In the 1920s, What Were the Values of the Midwest Considered to Be?

The 1920s heralded a dramatic break between America's past and future. Before Globe War I the country remained culturally and psychologically rooted in the nineteenth century, but in the 1920s America seemed to break its wistful attachments to the recent past and usher in a more modern era. The nearly vivid impressions of that era are flappers and dance halls, movie palaces and radio empires, and Prohibition and speakeasies. Scientists shattered the boundaries of infinite and time, aviators fabricated men fly, and women went to work. The country was confident—and rich. But the 1920s were an age of extreme contradiction. The unmatched prosperity and cultural advocacy was accompanied by intense social unrest and reaction. The same decade that bore witness to urbanism and modernism also introduced the Ku Klux Klan, Prohibition, nativism, and religious fundamentalism. America stood at a crossroads between innovation and tradition. Many Americans were looking boldly alee, but simply as many were gazing backward, to cherished memories of a fabled national innocence.

Age of Convergence

Many of the trends that converged to make the twenties distinct had been building for years, and in some cases, decades.

We think of the twenties as an era of liberation for women. Indeed, the decade gave ascension to the flapper, described by Webster's Collegiate Dictionary as "a immature girl, esp. one somewhat daring in behave, speech communication and dress," immortalized in the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald and by silent film stars like Clara Bow, Colleen Moore, and Louise Brooks. Just women had been breaking downwardly the separate spheres of Victorian culture for quite some fourth dimension. A powerful women's political movement demanded and won the correct to vote in 1920. Spurred on by the growth of an urban, industrial economy that required a larger female labor forcefulness, and past the emergence of public amusements that defied the old nineteenth-century courting organisation, many immature women now had the wherewithal and bulldoze to atomic number 82 independent lives. By the dawn of the decade, anywhere between ane-quarter and 1-third of urban adult female workers lived alone in private apartments or boardinghouses, free from the watchful eyes of their parents, and as early as 1896, newspaper columnist George Ade used the term "date" to depict a new convention by which boys and girls paired off to frolic at trip the light fantastic halls, amusement parks, and other public spaces, free from adult supervision.

Closely associated with the rise of the flapper, the twenties gave rise to a frank, national give-and-take about sex. But this trend, too, had been building over time. As early as 1913, the Atlantic Monthly announced that the clock had tolled "Sex o'clock in America," indicating a "Repeal of Reticence" most issues that had once been considered taboo. To be certain, these trends accelerated after World State of war I: surveys propose that fourteen percent of women built-in before 1900 engaged in pre-marital sex by the age of 25, while equally many as 39 percent of women who came of age in the 1910s and 1920s lost their virginity before wedlock. Simply the cardinal structural changes that were at play in earlier decades—namely, urbanization and industrialization—long predated the twenties. Between 1800 and 1920 the number of children borne by the average American woman cruel from seven to three. Americans were non necessarily having less sexual activity. Rather, in an urbanizing lodge, where more children were a cost rather than an nugget, they stepped up their use of birth control, and in so doing, redefined sex as something to appoint in for pleasure rather than procreation.

We think of the twenties equally an era of prosperity, and in many respects, Americans had never lived so well. Merely this tendency, too, claimed earlier roots. As factories and shops mechanized, the work week of the urban bluish-collar worker fell from 55.nine hours in 1900 to 44.2 in 1929, while his or her existent wages rose by 25 per centum. By the dawn of the twenties, Americans had more fourth dimension and coin to spend on new kinds of public amusements similar trip the light fantastic toe halls, movie theaters, fun parks, and baseball stadiums. They also had more opportunities to buy competitively priced durable items, thanks to new methods of production and distribution. The prosperity of the postal service-war period greatly accelerated this trend. Past 1929, American families spent over xx percent of their household earnings on such items as phonographs, factory-fabricated furniture, radios, electric appliances, automobiles, and "entertainment." What people couldn't afford, they borrowed. Past the mid-'20s Americans bought over iii-quarters of all furniture, phonographs, and washing machines on credit.

