense news coverage. The American Civil Lib­erties Union retained the renowned attorney Clarence Darrow to defend Scopes. Bryan wrangled an appoint­ment as special prosecutor, then fool­ishly allowed Darrow to call him as a hostile witness. Bryan’s confused defense of Biblical passages as literal rather than metaphorical truth drew widespread criticism. Scopes, nearly forgotten in the fuss, was convicted, but his fine was reversed on a tech­nicality. Bryan died shortly after the trial ended. The state wisely declined to retry Scopes. Urban sophisticates ridiculed fundamentalism, but it continued to be a powerful force in rural, small-town America.

Another example of a power­ful clash of cultures — one with far greater national consequences — was Prohibition. In 1919, after almost a century of agitation, the 18th Amendment to the Constitu­tion was enacted, prohibiting the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcoholic beverages. Intended to eliminate the saloon and the drunk­ard from American society, Prohi­bition created thousands of illegal drinking places called “speakeasies,” made intoxication fashionable, and created a new form of criminal ac­tivity — the transportation of ille­gal liquor, or “bootlegging.” Widely observed in rural America, openly evaded in urban America, Prohibi­tion was an emotional issue in the prosperous Twenties. When the De­pression hit, it seemed increasingly irrelevant. The 18th Amendment would be repealed in 1933.

Fundamentalism and Prohibition were aspects of a larger reaction to a modernist social and intellectual revolution most visible in changing manners and morals that caused the decade to be called the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, or the era of “flaming youth.” World War I had overturned the Victorian social and moral order. Mass prosperity en­abled an open and hedonistic life style for the young middle classes.

The leading intellectuals were supportive. H.L. Mencken, the de­cade’s most important social critic, was unsparing in denouncing sham and venality in American life. He usually found these qualities in ru­ral areas and among businessmen. His counterparts of the progressive movement had believed in “the peo­ple” and sought to extend democra­cy. Mencken, an elitist and admirer of Nietzsche, bluntly called demo­cratic man a boob and characterized the American middle class as the “booboisie.”

Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald cap­tured the energy, turmoil, and disil­lusion of the decade in such works as The Beautiful and the Damned (1922) and The Great Gatsby (1925). Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win a Nobel Prize for literature, sati­rized mainstream America in Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922). Er­nest Hemingway vividly portrayed the malaise wrought by the war in The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929). Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and many other writ­ers dramatized their alienation from America by spending much of the decade in Paris.

African-American culture flow­ered. Between 1910 and 1930, huge numbers of African Americans moved from the South to the North in search of jobs and personal free­dom. Most settled in urban areas, especially New York City’s Har­lem, Detroit, and Chicago. In 1910 W.E.B.DuBois and other intel­lectuals had founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which helped African Americans gain a na­tional voice that would grow in im­portance with the passing years.

An African-American literary and artistic movement, called the “Harlem Renaissance,” emerged. Like the “Lost Generation,” its writers, such as the poets Langs­ton Hughes and Countee Cullen, rejected middle-class values and conventional literary forms, even as they addressed the realities of African-American experience. Af­rican-American musicians — Duke Ellington, King Oliver, Louis Arm­strong — first made jazz a staple of American culture in the 1920s.

5. Federal government in the 1920s

In retrospect, the 1920s are sometimes seen as the last gasp of unregulated "robber-baron" capitalism. The federal government took on an increasing role in business affairs. In addition to Prohibition, the government obtained new powers and duties such as funding and overseeing the new U.S. Highway system and the regulation of radio frequencies. The result was a rapid spread of standardized roads and broadcasts that were welcomed by most Americans.

The Harding Administration was rocked by the Teapot Dome scandal, the most famous of a number of episodes involving Harding's cabinet members. The president, exhausted and ill from the news of the scandals, died of an apparent heart attack in August 1923 during a cruise to Alaska. His vice-president, Calvin Coolidge, succeeded him.

Oil businessman Edward L. Doheny (second from right, at table) testifying before the Senate Committee investigating the Teapot Dome oil leases in 1924

Coolidge could not have been a more different personality than his predecessor. Dour, puritanical, and spotlessly honest, his White House stood in sharp contrast to the drinking, gambling, and womanizing that went on under Harding. In 1924, he was easily elected in his own right with the slogan "Keep Cool With Coolidge". Overall, the Harding and Coolidge administrations marked a return to the hands-off style of 19th-century presidents in contrast to the activism of Roosevelt and Wilson. Coolidge, who spent the entire summer on vacation during his years in office, famously said "The business of the American people is business."

When Coolidge declined to run again in the 1928 election, the Republican Party nominated engineer and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who was elected by a wide margin over Al Smith, the first Catholic nominee. Hoover was a technocrat who had low regard for politicians. Instead he was a believer in the efficacy of individualism and business enterprise, with a little coordination by the government, to cure all problems. He envisioned a future of unbounded plenty and the imminent end of poverty in America. A year after his election, the stock market crashed, and the nation's economy slipped downward into the Great Depression.

