essay on the 1920s in america

1920s in America: A Decade of Roar and Silence

An essay: the turbulent 1920’s – roaring or snoring.

The 1920s, often dubbed the “ Roaring Twenties ,” was a decade of significant change, progress, and contradiction in American society. The period is frequently visualized through the lens of flapper dancers, jazz music, speakeasies, and economic prosperity. Yet, these lively portrayals must be weighed against the quieter, less flamboyant, yet equally defining elements of the era, which saw the tightening of immigration laws, the rise of nativism, and rural isolationism. Given the diverse and multifaceted nature of the 1920s, the question arises: was this era truly “roaring,” or was it also “snoring” in parts?

Roaring: An Era of Cultural and Economic Exuberance

From the vantage point of popular culture, the 1920s was undeniably roaring. The jazz age brought about a music revolution, with artists like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington defining an entirely new American sound. The Charleston and the shimmy, popular dances of the time, allowed many to express their newfound freedoms in flapper dresses and bobbed haircuts.

Economically, the country was booming. With the end of World War I, the U.S. emerged as a leading global power with a burgeoning economy. The stock market saw unprecedented growth, and many considered this a never-ending ascent to prosperity. The automobile, once a luxury, became commonplace, symbolized by Ford’s Model T. Radios, movies, and household appliances began to shape daily American life, marking the dawn of a consumerist culture.

Snoring: Underlying Tensions and Restrictive Changes

However, beneath the energetic surface of the ’20s, one could hear the steady drone of societal unease. The decade began with the enactment of the 18th Amendment, which ushered in the era of Prohibition. While intended to curb societal ills associated with alcohol, Prohibition paradoxically fostered organized crime, bootlegging, and underground bars called speakeasies.

In the political realm, the Red Scare, or fear of communist influence, led to the Palmer Raids and widespread suspicion of immigrants. The 1924 Immigration Act severely limited the number of newcomers, especially from Southern and Eastern Europe and Asia, reflecting a resurgence in nativist sentiments.

Racial tensions simmered throughout the decade. The Great Migration saw a significant movement of African Americans from the rural South to Northern cities, leading to racial tensions and riots in places like Chicago and Tulsa. The Ku Klux Klan also experienced a revival, not just in the South but across the nation.

In addition, the urban-rural divide widened. While cities thrived, rural areas felt left behind. The Scopes Trial of 1925, which put evolutionary theory on trial, underscored this cultural divide between urban modernists and rural traditionalists.

Conclusion: A Complex Mélange

The 1920s cannot be pinned down as merely roaring or snoring; it was a tumultuous blend of both. The exuberant cultural expressions and economic boom were juxtaposed against profound societal tensions and nativist retreats. The Roaring Twenties was as much about flappers and jazz as it was about the KKK and Prohibition.

To fully understand and appreciate the 1920s, one must acknowledge its dualities. By doing so, we gain insight not only into a unique decade in American history but also into the inherent contradictions that often define human progress. The 1920s serves as a compelling testament to America’s capacity for both dazzling progress and deep introspection.

Class Notes on the Turbulent 20’s – Roaring or Snoring?

The 1920’s were an odd time. On one hand we called it the roaring 20 ’s. America experienced a time of great wealth and new modern ideas. The role of women changed, sports and entertainment stars were celebrated and modern technology changed America’s landscape. On the other hand, however, America remained fiercely conservative and religious. We feared public dissent and rural America attempted to turn back the clock of progress. The reality is that America was a divided nation.

While the US was at war with the Triple Alliance many citizens opposed the war. The government felt that opposition to government policies in time of war threatened our national security. Restrictive laws such as the Espionage and Sedition Acts were passed in order to silence opposition. Many outspoken people were jailed. It was a time of great national crisis and the Constitution was thoroughly tested.

A. What were the Espionage and Sedition Acts? (1917) 1. Persons who commit the following acts may be fined up to $10,000 and/or jailed for up to 20 years: a. willfully cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny or refusal of duty in the military forces . (Espionage Act) b. prohibited disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive remarks about the form of government, flag or uniform of the United States. It even prohibited the opposition to the purchase of war bonds. (not investment advice!) (Sedition Act)

B. What was the result of the Espionage Acts during World War I?

1. Eugene V. Debs, arrested and convicted for opposing the war, 10 years. Gained over a million votes in a run for President while he was in prison. 2. Charles Schenck, member of the Socialist Party, sentenced to 15 years for publishing pamphlets urging citizens to refuse to participate in the draft. He called the draft slavery, among other things.

C. How were the Espionage and Sedition Acts challenged?

(Schenck v The United States) 1. Charles Schenck was arrested for violating the Espionage Act, passed by Congress in 1914. The Espionage Act made it illegal to defame the government or do anything that might retard the war effort. Schenck, a member of the Socialist Party, opposed the war and printed and distributed pamphlets urging citizens to oppose the draft which he likened to slavery. Schenck claimed his first amendment rights were violated. 2. The court ruled against Schenck saying that the Espionage Act did not violate the first amendment and that in times of war the government may place reasonable limitations on freedom of speech. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes outlined the courts opinion by explaining that when a “clear and present danger” existed such as shouting fire in a crowded theater, freedom of speech may be limited.

Even though things like the Espionage and Sedition Act occurred the US still became a more modern, faster and wealthier nation.

The 1920’s were a time of great social change characterized by apparent prosperity, new ideas, and personal freedom. Known as the “roaring twenties” America was reacting to the depression of the World War. It was like a giant party. New technology, new ideas and great change. Yet under the surface the same conservative values still flourished. The economic boom of the era was short-lived, but most of the social changes were lasting.

 What were some of the manners and moral changes that occurred?

1. America’s population generally shifted from rural areas to more urban ones.

More than half of the nations population now lived in cities and towns.

2. Urban communities life was now unquestionably lively and stimulating. There were many things to see-museums, art exhibits, plays, athletic events, trade expositions, and the like.

3. New ideas in science were examined and often accepted. Of course this was the case in the cities more so than in the small towns. In small town America most people remained relatively conservative. (See  Scopes Monkey Trial ) People now tended to be judged on their accomplishments rather than on their social background.

As life in the United States began to undergo changes, many felt the gnawing insecurity associated with change. The heroic person who could face the trials of competition or the dangers of the unknown became larger than life. The hero had come up against the strongest adversaries and won. For people living in uncertain times, the hero was proof that a brave and strong-willed man or woman could win out over fears of the unknown or the impossible.

What qualities seem to have been idolized in the 1920’s?

1. Writers Speak for the twenties

A. F. Scott Fitzgerald published  This Side Of Paradise and The Great Gatsby. He won instant acclaim as the spokesman for the twenties generation. In these novels and others, he described the confusion and tragedy caused by a frantic search for material success. B. Ernest Hemingway expressed disgust with prewar codes of behavior and the glorification of war. He also developed a clear, straightforward prose that set a new, tough, “hard-boiled” literary style

2. Sport Heroes

A. Babe Ruth – Perhaps the greatest baseball player who ever lived. He led the Yankees to seven world series and his record for Home Runs (Total and in a season – 60) stood for years. Ruth was a media icon and fan favorite. B. Harold Edward “Red” Grange – College football hero, this running back drew tens of thousands to watch him play and helped popularize college football. C. Jack Dempsey – One of the greatest heavyweight boxers of all time. Lost a dramatic title match to Gene Tunney. D. Bill Tilden and Helen Wills –Tennis champions who epitomized grace and poise. These star athletes helped popularize the sport of tennis. E. Johnny Weismuller – Olympic gold medal winning swimmer who later starred in Hollywood as Tarzan Lord of the Jungle.

3. Other important Heroes

A. Charles A. Lindbergh –He flew a nonstop flight from New York to Paris in thirty-three and a half hours. He was the man who epitomized heroism in the twenties. Lindbergh became a world and national hero who characterized courage and doing the impossible. B. Louis Armstrong –a trumpeter who played the first jazz heard north of Mason-Dixon line. C. W. E. B. Du Bois –founder of the NAACP and worked hard to improve the lives of blacks in America.

How Did the Role of Women Change in the 1920’s?

During World War 1, women served their country in almost every possible capacity. They took jobs in steel foundries, chemical plants, and munitions factories. Many went overseas as nurses in the newly created Army Corps of Nurses. Their experiences away from home and traditional women’s work gave them a strong moral argument for the right to vote. The many tactics of the women and the shameful way they were treated finally forced Congress to deal with the issue. President Wilson, finally declared himself in favor of woman suffrage and the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified on August 26 th 1920.

Many women’s styles changed as well. The popular hair style of the time was for women’s hair to be cut short into a bob. These modern women were known as “flappers.”

Between 1910 and 1930 the proportion of women in the labor force remained at about 20 percent. However, there was a notable change in the kinds of work that some women did. The number of female cooks, dress makers, household servants, and farm hands dropped. The number of women doctors, bankers, lawyers, police and probation officer, social workers, and hairdressers rose.

For all the changes in status during the twenties, it was still generally accepted-even by most women-that “woman’s place is in the home.” Men should earn more than women, it was thought, because usually they supported wives and children. Women workers generally were single. In some states, women teachers who married lost their jobs.

SCOPES MONKEY TRIAL

he 1920’s was not all “roaring” as we shall see. There were many, especially those in power who preached conservatism and moderation. America turned towards the right, we were a religious god fearing nation. This religious traditionalism brought about serious constitutional questions, ones that have yet to fully answered.

The Scopes Monkey Trial   – 1925 – In 1925 in Dayton Tennessee a group of teachers decided to test a law called the Butler Law. The Butler law made it illegal to teach the theory of evolution and instead mandated the biblical interpretation of creationism. The teachers felt that academic freedom and integrity as well as separation of church and state was at stake. Twenty four year old science teacher and football coach John T. Scopes would teach the class. Knowing he would be arrested Scopes taught the class and set into motion one of the most important trials in American history.

Scopes was arrested, as expected, for violating the Butler Law. At the ensuing trial William Jennings Bryan (Yes, the Populist guy!) acted as special prosecutor. World famous criminal defense lawyer Clarence Darrow defended Scopes. The trial raged on for days. The judge did not allow any of Darrow’s scientists to testify and public sentiment in the Bible Belt was against Scopes. Bryan portrayed Darrow as an agnostic and atheist. In desperation Darrow put Bryan himself on the stand. Darrow brilliantly was able to get Bryan to admit that the word of the bible is not literal, it was interpreted. This seemed to destroy the whole case. Darrow asked for immediate judgment and when the jury came back Darrow was shocked…he had lost! The judge levied the minimum fine possible ($100) against Scopes. Later that year the Scopes conviction was overturned on a technicality.

What did all this prove? Well for one it showed the religious and conservative nature of America. It also displayed the vast differences between the big cities and the small towns. The big city newspapers covering the trial scoffed at the Butler Law as small minded and archaic. In the cities Scopes was a hero but in Dayton Tennessee he was a criminal.

America was left with many questions. Were we to be a modern nation, the nation of Lindbergh and the roaring twenties or were we to be the nation of religious right wing conservatives? Only time would tell.

Primary Source Guides

Becoming Modern: America in the 1920s

• Examines the 1920s in comparison to the preceding and succeeding decades, highlighting four characteristics that distinguish it.
• Discusses the benefits and limitations of taking a snapshot view of a historical period.
• Suggests research methods to test hypotheses about the decade.
• Delves into how modernity was defined in the 1920s, both on a national and personal level.
• Explores the aspects of modernity that were embraced, resisted, or overlooked during the decade
• Examines how social and political divisions of the time were reflected in debates about modernity.
• Explores how innovations of the “machine age” transformed American life in the 1920s.
• Examines the perspectives of both proponents and critics of these changes, including artists.
• Considers the long-term effects predicted from these innovations.
• Draws parallels between the 1920s discussions on technological innovation and social change and similar discussions in the 21st century.
• Explores the factors that contributed to or hindered the unprecedented prosperity of the 1920s.
• Discusses how “prosperity” became a source of national pride and was adapted to suit various political and psychological aspirations.
• Examines the role of workingmen and labor unions in the economic landscape and compares the economic cycles of the 1920s to those before and after the decade.
• Investigates the social divisions of the 1920s, examining the factors that led to these divisions and how they were influenced by postwar adjustments and the concept of the “modern age.”
• Identifies common issues that overlapped multiple social divisions and traces the evolution of these issues into the 1930s as the nation faced the Great Depression.

This educational resource provides a comprehensive exploration of the 1920s in America, highlighting key themes, questions, and historical contexts to better understand this pivotal decade in American history.

• John F. Kasson (NHC Fellow, 1980–81; 2009–10)
• Sean McCann (NHC Fellow, 2001–02)
• Karen Lucic (Professor of Art, Vassar College)

History / American History / The Twenties / Modernism / United States of America /

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center

• Who were some early feminist thinkers and activists?
• What is intersectional feminism?
• How have feminist politics changed the world?

Roaring Twenties

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• CORE - The Roaring Twenties
• GlobalSecurity.org - USA History - The Jazz Age
• Minnesota Libraries Publishing Project - US History II: Gilded Age to Present - The Roaring Twenties
• NCpedia - Roaring Twenties
• Digital History - The Roaring Twenties
• The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History - The Roaring Twenties
• United States History for Kids - The Jazz Age

Roaring Twenties , colloquial term for the 1920s, especially within the United States and other Western countries where the decade was characterized by economic prosperity, rapid social and cultural change, and a mood of exuberant optimism. The liveliness of the period stands in marked contrast to the historical crises on either side of it: World War I (1914–18) and the Great Depression (1929–c. 1939). The name may have originated as a play on the nautical term roaring forties , referring to latitudes with strong ocean winds.

By the dawn of the 1920s, the second Industrial Revolution had transformed the United States into a global economic power and drawn millions of Americans to cities. With a concurrent rise in immigration, the 1920 U.S. census was the first in which the majority of the population lived in urban areas. Although World War I had strained the country’s finances, the fact that the United States had entered the war late and that the fighting took place overseas helped it secure a more dominant economic position relative to its European allies.

During the 1920s, the American economy continued to accelerate. One reason was the growing electrification of the country. The portion of U.S. households with electricity rose from 12 percent in 1916 to 63 percent in 1927, and its widening use in factories led to increased productivity. Also contributing to the economic boom was the advent of mass-production methods such as the assembly line , which spurred the growth of the automobile industry. The decade saw the number of passenger cars more than triple, which in turn stimulated the expansion of transportation infrastructure and the oil and gas industries. In addition, the overall business sector benefited from the laissez-faire economic policies of U.S. presidents Warren G. Harding (1921–23) and Calvin Coolidge (1923–29). Between 1922 and 1929, the country’s real gross national product increased by nearly 40 percent, and the unemployment rate remained low.

The technological and manufacturing boom ushered in a modern consumer culture . With electricity came a range of new household appliances, such as the refrigerator, vacuum cleaner, and washing machine, and the increased availability of credit made it possible for many Americans to afford them. The growth of the advertising industry and the development of sophisticated marketing techniques also helped create demand for these and other products in an expanding mass-media landscape. Not only was the radio one of the most popular new electric devices, installed in 40 percent of homes by 1930, but the airwaves became an effective advertising medium. As labour-saving technologies created more opportunities for leisure, a plethora of popular entertainment arose from new media. Moviegoing became an American pastime, especially after the emergence of “ talkies .” By the decade’s end, 80 million people flocked to cinemas weekly, with radio and magazines boosting interest in the stars on the screen.

The 1920s also brought about social changes for women in the United States. Women had entered the workforce in significant numbers during World War I, filling jobs that had been vacated by men sent to war and taking new jobs that aided the war effort. Their contributions galvanized support for the suffrage movement, which culminated in the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Many women remained in the workforce after the war, especially as growing industrialization provided greater opportunities. Young women who were employed in cities enjoyed unprecedented economic independence, and the increased use of contraception (the country’s first birth control clinic was opened in 1916) provided sexual freedom as well. Perhaps the most enduring symbol of the Roaring Twenties is that of the flapper , the emancipated “New Woman” who bobbed her hair, wore loose, knee-length dresses, smoked and drank in public, and was more open about sex.

In a rapidly modernizing world, young people guided creative movements that often defied convention. Jazz music, which had developed into an exciting style defined by improvisation and swinging rhythms, became the dominant sound of the new generation. (Its prominence earned the era another nickname, the Jazz Age, popularized by the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald .) The vitality of jazz was part of a broader flourishing of African American art and culture known as the Harlem Renaissance , which was centred in New York City but reverberated far beyond it. Fitzgerald himself was a leading figure of the Lost Generation , a group of writers whose work captured the era’s decadence and spoke to the disillusionment of many who came of age during World War I.

Although postwar economic conditions were less robust in western Europe than in the United States, the social and cultural milieus were similarly dynamic . In France the 1920s were known as “Les Années Folles” (“The Crazy Years”). In Germany’s Weimar Republic , which produced an explosion of intellectual and artistic activity, they were the “Goldene Zwanziger Jahre” (“Golden Twenties”). The British public was scandalized by the exploits of a set of affluent youth dubbed the Bright Young Things. In the art world, Surrealism grew out of the Dada movement that had developed in Zürich during the war, while Art Deco , promoted by a 1925 exposition in Paris , became highly influential in international architecture and design.