The proliferation of ad—alongside the maturation of the publishing, music, and moving picture industries—exposed citizens to a new gospel of fun that was intimately associated with the buy of goods and services. "Sell them their dreams," a prominent advertizing-human intoned. "Sell them what they longed for and hoped for and nigh despaired of having. Sell them hats by splashing sunlight across them. Sell them dreams—dreams of country clubs and proms and visions of what might happen if only. After all, people don't buy things to have them. . . . They buy promise—promise of what your merchandise might do for them."[one]

Age of Wonders

If many of the social trends that nosotros associate with the twenties had long been building, the decade was indeed unique in many ways.

It was a decade of firsts. For the first time ever, more than Americans (51 per centum) lived in cities than in villages or on farms.

It was a decade of economic expansion. Between 1919 and 1929 horsepower per wage earner in manufacturing skyrocketed by fifty percent, signaling a robust wave of mechanization that increased productivity by 72 percent in manufacturing, 33 percent in railroads, and 41 percent in mining.

And it was a decade of technological wonder.

In 1912, only xvi pct of American households had electricity; past the mid-20s, virtually two-thirds did. Overnight, the electrical vacuum cleaner, the electric refrigerator and freezer, and the automatic washing machine became staples in middle-class homes.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, automobiles were still unreliable and scarce, but in the years just prior to World State of war I, pioneers like Ransom Olds, Henry Leland, and Henry Ford revolutionized design and production methods to make the machine affordable and trustworthy. When the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd interviewed high school students in Muncie, Indiana, in the mid-20s, they constitute that the most common sources of disagreement between teenagers and their parents were 1) "the number of times you lot get out on schoolhouse nights during the week"; 2) "the 60 minutes y'all become in at night"; 3) "grades at school"; 4) "your spending money"; and 5) "employ of the automobile."[2]

Another pre-war engineering science that came of age in the twenties was film. By the mid-1920s movie theaters were selling 50 meg tickets each week, a sum equal to roughly one-half the U.s.a. population! And the generation that came of age in the twenties learned things at the movie palace that they couldn't acquire in school. "The only do good I always got from the movies was in learning to beloved and the cognition of sex," a young woman confided to an interviewer in the mid-20s. "If nosotros didn't see such examples in the movies," explain another, "where would we get the thought of being 'hot?' We wouldn't."[3] These young informants might have been thinking of the 1923 blockbuster Flaming Youth, which one reviewer described as "intriguingly risqué, but not necessarily offensively so. The flapperism of today, with its jazz. . . . and its utter disregard of the conventions, is daringly handled in this picture show. And it contains a bathing scene in silhouette that must have fabricated the censors blink."[4]

Like film, radio was invented in the belatedly nineteenth century only experienced its formative era of commercial expansion in the twenties. On Nov two, 1920, radio station KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, broadcast the presidential election returns. Information technology was the first-e'er alive radio transmission for a popular audition, and although few Americans that evening had the necessary engineering science to hear the results, past 1922 more than than 3 million households had acquired radio sets. Seven years later more than than twelve million households owned radios, fuelling an manufacture that saw $852 1000000 in annual sales.

Americans living in the 1920s could listen to Roxy and His Gang, the Clicqot Club Eskimos, and the Ipana Troubadours. They could hear Gartland Rice announce the World Series—live—or listen to Floyd Gibbons relate the solar day'south news. Radio proved a highly democratic medium, and by mid-decade local stations helped bring "race music," "hillbilly" sounds, and ethnic recordings into living rooms across the country. In the tardily 1920s enterprising American businessmen congenital powerful "X-stations" but across the border in northern United mexican states to evade federal radio frequency regulations. From this vantage signal they were able to beam the music of "Fiddlin' John Carson," the Carter Family, and Jimmie Rodgers to every destination from California to New York City.

