22 Cultural Conflict, Bubble, and Bust

1919–1932

The years following World War I were hardly the period of “normalcy” President Warren Harding had hoped for. Instead, the twenties both roared and retreated at the same time. For many, the postwar era opened possibilities for self-expression and a turn to life’s pleasures, encouraged by a booming consumer culture promising self-fulfillment and high living. For others, the so-called modern world’s hedonism beguiled Americans into abandoning traditional values of God and country for false values and empty promises. This core conflict about American values played itself out in the politics of the period. Suffragists finally won ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, and African American culture bloomed into a renaissance that proclaimed blacks’ self-confident identity. Yet the era’s more conservative leanings sought to purge society’s demons, whether they took form in liquor bottles, radical labor ideologies, subversive immigrants, or godless attacks on traditional values. The 1929 stock market crash revealed the economic strains that had fueled the 1920s exuberance and ushered in a new era of austerity.