Nevertheless, the popular image of the 1920s as a prosperous, progressive, and jubilant era obscures some realities. In the United States, the decade began with the enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment , under which the manufacture and sale of alcohol was prohibited. Despite the emergence of bootleggers and speakeasies , and the glamour associated with drinking illegally, the temperance movement did succeed in significantly reducing Americans’ consumption of alcohol. In addition, while the Great Migration provided a path for African Americans to pursue greater economic and educational opportunities, and the influence of African American culture spread, the 1920s also saw a revival of the Ku Klux Klan . Growing anti-foreign sentiment (also espoused by the new Klan) led to the Immigration Act of 1924, which severely restricted the number of immigrants arriving in the United States.

More generally, not all Americans shared in the spoils of the roaring national economy. In the late 1920s, the wealthiest 1 percent received nearly one-quarter of all pretax income, and 60 percent of families earned less than $2,000 a year, a benchmark that economists regarded as “sufficient to supply only basic necessities.” Rural, nonwhite, and immigrant Americans were among the groups less likely to benefit from the boom. Inequality was one of several factors that contributed to the collapse of the economy in 1929, as the stock market crash in October signaled the end of the Roaring Twenties and the start of the Great Depression.

US History: Resources by Decade: 1920s

1920s: resources from database u.s. history in context (gale).

• U.S. History in Context (Gale): 1920s This link contains a variety of content (e.g. an overview, academic journals, primary sources, images, references) on the 1920s.

Barnett, Thomas P. (American architect, 1870-1929), Role: painter. (Work: 1922, Era: CE, Image Date: 1989). Riches of the Mines, detail view. [mural paintings (visual works)].  https://library.artstor.org/public/SS7732236_7732236_12897144

Ebooks and Print Books: USA in 1920s

• << Previous: 1910s
• Next: 1930s >>
• Last Updated: Jan 19, 2024 11:50 AM
• URL: https://libguides.polk.edu/usabydecade

Polk State College is committed to equal access/equal opportunity in its programs, activities, and employment. For additional information, visit polk.edu/compliance .

Top of page

Presentation U.S. History Primary Source Timeline

The early 20th century was an era of business expansion and progressive reform in the United States. The progressives, as they called themselves, worked to make American society a better and safer place in which to live. They tried to make big business more responsible through regulations of various kinds. They worked to clean up corrupt city governments, to improve working conditions in factories, and to better living conditions for those who lived in slum areas, a large number of whom were recent immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Many progressives were also concerned with the environment and conservation of resources.

This generation of Americans also hoped to make the world a more democratic place. At home, this meant expanding the right to vote to women and a number of election reforms such as the recall, referendum, and direct election of Senators. Abroad, it meant trying to make the world safe for democracy. In 1917, the United States joined Great Britain and France--two democratic nations--in their war against autocratic Germany and Austria-Hungary. Soon after the Great War, the majority of Americans turned away from concern about foreign affairs, adopting an attitude of live and let live.

The 1920s, also known as the "roaring twenties" and as "the new era," were similar to the Progressive Era in that America continued its economic growth and prosperity. The incomes of working people increased along with those of middle class and wealthier Americans. The major growth industry was automobile manufacturing. Americans fell in love with the automobile, which radically changed their way of life. On the other hand, the 1920s saw the decline of many reform activities that had been so widespread after 1900.

THE AMERICAN YAWP

22. the new era.

“Women competing in low hurdle race, Washington, D.C.,” ca. 1920s. Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-65429)

*The American Yawp is an evolving, collaborative text. Please click  here  to improve this chapter.*

I. Introduction

Ii. republican white house, 1921-1933, iii. culture of consumption, iv. culture of escape, v. “the new woman”, vi. “the new negro”, vii. culture war, viii. fundamentalist christianity, ix. rebirth of the ku klux klan (kkk), x. conclusion, xi. primary sources, xii. reference material.

On a sunny day in early March 1921, Warren G. Harding took the oath to become the twenty-ninth president of the United States. He had won a landslide election by promising a “return to normalcy.” “Our supreme task is the resumption of our onward, normal way,” he declared in his inaugural address. While campaigning, he said, “America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration.” The nation still reeled from the shock of World War I, the explosion of racial violence and political repression in 1919, and, a lingering “Red Scare” sparked by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

More than 115,000 American soldiers had lost their lives in barely a year of fighting in Europe. Then, between 1918 and 1920, nearly seven hundred thousand Americans died in a flu epidemic that hit nearly 20 percent of the American population. Waves of labor strikes, meanwhile, hit soon after the war. Radicals bellowed. Anarchists and others sent more than thirty bombs through the mail on May 1, 1919. After wartime controls fell, the economy tanked and national unemployment hit 20 percent. Farmers’ bankruptcy rates, already egregious, now skyrocketed. Harding could hardly deliver the peace that he promised, but his message nevertheless resonated among a populace wracked by instability.

The 1920s, of course, would be anything but “normal.” The decade so reshaped American life that it came to be called by many names: the New Era, the Jazz Age, the Age of the Flapper, the Prosperity Decade, and, most commonly, the Roaring Twenties. The mass production and consumption of automobiles, household appliances, film, and radio fueled a new economy and new standards of living. New mass entertainment introduced talking films and jazz while sexual and social restraints loosened. But at the same time, many Americans turned their back on political and economic reform, denounced America’s shifting demographics, stifled immigration, retreated toward “old-time religion,” and revived the Ku Klux Klan with millions of new members. On the other hand, many Americans fought harder than ever for equal rights and cultural observers noted the appearance of “the New Woman” and “the New Negro.” Old immigrant communities that had predated new immigration quotas, meanwhile, clung to their cultures and their native faiths. The 1920s were a decade of conflict and tension. But whatever it was, it was not “normalcy.”

To deliver on his promises of stability and prosperity, Harding signed legislation to restore a high protective tariff and dismantled the last wartime controls over industry. Meanwhile, the vestiges of America’s involvement in World War I and its propaganda and suspicions of anything less than “100 percent American” pushed Congress to address fears of immigration and foreign populations. A sour postwar economy led elites to raise the specter of the Russian Revolution and sideline not just the various American socialist and anarchist organizations but nearly all union activism. During the 1920s, the labor movement suffered a sharp decline in memberships. Workers lost not only bargaining power but also the support of courts, politicians, and, in large measure, the American public. 1

Harding’s presidency would go down in history as among the most corrupt. Many of Harding’s cabinet appointees, however, were individuals of true stature that answered to various American constituencies. For instance, Henry C. Wallace, the vocal editor of Wallace’s Farmer and a well-known proponent of scientific farming, was made secretary of agriculture. Herbert Hoover, the popular head and administrator of the wartime Food Administration and a self-made millionaire, was made secretary of commerce. To satisfy business interests, the conservative businessman Andrew Mellon became secretary of the treasury. Mostly, however, it was the appointing of friends and close supporters, dubbed “the Ohio gang,” that led to trouble. 2

Harding’s administration suffered a tremendous setback when several officials conspired to lease government land in Wyoming to oil companies in exchange for cash. Known as the Teapot Dome scandal (named after the nearby rock formation that resembled a teapot), interior secretary Albert Fall and navy secretary Edwin Denby resigned and Fall was convicted and sent to jail. Harding took vacation in the summer of 1923 so that he could think deeply on how to deal “with my God-damned friends”—it was his friends, and not his enemies, that kept him up walking the halls at nights. But then, in August 1923, Harding died suddenly of a heart attack and Vice President Calvin Coolidge ascended to the highest office in the land. 3

The son of a shopkeeper, Coolidge climbed the Republican ranks from city councilman to governor of Massachusetts. As president, Coolidge sought to remove the stain of scandal but otherwise continued Harding’s economic approach, refusing to take actions in defense of workers or consumers against American business. “The chief business of the American people,” the new president stated, “is business.” One observer called Coolidge’s policy “active inactivity,” but Coolidge was not afraid of supporting business interests and wealthy Americans by lowering taxes or maintaining high tariff rates. Congress, for instance, had already begun to reduce taxes on the wealthy from wartime levels of 66 percent to 20 percent, which Coolidge championed. 4

While Coolidge supported business, other Americans continued their activism. The 1920s, for instance, represented a time of great activism among American women, who had won the vote with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Female voters, like their male counterparts, pursued many interests. Concerned about squalor, poverty, and domestic violence, women had already lent their efforts to prohibition, which went into effect under the Eighteenth Amendment in January 1920. After that point, alcohol could no longer be manufactured or sold. Other reformers urged government action to ameliorate high mortality rates among infants and children, provide federal aid for education, and ensure peace and disarmament. Some activists advocated protective legislation for women and children, while Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party called for the elimination of all legal distinctions “on account of sex” through the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which was introduced but defeated in Congress. 5

During the 1920s, the National Woman’s Party fought for the rights of women beyond that of suffrage, which they had secured through the 19th Amendment in 1920. They organized private events, like the tea party pictured here, and public campaigning, such as the introduction of the Equal Rights Amendment to Congress, as they continued the struggle for equality. Library of Congress .

“Change is in the very air Americans breathe, and consumer changes are the very bricks out of which we are building our new kind of civilization,” announced marketing expert and home economist Christine Frederick in her influential 1929 monograph, Selling Mrs. Consumer . The book, which was based on one of the earliest surveys of American buying habits, advised manufacturers and advertisers how to capture the purchasing power of women, who, according to Frederick, accounted for 90 percent of household expenditures. Aside from granting advertisers insight into the psychology of the “average” consumer, Frederick’s text captured the tremendous social and economic transformations that had been wrought over the course of her lifetime. 9

Indeed, the America of Frederick’s birth looked very different from the one she confronted in 1929. The consumer change she studied had resulted from the industrial expansion of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With the discovery of new energy sources and manufacturing technologies, industrial output flooded the market with a range of consumer products such as ready-to-wear clothing, convenience foods, and home appliances. By the end of the nineteenth century, output had risen so dramatically that many contemporaries feared supply had outpaced demand and that the nation would soon face the devastating financial consequences of overproduction. American businessmen attempted to avoid this catastrophe by developing new merchandising and marketing strategies that transformed distribution and stimulated a new culture of consumer desire. 10

The department store stood at the center of this early consumer revolution. By the 1880s, several large dry-goods houses blossomed into modern retail department stores. These emporiums concentrated a broad array of goods under a single roof, allowing customers to purchase shirtwaists and gloves alongside toy trains and washbasins. To attract customers, department stores relied on more than variety. They also employed innovations in service (such as access to restaurants, writing rooms, and babysitting) and spectacle (such as elaborately decorated store windows, fashion shows, and interior merchandise displays). Marshall Field & Co. was among the most successful of these ventures. Located on State Street in Chicago, the company pioneered many of these strategies, including establishing a tearoom that provided refreshment to the well-heeled female shoppers who composed the store’s clientele. Reflecting on the success of Field’s marketing techniques, Thomas W. Goodspeed, an early trustee of the University of Chicago, wrote, “Perhaps the most notable of Mr. Field’s innovations was that he made a store in which it was a joy to buy.” 11

In the 1920s Americans across the country bought magazines like Photoplay in order to get more information about the stars of their new favorite entertainment media: the movies. Advertisers took advantage of this broad audience to promote a wide range of goods and services to both men and women.  Archive.org .

The joy of buying infected a growing number of Americans in the early twentieth century as the rise of mail-order catalogs, mass-circulation magazines, and national branding further stoked consumer desire. The automobile industry also fostered the new culture of consumption by promoting the use of credit. By 1927, more than 60 percent of American automobiles were sold on credit, and installment purchasing was made available for nearly every other large consumer purchase. Spurred by access to easy credit, consumer expenditures for household appliances, for example, grew by more than 120 percent between 1919 and 1929. Henry Ford’s assembly line, which advanced production strategies practiced within countless industries, brought automobiles within the reach of middle-income Americans and further drove the spirit of consumerism. By 1925, Ford’s factories were turning out a Model-T every ten seconds. The number of registered cars ballooned from just over nine million in 1920 to nearly twenty-seven million by the decade’s end. Americans owned more cars than Great Britain, Germany, France, and Italy combined. In the late 1920s, 80 percent of the world’s cars drove on American roads.

As transformative as steam and iron had been in the previous century, gasoline and electricity—embodied most dramatically for many Americans in automobiles, film, and radio—propelled not only consumption but also the famed popular culture in the 1920s. “We wish to escape,” wrote Edgar Burroughs, author of the Tarzan series, “. . . the restrictions of manmade laws, and the inhibitions that society has placed upon us.” Burroughs authored a new Tarzan story nearly every year from 1914 until 1939. “We would each like to be Tarzan,” he said. “At least I would; I admit it.” Like many Americans in the 1920s, Burroughs sought to challenge and escape the constraints of a society that seemed more industrialized with each passing day. 12

Just like Burroughs, Americans escaped with great speed. Whether through the automobile, Hollywood’s latest films, jazz records produced on Tin Pan Alley, or the hours spent listening to radio broadcasts of Jack Dempsey’s prizefights, the public wrapped itself in popular culture. One observer estimated that Americans belted out the silly musical hit “Yes, We Have No Bananas” more than “The Star Spangled Banner” and all the hymns in all the hymnals combined. 13

As the automobile became more popular and more reliable, more people traveled more frequently and attempted greater distances. Women increasingly drove themselves to their own activities as well as those of their children. Vacationing Americans sped to Florida to escape northern winters. Young men and women fled the supervision of courtship, exchanging the staid parlor couch for sexual exploration in the backseat of a sedan. In order to serve and capture the growing number of drivers, Americans erected gas stations, diners, motels, and billboards along the roadside. Automobiles themselves became objects of entertainment: nearly one hundred thousand people gathered to watch drivers compete for the $50,000 prize of the Indianapolis 500.

Side view of a Ford sedan with four passengers and a woman getting in on the driver’s side, ca.1923. Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-54096.

Meanwhile, the United States dominated the global film industry. By 1930, as moviemaking became more expensive, a handful of film companies took control of the industry. Immigrants, mostly of Jewish heritage from central and Eastern Europe, originally “invented Hollywood” because most turn-of-the-century middle- and upper-class Americans viewed cinema as lower-class entertainment. After their parents emigrated from Poland in 1876, Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack Warner (who were, according to family lore, given the name when an Ellis Island official could not understand their surname) founded Warner Bros. In 1918, Universal, Paramount, Columbia, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) were all founded by or led by Jewish executives. Aware of their social status as outsiders, these immigrants (or sons of immigrants) purposefully produced films that portrayed American values of opportunity, democracy, and freedom.

Not content with distributing thirty-minute films in nickelodeons, film moguls produced longer, higher-quality films and showed them in palatial theaters that attracted those who had previously shunned the film industry. But as filmmakers captured the middle and upper classes, they maintained working-class moviegoers by blending traditional and modern values. Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 epic The Ten Commandments depicted orgiastic revelry, for instance, while still managing to celebrate a biblical story. But what good was a silver screen in a dingy theater? Moguls and entrepreneurs soon constructed picture palaces. Samuel Rothafel’s Roxy Theater in New York held more than six thousand patrons who could be escorted by a uniformed usher past gardens and statues to their cushioned seat. In order to show The Jazz Singer (1927), the first movie with synchronized words and pictures, the Warners spent half a million to equip two theaters. “Sound is a passing fancy,” one MGM producer told his wife, but Warner Bros.’ assets, which increased from just $5,000,000 in 1925 to $230,000,000 in 1930, tell a different story. 14

Americans fell in love with the movies. Whether it was the surroundings, the sound, or the production budgets, weekly movie attendance skyrocketed from sixteen million in 1912 to forty million in the early 1920s. Hungarian immigrant William Fox, founder of Fox Film Corporation, declared that “the motion picture is a distinctly American institution” because “the rich rub elbows with the poor” in movie theaters. With no seating restriction, the one-price admission was accessible for nearly all Americans (African Americans, however, were either excluded or segregated). Women represented more than 60 percent of moviegoers, packing theaters to see Mary Pickford, nicknamed “America’s Sweetheart,” who was earning one million dollars a year by 1920 through a combination of film and endorsements contracts. Pickford and other female stars popularized the “flapper,” a woman who favored short skirts, makeup, and cigarettes.

Mary Pickford’s film personas led the glamorous and lavish lifestyle that female movie-goers of the 1920s desired so much. Mary Pickford, 1920. Library of Congress .

As Americans went to the movies more and more, at home they had the radio. Italian scientist Guglielmo Marconi transmitted the first transatlantic wireless (radio) message in 1901, but radios in the home did not become available until around 1920, when they boomed across the country. Around half of American homes contained a radio by 1930. Radio stations brought entertainment directly into the living room through the sale of advertisements and sponsorships, from The Maxwell House Hour to the Lucky Strike Orchestra . Soap companies sponsored daytime dramas so frequently that an entire genre—“soap operas”—was born, providing housewives with audio adventures that stood in stark contrast to common chores. Though radio stations were often under the control of corporations like the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) or the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), radio programs were less constrained by traditional boundaries in order to capture as wide an audience as possible, spreading popular culture on a national level.

