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Postwar Society and Culture: Change and...
Introduction
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The 1920s was yet another decade of jarring social change in America, even as immigration was sharply reduced by Congress. For the first time, urban Americans outnumbered rural Americans, and city life affected family structure, employment, the role of women, and educational and cultural opportunities. New ideas—about marriage, child rearing, contraception, and women’s rights—gained currency. A younger generation, disillusioned by the outcome of the war, behaved in ways that confounded their elders. And, in addition, the emergence of radio, the movies, and spectator sports transformed leisure and popular culture. Rural Americans saw the urban culture as threatening; they were resistant to the changes society was undergoing. This resistance was played out in a number of ways: a rise of fundamentalism and the Scopes "Monkey Trial," a new Ku Klux Klan, and Prohibition. And in rural and urban areas alike, immigrants and foreigners remained suspect, as illustrated by the travesty of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial. Such paranoia coupled with the carnage of World War I led intellectuals to abandon the hope for social change implicit in the work of the realists and progressives. Authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway formed a "lost generation" (many of them expatriates) and along with H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis wrote as critics of society and of alienation. Likewise, blacks in the 1920s were disillusioned: the hope that their patriotism in World War I would lead to more opportunity was shattered. The 1920s did, however, see a flowering of black culture epitomized by the Harlem Renaissance. But in spite of this dissatisfaction, the "New Era" of the 1920s was very prosperous and good to many Americans. It was the first true age of the consumer. Meanwhile, the automobile made Americans even more mobile and became a symbol of freedom, prosperity, and individualism, and the airplane fascinated the public, especially after Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic flight.
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