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The Roaring 1920s Research Paper

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Introduction

The icons of the roaring twenties, the mob in the united states, stock market crash of 1929, reference list.

The roaring 1920’s describes a period in the American history after World War I distinguished by significant socio-cultural changes, organized crimes and the great economic depression. Fashion entered the modern era with the trendy flipper fashion making a significant impression.

The film and music industry underwent a transformation with the introduction of sound featured films. The dance clubs gained popularity during this epoch often christened ‘the Jazz age.’ The 1920s period was marked with breaking away from traditions caused by the introduction of new fashion and dance.

At the same time, the 1920s era was marked by rise in the level of organized crime including the Mob who had much influence in the American society and government coupled with speculative investment that led to decline in stock prices causing a major economic depression.

The 1920s epoch was characterized by a flourishing nightlife in cities such as Chicago with many nightlife establishments hosting popular dance bands, dancing contests and life radiobroadcasts for the audience (Kyvig 2001, 234).

However, social evils such as prostitution and gambling flourished at the same time leading to prohibitive drinking laws in major cities. Dancing boomed in the 1920s with many social and ethnic groups attending nightly recreational dance halls popularly known as cabarets. The cabarets were influential to the majority of fashionable middle class.

The nightclubs combined fashionable jazz music, public dance halls that hosted dancing competitions, and beer gardens for drinking. The nightlife flourished despite prohibition from the council authorities regulating drinking. Prostitution and gambling arose with the active nightlife

The entertainment industry including the film industry flourished in the 1920’s with a rise of music stars and motion picture production (O’Neal 2005, 58). The film industry’s relocation to Los Angeles facilitated the rise of Hollywood movie stars who lived luxurious lifestyles and had a lot of fanatical support.

This marked the Golden era of Hollywood. Silent films were predominant in the early twenties but all this changed in 1927 with the introduction of the jazz singer, Al Jolsen. Before then, stars of silent films like Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin were the only brilliant entertainers of the early 1920s.

Buster Keaton is another comedian star of the silent films before the invention of the talkies that transformed the film industry. The genres of the films included war, romance, biblical stories performed by Cecil Demille and silent comedies.

The fashion of the 1920s was marked by the introduction of the flipper fashions, new hairstyles that were a breakaway from the traditional past and the jazz music. The flapper fashion and hairstyles faced resistance from older generation up to 1925 when the new fashion was embraced contributing to significant transformation of the 1920s. The flapper dresses were short, unlike the traditional long Victoria-like dresses. The flappers also wore stockings and makeup unlike the traditional mode of dressing.

The 1920s saw the rise of organized criminal gangs in the American Society. ‘The American Mafia’, also called the ‘Mob’ arose with the aim of offering protection to the immigrant community without the involvement of the police or local authorities (Dickie 2004, 125).

The 1920s National prohibition to regulate drinking gave rise to organized gangs with national and international connections. Enforcement of the prohibition legislation faced opposition from notorious gangs such as the Al Capone’s mob of Chicago. The efforts to stop drug smuggling were deterred by organized smugglers with support from corrupt government officials and other international gangs.

The roaring 1920s decade was a period of wealth and economic prosperity especially in the manufacturing industry; for instance, “the automobile output increased exponentially between 1925 and 1929 period” (Henretta and Brody 2010, 67).

Business earnings also increased sharply during this period and the middle-class became wealthier investing in residential homes especially in Florida. However, towards the end of this decade, “a slump in share prices in New York Stock Exchange led to a major financial crisis that halted the flourishing economy” (Lange 2007, 81).

This crash is the infamous 1929 ‘Great Depression’ which led to business uncertainty affecting job security of American workers. Because of decline in stock prices, many investors faced financial difficulties that led to shut down of many businesses and resultant mass unemployment. This affected all industries including the then booming film industry.

New economic policies developed by the new administration helped to overcome the effects of the great depression. The economic recovery programs; known as the New Deal, allowed the federal government participation in social and economic projects of the citizens.

The New Deal led to the establishment of democratic governance that enhanced support for individual and community rights for all citizens. Before the 1929 stock market slump, the stock prices were rising which attracted huge investments. However, speculations over instability of the stock market led to panic selling of the shares causing the prices to go down.