Radio exposed Americans to a broad array of music. Jazz, a uniquely American musical style popularized by the African-American community in New Orleans, spread primarily through radio stations and records. The New York Times had ridiculed jazz as “savage” because of its racial heritage, but the music represented cultural independence to others. As Harlem-based musician William Dixon put it, “It did seem, to a little boy, that . . . white people really owned everything. But that wasn’t entirely true. They didn’t own the music that I played.” The fast-paced and spontaneity-laced tunes invited the listener to dance along. “When a good orchestra plays a ‘rag,’” dance instructor Vernon Castle recalled, “one has simply got to move.” Jazz became a national sensation, played and heard by both white and Black Americans. Jewish Lithuanian-born singer Al Jolson—whose biography inspired The Jazz Singer and who played the film’s titular character—became the most popular singer in America. 15

The 1920s also witnessed the maturation of professional sports. Play-by-play radio broadcasts of major collegiate and professional sporting events marked a new era for sports, despite the institutionalization of racial segregation in most. Suddenly, Jack Dempsey’s left crosses and right uppercuts could almost be felt in homes across the United States. Dempsey, who held the heavyweight championship for most of the decade, drew million-dollar gates and inaugurated “Dempseymania” in newspapers across the country. Red Grange, who carried the football with a similar recklessness, helped popularize professional football, which was then in the shadow of the college game. Grange left the University of Illinois before graduating to join the Chicago Bears in 1925. “There had never been such evidence of public interest since our professional league began,” recalled Bears owner George Halas of Grange’s arrival. 16

Perhaps no sports figure left a bigger mark than did Babe Ruth. Born George Herman Ruth, the “Sultan of Swat” grew up in an orphanage in Baltimore’s slums. Ruth’s emergence onto the national scene was much needed, as the baseball world had been rocked by the so-called Black Sox Scandal in which eight players allegedly agreed to throw the 1919 World Series. Ruth hit fifty-four home runs in 1920, which was more than any other team combined. Baseball writers called Ruth a superman, and more Americans could recognize Ruth than they could then-president Warren G. Harding.

After an era of destruction and doubt brought about by World War I, Americans craved heroes who seemed to defy convention and break boundaries. Dempsey, Grange, and Ruth dominated their respective sports, but only Charles Lindbergh conquered the sky. On May 21, 1927, Lindbergh concluded the first ever nonstop solo flight from New York to Paris. 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. 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 that technology could inspire and accomplish great things. Outlook Magazine called Lindbergh “the heir of all that we like to think is best in America.” 17

The decade’s popular culture seemed to revolve around escape. Coney Island in New York marked new amusements for young and old. Americans drove their sedans to massive theaters to enjoy major motion pictures. Radio towers broadcasted the bold new sound of jazz, the adventures of soap operas, and the feats of amazing athletes. Dempsey and Grange seemed bigger, stronger, and faster than any who dared to challenge them. Babe Ruth smashed home runs out of ball parks across the country. And Lindbergh escaped the earth’s gravity and crossed an entire ocean. Neither Dempsey nor Ruth nor Lindbergh made Americans forget the horrors of World War I and the chaos that followed, but they made it seem as if the future would be that much brighter.

Babe Ruth’s incredible talent accelerated the popularity of baseball, cementing it as America’s pastime. Ruth’s propensity to shatter records made him a national hero. Library of Congress .

This “new breed” of women – known as the flapper – went against the gender proscriptions of the era, bobbing their hair, wearing short dresses, listening to jazz, and flouting social and sexual norms. While liberating in many ways, these behaviors also reinforced stereotypes of female carelessness and obsessive consumerism that would continue throughout the twentieth century. Library of Congress .

The rising emphasis on spending and accumulation nurtured a national ethos of materialism and individual pleasure. These impulses were embodied in the figure of the flapper, whose bobbed hair, short skirts, makeup, cigarettes, and carefree spirit captured the attention of American novelists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis. Rejecting the old Victorian values of desexualized modesty and self-restraint, young “flappers” seized opportunities for the public coed pleasures offered by new commercial leisure institutions, such as dance halls, cabarets, and nickelodeons, not to mention the illicit blind tigers and speakeasies spawned by Prohibition. So doing, young American women had helped usher in a new morality that permitted women greater independence, freedom of movement, and access to the delights of urban living. In the words of psychologist G. Stanley Hall, “She was out to see the world and, incidentally, be seen of it.”

Such sentiments were repeated in an oft-cited advertisement in a 1930 edition of the Chicago Tribune : “Today’s woman gets what she wants. The vote. Slim sheaths of silk to replace voluminous petticoats. Glassware in sapphire blue or glowing amber. The right to a career. Soap to match her bathroom’s color scheme.” As with so much else in the 1920s, however, sex and gender were in many ways a study in contradictions. It was the decade of the “New Woman,” and one in which only 10 percent of married women—although nearly half of unmarried women—worked outside the home. 18   It was a decade in which new technologies decreased time requirements for household chores, and one in which standards of cleanliness and order in the home rose to often impossible standards. It was a decade in which women finally could exercise their right to vote, and one in which the often thinly bound women’s coalitions that had won that victory splintered into various causes. Finally, it was a decade in which images such as the “flapper” gave women new modes of representing femininity, and one in which such representations were often inaccessible to women of certain races, ages, and socioeconomic classes.

Women undoubtedly gained much in the 1920s. There was a profound and keenly felt cultural shift that, for many women, meant increased opportunity to work outside the home. The number of professional women, for example, significantly rose in the decade. But limits still existed, even for professional women. Occupations such as law and medicine remained overwhelmingly male: most female professionals were in feminized professions such as teaching and nursing. And even within these fields, it was difficult for women to rise to leadership positions.

Further, it is crucial not to overgeneralize the experience of all women based on the experiences of a much-commented-upon subset of the population. A woman’s race, class, ethnicity, and marital status all had an impact on both the likelihood that she worked outside the home and the types of opportunities that were available to her. While there were exceptions, for many minority women, work outside the home was not a cultural statement but rather a financial necessity (or both), and physically demanding, low-paying domestic service work continued to be the most common job type. Young, working-class white women were joining the workforce more frequently, too, but often in order to help support their struggling mothers and fathers.

For young, middle-class, white women—those most likely to fit the image of the carefree flapper—the most common workplace was the office. These predominantly single women increasingly became clerks, jobs that had been primarily male earlier in the century. But here, too, there was a clear ceiling. While entry-level clerk jobs became increasingly feminized, jobs at a higher, more lucrative level remained dominated by men. Further, rather than changing the culture of the workplace, the entrance of women into lower-level jobs primarily changed the coding of the jobs themselves. Such positions simply became “women’s work.”

The frivolity, decadence, and obliviousness of the 1920s was embodied in the image of the flapper, the stereotyped carefree and indulgent woman of the Roaring Twenties depicted by Russell Patterson’s drawing. Library of Congress .

Finally, as these same women grew older and married, social changes became even subtler. Married women were, for the most part, expected to remain in the domestic sphere. And while new patterns of consumption gave them more power and, arguably, more autonomy, new household technologies and philosophies of marriage and child-rearing increased expectations, further tying these women to the home—a paradox that becomes clear in advertisements such as the one in the Chicago Tribune . Of course, the number of women in the workplace cannot exclusively measure changes in sex and gender norms. Attitudes towards sex, for example, continued to change in the 1920s as well, a process that had begun decades before. This, too, had significantly different impacts on different social groups. But for many women—particularly young, college-educated white women—an attempt to rebel against what they saw as a repressive Victorian notion of sexuality led to an increase in premarital sexual activity strong enough that it became, in the words of one historian, “almost a matter of conformity.” 19

Meanwhile, especially in urban centers such as New York, the gay community flourished. While gay males had to contend with the increased policing of their daily lives, especially later in the decade, they generally lived more openly in such cities than they would be able to for many decades following World War II. 20 At the same time, for many lesbians in the decade, the increased sexualization of women brought new scrutiny to same-sex female relationships previously dismissed as harmless. 21

Ultimately, the most enduring symbol of the changing notions of gender in the 1920s remains the flapper. And indeed, that image was a “new” available representation of womanhood in the 1920s. But it is just that: a representation of womanhood of the 1920s. There were many women in the decade of differing races, classes, ethnicities, and experiences, just as there were many men with different experiences. For some women, the 1920s were a time of reorganization, new representations, and new opportunities. For others, it was a decade of confusion, contradiction, new pressures, and struggles new and old.

The iniquities of Jim Crow segregation, the barbarities of America’s lynching epidemic, and the depravities of 1919’s Red Summer weighed heavily upon Black Americans as they entered the 1920s. The injustices and the violence continued. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, Black Americans had built up the Greenwood District with commerce and prosperity. Booker T. Washington called it the “Black Wall Street.” On the evening of May 31, 1921, spurred by a false claim of sexual assault levied against a young Black man–nineteen-year-old Dick Rowland had likely either tripped over a young white elevator operator’s foot or tripped and brushed the woman’s shoulder with his hand–a white mob mobilized, armed themselves, and destroyed the prosperous neighborhood. Over thirty square blocks were destroyed. Mobs burned over 1,000 homes and killed as many as several hundred Black Tulsans. Survivors recalled the mob using heavy machine guns, and others reported planes circling overhead, firing rifles and dropping firebombs. When order was finally restored the next day, the bodies of the victims were buried in mass graves. Thousands of survivors were left homeless.

The relentlessness of racial violence awoke a new generation of Black Americans to new alternatives. The Great Migration had pulled enormous numbers of Black southerners northward, and, just as cultural limits loosened across the nation, the 1920s represented a period of self-reflection among African Americans, especially those in northern cities. New York City was a popular destination of Black Americans during the Great Migration. The city’s Black population grew 257 percent, from 91,709 in 1910 to 327,706 by 1930 (the white population grew only 20 percent). 22 Moreover, by 1930, some 98,620 foreign-born Black people had migrated to the United States. Nearly half made their home in Manhattan’s Harlem district. 23

Harlem originally lay between Fifth Avenue and Eighth Avenue and 130th Street to 145th Street. By 1930, the district had expanded to 155th Street and was home to 164,000 people, mostly African Americans. Continuous relocation to “the greatest Negro City in the world” exacerbated problems with crime, health, housing, and unemployment. 24 Nevertheless, it brought together a mass of Black people energized by race pride, military service in World War I, the urban environment, and, for many, ideas of Pan-Africanism or Garveyism (discussed shortly). James Weldon Johnson called Harlem “the Culture Capital.” 25 The area’s cultural ferment produced the Harlem Renaissance and fostered what was then termed the New Negro Movement.

Alain Locke did not coin the term New Negro , but he did much to popularize it. In the 1925 book The New Negro , Locke proclaimed that the generation of subservience was no more—“we are achieving something like a spiritual emancipation.” Bringing together writings by men and women, young and old, Black and white, Locke produced an anthology that was of African Americans, rather than only about them. The book joined many others. Popular Harlem Renaissance writers published some twenty-six novels, ten volumes of poetry, and countless short stories between 1922 and 1935. 26 Alongside the well-known Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, female writers like Jessie Redmon Fauset and Zora Neale Hurston published nearly one third of these novels. While themes varied, the literature frequently explored and countered pervading stereotypes and forms of American racial prejudice.

The Harlem Renaissance was manifested in theater, art, and music. For the first time, Broadway presented Black actors in serious roles. The 1924 production Dixie to Broadway was the first all-Black show with mainstream showings. 27 In art, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Aaron Douglas, and Palmer Hayden showcased Black cultural heritage and captured the population’s current experience. In music, jazz rocketed in popularity. Eager to hear “real jazz,” whites journeyed to Harlem’s Cotton Club and Smalls. Next to Greenwich Village, Harlem’s nightclubs and speakeasies (venues where alcohol was publicly consumed) presented a place where sexual freedom and gay life thrived. Unfortunately, while headliners like Duke Ellington were hired to entertain at Harlem’s venues, the surrounding Black community was usually excluded. Furthermore, Black performers were often restricted from restroom use and relegated to service door entry. As the Renaissance faded to a close, several Harlem Renaissance artists went on to produce important works indicating that this movement was but one component in African American’s long history of cultural and intellectual achievements. 28

Garveyism, criticized as too radical, nevertheless formed a substantial following and was a major stimulus for later Black nationalistic movements. Photograph of Marcus Garvey, August 5, 1924. Library of Congress .

The explosion of African American self-expression found multiple outlets in politics. In the 1910s and 1920s, perhaps no one so attracted disaffected Black activists as Marcus Garvey. Garvey was a Jamaican publisher and labor organizer who arrived in New York City in 1916. Within just a few years of his arrival, he built the largest Black nationalist organization in the world, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). 29 Inspired by Pan-Africanism and Booker T. Washington’s model of industrial education, and critical of what he saw as Du Bois’s elitist strategies in service of Black elites, Garvey sought to promote racial pride, encourage Black economic independence, and root out racial oppression in Africa and the Diaspora. 30

Headquartered in Harlem, the UNIA published a newspaper, Negro World , and organized elaborate parades in which members, known as Garveyites, dressed in ornate, militaristic regalia and marched down city streets. The organization criticized the slow pace of the judicial focus of the NAACP as well as its acceptance of memberships and funds from whites. “For the Negro to depend on the ballot and his industrial progress alone,” Garvey opined, “will be hopeless as it does not help him when he is lynched, burned, jim-crowed, and segregated.” In 1919, the UNIA announced plans to develop a shipping company called the Black Star Line as part of a plan that pushed for Black Americans to reject the political system and to “return to Africa” instead. Most of the investments came in the form of shares purchased by UNIA members, many of whom heard Garvey give rousing speeches across the country about the importance of establishing commercial ventures between African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, and Africans. 31

Garvey’s detractors disparaged these public displays and poorly managed business ventures, and they criticized Garvey for peddling empty gestures in place of measures that addressed the material concerns of African Americans. NAACP leaders depicted Garvey’s plan as one that simply said, “Give up! Surrender! The struggle is useless.” Enflamed by his aggressive attacks on other Black activists and his radical ideas of racial independence, many African American and Afro-Caribbean leaders worked with government officials and launched the “Garvey Must Go” campaign, which culminated in his 1922 indictment and 1925 imprisonment and subsequent deportation for “using the mails for fraudulent purposes.” The UNIA never recovered its popularity or financial support, even after Garvey’s pardon in 1927, but his movement made a lasting impact on Black consciousness in the United States and abroad. He inspired the likes of Malcolm X, whose parents were Garveyites, and Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana. Garvey’s message, perhaps best captured by his rallying cry, “Up, you mighty race,” resonated with African Americans who found in Garveyism a dignity not granted them in their everyday lives. In that sense, it was all too typical of the Harlem Renaissance. 32

For all of its cultural ferment, however, the 1920s were also a difficult time for radicals and immigrants and anything “modern.” Fear of foreign radicals led to the executions of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists, in 1927. In May 1920, the two had been arrested for robbery and murder connected with an incident at a Massachusetts factory. Their guilty verdicts were appealed for years as the evidence surrounding their convictions was slim. For instance, while one eyewitness claimed that Vanzetti drove the getaway car, accounts of others described a different person altogether. Nevertheless, despite worldwide lobbying by radicals and a respectable movement among middle-class Italian organizations in the United States, the two men were executed on August 23, 1927. Vanzetti conceivably provided the most succinct reason for his death, saying, “This is what I say . . . . I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian.” 33

Many Americans expressed anxieties about the changes that had remade the United States and, seeking scapegoats, many middle-class white Americans pointed to Eastern European and Latin American immigrants (Asian immigration had already been almost completely prohibited), African Americans who now pushed harder for civil rights, and, after migrating out of the American South to northern cities as a part of the Great Migration, the mass exodus that carried nearly half a million Black Southerners out of the South between 1910 and 1920. Protestants, meanwhile, continued to denounce the Roman Catholic Church and charged that American Catholics gave their allegiance to the pope and not to their country.

In 1921, Congress passed the Emergency Immigration Act as a stopgap immigration measure and then, three years later, permanently established country-of-origin quotas through the National Origins Act. The number of immigrants annually admitted to the United States from each nation was restricted to 2 percent of the population who had come from that country and resided in the United States in 1890. (By pushing back three decades, past the recent waves of “new” immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia, the law made it extremely difficult for immigrants outside northern Europe to legally enter the United States.) The act also explicitly excluded all Asians, although, to satisfy southern and western growers, it temporarily omitted restrictions on Mexican immigrants. The Sacco and Vanzetti trial and sweeping immigration restrictions pointed to a rampant nativism. A great number of Americans worried about a burgeoning America that did not resemble the one of times past. Many writers perceived that the country was now riven by a culture war.

In addition to alarms over immigration and the growing presence of Catholicism and Judaism, a new core of Christian fundamentalists were very much concerned about relaxed sexual mores and increased social freedoms, especially as found in city centers. Although never a centralized group, most fundamentalists lashed out against what they saw as a sagging public morality, a world in which Protestantism seemed challenged by Catholicism, women exercised ever greater sexual freedoms, public amusements encouraged selfish and empty pleasures, and critics mocked Prohibition through bootlegging and speakeasies.

Christian Fundamentalism arose most directly from a doctrinal dispute among Protestant leaders. Liberal theologians sought to intertwine religion with science and secular culture. These Modernists, influenced by the biblical scholarship of nineteenth-century German academics, argued that Christian doctrines about the miraculous might be best understood metaphorically. The Church, they said, needed to adapt itself to the world. According to the Baptist pastor Harry Emerson Fosdick, the “coming of Christ” might occur “slowly . . . but surely, [as] His will and principles [are] worked out by God’s grace in human life and institutions.” 34 The social gospel, which encouraged Christians to build the Kingdom of God on earth by working against social and economic inequality, was very much tied to liberal theology.

