The 1920’s should be called the Dreaming Decade. Everyone in America was dreaming of a better future, more freedom, or a safer community. Women had won the vote and now turned to overthrowing old traditions. Blacks migrated north to the promises of a better life. There were also those dreaming of a return to tradition. The Ku Klux Klan and fundamentalists promoted racial purity and stronger faith. President Hoover stated his dream, shared by many Americans during the Roaring 20’s, when he said, “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.” (Zinn 378) Everybody and their dog had a dream, and these dreams were what shaped the country and the world. Things would get better, progress would be made. The Dreaming Decade was full of optimism.

Women began dreaming of independence. In the first year of the new decade, they secured the right to vote. They proceeded to invade the work-place and college campuses. A new type of woman emerged that represented a departure from all previous stereotypes, who felt it “no longer necessary to maintain a rigid, Victorian female ‘respectability.’ They could smoke, drink, dance, wear seductive clothes and makeup, and attend lively parties.” (Brinkley 667) These women were called flappers. They were at the extreme, but their endeavors to become better than their parents’ generation reflected the attitude of many young women of the age.

Marketers were quick to latch onto the dreams of the New Woman. Marlboro began targeting cigarette ads to women. Cosmetics and beauty products, unpopular with the flappers’ mothers, became essential. During this period when women were looking for a new image, products were helping to define it. Advertisements played on women’s new insecurities with their bodies, their beauty, and their age. Women were dependent on media images to define how they should look and behave. The dream of women’s independence failed as its very image became dependent on marketing.

African-Americans also dreamed of freedom and independence from the old ways. Chicago and other northern cities promised to fulfill that dream by offering jobs and a tolerant atmosphere. Most blacks lived in the South as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. When the boll weevil ravaged the cotton crops, they were left with lower wages and unemployment. With the rise of the new Ku Klux Klan, lynchings became more frequent. “Every time a lynching takes place in a community down south… you can depend on it that colored people will arrive within two weeks.” (Tuttle 4) Even when black people weren’t being killed, they were being abused, segregated, and forced to live in poor conditions. “I suppose the worst place there is better than the best place here.” (2) The dreams of the North where the beginnings of the Great Migration.

The North held many promises for black people, but Chicago wasn’t always as great as it was made out to be. “Their aspirations for economic, political, and social rebirth were soon shattered by their reception in the city.” (Tuttle 5) The South was not the only place of prejudice. The high concentration of immigrants in the North made it a prime target of the Klan, where many resented the influx of foreigners that took away jobs. Blacks were now foreigners, migrants working along with the immigrants in hard, low-paying jobs. Unions like the AFL “often worked actively to exclude blacks… Most blacks, however, worked in jobs in which the AFL took no interest in at all - as janitors, dishwashers, garbage collectors, domestics, and other service capacities.” (Brinkley 661) Blacks in America had gone from slavery to sharecropping to service-workers. Their dreams of improvement and freedom went unfulfilled, ever after the Great Migration.

The Ku Klux Klan had dreams, too. They wanted racial purity, an America free from black people. The very aspirations of blacks helped fuel the Klan’s rebirth in the twenties, but “fear of the ‘New Negro’ rapidly declined as he either accepted his old place or moved to northern cities.” (Higham 5) This time around, however, the Klan had expanded their dream of “Native, white, Protestant supremacy.” (Colin 1) Jews, Catholics, and foreigners were terrorized. The Klan became widely popular, supported by many that believed that immigrants “undermined the whole economic system.” (Higham 2)

Fortunately or unfortunately, the KKK’s dream was doomed from the start. There were far too many immigrants to lynch or return them all. They had lived in America, some for generations, and had become Americans. “Anti-Klan mobs were beginning to lash back at the organization in areas where immigrants were strongly entrenched.” (Higham 6) There were more people who the Klan worked against than it worked for, and even some of those disagreed with its ways. Everyone had dreams of their own, but the Klan’s dream worked against many other people’s. “Explicitly, racism denied the regnant optimism of the Progressive era.” (Higham 3) Scandals involving high-ranking Klansmen caused distrust in the organization that had been founded on so-called moral principals, and finally led to its downfall. The racial purity they dreamed about was not to be.

Prohibition was another movement that represented the dream to return to tradition. It banned the manufacture, sale, and consumption of alcoholic beverages in 1920. Alcohol was associated with drunken violence, especially toward women and children in the home. It was also connected to immigrants, to which alcohol was part of everyday life. Many “Drys” were the same sort that supported the Ku Klux Klan, “fundamentalists: provincial, largely… rural men and women fighting to preserve traditional faith and to maintain the centrality of religion in American life.” (Brinkley 673) Prohibition was accompanied by other fundamentalist movements, such as banning the teaching of evolution in schools. The goal of these movements was to promote the dream of a traditional nation.

One of the famous trademarks of the twenties was the violation of Prohibition. Banning alcohol actually caused more problems than it solved. “Since an enormous, lucrative industry was now barred to legitimate businessmen, organized-crime figures took it over.” (Brinkley 671) Gangs used profits to move into prostitution, gambling, and drugs. Prohibition increased alcohol-related violence instead of preventing it. Gangs competed for the control of bootlegging, resulting in 500 deaths in Chicago alone. The drinks themselves were more dangerous - homemade alcohol could cause blindness and death. Still, the demand for it went unabated. Even the police could be bought off by bootleggers. The fundamentalists lost ground in their push for Creationist teachings, as well. The Scopes trial in 1925 revealed them to be narrow-minded and their position anti-progress. The dream of bringing back old traditions and preventing the harm alcohol could bring was crushed by the negative response to Prohibition.

The dreams could not mask reality. Most dreams were never to come true. This was the dual identity of the Dreaming Decade. There were wonderful dreams, but they sowed the seeds for their own destruction. Women sought to create a new image, and found it not in themselves, but in the products sold to them. Black Americans went north to escape the clinging bonds of slavery, but found new shackles, this time in the unfamiliar streets of Chicago. The Ku Klux Klan, whose dream was obviously a horrible nightmare for many, failed nonetheless. Prohibition’s more noble goal ended up causing the problems it tried to fix. Even Hoover’s dream of ending poverty was ridiculous when “the top 0.5 percent of Americans in 1929 owned 32.4 percent of all the net worth of individuals.” (McElvaine 3) The dreams of a nation lay broken at the end of the Dreaming Decade. Perhaps the Great Depression affected people’s spirits so greatly because they had much more than money invested in the failed dreams. The 1920’s were full of hope but devoid of solutions. A fitful and universal name for those years would be the Dreaming Decade - the era of dreams.

Works Cited

• Brinkley, Alan. The Unfinished Nation. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1993.

• Gordon, Colin. “The Ku Klux Klan Defines Americanism.” Major Problems in American History, 1920-1945. Houghton Mifflin, 1926.

• Higham, John. “The Tribal Twenties.” Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism. New Jersey: Trustees of Rutgers College, 1955.

• McElvaine, Robert S. “Who Was Roaring in the Twenties? - Origins of the Great Depression.” The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941. New York: Times Books, 1984.

• Tuttle, William M., Jr. “Going into Canaan.” Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919. New York: Atheneum, 1970.

• Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York: Harper Perennial, 1980.