Politics: The decade was characterized by pro-business, small-government conservatism, spearheaded by the three Republican presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. Harding’s administration was known for its corruption, whereas Coolidge’s was marked by the mantra of “the chief business of the American people is business.”
Foreign Policy: Deeply disillusioned with participation on the world stage after WWI, the United States withdrew, embracing an isolationist stance. It did not join the League of Nations; it ignored the rise of Hitler and fascism in Europe and the militancy of Japan in Asia; it committed itself to disarmament; and, with the Kellogg-Briand Pact, it embraced the idea that war was no longer a solution to global problems. Its tariffs focused heavily on promoting American manufacturing as opposed to facilitating global trading relationships.
Economics: Though there was a slight economic downturn after WWI, the decade quickly become one of growth and prosperity. It was a “culture of consumption,” characterized by new consumer products and the proliferation of advertisements and offerings of credit. In particular, the automobile was seen as a marvelous invention, and by the end of the decade, there were over 27 million registered automobiles in the country. Most Americans were not aware that the affluence of the country was somewhat of a façade, as deep problems with the stock market, the wealth gap, manufacturing, and other foundational issues were leading to the stock market crash of 1929 and a subsequent decade of depression.
Race and Gender: Racial tensions were continually manifest, both in the South, where the Jim Crow laws reigned supreme, and in the North, where the Great Migration of the 1910s had brought thousands of Black Southerners to what they hoped would be a place of better opportunities. New York, for example, saw its Black population grow 257% from 1910-1930. The decade saw race riots shatter the tenuous peace of urban areas such as Tulsa, Ohio, and the KKK had a recrudescence in this era, allying its anti-Black views with anti-radical, anti-Catholic, anti-birth control, and anti-foreign views. In terms of gender, women received the right to vote in 1920 after a century of activism, but they were less politically feminist during the 1920s. Rather, women sought more freedom in their clothing, sexual behavior, and their presence in the public arena. Most women still did not work outside the home, however, and the “New Woman,” as she was deemed, was mostly a product of the cities.
Social: The country was very xenophobic and anti-immigration during the 1920s. Restrictive immigration laws were put into effect, limiting the number of people from anywhere other than Western and North Europe. Related to this was the fear over “radicals,” which was a blanket term for Socialists, Communists, anarchists, labor activists, and more nebulous categories like intellectuals and foreigners. The decade featured the first Red Scare, which resulted in deportations, jailing, and other forms of persecution. It was also a time of culture clash, with fundamentalist Christians pushing against what they saw as the incursion of secularism in culture, education, and society as a whole.
Arts and Culture: Notable literary contributions came from the so-called Lost Generation, writers who were disillusioned and disenchanted with Western civilization due to the horrors and excesses of WWI. F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway typified this mindset in their novels, and poets like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound created hollow, empty landscapes with their verses in order to speak to the loss of meaning and progress. These literary modernists were very experimental in both structure and language, as were their visual artist peers like Georgia O’Keeffe and Arthur Dove, who experimented with abstraction in their paintings. The Harlem Renaissance was also one of the most important American movements in arts and letters, with writers, essayists, and poets extolling the merits of Black life and history.
Leisure: Americans flocked to the movies in the 1920s, with weekly movie attendance hitting 40 million in the middle of the decade. Women made up 60% of the audience, and the movies overall were accessible to all races and classes. Radio was just as popular (half of all American homes had one by 1930), exposing Americans to news, sports, advertisements, jazz music, radio shows, and more.
