Roaring Twenties

1920s Politics: From Harding to Hoover

The politics of the 1920s marked one of the sharpest turnabouts in modern American history. The decade opened in the aftermath of Woodrow Wilson’s ambitious but exhausting experiment in Democratic progressivism, the First World War, and a failed attempt to recast the global order through the League of Nations. It closed with the United States more isolated, more nativist, more business-friendly, and more unequal than at any point in the previous generation. In between, Americans elected three Republican presidents in a row, ratified the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the vote, watched the Ku Klux Klan rise to a membership counted in the millions, embraced a constitutional ban on alcohol that produced an orgy of illegal drinking, and adopted the most restrictive immigration laws in the nation’s history.

To understand the 1920s is to understand this paradox: a decade of dazzling cultural energy and stagnant, deeply conservative politics. The same years that produced the flapper, the jazz record, and Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight also produced the Sacco and Vanzetti executions, the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill’s defeat, and the Teapot Dome scandal. This pillar examines the principal political themes of the era — the Republican presidencies, the second wave of the Klan, and the long road to women’s suffrage — and the social forces that shaped them.

From Wilsonian Progressivism to the Republican Decade

The political ground shifted dramatically between 1918 and 1920. Woodrow Wilson had led the country through the war with a sweeping reform agenda, including the Federal Reserve Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, the Federal Trade Commission Act, and the Federal Income Tax of 1913. After the war, his push for the League of Nations had been rejected by the Senate, and he suffered a debilitating stroke in October 1919. By the time the 1920 campaign opened, the Democratic Party was exhausted and divided between Wilson loyalists and a restive agrarian-and-immigrant wing based in the South and the cities.

The Republicans sensed an opportunity. Their convention in Chicago, in June 1920, produced a compromise candidate in Warren Gamaliel Harding, a former newspaper editor and U.S. senator from Ohio. Harding was affable, handsome, and unambiguous about what he wanted. His campaign slogan — “a return to normalcy” — spoke to a country tired of crusades abroad and moralizing at home. He won in a landslide, taking 60 percent of the popular vote and 404 of 531 electoral votes against the Democratic nominee, Ohio Governor James M. Cox. The voters also rejected Cox’s running mate, the young Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The shift was not merely a change of party. It was a change of governing philosophy. Where Wilson had believed that government could shape a more just economic order, Harding and his successor Calvin Coolidge believed that government should mostly get out of the way. Coolidge’s famous remark — “the chief business of the American people is business” — captured the new consensus. The Republican Party would hold the White House for twelve consecutive years, from 1921 to 1933.

The Three Republican Presidents

The Republican ascendancy of the 1920s was led by three very different men. A detailed look at each — and the three Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations — is the natural starting point for understanding the decade.

Warren G. Harding (1921–1923)

Harding has the worst reputation of any modern president, but he was not without achievements. He signed the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, which created the modern presidential budget process and the General Accounting Office. He appointed Charles Evans Hughes as Secretary of State, Andrew Mellon as Secretary of the Treasury, and Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce — three men who would dominate economic policy for the rest of the decade. He called the Washington Naval Conference in 1921, which produced the Five-Power Treaty limiting naval tonnage and marked the high-water mark of interwar disarmament. He signed the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, the first major restriction on European immigration in generations.

But Harding is remembered for the scandals of his administration, which emerged in full only after his sudden death from a heart attack on August 2, 1923, in San Francisco. The most famous is the Teapot Dome affair, in which the Secretary of the Interior, Albert Bacon Fall, secretly leased the federal Teapot Dome oil reserve in Wyoming and the Elk Hills reserve in California to private oilmen in return for more than $400,000 in bribes. The Veterans’ Bureau scandal, the Daugherty affair, the suicide of Harding’s friend Jess Smith, and the mental breakdown of Edward “Ned” McLean — the Washington Post publisher who had become enmeshed in the scandals — destroyed the administration’s reputation. The details of these are explored in the Harding administration scandals.

