Guided Readings: The Jazz Age - The American 1920s The 1920s - An Overview In 1931, a journalist named Frederick Lewis Allen published a volume of popular history that did more to shape the popular image of the 1920s than any book ever written by a professional historian. Entitled Only Yesterday, it depicted the 1920s as a cynical, hedonistic interlude between the Great War and the Great Depression, a decade of dissipation, jazz bands, raccoon coats, and bathtub gin. Allen argued that World War I shattered Americans' faith in reform and moral crusades, leading the younger generation to rebel against traditional taboos while their elders engaged in an orgy of consumption and speculation. The popular image of the 1920s as a decade of prosperity and riotous living, of bootleggers and gangsters, flappers and hot jazz, flagpole sitters and marathon dancers, is indelibly etched in the American psyche. But this image is also profoundly misleading. The 1920s was a decade of deep cultural conflict. Unlike the pre-Civil War decades, when the fundamental conflicts in American society involved geographic region, or the gilded Age, when conflicts centered on ethnicity and social class, the conflicts of the 1920s were primarily cultural, pitting a more cosmopolitan, modernist urban culture against a more provincial, traditionalist, rural culture. The decade witnessed a titanic struggle between an old and a new America. Immigration, race, alcohol, evolution, gender politics, sexual morality all became major cultural battlefields during the '20s. Wets battled drys, religious modernists battled religious fundamentalists, urban ethnics battled the Ku Klux Klan. The 1920s was a decade of profound social change. The most obvious signs of change were the rise of a consumer-oriented economy and of mass entertainment, which helped to bring about a "revolution in morals and manners." Sexual mores, gender roles, hair styles, and dress all changed profoundly during the 1920s. Many Americans regarded these changes as a liberation from the country's Victorian past. But for others, morals seemed to be decaying and the United States seemed to be changing in undesirable ways. The result was a thinly veiled "cultural civil war." Back to menu Next
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