Lesson 19: The Jazz Age — 1920s Prosperity, Prohibition & Change

The 1920s "roared" with jazz, flappers, automobiles, and stock market speculation — a decade of liberation and excess that ended in economic catastrophe.

Prosperity and Consumer Culture

Postwar America boomed. Henry Ford's assembly line made cars affordable — Model T prices fell from $850 to $290; by 1929, one in five Americans owned a car. Installment buying ("buy now, pay later") fueled consumption of radios, refrigerators, and washing machines. Advertising became a major industry. The stock market soared as millions bought shares, many on margin (with borrowed money) — a house of cards.

Cultural Revolution

Jazz — born in Black New Orleans — conquered the nation through Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. The Harlem Renaissance showcased Black art, literature (Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston), and intellect. Flappers defied Victorian norms with short hair, short skirts, and public smoking. Hollywood talkies (The Jazz Singer, 1927) and radio created mass culture. Charles Lindbergh's 1927 solo Atlantic flight made him a hero.

Prohibition and Crime

The 18th Amendment (1920) banned alcohol, pushed by temperance crusaders and anti-immigrant nativists. Instead of sobriety, Prohibition created speakeasies, bootlegging, and organized crime — Al Capone's Chicago empire grossed $60 million yearly. The St. Valentine's Day Massacre (1929) epitomized gang violence. Prohibition was widely flouted and finally repealed by the 21st Amendment (1933).

Shadows Beneath the Glitter

Prosperity was uneven: farmers suffered from overproduction; Black Americans faced the Great Migration's promise tempered by Northern racism and the KKK's revival. The Scopes Trial (1925) pitted evolution against fundamentalism. Sacco and Vanzetti's execution (1927) reflected nativist paranoia. The decade's credit bubble — margin buying, Florida land speculation — foreshadowed the crash.

Why It Matters

The 1920s established modern consumer culture, mass media, and the expectation of government non-interference in the economy — all shattered by the Depression. The decade's cultural achievements, especially the Harlem Renaissance, remain foundational to American art.

Voices from the Past

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925): "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Gatsby's tragedy — wealth without meaning — captured the decade's hollowness.

Langston Hughes, "I, Too" (1926): "I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong." Hughes asserted Black belonging with quiet power.

Herbert Hoover, accepting the 1928 nomination: "We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land." Fourteen months later, the crash proved him tragically wrong.

Discussion Questions

• Was the 1920s a decade of liberation or illusion?
• How did mass culture change American identity?
• What caused the Great Depression? Could it have been prevented?

The Lost Generation

WWI veterans - Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner - became the Lost Generation, disillusioned by war. Hemingway's spare prose (The Sun Also Rises) rejected Victorian sentimentality. Fitzgerald's Gatsby critiqued wealth's emptiness. Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha explored Southern guilt. Paris - Gertrude Stein's salon - was their capital. Meanwhile, modernism transformed art: Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot's Waste Land. Harlem and Paris were twin capitals of cultural revolution - one Black, one expatriate, both rejecting old orders.

Prohibition's Failure

Prohibition - noble experiment - failed comprehensively. Consumption initially fell, then rebounded. Speakeasies - 30,000 in New York alone - flouted law. Bootlegging enriched criminals: Capone, Luciano, Schultz. Corruption - police, judges, politicians on the take - undermined rule of law. Poisoned industrial alcohol killed thousands. Women - temperance leaders - were disillusioned. Repeal (1933) was the only constitutional reversal of a moral crusade. Lessons: laws without consensus fail; prohibition creates black markets; moral crusades often backfire. The drug war replays these dynamics.

Fundamentalism vs Modernism

The Scopes Trial (1925) - Clarence Darrow vs. William Jennings Bryan - dramatized fundamentalist-modernist divide. Bryan - three-time presidential candidate - defended biblical literalism; Darrow mocked him. Mencken reported with contempt for Southern fundamentalists. But fundamentalism didn't die - it organized: Bible colleges, radio ministries, later the Moral Majority. The modernist victory in the 1920s was cultural, not political - setting up culture wars that continue. Evolution - still contested in some schools - shows science-religion tensions persist.

Thinking Historically: Causation, Continuity, and Change

"The Roaring Twenties" is a label to interrogate, not a fact. The decade's culture had identifiable causes: disillusion among war veterans; a Black population newly urban through the Great Migration; and technologies — radio, film, the automobile — that nationalized tastes for the first time. Prosperity funded the experimentation, but prosperity itself was unevenly caused and unevenly shared. Autos, construction, and electrical goods boomed while farmers (overproducing since 1919), coal miners, and textile workers were in depression all decade long. That split is the causal bridge to 1929: a consumer economy resting on installment credit and margin loans, wired to a farm sector that had already collapsed.

