Detail from a cartoon entitled "Cleaning the Nest"

With the end of World War I came deep-seated fears of political radicalism, the beginnings of what would become the "Red Scare." Before the end of the Wilson presidency, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer led raids on leftist organizations such as the International Workers of the World, a labor union. Palmer hoped his crusade against radicalism would usher him into the presidency. He created the precursor to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which collected the names of thousands of suspected Communists.

More than 500 aliens on the list were deported, including the radical orator Emma Goldman. Palmer claimed he was ridding the country of "moral perverts," but his tactics, which tended to violate civil liberties, proved to be too draconian in the minds of the electorate.

Marcus Garvey

During the early 1920s, the ranks of the Ku Klux Klan swelled to 4.5 million. The Klan helped to elect 16 U.S. Senators, as well as many Representatives and local officials. When David Curtis Stephenson, Indiana's head Klansman, was convicted of kidnapping and sexual assault in 1925, indictments and prosecutions of Klan-supported politicians on corruption charges followed. Nationwide membership of the Klan fell to just 45,000 in five years.

Marcus Garvey, the "Black Moses," led a national movement whose theme was the impossibility of equal rights in white America. Garvey preached black pride, segregation and a return to Africa, but the decade's currents of white supremacy overpowered him. He was charged with mail fraud, jailed and deported.

William Allen White, a small-town editor in Emporia, Kansas, crusaded against the Klan and for free speech. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial, he wrote: "If there is freedom, folly will die of its own poison."

• William Allen White (pdf)

Woman celebrating the passage of the 19th Amendment.

With the passage of the 19th Amendment, women were given the right to vote in 1920, but voting remained an upper- and middle-class activity. No new opportunities in the workplace arose, and the momentum of the women's movement at the beginning of the decade was eventually swallowed by the rise of consumer culture.

Warren G. Harding, a Republican Senator from Ohio, was elected President in 1920. Under Harding, government's previous efforts to regulate business practices were relaxed in favor of a new emphasis on corporate partnerships. Best known for a series of outrageously corrupt political scandals, Harding's presidency was not without its merits. He pardoned Eugene Debs, the imprisoned Socialist Party leader; he persuaded the steel industry to enact an 8-hour workday; and he helped slow down the arms race. However, his administration was stacked with corrupt officials who gave kickbacks to the Justice Department and the Veterans Bureau. After Harding died of a stroke while still in office in 1923, the Teapot Dome scandal broke, revealed that private oil companies had been draining oil from federal lands.

• The presidency of Warren G. Harding (video)
• Corruption in the Harding administration (video)

Herbert Hoover

Harding's sudden demise meant his Vice President, Calvin Coolidge, held the top office. Nicknamed "Silent Cal," Coolidge was asked during the 1924 election if he had anything to say about the world situation. His reply: "No." Still, a divisive Democratic Party helped the incumbent win the election by 7 million votes.

• Calvin Coolidge, a.k.a. "Silent Cal" (video)

When the Democrats nominated Al Smith, an Irish-Catholic from New York's Lower East Side, for President in 1928, the party closed ranks behind him, but economic prosperity and anti-Catholic sentiment kept Smith from being elected. He is credited with awakening a vast army of immigrants in the big cities and with shifting African-American voters toward the Democrats.

The 1928 President-elect, Herbert Hoover, envisioned a private economy that would operate mostly free from government intervention. Predicting ever-greater prosperity, he said, "We shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation." But then the stock market fell out from under him.

• Hoover elected (video)

"Flappers"

The image of the 1920s as a decade of prosperity, of flappers and hot jazz, is largely a myth, even in the eyes of the writer who coined some of those terms. In his article "Echoes of the Jazz Age," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: "It was borrowed time anyway – the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of a grand duc and the casualness of chorus girls."

There is some truth to the decade's image of prosperity but, as Fitzgerald notes, it was concentrated at the top. Six million families made less than $1,000 a year. According to the Brookings Institution, one-tenth of 1 percent of families at the top took in as much income as 42 percent of families at the bottom. In New York City, millions of people lived in tenements condemned as firetraps. When Fiorello La Guardia, a Congressman from East Harlem, toured the poorer districts of New York in 1928, he reported: "I confess I was not prepared for what I actually saw. It seemed almost incredible that such conditions of poverty could really exist."

• F. Scott Fitzgerald Additional Papers (web site)
• Flappers (video)

The Ku Klux Klan march in Stocktan, California, during the 1920s.