Calvin Coolidge (1923–1929)

Vice President Coolidge was vacationing at his father’s homestead in Vermont when word of Harding’s death reached him. His father, a notary public, administered the oath of office by lamplight. Coolidge would go on to win election in his own right in 1924 — the first presidential election in which all white Southern women could vote, after the Nineteenth Amendment was extended to them by the 19th Amendment’s anti-sex-discrimination clause — and would serve until 1929.

Coolidge’s reputation is built on a paradox. Contemporaries saw him as colorless, austere, and detached — “Silent Cal,” the press called him — and his deliberate understatement became the model for what we now think of as the Twenties temperament. Yet historians have reassessed his presidency repeatedly. In the 1950s, he was considered a minor president; in the 1980s, conservative admirers praised him as a model of limited government; in the 2010s, economic historians pointed out that the prosperity of the 1920s coincided almost exactly with his time in office.

Coolidge’s substantive achievements included the Revenue Acts of 1924 and 1926, which cut the top marginal income tax rate from 73 percent to 25 percent, and the Federal Radio Commission of 1927, the first federal agency to regulate the new medium of broadcasting. He signed the Immigration Act of 1924 and the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928. He also refused to use federal power to relieve farmers suffering under the long agricultural depression, vetoing the McNary-Haugen Farm Bill twice, in 1927 and 1928. His terse announcement, in August 1927, that “I do not choose to run” for president in 1928 effectively ended his political career and helped elect his successor.

Herbert Hoover (1929–1933)

Herbert Clark Hoover, who had served as Secretary of Commerce under both Harding and Coolidge, won the 1928 election in a landslide over the Democratic nominee, New York Governor Alfred E. Smith. Smith’s Catholicism, his association with Tammany Hall, his opposition to Prohibition, and his urban, ethnic base made him an easy target for the religious and rural voters who had become the Republican core. Hoover won 58 percent of the popular vote and carried forty states. He was inaugurated on March 4, 1929, just seven months before the Wall Street Crash of October 1929.

Hoover’s presidency was the unhappiest of the three. His initial response to the crash and the spreading depression relied on what he called “rugged individualism” and voluntarism — appeals to business and charity rather than direct federal action. He convened the President’s Conference on Unemployment in 1929 and supported the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929, the Federal Farm Board, and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation of 1932. He signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, which raised duties on more than 20,000 imported goods and triggered retaliatory tariffs abroad. He signed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1932, which created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and separated commercial and investment banking — provisions still in effect today. He authorized the construction of what would be named the Hoover Dam.

None of it was enough. By 1932, unemployment was over 20 percent. The Bonus Army of unemployed World War I veterans marched on Washington that summer, and Hoover’s decision to use the U.S. Army — under Douglas MacArthur — to disperse them was the symbolic end of his presidency. He lost the 1932 election to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a landslide, taking only six states. His long post-presidential life, during which he served as a critic of the New Deal and an adviser to every Republican president from Truman to Eisenhower, gave him a second act; in the late 1940s, Harry Truman would call him “the greatest living American.” A careful look at Hoover’s response to the Depression reveals the limits of voluntarism and the seeds of the New Deal that replaced it.

The Mellon Plan: Tax Policy in the 1920s

The single most influential economic policymaker of the 1920s was not a president. It was Andrew William Mellon, the Pittsburgh banker, aluminum magnate, and three-time Secretary of the Treasury. Mellon, who had been the third-richest man in America when he took office, pushed through the most radical tax reductions in American history.

The Revenue Acts of 1924 and 1926 slashed the top marginal income tax rate from 73 percent in 1921 to 25 percent in 1926. Estate taxes were cut, capital gains taxes were cut, and the number of Americans paying any income tax at all fell from about 4 million in 1920 to fewer than 2 million by 1926. Mellon defended the cuts in his 1924 book Taxation: The People’s Business, arguing that high rates discouraged investment and that lower rates would produce more revenue by stimulating growth.

