[1917 – 1929] World War I and the 1920s

The year is 1917. For three years, a great and terrible war has been tearing Europe apart, a mechanized slaughter on a scale humanity has never witnessed. Across the vast Atlantic Ocean, the United States of America watches, a nation built on an ideal of staying out of the Old World’s endless quarrels. President Woodrow Wilson has just won re-election on the slogan, "He kept us out of war." Most Americans, from the steelworkers in Pittsburgh to the farmers in Iowa, want it to stay that way. The Atlantic feels like a shield. But the shield was cracking. German U-boats, sleek, metal sharks hunting in the depths, were sinking ships without warning, including American civilian vessels. Then, a secret message—the Zimmermann Telegram—is intercepted. It is a proposal from Germany to Mexico: if the U.S. enters the war, Mexico should attack its northern neighbor. In return, Germany promises to help Mexico reclaim Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The insult is profound, the threat tangible. The ocean no longer feels like a barrier, but a vulnerable frontier. On April 6, 1917, the reluctant giant awakens. Congress declares war. Suddenly, a nation of immigrants, many from the very countries now at war, must unite. Propaganda posters bloom on every wall. A stern Uncle Sam declares, “I Want YOU for U.S. Army.” A national draft, the Selective Service Act, is enacted, and over 4.7 million Americans will ultimately serve. They are called "Doughboys," a nickname of uncertain origin, and for most of them, farm boys and city dwellers alike, it is the first time they have ever left their home state, let alone crossed an ocean. They arrive in France to find a hellscape of trenches, barbed wire, and mud, where the air hums with machine-gun fire and shrieks with artillery. In grueling battles like the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, these fresh-faced Americans help tip the balance. Their arrival is a shot of adrenaline to the exhausted Allies. But the cost is high: over 116,000 American lives are lost not just to combat, but to a silent killer sweeping the globe—the Spanish Flu pandemic. When the armistice is signed on November 11, 1918, a wave of relief washes over the world. The surviving Doughboys come home, not to a grateful parade but to a nation wrestling with its new place in the world, and weary of foreign entanglements. They return to a country that feels… different. And then, the decade turns, and America explodes. The 1920s didn't just arrive; they erupted. It was as if the trauma and restraint of the war uncorked a national desire for release, for noise, for life lived at a frantic pace. This was the Jazz Age. In smoky, hidden clubs in Harlem, New Orleans, and Chicago, the syncopated, mournful, and joyous notes of the trumpet and saxophone, played by masters like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, became the nation’s new soundtrack. This was the sound of the Harlem Renaissance, a breathtaking cultural flowering as African Americans, having moved from the rural South to Northern cities in the Great Migration, forged a bold new identity in art, literature, and music. At the same time, a strange paradox grips the nation. While jazz clubs throbbed with life, the country was officially "dry." The 18th Amendment had outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. This "noble experiment," meant to cure society's ills, instead gave birth to a dark and glamorous underworld. Every city sprouted secret bars called "speakeasies," where you needed a password to get past the bouncer at the door. Bootleggers, like the notorious Al Capone in Chicago, built criminal empires on illegal liquor, their turf wars fought with sawed-off shotguns in city streets. For many, breaking the law became a national pastime, the hip flask a symbol of rebellion. The rebellion wasn't just in drinking. It was in the very way people lived, especially women. The "New Woman" emerged: the flapper. She cut her hair into a short, sharp bob, wore hemlines that rose scandalously to the knee, and discarded the tight corsets of her mother’s generation for loose, straight-cut dresses. Empowered by the 19th Amendment, which finally gave them the right to vote in 1920, these women smoked cigarettes in public, drove cars, and danced the Charleston with a joyful abandon that horrified their elders. And the car! The automobile was the engine of the 1920s, both literally and figuratively. Henry Ford’s assembly line churned out the Model T, making it affordable for the average family. By 1929, there were over 23 million cars on American roads. This single invention redrew the map of daily life. It gave birth to suburbs, gas stations, roadside motels, and a sense of freedom to go anywhere, to escape. This new, mobile society was a consumer society. For the first time, American homes were being wired for electricity, and a flood of new appliances promised to change daily life: refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and, most importantly, the radio. Families would gather in their living rooms to listen to news, music, and comedy shows, creating a shared national culture in real-time. To sell all these new goods, the modern advertising industry was born, persuading Americans that they needed these things to be happy, to be modern. And if you couldn't afford it? No problem. Buy it on credit, on the installment plan—"a dollar down and a dollar forever." The skylines of the cities reflected this soaring ambition. Gleaming Art Deco skyscrapers, like the Chrysler Building in New York, reached for the heavens, monuments of steel and glass to American confidence. The stock market seemed to embody this endless ascent. Stories abounded of shoe-shine boys and waitresses playing the market and getting rich. It felt like a game anyone could win. Stocks were bought "on margin"—paying only a small fraction of the price and borrowing the rest. It seemed foolproof, as long as the market kept going up. And it always went up. But beneath the roar of the twenties, there was a quiet, unsettling hum. Intolerance festered. The Ku Klux Klan saw a terrifying resurgence, not just in the South but across the country, targeting not only African Americans but also Catholics, Jews, and immigrants. Fear of foreigners led to strict new laws, like the Immigration Act of 1924, which slammed the door on many hoping for a new life in America. The prosperity, too, was uneven. While cities gleamed, farmers struggled with debt and falling crop prices. The party was not for everyone. The music, the dancing, the buying, the building—it all crescendoed toward the end of the decade in a frenzy of speculation. The stock market had detached from reality, floating on a bubble of pure optimism and borrowed money. In October 1929, the bubble trembled. On October 24, "Black Thursday," the market plunged. Panic set in. Bankers tried to prop it up, but it was like trying to hold back the tide. Then came Tuesday, October 29. Black Tuesday. The bottom fell out. In a single day, the market lost 12% of its value. Ticker-tape machines, which had once spat out fortunes, now printed only ruin. In a matter of weeks, $30 billion in paper value—more than the entire cost of World War I to the United States—evaporated into thin air. The roar of the twenties fell silent, replaced by a stunned, fearful quiet. The party was over. A new, far more difficult era was about to begin.