During the 1910s, funding from oil barons Lyman and Milton Stewart enabled the evangelist A. C. Dixon to commission some ninety essays to combat religious liberalism. The collection, known as The Fundamentals , became the foundational documents of Christian fundamentalism, from which the movement’s name is drawn. Contributors agreed that Christian faith rested on literal truths, that Jesus, for instance, would physically return to earth at the end of time to redeem the righteous and damn the wicked. Some of the essays put forth that human endeavor would not build the Kingdom of God, while others covered such subjects as the virgin birth and biblical inerrancy. American fundamentalists spanned Protestant denominations and borrowed from diverse philosophies and theologies, most notably the holiness movement, the larger revivalism of the nineteenth century, and new dispensationalist theology (in which history proceeded, and would end, through “dispensations” by God). They did, however, all agree that modernism was the enemy and the Bible was the inerrant word of God. It was a fluid movement often without clear boundaries, but it featured many prominent clergymen, including the well-established and extremely vocal John Roach Straton (New York), J. Frank Norris (Texas), and William Bell Riley (Minnesota). 35

On March 21, 1925, in a tiny courtroom in Dayton, Tennessee, fundamentalists gathered to tackle the issues of creation and evolution. A young biology teacher, John T. Scopes, was being tried for teaching his students evolutionary theory in violation of the Butler Act, a state law preventing evolutionary theory or any theory that denied “the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible” from being taught in publicly funded Tennessee classrooms. Seeing the act as a threat to personal liberty, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) immediately sought a volunteer for a “test” case, hoping that the conviction and subsequent appeals would lead to a day in the Supreme Court, testing the constitutionality of the law. It was then that Scopes, a part-time teacher and coach, stepped up and voluntarily admitted to teaching evolution (Scopes’s violation of the law was never in question). Thus the stage was set for the pivotal courtroom showdown—“the trial of the century”—between the champions and opponents of evolution that marked a key moment in an enduring American “culture war.” 36

The case became a public spectacle. Clarence Darrow, an agnostic attorney and a keen liberal mind from Chicago, volunteered to aid the defense and came up against William Jennings Bryan. Bryan, the “Great Commoner,” was the three-time presidential candidate who in his younger days had led the political crusade against corporate greed. He had done so then with a firm belief in the righteousness of his cause, and now he defended biblical literalism in similar terms. The theory of evolution, Bryan said, with its emphasis on the survival of the fittest, “would eliminate love and carry man back to a struggle of tooth and claw.” 37

During the Scopes Trial, Clarence Darrow (right) savaged the idea of a literal interpretation of the Bible. “Dudley Field Malone, Dr. John R. Neal, and Clarence Darrow in Chicago, Illinois.” The Clarence Darrow Digital Collection , University of Minnesota.

Newspapermen and spectators flooded the small town of Dayton. Across the nation, Americans tuned their radios to the national broadcasts of a trial that dealt with questions of religious liberty, academic freedom, parental rights, and the moral responsibility of education. For six days in July, the men and women of America were captivated as Bryan presented his argument on the morally corrupting influence of evolutionary theory (and pointed out that Darrow made a similar argument about the corruptive potential of education during his defense of the famed killers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb a year before). Darrow eloquently fought for academic freedom. 38

At the request of the defense, Bryan took the stand as an “expert witness” on the Bible. At his age, he was no match for Darrow’s famous skills as a trial lawyer and his answers came across as blundering and incoherent, particularly as he was not in fact a literal believer in all of the Genesis account (believing—as many anti-evolutionists did—that the meaning of the word day in the book of Genesis could be taken as allegory) and only hesitantly admitted as much, not wishing to alienate his fundamentalist followers. Additionally, Darrow posed a series of unanswerable questions: Was the “great fish” that swallowed the prophet Jonah created for that specific purpose? What precisely happened astronomically when God made the sun stand still? Bryan, of course, could cite only his faith in miracles. Tied into logical contradictions, Bryan’s testimony was a public relations disaster, although his statements were expunged from the record the next day and no further experts were allowed—Scopes’s guilt being established, the jury delivered a guilty verdict in minutes. The case was later thrown out on a technicality. But few cared about the verdict. Darrow had, in many ways, at least to his defenders, already won: the fundamentalists seemed to have taken a beating in the national limelight. Journalist and satirist H. L. Mencken characterized the “circus in Tennessee” as an embarrassment for fundamentalism, and modernists remembered the “Monkey Trial” as a smashing victory. If fundamentalists retreated from the public sphere, they did not disappear entirely. Instead, they went local, built a vibrant subculture, and emerged many decades later stronger than ever. 39

This photo by popular news photographers Underwood and Underwood shows a gathering of a reported three hundred Ku Klux Klansmen just outside Washington DC to initiate a new group of men into their order. The proximity of the photographer to his subjects for one of the Klan’s notorious night-time rituals suggests that this was yet another of the Klan’s numerous publicity stunts. Underwood and Underwood, “Klan assembles Short Distance from U.S. Capitol,” (ca. 1920’s). Library of Congress .

Suspicions of immigrants, Catholics, and modernists contributed to a string of reactionary organizations. None so captured the imaginations of the country as the reborn Ku Klux Klan (KKK), a white supremacist organization that expanded beyond its Reconstruction Era anti-Black politics to now claim to protect American values and the American way of life from Black people, feminists (and other radicals), immigrants, Catholics, Jews, atheists, bootleggers, and a host of other imagined moral enemies.

Two events in 1915 are widely credited with inspiring the rebirth of the Klan: the lynching of Leo Frank and the release of The Birth of a Nation , a popular and groundbreaking film that valorized the Reconstruction Era Klan as a protector of feminine virtue and white racial purity. Taking advantage of this sudden surge of popularity, Colonel William Joseph Simmons organized what is often called the “second” Ku Klux Klan in Georgia in late 1915. This new Klan, modeled after other fraternal organizations with elaborate rituals and a hierarchy, remained largely confined to Georgia and Alabama until 1920, when Simmons began a professional recruiting effort that resulted in individual chapters being formed across the country and membership rising to an estimated five million. 40

Partly in response to the migration of Black southerners to northern cities during World War I, the KKK expanded above the Mason-Dixon Line. Membership soared in Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, and Portland, while Klan-endorsed mayoral candidates won in Indianapolis, Denver, and Atlanta. 41 The Klan often recruited through fraternal organizations such as the Freemasons and through various Protestant churches. In many areas, local Klansmen visited churches of which they approved and bestowed a gift of money on the presiding minister, often during services. The Klan also enticed people to join through large picnics, parades, rallies, and ceremonies. The Klan established a women’s auxiliary in 1923 headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas. The Women of the Ku Klux Klan mirrored the KKK in practice and ideology and soon had chapters in all forty-eight states, often attracting women who were already part of the Prohibition movement, the defense of which was a centerpiece of Klan activism. 42

Contrary to its perception of as a primarily southern and lower-class phenomenon, the second Klan had a national reach composed largely of middle-class people. Sociologist Rory McVeigh surveyed the KKK newspaper Imperial Night-Hawk for the years 1923 and 1924, at the organization’s peak, and found the largest number of Klan-related activities to have occurred in Texas, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, and Georgia. The Klan was even present in Canada, where it was a powerful force within Saskatchewan’s Conservative Party. In many states and localities, the Klan dominated politics to such a level that one could not be elected without the support of the KKK. For example, in 1924, the Klan supported William Lee Cazort for governor of Arkansas, leading his opponent in the Democratic Party primary, Thomas Terral, to seek honorary membership through a Louisiana klavern so as not to be tagged as the anti-Klan candidate. In 1922, Texans elected Earle B. Mayfield, an avowed Klansman who ran openly as that year’s “klandidate,” to the U.S. Senate. At its peak the Klan claimed between four and five million members. 43

Despite the breadth of its political activism, the Klan is today remembered largely as a violent vigilante group—and not without reason. Members of the Klan and affiliated organizations often carried out acts of lynching and “nightriding”—the physical harassment of bootleggers, union activists, civil rights workers, or any others deemed “immoral” (such as suspected adulterers) under the cover of darkness or while wearing their hoods and robes. In fact, Klan violence was extensive enough in Oklahoma that Governor John C. Walton placed the entire state under martial law in 1923. Witnesses testifying before the military court disclosed accounts of Klan violence ranging from the flogging of clandestine brewers to the disfiguring of a prominent Black Tulsan for registering African Americans to vote. In Houston, Texas, the Klan maintained an extensive system of surveillance that included tapping telephone lines and putting spies in the local post office in order to root out “undesirables.” A mob organized and led by Klan members in Aiken, South Carolina, lynched Bertha Lowman and her two brothers in 1926, but no one was ever prosecuted: the sheriff, deputies, city attorney, and state representative all belonged to the Klan. 44

The Klan dwindled in the face of scandal and diminished energy over the last years of the 1920s. By 1930, the Klan only had about thirty thousand members and it was largely spent as a national force, only to appear again as a much diminished force during the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

In his inauguration speech in 1929, Herbert Hoover told Americans that the Republican Party had brought prosperity. Even ignoring stubbornly large rates of poverty and unparalleled levels of inequality, he could not see the weaknesses behind the decade’s economy. Even as the new culture of consumption promoted new freedoms, it also promoted new insecurities. An economy built on credit exposed the nation to tremendous risk. Flailing European economies, high tariffs, wealth inequality, a construction bubble, and an ever-more flooded consumer market loomed dangerously until the Roaring Twenties ground to a halt. In a moment the nation’s glitz and glamour seemed to give way to decay and despair. For farmers, racial minorities, unionized workers, and other populations that did not share in 1920s prosperity, the veneer of a Jazz Age and a booming economy had always been a fiction. But for them, as for millions of Americans, the end of an era was close. The Great Depression loomed.

1. Warren G. Harding and the “Return to Normalcy” (1920)

Republican Senator and presidential candidate Warren G. Harding of Ohio delivered the following address to the Home Market Club of Boston on May 14, 1920. In it, Harding outlined his hope that the United States would, after a decade of progressive politics and foreign interventions, return to “normalcy.” In November, Harding received the highest percentage of the popular vote in a presidential election up to that time.

2. Crystal Eastman, “Now We Can Begin” (1920)

In the following selection, Crystal Eastman, a socialist and feminist, considered what women should fight for following the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted American women the right to vote.

3. Explanation of the Objects of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (1921)

Inspired by the writings of Booker T. Washington, Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey became the most prominent Black Nationalist in the United States. He championed the back-to-Africa movement, advocated for Black-owned businesses—he founded the Black Star Line, a transnational shipping company—and founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Thousands of UNIA chapters formed all across the world. In 1921, Garvey recorded a message in a New York studio explaining the object of the UNIA.

4. Hiram Evans on the “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism” (1926)

The “Second” Ku Klux Klan rose to prominence in the 1920s and, at its peak, claimed millions of Americans as members. Klansmen wrapped themselves in the flag and the cross and proclaimed themselves the moral guardians of America. The organization appealed to many “respectable,” middle-class Americans. Here, Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans, a dentist from Dallas, Texas, outlines the Second Klan’s potent mix of Americanism, Protestantism, and white supremacy.

5. Herbert Hoover, “Principles and Ideals of the United States Government” (1928)

Republican Herbert Hoover embodied the political conservatism of the 1920s. He denounced the regulation of business and championed the individual against “bureaucracy.” In November 1928, Hoover, a Protestant from the Midwest, soundly defeated Al Smith, an Irish Catholic from New York City. Here, in a speech delivered in late October, Hoover outlined his vision of American government.

6. Ellen Welles Page, “A Flapper’s Appeal to Parents” (1922)

By 1922, “the Flapper” had become a full-blown cultural phenomenon. In the following article, Ellen Welles Page, a self-described “semi-flapper,” attempted to explain the appeal of the flapper and pled with America’s mothers and fathers not to reflexively judge their flapper daughters.

7. Alain Locke on the “New Negro” (1925)

Alain Locke, a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, was a distinguished academic—the first African American Rhodes Scholar, he obtained a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard—who taught at Howard University for 35 years. In 1925, he published an essay, “Enter the New Negro,” that described an African American population busy seeing “a new vision of opportunity.”

8. Advertisements (1924)

In the 1920’s Americans across the country bought magazines like Photoplay in order to get more information about the stars of their new favorite entertainment media: the movies. Advertisers took advantage of this broad audience to promote a wide range of goods and services to both men and women who enjoyed the proliferation of consumer culture during this time.

9. Klan Gathering (ca. 1920s)

This photo by popular news photographers Underwood and Underwood shows a gathering of a reported 300 Ku Klux Klansmen just outside Washington DC to initiate a new group of men into their order. The proximity of the photographer to his subjects for one of the Klan’s notorious night-time rituals suggests that this was yet another of the Klan’s numerous publicity stunts.

This chapter was edited by Brandy Thomas Wells, with content contributions by Micah Childress, Mari Crabtree, Maggie Flamingo, Guy Lancaster, Emily Remus, Colin Reynolds, Kristopher Shields, and Brandy Thomas Wells.

Recommended citation: Micah Childress et al., “The New Era,” Brandy Thomas Wells, ed., in The American Yawp , eds. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).

Recommended Reading

• Allen, Frederick Lewis. Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s. New York: Harper and Row, 1931.
• Baldwin, Davarian. Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
• Blee, Kathleen M. Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
• Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books, 1995.
• Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
• Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.
• Dumenil, Lynn. The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995.
• Fox, Richard Wightman, and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds. The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983.
• Gage, Beverly. The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Grant, Colin. Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Hall, Jacquelyn. Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.
• Heap, Chad. Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
• Hernández, Kelly Lytle. Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. New York: University of California Press, 2010.
• Huggins, Nathan. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.
• Larson, Edward. Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
• MacLean, Nancy. Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
• Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism: 1870–1925. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
• McGirr, Lisa. The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State. New York: Norton, 2016.
• Montgomery, David. The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
• Ngai, Mae M., Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
• Okrent, Daniel. Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. New York: Scribner, 2010.
• Sanchez, George. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
• Tindall, George Brown. The Emergence of the New South, 1913–1945. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1967.
• Weinrib, Laura. The Taming of Free Speech: America’s Civil Liberties Compromise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.
• Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Sons: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Vintage Books, 2010.
• David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). [ ↩ ]
• William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–1932 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). [ ↩ ]
• Robert K. Murray, The Harding Era: Warren G. Harding and His Administration (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969). [ ↩ ]
• Leuchtenburg, Perils of Prosperity . [ ↩ ]
• Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). [ ↩ ]
• Allan J. Lichtman, Prejudice and the Old Politics: The Presidential Election of 1928 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1979). [ ↩ ]
• “Hoover Accepts the Republican Nomination,” Sacramento Bee, August 11, 1928. [ ↩ ]
• Allan J. Lichtman, Prejudice and the Old Politics: The Presidential Election of 1928 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979). [ ↩ ]
• Christine Frederick, Selling Mrs. Consumer , (New York: Business Bourse, 1929), 29. [ ↩ ]
• T. J. Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880–1930,” in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980 , ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 1–38. [ ↩ ]
• Thomas W. Goodspeed, “Marshall Field,” University of Chicago Magazine, Vol. III (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), 48. [ ↩ ]
• LeRoy Ashby, With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture Since 1830 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 177. [ ↩ ]
• Ibid., 183. [ ↩ ]
• Ibid., 216. [ ↩ ]
• Ibid., 210. [ ↩ ]
• Ibid., 181. [ ↩ ]
• John W. Ward, “The Meaning of Lindbergh’s Flight,” in Studies in American Culture: Dominant Ideas and Images , ed. Joseph J. Kwiat and Mary C. Turpie (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1960), 33. [ ↩ ]
• See Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 113. [ ↩ ]
• Cott, Grounding of Modern Feminism , 150. [ ↩ ]
• George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994). [ ↩ ]
• Cott, Grounding of Modern Feminism , 160. [ ↩ ]
• Mark R. Schneider, “ We Return Fighting”: The Civil Rights Movement in the Jazz Age (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002), 21. [ ↩ ]
• Philip Kasinitz, Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 25. [ ↩ ]
• James Weldon Johnson, “Harlem: The Culture Capital,” in Alain Locke, The New Negro: An Interpretation (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925), 301. [ ↩ ]
• Ibid. [ ↩ ]
• Joan Marter, ed., The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, Volume 1 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 448. [ ↩ ]
• James F. Wilson, Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality inJames F. Wilson, Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 116 . [ ↩ ]
• Cary D. Wintz and Paul Finkelman, Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance , Vol. 2 (New York: Routledge, 2004), 910–911. [ ↩ ]
• For Garvey, see Colin Grant, Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Judith Stein, The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1986); and Ula Yvette Taylor, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). [ ↩ ]
• Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (London: Verso, 1998). [ ↩ ]
• Grant, Negro with a Hat ; Stein, World of Marcus Garvey ; Taylor, Veiled Garvey . [ ↩ ]
• Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti (New York: Viking, 1928), 272. [ ↩ ]
• Harry Emerson Fosdick, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” Christian Work 102 (June 10, 1922): 716–722. [ ↩ ]
• George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). [ ↩ ]
• Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). [ ↩ ]
• Leslie H. Allen, ed., Bryan and Darrow at Dayton: The Record and Documents of the “Bible-Evolution” Trial (New York: Arthur Lee, 1925). [ ↩ ]
• Larson, Summer for the Gods . [ ↩ ]
• Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). [ ↩ ]
• Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. [ ↩ ]
• MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry . [ ↩ ]
• George Brown Tindall, The Emergence of the New South: 1913–1945 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1967). [ ↩ ]
• MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry ; Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). [ ↩ ]

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

6 The Roaring Twenties

The 1920s would be anything but “normal.” The decade so reshaped American life that it came to be called by many names: the New Era, the Jazz Age, the Age of the Flapper, the Prosperity Decade, and, most commonly, the Roaring Twenties. The mass production and consumption of automobiles, household appliances, film, and radio fueled a new economy and new standards of living. New mass entertainment introduced talking films and jazz while sexual and social restraints loosened. But at the same time, many Americans turned their back on political and economic reform, denounced America’s shifting demographics, stifled immigration, retreated toward “old-time religion,” and revived the Ku Klux Klan with millions of new members. On the other hand, many Americans fought harder than ever for equal rights and cultural observers noted the appearance of “the New Woman” and “the New Negro.” Old immigrant communities that had predated new immigration quotas, meanwhile, clung to their cultures and their native faiths. The 1920s were a decade of conflict and tension. Whatever it was, it was not “normalcy.”

