The Jazz Age

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Prohibition of alcohol would be the most lasting and controversial home front legacy of World War I in the United States. The 18th Amendment, which prohibited the manufacture, sale, and transportation of "intoxicating liquors," grew out of the temperance crusade of the 19th century. The movement gained strength after 1900 by appealing to a wide variety of reformers who expected that banning alcohol consumption by force of law would be a shortcut to other goals they had long pursued.

To Progressives, prohibition would help to assimilate immigrants and shut down saloons. Saloons were considered cesspools of corruption, immorality, and machine politics. To employers, prohibition promised to increase labor productivity and cut down on factory accidents, while adding to workers' take-home earnings without any raise in pay. To social workers, prohibition seemed an easy way to reduce crime, poverty, and family violence all at once. To nativists and country folks, prohibition served as a handy club with which to bash foreigners and city-slickers.

Woman suffrage advocates followed the example of prohibitionists and used World War I to push their reform agenda toward final approval, after many years of agitation. Only 11 states had enacted suffrage by the time the war broke out because it was still widely believed by Americans of both sexes that women would neglect their private responsibilities toward home and family if they were allowed to participate in the public world of politics.

Once the United States entered World War I, however, American women played vital public roles by working on farms, and in offices and factories, and by volunteering for war service as nurses, clerks, recruiters, and recreation workers. President Wilson had always opposed woman suffrage, but women's wartime service convinced him that it was time to recognize their contributions. Enacting suffrage, he felt, would demonstrate the nation's commitment to democracy. Perhaps he was also influenced by dozens of militant women in Alice Paul's National Women's Party. They had chained themselves to the White House fence and, when arrested, staged hunger strikes in order to shame a president who claimed to fight for democracy.

The decade also saw major changes in the lives of African Americans. Jim Crow segregation remained the law in the southern states, and so did disfranchisement, while racial discrimination in jobs and housing still prevailed across the land. But the first stirrings of change came during World War I, when half a million African Americans left the rural South for the urban North. Close to a million more would follow in the 1920s, beckoned by the lure of a better life.

Deprived of their usual source of cheap labor from European immigrants, northern employers recruited poor southern blacks to work in northern factories during World War I. Many black sharecroppers and their families were eager to escape from the endless cycle of debt, poverty, and racist terror in the South. By joining the Great Migration, as this epic shift of population was called, African Americans could not escape racism. Even in the North they had to live in proscribed ghetto areas and put up with low-wage jobs, everyday hatred, and de facto segregation. Black migrants to northern cities did, however, escape from the degrading heritage of slavery in the South. The men, at least, even gained the right to vote, which began the process of building up African American political power for the future.

The 1920 election disappointed those who wanted a popular referendum on US membership in the League of Nations. Governor James Cox of Ohio, the Democratic nominee, endorsed the League -- but Senator Warren Harding, the Republican nominee, also from Ohio, did not. All of the leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination in 1920 had been outspoken opponents of the League, but delegates to the party's national convention decided to dodge the issue by nominating Senator Harding, a "dark horse" candidate who avoided saying much in public about it.

1920 Presidential Race
Image of the 1920 presidential race showing the states supporting overwhelmingly Republican Warren Harding. Democrat James Cox is supported by the southern states and Texas.

This calculated indifference toward the leading issue of the day freed Harding to campaign more generally against the past two decades of progressive reform, which seemed to have led the country so badly astray in pursuit of impossibly idealistic goals. Postwar voters grown weary of reform crusades at home and abroad found Harding's vague promise of "not nostrums, but normalcy" reassuring somehow. The result was a record landslide: Harding won 60 percent of the popular vote in 1920, a feat that has only been surpassed twice since then (in 1936 and 1964).

Once in office, President Harding steered clear of any further US involvement in European balance-of-power politics. Not only would the League of Nations have to make do without the United States, but so would America's erstwhile allies Britain and France. They had to enforce the Treaty of Versailles against Germany on their own, until eventually they stopped trying.

"The Gap in the Bridge," Punch, 1919
Cartoon depicting the League of Nations as a bridge with Belgium and France on one side, England and Italy on the other, and the keystone in the middle as in the US is missing.

Instead of working with Britain and France, US diplomats of the 1920s demanded that the Allies repay their leftover war debts, which aroused tremendous resentment on both sides of the Atlantic. A few international arms control treaties were negotiated in the 1920s at America's behest, and US diplomats also led the way in convincing 62 nations to sign a meaningless pact outlawing war (except in "self-defense"). But otherwise, the United States resumed its traditional posture of isolationism in world affairs.

As usual, however, isolation did not extend to trade. The 1920s saw enormous growth in US trade and foreign investment even as American involvement in world politics and diplomacy shriveled away. The effort by progressive presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson to goad Americans out of their insular indifference to world affairs was now decisively repudiated. Tragically, the demise of Wilson's dream of collective security against aggression would clear the way for the rise of Fascism in Europe and Asia and another world war.

Republican conservatives like President Harding set the pro-business tone for politics and governance in the 1920s. It was clear that the progressive spirit of government activism was now dead. This otherwise quite conservative decade had some insurgent candidacies, a few public hydroelectric power projects, and the beginning of federally subsidized health care for poor mothers and children. But Democrats offered no effective opposition to Republicans as they dissolved into fratricidal warfare between native-born rural Protestants and urban-based ethnic factions.

Image with a photo and a quote from Warren Harding stating that America at the present needed to look inside the nation, to leave progressivism behind, and to become pro-business.

