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I swear if another random whore gets me another Gmail saying SOMEONE POSTED HERE I'm make you jump off the Eiffel tower.

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you niggas still talking onnis bitch like tht thts crazy asf!! but fwmm onna ig @toorawdayy if you want the spam and private spam dm

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you niggas still talking onnis bitch like tht thts crazy asf!! but fwmm onna ig @toorawdayy if you want the spam and private spam dm

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bitch bend over , stand up on yo toes , lock yo knees back , bitch breathhh throughh yo noseee .

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bitch bend over , stand up on yo toes , lock yo knees back , bitch breathhh throughh yo noseee .

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didnt een kno ts existed till i got a notis .

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didnt een kno ts existed till i got a notis .

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anyone know where peyton at

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girl its me pals or pais or paris or paisley or whatever u called me lol

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girl its me pals or pais or paris or paisley or whatever u called me lol

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english4.02.pdf - Powerful Ora,on Assessment Step 1: Read the following speech from Senator David Bennett Hill "I am a Democrat and Not A Revolutionist" | Course Hero

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View english4.02.pdf from HISTORY 204 at FLVS. Powerful Ora,on Assessment Step 1: Read the following speech from Senator David Bennett Hill "I am a Democrat and Not A Revolutionist" given in July

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Leaving ts is crazy 😂

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my dad bloocked zoom- LETS GOBRUNCH INSTEAD :D

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my dad bloocked zoom- LETS GOBRUNCH INSTEAD :D

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BITCH I MISSED YOUMORE WITH THAT TRIPLE DOUBLE THICKY NICKIE BOOTY 😨

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BITCH I MISSED YOUMORE WITH THAT TRIPLE DOUBLE THICKY NICKIE BOOTY 😨

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MATTHEW ONLY PLAYED 3 TIMES AND HE MADE IT TO DOOR 51 GIRL- 

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MATTHEW ONLY PLAYED 3 TIMES AND HE MADE IT TO DOOR 51 GIRL- 

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KMNLNJKFJDWJEFWNHw

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GIRL I TEXTED U ASKING IF U WANTED TO PLAY DOOR WITH ME AND MATTHEW

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GIRL I TEXTED U ASKING IF U WANTED TO PLAY DOOR WITH ME AND MATTHEW

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He addressed that some people thought we should wait, that we were not ready to go into space, and explore the moon.

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He addressed that some people thought we should wait, that we were not ready to go into space, and explore the moon.

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He stated the importance of putting a man on the moon before the end of the decade in its efforts against the Soviet Union and the expectation was met in 1969 by the astronaut Neil Armstrong. His speech forged a new path that the US was heading and inherently started the revolution of the exploration of outer space.

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He stated the importance of putting a man on the moon before the end of the decade in its efforts against the Soviet Union and the expectation was met in 1969 by the astronaut Neil Armstrong. His speech forged a new path that the US was heading and inherently started the revolution of the exploration of outer space.

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Which statement is not used to prove that ΔABC is similar to ΔADE? triangles ABC and ADE in which point E is between points

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Answers: 2 question: Which statement is not used to prove that ΔABC is similar to ΔADE?

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Transcribed image text: Triangle GHI is dilated to form new triangle JKL. If angle His congruent to angle K, what other information will prove that the two triangles are similar by the AA smanly postulate? Angle is congruent to angle L Side GH is congruent to side JK Angle lis congruent to angle L Side IG is congruent to side L.

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Transcribed image text: Triangle GHI is dilated to form new triangle JKL. If angle His congruent to angle K, what other information will prove that the two triangles are similar by the AA smanly postulate? Angle is congruent to angle L Side GH is congruent to side JK Angle lis congruent to angle L Side IG is congruent to side L.

