What Happened in 1920: A Pivotal Year in American History

The year 1920 is one of the most important pivot points in American history. In a single twelve-month span, the country adopted a constitutional ban on alcohol, ratified the amendment that gave women the right to vote, elected a president on a promise of “normalcy,” and broadcast the first commercial radio program. The decade that historians would call the Roaring Twenties began, in effect, on January 1, 1920, and almost every major theme of the next ten years was foreshadowed in that year. To see the larger context, see the parent timeline of the 1920s; to compare this year with other pivotal years, see the major events of 1925 and the key events of 1927.

Prohibition Takes Effect

The most significant change of January 17, 1920, was the activation of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act, the federal laws that together banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors throughout the United States. Prohibition, the resulting era, was the most ambitious experiment in social engineering in American history, and it would be one of the most consequential failures. By the time the country repealed the amendment in 1933, the attempt to legislate personal morality had produced organized crime on a scale not seen since the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan, had given rise to a vast network of speakeasies, and had so discredited the moral-reform tradition that no similar amendment has been attempted since. The full history of this is told in our Prohibition and speakeasies page.

The Nineteenth Amendment and the Election

On August 18, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment was officially certified as part of the Constitution, prohibiting the denial of the right to vote on the basis of sex. The amendment was the culmination of more than seventy years of struggle, beginning with the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 and continuing through the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the more militant National Woman’s Party founded by Alice Paul. Ratification was completed on August 18, 1920. The full story of the 72-year fight is in our history of women’s suffrage and the 19th Amendment.

The 1920 presidential election, held on November 2, was the first in which American women voted nationwide. The result was not in doubt — Republican Warren G. Harding defeated Democrat James M. Cox in a landslide of 404 to 127 electoral votes, taking 60 percent of the popular vote. Roughly 8 million women voted, accounting for about a third of the total electorate. The election, the amendment, and the Prohibition Act together made 1920 the most consequential single year for American political rights since Reconstruction.

The Return to Normalcy

Warren G. Harding was a newspaper publisher from Ohio who had served in the U.S. Senate since 1915. He was not the first choice of the Republican establishment, which had preferred Frank Lowden of Illinois or Leonard Wood of Massachusetts, but the convention deadlocked for ten ballots before settling on Harding as a compromise. His running mate was Calvin Coolidge, the stern, poker-faced governor of Massachusetts. Harding’s campaign theme was a return to “normalcy” — a word he had deliberately invented to suggest a return to the simpler pre-war era. The slogan captured the mood of an exhausted, war-weary electorate that wanted nothing more than stability, and the Republicans won both houses of Congress by similarly large margins. Cox, the Democratic nominee, was a strong supporter of the League of Nations, an international body that President Wilson had championed but that the Senate had refused to ratify. To see the larger arc of the decade’s politics, see our Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover page.

The Red Scare and the Palmer Raids

The year 1920 was also the high point of the First Red Scare, a wave of anti-radical hysteria that had begun with the Russian Revolution of 1917 and intensified in the spring of 1919 with a series of anarchist bombings. On June 2, 1919, a bomb exploded on the doorstep of the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in Washington, D.C. On September 16, 1920, a much more powerful bomb exploded on Wall Street outside the offices of J.P. Morgan, killing 30 people and injuring hundreds — the deadliest terror attack in the United States to that point. In November 1919 and January 1920, Palmer ordered the Palmer Raids, a series of mass arrests of suspected radicals, communists, and anarchists. The raids swept up roughly 10,000 people in a few weeks. Many were held without charge; several hundred, including the immigrant anarchist Emma Goldman, were deported to the Soviet Union. The Palmer Raids, like the Sacco and Vanzetti case, contributed to the nativist climate of the early 1920s and the Immigration Act of 1924.

The First Commercial Radio Broadcast

On the evening of November 2, 1920, station KDKA of Pittsburgh made the first commercial radio broadcast in American history, reporting the results of the Harding-Cox election as the returns came in. The broadcast was heard by an audience of perhaps a few hundred radio owners within range of the Pittsburgh transmitter, and it is commemorated today as the beginning of the radio age. By the end of the decade, more than 500 commercial stations had been licensed, and nearly 12 million households owned radio sets. The rise of radio broadcasting in the 1920s reshaped American politics, entertainment, advertising, and family life, and the medium would become the most powerful single force in American popular culture of the 1920s.

Miss America and Babe Ruth

On September 8, 1920, the Inter-City Beauty Contest — soon renamed the Miss America Pageant — was held in Atlantic City, New Jersey, as a way to extend the tourist season past Labor Day. The first winner was Margaret Gorman, a 16-year-old from Washington, D.C. The pageant became an annual institution and a fixture of American popular culture, and it was the public face of a broader 1920s revolution in the visibility of women in public life.

The 1920 baseball season was the first after the Black Sox Scandal, in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox had been accused of throwing the 1919 World Series. The players were banned from the sport for life in August 1921 by the new Commissioner of Baseball, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis (a grand jury had returned indictments in 1920; Landis handed down the lifetime bans the following year), and the scandal had shocked the country. The player who rescued baseball from the scandal was Babe Ruth, the larger-than-life outfielder who had been sold by the Red Sox to the Yankees in December 1919. In his first year in New York, Ruth hit 54 home runs — more than any other team in the American League — and established himself as the most popular player in the game. Ruth’s swing would define baseball for the rest of the decade. The full story is in our Babe Ruth and the Golden Age of Baseball page. On September 17, 1920, a group of professional football teams met in Canton, Ohio, and formed the American Professional Football Association, the forerunner of the National Football League.

The 1920 Census: An America Transformed

The 1920 census, taken in January, revealed that for the first time in American history, more Americans lived in cities than in rural areas. The urban population was roughly 51.2 percent of the total, and the rural population about 48.8 percent — the narrowest such margin in American history to that point and the formal turning point of a decades-long shift. The census also showed a population of 106 million, the first census in which the population had exceeded 100 million. The 1920 census was the statistical portrait of a country transformed by industrialization, immigration, and the First World War — an America that, over the next ten years, would be transformed again by the automobile, the radio, the talking film, and the boom-and-bust of the most volatile decade in its history.

A Year That Set the Decade’s Course

The events of 1920 — Prohibition, women’s suffrage, the Harding landslide, the Red Scare, the first commercial radio, the first Miss America, the rise of Babe Ruth, and the country’s transition from rural to urban — were not a single story but a set of them. Each would unfold and grow in the years to come. Together, they set the course of the decade. The 1920s began, in a real sense, in 1920.