The chapter begins with a panoramic view of the 1920s that features evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, Frederick Lewis Allen's fictional Smiths, and some real-life examples of the social changes that occurred during these years. Together these vignettes reveal the dominant cultural stresses of the decade: the conflicts between old and new, confidence and insecurity, and modernism and traditionalism, all of which uncomfortably coexisted in a rapidly changing society.

The Roaring Economy

If anything roared in the "Roaring Twenties," it was industry and commerce. The economy experienced the greatest peacetime growth rate ever. Several factors accounted for this success: technological advances; booming construction and automobile industries; corporate consolidation; new techniques of business and personnel management (called "welfare capitalism"); and the growth of advertising and the nation's consumer culture. A modern ethic of high spending and high consumption worked its way into American society.

A Mass Society

New systems of national distribution and marketing led not simply to a higher standard of living but increasingly to a mass culture and a more homogenized society. Traditional institutions that had bound Americans together weakened during this decade. Local communities and churches, which had often served as the arbiters of morality and propriety, found their authority undercut by new tastemakers in Hollywood and New York. Automobiles gave people new mobility and independence and so undermined the family and the community. Public education also diminished family control by creating competing centers of authority for children, including a new peer culture of students. A modern lifestyle began to emerge, complete with increasingly independent women, the new media of radio and film, a standardized culture, impersonal cities, spectator sports, jazz music, alienated intellectuals, and a rising tide of black nationalism.

Defenders of the Faith

Mass society sharpened awareness of the differences between modern and traditional America. As modernism transformed the country, traditional culture hardened, perceiving change with suspicion and diversity with dismay. The unspent anti-radicalism of World War I combined with growing fear of foreigners to produce the most restrictive immigration laws in history. The National Origins Acts specifically reduced the flow of eastern and southern European immigrants, deemed most different (and therefore most threatening) to native Protestant America.

Prohibition, best understood as class and cultural legislation, rested on a similar anti-urban and anti-foreign bias. It drew support from many segments of the electorate, but its most ardent advocates came primarily from embattled Protestant evangelical churches. A resuscitated Ku Klux Klan fought to revive a lost America, free from "aliens," blacks, and uppity women, while a fundamentalist crusade succeeded in both enacting legislation to prevent the teaching of modern theories of evolution and distributing millions of copies of pamphlets called The Fundamentals, which promoted a return to more orthodox Christian beliefs. By the middle of the decade the defenders of an older faith had begun to falter, the victims of their own corruption and their own successes.

Republicans Ascendant

In government, the administration of Warren G. Harding ushered in a return to "normalcy," which proved anything but normal. For the first time since Reconstruction, a single party—the Republicans—ruled Washington. Dedicated to cautious, business-led policies, Harding and his successor, Calvin Coolidge, reversed the reformist trends of the previous two decades.

Government became the handmaiden of private enterprise. Lower taxes, higher tariffs, fewer antitrust suits, and more support for private collaboration and consolidation characterized public policy in the 1920s. Promoted by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, "associationalism" encouraged trade associations and other business organizations to order and stabilize the economy, spreading a gospel of efficiency and cooperation among businesses. Oligopolies dominated nearly every basic industry; by limiting competition, they helped to coordinate industrial policy and increase productivity. Meanwhile the interests of laborers and farmers received scant attention from Washington as prosperity soared.

In the election of 1928, a divided Democratic party swung from its rural to its urban wing and nominated former New York governor, Al Smith. The majority Republicans ran Herbert Hoover, a Quaker, a "dry" (i.e., an advocate of Prohibition), and an enormously popular cabinet member. Hurt by his urban roots, his Catholicism, and his advocacy of Prohibition repeal, Smith won only 8 states. Buried in the returns, though, were the stirrings of a major political realignment. The 12 largest cities, solidly Republican in 1924, went to Smith, moved to the Democratic column by their growing immigrant populations. Together with western farmers, urban immigrants would form the tangible nucleus of a powerful, longstanding coalition that would transform the Democrats into the majority party by 1932.

The Great Bull Market

Over the course of the 1920s, a wave of speculation boosted the stock market to unprecedented heights. Americans increasingly bought stock, like many of their other purchases, on credit. When the market crashed in October 1929, it did not cause the great Depression, but it did severely damage the banking industry and destroy the boundless confidence that had accumulated during the decade. Ultimately, the crash began a downward economic cycle that would topple not only the American economy but also those of nations around the world.