{"id":1527,"date":"2015-08-20T05:56:29","date_gmt":"2015-08-20T05:56:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.candelalearning.com\/americanyawphist118x15x1\/?post_type=chapter&p=1527"},"modified":"2015-08-20T05:56:29","modified_gmt":"2015-08-20T05:56:29","slug":"introduction-31","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/sanjacinto-atdcoursereview-ushistory2-1\/chapter\/introduction-31\/","title":{"raw":"Introduction","rendered":"Introduction"},"content":{"raw":"[caption id=\"attachment_1291\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"1000\"]\"Al<\/a> Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer<\/em>, 1927.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nOn a sunny day in early March of 1921, Warren G. Harding took the oath to become the twenty-ninth President of the United States. He had won a landslide election by promising a \u201creturn to normalcy.\u201d \u201cOur supreme task is the resumption of our onward, normal way,\u201d he declared in his inaugural address. Two months later, he said, \u201cAmerica\u2019s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration.\u201d The nation still reeled from the shock of World War I, the explosion of racial violence and political repression in 1919, and, bolstered by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, a lingering \u201cRed Scare.\u201d\r\n\r\nMore than 115,000 American soldiers had lost their lives in barely a year of fighting in Europe. Between 1918 and 1920, nearly 700,000 Americans died in a flu epidemic that hit nearly twenty percent of the American population. Waves of strikes hit soon after the war. Radicals bellowed. Anarchists and others sent more than thirty bombs through the mail on May 1, 1919. After war controls fell, the economy tanked and national unemployment hit twenty percent. Farmers\u2019 bankruptcy rates, already egregious, now skyrocketed. Harding could hardly deliver the peace that he promised, but his message nevertheless resonated among a populace wracked by instability.\r\n\r\nThe 1920s would be anything but \u201cnormal.\u201d The decade so reshaped American life that it came to be called by many names: the New Era, the Jazz Age, the Age of the Flapper, the Prosperity Decade, and most commonly, the Roaring Twenties. The mass production and consumption of automobiles, household appliances, film, and radio fueled a new economy and new standards of living, new mass entertainment introduced talking films and jazz while sexual and social mores loosened. Meanwhile, many Americans turned their back on reform, denounced America\u2019s shifting demographics, stifled immigration, retreated toward an \u201cold time religion,\u201d and revived with millions of new members the Ku Klux Klan. Others, though, fought harder than ever for equal rights. Americans noted \u201cthe New Woman\u201d and \u201cthe New Negro,\u201d and the old immigrant communities that had escaped the quotas clung to their cultures and their native faiths. The 1920s were a decade of conflict and tension. And whatever it was, it was not \u201cnormalcy.\u201d","rendered":"
\"Al<\/a><\/p>\n

Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer<\/em>, 1927.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

On a sunny day in early March of 1921, Warren G. Harding took the oath to become the twenty-ninth President of the United States. He had won a landslide election by promising a \u201creturn to normalcy.\u201d \u201cOur supreme task is the resumption of our onward, normal way,\u201d he declared in his inaugural address. Two months later, he said, \u201cAmerica\u2019s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration.\u201d The nation still reeled from the shock of World War I, the explosion of racial violence and political repression in 1919, and, bolstered by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, a lingering \u201cRed Scare.\u201d<\/p>\n

More than 115,000 American soldiers had lost their lives in barely a year of fighting in Europe. Between 1918 and 1920, nearly 700,000 Americans died in a flu epidemic that hit nearly twenty percent of the American population. Waves of strikes hit soon after the war. Radicals bellowed. Anarchists and others sent more than thirty bombs through the mail on May 1, 1919. After war controls fell, the economy tanked and national unemployment hit twenty percent. Farmers\u2019 bankruptcy rates, already egregious, now skyrocketed. Harding could hardly deliver the peace that he promised, but his message nevertheless resonated among a populace wracked by instability.<\/p>\n

The 1920s would be anything but \u201cnormal.\u201d The decade so reshaped American life that it came to be called by many names: the New Era, the Jazz Age, the Age of the Flapper, the Prosperity Decade, and most commonly, the Roaring Twenties. The mass production and consumption of automobiles, household appliances, film, and radio fueled a new economy and new standards of living, new mass entertainment introduced talking films and jazz while sexual and social mores loosened. Meanwhile, many Americans turned their back on reform, denounced America\u2019s shifting demographics, stifled immigration, retreated toward an \u201cold time religion,\u201d and revived with millions of new members the Ku Klux Klan. Others, though, fought harder than ever for equal rights. Americans noted \u201cthe New Woman\u201d and \u201cthe New Negro,\u201d and the old immigrant communities that had escaped the quotas clung to their cultures and their native faiths. The 1920s were a decade of conflict and tension. And whatever it was, it was not \u201cnormalcy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t

\n\t\t\t

Candela Citations<\/h3>\n\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
CC licensed content, Shared previously<\/div>