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Education was boosting in the 1920s more people were required to go to school and remain in school until graduation

The battle over evolution

Opponents of Darwin's theories posted up in Tennessee and started a war that still wages today.
Bible Belt
those areas of the southern and midwestern US and western Canada where Protestant fundamentalism is widely practiced.
John T. Scopes
John Thomas Scopes was a teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, who was charged on May 5, 1925, with violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution in Tennessee schools.
Fundamentalism
a form of a religion, especially Islam or Protestant Christianity, that upholds belief in the strict, literal interpretation of scripture.

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Prosperity—real, sustained, and widely shared—put much of the “roar” into the twenties.
Great new industries suddenly sprouted Supplying electrical power for the humming new machines became a giant business in the 1920s.
The nation’s deepening “love affair” with the automobile headlined a momentous shift in the
character of the economy.

Babe ruth: the "Sultan of sweat"
Sports became big business in the consumer economy of the 1920s.
Buying on credit was another innovative feature of the postwar economy. “Possess today
and pay tomorrow” was the message directed at buyers.

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The “Red Scare” of 1919-20 resulted in Attorney General Mitchell Palmer using a series of
raids to round up and arrest about 6,000 suspected Communists. In December of 1919, 249 alleged alien radicals were deported on the Buford. The Red Scare severely cut back free speech for a period, since the hysteria caused many people to want to eliminate any Communists and their ideas.

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The new Ku Klux Klan was anti-foreign, anti-Catholic, anti-black,
anti-Jewish, anti-pacifist, anti-Communist, anti-internationalist,
anti-revolutionist, anti-bootlegger, anti-gambling, anti-adultery, and
anti-birth control. At its peak in the 1920s, it claimed 5 million members, mostly from the South, but it also featured a reign of hooded horror. The KKK employed the same tactics of fear, lynchings, and intimidation. It was stopped not by the exposure of its horrible racism, but by its money fraud.

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In 1920-21, some 800,000 European “New Immigrants”
came to the U.S. and Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, in which newcomers
from Europe were restricted at any year to a quota, which was set at 3% of the people of their nationality who lived in the U.S. in 1910. The immigrant tide was now cut off, but those that were in America struggled to adapt. Labor unions in particular had difficulty in organizing because of the differences in race, culture, and nationality.

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The 18th Amendment prohibited the sale of alcohol, but this law never was effectively enforced because so many people violated it. Prohibition was particularly supported by women and the
Women’s Christian Temperance Union, but it also posed problems
from countries that produced alcohol and tried to ship it to the U.S.

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Prohibition led to the rise of gangs that competed to distribute liquor. In the gang wars of Chicago in the 1920s, about 500 people were
murdered, but captured criminals were rare, and convictions even rarer, since gangsters often provided false alibis for each other. Gangs moved into other activities as well: prostitution, gambling,
and narcotics, and by 1930, their annual profit was a 12–18 billion dollars.

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A new industrial revolution slipped into high gear in America in the 1920s. Of all the inventions of the era, the automobile cut the deepest track. Americans adapted rather than invented the gasoline engine; Europeans can claim the
original honor.
motorcar capital of America. Frederick W. Taylor ((1856-1915) A prominent inventor and engineer who developed "scientific
management," a system of shop-floor organization that stressed efficient, highly supervised
labor management and production methods. His methods revolutionized manufacturing
across the industrialized world.) ,

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The impact of the self-propelled carriage on various aspects of American life was tremendous.
New industries boomed lustily; older ones grew sickly. The petroleum business experienced
an explosive development. Hundreds of oil derricks shot up in California, Texas, and
Oklahoma, as these states expanded wondrously and the wilderness frontier became an
industrial frontier.

Gas Station, 1923
Gas stations began to appear in 1913

The modern Woman in the drivers seat
the Ford Motor Company used
advertising to convey that driving an automobile was respectable for women. A woman who drove was not only modern, but she also better fulfilled her duties as a household manager.

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In the 1890s, Guglielmo Marconi had already invented wireless
telegraphy and his invention was used for long distance communication
in the Great War.
Then, in November of 1920, the first voice-carrying radio station
began broadcasting when KDKA (in Pittsburgh) told of presidential
candidate Warren G. Harding’s landslide victory.
While the automobile lured Americans away from home, the radio
lured them back, as millions tuned in to hear favorites like Amos
‘n’ Andy and listen to the Eveready Hour.
Sports were further stimulated while politicians had to adjust
their speaking techniques to support the new medium, and music could finally be heard electronically.

