The 1920s and 1970s

In the history of any decade, there is much interpenetration of social, economic, and political trends, and the experience of such trends pervades the entire culture. Thus the issues informing comparisons of decades become issues of cultural history, and indeed it is not too much to say that the culture issues from history. This seems decisively true in the case of the 1920s, the character and tenor of which issued from World War I, and which "lies like a band of scorched earth dividing that [earlier] time from ours" (Tuchman, 1981, p. xv). By the 1920s for the U.S. and Western Europe, a process of fundamental social and political change had begun that has essentially continued to the present day. Tuchman says that the Great War caused many fundamental changes: "in destroying beliefs, changing ideas, and leaving incurable wounds of disillusion, it created a physical as well as psychologic gulf between two epochs" (p. xv).

In the social realm, the transformation was consciously revo

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ears to have been the greatest factor in setting off the depression, and Allen contrasts the exuberant optimism of 1929 and the low pitch of 1930. On the other hand, the stock market crash reached consumers in practical ways, in the form of pay cuts, layoffs, and production cutbacks owing to the absence of paying markets. The Depression, says Allen, was both financial and psychological (Allen, 1964, pp. 284-5). Meanwhile on the American political front, came social tensions arising from scandals and unrest. The Teapot Dome scandal, involving Harding Administration cabinet-officer collusion in special deals for Sinclair Oil's lease of U.S. Navy Oil Reserve wells in Wyoming was only the most famous of political corruption incidents that came to light after Harding's death in 1923 (Allen, 1964, pp. 113-17). The so-called Palmer raids of the early 1920s arose from the Big Red Scare in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer authorized arrests of socialist and liberal political figures as threats to American life. The executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, Italian-American anarchists accused of murder during a train robbery, appear to have represented the Red Scare peak (pp. 70-2). Meanwhile, a number
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Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)

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