Q: How did Americans differ on major social and cultural issues?
A: In the 1920s, many city dwellers enjoyed a rising standard of living, while most farmers suffered through hard times. Conflicting visions for the nation's future heightened tensions between cities and rural areas.
The 1920s was a decade of exciting social changes and profound cultural conflicts. For many Americans, the growth of cities, the rise of a consumer culture, the upsurge of mass entertainment, and the so-called "revolution in morals and manners" represented liberation from the restrictions of the country's Victorian past. Sexu@l mores, gender roles, hair styles, and dress all changed profoundly during the 1920s.
But for many others, the United States seemed to be changing in undesirable ways. The result was a thinly veiled "cultural civil war," in which a pluralistic society clashed bitterly over such issues as foreign immigration, evolution, the Ku Klux Klan, prohibition, women’s roles, and race.
The 1920s was the first decade to have a nickname: “Roaring 20s" or "Jazz Age." It was a decade of prosperity and dissipation, and of jazz bands, bootleggers, raccoon coats, bathtub gin, flappers, flagpole sitters, bootleggers, and marathon dancers.
It was, in the popular view, the “Roaring 20s”, when the younger generation rebelled against traditional taboos while their elders engaged in an 0rgy of speculation. But the 1920s was also a decade of bitter cultural conflicts, pitting religious liberals against fundamentalists, nativists against immigrants, and rural provincials against urban cosmopolitans.
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