The Roaring Twenties

Hi, and welcome back to Heimler's History.

Ooh, we had ourselves a good time

in World War I, opening up to the world

and all of its global affairs,

but by the time the 1920s roll around,

we're ready to get out

of that relationship and just

work on us for a little bit.

"Look, Europe, I just don't have room in my

life for both of you, you and your drama.

Look, it's not because I don't like

you anymore, it's because I hate you.

Look, my friends don't like you and I

can't exactly break up with them, so..."

[LAUGHTER]

Anyway, it was during this time

that America decided to take a little time

away from the relationship and figure our

own selves out for a little while,

and as it turns out,

it was a decade of astonishing

upheaval and enormous prosperity.

So, if you're ready,

I'm ready, let's get to it.

(It's time to kick it old school).

[MUSIC]

Okay, it's difficult to conceive just how much changed during the 1920s,

but I think you'll get a sense of it if I just list them one after the other,

that way you get a sense of the mounting craziness. First, there was the curbing of free speech

and something called the Red Scare. So, in 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution

happened over in Russia and now they were

altogether communist,

and if there's one thing good old

red-blooded Americans hate,

it's a communist.

And so, fearing that the commies would

infiltrate America,

guys like Mitchell Palmer took up crusades

to purge America of its reds, which,

in general, happened to be the liberals.

Our fear of communism became so acute

that we passed a series of laws

which effectively shut people's mouths so

that they could not advocate for violence

as a means of social change, which, as

it turns out, is a hallmark of communism.

So, do we really need free speech?

Nah.

Second, during this time you've got

the spawning of a new

and revived Ku Klux Klan.

In case you didn't know,

this is a group of folks who dressed up

in their bedsheets and bandied

around the following principles.

They were anti-foreign, anti-Catholic,

anti-Black, anti-Jewish, anti-pacifist,

anti-communist, anti-internationalist,

anti-bootlegger, anti-evolution,

anti-gambler, anti-adultery...

Wait a minute, who's for adultery?

And anti-birth control.

But they didn't only organize based

on what they were against,

these guys were also for a few things too.

The Ku Klux Klan were for things like

whiteness, and Protestant-ness,

and Native Americans.

No, not those Native Americans.

[BELL DINGS] There it is.

And I have to admit,

sometimes it's hard to take these guys

very seriously because they have

the following real ranks

in their organization.

They have imperial wizards,

grand goblins, and king Kriegels.

And frankly, sometimes it's hard to know

whether to fear these guys or to tell

the dungeon master that you're ordering

a full-blown melee on their demogorgon.

Third thing going on in the '20s,

we close that spigot on immigration.

Not only were we tired of fighting

on European soil, we had also grown tired

of all those Europeans trying

to find a home on our soil.

So, we get the Immigration Act of 1924

which squeezed the immigration quota down

to 2%, and all of this ended an era

of almost unrestricted

immigration to the United States.

Fourth, there was Prohibition.

You'll recall that women and churches had

been crusading loudly and for decades

to get that devil drink out of American

hands, and the craziest part is that they

crusaded so loudly that Congress passed

a constitutional amendment,

namely the Eighteenth Amendment,

abolishing the manufacture

and sale of intoxicating liquors.

But prohibitionists underestimated just

how much Americans,

and especially the European immigrants,

loved their giggle sauce.

They also failed to contend with just how

difficult it would be to enforce

a law which most Americans opposed.

And so, Americans didn't really stop

drinking all that much, they just

took their drinking underground.

Secret bars called speakeasies sprang up

dozens at a time in every town and city.

Enforcement officers were bribed

to the extreme, and all in all,

Prohibition, the last spasm

of progressive impulse, was a failure.

Fifth, there was a giant clash between

anti-religious thought and religious

thought, and all of this was concentrated

on what became known as

the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925.

So, the story is, several states had made

it illegal to teach Darwinian evolution

in public schools, and Tennessee was one

of those states, and it was a high school

biology teacher by the name of John T.

Scopes who decided he did not like

that law very much and would

teach Darwin anyway.

Now, not surprisingly,

his illegal shenanigans were made

public and the trial was set.

The case shouldn't have been

that spectacular,

but spectacular personalities showed up

and made sure that this case became

a national triumph

for one side or the other.

The famed criminal lawyer Clarence Darrow

arrived to defend Scopes,

and the oft presidential hopeful

William Jennings Bryan showed up

to prosecute on behalf of what everyone

was calling fundamentalist Christians.

Long story short, Scopes was found guilty

but it didn't really matter,

because the lasting influence of the trial

was that it cast doubt on the

fundamentalists and their cause.

Sixth, there was the rise

of mass consumption.

Henry Ford had perfected the assembly line

and everybody fell in love with his

Model T, and Henry Ford's manufacturing

principles began to spread,

and all of a sudden America is churning

out manufactured goods like never before

and people are buying

them like never before.

And the good news is,

ordinary people didn't even have to have

the money to buy all of this stuff

because of the rise of consumer credit.

It was the rise of what the credit

companies called "possess now,

pay tomorrow."

Seventh, there was

a revolution in entertainment.

With the advent of radio and motion

pictures, people were consuming sporting

events at home and politicians could now

deliver their message to millions

of people at a time

instead of just thousands.

Eighth, there was

a revolution for the ladies.

Margaret Sanger,

who was a fierce feminist,

organized a birth control movement which

openly talked about using contraceptives.

Women were finding freedom in the way they

dressed and the way they carried

themselves, and case

in point, the flappers.

These women flouted tradition by cutting

their hair short, smoking and drinking,

and even showing their ankles in public.

Ninth and finally, American literature was

coming into its own in the form

of something called modernism,

which is a habit of thought

which questions authority and conventions.

You've got F.

Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby,

Ernest Hemingway and A Farewell to Arms,

William Faulkner

and The Sound and the Fury.

And mostly concentrated in the North,

you had a proliferation of Black

authors coming into their own as well.

This was a movement that became

known as the "Harlem Renaissance."

You had Claude McKay and Langston Hughes

and Zora Neale Hurston.

You put all this together and you had

a decade that roared, sometimes in fury,

sometimes in laughter,

but a roar nonetheless.

But the roar couldn't last forever.

In fact, very soon,

the roar will be reduced to a whimper

by the great stock market crash of 1929,

but we'll have to save

that for another lecture.

I'll see you next time.