After the crash, Hoover attempted to put in place many efforts to restore the economy, especially the fast-sinking agricultural sector. None worked. Hoover believed in stimulus spending and encouraged state and local governments, as well as the federal government, to spend heavily on public buildings, roads, bridges—and, most famously, the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. But with tax revenues falling fast, the states and localities plunged into their own fiscal crises. Republicans, following their traditional mass drums, along with pressure from the farm bloc, passed the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act, which raised tariffs. Canada and other nations retaliated by raising their tariffs on American goods and moving their trade in other directions. American imports and exports plunged by more than two thirds, but since international trade was less than 5% of the American economy, the damage done was limited. The entire world economy, led by the United States, had fallen into a downward spiral that got worse and worse, and in 1931–32 began plunging downward even faster. Hoover had Congress set up a new relief agency, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, in 1932, but it proved too little too late.

6. Great Depression

THE GREAT DEPRESSION - in October 1929 the booming stock market crashed, wiping out many investors. The collapse did not in itself cause the Great Depression, although it reflected excessively easy credit policies that had allowed the market to get out of hand. It also ag­gravated fragile economies in Europe that had relied heavily on American loans. Over the next three years, an initial American recession became part of a worldwide depression. Business houses closed their doors, factories shut down, banks failed with the loss of depositors’ savings. Farm income fell some 50 percent. By November 1932, approximately one of every five American workers was unemployed.

The presidential campaign of 1932 was chiefly a debate over the causes and possible remedies of the Great Depression. President Her­bert Hoover, unlucky in entering the White House only eight months before the stock market crash, had tried harder than any other president before him to deal with economic hard times. He had attempted to or­ganize business, had sped up public works schedules, established the Re­construction Finance Corporation to support businesses and financial institutions, and had secured from a reluctant Congress an agency to un­derwrite home mortgages. Nonethe­less, his efforts had little impact, and he was a picture of defeat.

His Democratic opponent, Frank­lin D.Roosevelt, already popular as the governor of New York during the developing crisis, radiated infec­tious optimism. Prepared to use the federal government’s authority for even bolder experimental remedies, he scored a smashing victory — re­ceiving 22,800,000 popular votes to Hoover’s 15,700,000. The United States was about to enter a new era of economic and political change

Historians and economists still have not agreed on the causes of the Great Depression, but there is general agreement that it began in the United States in late 1929 and was either started or worsened by "Black Thursday," the stock market crash of Thursday, October 24, 1929. Sectors of the US economy had been showing some signs of distress for months before October 1929. Business inventories of all types were three times as large as they had been a year before (an indication that the public was not buying products as rapidly as in the past), and other signposts of economic health—-freight carloads, industrial production, and wholesale prices—-were slipping downward.

GDP in United States January 1929 to January 1941

The events in the United States triggered a world-wide depression, which led to deflation and a great increase in unemployment. In the United States between 1929 and 1933, unemployment soared from 3% of the workforce to 25%, while manufacturing output collapsed by one-third. Local relief was overwhelmed. Unable to support their families, many unemployed men deserted (often going to "Hoovervilles") so the meager relief supplies their families received would stretch farther. For many, their next meal was found at a soup kitchen, if at all.

Adding to the misery of the times, drought arrived in the Great Plains. Decades of bad farming practices caused the topsoil to erode, and combined with the weather conditions (the 1930s was the overall warmest decade of the 20th century in North America) caused an ecological disaster. The dry soil was lifted by wind and blown into huge dust storms that blanketed entire towns, a phenomenon that continued for several years. Those who had lost their homes and livelihoods in the Dust Bowl were lured westward by advertisements for work put out by agribusiness in western states, such as California. The migrants came to be called Okies, Arkies, and other derogatory names as they flooded the labor supply of the agricultural fields, driving down wages, pitting desperate workers against each other. They came into competition with Mexican laborers, who were deported en masse back to their home country.

In the South, the fragile economy collapsed further. To escape, rural workers and sharecroppers migrated north by train with hopes to work in auto plants around Detroit. In the Great Lakes states, farmers had been experiencing depressed market conditions for their crops and goods since the end of World War I. Many family farms that had been mortgaged during the 1920s to provide money to "get through until better times" were foreclosed when farmers were unable to make payments. Worldwide, desperate governments sought economic recovery by adopting restrictive, autarkic policies—high tariffs, import quotas, and barter agreements—and by experimenting with new plans for their internal economies. Britain adopted far-reaching measures in the development of a planned national economy. In Nazi Germany, economic recovery was pursued through rearmament, conscription, and public works programs. In Benito Mussolini's Italy, the economic controls of his corporate state were tightened. Some observers throughout the world saw in the massive program of economic planning and state ownership of the Soviet Union what appeared to be a depression-proof economic system and a solution to the crisis in capitalism.