Continuity disciplines the liberation story. Temperance was a nineteenth-century movement that won in 1920 and lost by 1933. The revived Klan sold old prejudices with modern marketing. Fundamentalism did not die at the Scopes trial — it built colleges, publishing houses, and radio networks and waited half a century for its political return. And the decade's racial violence was not a survival from an older America but a contemporary event: in 1921 a white mob destroyed Greenwood, Tulsa's prosperous Black business district, killing as many as 300 people — an atrocity then omitted from most textbooks for generations.

Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday (1931) fixed the portrait of a "revolution in manners and morals" almost before the decade ended. Later social historians stressed how many Americans — rural, older, devout — experienced the same years as threat rather than liberation, which is precisely why the decade's politics (Prohibition enforcement, immigration restriction, the election of 1928) look so defensive. Change and its policing were contemporaries.

Add the automobile to the causal ledger, because contemporaries did. By 1929, one in five Americans owned a car, and the car quietly reorganized courtship (out from under the parlor's supervision), retail (the first suburban shopping centers), crime (the getaway that made Prohibition enforcement a chase), and the oil economy that would dominate the century's geopolitics. Mass media did parallel work on culture: network radio and Hollywood talkies standardized speech, slang, and aspiration from New York to the smallest town — which is one reason the decade's traditionalists felt besieged; the siege was arriving by loudspeaker and screen in their own parlors. And mark the quiet demographic hinge: the census of 1920 recorded, for the first time, more Americans living in urban than in rural places (using the Census Bureau's generous definition of a town of 2,500). The political system still over-represented the countryside, and much of the decade's cultural legislation — Prohibition enforcement, immigration restriction, anti-evolution laws — can be read as a rural majority's last stand conducted through institutions that had not yet caught up with the census. That lag between demographic change and political power is a causal pattern you will meet again in Lesson 22.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Universal prosperity. Farmers, coal miners, and textile workers were depressed throughout the decade; the "roar" was regional and sectoral.
• "Prohibition stopped drinking." Consumption fell, then rebounded through speakeasies and bootlegging, while corruption and poisoned liquor killed thousands.
• Scopes as fundamentalism's death. Bryan's side won the verdict; fundamentalists withdrew from national politics to build institutions — colleges, publishers, radio — and returned decades later.

Exam Experience: SAQ Practice (APUSH Style)

The stimulus — Langston Hughes, "I, Too" (published 1926): "I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong. Tomorrow, I'll be at the table When company comes."

Answer all parts.

• (a) Identify the claim Hughes makes about Black Americans' place in the nation.
• (b) Explain how the poem expresses the aims of the Harlem Renaissance.
• (c) Explain one reality of the 1920s that stood in sharp contradiction to the poem's confidence.

Model answers.

• (a) Hughes claims present belonging, not future permission: the speaker already "sings America" — he is a maker of the nation, currently exiled to the kitchen by custom rather than by any lack of Americanness. The poem's wager is that the exclusion is temporary ("tomorrow") and that those excluded are growing stronger on what they are fed in exile.
• (b) The Harlem Renaissance aimed to make Black culture the vehicle of Black citizenship claims: art, music, and literature would demonstrate — and create — racial pride and equality. Hughes's poem does this in form as well as message, building a dignified lyric from Black vernacular speech and answering Walt Whitman's democratic catalogs ("I hear America singing") on his own terms. In his 1926 essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," Hughes had argued that young Black artists should express their "individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame" — the poem is that manifesto in miniature.
• (c) Any one evidenced example: In 1921, a white mob destroyed Greenwood, the prosperous Black business district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, killing as many as 300 people and burning some 1,250 homes — with no prosecutions. The revived Ku Klux Klan enrolled millions of members nationwide and marched openly in Washington. Northern cities enforced segregation by restrictive covenant and violence against Black homebuyers. Lynchings continued through the decade despite the NAACP's national campaign and the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill's death by Senate filibuster.

Scoring notes.

• (a) distinguishes claim from theme: "racism is bad" is a theme; "the excluded are already Americans and the exclusion is temporary" is the claim. Only the second scores.
• In (b), connect the poem to a movement aim (culture as claim to citizenship) — ideally with Hughes's own prose manifesto or the Whitman echo as evidence.
• (c) requires a dated, specific contradiction (Tulsa 1921, the Dyer bill's filibuster). "Racism still existed" is not an answer.