that haunted immigrant communities. To
Dos Passos, the executions underscored the
success of the anti- radical crusade: “They are
stronger. They are rich. They hire and fire
the politicians, the old judges,... the college
presidents.” Dos Passos’s lament was a bitter
comment on the triumph of pro- business
conservatism during the 1920s.
In popular memory, the decade that fol-
lowed World War I is recalled as the Jazz Age
or the Roaring Twenties. With its flappers
(young, sexually liberated women), speakeas-
ies (nightclubs that sold liquor in violation
of Prohibition), and a soaring stock market
fueled by easy credit and a get- rich- quick
outlook, it was a time of revolt against moral
rules inherited from the nineteenth century.
Observers from Europe, where class divi-
sions were starkly visible in work, politics,
and social relations, marveled at the unifor-
mity of American life. Factories poured out
standardized consumer goods, their sale pro-
moted by national advertising campaigns.
Conservatism dominated a political system
from which radical alternatives seemed to
have been purged. Radio and the movies
spread mass culture throughout the nation.
Americans seemed to dress alike, think
alike, go to the same movies, and admire
the same larger- than- life national celebrities.
Many Americans, however, did not wel-
come the new secular, commercial culture.
They resented and feared the ethnic and
racial diversity of America’s cities and what
they considered the lax moral standards of
urban life. The 1920s was a decade of pro-
found social tensions— between rural and
urban Americans, traditional and “modern”
Christianity, participants in the burgeoning
consumer culture and those who did not
fully share in the new prosperity.
- CHRONOLOGY •
1915 Reemergence of the Ku
Klux Klan
1919 Schenck v. United States
1920 American Civil Liberties
Union established
1921 Trial of Sacco and
Vanzetti
1922 Washington Naval Arms
Conference
Cable Act
Herbert Hoover’s American
Individualism
1923 Adkins v. Children’s
Hospital
Meyer v. Nebraska
1924 Immigration Act of
1924
Indian Citizenship Act of
1924
1925 Scopes trial
1927 Charles Lindbergh
flies nonstop over the
Atlantic
Sacco and Vanzetti
executed
1927– President Coolidge vetoes
1928 McNary- Haugen farm
bill
1929 Sheppard- Towner Act
repealed
Stock market crashes
1930 Hollywood adopts the
Hays code
Smoot- Hawley Tariff
1932 Reconstruction Finance
Corporation established
Bonus march on
W ashington- •
FROM BUSINESS CULTURE TO GREAT DEPRESSION ★^781