United States

Social changes were not limited to the young. Productivity gains brought most Americans up to at least a modest level of comfort. People were working fewer hours a week and earning more money than ever before. New consumer goods—radios, telephones, refrigerators, and above all the motor car—made life better, and they were easier to buy thanks to a vastly expanded consumer credit system. Leisure activities became more important, professional sports boomed, and the rapid growth of tabloid newspapers, magazines, movies, and radios enabled millions to share in the exciting world of speakeasies, flappers, and jazz music, even if only vicariously.

Joe (“King”) Oliver's Creole Jazz Band performing in Chicago, 1923.Pictorial Press/Alamy

A Ku Klux Klan initiation ceremony, 1920s.© Jack Benton—Hulton Archive/Getty Images

William Jennings Bryan (lower left, with fan) and Clarence Darrow (centre right, arms folded) in a Dayton, Tennessee, courtroom during the Scopes Trial, July 1925.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.On the darker side, antiforeign sentiment led to the revival of the racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan, especially in rural areas. During the early 1920s the Klan achieved a membership of some 5,000,000 and gained control of, or influence over, many city and state governments. Rural areas also provided the base for a Christian fundamentalist movement, as farmers and small-town dwellers who felt threatened and alienated by the rapidly expanding, socially changing cities fought to preserve American moral standards by stressing religious orthodoxy. The movement grew steadily until 1925, when John T. Scopes, a biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, was tried for violating a law common to many Southern states prohibiting the teaching of the theory of evolution. Although Scopes was found guilty of breaking the law, both the law itself and fundamentalist beliefs were ridiculed during the course of the trial, which attracted national attention (see Scopes Trial).

One fundamentalist goal that was achieved was the passage in 1919 of theProhibition (Eighteenth) Amendment" class="md-crosslink"> Prohibition (Eighteenth) Amendment, which prohibited the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors. Millions of mostly Protestant churchgoers hailed Prohibition as a moral advance, and the liquor consumption of working people, as well as the incidence of alcohol-related diseases and deaths, does seem to have dropped during the period. On the other hand, millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens drank the prohibited liquor, prompting the growth of organized crime. The illegal liquor business was so lucrative and federal prohibition enforcement machinery was so slight that gangsters were soon engaged in the large-scale smuggling, manufacture, and sale of alcoholic beverages.

New York City Deputy Police Commissioner John A. Leach (right) watching agents pour liquor into the sewer following a raid, c. 1920.New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (neg. no. LC-USZ62-123257)

As in legitimate business, the highest profits came from achieving economies of scale, so gangsters engaged in complex mergers and takeovers; but, unlike corporate warfare, the underworld used real guns to wipe out competition. In 1931 a national law-enforcement commission, formed to study the flouting of prohibition and the activities of gangsters, was to report that prohibition was virtually unenforceable; and, with the coming of the Great Depression, prohibition ceased to be a key political issue. In 1933 the Twenty-first Amendment brought its repeal.

In the meantime, prohibition and religion were the major issues of the 1928 presidential campaign between the Republican nominee, Herbert Hoover, and the Democrat, Gov. Alfred E. Smith of New York. Smith was an opponent of prohibition and a Roman Catholic. His candidacy brought enthusiasm and a heavy Democratic vote in the large cities, but a landslide against him in the dry and Protestant hinterlands secured the election for Hoover.

Al Smith in an undated photograph.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

The Great Depression