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| 1919–20 |
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| Cost of living increased to 77 percent of prewar level in 1919 and to 105 percent a year later. | 1 |
| Numerous strikes erupted involving 4 million workers. The largest strike involved 350,000 steelworkers who walked out in September. The union demanded a reduction in the number of hours and workdays; the U.S. Steel Corp. responded by hiring Hispanic- and African-American workers as strikebreakers, who for their part resented the discriminatory practices of steel unions. | 2 |
| Growing corporate and service sector employment in the 1920s created new pressures for emotional restraint in the work place. Various kinds of employees were told to manipulate emotions to please customers, bosses, or subordinates. | 3 |
| The combination of machine-produced interchangeable parts and the moving assembly line helped to stimulate the emergence of a consumer-oriented society. Automobile sales, mainly of Ford's famous Model T, soared to 5 million by 1929, rising from about 1.5 million in 1921. The rapid expansion of electric power and equipment companies also spurred the development of electric home appliances. From the launch of KDKA in Pittsburgh in 1920 to the onset of the Great Depression, radio stations rose in number to about 800 in 1929, with nearly 40 percent of all families owning receiving sets. At the same time, the movie industry introduced the “star system” and pushed weekly movie attendance from about 40 million in 1922 to over 100 million less than a decade later. Other forms of leisure, education, social services, health care, and media also witnessed rapid growth. | 4 |
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| 1920s |
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| The Lost Generation. The mass destruction of human life during World War I embittered large segments of postwar American artists and intellectuals. They linked the war to what they saw as the debilitating impact of materialism and the onslaught of consumer culture. Some of these writers, like T. S. Eliot, left the U.S. and settled permanently overseas. Others, like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, frequently traveled to Europe, particularly Paris, and even lived there for long periods of time. In Paris these artists came under the influence of the “modernist movement” in cultural expression and took a highly critical posture toward the recent impact of science, technology, and urbanization on American life. Writers like Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and Theodore Dreiser wrote scathing indictments of American culture. The 1920s were an unusually rich era of artistic creation. Edith Wharton won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Age of Innocence (1920); African Americans launched the Harlem Renaissance, which the critic Alain Locke promoted in an anthology, The New Negro (1926); William Faulkner explored Southern life in his novel The Sound and the Fury (1929); and Sinclair Lewis received the Nobel Prize for literature (1930). Major composers included Aaron Copland, Howard Hanson, and George Gershwin. Both Copland and Gershwin appreciated the growing popularity of African-American jazz and sought to adapt it to symphonic forms. One of the leading big band composers was Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899–1974). | 5 |
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| 1920, Feb. 28 |
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| Transportation Act signed by President Wilson, giving the Interstate Commerce Commission power to establish and maintain rates that would yield a “fair return upon the aggregate value of the railway property of the country,” and power to prescribe minimum rates. Prosperous roads were to share profits with the less prosperous. The commission was empowered to draw up a plan for the consolidation of the railway lines into a limited number of systems, such combinations to be exempt from operation of the antitrust laws. | 6 |
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| March 1 |
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| The railroads were returned to their owners. | 7 |
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| June 5–1928 |
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| Merchant Marine Acts. Under the act of 1920 the Shipping Board was to dispose of the wartime merchant fleet to private parties, and to operate those ships that it could not sell; to establish new shipping routes; and to keep ships in these services until private capital could be attracted to them. In effect the act of 1928 provided for subsidies to the merchant marine. | 8 |
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| June 20 |
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| Water-Power Act passed, creating a federal power commission composed of the secretaries of war, interior, and agriculture and subordinate appointive officers. Its authority extended to all waterways on public lands and to all navigable streams, including falls and rapids. It could license power companies to use appropriate dam sites for periods not exceeding 50 years. | 9 |
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| Aug. 28 |
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| Nineteenth Amendment, providing for women's suffrage. | 10 |
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| Sept. 8–11 |
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| Transcontinental air mail service established between New York and San Francisco. | 11 |
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| Nov. 2 |
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| The Westinghouse Electrical Company arranged the first general radio broadcast for the national election. On Nov. 30 the same company broadcast the first regular evening program. | 12 |
| Warren G. Harding (Republican) elected president over James M. Cox (Democrat), 404 electoral votes to 137. | 13 |
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