It feels like the Roaring ’20s all over again
Granted, the intervening century saw great advances in medicine, inclusion of women and minorities, communication, transportation, working conditions, etc. But for fun, let’s just consider the two decades themselves. The “roaring 1920s” and the yet-to-be-labeled 2020s in which we now find ourselves.
The simplistic Hollywood vision of the 1920s, all liberated colorful flappers and tipsy spoiled swells carousing in speakeasies run by larger-thanlife gangsters, is only a part of it. The decadence enjoyed by a few after the
Great War, as it was then known, ignores the hardships of the returning soldiers, the isolation and exclusion of African Americans only two generations out of slavery, and post-war unsettlement in Europe.
Music, art, the movies and architecture flourished, but so did materialism and over-indulgence, and their cousins greed and corruption. There was little thought to the future.
The dance craze of the 1920s was emblematic of shedded inhibitions and freedom from controls (and responsibilities). It was a decade for women. They broke from the Victorian way of life, literally exchanging corsets and hourglass figures for loose clothing and slender figures. Women left home; they danced, drank, smoked, flirted ... and worked.
Even lower-income women could become independent through readily available work in factories and shops and progression through job training. More limited in their choices, in 1920 the majority of African-American female workers were agricultural laborers and domestic servants. There were work opportunities for all, and, with multiple cultural music and dance genres, enjoyment for all.
Such conditions cannot last, and as we know they didn’t. The last year of that decade saw the inevitable stock market crash, the beginning of the Great Depression, and deterioration of conditions in Europe.
Now, the 2020s: I’m no seer and certainly no expert. But it doesn’t take much foresight to see logical progressions from today and parallels with those other ’20s.
We have hardships of soldiers returning from a new and never-ending great war. As compared to the unsettlement in Europe in that previous decade, today we are embarking on a new wave of unsettlement in Europe and the Middle East.
The 1920s saw the world recovering from an influenza pandemic, and in our 2020s we’re contending with a deadly new virus.
We see the isolation and exclusion of new sets of immigrants and minorities, and anticipate new immigration restrictions. A 1926 U.S. immigration law specifically restricted Asian immigrants and did not affect Hispanics; ironically, that situation is now reversed.
Socially we have a redux of the 1920s sexual revolution, with alternative lifestyles vying for acceptance against a neo-conservative backdrop.
We also have a new generation of selfish materialism, an attitude of entitlement enjoyed by a few. For most others it’s a period of over-extension and indulgence, with their cousins debt and lassitude.
Oddly, some of these parallel that long-ago decade and could serve as a warning of sorts. The stage props have changed dramatically, but the hearts and minds of we strutting and fretting actors, and all the evils and excesses we are prone to, and all the sins we are tempted by, haven’t. Will we ever learn?