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The 1920s carried much change in society. Some of these changes were more rights for women, jazz music, and prohibition. The people of the 1920s were disillusioned by society lacking in idealism and vision, sense of personal alienation, and Americans were obsessed with materialism and outmoded moral values (The Roaring Twenties).Cultural changes were strongly influenced by the destruction of World War I ending 1918. America needed to recover and with it youth rebelled against the norms of the older generations. The prohibition outlawed alcohol to try and diminish the crime rate. This led to a higher consumption of alcohol and illicit speakeasies. As fast as the police closed down one venue, more would spring up in its place (Prohibition in the United States). Government intrusion with the Volstead Act of 1919 outlawed beverages over 0.5 alcohol volume ...show more content...
Women began working outside of the home rebelling Victorian principles. Flappers were not politically motivated. This culture was more about rebelling authority and free spirit. This lifestyle strangely empowered the women's movement leading to a woman's right to vote. Such unrest, change, and free spirit only lasted a decade. The Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression of 1930 ensured that the hedonism and excess of flappers were abruptly and instantly snuffed out (Flappers and the Roaring 20s). It was also a time of new inventions. The most significant was the automobile. The automobile in particular revolutionized the way that American youth socialized, bestowing youth both "mobility and privacy" (How the Youth Culture of the 1920s Reinvigorated America). Youth were able to get out of the house away from the older generation. Dating became popular. Mobility brought access to movies and media which influenced attitudes, dress, and fostered the idea of

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The 1920s carried much change in society. Some of these changes were more rights for women, jazz music, and prohibition. The people of the 1920s were disillusioned by society lacking in idealism and vision, sense of personal alienation, and Americans were obsessed with materialism and outmoded moral values (The Roaring Twenties).Cultural changes were strongly influenced by the destruction of World War I ending 1918.

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What finally ended the Great Depression? That question may be the most important in economic history. If we can answer it, we can better grasp what perpetuates economic stagnation and what cures it.

The Great Depression was the worst economic crisis in U.S. history. From 1931 to 1940 unemployment was always in double digits. In April 1939, almost ten years after the crisis began, more than one in five Americans still could not find work.

On the surface, World War II seems to mark the end of the Great Depression. During the war, more than 12 million Americans were sent into the military, and a similar number toiled in defense-related jobs. Those war jobs seemingly took care of the 17 million unemployed in 1939. Most historians have therefore cited the massive spending during wartime as the event that ended the Great Depression.

Some economists- especially Robert Higgs -have wisely challenged that conclusion. Let's be blunt. If the recipe for economic recovery is putting tens of millions of people in defense plants or military marches, then having them make or drop bombs on our enemies overseas, the value of world peace is called into question. In truth, building tanks and feeding soldiers-necessary as it was to winning the war-became a crushing financial burden. We merely traded debt for unemployment. The expense of funding World War II hiked the national debt from $49 billion in 1941 to almost $260 billion in 1945. In other words, the war had only postponed the issue of recovery.

Even President Roosevelt and his New Dealers sensed that war spending was not the ultimate solution; they feared that the Great Depression-with more unemployment than ever-would resume after Hitler and Hirohito surrendered. Yet FDR's team was blindly wedded to the federal spending that (as I argue in New Deal or Raw Deal?) had perpetuated the causes of the Great Depression during the 1930s.

FDR had halted many of his New Deal programs during the war-and he allowed Congress to kill the WPA, the CCC, the NYA, and others-because winning the war came first. In 1944, however, as it became apparent that the Allies would prevail, he and his New Dealers prepared the country for his New Deal revival by promising a second bill of rights. Included in the President's package of new entitlements was the right to "adequate medical care," a "decent home," and a "useful and remunerative job." These rights (unlike free speech and freedom of religion) imposed obligations on other Americans to pay taxes for eyeglasses, "decent" houses, and "useful" jobs, but FDR believed his second bill of rights was an advance in thinking from what the Founders had conceived.

Roosevelt's death in the last year of the war prevented him from unveiling his New Deal revival. But President Harry Truman was on board for most of the new reforms. In the months after the end of the war, Truman gave major speeches showcasing a full employment bill-with jobs and spending to be triggered if people failed to find work in the private sector. He also endorsed a national health care program and a federal housing program.

But 1946 was very different from 1933. In 1933, large Democratic majorities in Congress and public support gave FDR his New Deal, but stagnation and unemployment persisted. By contrast, Truman had only a small Democratic majority-and no majority at all if you subtract the more conservative southern Democrats. Plus, the failure of FDR's New Deal left fewer Americans cheering for an encore.

In short, the Republicans and southern Democrats refused to give Truman his New Deal revival. Sometimes they emasculated his bills; other times they just killed them.

Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, one of the leaders of the Republican-southern Democrat coalition, explained why he voted against much of the program:

The problem now is to get production and employment. If we can get production, prices will come down by themselves to the lowest point justified by increased costs. If we hold prices at a point where no one can make a profit, there will be no expansion of existing industry and no new industry in that field.

Robert Wason, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, simply said, "The problem of our domestic economy is the recovery of our freedom."

Alfred Sloan, the chairman of General Motors, framed the question this way: "Is American business in the future as in the past to be conducted as a competitive system?" He answered: "General Motors ... will not participate voluntarily in what stands out crystal clear at the end of the road-a regimented economy."

Taft, Wason, and Sloan reflected the views of most congressmen, who proceeded to squelch the New Deal revival. Instead, they cut tax rates to encourage entrepreneurs to create jobs for the returning veterans.

After many years of confiscatory taxes, businessmen desperately needed incentives to expand. By 1945, the top marginal income tax rate was 94 percent on all income over $200,000. We also had a high excess-profits tax that had absorbed more than one-third of all corporate profits since 1943-and another corporate tax that reached as high as 40 percent on other profits.

In 1945 and 1946, Congress repealed the excess-profits tax, cut the corporate tax to a maximum 38 percent, and cut the top income tax rate to 86 percent. In 1948 Congress sliced the top marginal rate further, to 82 percent.

Those rates were still high, but they were the first cuts since the 1920s and sent the message that businesses could keep much of what they earned. The year 1946 was not without ups and downs in employment, occasional strikes, and rising prices. But the "regime certainty" of the 1920s had largely returned, and entrepreneurs believed they could invest again and be allowed to make money.

As Sears, Roebuck and Company Chairman Robert E. Wood observed, after the war "we were warned by private sources that a serious recession was impending. . . . I have never believed that any depression was in store for us."

With freer markets, balanced budgets, and lower taxes, Wood was right. Unemployment was only 3.9 percent in 1946, and it remained at roughly that level during most of the next decade. The Great Depression was over.

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What Ended the Great Depression? | Burton W. Folsom

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What finally ended the Great Depression? That question may be the most important in economic history. If we can answer it, we can better grasp what perpetuates economic stagnation and what cures it. The Great Depression was the worst economic crisis in U.S. history. From 1931 to 1940 unemployment was always in double digits.

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The Great Depression, a worldwide economic collapse that began in 1929 and lasted roughly a decade, was a disaster that touched the lives of millions of Americans-from investors who saw their fortunes vanish overnight, to factory workers and clerks who found themselves unemployed and desperate for a way to feed their families.

Some people were reduced to selling apples on street corners to support themselves, while others lost their homes and were forced to survive in shanty towns that became known as " Hoovervilles," a bitterly derisive reference to President Herbert Hoover, who in the early 1930s often claimed that " prosperity was just around the corner," even as economic and trade policy mistakes and reluctance to provide government assistance to ordinary Americans worsened their predicament.

It's not easy-even for people who've lived through the economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic-to grasp the depths of deprivation to which the economy sank during the Great Depression. When the unemployment rate peaked in 1933, 25.6 percent of American workers-one in four-found themselves unemployed. That's a vastly higher rate than the 14.7 percent unemployment in April 2020, when the coronavirus forced businesses and factories to shut down.

Things were so bad that of all the days of unemployment experienced by individual American workers in American history, half occurred during the Great Depression, according to University of California, Irvine economics Professor Gary Richardson, who has done extensive research on that period and the subject of downturns in general.

"There have been a lot of ups and downs, but the Great Depression is really the biggest one," he explains.

It's not easy to explain exactly why such hard times happened. "For something to be as bad as the Great Depression, you really need multiple things going wrong, in the U.S. and around the world," Richardson says.

Here are some of the things that historians and economists often point to as factors that combined to lead to the worst economic disaster in history.

1. Vulnerabilities in the Global Economy

In the 1920s, nations bounced back from the disruption and destruction caused by World War I, with factories and farms producing again, Richardson notes. But the nature of the economy in the United States and elsewhere shifted, as ordinary consumers buying durable goods such as appliances and cars-often on credit-became more and more important.