The decade of 1920s was an era of break away from traditional lifestyles into modernity. Introduction of trendy fashions like flappers, jazz music and musical bands were popular in this era. The film industry underwent a major transformation with the relocation of the movie industry to Hollywood and the innovation of ‘talkies’ in sound films.

However, the roaring era faced threats from organized criminal gangs like the Mafia that increased insecurity in cities. In addition, the stock market slumping of 1929 affected the flourishing investment industry affecting the lives of many Americans.

Dickie, John. 2004. Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia . New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Henretta, James, and Brody, David. 2010. America: A Concise History, Volume ll: Since1877 . Fourth Edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.

Kyvig, David E. 2001. Daily Life in the United States, 1920-1939: Decades of Promise & Pain . Westport: Greenwood Press.

Lange, Brenda. 2007. Milestones in American History: Stock Market Crash of 1929: The End of Prosperity. London: Chelsea House.

O’Neal, Michael J. 2005. America in the 1920s. London: Chelsea House.

• American Upper-Middle Class Leisure and Consumption
• Comparison of Working Poor Class in Jacksonian and Present Day America
• Roaring Dragon Hotel: The Case Study
• American Society in the 1920s
• The Culture Wars in the United States of America
• Shay's rebellion
• The Southern Argument for Slavery
• The meaning of the word "freedom" in the context of the 1850s!
• Concepts of Bill Clinton
• Free Speech: First Amendment
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2018, September 10). The Roaring 1920s. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-roaring-1920s/

"The Roaring 1920s." IvyPanda , 10 Sept. 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/the-roaring-1920s/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'The Roaring 1920s'. 10 September.

IvyPanda . 2018. "The Roaring 1920s." September 10, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-roaring-1920s/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Roaring 1920s." September 10, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-roaring-1920s/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Roaring 1920s." September 10, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-roaring-1920s/.

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The Roaring Twenties

By: History.com Editors

Updated: March 28, 2023 | Original: April 14, 2010

The Roaring Twenties was a period in American history of dramatic social, economic and political change. For the first time, more Americans lived in cities than on farms. The nation’s total wealth more than doubled between 1920 and 1929, and gross national product (GNP) expanded by 40 percent from 1922 to 1929. This economic engine swept many Americans into an affluent “consumer culture” in which people nationwide saw the same advertisements, bought the same goods, listened to the same music and did the same dances. Many Americans, however, were uncomfortable with this racy urban lifestyle, and the decade of Prohibition brought more conflict than celebration. But for some, the Jazz Age of the 1920s roared loud and long, until the excesses of the Roaring Twenties came crashing down as the economy tanked at the decade’s end.

Flappers: The 'New Woman'

Perhaps the most familiar symbol of the “Roaring Twenties” is probably the flapper : a young woman with bobbed hair and short skirts who drank, smoked and said “unladylike” things, in addition to being more sexually “free” than previous generations. In reality, most young women in the 1920s did none of these things (though many did adopt a fashionable flapper wardrobe ), but even those women who were not flappers gained some unprecedented freedoms.

They could vote at last: The 19th Amendment to the Constitution had guaranteed that right in 1920, though it would be decades before Black women in the South could fully exercise their right to vote without Jim Crow segregation laws.

Millions of women worked in blue-collar jobs, as well as white-collar jobs (as stenographers, for example) and could afford to participate in the burgeoning consumer economy. The increased availability of birth-control devices such as the diaphragm made it possible for women to have fewer children.

In 1912, an estimated 16 percent of American households had electricity; by the mid-1920s, more than 60 percent did. And with this electrification came new machines and technologies like the washing machine, the freezer and the vacuum cleaner eliminated some of the drudgeries of household work.

Did you know? Because the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act did not make it illegal to drink alcohol, only to manufacture and sell it, many people stockpiled liquor before the ban went into effect. Rumor had it that the Yale Club in New York City had a 14-year supply of booze in its basement.

Fashion, Fads and Film Stars

During the 1920s, many Americans had extra money to spend—and spend it they did, on movies, fashion and consumer goods such as ready-to-wear clothing and home appliances like electric refrigerators. In particular, they bought radios.

The first commercial radio station in the United States, Pittsburgh’s KDKA , hit the airwaves in 1920. Two years later Warren G. Harding became the first president to address the nation by radio —and three years later there were more than 500 stations in the nation. By the end of the 1920s, there were radios in more than 12 million households.

