The 1920s (pronounced "nineteen-twenties" often shortened to the "'20s" or the "Twenties") was a decade that began on January 1, 1920, and ended on December 31, 1929. In America, it is frequently referred to as the "Roaring Twenties" or the "Jazz Age", while in Europe the period is sometimes referred to as the "Golden Twenties"[1] because of the economic boom following World War I (1914–1918). French speakers refer to the period as the "Années folles" ('crazy years'),[2] emphasizing the era's social, artistic, and cultural dynamism.
The Roaring Twenties brought about several novel and highly visible social and cultural trends. These trends, made possible by sustained economic prosperity, were most visible in major cities like New York, Chicago, Paris, Berlin, and London. "Normalcy" returned to politics in the wake of hyper-emotional patriotism during World War I, jazz blossomed, and Art Deco peaked. For women, knee-length skirts and dresses became socially acceptable, as did bobbed hair with a finger waveormarcel wave. The women who pioneered these trends were frequently referred to as flappers.[3]
The era saw the large-scale adoption of automobiles, telephones, motion pictures, radio, and household electricity, as well as unprecedented industrial growth, accelerated consumer demand and aspirations, and significant changes in lifestyle and culture, mostly in the urbanized areas of the Western World. The media began to focus on celebrities, especially sports heroes and movie stars. Large baseball stadiums were built in major US cities, in addition to palatial cinemas.
Most independent countries passed women's suffrage after 1918, especially as a reward for women's support of the war effort and endurance of its deaths and hardships.[citation needed]
Irish Free State gains independence from the United Kingdom in 1922.
Egypt officially becomes an independent country through the Declaration of 1922, though it still remains under the military and political influence of the British Empire.
Women's suffrage movement continues to make gains as women obtain full voting rights in the United Kingdom in 1918 (women over 30) and in 1928 (full enfranchisement), in the United States in 1920. Also : full or partial gains in Uruguay 1917; Canada, 1917–1925 except Quebec (1940); Czechoslovakia 1920; Irish Free State, 1922; Burma, 1922; Italy, 1925 (partial); Ecuador 1929.[4]
United States
[edit]Prohibition agents emptying barrels of alcohol
The Osage Indian murders of the 1920s lead to the federal government launching the first large scale investigation by the recently formed Bureau of Investigation, which would later become the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).[5]
The Immigration Act of 1924 places restrictions on immigration. National quotas curbed most Eastern and Southern European nationalities, further enforced the ban on immigration of East Asians, South Asians, and Southeast Asians, and put mild regulations on nationalities from the Western Hemisphere (Latin Americans).
The major sport was baseball and the most famous player was Babe Ruth.
A peak in the early 1920s in the membership of the Ku Klux Klan of four to five million members (after its reemergence in 1915), followed by a rapid decline down to an estimated 30,000 members by 1930.[6]
The Scopes trial (1925), which declared that John T. Scopes had violated the law by teaching evolution in schools, creating tension between the competing viewpoints of creationism and evolution.
Polish–Soviet War (1920–1921); Poland defeats Soviet expansion; Ukraine and Belarus were divided.
Major armed conflict in Ireland including Irish War of Independence (1919–1921) resulting in part of Ireland becoming an independent country in 1922 followed by the Irish Civil War (1922–1923).
Economic boom ended by "Black Tuesday" (October 29, 1929); the stock market crashes, leading to the Great Depression. The market actually began to drop on Thursday October 24, 1929, and the fall continued until the huge crash on Tuesday October 29, 1929.
The Dawes Plan, through which the U.S. made significant loans to Germany in order to help stabilize its economy and make war reparations payments, was enacted in 1924.
Average annual inflation for the decade was virtually zero but individual years ranged from a high of 3.47% in 1925 to a deflationary −11% in 1921.[9]
The Tri-State tornado outbreak struck the United States on 18 March 1925. The Tri-State Tornado, which the outbreak gets its name from, became the deadliest tornado in US history, as it killed 695 people, whom 613 of which in Illinois, 71 in Indiana, and 12 (possibly more) in Missouri. The outbreak as a whole, killed 751.
The tornado, was the deadliest in history, until 1989, where a F3 tornado hit Bangladesh, killing 1300. However, The Tri-State Tornado is still the 2nd deadliest in history, and the deadliest in the United States.
The first animated short film by Walt Disney is released in 1928, featuring Mickey Mouse. Steamboat Willie was the first sound cartoon to attract widespread notice and popularity.
The most memorable fashion trend of the Roaring Twenties was undoubtedly "the flapper" look.