While that consumption created a lot of wealth for business owners, it also made them vulnerable to sudden shifts in consumer confidence. At the same time, nations that were producing a lot of products and exporting them became fierce competitors. "The war had eliminated a lot of the cooperation between nations that were required to run the international financial system," Richardson says. That inability to work together at controlling problems meant that any one country's efforts to control a downturn were less effective.

2. Financial Speculation

The 1920s economic boom helped breed a widespread belief that it was easy to get rich quick if you were bold enough to invest in the right opportunity at the right time. That's one reason why so many ordinary Americans were fleeced by con artists who sold them on shady schemes, from Florida swampland and nonexistent oil deposits to the notion of buying Spanish mail coupons and redeeming them for U.S. stamps to profit on the weaker Spanish currency.

But the riskiest gambling took place on Wall Street. Investors increasingly bought stocks on margin, in which they put down as little as 10 percent of the price of a stock, and borrowed the rest of the money, with their stock itself as collateral. Corporate stocks soared, and brokers made huge commissions.

But the bubble eventually had to burst. It did that on Black Monday, October 28, 1929, when the Dow Jones average declined nearly 13 percent in one day. That started a period of catastrophic declines that destroyed almost half of the Dow's value in a single month. By 1932, at the nadir of the financial crisis, the nation's public companies had lost 89 percent of their value. Scores of investors were ruined, and companies found it difficult to finance their operations.

"The stock market crash did two things," explains Mary Eschelbach Hansen, a professor of economics at American University. "It had a wealth effect on consumption (when people's wealth falls, they consume less), and it also made consumers and firms pessimistic. Then came a series of banking panics and failures. Households lost more of their wealth, and the lines of credit that firms used were disrupted. Unemployment soared."

3. Blunders by the Fed

The Federal Reserve System, created in 1913, was supposed to ensure the nation's economic stability by controlling the money supply. But the still-new institution's policies in the 1920s not only failed to stop the Great Depression but actually may have helped to cause it.

"There was a drastic 67 percent increase in the money supply between 1921 and 1929," explains Daniel J. Smith, a professor of economics and finance and director of the Political Economy Research Institute at Middle Tennessee State University.

That policy led to declining interest rates, which encouraged people to borrow and overinvest. "It also led to unchecked speculation in the formation of a bubble in the stock market," Smith says. "Normally, overinvestment would lead to rising interest rates, which would act as a natural break to prevent a bubble from forming. This didn't occur due to the easy monetary policies of the young Fed."

But eventually, in 1929, the Fed's board worried that speculation was out of control, and abruptly slammed on the breaks by contracting the money supply and raising interest rates, Smith notes.

The Fed's move to cool the stock market worked a little too well. "They got the stock market to come down," Richardson explains. "But then it came down a lot, and it came down very quickly."

4. The Gold Standard

Back in 1929, the United States-like many other countries at the time-was on the Gold Standard, with the dollar redeemable in gold and pegged to its value. But after the Wall Street crash, nervous investors began to trade their dollars for gold.

As former Fed chairman Ben Bernacke noted in a 2004 lecture, the Fed then moved to jack up interest rates higher to protect the dollar's value. But those high-interest rates made it difficult for businesses to borrow the money that they needed to survive, and many ended up closing their doors instead.

5. The Smoot-Hawley Act

Trade protectionists in Congress enacted the Smoot-Hawley Act, which was written in early 1929, while the economy still seemed to be going strong. But after the Wall Street Crash weakened the economy, President Hoover still signed it into law in 1930. The law raised U.S. tariffs by an average of 16 percent, in an effort to shield American factories from the competition with foreign countries' lower-priced goods. But the move backfired when other countries put tariffs on U.S. exports.

"If you're a country and you impose tariffs that can be good for your domestic industries because your domestic energy might produce more for home consumption," Richardson says. "But if other countries retaliate, then it could be bad for everybody."

Combined: A Perfect Economic Storm

The really unlucky thing was that all those factors combined in a sort of perfect economic storm, whose devastating effects had long-lasting repercussions. As Richardson notes, the U.S. economy didn't again reach full employment until 1940-just in time for World War II to disrupt consumption with rationing needed to ensure that the military had enough resources. Life didn't really get back to normal until after the war when the victorious United States emerged as the world's leading economy.

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5 Causes of the Great Depression | HISTORY

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By 1929, a perfect storm of unlucky factors led to the start of the worst economic downturn in U.S. history.

