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.

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).

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.

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.

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