Republican progressives never regained any seats of power within their party after having joined the third-party effort of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. Almost all progressive Republicans returned to the G.O.P. within a few years, but they were left without much influence. Hence conservatives were able to dominate the Republican Party, which in turn dominated national politics all decade long. The result was a decade of retreat from the progressive commitment to government regulation of business and government protection for workers, consumers, small business, and the environment.

President Calvin Coolidge, who replaced Harding upon the latter's death in 1923, famously said, "The chief business of the American people is business." This pithy little phrase served as cover for the effective takeover of government by big business in the 1920s. The carefully constructed progressive regulatory state withered away under conservative Republican administrations more interested in promoting economic growth than protecting the public interest. The abandonment of antitrust law enforcement led to the biggest wave of corporate mergers in the history of American business (until the 1980s).

Image of Calvin Coolidge and quotes supporting that he thought that the chief business of America is business.

Big business, which had terrified so many Americans in the Progressive Era, grew bigger than ever in the 1920s, but now politicians and the press hailed these behemoths of the corporate world as benevolent and public-spirited. Harding and Coolidge pushed through drastic income tax cuts at a time when only the wealthiest Americans paid any income tax at all, while their administrations also raised tariffs to record high levels. The effect was to shift the burden of taxation from a few high-income earners to the masses of consumers, reversing the prewar progressive trend.

Meanwhile, labor unions, weakened by the Red Scare, were forced to surrender their wartime gains, and more, as employers experimented with "welfare capitalism" and other union-busting schemes that sharply reduced union membership and worker protections. By the late 1920s, these policies combined to help make the nation's wealth more concentrated than ever before or since. Indeed, it was as if the Progressive Era had never happened.

The potential for corruption inherent in business-government "cooperation" became apparent following President Harding's death, when the Teapot Dome scandal erupted and several high-ranking members of his administration went to prison for taking bribes from oil companies. Nonetheless, under President Coolidge, the pro-business, anti-progressive policies continued apace. Republican politicians claimed to have inaugurated a "New Era" of permanent prosperity by letting business manage its own affairs free from government interference.

"Who Says a Watched Pot Never Boils?," 1924; "Juggernaut," 1924; Fall and Teapot Dome, 1928
Three cartoons depicting the Teapot Dome Oil scandal and how corruption reached the White House.

Intellectuals disgusted by the nation's low-brow, commercialized culture and self-satisfied politics went into self-imposed exile in Europe. On the other hand, titans of the business world who had once been vilified as "robber barons" were now celebrated as visionary entrepreneurs engaged in noble service to their fellow man.

Yankees, Lou Gehrig, homerun, 1925; Teens dancing the Charleston, 1926; Charles Lindbergh, American pilot who made first solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic; Film premiere in New York, 1926; Mary Pickford, actress and co-founder of United Artists Film Studio
Five photographs of the Yankees, Charles Lindbergh, Mary Pickford, and teens dancing in the streets.

Henry Ford, who sold millions of dependable, low-priced "Model T" automobiles in the 1920s, became a national folk hero despite his virulent anti-Semitism, eccentric notions, and harsh anti-union tactics. Reporters who had once raised questions about the methods of big businessmen in the Progressive Era now switched to praising their presumptive genius and public usefulness. A popular 1920s bestseller even portrayed Jesus Christ as a "super salesman" and "forceful executive" who achieved success through mastery of modern business techniques.

New Era prosperity did set the tone for the 1920s. Exciting new high-tech industries thrived such as automobiles, consumer appliances, chain stores, construction, leisure, recreation, and entertainment, especially in big cities. Nearly a hundred million movie tickets were sold each week and Americans flocked to baseball parks, golf courses, and dance halls as well.

Automobile registrations soared over 20 million until by decade's end three out of four cars in the world were registered in the United States. Owning a car was finally within reach of most American families. The celebrity exploits of movie stars like Mary Pickford, sports heroes like Babe Ruth, and the great trans-Atlantic aviator Charles Lindbergh filled the newsreels, magazines, and newspapers, while radio broadcasts of music, news, sports, soap operas, speeches, sermons, comedies and dramas reached into tens of millions of homes.

Popular fads ranging from "The Charleston" dance craze and mahjong parties to self-improvement books, vitamins, and palm reading preoccupied those Americans who were lucky enough to have leisure time and disposable income for such frivolous pursuits. But cultural interests, access to technology, openness to change, and differences in prosperity often divided Americans along rural vs. urban lines.

In the 1920s immigration became a battlefront between urban modernists and rural traditionalists. New arrivals from southern and eastern Europe rose sharply after World War I. This upset nativists and Protestant old-stock Americans who had never been comfortable with the entry of so many Catholics and Jews into the country during the prewar decades. The wartime spirit of "100% Americanism" and the postwar Red Scare, both which aroused prejudice against foreigners as presumptively disloyal or radical, gave nativists, after decades of trying, a chance to finally enact severe restrictions on immigration in the 1920s.

Responding to public fears of "inundation" and "race suicide," Congress passed the National Origins Act of 1924, which imposed strict quotas on immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and dramatically reduced immigration overall. Asian immigration was banned entirely. "America must be kept American," said President Coolidge upon signing the law.

The nation's traditional welcome to immigrants, or at least to Europeans, now came to an end. The golden door to America was slammed shut in the faces of those yearning to breathe free. Immigration from Mexico and the Philippines, however, rose sharply in the 1920s. This was because no amount of nativist fury could wean American agriculture and industry away from its reliance on cheap labor from any available source.

Underneath the decade's noisy battles over immigration, Prohibition, and evolution lay a fundamental culture clash between country and city, between Protestant and Catholic, between native-born and immigrant, between religious and secular, between rigidly intolerant values inherited from the 19th century and more flexible modern values of tolerance gaining ascendancy in the 20th.