People also swarmed to see Hollywood movies: Historians estimate that, by the end of the decades, three-quarters of the American population visited a movie theater every week, and actors like Charlie Chaplin , Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino and Tallulah Bankhead became household names.

But the most important consumer product of the 1920s was the automobile . Low prices (the Ford Model T cost just $260 in 1924) and generous credit made cars affordable luxuries at the beginning of the decade; by the end, they were practically necessities.

By 1929 there was one car on the road for every five Americans. Meanwhile, an economy of automobiles was born: Businesses like service stations and motels sprang up to meet drivers’ needs—as did the burgeoning oil industry .

The Jazz Age

Cars also gave young people the freedom to go where they pleased and do what they wanted. (Some pundits called them “bedrooms on wheels.”) What many young people wanted to do was dance: the Charleston, the cake walk, the black bottom and the flea hop were popular dances of the era.

Jazz bands played at venues like the Savoy and the Cotton Club in New York City and the Aragon in Chicago ; radio stations and phonograph records (100 million of which were sold in 1927 alone) carried their tunes to listeners across the nation. Some older people objected to jazz music’s “vulgarity” and “depravity” (and the “moral disasters” it supposedly inspired), but many in the younger generation loved the freedom they felt on the dance floor.

The novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald chronicled the hedonism and excitement of the Jazz Age—Fitzgerald once claimed that the 1920s were “the most expensive orgy in history”—while other writers, artists, musicians and designers ushered in a new era of experimental Art Deco and modernist creativity.

Prohibition Era

During the 1920s, some freedoms were expanded while others were curtailed. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1919, had banned the manufacture and sale of “intoxicating liquors,” and at 12 a.m. on January 16, 1920, the federal Volstead Act closed every tavern, bar and saloon in the United States. From then on, it was illegal to sell any “intoxication beverages” with more than 0.5 percent alcohol.

This drove the liquor trade underground—now, instead of ordinary bars, people simply went to nominally illegal speakeasies, where liquor was controlled by bootleggers, racketeers and other organized crime figures such as Chicago gangster Al Capone . (Capone reportedly had 1,000 gunmen and half of Chicago’s police force on his payroll.)

To many middle-class white Americans, Prohibition was a way to assert some control over the unruly immigrant masses who crowded the nation’s cities. For instance, to the so-called “Drys,” beer was known as “Kaiser brew.” Drinking was a symbol of all they disliked about the modern city, and eliminating alcohol would, they believed, turn back the clock to an earlier and more comfortable time

Immigration and Racism in the 1920s

Prohibition was not the only source of social tension during the 1920s. An anti- Communist “Red Scare” in 1919 and 1920 encouraged a widespread nativist and anti-immigrant hysteria. This led to the passage of an extremely restrictive immigration law, the National Origins Act of 1924 , which set immigration quotas that excluded some people (Eastern Europeans and Asians) in favor of others (Northern Europeans and people from Great Britain, for example).

Immigrants were hardly the only targets in this decade. The Great Migration of Black Americans from the rural South to Northern cities and the increasing visibility of Black culture—jazz and blues music, for example, and the literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance —discomfited some white Americans. Millions of people, not just in the South but across the country, joined the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

By the middle of the decade, the KKK had two million members, many of whom believed the Klan represented a return to all the “values” that the fast-paced, city-slicker Roaring Twenties were trampling. More specifically, the 1920s represented economic and political uplift for Black Americans that threatened the social hierarchy of Jim Crow oppression. 

Early Civil Rights Activism

During this decade, Black Americans sought stable employment, better living conditions and political participation. Many who migrated to the North found jobs in the automobile, steel, shipbuilding and meatpacking industries. But with more work came more exploitation.

In 1925, civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph founded the first predominantly Black labor union , the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters , to draw attention to the discriminatory hiring practices and working conditions for Blacks. And as housing demands increased for Black people in the North, so did discriminatory housing practices that led to a rise of urban ghettos, where Black Americans—excluded from white neighborhoods—were relegated to inadequate, overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions.