On a sunny day in early March 1921, Warren G. Harding took the oath to become the twenty-ninth president of the United States. A former newspaper editor who had entered politics in 1900 as an Ohio state senator and lieutenant governor before becoming the junior U.S. senator for Ohio, Harding had won a landslide election by promising a “return to normalcy.” The Republican Party had planned to nominate Theodore Roosevelt for the presidency in 1920. Roosevelt had been critical of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, and was expected to be a strong candidate given his continued popularity and a promised platform including old-age pensions for workers, government insurance for sickness and unemployment, public housing programs for low-income families, reduction of work hours, aid to farmers, and greater regulation of large corporations. Roosevelt wrote to a friend that “I wish to do everything in my power to make the Republican Party the party of sane, constructive radicalism, just as it was under Lincoln.” But the former president died unexpectedly in January 1919 of a coronary embolism. Lacking a compelling candidate to replace Roosevelt, the party decided to nominate Harding in a back-channel negotiation style that became known as the “smoke-filled room”. Democrats accused the party of putting forward a “weak and mediocre” candidate who “never had an original idea.” William Randolph Hearst’s papers called Harding the “flag-bearer of a new Senatorial autocracy” and the New York Times described Harding as a “very respectable Ohio politician of the second class.” Harding won partly because the Democrats also chose a mediocre Ohio politician, Governor James M. Cox, as their candidate (although they did pick Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt as his running-mate).

Question for Discussion

• Why did the promise to return America to “normalcy” resonate with voters?

“Our supreme task is the resumption of our onward, normal way,” Harding declared in his inaugural address. Two months later, he elaborated on this theme, saying  “America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration.” While critics described Harding’s oratory as “an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea,” the idea of returning America to normal resonated with the people. The nation had been hit with a series of shocks including World War I, the influenza pandemic which caused as many as 675,000 American deaths, a lingering “Red Scare” sparked by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and the explosion of racial violence that began in the “Red Summer” of 1919 and continued in 1921 with the Greenwood Massacre in Tulsa Oklahoma.

In 1921 Greenwood was one of the most affluent and commercially successful black communities in America. Originally attracted by the Oklahoma oil boom, black workers, merchants, and professionals built a thriving business district that Booker T. Washington called the “Negro Wall Street”. Although they made up only about an eighth of the population, African Americans prospered in Tulsa. The violence began when a 17-year old white woman ran out of an elevator in a public building and claimed a 19-year old black shoe shiner named Dick Rowland had sexually assaulted her. Rowland was arrested by the county sheriff and newspapers picked up the story, running headlines announcing “To Lynch Negro Tonight” and “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator.” A group of armed black citizens including several black business leaders arrived to prevent a lynch mob from taking Rowland from the jail. Shots were exchanged when the lynch mob arrived and tried to disarm the blacks defending Rowland, resulting in ten white and two black deaths.

As news of this fight spread, white rioters attacked Greenwood in force overnight and into the following day. Stores and homes were looted and set on fire. When Tulsa firefighters arrived, they were turned away by white vigilantes. A number of eyewitness accounts described private aircraft being used to shoot into black crowds and drop turpentine firebombs onto black-owned buildings. The death toll is uncertain, but probably amounted to several hundred black deaths and up to a hundred white. About 6,000 Greenwood residents were arrested and briefly detained. Nearly a hundred people were indicted but no one was prosecuted for the riots. The Red Cross reported that 1,256 homes were burned and an additional 215 looted. About 10,000 people were left homeless.

• Why does the Greenwood Massacre not typically get taught in US History?

To deliver on his promises of stability and prosperity, Harding signed legislation to restore a high protective tariff and dismantled the last wartime controls over industry. Meanwhile, the vestiges of America’s involvement in World War I and its propaganda and suspicions of anything less than “100 percent American” pushed Congress to address fears of immigration and foreign populations. A postwar recession allowed elites to raise the specter of the Russian Revolution and sideline not just American socialist and anarchist organizations but nearly all union activism. During the 1920s, the labor movement suffered a sharp decline in memberships. Workers lost not only bargaining power but also the support of courts, politicians, and the American public.

Harding’s presidency would go down in history as among the most corrupt. Some of Harding’s cabinet appointees were competent administrators that answered to various American constituencies. For instance, Henry C. Wallace, the vocal editor of  Wallace’s Farmer  and a well-known proponent of scientific farming, was secretary of agriculture. Herbert Hoover, the popular head of the wartime Food Administration and a self-made millionaire, was secretary of commerce. To satisfy Wall Street, the conservative Pittsburgh banker Andrew Mellon became secretary of the treasury. Mostly, however, it was the appointing of friends and close supporters, dubbed “the Ohio gang,” that led to trouble.Harding’s administration suffered a tremendous setback when several officials conspired to lease government land in Wyoming to oil companies in exchange for cash. In a scandal known as the “Teapot Dome” after a Wyoming rock formation that resembled a teapot, interior secretary Albert Fall and navy secretary Edwin Denby were eventually convicted and sent to jail. Harding took vacation in the summer of 1923, intending to think deeply on how to deal with his “God-damned friends”. It was Harding’s friends, and not his enemies, that kept him up walking the halls at nights. But then, in August 1923, Harding died suddenly of a heart attack and Vice President Calvin Coolidge ascended to the highest office in the land.

The son of a Vermont shopkeeper, Coolidge had climbed the Republican ranks from city councilman to governor of Massachusetts. As president, Coolidge sought to remove the stain of scandal but otherwise continued Harding’s economic approach, refusing to take actions in defense of workers or consumers against American business. “The chief business of the American people,” the new president stated, “is business.” One observer called Coolidge’s policy “active inactivity,” but Coolidge was not afraid of supporting business interests and wealthy Americans by lowering taxes or maintaining high tariff rates. Congress, for instance, had already begun to reduce taxes on the wealthy from wartime levels of 66 percent to 20 percent, which Coolidge championed. Government spending had been cut back substantially since the end of the war, and by 1927 only the wealthiest 2% of Americans paid any federal income taxes. In addition to business, Coolidge supported civil rights and racial tolerance. In his first state of the union message he said African Americans’ Constitutional rights were “just as sacred as those of any other citizen” and that it was a “public and a private duty to protect those rights.” He called on Congress to pass a law making lynching a federal crime, but legislators did not respond. And he gave the 1924 commencement address at Howard University, praising its mostly-black graduates and thanking the black community for its contributions to U.S. society and to the recent war effort, despite the discrimination and prejudice inflicted by white supremacists. Coolidge also supported and signed the Indian Citizenship Act, which for the first time made Indians living on reservations U.S. citizens. Late in 1924, Coolidge spoke against “race hatreds” and “prejudices” and argued that tolerance of differences was an American value and an advantage in a nation of immigrants. This was not the opinion of most Americans, as we will see.

While Coolidge supported business and social issues, he did not seem to believe the government should have a particularly activist agenda. Other Americans, however,  continued their activism. American women had won the vote with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Female voters, like their male counterparts, pursued many interests. Concerned about squalor, poverty, and domestic violence and convinced that alcohol was to blame, women had already lobbied for prohibition, which went into effect under the Eighteenth Amendment in January 1920. Other women reformers urged government action to ameliorate high mortality rates among infants and children, provide federal aid for education, and ensure peace and disarmament. Some activists advocated protective legislation for women and children, while Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party called for the elimination of all legal distinctions “on account of sex” through the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which was introduced but defeated in Congress.

National politics in the 1920s were dominated by the Republican Party, which held not only the presidency but both houses of Congress as well. In a note passed to American reporters, Coolidge announced his decision not to run in the presidential election of 1928. Republicans nominated Herbert Hoover, an orphan from Iowa who had graduated from Stanford, become wealthy as a mining engineer, and won a deserved reputation as a humanitarian for his relief efforts in war-torn Europe. Coolidge had kept Hoover on as secretary of commerce after Harding’s death, but was not thrilled about endorsing him. He once remarked that “for six years that man has given me unsolicited advice—all of it bad.” Running against Hoover was Democrat Alfred E. Smith, the four-time governor of New York and the son of Irish immigrants. Smith was a part of the New York political machine and favored workers’ protections while also opposing prohibition and immigration restrictions. Hoover focused on economic growth and prosperity. As secretary of commerce under Harding and Coolidge, he claimed credit for the sustained growth seen during the 1920s. Hoover boasted in 1928 that America had never been closer to eliminating poverty. Much of the election, however, centered on Smith’s religion. Not only was he a Catholic, Smith opposed Protestant America’s greatest political triumph: Prohibition. Many Protestant ministers preached against Smith and warned that as president he would take orders from the pope. Hoover won in a landslide. While Smith won handily in the nation’s largest cities, portending future political trends, he lost most of the rest of the country. Even several solidly Democratic southern states chose a Republican for the first time since Reconstruction.

Questions for Discussion

• How were Republican politicians able to hold onto the White House for an entire generation after World War I?
• What was the appeal of Herbert Hoover?

“Change is in the very air Americans breathe, and consumer changes are the very bricks out of which we are building our new kind of civilization,” announced marketing expert and home economist Christine Frederick in her influential 1929 book, Selling Mrs. Consumer (which she incidentally dedicated to Herbert Hoover). The book, based on one of the earliest surveys of American buying habits, advised manufacturers and advertisers how to capture the purchasing power of women, who, according to Frederick, controlled 90 percent of household expenditures. In addition to offering advertisers insight into consumer psychology, Frederick’s text captured the tremendous social and economic transformations that had been wrought over the course of her lifetime. The consumer change she studied had resulted from the industrial expansion that flooded the market with a range of consumer products such as ready-to-wear clothing, convenience foods, and home appliances. By the end of the nineteenth century, output had risen so dramatically that many contemporaries feared supply had outpaced demand and that the nation would soon face the devastating financial consequences of overproduction. American businessmen attempted to avoid this catastrophe by developing new merchandising and marketing strategies that transformed distribution and stimulated a new culture of consumer desire.

The department store stood at the center of this early consumer revolution. By the 1880s, a few large dry-goods retailers had blossomed into modern department stores that concentrated a broad array of goods under a single roof, allowing customers to purchase shirts and gloves alongside toy trains and washbasins. To attract customers, department stores employed innovations in service such as access to restaurants, writing rooms, and babysitting, and spectacle such as elaborately decorated store windows, fashion shows, and interior merchandise displays. Marshall Field & Co. was among the most successful of these ventures. Located on State Street in Chicago, the company pioneered strategies including a tearoom that provided refreshment to the well-heeled female shoppers who composed the store’s clientele. Reflecting on the success of Field’s marketing techniques, Thomas W. Goodspeed, an early trustee of the University of Chicago, wrote, “Perhaps the most notable of Mr. Field’s innovations was that he made a store in which it was a joy to buy.”

The joy of buying infected a growing number of Americans in the early twentieth century as the rise of mail-order catalogs, mass-circulation magazines, and national branding further stoked consumer desire. Henry Ford’s assembly line, which advanced production strategies practiced within countless industries, brought automobiles within the reach of middle-income Americans and further drove the spirit of consumerism. By 1925, Ford’s factories were turning out a Model-T every ten seconds. But in addition to learning to make cars more quickly and inexpensively, Ford had also realized that along with creating a product for consumers, he also needed to produce consumers. In 1913, Henry Ford hired 52,000 men to fill 14,000 positions in his factories. In 1914, Ford boosted the daily wage to $5, more than double the going rate for factory workers. Turnover at his factories dropped dramatically, work quality improved, and suddenly Ford workers could afford the cars they built. And not just Ford workers, because other factories were forced to raise their wages to meet Ford’s. The number of registered cars ballooned from just over nine million in 1920 to nearly twenty-seven million by the decade’s end. Americans owned more cars than Great Britain, Germany, France, and Italy combined. In the late 1920s, 80 percent of the world’s cars drove on American roads. The automobile industry also fostered the new culture of consumption by promoting the use of credit. By 1927, more than 60 percent of American automobiles were sold on credit, and installment purchasing was made available for nearly every other large consumer purchase. Spurred by access to easy credit, consumer expenditures for household appliances more than doubled between 1919 and 1929.

• How did national consumer brands become popular?
• What was Henry Ford’s main contribution to consumerism?

As transformative as steam and iron had been in the previous century, gasoline and electricity in the form of  automobiles, film, and radio propelled not only consumption but also the escapist popular culture in the 1920s. “We wish to escape,” explained Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of the Tarzan series, “the restrictions of manmade laws, and the inhibitions that society has placed upon us.” Burroughs published a new Tarzan story nearly every year from 1914 until 1939. “We would each like to be Tarzan,” he said. “At least I would; I admit it.” Like many Americans in the 1920s, Burroughs wished to escape the constraints of a society that seemed more industrialized with each passing day. And like Burroughs, Americans escaped the limitations of their own day-to-day existence. Whether through Hollywood’s latest films, jazz music on Edison’s new phonograph records, or listening to radio broadcasts of Jack Dempsey’s prizefights, the public wrapped itself in popular culture. As the automobile became more popular and more reliable, more people traveled more frequently and attempted greater distances. Women increasingly drove themselves to their own activities as well as those of their children. Vacationing Americans sped to Florida to escape northern winters. Young men and women fled the supervision of courtship, exchanging the chaperoned parlor couch for making out in the backseat of a sedan. In order to capture the growing number of drivers, Americans erected gas stations, diners, motels, and billboards along the roadside. Automobiles themselves became objects of entertainment when nearly a hundred thousand people gathered to watch drivers compete for the $50,000 prize of the second Indianapolis 500 race on Memorial Day, 1912.

Meanwhile, the United States dominated the global film industry. By 1930, as moviemaking became more expensive, a handful of film companies took control of the industry. Immigrants, mostly of Jewish heritage from central and Eastern Europe, had the opportunity to “invent Hollywood” because most middle- and upper-class Americans viewed cinema as lower-class entertainment. After their parents emigrated from Poland in 1876, Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack Warner began making films during World War I and later established Warner Bros. In 1918, Universal, Paramount, Columbia, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) were all founded by or led by Jewish executives. Aware of their social status as outsiders, these immigrants and sons of immigrants deliberately produced films that portrayed American values of opportunity, democracy, and freedom.

Not content with distributing thirty-minute films in cheap, five-cent amusement halls known as nickelodeons, these early film moguls produced longer, higher-quality films and showed them in palatial theaters, attracting viewers who had previously shunned the film industry. But as filmmakers captured the middle and upper classes, they maintained working-class moviegoers by blending traditional and modern values. Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 epic  The Ten Commandments  depicted orgiastic revelry, for instance, while still managing to celebrate a biblical story. Samuel Rothafel’s Roxy Theater in New York held more than six thousand patrons who could be escorted by a uniformed usher past gardens and statues to their cushioned seat. In order to show  The Jazz Singer  (1927), the first movie with synchronized words and pictures, the Warners spent half a million dollars to equip two theaters with the new technology. “Sound is a passing fancy,” one MGM producer told his wife, but Warner Bros.’ assets, which increased from just $5,000,000 in 1925 to $230,000,000 in 1930, tell a different story.

Americans fell in love with the movies. Whether it was the surroundings, the sound, or the production budgets, weekly movie attendance skyrocketed from sixteen million in 1912 to forty million in the early 1920s. Hungarian immigrant William Fox, founder of Fox Film Corporation, declared that “the motion picture is a distinctly American institution” because “the rich rub elbows with the poor” in movie theaters. With no seating restriction, the one-price admission was accessible for nearly all Americans (African Americans, again the exception, were either excluded or segregated). Women represented more than 60 percent of moviegoers, packing theaters to see Mary Pickford, nicknamed “America’s Sweetheart,” who was earning one million dollars a year by 1920 through a combination of film and endorsements contracts. Pickford and other female stars popularized the image of the “flapper,” an independent woman who favored short skirts, makeup, and cigarettes.

As Americans went to the movies more and more, at home they had the radio. Italian scientist Guglielmo Marconi transmitted the first transatlantic wireless message in 1901, but radios in the home did not become available until around 1920. Around half of American homes contained a radio by 1930. Radio stations brought entertainment directly into the living room through the sale of advertisements and sponsorships, from  The Maxwell House Hour  to the  Lucky Strike Orchestra . Soap companies sponsored daytime dramas so frequently that an entire genre of “soap operas” was born, providing housewives with audio adventures that stood in stark contrast to common chores. Though radio stations were often under the control of corporations like the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) or the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), radio programs were less constrained by traditional boundaries in order to capture as wide an audience as possible, spreading popular culture on a national level.

