Preface – The League of Nations, Isolationist Retreat
Woodrow Wilson with his Fourteen Points wanted to be the architect of the post-war peace process. Wilson was a Southerner. He grew up in the South after the Civil War. He knew from his experiences what emotions were left over after a war. He realized that revenge on the part of the winner of the […]
Characteristics of the Twenties Zeitgeist – Cultural Wars
The romanticism of prewar days had disappeared in the shock of aerial bombardment and mustard gas. Necessity and opportunity had combined to free women from claustrophobic styles and ankle-length hair, even while their husbands, sons and lovers returned from the war wounded, bitter, and dazed to take up lives that no longer looked or felt […]
Revolution in Manners and Morals during the 1920s – The Arrival of the Flapper and Sheik
The Twenties was the decade when modern society was established, when more things changed more rapidly than in all the years prior and since, and when urban culture had its beginnings. (Jennings, p. 102) The Twenties was characterized by a rejection of the code of the Victorian Age that held women to stringent standards of […]
The Disillusionment of the Lost Generation and The Rejection of Traditional Values
One of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s characters in This Side of Paradise, “…the seminal novel of the early 1920s” (Moore, p. 239), says “Here was a new generation…grownup to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faith in man shaken.” This describes the mindset of “The Lost Generation”, a term used to refer to the […]
The “Algonquin Round Table”
There was a domestic version of 1920’s Paris expat literary, social scene. It was called “The Algonquin Round Table”, aka “The Vicious Circle”. It was a gathering of American literary and artistic intellectuals, who regularly met in the Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan, NYC and critically commented on the state of American […]
The Harlem Renaissance
During the 1920s, Harlem became the capital of black America, attracting black intellectuals and artists from across the country and the Caribbean. The Harlem Renaissance was the black version of the cultural rejection of the Lost Generation and the Algonquin Round Table. The Harlem Renaissance was the name given to the cultural, social, and artistic […]
Ballyhoo, Fads, Fashions and Follies
If one asked several people what image they had of the 1920s, an answer that might head the list of characteristics is something having to do with craziness, for the nonsense stunts and silly activities that seemed to dominate the social scenes of the Jazz Age. (Allen, Preface, p. 4) Several type of endurance contests […]
Charles A. Lindbergh
Keeping with the tendency of the times to exaggerate most things, The Twenties featured numerous “causes celebres”, where events, fostered by sensationalist media, grabbed hold of the public attention and would not let go. Perhaps the most notable of these “causes celebres” was Charles A. Lindbergh. On May 27, 1927, 25 years old Charles Lindbergh […]
The Scopes Trial
The Scopes trial in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee in the summer of 1925 grabbed the attention of the entire nation. For days on end, people thronged to the town square where they set up tents, jammed the small country court house, read endless newspaper stories and listened to radio broadcasts about the trial […]
Religious Celebrities – Aimee Semple McPherson and William Ashley “Billy” Sunday
Evangelical preachers, with their staged revivalist performances in tents and on radio, abounded all over the country in the Twenties. Two of the most well-known of the religious celebrities were Aimee Semple McPherson and William Ashley “Billy” Sunday. Aimee Semple McPherson, also known as “Sister Aimee” or simply “Sister”, was a Los Angeles based Canadian-American […]