Happy Days are here again. It’s 2020, time of the Roarin’ Twenties. When will the Flappers get to town? What about the “Bathtub gin” and happy times when women’s fashions were incredibly scanty for that time period and gentlemen wore suits and ties and removed their hats while inside? Hollywood brought jazzy music along with great movies, and incredible plots. It was the heyday of fun after the horrible War to End All Wars.
Life changed after the war. Young men had visited Paris (France that is) only to return home with a different outlook on life. The fact that each of those young men even came home was amazing to them, their families, and friends. The Spanish Influenza, which didn’t start in Spain, scared everyone when entire families suffered and died. It was a good thing when 1919 rolled into 1920.
But rolling in with the new decade came economic problems and Prohibition! For the first time in American history the consumption of alcoholic beverages was forbidden. To make certain this was enacted, police raided warehouses, bars, saloons, chicken houses, and everything in between including under the Baptist Church steps, to make certain all alcohol was poured down the drain.
This is where the fun began. In cities on the east coast and west coasts, in cities like Chicago and New Orleans, and other sites where imbibing alcohol was common occurrence, the wealthier crowds continued to imbibe and party away as if the Volstead Act didn’t include them. Movies and television shows have painted a fun, wild time in U. S. cities.
At first new inventions such as radios and refrigerators sold like crazy. Everyone who had a good job with money purchased those things as well as automobiles. How many radios and refrigerators did a family really need? Automobiles can be driven more than one year. Industries began to worry about marketing their goods. Prices increased and continued to increase.
But what about the core of the country, the South, the Great Plains, mining towns and industrial workers whose wages and work schedules did not provide for such fun? Throughout the Midwest rains didn’t fall as usual, crops dried up and livestock suffered. The farmers’ sales dropped when prices failed. Cotton suffered during World War I when textile mills in Europe were converted to defense plants. It took a long time for cotton to recover and some believe it never did.
Finally, the end came crashing down in the latter part of the 1920s. On October 29, 1929, or Black Tuesday as it is known today, all stock markets went bezerk. The Roarin’ Twenties came to an abrupt end. We know the end of the story, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, bread lines (even ones here in Greenville) and sheer misery.
I never really wanted to learn American history from 1918 through World War II, but I was selected to write a biography of a Texas senator from 1912 to his death in 1941. As I have researched, I have determined there was no Roarin’ Twenties in Texas. Good times had to wait for the “Worst Hard Time” to leave us.
When I was researching World War I, I set up a Facebook page I called A Century Ago. Well, it’s back up, but this time the Roarin’ Twenties of North Texas. Enjoy!