Radio exposed Americans to a broad array of music. Jazz, a uniquely American musical style popularized by the African-American community in New Orleans, spread primarily through radio stations and records. The  New York Times  had ridiculed jazz as “savage” because of its racial heritage, but the music represented cultural independence to others. As Harlem-based musician William Dixon put it, “It did seem, to a little boy, that . . . white people really owned everything. But that wasn’t entirely true. They didn’t own the music that I played.” The fast-paced and spontaneity-laced tunes invited the listener to dance along. “When a good orchestra plays a ‘rag,’” dance instructor Vernon Castle recalled, “one has simply got to move.” Jazz became a national sensation, played and heard by whites and blacks both. Jewish Lithuanian-born singer Al Jolson, whose biography inspired  The Jazz Singer  and who played the film’s titular character, became the most popular singer in America.

The 1920s also witnessed the maturation of professional sports. Play-by-play radio broadcasts of collegiate and professional sporting events marked a new era for sports, despite the racial segregation in most. Suddenly, Jack Dempsey’s left crosses and right uppercuts could almost be felt in homes across the United States. Dempsey, who held the heavyweight championship for most of the decade, drew million-dollar gates and inaugurated “Dempseymania” in newspapers across the country. But no sports figure left a bigger mark than did Babe Ruth. Born George Herman Ruth, the “Sultan of Swat” grew up in an orphanage in Baltimore’s slums. Ruth’s emergence onto the national scene was much needed, as the baseball world had been rocked by the so-called Black Sox Scandal in which eight players allegedly agreed to throw the 1919 World Series. Originally a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, Ruth switched to the outfield when he was sold to the New York Yankees in 1919. Ruth hit fifty-four home runs in 1920, which was more than any other team combined. Baseball writers called Ruth a superman, and more Americans could recognize Ruth than president Warren G. Harding.

After an era of destruction and doubt brought about by World War I, Americans craved heroes who seemed to defy convention and break boundaries. Dempsey and Ruth dominated their respective sports, but only Charles Lindbergh conquered the sky. On May 21, 1927, Lindbergh concluded the first ever nonstop solo flight from New York to Paris. Armed with only a few sandwiches, bottles of water, paper maps, and a flashlight, Lindbergh successfully navigated over the Atlantic Ocean in thirty-three hours. 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 that technology could inspire and accomplish great things.  Outlook Magazine  called the Detroit native “the heir of all that we like to think is best in America.”

The decade’s popular culture seemed to revolve around escape. Coney Island in New York marked new amusements for young and old. Americans drove their sedans to massive theaters to enjoy major motion pictures. Radio towers broadcasted the bold new sound of jazz, the adventures of soap operas, and the feats of athletes like Jack Dempsey. Babe Ruth smashed home runs out of ball parks across the country. And Lindbergh escaped the earth’s gravity and crossed an entire ocean. Neither Dempsey nor Ruth nor Lindbergh made Americans forget the horrors of World War I and the chaos that followed, but they made it seem as if the future would be that much brighter.

Babe Ruth’s incredible talent accelerated the popularity of baseball, cementing it as America’s pastime. Ruth’s propensity to shatter records made him a national hero.  Library of Congress .

• What was the role of immigrants in the new media culture?
• How was the role of sports and entertainment changing?

The rising national emphasis on materialism and individual pleasure were embodied in the figure of the flapper, whose bobbed hair, short skirts, makeup, cigarettes, and carefree spirit captured the attention of American novelists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis. Rejecting the old Victorian values of desexualized modesty and self-restraint, young flappers seized opportunities for the public coed pleasures offered by new commercial leisure institutions such as dance halls, cabarets, and nickelodeons, not to mention the illicit speakeasies spawned by Prohibition. The flapper helped usher in a new morality that permitted women greater independence, freedom of movement, and access to the delights of urban living. In the words of psychologist G. Stanley Hall, “She was out to see the world and, incidentally, be seen of it.”

The new freedom of women, however, was never far from consumption. A 1930  Chicago Tribune advertisement called “Feminine Values” declared, “Today’s woman gets what she wants. The vote. Slim sheaths of silk to replace voluminous petticoats. Glassware in sapphire blue or glowing amber. The right to a career. Soap to match her bathroom’s color scheme.” New ideas about sex and gender were in many ways a study in contradictions. It was the decade of the “New Woman,” in which only 10 percent of married women (but nearly half of unmarried women) worked outside the home. It was a decade in which new technologies decreased time requirements for household chores, and one in which standards of cleanliness and order in the home rose to often impossible standards. It was a decade in which women finally could exercise their right to vote, and one in which the thinly-bound women’s coalitions that had won that victory splintered into various causes. Finally, it was a decade in which images such as the “flapper” gave women new modes of representing femininity, and one in which such representations were often inaccessible to women of certain races, ages, and classes.

Women gained increased opportunities to work outside the home. The number of professional women rose significantly in the 1920s. But limits still existed, even for professional women. Occupations such as law and medicine remained overwhelmingly male and most female professionals were in feminized professions such as teaching and nursing. And even within these fields, it was difficult for women to rise to leadership positions.

Further, it is crucial not to overgeneralize the experience of all women based on a subset of the population. A woman’s race, class, ethnicity, and marital status all had an impact on both her opportunity to work outside the home and the types of jobs that were available to her. And not all women were equally excited about the changes in their status or eager to leave their homes to take a job. Also, for many minority women, work outside the home was not a cultural statement but rather a financial necessity, and physically demanding, low-paying domestic service work continued to be the most common job type. Young, working-class white women were joining the workforce more frequently, too, but often to help support their struggling mothers and fathers.

For the young, middle-class, white women most likely to fit the image of the carefree flapper, the most common workplace was the office. These predominantly single women increasingly became clerks and secretaries, jobs that had been primarily male earlier in the century. But here, too, there was a clear ceiling. While entry-level clerical jobs became increasingly feminized, jobs at higher, more lucrative levels remained dominated by men. Often, rather than changing the culture of the workplace, the entrance of women into lower-level jobs primarily changed the coding of the jobs themselves. Like nursing and teaching, such positions simply became “women’s work.”

Finally, as these same women grew older and married, social changes became even subtler. Married women were, for the most part, expected to remain in the domestic sphere. While new patterns of consumption gave them more power and, arguably, more autonomy, new household technologies and philosophies of marriage and child-rearing increased expectations, further tying these women to the home. Of course, the number of women in the workplace is not the only measure of changes in sex and gender norms. Attitudes towards sex, for example, continued to change in the 1920s , with significantly different impacts on different social groups. But for many young, college-educated white women, an attempt to rebel against what they saw as a repressive Victorian notion of sexuality led to an increase in premarital sexual activity strong enough that it became, in the words of one historian, “almost a matter of conformity.”

In the homosexual community, meanwhile, a vibrant gay culture grew, especially in urban centers such as New York. While gay males had to contend with increased policing of the gay lifestyle, in general they lived more openly in New York in the 1920s than would be possible for many decades following World War II. At the same time, for many lesbians in the decade, the increased sexualization of women brought new scrutiny to same-sex female relationships previously dismissed as harmless. Ultimately, the most enduring symbol of the changing notions of gender in the 1920s remains the flapper. But it is just that:  a  representation of womanhood of the 1920s. There were many women in the decade of differing races, classes, ethnicities, and experiences, just as there were many men with different experiences. For some women, the 1920s were a time of reorganization, new representations, and new opportunities. For others, it was a decade of confusion, contradiction, new pressures, and struggles between new and old.

• In what ways were women successful in causing and taking advantage of changes in American society?
• In what ways were they unsuccessful?

Just as cultural limits loosened across the nation, the 1920s represented a period of serious self-reflection among African Americans, most especially those in northern ghettos. New York City was a popular destination of American blacks during the Great Migration. The city’s black population grew 257 percent, from 91,709 in 1910 to 327,706 in 1930, while the white population grew only 20 percent. Moreover, by 1930, 98,620 foreign-born blacks had migrated to the United States. Nearly half made their home in Manhattan’s Harlem district.

Harlem originally lay between Fifth Avenue and Eighth Avenue, from 130th Street to 145th Street in the northwest of Manhattan. By 1930, the district had expanded to 155th Street and was home to 164,000 people, mostly African Americans. Continuous relocation to “the greatest Negro City in the world” exacerbated problems with health, housing, crime, and unemployment. Nevertheless, it brought together a population of black people energized by race pride, military service in World War I, urban life, and for many the ideas of Pan-Africanism. James Weldon Johnson called Harlem the black “Culture Capital.” The area’s energy produced what was then termed the New Negro Movement.

Alain Locke’s 1925 book  The New Negro proclaimed that after generations of subservience, “we are achieving something like a spiritual emancipation.” Popular Harlem Renaissance writers published twenty-six novels, ten volumes of poetry, and countless short stories between 1922 and 1935. Alongside the well-known Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, female writers like Jessie Redmon Fauset and Zora Neale Hurston published nearly a third of these novels. While themes varied, the literature frequently explored and countered the stereotypes and forms of American racial prejudice. The Harlem Renaissance influenced theater, art, and music. For the first time, Broadway presented black actors in serious roles. The 1924 production  Dixie to Broadway  was the first all-black show with mainstream showings. In art, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Aaron Douglas, and Palmer Hayden showcased black cultural heritage and captured current black experience. In music, jazz rocketed in popularity. Eager to hear “real jazz,” whites journeyed to Harlem’s Cotton Club and Smalls. Harlem’s nightclubs and speakeasies (secret, illegal venues where alcohol was publicly consumed) presented a place where sexual freedom and gay life thrived. Unfortunately, while headliners like Duke Ellington were hired to entertain at Harlem’s venues, the surrounding black community was usually excluded. Furthermore, black performers were often restricted from restroom use and relegated to service door entry.

The explosion of African American self-expression found multiple outlets in politics. In the 1910s and 1920s, perhaps no one so attracted disaffected black activists as Marcus Garvey. Garvey was a Jamaican publisher and labor organizer who arrived in New York City in 1916. Within just a few years of his arrival, he built the largest black nationalist organization in the world, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Inspired by Pan-Africanism and Booker T. Washington’s model of industrial education, and critical of what he saw as Du Bois’s service of black elites, Garvey sought to promote racial pride, encourage black economic independence, and root out oppression in Africa and the Diaspora. Headquartered in Harlem, the UNIA published a newspaper,  Negro World , and organized elaborate parades in which Garveyites dressed in militaristic regalia and marched down city streets. The organization criticized the slow pace and the judicial focus of the NAACP as well as its acceptance of memberships and funds from whites. “For the Negro to depend on the ballot and his industrial progress alone,” Garvey opined, “will be hopeless as it does not help him when he is lynched, burned, jim-crowed, and segregated.” In 1919, the UNIA announced plans to develop a shipping company called the Black Star Line as part of a plan that pushed for blacks to reject the American political system and to return to Africa instead. Most of the investments came in shares purchased by UNIA members who had heard Garvey’s speeches about the importance of establishing commercial ventures between African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, and Africans.

Garvey’s detractors disparaged these public displays and business ventures, and they criticized Garvey for peddling empty promises in place of measures that addressed the material concerns of African Americans. NAACP leaders depicted Garvey’s plan as one that simply said, “Give up! Surrender! The struggle is useless.” Enflamed by his aggressive attacks on other black activists and his radical ideas of racial independence, some African American and Afro-Caribbean leaders worked with government officials and launched the “Garvey Must Go” campaign, which culminated in his 1922 indictment and 1925 imprisonment and subsequent deportation for “using the mails for fraudulent purposes.” The UNIA never recovered its popularity or financial support, even after Garvey’s pardon in 1927, but his movement made a lasting impact on black consciousness in the United States and abroad. He inspired the likes of Malcolm X, whose parents were Garveyites, and Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana. Garvey’s message, perhaps best captured by his rallying cry, “Up, you mighty race,” resonated with African Americans who found in Garveyism a dignity not granted them in their everyday lives.

• What contributions did black authors and artists make to the culture of the 1920s?

In addition their alarm over immigration of Catholics and Jews, a new group of Christian fundamentalists were very concerned about relaxed sexual mores and increased social freedoms, especially in cities. Fundamentalists lashed out against what they saw as a sagging public morality, a world in which Protestantism seemed challenged by Catholicism, women exercised ever greater sexual freedoms, public amusements encouraged selfish and empty pleasures, and Prohibition was mocked  through bootlegging and speakeasies. Christian Fundamentalism arose from a doctrinal dispute among Protestant leaders. Liberal theologians had begun to intertwine religion with science and secular culture. These Modernists argued that Christian doctrines about the miraculous might be best understood metaphorically. The Church, they said, needed to adapt itself to the world. The social gospel, which encouraged Christians to build the Kingdom of God on earth by working against social and economic inequality, was very much tied to liberal theology.

During the 1910s, funding from oil barons Lyman and Milton Stewart enabled the evangelist A. C. Dixon to commission some ninety essays to attack Protestant liberalism. The collection, known as  The Fundamentals , argued that Christian faith rested on literal truths: that Jesus, for instance, would physically return to earth at the end of time to redeem the righteous and damn the wicked. All the supernatural claims and miracles of the Bible were literally true, The Fundamentals said, and should never be considered as metaphors or as the misunderstandings of an earlier age. Some of the essays claimed that human endeavor could never build the Kingdom of God, while others covered such subjects as the virgin birth and biblical inerrancy. American fundamentalists spanned Protestant denominations and borrowed from diverse philosophies and theologies. They did, however, all agree that modernism was the enemy and the Bible was the inerrant word of God. It was a fluid movement often without clear boundaries, but it featured many prominent clergymen, including the well-established and extremely vocal John Roach Straton (New York), J. Frank Norris (Texas), and William Bell Riley (Minnesota).

The most dramatic contest between fundamentalism and American mainstream culture was the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925. On March 21, in a tiny courtroom in Dayton Tennessee, fundamentalists gathered to defend creation and attack evolution. A young biology teacher, John T. Scopes, was being tried for teaching his students evolutionary theory in violation of the Butler Act, a state law preventing any theory that denied “the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible” from being taught in publicly funded Tennessee classrooms. Seeing the act as a threat to personal liberty, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had immediately found a volunteer for a test case, hoping that subsequent appeals would lead to a day in the Supreme Court, testing the constitutionality of the law. Scopes, a part-time teacher and coach, voluntarily admitted to teaching evolution. Scopes’s violation of the law was never in question and the stage was set for the pivotal courtroom showdown, “the trial of the century” between the champions and opponents of evolution that marked a key moment in an enduring American “culture war.”

The case became a public spectacle. Clarence Darrow, an agnostic attorney and a keen liberal mind from Chicago, volunteered to aid the defense against William Jennings Bryan. The prosecutor was the three-time presidential candidate who in his younger days had led the political crusade against corporate greed. He had championed Populism with a firm belief in the righteousness of his cause, and now he defended biblical literalism in similar terms. The theory of evolution, Bryan said, with its emphasis on the survival of the fittest, “would eliminate love and carry man back to a struggle of tooth and claw.” Although this sentiment is more true of Social Darwinism than Darwin’s actual theory, it is unclear whether Bryan appreciated that fact or whether he was arguing that the effect of teaching Darwin would be the acceptance of Social Darwinism.

Newspapermen and spectators flooded the small town of Dayton. Across the nation, Americans tuned their radios to the live national broadcasts of a trial that dealt with questions of religious liberty, academic freedom, parental rights, and the moral responsibility of education. For six days in July, the men and women of America were captivated as Bryan presented his argument on the morally corrupting influence of evolutionary theory (and pointed out that Darrow had made a similar argument about the corruptive potential of education during his defense of the famed killers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb a year before). Darrow eloquently fought for academic freedom.

Bryan’s actual objection to the teaching of evolution was that he thought rejecting the Bible threw morality out of the classroom. Darrow argued that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment made the Butler Act unconstitutional. Then, the trial turned away from either of those points when at the request of the defense, Bryan took the stand as an “expert witness” on the Bible. Although three years younger than Darrow, Bryan was no match for Darrow’s still sharp skills as a trial lawyer and his answers came across as blundering and incoherent. It became clear that Bryan was not in fact a literal believer in  all  of the Genesis account: believing, as many anti-evolutionists did, that the meaning of the word  day  in the book of Genesis could be taken as allegory. Bryan reluctantly admitted as much, not wishing to alienate his fundamentalist followers. Then Darrow posed a series of unanswerable questions: Was the “great fish” that swallowed the prophet Jonah created for that specific purpose? What precisely happened astronomically when God made the sun stand still? Bryan could cite only his faith in miracles. Embarrassed by these logical contradictions, Bryan’s testimony was a public relations disaster, although his statements were expunged from the record the next day and no further experts were allowed. Scopes’s guilt being well established, the jury delivered a guilty verdict in minutes. Scopes began his appeal process in the Tennessee Supreme Court and the court set aside his conviction on a legal technicality, which made it impossible to continue appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court. But few cared about the verdict. Darrow had already won in the court of public opinion and the fundamentalists seemed to have taken a beating in the national limelight. Satirist H. L. Mencken characterized the “circus in Tennessee” as an embarrassment for fundamentalism, and modernists celebrated the “Monkey Trial” as a smashing victory. If fundamentalists retreated from the public sphere, they did not disappear entirely. Instead, they went local, built an underground subculture, and emerged many decades later stronger than ever.

