THE JAZZ AGE

Roaring Twenties history — the Jazz Age, Harlem Renaissance, Prohibition, the 1929 stock market crash, and the complete narrative history of America in the 1920s, 1919-1929.

On the night of November 11, 1918, strangers embraced on Broadway and factory whistles blew across New York's boroughs as the Armistice ended the First World War. America had emerged as the world's dominant economic power — and then chose, emphatically, to turn inward. The decade that followed would be at once brilliant and ugly, creative and fearful, free and violently repressive. It was called, later and with some nostalgia, the Roaring Twenties. The roar was real. So was the silence underneath it.

This is the complete story of the Jazz Age — from the Red Summer of 1919, when race riots erupted in 26 cities and the Tulsa Race Massacre destroyed Black Wall Street, to Black Tuesday on October 29, 1929, when the Dow Jones fell and broker loan debt of $8.5 billion began its cascade collapse. Historian Arthur Whitfield Cavendish traces six parts across 24 chapters, following Warren Harding's Teapot Dome corruption, Al Capone's bootleg empire, Alain Locke's Harlem Renaissance, Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic flight, and Herbert Hoover's failed bid to halt the speculation that had pushed the Dow from 63.9 in 1921 to 381.17 in September 1929 — a 497% gain built on 10% margin accounts.

Inside this Roaring Twenties history:

• The Red Summer and Tulsa Massacre — 26 race riots in 1919; white mobs and deputized gunmen burn 35 blocks of Greenwood, killing between 100 and 300 Black Tulsans, leaving 8,000 homeless (Chapters 1, 4)
• Prohibition and organized crime — from the Noble Experiment's passage to Al Capone's $60-million Chicago operation, and the structural corruption that made Prohibition unenforceable (Chapter 3, 15)
• The Harlem Renaissance — Philip Payton's Afro-American Realty Company fills Harlem; Alain Locke's 1925 anthology The New Negro names a movement; Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Duke Ellington build a culture (Chapter 9)
• Radio, film, and the Model T — KDKA's 1920 election broadcast; David Sarnoff builds NBC; Al Jolson's 1927 Jazz Singer makes silent film obsolete; Ford's five-dollar day and 143,000 filling stations reshape American geography (Chapters 6, 7)
• The stock market boom and crash — Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation falls from $104 to $1.75; Roger Babson's ignored September 1929 warning; Black Tuesday and the $8.5 billion call-money collapse (Chapters 8, 19-20)
• The Scopes Trial and culture wars — fundamentalism versus modernism in Dayton, Tennessee, and the immigration restriction laws that closed the Golden Door (Chapters 12, 13)
• The decade's honest reckoning — what the Ku Klux Klan's four-million-member revival, the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and the farmers' forgotten depression reveal about the America the mythology left out (Chapters 4, 14, 16)

The Jazz Age created the mass media, the consumer economy, and a racial reckoning that took another generation to reach. Its prosperity was real; its foundations were not. Understanding both is essential to understanding the America that followed.

For readers of Erik Larson's THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY and Isabel Wilkerson's THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS.