The 1920s Summary & Analysis
The 1920s have long been remembered as the Roaring '20s, an era of unprecedented affluence best remembered through the cultural artifacts generated by its new mass-consumption economy:
- a Ford Model T in every driveway
- Amos 'n' Andy on the radio
- the first "talking" motion pictures at the cinema
- baseball hero Babe Ruth in the ballpark
- celebrity pilot Charles Lindbergh on the front page of every newspaper
As a soaring stock market minted millionaires by the thousands, young Americans in the nation's teeming cities rejected traditional social mores by embracing a modern urban culture of freedom—drinking illegally in speakeasies, dancing provocatively to the Charleston, and listening to the sexy rhythms of jazz music.
However, the entrenched image of the 1920s as a sort of nationwide, decade-long party—à la the movable feast enjoyed by Jay Gatsby, an iconic figure of the age—obscures a very different reality for many Americans: the Roaring '20s left nearly half the country behind.
The 1920 Census revealed that for the first time in United States history, a majority of Americans lived in cities. Still, throughout the decade, well over 40% of the country's population resided on farms and in tiny rural communities.
And down on the farm? Life was anything but roaring.
For American farmers, the Great Depression began not with the stock market crash in 1929, but with the collapse of agricultural prices in 1920. So, the entire decade of the 1920s was a time of poverty and crushing indebtedness, leading to ever-rising foreclosures of family farms. More than 90% of American farms lacked electricity, and the proportion of farms with access to a telephone actually decreased over the course of the decade.8
Yikes.
Furthermore, rural Americans—overwhelmingly native-born, white Protestants—found the modern, sexualized, multi-ethnic culture of the cities deeply offensive to their traditional beliefs.
Their antagonism toward the perceived cultural excesses of the Roaring '20s fueled a political backlash that allowed a resurgent Ku Klux Klan to take over several state governments. It was anti-Black as always, but now also anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-evolution, anti-drinking, and anti-sex.
The story of the 1920s is embodied no more by Henry Ford or Louis Armstrong than it is by Ed Jackson, Ku Klux Klansman, and the Governor of Indiana. The 1920s roared with a clash of civilizations as Americans struggled to reconcile the prosperous modernity of the city with the impoverished traditionalism of the country.