• What was the point of the “Monkey Trial”?
• What did the controversy over the trial say about the differences between “country people” and “city people”?

The release of  The Birth of a Nation in 1915 valorized the Reconstruction Era Klan as a protector of feminine virtue and white racial purity. Taking advantage of this sudden surge of popularity, Colonel William Joseph Simmons organized what is often called the “second” Ku Klux Klan in Georgia in late 1915. This new Klan, modeled after other fraternal organizations with elaborate rituals and a hierarchy, remained largely confined to Georgia and Alabama until 1920, when Simmons began a professional recruiting effort that resulted in individual chapters being formed across the country and membership rising to an estimated five million.

Following the Great Migration of southern blacks to northern cities during World War I, the KKK expanded above the Mason-Dixon Line. Membership soared in Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, and Portland, while Klan-endorsed mayoral candidates won in Indianapolis, Denver, and Atlanta. The Klan often recruited through fraternal organizations such as the Freemasons and through Protestant churches. In many areas, local Klansmen visited churches with a gift of money for the presiding minister, often during services. The Klan also enticed people to join through large picnics, parades, rallies, and ceremonies. The Klan established a women’s auxiliary in 1923 headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas. The Women of the Ku Klux Klan mirrored the KKK in practice and ideology and soon had chapters in all forty-eight states, often attracting women who were already part of the Prohibition movement, a centerpiece of Klan activism.Contrary to its image as a primarily southern and lower-class phenomenon, the second national Klan was composed largely of middle-class members. In 1923 and 1924, at the organization’s peak, the largest number of Klan-related activities occurred in Texas, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, and Georgia. The Klan was even present in Canada, where it was a powerful force within Saskatchewan’s Conservative Party. In many states and localities, the Klan dominated politics to such a level that no candidate could be elected without the support of the KKK. At its peak the Klan claimed between four and five million members.

Despite the breadth of its political activism, the Klan is today remembered largely as a violent vigilante group, with good reason. Klan members and affiliate organizations often engaged in lynching and “nightriding”, the physical harassment of bootleggers, union activists, civil rights workers, or any others deemed “immoral”, under the cover of darkness while wearing their hoods and robes. In fact, Klan violence was extensive enough in Oklahoma that Governor John C. Walton placed the entire state under martial law in 1923. Witnesses testifying before the military court disclosed accounts of Klan violence ranging from the flogging of clandestine brewers to the disfiguring of a prominent black Tulsan for registering African Americans to vote. In Houston, Texas, the Klan maintained an extensive system of surveillance that included tapping telephone lines and putting spies in the local post office to root out “undesirables.” A mob organized and led by Klan members in Aiken, South Carolina, lynched Bertha Lowman and her two brothers in 1926. No one was ever prosecuted because the sheriff, deputies, city attorney, and state representative all belonged to the Klan.

• What did the rebirth of the Klan and the continuation of lynching suggest about US attitudes regarding their communities?

In his inauguration speech in 1929, Herbert Hoover told Americans that the Republican Party had brought national prosperity. Even ignoring stubbornly large rates of poverty and unparalleled levels of inequality, he could not see the weaknesses behind the decade’s economy. As the new culture of consumption promoted new freedoms, it also promoted new insecurities. An economy built on credit exposed the nation to tremendous risk. Flailing European economies, high tariffs, wealth inequality, a construction bubble, and an ever-more flooded consumer market loomed dangerously until the Roaring Twenties crashed to a halt. In The fall of 1929 the nation’s glitz and glamour seemed to give way to decay and despair. For farmers, racial minorities, unionized workers, and other populations that did not share in 1920s prosperity, the veneer of a Jazz Age and a booming economy had always been a fiction. But for them, as for millions of Americans, the end of an era was close. The Great Depression loomed.

Primary Sources

Warren G. Harding and the “Return to Normalcy” (1920)

Republican Senator and presidential candidate Warren G. Harding of Ohio delivered the following address to the Home Market Club of Boston on May 14, 1920. In it, Harding outlined his hope that the United States would, after a decade of progressive politics and foreign interventions, return to “normalcy.” In November, Harding received the highest percentage of the popular vote in a presidential election up to that time.

Crystal Eastman, “Now We Can Begin” (1920)

In the following selection, Crystal Eastman, a socialist and feminist, considered what women should fight for following the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted American women the right to vote.

Explanation of the Objects of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (1921)

Inspired by the writings of Booker T. Washington, Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey became the most prominent Black Nationalist in the United States. He championed the back-to-Africa movement, advocated for black-owned businesses—he founded the Black Star Line, a transnational shipping company—and founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Thousands of UNIA chapters formed all across the world. In 1921, Garvey recorded a message in a New York studio explaining the object of the UNIA.

Hiram Evans on the “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism” (1926)

The “Second” Ku Klux Klan rose to prominence in the 1920s and, at its peak, claimed millions of Americans as members. Klansmen wrapped themselves in the flag and the cross and proclaimed themselves the moral guardians of America. The organization appealed to many “respectable,” middle-class Americans. Here, Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans, a dentist from Dallas, Texas, outlines the Second Klan’s potent mix of Americanism, Protestantism, and white supremacy.

Herbert Hoover, “Principles and Ideals of the United States Government” (1928)

Republican Herbert Hoover embodied the political conservatism of the 1920s. He denounced the regulation of business and championed the individual against “bureaucracy.” In November 1928, Hoover, a Protestant from the Midwest, soundly defeated Al Smith, an Irish Catholic from New York City. Here, in a speech delivered in late October, Hoover outlined his vision of American government.

Advertisements (1924)

In the 1920’s Americans across the country bought magazines like Photoplay in order to get more information about the stars of their new favorite entertainment media: the movies. Advertisers took advantage of this broad audience to promote a wide range of goods and services to both men and women who enjoyed the proliferation of consumer culture during this time.

Klan Gathering (ca. 1920s)

This photo by popular news photographers Underwood and Underwood shows a gathering of a reported 300 Ku Klux Klansmen just outside Washington DC to initiate a new group of men into their order. The proximity of the photographer to his subjects for one of the Klan’s notorious night-time rituals suggests that this was yet another of the Klan’s numerous publicity stunts.

Reference Material

This chapter was remixed by Dan Allosso, who adapted The American Yawp Chapter 22 and added original content. The original Yawp chapter was edited by Brandy Thomas Wells, with content contributions by Micah Childress, Mari Crabtree, Maggie Flamingo, Guy Lancaster, Emily Remus, Colin Reynolds, Kristopher Shields, and Brandy Thomas Wells.

Recommended Reading

• Allen, Frederick Lewis.  Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s.  New York: Harper and Row, 1931.
• Baldwin, Davarian.  Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
• Blee, Kathleen M.  Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
• Chauncey, George.  Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940.  New York: Basic Books, 1995.
• Cohen, Lizabeth.  Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
• Douglas, Ann.  Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s.  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.
• Dumenil, Lynn.  The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s.  New York: Hill and Wang, 1995.
• Fox, Richard Wightman, and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds.  The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980.  New York: Pantheon Books, 1983.
• Gage, Beverly.  The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Grant, Colin.  Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Hall, Jacquelyn.  Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.
• Heap, Chad.  Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
• Hernández, Kelly Lytle.  Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol.  New York: University of California Press, 2010.
• Huggins, Nathan.  Harlem Renaissance.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.
• Larson, Edward.  Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
• MacLean, Nancy.  Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
• Marsden, George M.  Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism: 1870–1925.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
• McGirr, Lisa.  The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State.  New York: Norton, 2016.
• Montgomery, David.  The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
• Ngai, Mae M.,  Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.
• Okrent, Daniel.  Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.  New York: Scribner, 2010.
• Sanchez, George.  Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
• Tindall, George Brown.  The Emergence of the New South, 1913–1945.  Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1967.
• Weinrib, Laura.  The Taming of Free Speech: America’s Civil Liberties Compromise.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.
• Wilkerson, Isabel.  The Warmth of Other Sons: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.  New York: Vintage Books, 2010.

Media Attributions

• Handmade Software, Inc. Image Alchemy v1.11 © National Woman's Party is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Warren_G_Harding-Harris_&_Ewing © Harris & Ewing is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Tulsariotpostcard2 © Unknown is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Nab_Negro_for_Attacking_Girl_in_an_Elevator © Tulsa Tribune is licensed under a Public Domain license
• 2560px-Albert_B._Fall_with_map_background © Bain News Service is licensed under a Public Domain license
• 1924_Indian_Citizenship_Act is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Herbert_Hoover_-_NARA_-_532049 © Unknown is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Macy’s_Herald_Square_LC-USZ62-123584_crop © Irving Underhill is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Ford_assembly_line_-_1913 © Unknown is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Tarzan_and_the_golden_lion © J. Allen St. John is licensed under a Public Domain license
• 1912_Indianapolis_500,_Joe_Dawson_winning © Bain News Service is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Roxy_Theater_NY_Weekly_Review_March_10,_1928 © Roxy Theater is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Mary_Pickford-Ziegfeld © Alfred Cheney Johnston is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Jazzing_orchestra_1921 © Robert Runyon is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Babe_Ruth_by_Paul_Thompson,_1920 © Paul Thompson is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Charles_Lindbergh_and_the_Spirit_of_Saint_Louis_(Crisco_restoration,_with_wings) © Unknown is licensed under a Public Domain license
• FlappermagNovpg2 © The Flapper is licensed under a Public Domain license
• The_Flapper_by_Frank_Xavier_Leyendecker © Frank Xavier Leyendecker is licensed under a Public Domain license
• ThePlasticAge © Percy Marks is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Eva_Kotchever_(“Eve_Addams”)_on_right_with_an_unidentified_woman © Unknown is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Three_Harlem_Women,_ca._1925 © Unknown is licensed under a Public Domain license
• UNIA_parade_in_Harlem,_1920 © Unknown is licensed under a Public Domain license
• 1920px-Marcus_Garvey_1924-08-05 © George Grantham Bain is licensed under a Public Domain license
• A.C._Dixon_LCCN2014685940_(2)_(cropped) © Bain News Service is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Scopes © Watson Davis is licensed under a Public Domain license
• WJBryan © Bain News Service is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Ku_Klux_Klan_members_march_down_Pennsylvania_Avenue_in_Washington,_D.C._in_1928 © Unknown is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Ku_Klux_Klan_parade7 © National Photo Company Collection is licensed under a Public Domain license

US History II: Gilded Age to Present Copyright © by Dan Allosso is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book

American Society in the 1920s Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

In a course of history, ten years does not seem like a long time. However, even one decade can be enough to implement an all-important change that will serve as a bridge between the way things were and the way they will be. There is no better example to prove this than that of the 1920s in the USA.

Nicknamed “the Roaring Twenties”, these years “witnessed sweeping transformations in almost every facet of American life” (Boehm and Corey 183). According to Stone and Kuznick, it turned out to be “a decade of bold cultural experimentation mixed with political conservatism – an old culture of scarcity versus a new culture of abundance” (29). After the end of the World War II, the balance of power in the international arena shifted, and for the United States the post-war decade became much more than a “return to normalcy” (Stone and Kuznick 29) – it was “an epoch of resurgent economic prosperity, expansion of […] economy, and rise to financial super power status” (Navarro 10). This change reflected in the mindset of the American society, creating a tendency to extravagance and over-the-top money spending, depicted in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby . It was in the 1920s that the consumerism culture began to emerge and grow, catalyzed by “the booming automobile industry and the emergence of advertising and the huge entertainment industries of radio and the movies” (Kennedy and Bailey 575). Affordable cars and improved infrastructure allowed more mobility and facilitated traveling; going to the cinema became one of America’s favorite pastimes; new music styles and dances quickly became popular, creating a new culture.

Music in the 1920s was synonymous with jazz, which spread so quickly that the decade was also known as “the Jazz Age”:

Jazz reached the height of its vogue at a time when minds were reacting from the horrors and strain of war. Humanity welcomed it because in its fresh joyousness men found a temporary forgetfulness, infinitely less harmful than drugs or alcohol. (Kennedy and Bailey 593)

Jazz music with its improvisation and the Charleston with its new, crazy – by the time’s standards – and fun moves helped spread the ideas of freedom and abolish “many of the social restrictions that the previous Victorian Age had imposed on daily life in the United States” (Miller et al. 4). One of the things that gradually became obsolete was the discrimination of women. An important step toward the emancipation was the right to vote, guaranteed for women by the Nineteenth Amendment. Miller et al. suggest that it also “encouraged a sense of social and cultural freedom” and thus invoked the following: “Clothing styles became more revealing; women smoked in public, enjoyed new dance styles, and sought different form of expression that often shocked their parents and grandparents” (4). Although the image of “flappers” and movie-screen “it-girls” caused public disdain for women because of their allegedly lowered morals, and women were still unjustly treated at the workplace, often receiving less money and having more trouble getting employed than their male co-workers, the 1920s greatly contributed to the equality movement.

Heightened consumerism, prosperous car and movie industries, jazz and liberation of women was not the end of social and economic changes of the decade. In the 1920s, many Americans moved to the cities, thus forming the present-day image of the USA as an industrial and urbanized country. Many skyscrapers were built at that time, including the famous Empire State Building in New York, the infrastructure was improved, and the suburbs grew.

Nevertheless, the 1920s were not all happy. This was the age of Prohibition, resulting in alcohol being served illegally at speakeasies, which “caused a severe downturn for legitimate dining establishments, the general public preferring those venues who could supply alcoholic beverages” (Kreis 442). Bootlegging business resulted in the rise of organized crime. Kreis suggests that many people, like Al Capone, were willing to break laws in order to escape poverty (446), of which a significant part of population suffered in spite of the country’s economic development.

Another characteristic trait of the time was the intolerance of the previously welcoming nation toward immigrants, as evidenced by the Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924. According to Navarro, a spike of nativism and racist movements led to the revival of the Ku Klux Klan and turned the decade into “a time of profound bigotry, […] segregation, and growing poverty” (11) for racial minorities, prompting them to respond with cultural phenomena such as the Harlem Renaissance.

All in all, the 1920s can be characterized by both positive and negative tendencies in the country’s development. It was the decade of centralization, cultural innovations, industrial development and growth of consumerism, as well as the period of increased criminal activities and racial discrimination. There are two sides to every coin, and history is made of good and bad things that happened. Therefore, although the Roaring Twenties were not all picture-perfect, their role in shaping the present-day USA is indisputable.

Works Cited

Boehm, Lisa Krissoff, and Steven Hunt Corey. America’s Urban History . New York: Routledge, 2014. Print.

Kennedy, David, and Thomas Bailey. The American Spirit: United States History as Seen by Contemporaries . Boston: Cengage Learning, 2015. Print.

Kreis, James. Ten Stories from the Roaring Twenties . Bloomington: Author House, 2014. Print.

Miller, Randall M., Theodore J. Zeman, Francis J. Sicius, and Jolyon P. Girard. Daily Life through American History in Primary Documents . Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2011. Print.

Navarro, Armando. Global Capitalist Crisis and the Second Great Depression: Egalitarian Systemic Models for Change . Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012. Print.

Stone, Oliver, and Peter Kuznick. The Concise Untold History of the United States . New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. Print.

• History of Achieving the American Dream
• The Major Eras of American Federalism
• The Great Gatsby' by Scott Fitzgerald Literature Analysis
• The Culture Wars in the United States of America
• The Great Gatsby
• Jeffersonian Democracy in American History
• The New Deal and Dust Bowl Ballads: The Connection
• Divergences Between North and South as Major Causes of the American Civil War
• Burdick & Lederer’s “The Ugly American” Analysis by Palm
• History and Evolution of the Public Policy
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2022, January 26). American Society in the 1920s. https://ivypanda.com/essays/american-society-in-the-1920s/

"American Society in the 1920s." IvyPanda , 26 Jan. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/american-society-in-the-1920s/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'American Society in the 1920s'. 26 January.

IvyPanda . 2022. "American Society in the 1920s." January 26, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/american-society-in-the-1920s/.

1. IvyPanda . "American Society in the 1920s." January 26, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/american-society-in-the-1920s/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "American Society in the 1920s." January 26, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/american-society-in-the-1920s/.

The Culture of the 1920s in America

This essay about 1920s culture examines the transformative period known as the “Roaring Twenties,” a decade marked by vibrant cultural expression and significant societal shifts in America. It highlights the rise of jazz music, which became the era’s defining soundtrack and influenced social dance culture with styles like the Charleston and the Lindy Hop. The essay also discusses the emergence of the “flapper,” a new woman’s identity that symbolized the decade’s break from traditional gender norms and embraced personal freedom. Additionally, it explores the impact of Prohibition, which, although intended to curb alcohol consumption, ironically fostered an underground liquor trade and speakeasies, fueling organized crime and a culture of defiance. Finally, the expansion of mass entertainment is addressed, with the growth of Hollywood, the advent of talkies, and the widespread popularity of radio, which linked the nation in a shared cultural experience. The 1920s was a period of rebellion, liberation, and innovation that profoundly influenced the cultural landscape of America.

How it works

The 1920s, often denoted as the “Roaring Twenties,” constituted a decade of profound cultural, social, and political upheaval that redefined American society. It heralded an era distinguished by exuberant cultural expression, seismic shifts in societal norms, and a palpable liberation from the constraints of yesteryears. This exposition delves into the cultural tapestry of the 1920s, accentuating its defining attributes, including the sway of jazz music, the emergence of a novel feminine archetype, the ramifications of Prohibition, and the burgeoning realm of mass entertainment.