The 1920s is the decade in which fashion entered the modern era. It was the decade in which women first abandoned the more restricting fashions of past years and began to wear more comfortable clothes (such as short skirts or trousers). Men also abandoned highly formal daily attire and even began to wear athletic clothing for the first time. The suits men wear today are still based, for the most part, on those worn in the late 1920s. The 1920s are characterized by two distinct periods of fashion. In the early part of the decade, change was slow, as many were reluctant to adopt new styles. From 1925, the public passionately embraced the styles associated with the Roaring Twenties. These styles continued to characterize fashion until the worldwide depression worsened in 1931.
Music
[edit]The period from the end of the First World War until the start of the Depression in 1929 is known as the "Jazz Age".
The "Jazz Age" – jazz and jazz-influenced dance music became widely popular throughout the decade.
First commercial radio stations in the U.S., 8MK (WWJ) in Detroit and (KDKA 1020 AM) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, go on the air on August 27, 1920.
Both stations broadcast the election results between Harding and Cox in early November. The first station to receive a commercial license is WBZ, then in Springfield MA, in mid-September 1921. While there are only a few radio stations in 1920–21, by 1922 the radio craze is sweeping the country.
1922: The BBC begins radio broadcasting in the United Kingdom as the British Broadcasting Company, a consortium between radio manufacturers and newspapers. It became a public broadcaster in 1926.
Way Down East: p. 52. "D.W. Griffith's Way Down East (1920) was projected to return rentals of $4,000,000 on an $800,000 negative. This figure was based on the amounts earned from its roadshow run, coupled with its playoff in the rest of the country's theaters. Griffith had originally placed the potential film rental at $3,000,000 but, because of the success of the various roadshows that were running the $4,000,000 total was expected. The film showed a profit of $615,736 after just 23 weeks of release on a gross of $2,179,613."
What Price Glory?: p. 112. "What Price Glory hit the jackpot with massive world rentals of $2,429,000, the highest figure in the history of the company. Since it was also the most expensive production of the year at $817,000 the profit was still a healthy $796,000..."
Cavalcade: p. 170. "The actual cost of Cavalcade was $1,116,000 and it was most definitely not guaranteed a success. In fact, if its foreign grosses followed the usual 40 percent of domestic returns, the film would have lost money. In a turnaround, the foreign gross was almost double the $1,000,000 domestic take to reach total world rentals of $3,000,000 and Fox's largest profit of the year at $664,000."
State Fair: p. 170. "State Fair did turn out to be a substantial hit with the help of Janet Gaynor boosting Will Rogers back to the level of money-making star. Its prestige engagements helped raked in a total $1,208,000 in domestic rentals. Surprisingly, in foreign countries unfamiliar with state fairs, it still earned a respectable $429,000. With its total rentals, the film ended up showing a $398,000 profit."
^Hall & Neale 2010, p. 53. "The Four Forsemen of the Apocalypse was to become Metro's most expensive production and one of the decade's biggest box-office hits. Its production costs have been estimated at "something between $600,000 and $800,000." Variety estimated its worldwide gross at $4 million in 1925 and at $5 million in 1944; in 1991, it estimated its cumulative domestic rentals at $3,800,000."
^Brownlow, Kevin (1968). The parade's gone by . University of California Press. p. 255. ISBN978-0-520-03068-8. The negative cost was about $986,000, which did not include Fairbanks' own salary. Once the exploitation and release prints were taken into account, Robin Hood cost about $1,400,000—exceeding both Intolerance ($700,000) and the celebrated "million dollar movie" Foolish Wives. But it earned $2,500,000.
^Vance, Jeffrey (2008). Douglas Fairbanks. University of California Press. p. 146. ISBN978-0-520-25667-5. The film had a production cost of $930,042.78—more than the cost of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance and nearly as much as Erich von Stroheim's Foolish Wives (1922).
ch. 70. The Ten Commandments (1956). "Cost: $13,272,381.87; Gross receipts: $90,066,230.00 (to June 23, 1979)"
^May, Richard P. (Fall 2005), "Restoring The Big Parade", The Moving Image, 5 (2): 140–146, doi:10.1353/mov.2005.0033, ISSN1532-3978, S2CID192076406, ...earning somewhere between $18 and $22 million, depending on the figures consulted
^Robertson, Patrick (1991). Guinness Book of Movie Facts and Feats (4 ed.). Abbeville Publishing Group. p. 30. ISBN978-1-55859-236-0. The top grossing silent film was King Vidor's The Big Parade (US 25), with worldwide rentals of $22 million.
