The Roaring Twenties

World War I ended in November 1918, but peace did not bring calm. In 1919 about 4 million workers went on strike, including police in Boston and steelworkers across the country. Russia’s 1917 revolution had put communists in power, and many Americans feared a revolution at home. In the spring of 1919 anarchists mailed bombs to officials, and one damaged the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer.

This Red Scare led to the Palmer Raids of November 1919 and January 1920. Federal agents arrested thousands of suspected radicals, many of them immigrants, often without warrants. Hundreds were deported, including the anarchist Emma Goldman. When the revolution Palmer predicted for May Day 1920 never came, the panic faded.

In 1920 two Italian immigrant anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were arrested for a robbery and murder in South Braintree, Massachusetts. The evidence against them was disputed, and the judge was openly hostile. Protesters around the world said they were convicted for their beliefs and their background. They were executed in 1927. In 1977 the governor of Massachusetts declared that their trial had been unfair, without ruling on their guilt.

Fear of foreigners, called nativism, also changed the law. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924 set quotas by nationality. The 1924 law based them on the 1890 census, before most Italians, Jews, Poles and Greeks had arrived, so it sharply cut immigration from southern and eastern Europe, and it barred almost all immigrants from Asia. Immigration from Mexico and the rest of the Western Hemisphere was not limited by quotas.

• The automobile. Henry Ford introduced the Model T in 1908. In 1913 his Highland Park plant in Michigan began using a moving assembly line, and the price of a Model T fell from $850 in 1908 to $260 for the basic Runabout by 1925. In 1914 Ford began paying many workers $5 a day, about twice the usual factory wage, partly to stop them from quitting the dull, fast-paced work. By 1929 Americans owned more than 20 million cars. Cars created jobs in steel, rubber, glass and oil, and they paid for paved roads, gas stations, motels and new suburbs.
• Credit. Families bought cars, radios, washing machines and furniture on the installment plan, paying a little each month with interest. Consumer debt grew quickly.
• Advertising. Companies spent heavily to make people want new products, often promising status, beauty or youth rather than describing the product.
• Radio and movies. KDKA in Pittsburgh began commercial broadcasting on November 2, 1920, with the presidential election returns. By 1930 about 4 in 10 American homes had a radio. Tens of millions of people went to the movies each week, and in 1927 The Jazz Singer brought synchronized talking to feature films. Radio, movies and national ads gave Americans a shared popular culture.
• Electrification. By 1930 about two-thirds of American homes had electricity, which powered irons, vacuum cleaners and refrigerators. Only about 1 farm in 10 did.

Left out. Not everyone shared in the boom. When World War I ended, European demand for American food collapsed, and crop prices fell sharply in 1920 and 1921. Farmers who had borrowed to buy land and machinery during the war could not pay their debts, and farm income stayed low all decade. Coal mining and textile towns also struggled, and wages for many factory workers rose slowly.

In 1920 Republican Warren G. Harding promised a return to “normalcy” and won about 60 percent of the popular vote. He chose some able cabinet members, such as Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, but also friends from Ohio, the “Ohio Gang,” who used their offices to get rich.

The worst scandal was Teapot Dome. Interior Secretary Albert Fall leased government oil reserves set aside for the navy, at Teapot Dome in Wyoming and Elk Hills in California, to oilmen Harry Sinclair and Edward Doheny, who had given him large loans and gifts. Senate hearings exposed the deals, and in 1929 Fall was convicted of bribery, and in 1931 he became the first cabinet member sent to prison for crimes committed in office. Harding himself died in August 1923, before most of the scandals came out.

Calvin Coolidge, his vice president, took over and won the 1924 election. Quiet and thrifty, he believed in laissez-faire: the government should cut taxes, keep spending low and not interfere with business. With Mellon’s support, Congress cut income taxes, especially for the wealthy. Coolidge twice vetoed the McNary-Haugen bills, which would have had the government buy surplus crops to raise farm prices.

Temperance reformers had fought alcohol for nearly a century, blaming it for poverty, violence and broken families. The 18th Amendment, ratified in January 1919, banned making, selling and transporting alcoholic drinks starting in January 1920. The Volstead Act set the rules for enforcing it.

