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.