The American Yawp — Chapter Twenty: The New Era
Abridged for Intermediate-High Learners

In 1921, Warren G. Harding became president by promising a "return to normalcy" after the shocks of World War I, racial violence, and a deadly flu epidemic. But the 1920s were anything but normal. The decade — the Roaring Twenties — brought amazing prosperity and deep conflict. Harding cut taxes, raised tariffs, and removed wartime controls on business. The Teapot Dome scandal ruined his presidency: officials secretly leased government oil lands for cash. Harding died in 1923, and Calvin Coolidge became president. Coolidge declared, "The chief business of the American people is business."

New factories flooded stores with goods, and advertising taught Americans to buy. By 1929, women made 90 percent of household purchases. Department stores, mail-order catalogs, and national brands created a culture of consumption. Credit made it all possible: by 1927, more than 60 percent of cars were bought on installment plans — small payments made over time. Henry Ford's assembly line made cars affordable: his factories produced a Model T every ten seconds, and the number of cars on American roads jumped from nine million in 1920 to twenty-seven million by 1930.

Americans used their new wealth to escape everyday life. They drove to Florida vacations, listened to the radio broadcast, and packed movie theaters. Weekly movie attendance soared from sixteen million in 1912 to forty million in the early 1920s. Immigrants built Hollywood into the world's film capital. In 1927, The Jazz Singer became the first movie with synchronized sound. Radio brought jazz, born in Black communities in New Orleans, into living rooms across the country. Sports heroes like Jack Dempsey and Babe Ruth became national celebrities. In 1927, Charles Lindbergh flew alone across the Atlantic, from New York to Paris.

The decade's most famous symbol was the flapper, a young woman with bobbed hair and short skirts who smoked, danced to jazz, and enjoyed city nightlife. Women had won the right to vote in 1920, and more women worked outside the home. But freedom had limits: only 10 percent of married women held jobs, and most professional women worked as teachers or nurses. The Eighteenth Amendment had banned alcohol in 1920, but many Americans drank anyway in secret bars. A speakeasy was an illegal bar that sold alcohol in hiding from the police.

For Black Americans, the 1920s brought pride and terrible violence. In 1921, a white mob destroyed the prosperous Black district of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma — "Black Wall Street" — burning more than a thousand homes and killing hundreds of residents. Meanwhile, the Great Migration carried Black southerners to northern cities. In New York's Harlem, the largest Black community in America, artists and writers created the Harlem Renaissance — a rebirth of Black art, music, and literature. Writers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston challenged racist stereotypes. Marcus Garvey built the Universal Negro Improvement Association, urging Black pride and economic independence, until the government jailed and deported him.

Many Americans feared these changes. After the trial and execution of the Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, nativism surged. Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which set a strict quota based on each nationality's 1890 population and banned Asian immigrants entirely. Followers of Christian fundamentalism battled modern science: in 1925, Tennessee put teacher John Scopes on trial for teaching evolution, in the famous "Monkey Trial." The reborn Ku Klux Klan also spread hate. By the mid-1920s it claimed four to five million members nationwide and used threats and vigilante violence against Black Americans, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants.

When Herbert Hoover became president in 1929, he promised that poverty would soon disappear. But the prosperity rested on shaky ground: an economy built on credit, high tariffs, and wild speculation. Within months, the Roaring Twenties crashed into the Great Depression.