Drinking did fall, especially at first, but millions of Americans kept drinking. They bought from bootleggers, made “bathtub gin” at home and went to illegal bars called speakeasies. Smuggling and selling liquor made organized crime rich. In Chicago, Al Capone’s gang fought rivals for control of the trade, and police and politicians were bribed to look the other way. Federal agents finally convicted Capone in 1931, of income tax evasion.

By the early 1930s many Americans thought Prohibition had failed and that legal alcohol could bring in taxes and jobs during the Depression. The 21st Amendment, ratified in December 1933, repealed the 18th.

Starting around World War I, Black Southerners moved by the hundreds of thousands to cities such as New York, Chicago and Detroit in the Great Migration, escaping Jim Crow laws, lynching and poor sharecropping. About 1.6 million moved between 1910 and 1940. In the North they found factory jobs and the vote, but also segregated housing, job discrimination and, in 1919, deadly race riots in Chicago and other cities.

New York’s Harlem became the center of the Harlem Renaissance, home to Black writers, artists and musicians. Langston Hughes wrote poems in the rhythms of jazz and the blues about Black life and pride, collected in The Weary Blues (1926). The painter Aaron Douglas made bold, geometric murals and illustrations drawing on African art. Zora Neale Hurston collected Southern Black folklore and wrote stories and, later, novels. Musicians such as Duke Ellington, whose orchestra began a long run at the Cotton Club in 1927 (a whites-only club with Black performers), and the trumpeter Louis Armstrong made jazz America’s most exciting music. The Jamaican-born leader Marcus Garvey built a mass movement around Black pride and independence. Writers spoke of a “New Negro” who demanded respect and equal rights.

The 19th Amendment, ratified in August 1920, barred states from denying the vote on account of sex. Many more women worked for wages, mostly as clerks, teachers, nurses and factory hands, though usually for less pay than men. Young women called flappers cut their hair short, wore shorter skirts, drove cars, smoked and danced in public, shocking many of their parents. Most women did not live like flappers, but the image stood for new freedoms. Activists such as Margaret Sanger campaigned for birth control, and in 1923 Alice Paul proposed an Equal Rights Amendment, which Congress would not pass for nearly fifty years.

Many rural and small-town Americans felt their values were under attack from the cities. Religious fundamentalists read the Bible literally and opposed teaching that humans had evolved. In 1925 Tennessee’s Butler Act made it a crime to teach evolution in public schools. Teacher John Scopes agreed to test the law, and the Scopes trial in Dayton that July became a national show, broadcast on radio. Clarence Darrow defended Scopes, and William Jennings Bryan, the former presidential candidate, helped the prosecution. Darrow even called Bryan to testify as an expert on the Bible. Scopes was convicted and fined $100; the Tennessee Supreme Court later set aside the verdict on a technicality, and the law stayed on the books until 1967.

A second Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1915, grew rapidly in the early 1920s, claiming millions of members by the middle of the decade. Unlike the Reconstruction Klan, it was strong in the Midwest and West as well as the South. It targeted Catholics, Jews and immigrants as well as Black Americans, and in 1925 tens of thousands of its members marched in Washington. After scandals, including the murder conviction of Indiana Klan leader D. C. Stephenson in 1925, membership collapsed.

Some young writers who had lived through the war felt disillusioned with American society. Gertrude Stein called them a “lost generation,” and Ernest Hemingway used the phrase in The Sun Also Rises (1926). Many lived for a time in Paris. In The Great Gatsby (1925), F. Scott Fitzgerald portrayed wealthy Long Islanders whose glittering parties hid emptiness and carelessness. Sinclair Lewis mocked small-town conformity and boosterism in Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922). Images from these books, like Gatsby’s green light and Babbitt the booster, are still how many people picture the decade.

Beneath the prosperity, several problems were growing. Historians debate how much each one mattered, and Unit 2 follows what happened next.

• Farm debt. Farm prices stayed low, and hundreds of small rural banks failed each year when farmers could not repay loans.
• Overproduction and uneven income. Factories and farms could make more than Americans could afford to buy. A growing share of income went to the richest families, while many workers’ wages rose slowly.
• Debt and speculation. Families bought on credit, and investors bought stocks on margin, borrowing from brokers. A land boom in Florida rose and crashed in 1926. Stock prices kept climbing until September 1929.