Chapter 31

The end of World War I brought jarring dislocation: returning soldiers competed for jobs, wartime price controls ended, and inflation and labor strikes spread nationwide. Fear of Bolshevism after the 1917 Russian Revolution combined with a series of anarchist bombings to trigger the Red Scare of 1919–1920.

Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer orchestrated the Palmer Raids, rounding up thousands of suspected radicals, socialists, and immigrants, often without warrants, and deporting many with little regard for due process. Though the hysteria faded by 1920, it left a lasting suspicion of radicalism, labor unions, and foreigners.

Weary of Wilsonian idealism and reform, voters elected Republican Warren G. Harding in 1920 on a promise of "return to normalcy." Harding's administration favored business interests and low taxes but was marred by scandal, most notably the Teapot Dome affair, in which Interior Secretary Albert Fall secretly leased federal oil reserves in exchange for bribes.

Harding died suddenly in 1923, elevating the taciturn Vice President Calvin Coolidge, whose famous credo, "the chief business of the American people is business," captured the pro-business, low-regulation spirit of the decade. Coolidge won election in his own right in 1924 and presided over continued prosperity.

Postwar nativism culminated in the Emergency Quota Act (1921) and the more restrictive National Origins Act (1924), which sharply limited immigration and used discriminatory quotas favoring northern and western Europeans while virtually excluding Asians and severely limiting southern and eastern Europeans.

Nativist prejudice was also on display in the controversial 1921 trial of Italian immigrant anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, convicted of murder on flimsy evidence and executed in 1927 despite international protests. Meanwhile, a revived Ku Klux Klan, now targeting Catholics, Jews, and immigrants as well as Black Americans, claimed millions of members nationwide before scandal discredited its leadership.

The Eighteenth Amendment, ratified in 1919 and enforced by the Volstead Act, banned the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages nationwide, the culmination of decades of temperance activism. In practice, Prohibition proved nearly impossible to enforce, especially in cities, where speakeasies flourished and millions of ordinary Americans openly flouted the law.

Prohibition instead fueled the rise of organized crime, as bootleggers and gangsters such as Chicago's Al Capone built vast criminal empires supplying illegal liquor, often through bribery and violence. Disillusionment with the "noble experiment's" failure steadily grew until the amendment was repealed in 1933.

Henry Ford's moving assembly line made the automobile affordable for millions of ordinary Americans; the Model T transformed transportation, spurred suburban growth, and created vast new industries in oil, rubber, and road construction. Rising wages, installment buying, and aggressive advertising fueled an explosion of consumer spending on radios, appliances, and other new goods.

The new medium of radio broadcast news, entertainment, and advertising into millions of homes, while Hollywood films and nationally circulated magazines helped forge, for the first time, a truly national mass culture that transcended regional differences.

The Great Migration of Black southerners to northern cities during and after World War I fed a remarkable flowering of Black artistic and literary achievement centered in Harlem, New York, known as the Harlem Renaissance. Writers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston and musicians who pioneered jazz, such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, gave voice to Black identity and experience as never before.

Jazz itself, born from Black musical traditions, became the definitive soundtrack of the era, so much so that the 1920s are often called the "Jazz Age." Yet even as Black culture flourished, most African Americans still faced pervasive segregation, discrimination, and, especially in the South, the constant threat of violence.

The decade's rapid cultural change provoked a fierce backlash from religious fundamentalists, who insisted on the literal truth of the Bible against the growing influence of Darwinian evolution and modern science. Tennessee outlawed the teaching of evolution in public schools, setting the stage for the sensational 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial."

Schoolteacher John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching evolution, with famed orator William Jennings Bryan assisting the prosecution and renowned attorney Clarence Darrow defending Scopes. Though Scopes was convicted, the trial's national media circus humiliated Bryan and exposed a deep and lasting cultural divide between rural, traditional America and the modernizing cities.

The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 finally secured women's suffrage nationwide, capping decades of activism. In the following years, a new generation of young women known as "flappers" flouted Victorian conventions with bobbed hair, short skirts, cosmetics, and public smoking and drinking, symbolizing a broader loosening of social and sexual mores.

More women entered the paid workforce and pursued higher education than ever before, even as most still faced unequal pay and limited career opportunities. The decade's dramatic clash between traditional values and new freedoms — in dress, entertainment, religion, and gender roles — exposed a cultural fault line that would persist well beyond the 1920s.