The American Heritage History of the 20's & 30's

"...the story of the changes that came to American...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 here too, some baffled, some belligerent, all caught in the crosscurrents of a nation in transition.