The Roaring Twenties & the Great Depression

The war ended in November 1918. Somewhere around 20 million people were dead, four empires had collapsed, and the political map of Europe had been redrawn with a shaking hand. Within five years, the survivors were dancing the Charleston.

That transition, from the mud of the Western Front to the glitter of the Jazz Age, was not as sudden as it looks in retrospect. The early 1920s were grim in much of Europe. Germany lurched through attempted coups and economic freefall. Britain mourned a generation of dead men and struggled with unemployment. France buried its dead and tried to rebuild the shattered towns of Picardy and Flanders. The party, when it came, was largely an American invention, exported outward through movies, music, and the sheer gravitational pull of the world's newest economic superpower.

The United States had entered the war late, lost relatively few soldiers compared to the European powers, and emerged with its industrial infrastructure not only intact but massively expanded. American factories had supplied the Allies with weapons, vehicles, and food for years before American troops ever reached the front. When the fighting stopped, those factories did not shut down. They pivoted. Instead of shells and rifles, they produced automobiles, radios, refrigerators, and vacuum cleaners. The consumer economy was born, and with it came a decade that felt, to those living through it, like the future had arrived early.