What you’ll learn to do: examine societal and political tensions of the 1920s

Figure 1. The Purple Gang, also known as the Sugar House Gang, was a criminal mob of bootleggers and hijackers comprised predominantly of Jewish gangsters. They operated in Detroit, Michigan, during the Prohibition-era 1920s and came to be Detroit’s dominant gang.

The 1920s was a decade of profound social changes involving immigration, race, alcohol, evolution, gender politics, and sexual morality, which all became major cultural battlefields. In many cases, these divides were geographic as well as philosophical. City dwellers tended to embrace the cultural changes of the era, whereas those who lived in rural towns clung to traditional norms. The Sacco and Vanzetti trial in Massachusetts, as well as the Scopes trial in Tennessee, revealed many Americans’ fears and suspicions about immigrants, radical politics, and the ways in which new scientific theories might challenge traditional Christian beliefs. Some reacted more zealously than others, leading to the inception of nativist and fundamentalist perspectives, as well as the reinvigoration of once-faded terror groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.