Black Americans battled for political and civil rights throughout the Roaring Twenties and beyond. The NAACP launched investigations into Black disenfranchisement in the 1920 presidential election, as well as surges of white mob violence, such as the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.

How Prohibition Fueled the Rise of the Ku Klux Klan

100 years ago, the KKK began terrorizing Catholic immigrants in the name of Prohibition.

Why the Roaring Twenties Left Many Americans Poorer

For some, the Great Depression began in the 1920s.

How Flappers of the Roaring Twenties Redefined Womanhood

Young women with short hairstyles, cigarettes dangling from their painted lips, dancing to a live jazz band, explored new‑found freedoms.

The NAACP also pushed for the passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, a law to make lynching a federal crime, but it was defeated by a Senate filibuster in 1922. A political milestone for Black Americans finally occurred when Oscar De Priest , a Chicago Republican , became the first Black congressman since Reconstruction to be elected to the House of Representatives in 1928.

The Roaring Twenties ushered in several demographic shifts, or what one historian called a “cultural Civil War” between city-dwellers and small-town residents, Protestants and Catholics, Blacks and whites, “New Women” and advocates of old-fashioned family values.

But coming immediately after the hardships of World War I and the Spanish flu epidemic , the Roaring Twenties also gave many middle-class Americans an unprecedented taste of freedom, unbridled fun and upward economic mobility unsurpassed in U.S. history.

What Caused the Roaring Twenties? Not the End of a Pandemic (Probably). Smithsonian Magazine . The Roaring Twenties. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History . The Roaring 20s. PBS: American Experience .

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Home / Essay Samples / History / Contemporary History / Roaring Twenties

Roaring Twenties Essay Examples

The roaring twenties and its impact on america.

The end of World War I brought a time of relief, excitement and prosperity known at the Roaring 20’s. President Coolidge was residing in office during this era of mass cultural changes and advances. A few of the more notable advances were in transportation, radios...

Roaring Twenties – an Explosive Decade of an Alteration of America

The start of the Roaring Twenties began as World War I had come to an end, as many soldiers returned home. Reforms were made that replaced corrupt political leaders to show progress. Films were produced to demonstrate to the public the events of the war...

The Divided Dichotomy of Roaring Twenties

The roaring twenties in American history brought both social and political change to a vast majority of peoples public and personal lifestyle. The economic wealth of the country doubled in numbers, leading the way for a new lifestyle of abundance many have never experienced before....

Changes in Canadian Society in Roaring Twenties

Did you know that 15 million Ford cars were sold by the end of 1927? The Roaring Twenties was a time where consumerism changed Canadian society in a positive way. One way was the introduction of new products that supported daily living. In addition, mass...

Roaring 20s: Decade of Prosperity and Growth

The 20's marked a decade of prosperity and growth. It was a time of transition in culture and in society. It took place in Canada, the UK and particularly the United States, the most notable countries. Metropolitan towns developed and the economy was high for...

The Great Changes During 1920s in America

America in the 1920s was a period of great change. This was the decade in which there was mass production, jazz, cinema, dating, and the introduction of prohibition. Life was very great for all Americans and so that is why this time period is known...

Flappers in Roaring Twenties

The roaring twenties describes a period in American history after World War 1 that experienced dramatic social and political change. The Roaring Twenties was a transitional time period for women in terms of redefining womanhood, expressing themselves, and voicing their opinions. No cultural symbol of...

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About Roaring Twenties

Roaring Twenties is a common reference to the social change and turmoil associated with the 1920s. It was a period of economic prosperity with a distinctive cultural edge in the United States and Europe.

League of Nations, Prohibition, Tulsa race massacre, pinnacle Of The KKK, Harlem Renaissance, Jazz Age, Teapot Dome scandal, Scopes Monkey Trial, first Radio broadcasting, Rise of the automobile, Lindbergh's flight.

The 20s decade saw the large-scale development and use of automobiles, telephones, films, radio, and electrical appliances in the lives of millions in the Western world. Aviation soon became a business. Nations saw rapid industrial and economic growth, accelerated consumer demand, and introduced significant new trends in lifestyle and culture.

On October 29, 1929, also known as Black Tuesday, stock prices on Wall Street collapsed. The events in the United States added to a worldwide depression, later called the Great Depression, that put millions of people out of work around the world throughout the 1930s.

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