The Roaring Twenties

"Jazz Age"

New Woman: To many, the "new woman" personified the radical changes taking place in American society. Women, particularly young fashionable women called "flappers" frequented speakeasies, drank and smoked with men, danced the Charleston and Black Bottom, and spoke freely of sex. While most women of the 1920s were not flappers, there is little doubt that their lives had changed. Women were now voting, practicing birth control, getting college educations (even if college was a means to further their husband's careers), entering the workplace, driving automobiles, and divorcing in larger numbers than before. One in six marriages would end in divorce. These changes would have broad ramifications for American society. [On flappers, see "Flapper Jane"]

Such social indications of modernity were parallel to those in science and literature. Einstein's theory of relativity, Marx's emphasis on materialism, Darwin's biological findings, Freud's theories of sexuality shattered old intellectual constructs of the world as knowable and certain. New trends in science shook the faith in rational, absolute values. Increasingly values themselves would become relative.

American expatriate writers and intellectuals fled in the 1920s to Europe, especially Paris. It would be these writers that best articulated the modernist disillusionment with the world. Industrialization had begun the process of alienation for this "lost generation," the war completed it. Among these expatriates would be some of America's best writers and poets: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner. Their work resonated with such themes as the inability of man to control his fate, the loss of faith, and a search for meaning in an irrational world. It would be Fitzgerald who would note that his generation had grown up to find all gods dead, all the wars fought, all faith in man shaken. Hemingway's Sun Also Rises expresses a theme of the lost generation, the desperate search to find meaning in life. Eliot's "Wasteland" became the touchstone of a burned out generation. [See "The Modern Period" and "Fitzgerald"]

In Harlem African American writers and poets such as Langston Hughes created their own literary renaissance, exploring the roots of their African heritage. Jazz, that uniquely American art form, filled the air. [See "Harlem Renaissance"]

Modernists and traditionalists clashed during the 1920s over such issues as religion in contemporary society [See "Scopes Monkey Trial-July 10-25, 1925" and Prohibition [See "Prohibition". Traditionalists frowned on the behavior of the new woman, rejected the secularization of religion, and were skeptical of the findings of modern science. During the 1920s, a revived Ku Klux Klan claimed to speak for traditional values. It was anti-foreign, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-black, anti-adultery, and anti-birth control. It was also pro-American (that is Anglo-Saxon American) and pro-Protestant. Like other nativists, the Klan supported restrictions on immigration coming from Southern and Eastern Europe. Beginning in 1921, Congress responded by passing several National Origin Acts, imposing strict quotas on Eastern & Southern European immigrants and banning Oriental immigration entirely. Critics charged that the conviction and execution of two Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, resulted from this anti-immigrant backlash.