" ... the story of the changes that came to America ... in the years between the two World Wars. At first, as the 1920's dawn, there is the ultraconservatism that rejects Wilson's League of Nations, amends the Constitution to prohibit the sale of alcoholic beverages, suspects every immigrant of being a Red, and places TWK (meaning Trade With the Klan) stickers in merchant-members' shop windows. Then Henry Ford mass-produces flivvers that cost as little as $290, women get the vote, girls get a new concept of morality, and a freewheeling, flask-toting citizenry begins its surge to hedonism. They have plenty of examples to emulate: public officials get rich on purloined Navy oil while the President whom they betray dallies in the 'Little White House on H Street' or with his paramour in a little White House closet, the high jinks of high society and Hollywood are amply reported by a sensation-seeking press, the advertising fraternity urges everyone to keep up with the Joneses and endows [them] with everything. The great euphoria reaches its climax with the stock market crash ... Here you see what America was like when factories lay idle and old newspapers become 'Hoover blankets' for evicted families; when angry farmers gathered at foreclosure sales with pitchforks and shotguns to fight for their land; when the International Apple Shippers' Association offered apples on credit to the jobless to sell for five cents apiece on city streets; when Franklin Roosevelt said, 'This nation asks for action, and action now.' and started the kind of action that kept him in the White House for the rest of the Thirties and beyond. To be sure, there were many during those decades who did not drink bathtub gin and hanker for the sinful ways of the city, who were not wiped out by the economic downturn, did not hate 'that man in the White House.' These people are here too, some baffled, some belligerent, all caught in the crosscurrents of a nation in transition."--Jacket flaps.

No decade in American history has roared as loudly as the 1920s. For two centuries, the United States had lived in happy isolation from international issues. Then it was drawn into World War I. Although America was still fundamentally a provincial society, by the end of the war and the opening of the new decade, most Americans understood that a new era lay before the country. Despite Prohibition, it was an intoxicating decade, populated with characters as varied as Clarence Darrow, Henry Ford, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Lindbergh, Woodrow Wilson - and flappers. It was a time when ideas about love, public decorum, dress, and speech were changing. It was a time of cultivation of the new, shocking, and sometimes, according to the standards of the previous decade, vulgar: the stocking rolled below the knee, four-letter words in the mouths of debutantes, and speakeasies. All of these details, along with the economic collapse that ended the decade and sparked the Great Depression, are captured in this vivid chronicle by noted historian Edmund O. Stillman.

The fads, diversions, artistic accomplishments, and manners of the lively era with profiles of prominent individuals

Details the Roaring Twenties in American history discussing presidents, the Eighteenth Amendment, Nineteenth Amendment, expatriate writers, the Ku Klux Klan, the Harlem Renaissance, restricted immigration, the National Football League and more.