The 1920s: Decade of Optimism. By the 1920s innovative forces thrusting into American life were creating a new way of living. The automobile and the hard-surfaced road produced mobility and a blurring of the traditional rural-urban split. The radio and motion pictures inaugurated a national culture, one built on new, urban values. The 19 Amendment (1920) gave women the vote in national politics and symbolized their persistence in efforts to break out of old patterns of domesticity. The war had accelerated their entrance into business, industry, and the professions and their adoption of practices, such as drinking and smoking, traditionally considered masculine. So, too, young people turned to new leaders and values and sought unorthodox dress, recreations, and morals.
Traditional WASP (white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant) America fought the new ways. The adoption of prohibition in 1919 (with ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment) had been a victory of Yankee moral values over those of immigrants, but now many of the great cities practically ignored the measure. The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics sent a Red Scare shivering through the country in 1919-20; suspicion centered on labor unions as alleged instruments of Moscow. The Ku Klux Klan, stronger in the northern Republican countryside than in the South, attacked the so-called New Negro, who returned from the fighting in France with a new sense of personal dignity (the Harlem Renaissance expressed this spirit through the arts), and the millions of Roman Catholics and Jews who had been flooding into the country since the 1890s. The Immigration Law of 1924 established a quota system that discriminated against all groups except northern and western Europeans. In 1925 the spectacular Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tenn., convicted a high school science teacher of presenting Darwinian theories of evolution, which fundamentalist Protestants bitterly opposed.
New ideas, however, continued to inundate the country, and optimism remained high. The U.S. population delighted in the "miracles" that new inventions had brought them-electric lights, airplanes, new communication systems. Charles Lindbergh's solo flight to Paris in 1927 seemed to capture the spirit of the age. The business community was praised for its values and productivity. Henry Ford and his system of cheap mass production of automobiles for people of modest incomes was regarded as symbolic of the new era.
Three Republican presidents occupied the White House during the 1920s. Warren Harding, a conservative, was swept into office by a landslide victory in 1920. He proved an inept president, and his administration was racked by scandals, including that of Teapot Dome. Calvin Coolidge, who succeeded to the office on Harding's death (1923), worshiped business as much as he detested government. Herbert Hoover, an engineer, brought to the presidency (1929-33) a deep faith in the essential soundness of capitalism, which to him represented the fullest expression of individualism. In 1920 the U.S. census showed, for the first time, that a majority of Americans lived in cities of 2,500 people or more.
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2010-07-26, 19:31
the decade of optimism 1920's in america
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