The Postwar Boom

The much ballyhooed prosperity of the 1920s, the so-called Jazz Age, was largely confined to the upper-middle class. Although quick fortunes were made in the stock market and in real-estate speculation, most Americans did not see their economic situation improve in the postwar years In Giants in the Earth, Rolvaag describes the formation of farm settlements on the southeastern Dakota prairies in the late 1870s, and over the next half a century, many of these farms would do well. The First World War permanently reversed the fortunes of farmers, and during the 1920s, 4 million farmers left their farms. Nonetheless, these were important years for business, which a succession of American presidents from Warren G. Harding to

Herbert Hoover believed would banish poverty in the United States. Sinclair Lewis incarnated this belief in business as the ultimate panacea in the main character of his novel Babbitt...