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Part I: American Involvement in WWI When World War I erupted across Europe in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the United States would remain neutral, and many Americans supported this policy of nonintervention.Women The most familiar symbol of the "Roaring Twenties" is probably the flapper6 : a young woman with bobbed hair and short skirts who drank, smoked and said what might be termed "unladylike" things; even those women who were not flappers gained some unprecedented freedoms. They could vote at last: The 19th Amendment to the Constitution had guaranteed that right in 1920. Millions of women worked in white-collar jobs and could afford to participate in the burgeoning consumer economy. The increased availability of birth-control devices made it possible for women to have fewer children. And new machines and technologies like the washing machine and the vacuum cleaner eliminated some of the household work. The Birth of Mass Culture and Consumerism During the 1920s, many Americans had extra money to spend, and they spent it on consumer goods such as ready-to-wear clothes and home appliances like electric refrigerators. In particular, they bought radios. The first commercial radio station in the U.S. hit the airwaves in 1920; three years later there were more than 500 stations in thenation. By the end of the 1920s, there were radios in more than 12 million households. People also went to the movies: Historians estimate that, by the end of the decades, three-quarters of the American population visited a movie theater every week. But the most important consumer product of the 1920s was the automobile. Low prices and generous credit made cars7 affordable luxuries at the beginning of the decade; by the end, they were practically necessities. In 1929 there was one car on the road for every five Americans. Meanwhile, an economy of automobiles was born: Businesses like service stations and motels sprang up to meet drivers' needs. The Jazz Age Cars also gave young people the freedom to go where they pleased and do what they wanted. What many young people wanted to do was dance: the Charleston, the cake walk, the black bottom, the flea hop Jazz bands played at dance halls; radio stations and phonograph records (100 million of which were sold in 1927 alone) carried their tunes to listeners across the nation. The novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) chronicled the Jazz Age. Prohibition During the 1920s, some freedoms were expanded while others were curtailed. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1919, had banned the manufacture and sale of "intoxicating liquors," and at 12 A.M. on January 16, 1920, the federal Volstead Act closed every bar and saloon in the United States.However, the interception and publication of the Zimmerman telegram threatening an alliance between Germany and Mexico1 and the fall of the Tsarist regime in Russia made Wilson's claims that he wanted to fight to make the world safe for democracy.Some older people objected to jazz music's "vulgarity" and "depravity" (and the "moral disasters" it supposedly inspired), but many in the younger generation loved the freedom they felt on the dance floor.U.S economic output doubled in four years (highly productive industry).The U.S. officially entered the conflict on April 6, 1917.Impact of WWI The United States became a world power.As a result, America had developed a comparative advantage in mass production of goods.Wilson was the first U.S. president to visit Europe when he attended the Paris Peace Conference2 .It had also become a major military power.

Part I: American Involvement in WWI
When World War I erupted across Europe in 1914, President
Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the United States would remain
neutral, and many Americans supported this policy of
nonintervention. However, the interception and publication of
the Zimmerman telegram threatening an alliance between
Germany and Mexico1 and the fall of the Tsarist regime in Russia
made Wilson’s claims that he wanted to fight to make the world safe for democracy.
The U.S. officially entered the conflict on April 6, 1917.
Impact of WWI
The United States became a world power. U.S economic output doubled in four years
(highly productive industry). As a result, America had developed a comparative
advantage in mass production of goods. It had also become a major military power.
Wilson was the first U.S. president to visit Europe when he attended the Paris Peace
Conference2
. He was also the first to claim the U.S. role of making the world "safe for
democracy.
World War I took the United States out of a recession3
into an economic boom. Before
the war, America had been a debtor nation. After the war, it became a lender.
U.S. exports to Europe increased as those countries geared up for war. Later, U.S.
spending increased as it prepared to enter the war itself. It cost $32 billion. Three
million citizens joined the military. The federal government hired another 500,000.
Unemployment fell from 7.9 percent to 1.4 percent.
Before World War I, at least 90 percent of American blacks remained in the South. They
were illiterate and poor due to Jim Crow laws4
(legalized racial segregation and meant
to marginalize African Americans by denying them the right to vote, hold jobs, get an
education or other opportunities). After the war, blacks moved north in the Great
Migration5
. The war had slowed immigration from Europe, creating a labor shortage in
the North. Companies began recruiting black Southerners to work in their factories.
Returning black veterans were open to a new way of life.