Render to Normalcy

Since the dawn of the twentieth century, American politics had been dominated past Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, two presidents whose outsized personalities and dueling visions of the progressive spirit divers the tenor and tone of public life. After 1920, Americans seemed to aspire to "normalcy." In Warren G. Harding, they got exactly what they bargained (and voted) for.

Harding's best qualities were his farthermost affability and hitting good looks. Both got him in trouble regularly. Fifty-fifty as a young boy, the hereafter president seemed all also inclined to please everyone and offend no one. As a successful newspaper publisher, local political leader and, later, Usa senator from Ohio, Harding joined the Rotary Club, the Elks, the Odd Fellows, the Hoo Hoos, the Cherry Men, and the Moose. He relished poker games and excelled at public speaking. He played the b-flat trumpet in the town marching band. Indeed, Warren Harding was the very embodiment of Sinclair Lewis's Babbit—and proud to be then.

The ever-genial Harding stacked his Cabinet with cronies from Ohio. He allow his attorney general sell pardons and pledges of authorities non-interference to the highest bidders. He looked the other manner while his secretary of the interior accustomed almost $400,000 in kickbacks in exchange for a long-term charter on oil-rich federal lands at Teapot Dome, Wyoming. All the while, he adhered to a limited and conservative vision of government, pressing for lower taxes and less regulation and issuing an implicit repudiation of Wilsonian reformism.

Despite—or perhaps even because of—his limitations, Warren Harding was widely admired by the American electorate. When he died halfway through his term, the public offered up a nifty outpouring of sorrow and sympathy. Information technology was just in the post-obit months that Warren Harding'south countrymen learned of their late president's extramarital affairs and scandal-ridden administration. But by then, it hardly seemed to matter. Everything was back to normal.

Silent Cal

Harding's successor, Calvin Coolidge, may accept been the most reticent man ever to occupy the White House. Ascetic, laconic, and conservative to a fault, "Silent Cal" perfectly embodied the laissez-faire ethic that governed American politics throughout the "Jazz Age." He slept 11 hours each day, vetoed far more bills than he proposed, and claimed that his only hobby was "holding public office." He had niggling to say. When a constituent bet that she could "become more than two words" out of him, the President replied just: "You lose." Upon hearing that Coolidge had passed away in 1933, the famous wit Dorothy Parker asked: "How could they tell?"

Coolidge slashed the federal budget past almost half, eliminated the souvenir tax, sliced the estate tax by fifty percent, and lowered the maximum federal surtax from 60 pct to 20 per centum. The president disavowed anything beyond minimal regulation of business and commerce. He denied a federal role in labor relations and repeatedly affirmed his absolute faith in market forces. What was "of real importance to wage-earners," he claimed, "was non how they might quarrel with their employers just how the business of the country might and so be organized as to insure steady employment at a fair charge per unit of pay."[v]

In 1928 Coolidge announced unexpectedly and without fanfare that he did "not choose to run for president" again. His wife was every bit surprised as anyone. "Isn't that simply like the man!" she exclaimed. "I had no idea."

The Engineer

When Herbert Hoover took the oath of part as the nation'due south thirty-first president in 1929, the New York Times sounded an enthusiastic notation of approval, applauding the new chief executive for his "versatile power," "sterling grapheme," and "Progressive leanings."

Orphaned at the tender age of 9, Hoover was raised by ascetic Quaker relatives in Iowa. He worked his way through Stanford University, where he earned a degree in engineering and graduated first in his course. Over the next twenty years he ascended steadily up the corporate ladder, carving out a brilliant career as a mine operator, engineer, and businessman. During World State of war I he served as Usa food administrator and masterminded voluntary production and consumption standards that kept the American Expeditionary Forcefulness well nourished and domestic prices steady. After the war he headed up the American relief effort in Belgium, where he was widely credited with feeding and clothing several hundred yard European refugees. After saving Belgium, Hoover served as secretary of commerce under Warren Thou. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. In that office he greatly expanded the government's collection and dissemination of industrial data, organized dozens of voluntary corporate councils, and brought the executive branch into close cooperation with business and labor.

