Timeline of the 1920s: Key Events That Shaped the Decade

The 1920s unfolded with remarkable speed. In a single decade, America went from a country recovering from a world war to the largest economy on Earth; from a nation that had never heard a radio broadcast to one in which millions of families gathered around a wooden set every evening; from a place where women could not vote to one where they could run for president. This timeline of the 1920s follows the decade year by year, highlighting the political decisions, cultural moments, technological breakthroughs, and economic shifts that together produced the Jazz Age. For a fuller picture of the events behind each year, , the major events of 1925, and the key events of 1927.

1920: The Beginning of Everything

The decade opened with two of the most consequential pieces of social legislation in American history. On January 17, the Eighteenth Amendment took effect, beginning Prohibition — the national ban on the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol. Eight months later, on August 18, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, granting American women the right to vote. The 1920 presidential election, in which Republican Warren G. Harding defeated Democrat James M. Cox by a landslide, was the first in which women voted nationwide.

In November 1920, station KDKA in Pittsburgh made the first commercial radio broadcast in the United States, reporting the Harding-Cox returns. The first Miss America pageant was held in Atlantic City. Major League Baseball resumed play after the 1919 Black Sox Scandal, with the Chicago White Sox banned from the World Series. The American Professional Football Association, the forerunner of the NFL, was founded on September 17. And the 1920 census, released that year, showed that for the first time in American history, more Americans lived in cities than in the countryside.

1921: A Return to Normalcy

The Harding administration took office promising a “return to normalcy,” and on May 19, 1921, Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, the first of two immigration-restriction laws that would define the decade. The law limited immigration from any country to 3 percent of the number of residents from that country counted in the 1910 census. The economy slid into a brief but sharp recession that lasted until July 1921.

A new burst of public attention fell on a sensational murder case: in May 1920, two Italian immigrants and admitted anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, had been arrested in Massachusetts for the murder of a paymaster and his guard. Their trial and the long international campaign to save them would run for the rest of the decade. On November 11, 1921, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was dedicated at Arlington National Cemetery.

1922: A Slowing Economy, a Growing Culture

The Washington Naval Conference opened in November 1921 and ran into February 1922, producing a major arms-limitation treaty among the United States, Britain, Japan, France, and Italy. The Five-Power Treaty set capital-ship tonnage ratios that would shape Pacific security for the rest of the decade. On May 30, 1922, the Lincoln Memorial was formally dedicated in Washington, D.C. — a building whose two famous inscriptions (“In this temple…” and “Four score and seven years ago…”) are both correctly carved, unlike the deliberate Latin error at the later World War II Memorial that converts “E Pluribus Unum” to “Out of many, one.”

Culturally, 1922 was a year of consolidation. F. Scott Fitzgerald published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, the previous year, and he cemented his reputation as the voice of the Jazz Age with the short-story collection Tales of the Jazz Age in September 1922. The Reader’s Digest was founded that year, and the Brylcreem hair product, still a familiar brand a century later, was first sold.

1923: Hard Times, New Voices

The economy slowed further in 1923, and unemployment hovered around 2.5 percent for most of the year. But the year is best remembered for two events at the end of summer. On August 2, 1923, President Warren G. Harding died suddenly in San Francisco, apparently of a heart attack, and Vice President Calvin Coolidge was sworn in as the 30th president at 2:47 a.m. by his father, a notary public, in the family homestead in Plymouth Notch, Vermont. Less than a week later, on August 8, Harding’s vice president Coolidge was officially inaugurated in Washington.

A few weeks earlier, on July 24, 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne was signed, settling the boundaries of modern Turkey and recognizing the Republic of Turkey that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk had proclaimed the previous year. In Hollywood, the famous HOLLYWOOD sign was erected on Mount Lee, originally as “HOLLYWOODLAND,” an advertisement for a real estate development. And on December 6, 1923, a U.S. military flight made the first transcontinental airmail delivery, from New York to San Francisco in 33 hours and 20 minutes. The Teapot Dome oil-leases scandal began to unravel in April 1922 when Senator Thomas J. Walsh of Montana launched his Senate investigation, and the criminal case would eventually reach the Supreme Court in 1927.

1924: Coolidge Wins, America Restricts

The year was dominated by the presidential election. Calvin Coolidge, who had served as vice president under Harding, won a full term in his own right on November 4, 1924, defeating Democrat John W. Davis and Progressive Robert M. La Follette in a contest with the lowest voter turnout of the twentieth century. Coolidge won 54 percent of the vote and 382 electoral votes.

On May 26, 1924, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924 (also called the Johnson-Reed Act), which tightened the 1921 quotas and effectively ended large-scale immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa for the next four decades. On June 2, Congress granted full citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States. The Democratic National Convention that summer, held at Madison Square Garden, ran for 103 ballots — still the longest major-party convention in American history — before nominating Davis.

In sports, the 1924 Winter Olympics opened on January 25 in Chamonix, France, the first Olympic Winter Games in history. The Summer Games, held in Paris from May through July, featured the legendary Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi, who won five gold medals. Johnny Weissmuller won three swimming golds; he would later find a second career as Tarzan. And in October 1924, the famous bank robber “Pretty Boy” Floyd began his criminal career in a small-town Oklahoma bank job.

