U.S. History Collection
You Decide: Were the 1920s the “Roaring ’20s”?

Introduction

You Decide:

To what extent do the 1920s deserve to be known as the “Roaring ’20s”?

“It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire.”

–F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1931

“The United States has never been ‘one nation under God’ but several nations gazing up at him, dissimilar faces huddled beneath a single flag. In white America, the ’20s may have roared, but in my Black world—in what has been called the Other America—the decade also moaned.”

–Cicely Tyson, 2020

Flappers during a Charleston dance contest in 1926.

A black and white photo shows a festive scene of four musicians playing while mingling in a row of women linked arm-in-arm dancing and holding their left leg out.

Flappers. Speakeasies. Jazz. Hollywood. The first decade to receive a nickname, the “Roaring ’20s” gave Americans shiny automobiles, motion pictures, and jazz and has captured the imagination of historians, journalists, and novelists alike. But the 1920s saw progressivism and modernism countered by a conservative reaction.

  • Women could now vote, but the end of World War I ushered in a new rise of nativism, with increasing restrictions placed on immigration and harsh crackdowns on radicals.
  • A consumer society with looser social norms developed, yet Prohibition ruled the land.
  • The 1915 film The Birth of a Nation romanticized the southern “Lost Cause” and prompted a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, which terrorized non-whites, immigrants, and Catholics.
  • The migration of Black Americans from the South to the North created both artistic movements through the Harlem Renaissance and some economic success, yet African Americans still contended with legal and de facto discrimination.
  • The Scopes Trial highlighted arguments between religious fundamentalism and science.
  • Despite unprecedented economic growth, the plight of farmers in the West continued with ongoing rural poverty.

 

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