The results were real but uneven. Federal revenue did grow despite the rate cuts, at least until 1929, because the underlying economy expanded so rapidly. But the benefits were extraordinarily concentrated. By 1929, the top 5 percent of American families received about 33 percent of all personal income — a level of inequality that, remarkably, is not far from what we see today. The Mellon Plan, as it was called, established the political template that would be reused many times in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Isolationism: The Rejection of the League and the Washington Conference

The First World War had briefly made Americans internationalists. Wilson had led the country into the war in 1917 promising to “make the world safe for democracy,” and his Fourteen Points had laid out a vision of a new world order based on collective security, self-determination, and open diplomacy. The League of Nations was the institutional expression of that vision.

The American people, however, were not interested. The Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and 1920, and the United States never joined the League. The result was a foreign policy that historians call isolationism — not strict non-involvement, but a deep reluctance to enter into binding international commitments. The 1920s were dominated by what one senator called “normalcy” in foreign affairs: high tariffs, restricted immigration, the avoidance of alliances, and a focus on disarmament rather than enforcement.

The high-water mark of this approach was the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–22, called by Harding and led by Secretary of State Hughes. The conference produced three treaties. The Five-Power Treaty set limits on the tonnage of capital ships held by the United States, Britain, Japan, France, and Italy. The Four-Power Treaty committed the United States, Britain, Japan, and France to respect each other’s Pacific possessions. The Nine-Power Treaty affirmed the Open Door in China. Together, they represented the most successful arms-control negotiation of the interwar period.

The 1920s ended with another landmark: the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, signed in Paris by fifteen nations and ultimately endorsed by sixty-two. The pact “renounced war as an instrument of national policy” — but contained no enforcement mechanism, and its signing is sometimes used as a marker for the high point of American isolationism. The disarmament of the 1920s did not survive the rise of Nazi Germany, and the world order it tried to build would be shattered within a decade.

Immigration Restriction: The Quota Acts of 1921 and 1924

The 1920s also witnessed the most restrictive immigration laws in American history. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921, signed by Harding, limited immigration from any country to 3 percent of the number of people from that country counted in the 1910 census. The Immigration Act of 1924 — also known as the Johnson-Reed Act — tightened the limit to 2 percent and shifted the baseline to the 1890 census, a deliberate choice that would favor immigrants from northwestern Europe and exclude those from southern and eastern Europe.

The 1924 act also excluded Asian immigrants entirely. It defined the national origins formula that would govern American immigration policy for the next forty years. The act was, in effect, an attempt to keep the United States racially and ethnically what it had been in 1900, at the very moment when the country was becoming increasingly diverse.

The effects were immediate. Total immigration fell from about 805,000 in 1924 to about 295,000 in 1925, and it would never again reach pre-1924 levels. The quotas favored the British, Germans, and Scandinavians; Italians, Poles, Greeks, Jews, and Slavs found the gates increasingly closed. The Great Wave of European immigration, which had brought more than 23 million people to the United States between 1880 and 1920, was over.

The political logic behind the quotas was the same as that behind the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan and the Red Scare: a deep anxiety about the country’s changing demographics and the conviction that the United States was, and should remain, a Nordic-Protestant nation. The Sacco and Vanzetti case of 1920–27 — in which two Italian-born anarchists were convicted of murder and executed in Massachusetts — became the international symbol of this nativist turn. Read more about the second wave of the KKK and the political force that it became.

The Red Scare’s Long Shadow: Sacco, Vanzetti, and After

The First Red Scare of 1919–20 had been set off by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, a wave of strikes, and a series of anarchist bombings — including one that damaged the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in June 1919. Palmer launched the Palmer Raids in November 1919, deporting hundreds of suspected radicals and arresting thousands more. The most famous victims were the Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, arrested in May 1920 for the armed robbery and murder of a payroll clerk and a guard in South Braintree, Massachusetts.

The trial and appeal lasted from 1921 to 1927. The two men were convicted in 1921 and sentenced to death. They appealed repeatedly, supported by an international campaign that argued they had been convicted for their anarchist beliefs rather than for any crime. Massachusetts Governor Alvan T. Fuller appointed a special commission, chaired by President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard, which reviewed the evidence and confirmed the verdict in 1927. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed on August 23, 1927.

