Scanning some of the 1920s headlines, one can see the hectic pace- good and bad- of the decade of the Twenties: Women's vote is legal! Booze isn't! Jolson talks! Millions mourn Rudolph Valentino Senate turns back on League of Nations! Wilson dies a broken man! Stock market creates millionaires! Bankers jump as market crashes!
While women rejoiced over finally gaining suffrage, their victory was politically overshadowed by the Senate's decision to turn America's back on a Europe recovering from World War I and needing an organization to guarantee world peace. Wilson's illness and incompetent staff helped doom entry into the League of Nations. "Senator Henry Cabot Lodge with malevolent ingenuity maneuvered the Senate...On November 19, the Noes won" (Morison 883). So, America turned isolationist. Railroads prospered. What was good for General Motors was to be good for the nation. As tens of thousands of new cars rolled off the Detroit assembly lines, entrepreneurs created construction companies to build roads and bridges and tunnels to accommodate America's new love: the automobile. There was another sort of love: for bootleg liquor, courtesy of the Mafia and other gangsters who brought illegal liquor and sold it in night clubs known as "speakeasies". Jazz flourished as a musical genre, but so did Jim Crow, which kept Negroes from becoming equal citizens. It was an era of easy money where Woolworth's and the Great Atlantic and Pacific opened more stores nationwide to spur buying. Everybody was singing wanting to be rich as Rockefeller, until that fateful October Day when the bubble of Wall Street burst, banks closed, many people lost everything and the new song hit was "Hallelujah I'm a Bum."
Morison, Samuel Eliot: The Oxford History of the American People
New York: Oxford University Press 1965
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