Transcript

America has always been a society of contrasting elements, forces, ideas, and ideals. This was never more the case than during the 1920’s. After all, in the immediate aftermath of World War I, American politics changed dramatically from the crusading idealism and moralistic crusading of Woodrow Wilson to Republican Warren Harding, who was elected in 1920 on a platform of returning America to normalcy and not being engaged in all of the progressive reform efforts.

Socially, it was a time of tremendous tension as longstanding issues of concern and conflict between traditional rural America began to clash with the more urban, cosmopolitan modern America. The Ku Klux Klan, for example, experienced a revival in the 1920’s, not only being explicitly racist in its opposition to black Americans and their civil rights but also declaring that Jews and Catholics were not sufficiently American either. At the same time that was occurring, a religious revival was taking place across the United States. Religious fundamentalism was defending itself against the inroads of secular modernism, in particular Darwinism and Evolutionary Theory.

It was a time of prohibition of alcoholic beverages where moral reformers who had long been calling to outlaw alcohol finally succeeded in doing so, only to realize that enforcing prohibition was going to be an almost impossible task for a nation of drinkers.

These tensions between social values and religious ideals and traditional values all made for a very energetic mix. Intermingled with those tensions was an actual Red Scare after World War I when many workers and labor unions actually went on strike because of the difficult transition from wartime production and employment to civilian production and employment. People were genuinely scared that Bolshevism, having succeeded in revolutionizing Russia, might begin making inroads into American culture.

Those fears were also evident in the response to the emergence of cultural modernism. Modern artists and writers, first in Europe and then the United States, many of them animated by the scientific discoveries of Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, began experimenting with radical new forms of artistic expression. These were very disconcerting to many traditionalists in America as well as in Europe.

And so, the 1920’s were a time of significant tension. Old values and new experiments were clashing openly. Young Americans were experimenting with sexual liberation. It was the era of the flapper, the liberated woman. The right to vote for women was granted in the 1920’s.

At the same time, it was a period when many Americans thought that these new ideas and ideals were tearing America apart by threatening traditional values. Those energies divided America during the 1920’s. Ironically, it was the onset of a terrible, tragic Great Depression that unified Americans to the extent that everybody suffered from the economic calamity—rich and poor, conservative and radical, modernist and traditionalist. The Depression, ironically, brought together a nation that was experiencing the conflicting contrast of modernism and traditionalism during the 1920’s.

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