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On December 5, 1933, the Twenty-First Amendment was ratified, repealing Prohibition and ending a thirteen-year experiment in legislated morality. Since the nineteenth century, temperance reformers had argued that alcohol debased people's characters, destroyed domestic happiness, filled the nation's prisons, ruined moral sensibilities and physical vitality, and brought millions to poverty, misery, and premature death. Prohibition, authorized by the Eighteenth Amendment and enforced federally by the Volstead Act, sought to bring a utopian future of unprecedented health, morality, and productivity into being by prohibiting the manufacture, sale, transportation, importation, and exportation of intoxicating liquors. The Volstead Act did not ban the actual consumption of alcohol, but reformers believed that once it was no longer aggressively marketed by the liquor industry Americans would lose their taste for it. Certainly many did, as consumption declined considerably and remained lower even after repeal. But not nearly as many Americans gave up drinking as temperance advocates expected, and the rosy predictions of Prohibition's supporters hobbled the law from the start. They insisted that the resources needed to enforce the law would be minimal and would diminish as demand for alcohol disappeared. In this especially, they were mistaken.

By attempting to restrict the supply of alcohol rather than the demand for it, supporters of Prohibition virtually guaranteed the growth of a vast black market in booze. By 1930, the National Commission on Law Enforcement and Observance reluctantly conceded that illicit alcohol continued to flow freely from three primary sources: industrial manufacturers who diverted production to bootleggers; household and backwoods distillers; and smugglers who brought liquor to the United States from nations where alcohol was legally produced, sold, and exported. Indeed, at the outset of Prohibition, European and British distillers, loathe to lose their American market, flooded Caribbean islands like the Bahamas and Cuba with their wares, knowing that rum runners would "land their cargoes on a thousand thirsty beaches from Cape Breton to the sunny shores of Florida." Smuggling syndicates supplied the liquor markets of New York, Chicago, and other northeastern cities and protected their turf with violence, while in the South entrepreneurial locals participated in the liquor trade without much violence at all. Enterprising compatriots, meanwhile, chartered schooners to bring cargoes of liquor to the edges of territorial waters or used small boats to import cases of illegal booze for themselves or for larger syndicates. With so much illicit supply available, liquor could be had well beyond the underworld of liquor joints: the speakeasies, "blind tigers," and "blind pigs." Cafes, boarding houses, hotels, filling stations, and even hot dog stands and candy stores often sold liquor by the drink or by half-pint. Instead of curing social ills, Prohibition ultimately spawned organized crime, corruption, and disdain for law observance even among ordinary Americans.

It was not uncommon for Prohibition agents to be on the take, but even honest officials who did their best to enforce the law were hampered at the outset by insufficient resources. The initial appropriation for enforcement was a paltry $2.1 million. Six years later, in 1927, the head of the Prohibition enforcement asked for at least $300 million per year to enforce the law effectively and he received only $12 million. By the end of the 1920s, meanwhile, the Coast Guard had tracked, trailed, boarded, and seized hundreds of suspected smuggling schooners and motor boats, but realized that it faced a losing battle. "To keep out all smugglers," it reported in 1929, "it would be necessary to have vessels stationed every 500 yards along the coasts."

Inadequate resources at the federal level were matched by a lack of commitment to the law at the state and local levels. Several states refused to pass state-level prohibition laws, which meant that their law enforcement personnel had no authority to enforce federal prohibition laws. Other states passed Prohibition laws but refused to allocate state funds to enforce them, again tying the hands of state forces. Still other states faced persistent corruption among the very state and local officials assigned to make sure Prohibition laws worked, and local law enforcement officers, no less than their federal counterparts, sometimes participated in smuggling organizations themselves or received payments from smugglers and bootleggers to turn a blind eye to their activities.

By 1930, the failures of Prohibition were hard to miss. Despite an effort of nearly a decade, the federal government had been unable to stem liquor traffic, and indeed found itself in the midst of increasing complaints about corruption, crime, casual disregard for the law, and diminishing support for Prohibition itself. While the numbers of drunks staggering in the streets had reportedly declined, the character of drinking had changed. Prohibition encouraged the popularity of the cocktail as a mark of modern sophistication by encouraging mixers that disguised the foul taste of low-quality spirits. Drinking moved away from the dinner table into the public world, and women joined men at speakeasies and nightclubs. Alcoholic beverages accompanied college men and women on their dates. Even Americans who might be leery of indulging in alcohol near their neighbors were more willing to do so far from home. American tourists sought out destinations like Miami and Havana where alcoholic beverages were readily available. As one law enforcement officer wryly noted, in Miami every bellhop served as a bartender.