1925: A Year of Cultural Crossroads

1925 is the pivot of the decade — the year the Roaring Twenties reached their fullest expression and, almost in the same breath, began to be questioned. The summer’s biggest event was the Scopes “Monkey” Trial in Dayton, Tennessee. John T. Scopes, a high school biology teacher, was prosecuted for teaching Darwinian evolution, in violation of a state law. The trial drew William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential candidate and former Secretary of State, for the prosecution, and Clarence Darrow, the most famous defense attorney in America, for the defense. The case became a national referendum on modernism versus religious fundamentalism, and the trial was broadcast live on radio for the first time in U.S. history.

On April 10, 1925, The Great Gatsby was published, the defining novel of the decade. F. Scott Fitzgerald had been writing about the Jazz Age since 1920, and Gatsby was his masterpiece. In February, The New Yorker magazine was founded by Harold Ross. The Chrysler Building broke ground in New York, and Adolf Hitler published Mein Kampf in Germany. On December 1, 1925, the General Motors Acceptance Corporation was created to make car loans, helping to launch the consumer credit economy. To see the major events of 1925 in more detail, follow the link.

1926: A Boom, a Bomb, a Funeral

The economy of 1926 was a year of contradictions. Real estate speculation in Florida was reaching a frenzied peak, and a brief but spectacular collapse in the autumn of 1926 bankrupted many speculators (the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane would finish off the Florida boom the following year). On the world stage, the General Strike paralyzed Britain for nine days in May 1926, the only general strike in British history. Germany was admitted to the League of Nations.

In American entertainment, Walt Disney lost the rights to his first cartoon character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, to Universal in a contract dispute, and began work on a new character that would debut in 1928: Mickey Mouse. The magician Harry Houdini died on October 31, 1926, in Detroit, of peritonitis following a ruptured appendix. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were convicted of murder in July 1921, and the campaign to save them intensified.

1927: The Year Everything Happened

If a single year has to stand for the entire decade, it is 1927. On May 20–21, Charles Lindbergh completed the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight, flying the Spirit of St. Louis from Roosevelt Field, Long Island, to Le Bourget Field, Paris, in 33 hours and 30 minutes. He became the most famous man in the world overnight. On October 6, The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length “talkie” — a motion picture with synchronized dialogue — premiered in New York. The film starred Al Jolson and signaled the end of the silent era.

In baseball, Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs — the last of them on September 30, 1927, in the penultimate game of the season — breaking his own record and establishing a mark that would stand until Roger Maris hit 61 in 1961. The New York Yankees, led by Ruth and Lou Gehrig, won 110 games and swept the Pittsburgh Pirates in the World Series. On September 22, 1927, the long-running case of Sacco and Vanzetti ended in their execution by electrocution at Charlestown State Prison in Massachusetts, despite years of international protest.

The year also brought the first transatlantic telephone call (January 7, between New York and London), the groundbreaking for the Mount Rushmore sculpture (October 4), and the founding of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (May 11). The Mississippi Flood of 1927 submerged 27,000 square miles of seven states, the most destructive river flood in American history to that point. The Lindy Hop dance was created at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. The Ford Motor Company discontinued the Model T on May 26 and announced the Model A in December. The full story of the key events of 1927 deserves its own page.

1928: The Boom Peaks

The economy of 1928 was the peak of the Roaring Twenties. The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed through most of the year, briefly touching 300 in December before retreating. On November 6, Republican Herbert Hoover won a landslide victory over Democrat Al Smith of New York, becoming the 31st president. Smith was the first Catholic to run for president on a major-party ticket, and his candidacy, combined with Hoover’s promise of an end to poverty, made 1928 one of the most consequential elections of the century.

In popular culture, Mickey Mouse debuted in the animated short Steamboat Willie on November 18, 1928, and would become Walt Disney’s signature character. Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic as a passenger in June 1928, and the Scottish inventor John Logie Baird demonstrated color television in London. The Chrysler Building in New York rose to its full height. On the other side of the law, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre had taken place on February 14, 1929, but 1928 saw the growth of the Chicago Outfit and the rise of Al Capone as the most powerful gangster in America.

1929: The Crash and the Beginning of the End

For nine months, 1929 looked like 1928. The stock market climbed steadily, and the economic indicators remained strong. Herbert Hoover was inaugurated on March 4, and the administration prepared a program of policies that, in retrospect, would prove inadequate to the coming storm. In July, the Reed Committee of the Senate began investigating the practice of buying stocks on margin.

On October 24, 1929 — Black Thursday — the market opened weak and the losses accelerated. The tickertape fell behind by hours, leaving investors unable to track prices. A group of leading bankers, led by Thomas W. Lamont of J.P. Morgan, bought blue-chip stocks in a late-afternoon effort to halt the slide, and the market closed only slightly down.

The intervention failed. Black Monday, October 28, the Dow fell 12.8 percent. Black Tuesday, October 29, it fell another 11.7 percent. By mid-November 1929, the value of all listed stocks had fallen by roughly half from the September high. The crash, the worst in American history at that point, was over in days — but the depression it had triggered would last for the rest of the 1930s. The full story of the end of the Roaring Twenties and the stock market crash of 1929 is the beginning of the next chapter in American history.

A Decade in a Hundred Moments

The 1920s were, in the end, a decade of contradiction: progress and reaction, prosperity and inequality, liberation and repression, invention and destruction. The timeline above is a guide; the events, people, and ideas behind it are the substance of the rest of this site.