Fashions of a Decade the 1920s

The Roaring Twenties was a menstruum in history of dramatic social and political change. For the showtime time, more Americans lived in cities than on farms. The nation's total wealth more than than doubled between 1920 and 1929, and this economic growth swept many Americans into an flush but unfamiliar "consumer club." People from coast to declension bought the same goods (thanks to nationwide advertising and the spread of chain stores), listened to the same music, did the aforementioned dances and fifty-fifty used the aforementioned slang! Many Americans were uncomfortable with this new, urban, sometimes racy "mass civilization;" in fact, for many–even most–people in the The states, the 1920s brought more conflict than commemoration. All the same, for a small handful of young people in the nation's big cities, the 1920s were roaring indeed.

The 'New Woman'

The well-nigh familiar symbol of the "Roaring Twenties" is probably the flapper: a young woman with bobbed pilus and short skirts who drank, smoked and said what might be termed "unladylike" things, in addition to being more sexually "free" than previous generations. In reality, nigh young women in the 1920s did none of these things (though many did adopt a fashionable flapper wardrobe), but even those women who were non flappers gained some unprecedented freedoms.

They could vote at last: The 19th Amendment to the Constitution had guaranteed that right in 1920, though it would be decades before African American women in the Due south could fully do their right to vote without Jim Crow intimidation.

Millions of women worked in blue collar jobs, as well every bit white-collar jobs (equally stenographers, for example) and could afford to participate in the burgeoning consumer economy. The increased availability of nativity-command devices such as the diaphragm made information technology possible for women to have fewer children. And new machines and technologies similar the washing auto and the vacuum cleaner eliminated some of the drudgery of household work.

Mass Communication and Consumerism

During the 1920s, many Americans had extra coin to spend, and they spent it on consumer goods such equally ready-to-habiliment wearing apparel and dwelling appliances like electric refrigerators. In particular, they bought radios. The first commercial radio station in the United States, Pittsburgh's KDKA, striking the airwaves in 1920; 3 years after there were more than 500 stations in the nation. By the end of the 1920s, in that location were radios in more than than 12 million households. People also went to the movies: Historians estimate that, by the end of the decades, iii-quarters of the American population visited a movie theater every calendar week.

But the most important consumer product of the 1920s was the automobile. Low prices (the Ford Model T cost just $260 in 1924) and generous credit made cars affordable luxuries at the beginning of the decade; by the stop, they were practically necessities. In 1929 in that location was one car on the road for every 5 Americans. Meanwhile, an economy of automobiles was born: Businesses like service stations and motels sprang up to run into drivers' needs.

The Jazz Age

Cars also gave young people the freedom to go where they pleased and do what they wanted. (Some pundits called them "bedrooms on wheels.") What many young people wanted to do was dance: the Charleston, the cake walk, the black bottom, the flea hop

Jazz bands played at venues like the Savoy and the Cotton Club in New York Urban center and the Aragon in Chicago; radio stations and phonograph records (100 million of which were sold in 1927 lonely) carried their tunes to listeners across the nation. Some older people objected to jazz music's "vulgarity" and "depravity" (and the "moral disasters" information technology supposedly inspired), only many in the younger generation loved the freedom they felt on the trip the light fantastic floor. The novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) chronicled the Jazz Age.

Prohibition

Whorl to Continue

During the 1920s, some freedoms were expanded while others were curtailed. The 18th Subpoena to the Constitution, ratified in 1919, had banned the industry and auction of "intoxicating liquors," and at 12 A.1000. on January 16, 1920, the federal Volstead Deed closed every tavern, bar and saloon in the United States. From then on, it was illegal to sell any "intoxication beverages" with more than 0.5% alcohol. This drove the liquor trade surreptitious–now, people simply went to nominally illegal speakeasies instead of ordinary bars–where it was controlled by bootleggers, racketeers and other organized-criminal offense figures such as Chicago gangster Al Capone. (Capone reportedly had i,000 gunmen and one-half of Chicago's constabulary force on his payroll.)

To many center-class white Americans, Prohibition was a way to assert some command over the unruly immigrant masses who crowded the nation'southward cities. For instance, to the so-called "Drys," beer was known as "Kaiser mash." Drinking was a symbol of all they disliked about the modernistic city, and eliminating alcohol would, they believed, plow back the clock to an before and more than comfy time.

READ MORE: Run into All The Crafty Ways Americans Hid Alcohol During Prohibition

The 'Cultural Civil War'

Prohibition was not the merely source of social tension during the 1920s. An anti-Communist "Red Scare" in 1919 and 1920 encouraged a widespread nativist and anti-immigrant hysteria. This led to the passage of an extremely restrictive immigration police, the National Origins Deed of 1924, which ready immigration quotas that excluded some people (Eastern Europeans and Asians) in favor of others (Northern Europeans and people from Great Britain, for example).

Immigrants were inappreciably the merely targets in this decade. The Great Migration of African Americans from the Southern countryside to Northern cities and the increasing visibility of Black culture—jazz and blues music, for example, and the literary move known as the Harlem Renaissance—discomfited some white Americans. Millions of people, not just in the South, but across the land, including the west coast, Midwest and Northeast joined the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

Past the middle of the decade, the KKK had two one thousand thousand members, many who believed the Klan represented a return to all the "values" that the fast-paced, metropolis-slicker Roaring Twenties were trampling. More specifically, the 1920s represented economic and political uplift for African Americans that threatened the social hierarchy of Jim Crow oppression.

During this decade, Black Americans sought stable employment, better living atmospheric condition and political participation. Many who migrated to the North plant jobs in the automobile, steel, shipbuilding and meatpacking industries. But with more piece of work came more exploitation. In 1925, civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph founded the offset predominantly Black labor matrimony, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, to draw attention to the discriminatory hiring practices and working conditions for African Americans. And as housing demands increased for Blackness people in the North, then did discriminatory housing practices that led to a ascension of urban ghettos, where African Americans were excluded from white neighborhoods and relegated to inadequate, overcrowded and insanitary living conditions.

Black Americans battled for political and ceremonious rights throughout the Roaring Twenties and beyond. The NAACP launched investigations into African American disenfranchisement in the 1920 presidential election, equally well as surges of white mob violence, such as the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. The NAACP also pushed for the passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, a police to make lynching a federal law-breaking, simply it was defeated by a Senate filibuster in 1922. A political milestone for Black Americans finally occurred when Oscar De Priest, a Chicago Republican, became the start African American congressman since Reconstruction to be elected to the Firm of Representatives in 1928.

The Roaring Twenties ushered in several demographic shifts, or what 1 historian called a "cultural Civil War" between city-dwellers and small-town residents, Protestants and Catholics, Blacks and whites, "New Women" and advocates of old-fashioned family unit values.