The Roaring Twenties were a decade of enormous social change in America—but myths about the era sometimes exaggerate the reality of that strange and often troubling time. While consumerism boomed and many new inventions—radios and telephones, for example—became everyday items for many Americans, it was also a time of much bitterness, conflict and disappointment. The economic boom left many in the dust, America's traditional openness to immigration was severly cut back, and racial tensions rose. Prohibition, the “noble experiment,” caused ordinary citizens to resort to criminal behavior, even as government often winked and looked the other way.

The 20s were also known as a time of revolution in manners and morals, when young men, and especially young women, threw off many of the social restrictions of the Victorian era and began conducting themselves in ways that scandalized the older generations. Young women liberated themselves in everything from hairstyles and clothing to deportment and public, smoking cigarettes and drinking from flasks of illegal bootleg whiskey and bathtub gin. The 20s were known as the jazz age and saw a the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, divisions between town and country that went beyond mere style, the Harlem Renaissance, an enormous growth in production of items once seen as luxuries such as automobiles, and a general feeling of near euphoria, as if for the middle and wealthy classes, at least, things would just keep going up.

The stock market crash of 1929 ended their dreams of many and ushered in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Although the crash was not the cause of the Depression, it had a triggering effect, and the underlying economic weaknesses in the American economy brought on a period that was devastating for millions of Americans. The twenties saw Charles Lindbergh fly solo across the Atlantic and Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs. But it also saw the Scopes trial and the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti following their famous murder trial. It was a time of revolution, and as Dickens said of an earlier revolution, in many ways it was the best of times and the worst of times.

Twenties Summary and Links| History 122 Part 2 | Updated June 22, 2005