Foremost among the influential facets of 1920s culture was the ascension of jazz music, serving as the quintessential melody of the era. Rooted in the crucibles of African American communities in the Southern regions, jazz swiftly proliferated to the urban epicenters of the North, notably Chicago and New York City. Eminent luminaries such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington attained iconic status, their musical compositions emblematic of the epoch’s departure from convention and its embrace of novelty and spontaneity. Jazz not only revolutionized the American musical landscape but also left an indelible imprint on the social dance milieu, catalyzing the vogue of dance styles such as the Charleston, the Lindy Hop, and the Foxtrot.

The 1920s also bore witness to a seismic metamorphosis in the role and perception of women in society, personified by the archetype of the “flapper.” Flappers, emblematic of youthful femininity, adorned themselves in abbreviated hemlines and sported bobbed hairstyles, overtly challenging traditional gender mores through their indulgence in vices like imbibing alcohol, smoking, and partaking in activities traditionally associated with masculinity. This emergent feminine paradigm transcended the shackles of societal norms, embodying a fervent pursuit of autonomy and personal actualization. The flapper burgeoned into an emblem of the era’s newfound liberties and shifting paradigms concerning femininity and sexual agency.

Prohibition, a nationwide constitutional proscription on the production, importation, transportation, and retail of alcoholic beverages from 1920 to 1933, wielded a substantial influence on the cultural milieu of the 1920s. While ostensibly designed to curtail alcohol consumption, Prohibition inadvertently engendered a burgeoning clandestine liquor trade and the proliferation of speakeasies—covert drinking establishments where libations flowed freely. This epoch engendered not only the ascendance of organized criminal enterprises but also incubated a culture of defiance against federal mandates. Prohibition engendered a schism within American society, accentuating the schism between conservative rural enclaves and their more liberal urban counterparts.

Lastly, the 1920s emerged as a veritable heyday for mass amusement, particularly with the burgeoning prominence of Hollywood and the cinematic industry. The advent of “talkies,” motion pictures endowed with synchronized sound, heralded a revolution in cinematography, propelling luminaries such as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to cinematic stardom. The decade also witnessed the nascent inception of animations, epitomized by the debut of Walt Disney’s iconic character, Mickey Mouse, in 1928. Concurrently, the radio ascended as an indispensable facet of American domesticity; households congregated around the wireless apparatus to partake in news bulletins, dramatic recitals, comedic showcases, and live musical performances, forging communal bonds through a shared cultural milieu.

In summation, the cultural milieu of the 1920s was characterized by an amalgam of rebellion, emancipation, and innovation. From the jazz-infused melodies reverberating through music halls to the audacious declarations of the flapper cohort, and from the clandestine speakeasies that flouted Prohibition to the silver screens that gave voice to silent narratives, the Roaring Twenties unfolded as an epoch of metamorphosis that not only captivated America but also catalyzed and transformed it irrevocably. The epoch’s cultural metamorphoses mirrored broader societal transformations in the American fabric, many of which endure as enduring legacies shaping the contours of contemporary America.

Cite this page

The Culture of the 1920s in America. (2024, Apr 22). Retrieved from https://papersowl.com/examples/the-culture-of-the-1920s-in-america/

"The Culture of the 1920s in America." PapersOwl.com , 22 Apr 2024, https://papersowl.com/examples/the-culture-of-the-1920s-in-america/

PapersOwl.com. (2024). The Culture of the 1920s in America . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-culture-of-the-1920s-in-america/ [Accessed: 22 Aug. 2024]

"The Culture of the 1920s in America." PapersOwl.com, Apr 22, 2024. Accessed August 22, 2024. https://papersowl.com/examples/the-culture-of-the-1920s-in-america/

"The Culture of the 1920s in America," PapersOwl.com , 22-Apr-2024. [Online]. Available: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-culture-of-the-1920s-in-america/. [Accessed: 22-Aug-2024]

PapersOwl.com. (2024). The Culture of the 1920s in America . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-culture-of-the-1920s-in-america/ [Accessed: 22-Aug-2024]

Don't let plagiarism ruin your grade

Hire a writer to get a unique paper crafted to your needs.

Our writers will help you fix any mistakes and get an A+!

Please check your inbox.

You can order an original essay written according to your instructions.

Trusted by over 1 million students worldwide

1. Tell Us Your Requirements

2. Pick your perfect writer

3. Get Your Paper and Pay

Hi! I'm Amy, your personal assistant!

Don't know where to start? Give me your paper requirements and I connect you to an academic expert.

short deadlines

100% Plagiarism-Free

Certified writers

• History Classics
• Your Profile
• Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window)
• This Day In History
• History Podcasts
• History Vault

Why the Roaring Twenties Left Many Americans Poorer

By: Becky Little

Updated: March 26, 2021 | Original: March 23, 2021

In August 1929, Ladies Home Journal published an article titled “Everybody Ought to Be Rich.” In it, businessman John J. Raskob told Americans that if they invested $15 in the stock market every month, in 20 years they could have $80,000 (over $1 million today). Raskob insisted that “almost anyone who is employed can do that if he tries.”

For wealthy, white Americans like Raskob, the “Roaring ‘20s” was a time of immense economic prosperity. Yet for most Americans, it wasn’t. Low-wage jobs paid an average of $25 a week for men and $18 for women. So if low-wage workers had followed Raskob’s advice, they would have been placing most of a week's earnings in the stock market every month.

In fact, income inequality increased so much during the 1920s, that by 1928, the top one percent of families received 23.9 percent of all pretax income. About 60 percent of families made less than $2,000 a year , the income level the Bureau of Labor Statistics classified as the minimum livable income for a family of five.

This Woman Built a Formidable Gambling Empire in 1920s Harlem

Against the odds, Stephanie St. Clair became Harlem's 'Queen of Numbers,' facing down corrupt cops and violent mobsters.

8 Ways ‘The Great Gatsby’ Captured the Roaring Twenties—and Its Dark Side

From new money to consumer culture to lavish parties, F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel depicted the heyday of the 1920s—and foreshadowed the doom that would follow.

The Shady, Get‑Rich Scams of the Roaring Twenties

As Americans dreamed of amassing fabulous fortunes, many became vulnerable to cons.

As W.E.B. Du Bois observed in a 1926 essay : “We have today in the United States, cheek by jowl, Prosperity and Depression.”

Farmers Were Stuck With Surplus

The speakeasy party culture popularized in books , movies and magazines was only accessible to a small portion of wealthy, urban and mostly white Americans. Black Americans and immigrants faced violence from the newly revived Ku Klux Klan , and many workers’ wages either didn’t keep up with productivity or fell off completely. For farmers in particular, the Great Depression basically began after World War I .

During that war, U.S. farmers had increased food production to feed European allies. Afterward, prices and demand dropped, and farmers were stuck with an oversupply they couldn’t sell.

“Coming out of the war when exports fall, [farmers] get into this very unfortunate feedback loop,” says David Sicilia , a history professor at the University of Maryland. “Prices are falling and in order to continue to survive, farmers basically respond by planting even more. So there’s overproduction layered on top of overproduction, and so they get into this kind of vicious cycle.”

Overproduction also became a problem for manufacturing companies. Even though families that couldn’t afford to pay for radios, cars, dishwashers and other expensive items upfront could now purchase them on credit, the amount of new products companies produced still exceeded the number that families were able to buy. One of the contributing factors to this overproduction was companies’ desire to expand and drive up profits for shareholders.

Anti-Labor Climate

There was a strong belief under the presidents of the 1920s that prioritizing shareholder profits would create a stronger economy.  Robert Chiles , a history professor at the University of Maryland, says that when New York Governor Al Smith tried to gain state control of hydroelectric development to give residents lower energy rates, a memorandum from President Calvin Coolidge ’s administration opposing the idea stated that it was acceptable for New York residents to pay a lot for electricity because this increased the price of stocks.

Although many factory workers saw their wages increase modestly during the 1920s, these wages didn’t keep up with their productivity. Most corporations rewarded their shareholders with large dividends while trying to keep worker wages low.

It was difficult for workers to fight for higher wages because “there was a movement in terms of more aggressive application of labor law,” says Mark Joseph Stelzner , an economics professor at Connecticut College. Courts often ruled in favor of businesses (the Supreme Court even struck down a child labor law in 1918). Southern Black workers in particular had little recourse against Jim Crow laws that forced them to work for low wages. In this anti-labor climate, unions were weak and strikes became extremely rare.

Great Depression Causes

There were many factors that caused the Great Depression, but Sicilia argues that the stock market crash of 1929 was not one of the major ones. Instead, he says, the major drivers were more complex. One of the main factors was the government’s adherence to the gold standard . Another, he argues, was income inequality that had developed throughout the 1920s.

“With increased inequality, you have a much less stable economy because of the fact that the most stable component of GDP is essentially consumption,” Stelzner says.

Many Americans tried to call attention to this inequality by arguing that “Coolidge prosperity” was a myth. “Prosperity to the extent that we have it is unduly concentrated and has not equitably touched the lives of the farmer, the wage earner and the individual businessman,” said Al Smith when he accepted the Democratic nomination for president in 1928.

Smith lost the election to Herbert Hoover , who argued that Americans were experiencing prosperity. Soon after Hoover took office, the U.S. economy crashed. 

Sign up for Inside History

Get HISTORY’s most fascinating stories delivered to your inbox three times a week.

By submitting your information, you agree to receive emails from HISTORY and A+E Networks. You can opt out at any time. You must be 16 years or older and a resident of the United States.

More details : Privacy Notice | Terms of Use | Contact Us

• New Visions Social Studies Curriculum
• Curriculum Development Team
• Content Contributors
• Getting Started: Baseline Assessments
• Getting Started: Resources to Enhance Instruction
• Getting Started: Instructional Routines
• Unit 9.1: Global 1 Introduction
• Unit 9.2: The First Civilizations
• Unit 9.3: Classical Civilizations
• Unit 9.4: Political Powers and Achievements
• Unit 9.5: Social and Cultural Growth and Conflict
• Unit 9.6: Ottoman and Ming Pre-1600
• Unit 9.7: Transformations in Europe
• Unit 9.8: Africa and the Americas Pre-1600
• Unit 9.9: Interactions and Disruptions
• 10.0: Global 2 Introduction
• 10.01: The World in 1750 C.E.
• 10.02: Enlightenment, Revolution, and Nationalism
• 10.03: Industrial Revolution
• 10.04: Imperialism
• 10.05: World Wars
• 10.06: Cold War Era
• 10.07: Decolonization & Nationalism
• 10.08: Cultural Traditions and Modernization
• 10.09: Globalization and the Changing Environment
• 10.10: Human Rights Violations
• Unit 11.0: US History Introduction
• Unit 11.1: Colonial Foundations
• Unit 11.2: American Revolution
• Unit 11.3A: Building a Nation
• Unit 11.03B: Sectionalism & the Civil War
• Unit 11.4: Reconstruction
• Unit 11.5: Gilded Age and Progressive Era
• Unit 11.6: Rise of American Power
• Unit 11.7: Prosperity and Depression
• Unit 11.8: World War II
• Unit 11.9: Cold War
• Unit 11.10: Domestic Change
• Resources: Regents Prep: Global 2 Exam
• Regents Prep: Framework USH Exam: Regents Prep: US Exam
• Find Resources

Students will use the documents to write an essay discussing the shifts in American culture that took place in the 1920?s.  This is based on a NYS regents exam DBQ - however it is not originally a NYS Regents DBQ.  

Teacher Feedback

Please comment below with questions, feedback, suggestions, or descriptions of your experience using this resource with students.

If you found an error in the resource, please let us know so we can correct it by filling out this form . 

Home — Essay Samples — History — 1920S — The 1920s And The American Dream Essay

The 1920s and The American Dream Essay

• Categories: 1920S Economic Growth Roaring Twenties

About this sample

Words: 430 |

Published: Mar 5, 2024

Words: 430 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Prof. Kifaru

Verified writer

• Expert in: History Economics

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

1 pages / 505 words

3 pages / 1757 words

5 pages / 2082 words

2 pages / 939 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on 1920S

The 1920s was a transformative decade for automobile technology and culture in the United States. The era saw a rapid increase in the popularity and availability of cars, as well as significant advancements in automotive [...]

The 1920s was a decade of rapid growth and change in the United States. One of the most significant areas of development during this time was transportation. The 1920s saw the rise of the automobile as the dominant mode of [...]

The 1920s, often referred to as the "Roaring Twenties," was a decade marked by economic prosperity, cultural flourishing, and significant social changes in the United States and beyond. However, beneath the surface of this [...]

The 1920s, often referred to as the "Roaring Twenties," was a time of great social and cultural change in the United States. This decade saw the rise of new forms of entertainment that had a significant impact on society. From [...]

The 1920s was a prosperous decade that included change in society and its actions politically and economically. This duration included a period of free living and new adventures. They danced until they dropped and women shared [...]

Progressivism started off as a political movement with beliefs in government intervention. Progressives wanted to protect people’s rights against corruption and to fight against the effects of industrialisation. They appealed [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

• General Literature
• American Literature

The Wiley Blackwell Anthology of African American Literature, Volume 1: 1746 - 1920

ISBN: 978-1-118-60496-0

January 2014

Wiley-Blackwell

Digital Evaluation Copy

Gene Andrew Jarrett

The Wiley Blackwell Anthology of African American Literature is a comprehensive collection of poems, short stories, novellas, novels, plays, autobiographies, and essays authored by African Americans from the eighteenth century until the present.  Evenly divided into two volumes, it is also the first such anthology to be conceived and published for both classroom and online education in the new millennium. 

• Reflects the current scholarly and pedagogic structure of African American literary studies
• Selects literary texts according to extensive research on classroom adoptions, scholarship, and the expert opinions of leading professors
• Organizes literary texts according to more appropriate periods of literary history, dividing them into seven sections that accurately depict intellectual, cultural, and political movements
• Includes more reprints of entire works and longer selections of major works than any other anthology of its kind
• This first volume contains a comprehensive collection of texts authored by African Americans from the eighteenth century until the 1920s

Editorial Advisory Board Daphne A. Brooks, Princeton University Joanna Brooks, San Diego State University Margo Natalie Crawford, Cornell University Madhu Dubey, University of Illinois, Chicago Michele Elam, Stanford University Philip Gould, Brown University George B. Hutchinson, Cornell University Marlon B. Ross, University of Virginia Cherene M. Sherrard-Johnson, University of Wisconsin, Madison James Edward Smethurst, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Werner Sollors, Harvard University John Stauffer, Harvard University Jeffrey Allen Tucker, University of Rochester Ivy G. Wilson, Northwestern University

Get the best experience and stay connected to your community with our Spectrum News app. Learn More

Continue in Browser

Get hyperlocal forecasts, radar and weather alerts.

Please enter a valid zipcode.

Photo Essay: A look at the new foods to try at the 2024 New York State Fair

The New York State Fair offers a variety of foods to try including some now-classics like deep-fried Oreos and wine slushies. Check out some new items for sale at the 2024 New York State Fair:

1. Pickled Dr. Pepper and the Mona Lisa from Fair Deli

An unlikely combination of pickles and Dr. Pepper but the key is to put in the perfect amount of pickle juice. The Mona Lisa features Fair Deli’s homemade riggies and meatballs stuffed in a freshly baked bread loaf.

2. Deep-fried half-moon cookies and “death by peanut butter” from Fried Specialties

The lime green trucks that offer everything deep-fried from pickles to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches has two new items this year.  

“We’re doing half-moon cookies right out of Utica, New York. We’re battering them, deep frying them and topping them off with some chocolate and powdered sugar,” said owner Jim Hasbrouck.  

The other item “death by peanut butter” is a Reese’s peanut butter cups sandwiched with Nutter Butters deep-fried and covered in peanut butter sauce.  

“My wife loves peanut butter, so we went nuts with it this year,” Hasbrouck said.

3. Honey butter chicken fries from GOLDENKDOG

The winner of the best food at the Erie County Fair has now come to the New York State Fair, and owners Esther and Aaron Hicks are excited about their authentic Korean street food.

“It’s a basket of fries with chicken bites drizzled in our homemade honey butter sauce and spicy mayo sauce,” Esther Hicks described.  

GOLDENKDOG is a new vendor to the State Fair but was the first food truck Korean corndogs to the U.S., according to Hicks. They will be offering their honey butter chicken fries for $5 on Tasty Tuesday.

4. Cosmic brownie strawberry cups from Chocolate Taps

Fresh strawberries and warm chocolate with a variety of different flavors can be found in the Eatery at Chocolate Taps, new to the fair this year.  

“Our classic cup is either milk or dark Belgian chocolate, and then we have concocted a bunch of fun ideas like strawberry shortcake, strawberries and cream and then we will have daily specials as well,” said manager Lisa Zheng.

The specials will change each day, but they will offer some of their signature cups throughout the fair.

5. Chicken Cesar sandwich from The Saucy Sandwich

A mixture of fresh Cesar salad and warm chicken cutlets was the idea behind the chicken Cesar sandwich, said owner Joe Vassallo.  

“Not everybody is going to want a really hot sandwich, so this is a good one because it’ll cool people down and while still being warm and refreshing,” Vassallo said.  

However, the Saucy Sandwich does offer some heartier options like their chicken parm sandwich, and their riggie chicken parm sandwich. Their Tasty Tuesday sample will be Thai chili and garlic parm meatballs.