Part II: The Roaring Twenties
The 1920s was a decade of change, when many
Americans owned cars, radios, and telephones for
the first time. The cars brought the need for good
roads. The radio brought the world closer to home. The telephone connected families
and friends. Prosperity was on the rise in cities and towns, and social change flavored the air. A substantial growth of industry occurred in North Carolina, especially in the
areas of tobacco, textiles, and furniture. Some rural farmers were leaving their farms in
order to receive a regular paycheck in the factories. Unions were on the rise. Women
shortened, or “bobbed,” their hair, flappers danced and wore short fancy dresses, and
men shaved off their beards.
The 1920s began with the last American troops returning from Europe after WWI. They
were coming back to their families, friends, and jobs. Most of the soldiers had never
been far from home before the war, and their experiences had changed their
perspective of life around them. After seeing Europe, they wanted some of the finer
things in life for themselves and their families.
Women
The most familiar symbol of the “Roaring Twenties” is probably the flapper6
: a young
woman with bobbed hair and short skirts who drank, smoked and said what might be
termed “unladylike” things; even those women who were not flappers gained some
unprecedented freedoms. They could vote at last: The 19th Amendment to
the Constitution had guaranteed that right in 1920. Millions of women worked in
white-collar jobs and could afford to participate in the burgeoning consumer economy.
The increased availability of birth-control devices made it possible for women to have
fewer children. And new machines and technologies like the washing machine and the
vacuum cleaner eliminated some of the household work.
The Birth of Mass Culture and Consumerism
During the 1920s, many Americans had extra money to spend, and they spent it on
consumer goods such as ready-to-wear clothes and home appliances like electric
refrigerators. In particular, they bought radios. The first commercial radio station in the
U.S. hit the airwaves in 1920; three years later there were more than 500 stations in thenation. By the end of the 1920s, there were radios in more than 12 million households.
People also went to the movies: Historians estimate that, by the end of the decades,
three-quarters of the American population visited a movie theater every week.
But the most important consumer product of the 1920s was the automobile. Low prices
and generous credit made cars7 affordable luxuries at the beginning of the decade; by
the end, they were practically necessities. In 1929 there was one car on the road for
every five Americans. Meanwhile, an economy of automobiles was born: Businesses like
service stations and motels sprang up to meet drivers’ needs.
The Jazz Age
Cars also gave young people the freedom to go where they pleased and do what they
wanted. What many young people wanted to do was dance: the Charleston, the cake
walk, the black bottom, the flea hop Jazz bands played at dance halls; radio stations
and phonograph records (100 million of which were sold in 1927 alone) carried their
tunes to listeners across the nation. Some older people objected to jazz music’s
“vulgarity” and “depravity” (and the “moral disasters” it supposedly inspired), but
many in the younger generation loved the freedom they felt on the dance floor. The
novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) chronicled the Jazz Age.
Prohibition
During the 1920s, some freedoms were expanded while others were curtailed. The 18th
Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1919, had banned the manufacture and sale
of “intoxicating liquors,” and at 12 A.M. on January 16, 1920, the federal Volstead Act
closed every bar and saloon in the United States. From then on, it was illegal to sell any
“intoxication beverages” with more than 0.5% alcohol. This drove the liquor trade
underground–now, people simply went to nominally illegal speakeasies instead of
ordinary bars–where it was controlled by bootleggers, racketeers and other organizedcrime figures such as Chicago gangster Al Capone.
To many middle-class white Americans, Prohibition was a way to assert some control
over the unruly immigrant masses that crowded the nation’s cities. Drinking was a
symbol of all they disliked about the modern city, and eliminating alcohol would, they
believed, turn back the clock to an earlier and more comfortable time.
Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was the development of the Harlem neighborhood in New
York City as a black cultural mecca in the early twentieth century and the subsequent
social and artistic explosion that resulted. Lasting roughly from the 1910s through the
mid-1930s, the period is considered a golden age in African American culture,
manifesting in literature, music, stage performance and art. Embracing literary, musical,
and theatrical, participants sought to reconceptualize “the Negro” apart from the
white stereotypes that had influenced black peoples’ relationship to their heritage and
to each other. They also sought to break free of Victorian moral values and bourgeois
shame about aspects of their lives that might, as seen by whites, reinforce racist beliefs.
Never dominated by a particular school of thought but rather characterized by intense
debate, the movement laid the groundwork for all later African American literature and
had an enormous impact on subsequent black literature and consciousness worldwide.