• though the 1920s are remembered as an era of affluence and conservatism, the decade was a time of dramatic social,

l, economic,
and political change
o the recessions of 1921 and 1922 gave away to a new American era of cultural conflict and economic acceleration that
historians call the Roaring ‘20s
• after an era of destruction and doubt brought about by World War I, Americans craved heroes who seemed to defy convention
and break boundaries → it was in this era that Charles Lindbergh conquered the sky
o on May 21, 1927, Lindbergh concluded the first-ever nonstop solo flight from New York to Paris
o armed with only a few sandwiches, some bottles of water, paper maps, and a flashlight, Lindbergh successfully
navigated over the Atlantic Ocean in thirty-three hours
o some historians have dubbed Lindbergh the “hero of the decade”
 not only for his transatlantic journey but because he helped to restore the faith of many Americans in
individual effort and technological advancement
 in a world so recently devastated by machine guns, submarines, and chemical weapons, Lindbergh’s flight
demonstrated the ways in which technology might bear out the 20th century few could have imagined
• difficult to exaggerate how quickly the economy expanded in this post-war era
o manufacturing rose 60% during the ‘20s while incomes rose 33% with little inflation
o the technology sector took off in the 1920s
 the manufacture and sale of automobiles exploded, rapidly growing all of the industries related to the
automobile (rubber, roads, oil, etc.)
 powered by new, cheap technology, shortwave radio became the new symbol of the connected American
household
 train travel was commercialized
 mail delivery was accelerated
 electricity, home appliances, nylon, plastic, and the telephone were widely adopted by the end of the 1920s
 we even see rudimentary computers by the 1930s (specifically, analogue calculators that could handle 11-
digit numbers)
o scientists were even using the research of Gregor Mendel, a Catholic monk who studied vegetable hybridization in the
Civil War era, to begin to explore and understand genetics
• businesses consolidate and compete more directly in this era
o this time around, everyone is interested in a stable economy that won’t crash, as it did in 1893
o American labour experienced both the successes and the failures of the 1920s
 most workers saw their standard of living rise, and gestures of “welfare capitalism” by some employers sought
to appease workers and prevent workplace grievances
 working-class families, though, continued to rely on the combined earnings of several family members to
make ends meet
o the strength of American corporations and their open-shop principle beat back unionization efforts in the 1920s
 by not allowing unions to require membership of employees, two million fewer people were union members
by 1929
 women became full-force members of the American economy in this decade, in so-called pink-collar
professions like secretarial work and other non-manual service jobs
✓ national unions did not try to organize this growing group, however, nor did they court blacks who
held down jobs as janitors, dishwashers, garbage collectors, etc.
 in the West and Southwest, Asians (Japanese and Filipinos) and Hispanics (mostly Mexicans) filled the ranks of
unskilled workers, to the consternation of some whites
✓ employers in the relatively underpopulated West depended on this ready pool of low-paid labour
• like industry, agriculture in this era embraced new technologies
o the number of tractors by farmers quadrupled in the 1920s, opening up 35 million new acres to cultivation with their
new diesel engines
o new, hybridized strains of corn became available to farmers as early as 1921
o demand did not keep pace with productivity-driven technologies → farmers demanded relief in the form of government
price supports
 one scheme, called parity, set a complicated formula for setting prices for farm goods
✓ parity sought to ensure that farmers would earn back at least the production costs no matter the
market’s fluctuations
✓ President Calvin Coolidge vetoed the legislative expression of parity twice during his presidency
• a new culture began to take root in the United States in this era
o more than ever before, people could buy items not just for need but for convenience and pleasure
 driven by an advertising industry partly born out of the wartime propaganda movement, middle-class
families bought electric refrigerators, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners
 the department store became the centre of the early American consumer revolution, concentrating a broad
array of goods under a single roof
 people now wore watches, smoked packaged cigarettes, and went to see Hollywood films
 women purchased makeup and clothes
 Americans bought cars (30 million of them by 1930)
o the advertising industry expanded and consolidated quickly
 local newspapers were absorbed into national chains
 mass-circulation magazines went out to millions of Americans
 the sound was added to the film in 1927 (over 100 million people went to see a movie in 1930 alone)
  when everyone in Los Angeles and New York (and everywhere in between) started hearing the same
advertisements on the radio and the same movie stars on the big screen, a national, common American
culture began to take shape
• the new “professional” woman became a cultural touchstone in the 1920s
o motherhood and marriages were redefined by medical and psychological experts
 interest in birth control (which, along with abortion, was illegal in many states) grew, as Margaret Sanger
persuaded many middle-class women to reduce family size (a cause of poverty and distress in poor
communities)
o women in the 1920s began to shrug off the norms of rigid, Victorian female respectability
 they smoked, drank, danced, and attended parties
 this was reflected in the emergence of the flapper in American pop culture
✓ modern women whose liberated lifestyle found expression in dress, hairstyle, speech, and behaviour
✓ especially among working-class women who flocked to clubs and dance halls in search of
excitement and companionship after hours
o despite their cultural gains, efforts by women to gain political power through means like the Equal Rights Amendment
largely failed
• for many young people in the 1920s, disenchantment with the Great War contributed to a growing disenchantment with life in
America
o rather than try to influence or reform their new (arguably more vulgar) consumer-driven society, they isolated
themselves from it and earned the title of the Lost Generation
 many artists (among them Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein) found themselves a
part of this group and offered a series of savage critiques in response
✓ intellectuals of the 1920s claimed to reject the success ethic that they believed dominated American
life
✓ most famously, F. Scott Fitzgerald attacked the American obsession with material success in The
Great Gatsby in 1925
o African-American poets, novelists, jazz musicians, and artists in urban New York created a thriving culture rooted in the
historical legacy of race referred to as the Harlem Renaissance
• the modern, secular culture of the 1920s did not go unchallenged by traditionalists
o even while the noble experiment of national prohibition of alcohol was supplanted by organized crime and rapidly
failed, a largely rural Protestant American group continued to vehemently defend it
 to them, prohibition represented the effort of an older America to protect traditional notions of morality
 alcohol, associated with the modern city, became a symbol of the new culture that sought to replace them
 Prohibition, largely skirted across the country, was done in 1933 when the 18th Amendment was repealed
• to defenders of an older, more provincial America, the growth of large communities of foreign people, alien in speech and habit,
came to seem a direct threat to their own embattled way of life
o this nativism helped to instigate the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan as a major force in American society
 re-established in 1915 by a new group of White Southerners near Atlanta, Georgia (and partly inspired by D. W.