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Thomas Edison was one of those who invented the movie, but in 1903, the real birth of the movie came with The Great Train Robbery.

A first full-length feature was D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, which stunned viewers visually, but seemed to glorify the KKK in the Reconstruction era.

The first “talkie” or movie with sound was The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson. Hollywood, California, quickly became a hot spot for movie production, due to its favorable climate and landscape.

The first movies featured nudity and female vampires called

“vamps” until shocked public forced codes of censorship to

be placed on them. Propaganda movies of World War I boosted the popularity of movies.

Critics, though, did bemoan the vulgarization of popular tastes wrought by radio and movies.

These new mediums led to the loss of old family and oral traditions. Radio shows and movies seemed to lessen interaction and heighten passivity.

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For the first time, more Americans lived in urban areas, not the rural countryside.

The birth-control movement was led by fiery Margaret Sanger, and

the National Women’s Party began in 1923 to campaign for an Equal

Rights Amendment to the Constitution.

The Fundamentalists of old-time religion even lost ground to the

new Modernists, who liked to think that God was a “good

guy” and the universe was a nice place, as opposed to the

traditional view that man was a born sinner and in need of forgiveness

through Christ.

A brash new group shocked many conservative older folk (who labeled

the new style as full of erotic suggestions and inappropriate).

They danced new dances like the risqué “Charleston” and dressed more provocatively. Sigmund Freud said that sexual repression was responsible for most of society’s ills, and that pleasure and health demanded sexual

gratification and liberation. Jazz was the music of flappers, and Blacks like W.C. Handy,

“Jelly Roll” Morton, and Joseph King Oliver gave birth to

its bee-bopping sounds.

Black pride spawned such leaders as Langston Hughes of the Harlem

Renaissance and famous for The Weary Blues, which appeared in 1926, and Marcus Garvey (founder of the United Negro Improvement Association and inspiration for the Nation of Islam).

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There was much over-speculation in the 1920s, especially on Florida
home properties, and even during times of prosperity, many banks failed each year.

1. The whole system was built on fragile credit.

2. The stock market’s stellar rise made headline news (and
enticed investors to drop their savings into the market’s
volatility).

Secretary of the Treasury Mellon reduced the amount of taxes that
rich people had to pay, thus conceivably thrusting the burden onto the
middle class.

1. He reduced the national debt, though, but has since been accused of indirectly encouraging the Bull Market.

Whatever the case, the prosperities of the 1920s was setting up the
crash that would lead to the poverty and suffering of the 1930s.

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Gasoline engines also provided the power that enabled humans to fulfill the age-old dream
of sprouting wings. As aviation gradually got off the ground, the world slowly shrank. The public was made increasingly air-minded by unsung heroes—often martyrs—who appeared as stunt fliers at
fairs and other public gatherings.
In 1927 modest and skillful Charles A. Lindbergh, the so-called Flyin’ Fool, electrified the
world with the first solo west-to-east conquest of the Atlantic.

Lucky Lindy
Charles A. Lindbergh; The first person to fly solo across the Atlantic, Lindbergh became an
acclaimed celebrity— perhaps the first media-made “hero” of the twentieth century.

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By the dawn of the 1920s, many of the old writers had died, and those that survived, like Edith Wharton and Willa Cather were popular.

Many of the new writers, though, hailed from different backgrounds.

H.L. Mencken, the “Bad Boy of Baltimore,” found fault in much of America. He wrote the monthly American Mercury.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby, both of which captured the society of the “Jazz Age,” including odd mix of glamour and the cruelty.

Ernest Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises, and A Farewell to Arms,

and became a voice for the “Lost Generation”

young folks who’d been ruined by the disillusionment of WWI.

Sherwood Anderson wrote Winesburg, Ohio describing small-town life in America.

Sinclair Lewis disparaged small-town America in his Main Street and Babbitt.

Poetry also was innovative, and Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot were two great poets.

Eugene O’Neill’s plays like Strange Interlude laid bare human emotions.

Other famous writers included Claude McKay and Zora Neale Hurston.

Architecture also made its marks with the designs of Frank Lloyd

Wright, Wright was an understudy of Louis Sullivan (of Chicago

skyscraper fame) and amazed people with his use of concrete, glass, and

steel and his unconventional theory that “form follows

function.”

Champion of skyscrapers, the Empire State Building debuted in 1931.