Labor strikes broke out, pitting coal miners and railroad men against their powerful employers. Burton Wheeler, a Senator from Montana, visited one of the strike areas: "All day long I have listened to heartrending stories of women evicted from their homes by the coal companies. I heard pitiful pleas of little children crying for bread. I stood aghast as I heard most amazing stories from men brutally beaten by private policemen."

There was a sweeping crackdown on immigration. New quotas were established that heavily favored Anglo-Saxons. China, Bulgaria, Palestine and the African nations could send no more than 100 people. England and Northern Ireland could send 34,000, while Italy could send just under 4,000.

Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis were part of a generation of writers, artists and musicians who were among the most innovative in the country's history. Traditional taboos concerning sex and gender politics were challenged. The country went dry on January 16, 1920, after Prohibition was successfully linked with Progressive Era causes, such as reforms to end wife beating and child abuse.

• Prohibition rises (video)
• Prohibition fosters organized crime (video)
• Sinclair Lewis (PDF)

The African-American district burns during the Tulsa race riots of May, 1921.

The 1920s also saw a rise in tension between whites and blacks. In May of 1921, a large section of Tulsa was burned to the ground and a number of blacks and whites were killed. Some of the worst racial violence in American history took place during the 1920s. On the first day of 1923, a white mob searching for an alleged rapist burned all but one building in the tiny black settlement of Rosewood, Florida. Millions of blacks moved to northern cities. Soon, the black population of Chicago had swelled by 148 percent, Detroit's by 611 percent. Many cities adopted residential segregation ordinances to keep blacks out of white neighborhoods.

The United States became a consumer society in the 1920s. The automobile was its symbol; by 1929, there were 27 million autos on America's roads. Cigarettes, cosmetics and synthetic fabrics became staples of life. The rise of radio and the talking motion pictures (90 million Americans were going to them weekly) helped create a new popular culture that disseminated common speech, dress and behavior.

• The Ku Klux Klan rises (video)
• Timeline of the Tulsa Race Riot (web site)

The silent newsreels first produced by Pathe Weekly in 1911 became hugely popular talkies when Theodore Case developed his sound-on-film system.

The shift from print-based journalism to electronic media began in the 1920s. Competition between newspapers and radio was minimal, because the latter was not yet an effective news medium. People listened to radio bulletins, but to "read all about it" they picked up a tabloid or a broadsheet.

The New York World was generally known as the best paper of the decade. Regarded as "the newspaperman's newspaper," it was, in stature, the New York Times of its day, relying on solid reporting and writing instead of broad coverage. The paper's lauded and independently liberal editorial page was edited by Walter Lippmann, who became one of the most influential American writers of the century. The paper's merger into the World-Telegram is seen as a black day in newspaper history.

The talkie newsreel was born when Theodore Case developed his sound-on-film system. The Fox Film Corporation bought Case's system in 1926 and developed Fox Movietone News. The first talkie newsreel showed Charles Lindbergh taking off on his transatlantic flight on May 20, 1927. Its enormous success compelled other studios to produce competing newsreels. They became so popular that theaters showing only newsreels opened in major cities around the country.

Al Jolson, a white man, performing in "blackface".

Radios were first marketed for home use in 1920. By 1929, they sold 5 million sets every year. RCA's Radiola was the most widely advertised model, selling for $35. RCA formed the National Broadcasting Company, which had its first broadcast on November 15, 1926. Programming remained unimaginative until the end of the decade, relying on speeches, lectures (on such topics as basket weaving) and music. In 1925, more than 70 percent of air time was devoted to music; less than 1 percent was devoted to news. By 1929, 40 percent of the population owned radios, tuning in to hear music, sports scores, Al Jolson (the decade's top star) and Amos ‘n' Andy.

Jazz journalism brought with it sensational stories printed in a popular tabloid format. Modern media's obsession with sex and crime has nothing on the era's scandalous content. Stories such as the 1922 Hall-Mills case (involving the murder of a minister and a choir singer) and the 1927 Snyder-Gray case (involving the murder of a husband by an adulterous wife) gripped the nation. Competing tabloids included Joseph Medill Patterson's The New York Daily News, William Randolph Hearst's The New York Daily Mirror, and Bernarr Macfadden's New York Evening Graphic, also known as the "Porno-Graphic."

Modern advertising took root in the 1920s when advertising agencies started to take shape.

• The birth of modern advertising (video)