South Dakota School of Mines and Technology at Rapid City; state supported; coeducational; chartered 1885, opened 1887 as Dakota School of Mines, renamed 1943. Of note are an engineering and mining experiment station, an institute of atmospheric sciences, a natural science field station, and a geology museum.

Twenties, The. The twenties have spawned an image of bathtub gin, speakeasies, flappers, and decadence: in short, The Jazz Age. This superficial vision masks a far more complex history. In this period Americans grappled with the disruptions of ethnic and cultural conflict, the growth of the mass media and a consumer culture, and a transformation in women's roles. Acutely conscious of far‐reaching social changes, they struggled to interpret and cope with an increasingly modern society.

A Decade of Prosperity.

This sense of change was evident in the title Republican party politicians gave to the period. Calling it “The New Era,” presidents Warren G. Harding (1921–1923), Calvin Coolidge (1923–1929), and Herbert Hoover (1929–1933) promoted government‐business cooperation. After decades of reform activity, including efforts to enlarge federal regulation of corporations and the economy, demands for corporate reform receded, as big business enjoyed unprecedented public approval. “The man who builds a factory builds a temple,” Coolidge intoned; “The man who works there, worships there.”

This apotheosis of business stemmed in part from Americans' delight in widespread prosperity. The affluence of the 1920s, symbolized by a booming stock market, was rooted in surging industrial productivity, which rose 64 percent between 1920 and 1930, compared with only 12 percent in 1910–1920. The automotive industry—a major factor in the boom—increased annual car production from 1.5 million in 1919 to 4.8 million in 1929. Other dynamic economic sectors included the steel, rubber, chemical, and construction industries. The growth derived in part from technological developments, such as the widespread electrification of factory production, as well as from efficient new assembly‐line methods. Observers came from all over the world to witness what was called The Ford Miracle, Henry Ford's plant in River Rouge, Michigan, but Ford's company was only the most famous of the mass production industries churning out a seemingly limitless array of consumer goods.

The economy of the 1920s also became increasingly concentrated. In manufacturing and mining, over 1,200 mergers took place; in banking and finance, by 1929, thanks to consolidations, 1 percent of the banks controlled 46 percent of the country's banking resources. In that same year, 200 corporations owned approximately 20 percent of the nation's wealth. More and more Americans found themselves working for large corporations—either in blue‐collar jobs or in the rapidly expanding ranks of white‐collar employees necessary to maintain modern business operations. These changes in the nature of work undoubtedly led to more alienating labor, but there were compensations. Increasingly, Americans could experience the satisfactions of consumption and leisure.

Contemporary observers rightly viewed the plethora of products—electric toasters and irons, pastel‐colored plumbing fixtures and ranges, phonographs and radios, automobile and sporting goods equipment—as a consumer‐goods revolution. Although poorer Americans, especially African Americans and recent immigrants, could enjoy the new products only sparingly, innovations such as installment buying enhanced working‐ and middle‐class Americans' buying power. A significant portion of their dollars—an increase of 300 percent during the decade—went to leisure‐time pursuits. Americans enjoyed vacations, played at amusement parks, patronized sporting events, and idolized sports heroes like George Herman (“Babe”) Ruth and Red Grange. Above all, they flocked to the movies and worshipped screen stars like Mary Pickford, Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks. An estimated twenty to thirty million patrons a week helped to make the movies a key forum for entertainment and the spread of new cultural values. The growing interest in consumer goods and leisure‐time pursuits was stimulated by an increasingly sophisticated advertising industry, which developed new methods to encourage Americans to derive satisfaction and identity from the products they bought.

Changing Women's Roles and Urbanization.

Among the most eager consumers were young women who helped to create the persona most identified with the 1920s: the flapper. The flapper's daring appearance—bobbed hair, cosmetics, short skirts—matched her audacious behavior—smoking, drinking, jazz dancing, and sexual experimentation. Although the flapper stereotype exaggerates the liberation women enjoyed in the decade, sexual mores were evolving. Between the popularization of Freudian notions about sexuality, the movies' portrayal of highly sexualized relationships, changing notions about equality within marriage, and the increased availability of birth control, new sexual patterns emerged.

Contemporaries observed other changes in women's roles that seemed to augur the New Woman. The Nineteenth Amendment gave women the vote in 1920. Beginning around 1910, women's participation in the paid workforce grew. In addition, a greater percentage of married women worked for wages and the increased availability of respectable white‐collar office and sales work expanded the ranks of employed young, middle‐class women. Despite their increased presence in the labor market, most women encountered discrimination. In general, career women were limited to such “feminized” professions as nursing, teaching, and social work, while domestic work remained the only option for most women of color. Although more married women were working, social conventions continued to view child rearing and and housekeeping as women's most important roles, an idea that profoundly constricted women's opportunities for careers and mobility.

