Excerpt from “Discrimination and Disparities” by Thomas Sowell:

When intellectual elites discuss eras of change in the United States, for example, the decade of the 1920s is seldom, if ever, included. Yet there have been few decades with so many, and so large and such consequential changes in the lives of millions of Americans as the 1920s.

The 1920 census was the first census to show more Americans living in urban, rather than rural, communities. While the urban majority of the population was just over 51 percent at the beginning of the 1920s decade, the rate of increase of the urban population was more than eight times the rate of increase of the rural population. The 1920s marked a historic transition to a very different kind of society.

At the beginning of the 1920s, just 35 percent of American homes had electric lights — the same proportion that had gaslight, while another 27 percent of those homes were lit by lamps using either kerosene or coal oil. But, after that decade ended, 68 percent of the homes in America were lit by electricity in 1930. Home radios were virtually non-existent at the beginning of 1920; the first commercial radio station began broadcasting to the general public that autumn. Subsequently, 24 percent of American homes had radios by 1925 and 40 percent in 1930.

Most American families also had an automobile for the first time during that decade. As of 1920, 26 percent of American families had an automobile. But so many more families were able to buy cars during the 1920s that, when that decade was over, 60 percent of American families had an automobile in 1930.

The number of Americans attending colleges and universities doubled between 1920 and 1930. The 1920s were also the first decade of regularly scheduled airline passenger service, which had fewer than 6,000 passengers in 1926, but more than 170,000 passengers by 1929.

Sports and entertainment were also revolutionized in the 1920s. Motion pictures talked for the first time during that decade, greatly boosting attendance at movies—which was twice as large in 1929 as it had been just seven years earlier. This was also the decade that American popular music was revolutionized by jazz, which not only swept the country but spread internationally. In major league baseball, attendance records for every year of the 1920s exceeded the attendance in any year before 1920. The National Football League was founded in the 1920s, and attendance per NFL game in 1928 was three times what it was in 1921.

Chains of department stores and grocery stores spread rapidly across the country during the 1920s, usually selling at lower prices than independent stores, reflecting economies of scale that reduced the costs of getting merchandise from the producer to the consumer. There had been chains of stores before, but the decade of the 1920s was the decade when they expanded severalfold, displacing many small independent stores, whose costs of doing business were not low enough to enable them to match the low prices charged by chain stores.

None of these sweeping changes, however, was “change” to many, if not most, of the elite intelligentsia, because these were not the particular kinds of changes they sought, predicted or recognized. The decade of the 1920s was barely over before a widespread denigration of it as a stagnant or reactionary decade began—a view that has continued since then to the present day.

Justice-for-Coolidge