Griffith’s The Birth of Nation, which glorified the Klan that had disappeared in the 1870s), white southerners
turned their attention after WWI from just intimidating African-Americans to harassing Catholics, Jews, and
other foreigners
 with their new focus, their membership expanded to northern states as well (Indiana had the largest state
Klan) to include more than four million members by 1924
 most Klan units tried to present their members as patriots and defenders of morality, but Klans also operated
as brutal, even violent opponents of alien groups
 what the Klan feared, however, was not simply “racially impure” groups → they stood against anyone who
posed a challenge to traditional American values
• the place of religion in contemporary society was a flashpoint for conflict in the 1920s
o Protestantism was already divided into two warring camps
 modernists who attempted to adapt religion to the teachings of modern science
 fundamentalists fighting to preserve the literal interpretation of the Bible against Darwin’s scientific theories
o in the 1920s, fundamentalists in places like Tennessee began to draft rules that forbade the teaching of evolution in
public schools, and the ACLU rose to test their case in court
 the ACLU offered free counsel to Tennessee educators willing to defy the law → John T. Scopes, a twenty-four-
year-old biology teacher, accepted the challenge
✓ he was arrested with the ACLU’s support
✓ the fundamentalists trotted out the ageing William Jennings Bryan to assist the high-profile
prosecution during the Scopes Trial
✓ John Scopes had, of course, deliberately violated the law and was found guilty, but modernists
scored a massive victory by calling Bryan to the stand to testify as an “expert on the Bible”
➢ in cross-examination, broadcast across the country over the radio, the defence made Bryan
admit that religious dogma was subject to individual interpretation
• the anguish in provincial America proved particularly troubling to the Democratic Party in the 1920s
o they were composed of a diverse coalition of prohibitionists, Klansmen, religious fundamentalists, Catholics,
immigrants, and city-dwellers, who hardly agreed on anything at their 1924 and 1928 national conventions, losing to
Coolidge and Herbert Hoover
o for twelve years, beginning in 1921, the presidency and Congress rested firmly in the hands of the Republican Party
o Warren G. Harding, elected in 1920, was baffled by his responsibilities as president and weakened by his penchant for
gambling, illegal alcohol, and attractive women
 he was embroiled in scandals from the get-go and died while on a trip in San Francisco in 1923
 Calvin Coolidge, his successor, took an equally passive approach to his office
✓ he believed the government should interfere as little as possible in the life of the nation
✓ he easily won the election in 1924 and spent his term taking a hatchet to individual and corporate
taxes and paying down debts from the Great War
 ➢ in typically muted fashion toward the end of his term, he walked into a press room and
handed each reporter a slip of paper containing the single sentence, "I do not choose to
run for president in 1928”
• however passive the New Era presidents may have been, much of the federal government was working to adapt public policy to
the highest-priority, most widely accepted goal of the 1920s → to help business and industry operate with maximum efficiency
and productivity
o Coolidge’s Commerce Secretary, Herbert Hoover, worked to encourage voluntary cooperation in the private sector as the
best avenue to national economic stability
 he championed the concept of business associationism (a concept that envisioned the creation of national
organizations of businessmen, sorted by industry, to promote efficiency in production and marketing)
 many progressives were encouraged by the election of Herbert Hoover to the presidency in 1928
✓ he entered office promising bold new efforts to solve the nation’s remaining economic problems, but
less than a year after his inauguration, the nation plunged into the severest and most prolonged
economic crisis in history → a crisis that brought the Roaring optimism of the New Era crashing down
and launched the nation into a period of unprecedented social innovation and reform