Overview of the 1920s
Digital History ID 2920
The 1920s was a decade of exciting social changes and profound cultural conflicts. For many Americans, the growth of cities, the rise of a consumer culture, the upsurge of mass entertainment, and the so-called "revolution in morals and manners" represented liberation from the restrictions of the country's Victorian past. Sexual mores, gender roles, hair styles, and dress all changed profoundly during the 1920s. But for many others, the United States seemed to be changing in undesirable ways. The result was a thinly veiled "cultural civil war," in which a pluralistic society clashed bitterly over such issues as foreign immigration, evolution, the Ku Klux Klan, prohibition, women’s roles, and race.
The 1920s was the first decade to have a nickname: “Roaring 20s" or "Jazz Age." It was a decade of prosperity and dissipation, and of jazz bands, bootleggers, raccoon coats, bathtub gin, flappers, flagpole sitters, bootleggers, and marathon dancers. It was, in the popular view, the Roaring 20s, when the younger generation rebelled against traditional taboos while their elders engaged in an orgy of speculation. But the 1920s was also a decade of bitter cultural conflicts, pitting religious liberals against fundamentalists, nativists against immigrants, and rural provincials against urban cosmopolitans.
The American 1920s
The 1920s was a decade of major cultural conflicts as well as a period when many features of a modern consumer culture took root. In this chapter, you will learn about the clashes over alcohol, evolution, foreign immigration, and race, and also about the growth of cities, the rise of a consumer culture, and the revolution in morals and manners.
Click on the links below:
The 1920s - An Overview
The Postwar Red Scare
Postwar Labor Tensions
Prohibition
Race
The Great Migration
The Ku Klux Klan
Sacco and Vanzetti
Immigration Restriction
Fundamentalism and Pentecostalism
The Scopes Trial
Leopold and Loeb
Politics During the 1920s
The Democratic Convention of 1924
The Election of 1928
Herbert Hoover
The Consumer Economy and Mass Entertainment
The Formation of Modern American Mass Culture
Low Brow and Middle Brow Culture
The Avant-Garde
The New
Music
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Ain't We Got Fun
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Ain't We Got Fun
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Ain't We Got Fun
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April Showers
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April Showers
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Baltimore Buzz
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Bandana Days/I'm Just Wild About Harry
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Carolina in the Morning
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Crazy Blues
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Crazy Blues
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Daddy, You've Been Like a Mother to Me
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Frankie and Johnny
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Happy Tho' Married
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I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles
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It's Right Here for You
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Jazz Baby
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Jazz Baby
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Jazzing Around
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Makin' Whoopee
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My Mammy
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My Mammy
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Plantation Echoes
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Rockabye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody
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Second Hand Rose
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Singing in the Rain
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Swanee
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That Thing Called Love
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Toot, Toot, Tootsie
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Wabash Blues
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You Can't Do What My Last Man Did
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You Can't Keep a Good Man Down
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Best Students from period 7 -2016
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1920s Timeline
1920 U.S. population: 105,710,620.
Life expectancy had risen to 54 years from 49 years in 1901.
January 2: Government agents arrest members of the IWW and Communist Party in 33 cities. 556 aliens are deported for their political beliefs.
March 19: The Senate votes 49-35 to join the League of Nations, seven votes short of the two-thirds vote necessary for ratification. Defeat became certain when President Wilson instructed his supporters to vote down a League bill with Republican amendments attached.
August 18: The Woman's Suffrage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is ratified.
September 28: A Chicago grand jury indicts 8 players on the Chicago "Black Sox" for throwing the 1919 World Series. The players were acquitted but were later banned from baseball.
1921 May 19: Congress institutes a quota system that limits immigration to 3 percent of a nationality's number in the 1910 Census.
November 12: At the Washington Conference for Limitation of Armaments, conferees agree to restrict future construction of warships.
1924 May: Congress reduces immigration to approximately 150,000 people a year limiting each nationality to 2 percent of the number of persons in the U.S. in 1890.
May: "The Crime of the Century." Prodigies Nathan Leopold, Jr., and Richard Loeb confess to kidnapping and killing 13-year-old Bobby Franks for "the thrill of it."
November: Two states, Wyoming and Texas elected women governors.
1925 July: At the "Monkey" Trial in Dayton, Tenn., schoolteacher John Scopes is tried for violating a Tennessee law prohibiting the teaching of evolution. Scope's defense attorney Clarence Darrow called prosecuting attorney William Jennings Bryan to the stand, and ridiculed Bryan's fundamentalist religious beliefs. Scopes was found guilty of violating the law and fined $100. The sentence was later overturned.
1926 Henry Ford introduces the 49-hour work week in the auto industry.
1927 May 21: 25-year-old Charles Lindbergh flies from Long Island to Paris in 33 hours and 29 minutes.
August 23: Anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are executed in Massachusetts for the 1920 killing of a factory guard, despite protests that they were being punished for their radical beliefs.
October 6: The Jazz Singer, the first "talkie," premieres. The first words: "You ain't heard nothing yet."
1928 August 27: Fifteen nations sign the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which renounces war "as an instrument of national policy." Eventually sixty nations ratified that agreement, which lacked any enforcement mechanism.
1929 February 14: St. Valentine's Day Massacre. 14 members of a Chicago gang are shot to death in a Chicago warehouse on orders from Al Capone.
October 29: Black Tuesday. The bull market of the late 1920s comes to a crashing end. Between September 3 and December 1, stocks declined $26 billion in value.
Quiz on the 1920s
Digital History ID 3770
1. Prohibition drew its support primarily from
a. Catholics b. City-dwellers c. Native-born rural Protestants
2. The 1925 Scopes Trial dealt with
a. Two Italian anarchists accused of murder b. The teaching of evolution in public schools c. Two wealthy Chicago youths accused of committing a thrill killing of a child
3. The immigration laws of the 1920s were designed to reduce immigration from
a. Asia b. Mexico and Latin America c. Southern and Eastern Europe
4. The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s
a. was exclusively a Southern organization b. attacked Catholics, Jews, and divorcees as well as African Americans c. attracted fewer than half a million members and was strongly condemned by President Warren Harding
