The Roaring Twenties
The violence of World War I had a profound impact on the generation of
American youth who fought the war either in the trenches of Europe or the factories and
farms at home. Beyond the deaths from the war, the Spanish Influenza struck in a
worldwide plague killing somewhere between 20-40 million people. A US soldier
returned from Europe sick with it and was sent to Ft. Leavenworth in Kansas just as if an
enemy planned a direct hit at the center of America with a biological weapon of mass
destruction. In seven days, the flu spread across the entire country and killed 675,000
Americans by the end of 1918. The Civil War had only killed 650,000. World War
deaths and flu deaths contributed to a social revolution that produced what was called the
“Roaring Twenties.” If you are more musically inclined you can consider that the social
revolution steeped in death produced the first indigenous style of music that America
would export—the new “negro music,” jazz. The Roaring Twenties “roared” partly
because of this off-beat music. This decade in US history is also known as The Jazz Age.
The year of peace in Europe, 1919, brought more violence at home in the US. In
January, shipyard workers in Seattle struck for higher wages, organized a general strike,
and paralyzed the city. At the mayor’s request the federal government sent in the
Marines! In May, four hundred soldiers and sailors sacked the offices of a socialist
newspaper, the New York Call, and beat up the staff. In the summer, race riots erupted
in twenty-five cities across the country; the most serious outbreak was in Chicago where
38 were killed and more than 500 injured. In September, the Boston police force struck
for the right to unionize, and the city experienced a wave of looting and theft until
leading businessmen and Harvard students restored order. Also in September, 350,000
steelworkers struck for the right to unionize and for an eight-hour day. In November, a
mob in Centralia, Washington, dragged IWW agitator Wesley Everett from jail and
castrated him before hanging him. In December, agents of the Labor Department
rounded up 249 Russian-born American communists and deported them to Finland.
These events just prior to the decade of the 1920s foreshadowed great changes. Seldom,
however, has a generation given so little of permanent value and so much that was
troublesome to those who followed.
The whole country shuddered at the carnage of The Great War. Wilson’s attempt
to spread Progressivism to the international level proved to be a failure as the Progressive
Movement found itself unequal to the task of solving the world’s problems. Wilson’s
stroke was symbolic of the crippled reform movement, and big business was back in
charge for over a decade. Henry Ford created the $5/day minimum wage, turning his
own workers into consumers along with most other Americans who could now afford the
Model T because of the efficiency of the assembly line. Assembly line work, however,
was repetitive and dampened the spirit of craftsmanship since the line between skilled
and unskilled labor was blurred. Once General Motors Company (GMC) responded to
Ford’s success by offering cars on installment credit, our consumer-based economy was
born. Still, Henry Ford is the last great rags-to-riches American Dream story, and he
fancied himself a societal engineer as well as an automobile manufacturer. The
Republicans who swept to power in 1920 returned the emphasis of the federal
government from the reformer to the businessman.
The winner in 1920, Warren G. Harding, placed William Howard Taft where Taft
had always wanted to be in the first place—Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The Taft
Court was known as a staunch conservative bench that allowed employers to fire
employees for being in unions. Only a few states passed anti-child-labor laws which
most conservatives viewed as unconstitutional. The 1920 saw the First Red Scare, an
anti-communist backlash to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Many Americans were
anti-labor, anti-radical, and anti-Southeastern-Europeans and communists were all three.
The labor violence across America created one of the first times civil liberties were
suspended to ensure greater national security. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer
made “clear and present danger” the test excusing the raiding of labor headquarters in
search of Bolshevik literature. “Palmer Raids” continued until he was nearly killed
opening a mail bomb. Labor unions said they were merely trying to “cash-in” on the
post-war prosperity.
Warren G. Harding’s Administration was rocked by scandals as if the Gilded Age
had returned. He, like Grant, had difficulty seeing the true character of his “friends.”