It was Herbert Hoover's bully misfortune that the Low began only months into his term in part. Smart, well educated, well traveled, and enormously capable, Hoover considered himself an activist and a Quaker humanitarian. As an engineer, he embodied the guiding spirit of progressivism, with its faith in rational and informed public policy. The poverty and despair of his countrymen profoundly afflicted Hoover.

But like about public men of his era, Herbert Hoover believed that sound volunteerism was the all-time remedy for economic distress. Rather than adopt strong federal regulatory and fiscal measures, he called for more studies and for an organized—merely voluntary—response on the part of the individual sector.

By 1930, this pattern of inaction made Herbert Hoover 1 of the most despised men in America. A popular Vaudeville skit had the directly-man announce that the Depression was over. "Has Herbert Hoover died?" his sidekick would ask. In public appearances, the president seemed thoroughly defeated. "A rose would wilt in his hand," one observer famously remarked.

Culture Wars

The corking revolution in morals, aesthetics, and everyday life that was sweeping through America didn't run across with compatible approving. Though the twenties are remembered primarily every bit a decade of bold innovation and experimentation, they also witnessed a tearing counter-revolutionary tendency.

In 1925 a group of local boosters in Dayton, Tennessee, persuaded a young high schoolhouse science teacher, John Scopes, to violate the state'southward anti-evolution law. They merely wanted to describe attending to their economically depressed crossroads town. Instead, what followed was a sensational trial that pitted the famous "lawyer for the damned" Clarence Darrow, a committed civil libertarian and virtually fanatical atheist, against William Jennings Bryan, the famously eloquent Nebraskan who had thrice failed to attain the presidency only who remained a hero to rural fundamentalists in the South and Midwest. The trial's climax came when Darrow chosen his adversary to the stand equally a biblical practiced and Bryan reluctantly admitted that some scriptural linguistic communication might exist more allegorical than literal.

The trial seemed like the culmination of a long-simmering disharmonism betwixt liberal and fundamentalist Christians. Although it was technically a win for the prosecution, liberals declared it a great victory for their cause. Bryan, they said, had unintentionally exposed fundamentalism as a simpleton's creed, while Darrow had established the supremacy of science over fundamentalist Christianity. In fact, the conservatives were far from beat out. They immediately began to regroup and charter missions, publishing houses, and radio stations. 50 years later, they would reemerge as a powerful forcefulness in American public life.

More successful in the immediate term was the Ku Klux Klan, a Reconstruction-era paramilitary group that had faded from American life until 1915, when Colonel William Simmons re-founded the organization at a minor ceremony on Stone Mount, in Georgia. Past 1925 the system claimed at to the lowest degree five 1000000 members and controlled politics in Indiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado; it was enormously powerful in several other states, notably California and Georgia. The Klan's greatest legislative achievement came in 1924, when information technology joined a wide coalition of conservative groups that won passage and approval of a draconian anti-immigration statute. The golden door would remain closed for another forty years.

The new Klan represented various ideas to its polyglot membership. Information technology was avowedly white supremacist, but for good measure information technology also included Jews, Catholics, Asians, and "new women" among its listing of enemies. Its followers could be establish in cities too every bit in the countryside, but every bit a general rule, the organization was fundamentalist and bourgeois in both profile and disposition. As 1 sympathetic observer explained, "The Ku Klux motion seems to be another expression of the general unrest and dissatisfaction with both local and national conditions—the high toll of living, social injustice and inequality, poor assistants of justice, political corruption, hyphenism, disunity, unassimilated and alien idea and standards—which are distressing all thoughtful men."[vi]

In 1924, the system enjoyed sufficient forcefulness to forcefulness a deadlock at the Democratic National Convention, where supporters of New York'due south governor, Al Smith—a Catholic—faced off confronting Klansmen aligned with former Treasury Secretary William McAdoo. While Smith's supporters shouted "Ku Klux McAdoo!"—to which McAdoo supporters taunted their opponents with cries of "Booze! Booze! Booze!"—the convention came to a deadlock. On the 103rd election, exasperated, and desperate, the convention agreed on a compromise candidate, a lackluster federal judge named John Due west. Davis, who was resoundingly defeated by the incumbent, Calvin Coolidge. It was the high-water mark for the Klan.