The case became the political cause célèbre of the 1920s. Demonstrations were held in cities around the world. In 1977, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis issued a formal proclamation acknowledging that the trial had been unfair. The case is the clearest single example of how the politics of the Red Scare — the fear of communists, anarchists, and immigrant radicals — shaped the 1920s legal system and the broader political culture.

Prohibition: The Eighteenth Amendment and Its Enforcement

The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1919 and effective on January 17, 1920, banned “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” within the United States. The Volstead Act of 1919, which provided for federal enforcement, was passed over Wilson’s veto.

Prohibition was, in part, a political project of the 1920s. The dry coalition that had pushed it through combined the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League with progressive reformers and many women voters (some of whom had been granted suffrage before the Nineteenth Amendment). It was opposed by the urban Democratic machines, by the German-American and Irish-American communities, and by the liquor industry, which feared that the women’s vote would tip the balance permanently in favor of the drys.

The political effects of Prohibition in the 1920s were mixed. It is covered in detail elsewhere on this site in the Prohibition and Speakeasies cluster, but the political consequences bear noting here. Prohibition created a vast new class of federal crimes and an enormous underground economy. Al Capone of Chicago earned an estimated $60 million a year from bootlegging. Prohibition also strengthened organized crime to such a degree that it would persist for decades after the Twenty-First Amendment repealed the Eighteenth in 1933. Politically, the issue divided the parties, eroded respect for the law in cities, and contributed to the 1928 defeat of Al Smith — the first Catholic to win a major-party nomination — partly because of his association with the wet, urban, ethnic coalition that opposed Prohibition.

The Nineteenth Amendment and the First Women Voters

The Nineteenth Amendment, which prohibited the denial of the vote “on account of sex,” was ratified on August 18, 1920, when Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state to approve it. The amendment was the culmination of a 72-year fight that had begun at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 and was led, in its final phase, by two competing organizations: the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) under Carrie Chapman Catt, which favored state-by-state campaigns, and the more militant National Woman’s Party (NWP) under Alice Paul, which picketed the White House and modeled itself on the British suffragettes.

The amendment’s adoption in 1920 gave the vote to roughly 27 million American women. The first presidential election in which they could vote was the 1920 contest between Harding and Cox. The story of the fight for the 19th Amendment and the women’s vote in 1920 is more complicated than the celebratory version often told: women did not vote as a unified bloc, the “gender gap” did not appear in 1920, and African American women in the South were often denied the vote by poll taxes, literacy tests, and the white primary.

The Second Ku Klux Klan: Nativism, Politics, and Violence

The second Ku Klux Klan was founded on November 25, 1915, on Stone Mountain, Georgia, by William Joseph Simmons, a former Methodist preacher. Its rise was fueled by two cultural events: the release of D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), which glorified the Reconstruction-era Klan, and the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager in Atlanta, in 1915. The second Klan was different from the first in important ways. Where the first Klan had been a Southern vigilante group focused on the post–Civil War Republican Party, the second was a national, nativist, Protestant organization that was anti-Black, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, and anti-immigrant. It was led, from 1922 to 1939, by the Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans, a Texas dentist.

The Klan grew rapidly after 1920. By 1924, when it held a massive rally at the Madison Square Garden in New York, with 55,000 robed marchers, it claimed millions of members. Historians now estimate peak membership at 1.5 to 2 million in the mid-1920s, with another 2 to 4 million on the rolls as inactive or honorary members. The Klan was strong in Indiana, Colorado, Oregon, Texas, Oklahoma, and parts of the South. It controlled the Indiana state government briefly in the mid-1920s. It influenced state-level politics in Colorado and Oregon. The story of the rise of the second Klan, its membership and political power, and its decline in the late 1920s is one of the most disturbing stories of the decade.

The Klan’s appeal crossed traditional lines. It appealed to small-town Protestants anxious about the changes brought by immigration and urbanization. It appealed to women, who formed a substantial part of the membership. Its Women of the KKK (WKKK), organized under the Klavan in 1923, was one of the largest women’s organizations in the country. The Klan’s political influence was felt in both major parties. In 1924, the Democratic National Convention was riven by a fight over whether to denounce the Klan by name; the plank was defeated only by one vote. In 1928, the Klan opposed the Catholic Al Smith with extraordinary intensity, contributing to his defeat.

