7.8 1920s: Cultural and Political Controversies

Many of the decade's conflicts set urban, modern, more secular Americans against rural and small-town, religious, native-born Americans who felt their values were under threat.

Prohibition: the 18th Amendment (ratified 1919, in effect January 1920) and the Volstead Act banned making, selling and transporting alcohol. Drinking fell overall, but illegal bars called speakeasies and bootlegging flourished, helping gangsters like Al Capone grow powerful. Enforcement was weak, and the 21st Amendment repealed Prohibition in 1933.

The Scopes Trial (1925): Tennessee's Butler Act banned teaching human evolution in public schools. Teacher John Scopes was tried in Dayton, with the American Civil Liberties Union and lawyer Clarence Darrow defending him and William Jennings Bryan helping the prosecution. Scopes was convicted and fined $100 (overturned on a technicality), but Darrow's questioning of Bryan was widely reported, and the trial became a symbol of the clash between fundamentalist religion and modern science.

After the war and the Red Scare, nativism surged. The trial of Italian immigrant anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti for a 1920 robbery and murder became a symbol of anti-immigrant bias to many critics; they were executed in 1927 despite doubts about the evidence.

The Emergency Quota Act (1921) limited immigration from each country to 3 percent of that group's U.S. population in the 1910 census. The Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson–Reed Act) cut that to 2 percent and based it on the 1890 census, before most Southern and Eastern Europeans arrived. It also barred immigration from Asia almost entirely. Immigration from the Western Hemisphere was not limited by quotas, so Mexican immigration grew.

A second Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1915, grew to millions of members by the mid-1920s, strongest in the Midwest and South. It targeted Catholics, Jews and immigrants as well as Black Americans and presented itself as defending traditional morality. It declined quickly after scandals in the late 1920s.

The 19th Amendment (1920) gave women the vote. 'Flappers', young women with short hair and shorter skirts who danced, smoked and drove, became a symbol of new freedom, though most women's lives changed more modestly. More women worked in offices and stores, and Margaret Sanger campaigned for birth control. Critics saw these changes as threats to family and morality.

The Great Migration made Harlem in New York City a center of Black life. The Harlem Renaissance was a flowering of Black art, literature and music. Writers like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Claude McKay explored Black identity and pride, and Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro (1925) named the spirit of the movement. Jazz, created mainly by Black musicians such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, gave the 'Jazz Age' its name.

Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association urged Black pride, economic independence and a return to Africa, attracting a large following before he was convicted of mail fraud and deported in 1927. Violence continued too, including the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, in which a white mob destroyed the prosperous Black Greenwood district.

Writers of the 'Lost Generation', like F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, 1925) and Ernest Hemingway, along with novelist Sinclair Lewis, criticized materialism, conformity and small-town values, reflecting disillusionment after the war.