The Roaring Twenties

 

One hundred years ago, in 1925, America was changing. From politics, science, and the economy to fashions and entertainment, society was being reshaped by powerful forces both good and ill, many of them having parallels today.

For the richest ten percent, the economy was “Coolidge prosperity.” Republican President Calvin Coolidge, like his Party, believed in small government and unregulated capitalism. In 1923, the Republican Congress cut taxes on high incomes from 50% to 25% and on low incomes from 4% to 3%. By 1927, the number of millionaires had increased from 75 to 283.

Meanwhile, the average worker’s pay grew only 1.4% per year. Most people didn’t share in the prosperity at the top. Farmers had it especially hard, finding that costly mechanized production increased the food supply but reduced crop prices. Hundreds of thousands left their farms and moved to cities.

Economic growth was driven (sorry) by the auto industry. In 1919, 6.7 million cars were in service; by 1929, 23.1 million were using a growing system of paved highways and city streets. Unlike Ford’s open Model T painted only black, auto firms hired trained designers and sold stylish fully-enclosed models in a rainbow of colors thanks to new paint technology.

Radio boomed as well. After the first broadcast in 1920, radio sales were $60 million in 1922 rising to $430 million in 1925 and bringing news, music, sports, and more into homes across the country. Other new products in growing demand were rayon, cigarettes, telephones, and cosmetics. Silent movies made stars like Charlie Chaplin and Clara Bow known around the world.

The Twenties were also dubbed the Jazz Age. By 1925, the Harlem Renaissance, with the help of live radio and records, made musicians like Duke Ellington (pictured) household names and led to lively new dances where young women—Flappers—could show off their newly fashionable short skirts and bobbed hair. The appalling number of deaths in the recent World War and Spanish Flu epidemic fostered a sense that life was short so they might as well live it up. While jazz was the theme song of the Twenties, Nashville’s WSM radio aired, in 1925, the first “WSM Barn Dance,” eventually retitled Grand Ole Opry.

The same year, two Dayton, Tennessee, businessmen hatched a scheme to “put Dayton on the map” by persuading John Scopes, a local biology teacher, to purposely disobey a new state law prohibiting teaching evolution in state schools. Scopes did and was duly prosecuted. A trial was promptly held that attracted news coverage from around the country and overseas including live radio. Billed by the press as the Scopes Monkey Trial, the issue was whether schools could teach about scientific findings based on observable evidence. The local jury found Scopes guilty despite evolution being endorsed in the state-approved textbook, and he was fined $100. The verdict was soon overturned on a technicality.

Science made a quantum leap in 1925 when German physicist Werner Heisenberg published a paper describing quantum mechanics, a revolutionary view of how nature works at atomic and subatomic levels. Quantum physics eventually made possible semiconductors, lasers, MRI, smartphones, and more. 

The Roaring Twenties didn’t end well. The overheated stock market crashed in 1929, beginning the ten-year Great Depression caused, in part, by the Republicans’ failure to strictly regulate the stock market and banks, and by excessive wealth in the pockets of a few. Also, an isolationist foreign policy turned America inward, feeling safe behind its moat of oceans and powerful Navy. Distanced from former allies and refusing to join the League of Nations, an “America first” attitude helped allow the rise of fascist dictators in Italy and Germany and militarism in Japan. Are we making these mistakes again? Now?

         Never Forget

Hundreds of convicted criminals who attacked the U.S. Capitol and Congress on January 6, 2021, have been pardoned or their sentences commuted. These 1,300 or so rioters are now free to go where they want and do what they want. 

What the rioters wanted on January 6 was to prevent the certification of Joe Biden as president-elect even though he won election by a margin of seven million votes. They failed in that but succeeded in permanently staining the history of the United States and threatening our democracy itself. Like December 7, 1941, it was “a day that will live in infamy.” 

Told by the losing candidate that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” some of the rioters were ordinary citizens who chose to join the mob and march on the Capitol but didn’t participate in attacks on the police or other violence. Found guilty by judges or juries of trespassing or other minor crimes, they received light sentences. 

Others, however, were thugs, many with weapons and criminal records: far-right extremists and neo-Nazi white supremacists. They fought the police then broke into the building and desecrated the People’s House—our House—threatening to harm members of Congress and Vice-President Pence. These thugs were convicted of major crimes ranging from assaulting officers to conspiracy to seditious conspiracy. During the attack, 174 police officers were injured, and one killed; four other officers committed suicide in the following seven months.

The week after being freed, one of the former convicts was pulled over by an Indiana Highway Patrol officer for a traffic violation, had a gun, and was shot and killed by the officer. The same week, another was arrested on a federal gun charge related to domestic violence and resisting arrest. A third rioter is on the run from Texas police because of an arrest warrant for online solicitation of a minor. Yet another freed rioter said that he plans to buy “some m*********** guns.” Great. Just what we need.

There is a scheme afoot to rewrite our history making the attackers appear to be mostly a group of patriots taking a Capitol tour. The pardons and commutations were a first step followed last week by the firing of senior FBI and Justice Department officials involved in the investigations and prosecutions—officials who were just doing the jobs assigned to them: go after the lawbreakers we all saw on TV. Members of the Congressional January 6 Committee who investigated the attack may be the next targets. 

Congressional Republicans have already “forgotten” what the mob was up to and who put them up to it. Brendon Baliou, an experienced Justice Department lawyer who recently resigned, wrote that in 2021, GOP Representative Elise Stefanik said the rioters “should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” Later, she labelled them “hostages” and has now been chosen our new ambassador to the U.N.; former GOP Senator Kelly Loeffler said, “the violence, the lawlessness and siege of the halls of Congress are abhorrent.” Soon, though, she shifted to calling the House investigation a “sham” and that any indictment “should be dismissed out of hand.” She has been nominated to head the Small Business Administration.

Mr. Baliou emphasized that the rest of us “must keep the horrors of Jan. 6 from being forgotten. Memorialize the day…. Keep it alive in your conversations. Doing so matters. For in a time when many politicians’ careers depend on forgetting, memory itself is an act of resistance.”

If we fail to remember, we won’t have President Lincoln’s government “of the People, by the People, and for the People” anymore. Never forget.