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The Roaring Twenties was a menstruum in history of dramatic social and political change. For the commencement fourth dimension, more than Americans lived in cities than on farms. The nation's full wealth more than doubled betwixt 1920 and 1929, and this economic growth swept many Americans into an flush but unfamiliar "consumer lodge." People from declension to declension bought the aforementioned goods (thanks to nationwide advertising and the spread of concatenation stores), listened to the aforementioned music, did the same dances and fifty-fifty used the aforementioned slang! Many Americans were uncomfortable with this new, urban, sometimes racy "mass culture;" in fact, for many–even nearly–people in the United States, the 1920s brought more disharmonize than celebration. Yet, for a small handful of young people in the nation'due south big cities, the 1920s were roaring indeed.

The 'New Adult female'

The most familiar symbol of the "Roaring Twenties" is probably the flapper: a immature woman with bobbed hair and brusque skirts who drank, smoked and said what might be termed "unladylike" things, in addition to being more than sexually "gratuitous" than previous generations. In reality, almost immature women in the 1920s did none of these things (though many did adopt a stylish flapper wardrobe), but fifty-fifty those women who were non flappers gained some unprecedented freedoms.

They could vote at last: The 19th Amendment to the Constitution had guaranteed that right in 1920, though it would be decades earlier African American women in the South could fully practice their right to vote without Jim Crow intimidation.

Millions of women worked in bluish collar jobs, as well as white-neckband jobs (as stenographers, for instance) and could afford to participate in the burgeoning consumer economy. The increased availability of birth-control devices such as the diaphragm made it possible for women to have fewer children. And new machines and technologies like the washing car and the vacuum cleaner eliminated some of the drudgery of household piece of work.

Mass Communication and Consumerism

During the 1920s, many Americans had extra money to spend, and they spent it on consumer goods such equally ready-to-vesture dress and home appliances like electric refrigerators. In item, they bought radios. The start commercial radio station in the U.s., Pittsburgh's KDKA, hit the airwaves in 1920; three years later there were more than than 500 stations in the nation. By the cease of the 1920s, there were radios in more 12 meg households. People besides went to the movies: Historians estimate that, by the terminate of the decades, three-quarters of the American population visited a picture palace every calendar week.

Only the almost important consumer product of the 1920s was the automobile. Depression prices (the Ford Model T cost only $260 in 1924) and generous credit fabricated cars affordable luxuries at the showtime of the decade; by the end, they were practically necessities. In 1929 in that location was one car on the road for every five Americans. Meanwhile, an economy of automobiles was born: Businesses like service stations and motels sprang upwardly to meet drivers' needs.

The Jazz Age

Cars too gave young people the freedom to go where they pleased and do what they wanted. (Some pundits called them "bedrooms on wheels.") What many young people wanted to practice was dance: the Charleston, the cake walk, the blackness lesser, the flea hop

Jazz bands played at venues like the Savoy and the Cotton Lodge in New York City and the Aragon in Chicago; radio stations and phonograph records (100 1000000 of which were sold in 1927 alone) carried their tunes to listeners across the nation. Some older people objected to jazz music'south "vulgarity" and "depravity" (and the "moral disasters" it supposedly inspired), simply many in the younger generation loved the freedom they felt on the dance floor. The novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) chronicled the Jazz Age.

Prohibition

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During the 1920s, some freedoms were expanded while others were curtailed. The 18th Subpoena to the Constitution, ratified in 1919, had banned the manufacture and auction of "intoxicating liquors," and at 12 A.M. on January 16, 1920, the federal Volstead Deed closed every tavern, bar and saloon in the The states. From then on, it was illegal to sell whatever "intoxication beverages" with more than 0.5% alcohol. This drove the liquor merchandise underground–now, people only went to nominally illegal speakeasies instead of ordinary bars–where information technology was controlled by bootleggers, racketeers and other organized-offense figures such as Chicago gangster Al Capone. (Capone reportedly had 1,000 gunmen and half of Chicago's police on his payroll.)

To many eye-class white Americans, Prohibition was a manner to assert some control over the unruly immigrant masses who crowded the nation's cities. For instance, to the so-called "Drys," beer was known as "Kaiser mash." Drinking was a symbol of all they disliked well-nigh the modern city, and eliminating alcohol would, they believed, turn back the clock to an earlier and more comfortable time.

READ More than: Run into All The Crafty Ways Americans Hid Alcohol During Prohibition

The 'Cultural Civil War'

Prohibition was not the only source of social tension during the 1920s. An anti-Communist "Blood-red Scare" in 1919 and 1920 encouraged a widespread nativist and anti-immigrant hysteria. This led to the passage of an extremely restrictive immigration law, the National Origins Act of 1924, which prepare immigration quotas that excluded some people (Eastern Europeans and Asians) in favor of others (Northern Europeans and people from Uk, for instance).

Immigrants were hardly the just targets in this decade. The Great Migration of African Americans from the Southern countryside to Northern cities and the increasing visibility of Blackness culture—jazz and blues music, for example, and the literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance—discomfited some white Americans. Millions of people, non just in the South, but across the land, including the w coast, Midwest and Northeast joined the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

By the center of the decade, the KKK had 2 one thousand thousand members, many who believed the Klan represented a return to all the "values" that the fast-paced, city-slicker Roaring Twenties were trampling. More specifically, the 1920s represented economic and political uplift for African Americans that threatened the social hierarchy of Jim Crow oppression.

During this decade, Blackness Americans sought stable employment, better living conditions and political participation. Many who migrated to the North found jobs in the automobile, steel, shipbuilding and meatpacking industries. Just with more work came more exploitation. In 1925, civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph founded the first predominantly Blackness labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, to draw attention to the discriminatory hiring practices and working atmospheric condition for African Americans. And as housing demands increased for Black people in the N, so did discriminatory housing practices that led to a ascension of urban ghettos, where African Americans were excluded from white neighborhoods and relegated to inadequate, overcrowded and insanitary living weather condition.

Black Americans battled for political and ceremonious rights throughout the Roaring Twenties and beyond. The NAACP launched investigations into African American disenfranchisement in the 1920 presidential election, as well as surges of white mob violence, such as the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. The NAACP also pushed for the passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, a constabulary to make lynching a federal criminal offence, but it was defeated by a Senate filibuster in 1922. A political milestone for Blackness Americans finally occurred when Oscar De Priest, a Chicago Republican, became the first African American congressman since Reconstruction to be elected to the House of Representatives in 1928.

The Roaring Twenties ushered in several demographic shifts, or what ane historian called a "cultural Ceremonious State of war" betwixt city-dwellers and small-town residents, Protestants and Catholics, Blacks and whites, "New Women" and advocates of old-fashioned family values.