The decade’s raucous reputation gets some things right: Prohibition did transform Americans’ relationship with alcohol, turning drinking into a coed, social activity that moved out of disreputable saloons into homes, Dighe says. New York alone housed more than 30,000 speakeasies, many run by gangsters.
But that’s not the whole picture. Alcohol consumption itself decreased in the ’20s. In rural areas, the reinvigorated Ku Klux Klan took it upon itself to enforce the Volstead Act and act upon anti-immigrant hostilities. (Historian Lisa McGirr has argued that Prohibition helped kickstart the penal state and the disproportionate imprisonment of people of color and immigrants.) This dark side of Prohibition highlights an undercurrent of nativism and racism throughout the ’20s: White Oklahomans murdered several hundred Black neighbors in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, and national quotas enacted in 1924 slammed the door closed on immigration. And those speakeasies in Harlem, with their chorus girl extravaganzas, bathtub gin, and Madden’s No. 1 beer? White patrons came there to go “slumming.”
The ’20s were “a prosperity decade, no question about that,” says Dighe. Gross national product ballooned by 40 percent between 1922 and 1929. The Second Industrial Revolution—most notably electricity and the advent of the assembly line—led to a manufacturing boom. Cars could be put together in 93 minutes instead of half a day, and by the close of the decade, one-fifth of Americans owned an automobile, which they could use for leisure activities like traveling. The popularization of personal credit also enabled middle-class Americans to buy consumer goods in droves. The government, too, under the Republican administrations of Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, shared this spirit of wholehearted materialism, boosting corporations and otherwise taking a light touch to policy that corresponded with the prevailing anti-government sentiment of the time.
Examine this upbeat picture of consumerism more closely, though, and you’ll realize the economic boost of the ’20s was checkered. A sharp recession kicked off the decade, caused partially by the declining demand for American agricultural products after the war’s end brought European farming back into commission. (The limited data on the 1918 influenza’s impact indicates that for the most part, it caused short-term, not prolonged, business losses; scholars haven’t linked it to the prosperity of the following decade.) Then, as now, income inequality reached staggering rates. By the end of the ’20s, despite per capita income nearly doubling, the top 1 percent of U.S. families reaped more than 22 percent of the nation’s income.
The wealthy and middle class profited. African Americans, many of whom had moved to Northern cities for work as part of the Great Migration, newcomers to the country, and farmers did not share in that prosperity. The 1920 census marked the first time more than half the country’s population lived in urban areas. For rural Americans, particularly farmers, the ’20s “were roaring as in a roaring fire that was burning people out,” says curator Liebhold.