Arguably, Prohibition was the nearly successful achievement of anti-modern forces in the 1920s. Writing just afterwards Congress and states ratified the Eighteenth Subpoena, which authorized a ban on the production and sale of alcoholic beverages, the great urban wit H. Fifty. Mencken attributed such "crazy enactments" to "the yokel's built and incurable hatred of the city human being—his simian rage against everyone who, as he sees it, is having a better fourth dimension than he is." In his shrill, visceral response to Prohibition, Mencken may accept overstated the intensity of America's rural-urban split up. Over the next decade in that location would exist no shortage of bathtub gin and woodshed stills in the countryside. Yet he was correct on one count: passage of the Eighteenth Amendment and its accompanying federal statute, the Volstead Human action, both of which took effect in 1920, were the culminating events in a long effort by conservative forces to check the growing power of America'due south immigrants and urban dwellers—i and the same, in some respects, since outset- and 2nd-generation Americans comprised the overwhelming (75+ percent) part of the population in metropolises like New York, Chicago, and Boston. Though Americans widely flouted the new law (and, accordingly, the twenties are remembered as a specially liquid era), in fact, per capita alcohol consumption plummeted during Prohibition, lending the decade nevertheless another paradoxical trait.

End of an Era

The twenties were ever something of a gilded age. Even amongst the neat prosperity and excess of the decade, America'southward economy was fundamentally weak. Over 40 percent of Americans got past on less than $ane,500 each year, which economists cited as the minimum family subsistence level. The income of the top 0.1 per centum of families equaled the income of the bottom 42 percent. Nigh country folk did not experience the prosperity of the Roaring Twenties. Farm prices hitting stone lesser in the aftermath of World War I and widened the gulf between America'south (relatively) prosperous cities and impoverished farms.

Such glaring inequality had consequences. Boom times relied on mass consumption, and somewhen, working people reached their limit. The very wealthy could only buy then many cars, washing machines, radio sets, and movie tickets. When consumer demand bottomed out, America's economic system simply stopped functioning.

When the stock market complanate in 1929, and when the twin influences of under-consumption and over-speculation began wreaking structural havoc on the American economy, the nation's revolution in values and aesthetics remained incomplete. The twenties were arguably the nation'southward first mod decade, but many of its social and cultural revolutions would play themselves out in future years.

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[1] William Leach, Land of Want: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York, 1993), 298.

[ii] Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Written report in Mod American Culture (New York, 1929), 257, 524.

[iii] Garth South. Jowett, Ian C. Jarvie, and Katherine H. Fuller, eds., Children and the Movies: Media Influence and the Payne Fund Controversy (New York: Cambridge University Printing, 1996), 276.

[4] Joshua Zeitz, Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sexual activity, Fashion, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern (New York: Crown, 2006), 211.

[v]  William E. Leuchtenberg, The Perils of Prosperity: 1914-1932 (New York, 1958, rev. 1993), 97.

[six] Lynn Dumenil. Mod Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York, 1995), 235.

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Joshua Zeitz has taught American history at Harvard Academy and Cambridge University. He is the author of Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex activity, Manner, Celebrity and the Women Who Fabricated American Mod (2006) and White Indigenous New York: Jews, Catholics, and the Shaping of Post-War Politics ( 2007). He is currently writing a joint biography of John Hay and John Nicolay.

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