The Klan’s violence was a constant undercurrent. The Imperial Night Hawks, a Klan paramilitary group, conducted beatings, whippings, and murders across the country. Members were responsible for the destruction of the Osage Indian oil wealth in Oklahoma. The Klan’s appeal began to crumble after the D.C. Stephenson case in 1925. Stephenson, the Grand Dragon of Indiana, was convicted of the rape and murder of Madge Oberholtzer and sentenced to life in prison. His conviction exposed the Klan’s hypocrisy and led to a wave of resignations.

The Scopes Trial: Religion, Science, and Politics in 1925

The Scopes Trial, held in Dayton, Tennessee, in July 1925, was one of the most famous court cases in American history. The defendant, John Thomas Scopes, was a high school biology teacher charged with violating a Tennessee statute that made it illegal to teach “any theory that denies the story of the Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible.”

The trial pitted three-time Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan — who had become a leading voice for fundamentalist Christianity — against the famous defense attorney Clarence Darrow. The trial was broadcast on radio and covered by the journalist H.L. Mencken, whose satirical dispatches made Dayton a national symbol of rural American anti-intellectualism. Scopes was convicted and fined $100, but the case established the cultural authority of evolutionary theory in American public life. Politically, the trial marked the first time the new fundamentalist movement became a major force in national politics — a force that would, over the next century, become a major part of the Republican coalition.

Labor, Civil Rights, and the Limits of 1920s Politics

The 1920s were not a good decade for organized labor. Union membership fell by about a third, from roughly 5 million in 1920 to about 3.4 million in 1929. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) under Samuel Gompers focused on “pure and simple unionism” — better wages and hours for skilled, white, mostly male workers — and largely ignored the unskilled, the immigrant, and the African American worker.

The “American Plan”, an open-shop drive promoted by employers’ associations, was a major factor in the decline. Although ostensibly neutral, the plan was used to break unions and was often associated with anti-union violence, particularly in the textile and steel industries. The 1920s saw several long and bitter strikes — the steel strike of 1919 had spilled into 1920, the bituminous coal strike of 1922 involved more than 600,000 workers, and the Passaic textile strike of 1926 and the Lordsville strike drew national attention — but most ended in defeat for labor.

Civil rights progress was even more limited. The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, introduced repeatedly in Congress during the 1920s, would have made lynching a federal crime. It passed the House in 1922 but was blocked in the Senate by Southern Democrats. The NAACP, founded in 1909, grew rapidly during the decade and successfully organized against the confirmation of John J. Parker to the Supreme Court in 1930 over a campaign-speech statement favorable to African Americans. But the political system remained hostile. African Americans in the South were systematically disenfranchised by poll taxes, literacy tests, and white primaries. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s — a flowering of Black literature, music, and art centered in upper Manhattan — was a cultural phenomenon that did not yet have a political counterpart.

The 1928 Election: Hoover, Smith, and the Cultural Divide

The 1928 election was the most culturally divisive in American history since 1896. Herbert Hoover had been the leading progressive Republican — or at least, the most respectable progressive Republican. He was a Quaker from Iowa, an orphan who had made a fortune in mining engineering, a famous wartime relief administrator, and the architect of the Commission for Relief in Belgium and the American Relief Administration. He had served as Secretary of Commerce under both Harding and Coolidge and was closely identified with the associationalist tradition of public-private cooperation.

The Democratic nominee, Alfred Emanuel Smith, was the antithesis. Smith was the son of Irish immigrants, a Catholic, a product of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a four-term governor of New York, and a Tammany Hall insider. He was the first Catholic to win a major-party presidential nomination. He was also, famously, a “wet” — he opposed Prohibition — and he was associated with the urban, ethnic, immigrant coalition that the 1920s nativist movement despised.

