What do the 1920s mean to you?
After the devastation of the first World War, America experienced a decade of prosperity and joyousness while Europe was in pieces and doing its best to rebuild. During the 1920s Americans spent more money than air breathed on events that would raise a person’s morale. Two of the main events of interest were movie theaters and baseball games. Movie theaters rose in popularity due to a sale that was given to the people of two screen shoes and one live show for one price of 25 cents. The sport of Baseball was also taking flight due to Babe Ruth and his seemingly inhuman ability to hit home runs out of the park. Home runs and Ruth’s emergence packed the stands in stadiums across the country with every person that went hoping they would get a chance to see a home run or catch the ball.
Of course not everything was joyous and sunshine even with so much positivity in the air in the United States there were equal things taking place that had the complete opposite effects. One of the main things that dampened the positivity was the banning of the sale of alcohol, otherwise known as Prohibition. The United States government deemed alcohol an evil and that it was poisoning Americans so they banned the sale of it and its use at bars. While the ban did initially stop the sale and consumption of alcohol it did not last as people became more clever and began to smuggle or produce alcohol illegally. The men that were largely in charge of the illegal smuggling of alcohol were gangsters, and these gangsters would become so powerful that the government struggled to sniff out and stop the gangsters. As it turned out, the only ones capable of stopping gangsters were other gangsters that were greedy for more control, money, and power. All of these things and more describe the 1920s in its most basic form and are the foundation ideas of what the 1920s mean to me.
Jeffrey Horn is a senior history major at Ramapo College and will graduate in May 2023. He is also a captain of the Ramapo College Swim team and aspires to become a High School history teacher after gradutation.