Another important hallmark of social change was the Census Bureau's finding that as of 1920 the nation had become more urban than rural. Although based on a somewhat arbitrary definition of “urban,” the bureau's calculations nonetheless, symbolize the way urban life increasingly dominated the American scene. America's cities had been burgeoning for years, augmented not just by rural‐to‐urban migration, but by massive immigration as well. Although immigration slowed dramatically during World War I, it quickly revived after the armistice: In 1921, over 800,000 newcomers entered the United States. Also contributing to urbanization was the “Great Migration” of over a million African Americans out of the South. Lured by wartime job opportunities in northern industries, they eagerly fled the South's poverty and racial caste system. Although most found a better life in the North, here too, African Americans encountered racial segregation and discrimination.

Cultural Conflict.

Many Americans embraced the social changes of the decade—the modern woman, the consumer culture, urban life. Others, however, alarmed at the pace of change, helped make the 1920s a period of deep cultural conflict. The Fundamentalist movement disrupted many Protestant denominations as its leaders insisted upon their literalistic reading of the Bible. Their aggressive campaign to prohibit the teaching of the theory of evolution in the public schools, culminating in the Scopes Trial, thrust religious controversy into the public arena. After decades of agitation, national prohibition went into effect in 1920 with the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment, which prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. Prohibition represented the use of federal law to impose Protestant, old‐stock moral values of restraint and sobriety on the rest of the nation, especially immigrants. The movement to repeal Prohibition, which began almost immediately, remained highly controversial throughout the decade. Whether a candidate was “wet” or “dry” loomed large in many political campaigns.

Anti‐immigrant sentiment, a factor in the Sacco and Vanzetti case, permeated American politics in the 1920s. Following on the heels of the Red Scare of 1919–1921, rooted initially in the fear of immigrant radicals, the immigration laws of 1921 and 1924 established restrictive quotas for southern and eastern Europeans, and excluded Asian immigrants altogether. Immigration restriction proved popular, especially among members of the newly re‐constituted Ku Klux Klan. Claiming over three million members, the Klan at its peak in mid‐decade was an especially powerful political force in the South, Middle West, and West. Limited to native‐born, white, Protestant males (although women could join a female auxiliary), the Klan targeted immigrants, blacks, Jews, and Catholics for failing to live up to its definition of “100% Americanism.”

Intellectual and Cultural Creativity.

Intellectuals deplored these reactionary movements, or what they called the village mentality. The writers and artists known collectively as the Lost Generation, which included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), and William Carlos Williams (1883–1963), articulated a searing critique of the sterility of American culture. Sinclair Lewis and H.L. Mencken satirized small‐town provinciality and middle‐class conformity. These writers also explored the possibilities and dilemmas facing men and women as they encountered the more modern, and often more alienating, world of the early twentieth century.

Another group of intellectuals, African Americans who participated in the Harlem Renaissance, had different concerns. Writers like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Claude McKay (1890–1948) used their talents to promote black pride and to explore African American culture's distinctive contribution to American society. So, too, did musicians and performers like Edward (“Duke”) Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Paul Robeson. The vitality of their work and the community that nourished their creativity—Harlem—points to the need for a vision of the 1920s that moves beyond stereotypes of flappers and jazzhounds to encompass the full diversity of the American population and its struggles to adapt to a rapidly changing society.
See also Amusement Parks and Theme Parks; Anticommunism; Baseball; Birth Control and Family Planning; Business Cycle; Chemical Industry; Courtship and Dating; Electricity and Electrification; Film; Football; Iron and Steel Industry; Literature: Since World War I; Marriage and Divorce; Motor Vehicles; Nativist Movement; Religion; Science: From 1914 to 1945; Sexual Morality and Sex Reform; Smith, Alfred E.; Sports: Professional Sports; Stock Market Crash of 1929; Temperance and Prohibition.

Bibliography

Lawrence W. Levine , Defender of the Faith, William Jennings Bryan: The Last Decade 1915–1925, 1965.
John Braeman, Robert H. Bremner, and David Brody, eds., Change and Continuity in Twentieth Century America: The 1920s, 1968.
Lary May , Screening out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry, 1980.
Roland Marchand , Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940, 1985.
Nancy Cott , The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 1987.
James R. Grossman , Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners and the Great Migration, 1989.
Lizabeth Cohen , Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939, 1990.
Ann Douglas , Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, 1995.
Lynn Dumenil , The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s, 1995.

Lynn Dumenil