Hoover won 58 percent of the popular vote and 444 electoral votes, carrying forty states. He won every state outside the Solid South. Smith won only Massachusetts and Rhode Island among non-Southern states, plus the eight Southern states. The election is often interpreted as the high-water mark of the nativist, Protestant, rural coalition that would dominate American politics through the 1920s — and as the moment when the cultural and religious divide between urban and rural America became the central fact of national politics.

The 1928 election was also a test of the Nineteenth Amendment in the South. The 19th Amendment had been ratified in 1920, and by 1928 the white Southern women’s vote was large enough to be significant. Smith, who promised to nominate a woman to his cabinet, was the candidate of the Women’s City Club and the League of Women Voters. He won 82 percent of the vote in Louisiana and 79 percent in Mississippi, but the urban-rural divide was visible even in his home territory: he lost upstate New York to Hoover. The story of the first women voters is a critical chapter in the 1920s political story.

The “New Era” and the Politics of Prosperity

The 1920s were, in political terms, the era of the “New Era” — a phrase popularized by Herbert Hoover himself in his 1922 book America’s New Era. The phrase captured the sense, widespread in the 1920s, that the United States had entered a fundamentally new phase of its history, in which the old questions of industrial conflict, urban-rural tension, and class warfare had been resolved by a combination of business efficiency, technological progress, and government cooperation.

The New Era was, in some ways, the political version of Fordism — the mass-production, mass-consumption system pioneered by Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company and applied across the economy. It was a politics of high wages, low prices, mass markets, and a regulatory state that did not challenge the basic structure of capitalism. The Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Radio Commission, the Tariff Commission — all of these were the institutions of the New Era. They regulated the new capitalism; they did not replace it.

The New Era had its critics. The progressive Republicans — the La Follettes, the Borahs, the Norrises — argued that the prosperity of the 1920s was built on a foundation of monopoly and speculation that would eventually collapse. The Socialists and the Farmer-Labor movements argued that the New Era was a fraud, that the prosperity of the few was the poverty of the many. The NAACP and the Urban League argued that the New Era was closed to African Americans, who were still subject to the Jim Crow system in the South and to discrimination in the North. The NWP argued that the New Era was closed to women, who had won the vote but not the economic and legal equality that suffrage had promised.

The 1928 election was, in some ways, the New Era’s last stand. The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 was the end of the New Era in economics, and the 1930 midterms — in which the Republicans lost 49 House seats and 8 Senate seats — were the end of the New Era in politics. By 1932, the New Era was a memory, and the New Deal was the new political reality. The full transition is told in the end of the Roaring Twenties cluster.

The 1932 Watershed: How the Conservative Consensus Ended

The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 and the Great Depression that followed ended the conservative consensus. The Hoover administration struggled to respond, and by 1932 the country was ready for a change. The election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in November 1932 — and the inauguration of the New Deal in March 1933 — would mark the end of the Republican ascendancy of the 1920s. The political culture of the 1920s — pro-business, anti-immigrant, anti-Communist, suspicious of the city, suspicious of the South, suspicious of the new woman — would not, however, disappear. It would resurface, in different forms, again and again over the next century.

What the 1920s Left to American Politics

The politics of the 1920s are a permanent part of the American story. The decade’s conservatism is sometimes held up as a model of small-government prosperity. Its nativism is sometimes dismissed as a peculiar product of the post-war moment. The truth is more complicated. The 1920s gave us the modern income tax, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Radio Commission, the FBI, the Federal Trade Commission, the first peacetime military draft, the Bureau of the Budget, the General Accounting Office, the international tax system, the first serious immigration restrictions, the first serious restrictions on the right to strike, and the first mass-membership nativist organization. They also gave us the worst presidential scandal since the Civil War, the worst peacetime financial collapse in American history, and a global economic order that was already collapsing by the time the last of the 1920s presidents left office.

The 1920s are not a foreign country. The debates of the 1920s — about the size of government, the role of the courts, the rights of the immigrant, the treatment of the African American, the regulation of business, the place of women in public life — are still the debates of the present. The decade is, in many ways, the moment when the United States became the country we live in now.

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