^Hall & Neale 2010, pp. 58–59. "Even then, at a time when the budget for a feature averaged at around $300,000, no more than $382,000 was spent on production...According to the Eddie Mannix Ledger at MGM, it grossed $4,990,000 domestically and $1,141,000 abroad."
^Hall & Neale 2010, p. 163. "MGM's silent Ben-Hur, which opened at the end of 1925, had out-grossed all the other pictures released by the company in 1926 combined. With worldwide rentals of $9,386,000 on first release it was, with the sole possible exception of The Birth of a Nation, the highest-earning film of the entire silent era. (At a negative cost of $3,967,000, it was also the most expensive.)"
^Finler 2003, p. 188. "At a cost of $2 million Wings was the studio's most expensive movie of the decade, and though it did well it was not good enough to earn a profit."
Block, Hayley Taylor (2010), The Jazz Singer, p. 113, The film brought in $2.6 million in worldwide rentals and made a net profit of $1,196,750. Jolson's follow-up Warner Bros. film, The Singing Fool (1928), brought in over two times as much, with $5.9 in worldwide rentals and a profit of $3,649,000, making them two of the most profitable films in the 1920s. In: Block & Wilson 2010.
^Birchard, Robert S. (2010), The Broadway Melody, p. 121, It earned $4.4 million in worldwide rentals and was the first movie to spawn sequels (there were several until 1940). In: Block & Wilson 2010.
^Bradley, Edwin M. (2004) [1st. pub. 1996]. The First Hollywood Musicals: A Critical Filmography of 171 Features, 1927 Through 1932. McFarland & Company. ISBN978-0-7864-2029-2.
The Singing Fool: p. 12. "Ego aside, Jolson was at the top of his powers in The Singing Fool. The $150,000 Warner Bros. paid him to make it, and the $388,000 it took to produce the film, were drops in the hat next to the film's world gross of $5.9 million. Its $3.8-million gross in this country set a box-office record that would not be surpassed until Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)."
The Broadway Melody: p. 24. "The Broadway Melody with a negative cost of $379,000, grossed $2.8 million in the United States, $4.8 million worldwide, and made a recorded profit of $1.6 million for MGM."
Gold Diggers of Broadway: p. 58. "It grossed an impressive $2.5 million domestically and nearly $4 million worldwide."
^Solomon, Aubrey (2002) [First published 1988]. Twentieth Century-Fox: a corporate and financial history. Filmmakers series. Vol. 20. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN978-0-8108-4244-1.
Sunny Side Up: p. 10. "Sunny Side Up, a musical starring Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, showed domestic rentals of $3.5 million, a record for the company."
Forever Amber: p. 66. "On the surface, with world rentals of $8 million, Forever Amber was considered a hit at distribution level."
The French Connection
p. 167. "The Planet of the Apes motion pictures were all moneymakers and Zanuck's record would have immediately improved had he stayed through the release of The French Connection, which took in rentals of approximately $75 million worldwide."
Allen, Frederick Lewis. Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (1931), classic popular history of United States; online free
Currell, Susan. American Culture in the 1920s (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), a British perspective.
Dumenil, Lynn. The modern temper: American culture and society in the 1920s (Macmillan, 1995).
Grossman, Mark. Encyclopedia of the Interwar Years: From 1919 to 1939 (2000). 400pp.
Jacobson, Jon. "Is there a New International History of the 1920s?." American Historical Review 88.3 (1983): 617–645. online
Johnson, GAynor, and Michael Dockrill eds. Locarno Revisited: European Diplomacy 1920-1929 (2004)
McAuliffe, Mary. When Paris Sizzled: The 1920s Paris of Hemingway, Chanel, Cocteau, Cole Porter, Josephine Baker, and Their Friends (2016) excerpt
Maier, Charles S. Recasting bourgeois Europe: stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the decade after World War I (Princeton University Press, 2015), scholarly analysis
Mowat, Charles Loch. Britain Between the Wars, 1918–1940 (1955), 690pp; thorough scholarly coverage; emphasis on politics also online free to read, scholarly survey of the era.
Sobel, RobertThe Great Bull Market: Wall Street in the 1920s. (1968)
Uldricks, Teddy J. "Russia and Europe: Diplomacy, Revolution, and Economic Development in the 1920s." International History Review 1.1 (1979): 55–83.
Walters, Ryan S. The Jazz Age President: Defending Warren G. Harding (2022) excerpt also online review
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