The 1920's

The 1920s gave us jazz, movies, radios, illegal liquor, and prosperity. A  stereotypical point of view of the 20’s was known as the “roaring” 20’s. A decade of exciting change, new cultural touchstones, as well as increased personal freedom and dancing. It was also a time an increase in wealth, well for some people. During the 1920's, many Americans had extra money to spend, and they spent it on consumer goods such as ready-to-wear clothes and home appliances like electric refrigerators. In particular, they bought radios. The first commercial radio station in the U.S., Pittsburgh’s KDKA( A clear-channel radio station licensed in Pittsburgh), hit the airwaves in 1920. Three years later there were more than “500 stations in the nation”. By the end of the 1920's,” there were radios in more than 12 million households”. People also went to the movies: Historians estimate that, by the end of the decades, three-quarters of the American population visited a movie theater every week.

During the 1920's, some freedoms were expanded while others were curtailed. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1919, had banned the manufacture and sale of “intoxicating liquors,” and at 12 A.M. on January 16, 1920, the federal Volstead Act closed every tavern, bar and saloon in the United States. From then on, it was illegal to sell any “intoxicating beverages” with more than 0.5% alcohol. This drove the liquor trade underground, now people simply went to nominally illegal speakeasies instead of ordinary bars where it was controlled by bootleggers, racketeers and other organized-crime figures such as Chicago gangster Al Capone. “Capone reportedly had 1,000 gunmen and half of Chicago’s police force on his payroll. But the most important consumer product of the 1920's 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 end, they were practically necessities. In 1929 there was one car on the road for every five Americans. Meanwhile, an economy of automobiles was born: Businesses like service stations and motels sprang up to meet drivers’ needs.

During the 1920’s the government helped business grow like gangbusters largely by not regulating it much of it at all. This is known as Laissez-faire capitalism. The republican party dominated politics in the 1920’s with all the presidents elected in the decade being strong conservative republicans. The federal government feud the policies favored by business lobbies including lower taxes on personal income, in business profits, and efforts to weaken the power of unions. Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover stocked the boards of the federal reserve and the federal trade commission with men who shared their pro business views, shifting the country away from the economic regulation that it had been favored by progressives. That was very good for the American economy, at least in the short run.

The 1920's were an age of dramatic social and political change. For the first time, more Americans lived in cities than on farms. The nation’s total wealth more than doubled between 1920 and 1929, and this economic growth swept many Americans into an affluent but unfamiliar “consumer society.” People from coast to coast bought the same goods, listened to the same music, did the same dances and even used the same slang! Many Americans were uncomfortable with this new, urban, sometimes racy “mass culture”; in fact, for many even most people in the United States, the 1920's brought more conflict than celebration. However, for a small amount of young people in the nation’s big cities, the 1920's were “roaring”.

Sources:

http://www.history.com/topics/roaring-twenties
https://www.eduplace.com/ss/socsci/books/content/ilessons/52/ils_gr5c_u5_c10_l2.pdf
http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1564.html