Liquor flowed, of course, because, despite the fervent hopes of temperance activists, Americans never lost their taste for booze. Many of them expressed little real concern about violating the law to quench that thirst, and despite the concerted efforts of the Coast Guard, federal Prohibition agents, and local police to deprive them of alcoholic beverages, Americans continued to drink. Repealing the Prohibition amendment in December 1933 ended bootlegging and the free-for-all that was so profitable for the bootleggers, and brought back a legal trade in alcohol controlled through government regulation. The timing was no accident. Tax revenues from the sale of booze helped support government programs during the Great Depression, making the song "Happy Days Are Here Again" doubly appropriate.

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On December 5, 1933, the Twenty-First Amendment was ratified, repealing Prohibition and ending a thirteen-year experiment in legislated morality. Since the nineteenth century, temperance reformers had argued that alcohol debased people's characters, destroyed domestic happiness, filled the nation's prisons, ruined moral sensibilities and physical vitality, and brought millions to poverty, misery, and premature death.

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Flappers: The 'New Woman'

Perhaps the most familiar symbol of the "Roaring Twenties" is probably the flapper: a young woman with bobbed hair and short skirts who drank, smoked and said "unladylike" things, in addition to being more sexually "free" than previous generations. In reality, most young women in the 1920s did none of these things (though many did adopt a fashionable flapper wardrobe), but even those women who were not flappers gained some unprecedented freedoms.

They could vote at last: The 19th Amendment to the Constitution had guaranteed that right in 1920, though it would be decades before Black women in the South could fully exercise their right to vote without Jim Crow segregation laws.

Millions of women worked in blue-collar jobs, as well as white-collar jobs (as stenographers, for example) and could afford to participate in the burgeoning consumer economy. The increased availability of birth-control devices such as the diaphragm made it possible for women to have fewer children.

In 1912, an estimated 16 percent of American households had electricity; by the mid-1920s, more than 60 percent did. And with this electrification came new machines and technologies like the washing machine, the freezer and the vacuum cleaner eliminated some of the drudgeries of household work.

Did you know? Because the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act did not make it illegal to drink alcohol, only to manufacture and sell it, many people stockpiled liquor before the ban went into effect. Rumor had it that the Yale Club in New York City had a 14-year supply of booze in its basement.

Fashion, Fads and Film Stars

During the 1920s, many Americans had extra money to spend-and spend it they did, on movies, fashion and consumer goods such as ready-to-wear clothing and home appliances like electric refrigerators. In particular, they bought radios.

The first commercial radio station in the United States, Pittsburgh's KDKA, hit the airwaves in 1920. Two years later Warren G. Harding became the first president to address the nation by radio -and three years later there were more than 500 stations in the nation. By the end of the 1920s, there were radios in more than 12 million households.

People also swarmed to see Hollywood movies: Historians estimate that, by the end of the decades, three-quarters of the American population visited a movie theater every week, and actors like Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino and Tallulah Bankhead became household names.

But the most important consumer product of the 1920s was the automobile. Low prices (the Ford Model T cost just $260 in 1924) and generous credit made cars affordable luxuries at the beginning of the decade; by the end, they were practically necessities.

By 1929 there was one car on the road for every five Americans. Meanwhile, an economy of automobiles was born: Businesses like service stations and motels sprang up to meet drivers' needs-as did the burgeoning oil industry.

The Jazz Age

Cars also gave young people the freedom to go where they pleased and do what they wanted. (Some pundits called them "bedrooms on wheels.") What many young people wanted to do was dance: the Charleston, the cake walk, the black bottom and the flea hop were popular dances of the era.

Jazz bands played at venues like the Savoy and the Cotton Club in New York City and the Aragon in Chicago; radio stations and phonograph records (100 million of which were sold in 1927 alone) carried their tunes to listeners across the nation. Some older people objected to jazz music's "vulgarity" and "depravity" (and the "moral disasters" it supposedly inspired), but many in the younger generation loved the freedom they felt on the dance floor.

The novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald chronicled the hedonism and excitement of the Jazz Age-Fitzgerald once claimed that the 1920s were "the most expensive orgy in history"-while other writers, artists, musicians and designers ushered in a new era of experimental Art Deco and modernist creativity.

Prohibition Era

During the 1920s, some freedoms were expanded while others were curtailed. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1919, had banned the manufacture and sale of "intoxicating liquors," and at 12 a.m. on January 16, 1920, the federal Volstead Act closed every tavern, bar and saloon in the United States. From then on, it was illegal to sell any "intoxication beverages" with more than 0.5 percent alcohol.

This drove the liquor trade underground-now, instead of ordinary bars, people simply went to nominally illegal speakeasies, where liquor was controlled by bootleggers, racketeers and other organized crime figures such as Chicago gangster Al Capone. (Capone reportedly had 1,000 gunmen and half of Chicago's police force on his payroll.)

To many middle-class white Americans, Prohibition was a way to assert some control over the unruly immigrant masses who crowded the nation's cities. For instance, to the so-called "Drys," beer was known as "Kaiser brew." Drinking was a symbol of all they disliked about the modern city, and eliminating alcohol would, they believed, turn back the clock to an earlier and more comfortable time

Immigration and Racism in the 1920s

Prohibition was not the only source of social tension during the 1920s. An anti- Communist "Red Scare" in 1919 and 1920 encouraged a widespread nativist and anti-immigrant hysteria. This led to the passage of an extremely restrictive immigration law, the National Origins Act of 1924, which set immigration quotas that excluded some people (Eastern Europeans and Asians) in favor of others (Northern Europeans and people from Great Britain, for example).

Immigrants were hardly the only targets in this decade. The Great Migration of Black Americans from the rural South to Northern cities and the increasing visibility of Black culture-jazz and blues music, for example, and the literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance-discomfited some white Americans. Millions of people, not just in the South but across the country, joined the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

By the middle of the decade, the KKK had two million members, many of whom believed the Klan represented a return to all the "values" that the fast-paced, city-slicker Roaring Twenties were trampling. More specifically, the 1920s represented economic and political uplift for Black Americans that threatened the social hierarchy of Jim Crow oppression.

Early Civil Rights Activism

During this decade, Black Americans sought stable employment, better living conditions and political participation. Many who migrated to the North found jobs in the automobile, steel, shipbuilding and meatpacking industries. But with more work came more exploitation.

In 1925, civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph founded the first predominantly Black labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, to draw attention to the discriminatory hiring practices and working conditions for Blacks. And as housing demands increased for Black people in the North, so did discriminatory housing practices that led to a rise of urban ghettos, where Black Americans-excluded from white neighborhoods-were relegated to inadequate, overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions.

Black Americans battled for political and civil rights throughout the Roaring Twenties and beyond. The NAACP launched investigations into Black disenfranchisement in the 1920 presidential election, as well as surges of white mob violence, such as the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.

The NAACP also pushed for the passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, a law to make lynching a federal crime, but it was defeated by a Senate filibuster in 1922. A political milestone for Black Americans finally occurred when Oscar De Priest, a Chicago Republican, became the first Black congressman since Reconstruction to be elected to the House of Representatives in 1928.

The Roaring Twenties ushered in several demographic shifts, or what one historian called a "cultural Civil War" between city-dwellers and small-town residents, Protestants and Catholics, Blacks and whites, "New Women" and advocates of old-fashioned family values.

But coming immediately after the hardships of World War I and the Spanish flu epidemic, the Roaring Twenties also gave many middle-class Americans an unprecedented taste of freedom, unbridled fun and upward economic mobility unsurpassed in U.S. history.

Sources

What Caused the Roaring Twenties? Not the End of a Pandemic (Probably). Smithsonian Magazine.
The Roaring Twenties. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
The Roaring 20s. PBS: American Experience.

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Roaring Twenties: Flappers, Prohibition & Jazz Age - HISTORY

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The Roaring Twenties were a Jazz Age burst of prosperity and freedom for flappers and others during the Prohibition era, until the economy crashed in 1929.