When World War I ended, a promising young songwriter named Harry Donaldson cast his lot with the just-organized Irving Berlin Music Company. His smash 1919 hit was at once a question and a prophetic answer: “How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?” How, indeed? Millions of young Americans had been wrested from the boredom of country life to serve in the war, marking the beginning of the end of an agrarian society. To be sure, only a fraction of them ever saw Paris, and some got no farther than Camp Funston. But country boy, small-town bookkeeper, and city mill-worker alike developed a taste for travel and adventure.
Lured by the availability of jobs, the excitement of city life, and advances in transportation, nearly 15 million people were added to the number of American urbanites
Between 1920 and 1930. Sometime near the end of World War I, the number of Americans living in urban centers of 2,500 people or more passed the 50 million mark. As the census of 1920 was to report, for the first time, more than 50 percent of the population, over 54 million people, were urban dwellers. Leading the migration to the city were southern African Americans, who had begun migrating northward in large numbers during the war. Especially magnetic to African Americans were New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, D. C., Chicago, St. Louis, and Los Angeles. By 1930, Harlem was the concentration point of nearly 300,000 African Americans. The term Harlem Renaissance refers to a remarkable flowering in literature and the arts, but its backbone was industrial jobs. This wave of migration was tied to the end of free immigration discussed later in the chapter. Unable to rely on a steady flow of unskilled and low-skilled immigrants from Europe, employers turned to immigrants from the South.
In a dreadful intrusion on the rights of the individual, a minority secured passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, prohibiting the manufacture, sale, or transport of “intoxicating liquors” and taking away a basic comfort of field hands, factory workers, and others, on the grounds that drinking was sinful and that poor people were not entitled to such a luxury anyway.1 A swell of fear and hate was rising that would crest in the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, and by 1924, that organization’s antiAfrican American, anti-Jewish, and anti-Roman Catholic persecutions had become a national scandal.
The future nevertheless held a bright promise of prosperity and more leisure time. Women had gained the right to vote, but their emancipation was broader than that. Young women in particular began to chisel away at the double standard of morality that had been typical of pre-1914 relations between the sexes; the “flapper” of the 1920s was already emerging in 1919 as the girl who could smoke men’s cigarettes, drink men’s whiskey, and play men’s games. It might have been expected that these changes would be matched by changes in the workplace, especially among older married women (Goldin 1990, chapter 6). Increased education, a reduced birthrate, smaller families, the emergence of the clerical sector, and the demonstration effect of World War I all worked toward greater female participation in the labor force. Indeed, looking at the purely economic factors, one might have expected a rapid increase in the number of two-earner households of the sort that actually arrived in the 1980s. But this development was prevented by “marriage bars,” policies followed by public and private employers that prohibited the hiring of married women and that forced female employees to leave when they married. In part, these bars simply reflected broader social norms maintaining that married women belonged at home with their children. They became more widespread in the 1920s with the growth of large firms that relied on personnel departments to make hiring and firing decisions and that preferred bureaucratic rules for making decisions to individualized hiring and firing.
World History
