A New Society: Economic & Social Change
A tide of economic and social change swept across the country in the 1920s. Nicknames for the decade, such as “the Jazz Age” or “the Roaring Twenties,” convey something of the excitement and the changes in social conventions that were taking place at the time. As the economy boomed, wages rose for most Americans and prices fell, resulting in a higher standard of living and a dramatic increase in consumer consumption. Although most women's lives were not radically transformed by “labor‐saving” home appliances or gaining the right to vote, young American women were changing the way they dressed, thought, and acted in a manner that shocked their more traditional parents. These changes were encouraged by the new mass media that included radio and motion pictures.
The 1920s 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.”
Life in the United States of America, 1920-1933
Includes information on Life for Black Americans, Immigrants and Native Americans; Prohibition, Social Change and Popular Entertainment, The 'Roaring Twenties'. Economic Problems, The Wall Street Crash and The Great Depression.
Includes information on the reasons for rapid economic growth in the 1920s.
Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most severe of approximately 25 race riots throughout the U.S. in the “Red Summer” (meaning “bloody”) following World War I; a manifestation of racial frictions intensified by large-scale African American migration to the North, industrial labor competition, overcrowding in poor urban neighbourhoods, and greater militancy among Black war veterans who had fought “to preserve democracy.” In the South revived Ku Klux Klan activities resulted in 64 lynchings in 1918 and 83 in 1919; race riots broke out in Washington, D.C.; Knoxville, Tennessee; Longview, Texas; and Phillips county, Arkansas. In the North the worst race riots erupted in Chicago and in Omaha, Nebraska.
Disbanded after Reconstruction, the KKK returned to national prominence in the 1920s to direct its hatred against African Americans, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants.
The film Birth of a Nation portrayed the KKK as a heroic organization and led to a resurgence in membership.
Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
2013, The Roaring 20's: Crash Course US History #32, online video, Crash Course, viewed 18 November, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfOR1XCMf7A
America, 1920-1938: Video playlist
Crime and Corruption, 1910-1929
Crime and corruption were rife in the 1920s as a result of Prohibition, organised crime and Warren Harding's corrupt government.
Prohibition: United States History (1920-1933)
Prohibition was the legal prevention of the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages in the United States from 1920 to 1933 under the terms of the Eighteenth Amendment.
Before World War One, over half of the states in the USA, especially in the Midwest, had some type of ban on alcohol in their area, with only 13 being completely dry.
Within a few years, the federal government extended Prohibition on alcohol to all states.
On 16 January 1918, the Eighteenth Amendment to the USA’s constitution made it illegal to manufacture, transport and sell alcohol in the USA.
Jim Crow Jubilee (1847), sheet music cover illustrated with caricatures of African American musicians and dancers.
Jim Crow Jubilee.[Image]. In Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved from https://school.eb.com.au/levels/high/article/Jim-Crow-law/43641
Jim Crow law, in U.S. history, any of the laws that enforced racial segregation in the South between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the beginning of the civil rights movement in the 1950s. Jim Crow was the name of a minstrel routine (actually Jump Jim Crow) performed beginning in 1828 by its author, Thomas Dartmouth (“Daddy”) Rice, and by many imitators, including actor Joseph Jefferson. The term came to be a derogatory epithet for African Americans and a designation for their segregated life.
From the 1880s into the 1960s, a majority of American states enforced segregation through "Jim Crow" laws (so called after a black character in minstrel shows). From Delaware to California, and from North Dakota to Texas, many states (and cities, too) could impose legal punishments on people for consorting with members of another race. The most common types of laws forbade intermarriage and ordered business owners and public institutions to keep their black and white clientele separated.
Jim Crow Laws (includes primary sources)
After the American Civil War most states in the South passed anti-African American legislation. These became known as Jim Crow laws. This included laws that discriminated against African Americans with concern to attendance in public schools and the use of facilities such as restaurants, theaters, hotels, cinemas and public baths. Trains and buses were also segregated and in many states marriage between whites and African American people.
Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960s. Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid anti-black laws. It was a way of life. Under Jim Crow, African Americans were relegated to the status of second class citizens.
Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a white man, was born in New York City in 1808. He devoted himself to the theater in his twenties, and in the early 1830s, he began performing the act that would make him famous: he painted his face black and did a song and dance he claimed were inspired by a slave he saw. The act was called “Jump, Jim Crow” (or “Jumping Jim Crow”).