Harding’s own father said if Warren were a girl he would always be pregnant because he
couldn’t say, “No.” Harding said, “I knew I couldn’t be America’s best president, but I
wanted to be its best loved [italics mine].” Harding’s presidency is an excellent example
of how foolish it is for a leader to try to please everybody. In part to shore up his
reputation he embarked on a national speaking tour and died from exhaustion in 1923.
His death placed Calvin Coolidge squarely at average on my president chart, the only
president to receive that ranking.
Coolidge’s greatest accomplishment was to let Andrew Mellon, Harding’s old
Secretary of the Treasury, push through significant tax cuts. Mellon created the notion of
supply-side economics, although it wasn’t called that until Ronald Reagan adopted the
idea in the 1980s. Mellon said if the government lowered taxes, people would use that
extra money to invest in business and would expand the economy. Then the government
would make more money on a larger economy with lower taxes! Mellon’s idea worked
for both Republicans like Reagan and Democrats like John Kennedy. First, though, it
worked for Coolidge who dropped the national debt $10 billion.
Labor unions, again, said that they should demand more during fat years than in
lean, and the Coolidge prosperity made most of the economy fat. Farmers, however,
entered the Great Depression immediately after the end of the World War I since they no
longer were feeding European allies. Even blacks began to demand more through the
efforts of leaders like Marcus Garvey of the Universal Negro Improvement Association
(UNIA). Garvey dressed flamboyantly and coined the phrase, “Black is Beautiful.” He
represented the next step forward for blacks’ civil rights. Having been received as equals
by the French when they fought in WWI, they returned less satisfied to cower under the
reign of Jim Crow.
Writers reacted to and contributed to the changes they observed in American
society. Many of them openly rejected traditional American values and traveled abroad
in search of a culture. Together, authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and
Sinclair Lewis are known as the Lost Generation. They were “lost” in many ways
including the expatriation of T. S. Eliot and the eventual suicide of Hemingway who had
served as an ambulance driver in Europe during the war. All these authors criticized the
spoiled, materialistic American society born of The Great War. They described the US as
amoral. Young Americans, especially, had ceased asking if their behavior and values
were moral or immoral, and when a person no longer considers the difference between
right or wrong he or she is said to be amoral.
The Lost Generation also criticized the conformity of American society that was
evidenced by nativism and the resurgence of the KKK. The Klan had over 5 million
members through the 1920s and expanded its animosity toward blacks to include Jews
and Roman Catholics. These serious social conflicts festered while the nation
worshipped heroes like Charles Lindbergh for flying a plane across the Atlantic and Babe
Ruth for hitting a baseball across a fence more than anyone else. At bottom, Lindbergh’s
feat was largely accomplished by staying awake for around 36 hours, and Ruth was also
the strikeout king as well as the Sultan of Swat. Both were flawed men to be such
publicly adored figures.
A clash between Fundamentalist Christianity and Modernism came to a climax in
our own state of Tennessee, in Dayton. The trial of John T. Scopes for teaching
evolution in his high school biology classroom against state law pitted William Jennings
Bryan for the prosecution against the most famous defense attorney in America, Clarence
Darrow. Darrow, a professed agnostic, cross-examined Bryan who had placed himself on
the stand as an “expert” on the Bible. Remember, Bryan was a politician, not a
theologian. Regardless, Scopes was found guilty, but the debate over religion, irreligion,
and science had just begun in America.
Therefore, the 1920s was a time of tremendous societal flux. The American
Expeditionary Force can be seen as a smitten limb that we drew back after the blow of
The Great War. The US sought to put the war behind us, and for a brief time we were
isolationist again. We restricted immigration at the very moment millions of Europeans
from the Allied Powers as well as the Central Powers wanted to escape the devastation
there and seek their own American Dream. The American soldiers who survived to
return home came back changed. Some doughboys had never left the farms on which
they were born yet returned from Europe having debauched themselves in Paris. New
inventions joined with the new “morality” of a societal and sexual revolution to transform
American life. These changes stemmed from insecurity associated with a brush with
death. The dual result of this reaction was a despising of who or what was different and a
rejection of traditional values.