In the 1920s, personalities bigger than Paul Bunyan took the country by storm, and while there's no question that the likes of Charles Lindbergh, Babe Ruth and others accomplished great things, there's also no doubt that their heroics were magnified by the birth of mass media -- most notably commercial radio.
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Babe Ruth
KDKA in Pittsburgh became the first licensed radio station in America in 1920. Within a few years, RCA had organized the National Broadcasting Company, and commercial radio networks soon dominated the airwaves. For the first time, Americans didn't have to be on hand to witness political conventions, sporting events or great tragedies; they could experience them in their own living rooms. When the advent of commercials demonstrated that radio could sell ice to Eskimos, network executives eager to cash in handed over their programming power to sophisticated advertising executives. Overnight, radio's primary function became to sell, not inform.
Advertisers didn't have to work hard to sell the good life to their listeners. Following the end of World War I, Americans turned away from idealism, preferring instead what 1920 GOP presidential candidate Warren Harding called "normalcy." The advent of Prohibition did little to deter them. Speakeasies and bootlegging prospered, and organized criminals led by the likes of Al Capone found that there were enormous profits to be made thanks to the Eighteenth Amendment's ban on intoxicating beverages.
Harding won in a landslide in an election that, following the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, allowed women to choose their chief executive for the first time. It wasn't too long before Harding ran into trouble when it was found that his Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall, had allowed an oil company private access to drill on land that had supposedly been set aside for the military. The Teapot Dome scandal, as it was called, might have taken down his administration had he not died first, as a result of food poisoning, on August 3, 1923. His successor was Vice President Calvin Coolidge. It turned out that most Americans didn't care much about Teapot Dome. While Democrats tried to pin the corruption label on the GOP, Coolidge was easily re-elected in 1924 over John W. Davis.
With the assistance of radio and the continuing newspaper war between Hearst and Pulitzer, the 1920s were a decade of big stories, larger-than-life personalities and heroic accomplishments. Some of them were even genuine.
There were the sports heroes like Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey and Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel. There were the heroes of the air, like Richard Byrd, who flew over both the North Pole and South Pole (although not during the same flight); Amelia Earhart; and, of course, Lindbergh. Other prominent personalities who naturally took to radio included the huckster/preacher Aimee Semple McPherson and humorist Will Rogers. Jazz enjoyed crossover popularity, even more so when George Gershwin combined elements of jazz, classical and American folk and produced an instant classic in "Rhapsody in Blue."
Even murders were major news. News coverage of the Hall-Mills case and the Leopold and Loeb murder of Bobby Franks was massive and riveting. The Sacco and Vanzetti case, on the other hand, earned little coverage when what started out in 1923 as a robbery turned into murder in a small Massachusetts town. But by the time the two anarchists were executed for the crime in 1927, it seemed like the whole world was paying attention to what many believed (and still believe) was a black eye for the reputation of American justice. The decade's other major criminal trial didn't involve murder but rather the teaching of evolution in Tennessee by John T. Scopes. The 1925 trial drew reporters from all over the country, and they got to witness a masterful performance by Clarence Darrow when he put fundamentalist leader William Jennings Bryan through a grueling cross examination. Only days after he left the stand, Bryan was dead.
Due to advances in technology, Americans could go to the theater and see talking pictures; a few even witnessed the earliest broadcasts of words and pictures from an invention called television. A real estate boom drew scores of speculators to Florida until many of them realized they had purchased useless swampland, and although the economy began to show some signs of leveling off, Republican Herbert Hoover was easily elected President in 1928 over Democrat Al Smith.
But the good times could often be often overstated. African-American poverty was rampant and civil rights were virtually nonexistent in the South. The revived Ku Klux Klan could be so brazen that 40,000 members marched without hoods through the streets of Washington, DC, in 1925. One response to the widespread despair in the black community was Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa movement, which drew thousands of followers.
Farmers began to suffer heavily during the 1920s. Overproduction led to drastically low prices. More and more farmers began abandoning the equipment and moving to the city. Their troubles were like the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Several times in 1929 stock prices plummeted suddenly only to recover. But when they fell again on October 24, 1929, by record levels, the worst Depression in American history quickly brought the Roaring Twenties to a roaring halt.
The 1910s
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