Many predict another round of Roaring ’20s
Like now, 1920s came on heels of pandemic
History repeats itself. But do decades duplicate?
As hopes rise that the pandemic is ebbing in the United States and Europe, visions of a second Roaring Twenties to match last century’s post-pandemic decade have proliferated. Months of lockdown and restrictions on social life have given way to dreams of a new era of frivolity and decadence. For some, it feels like party time.
In many parts of the world, such thoughts are unthinkable. India is engulfed in crisis. The virus is raging in South America. Japan is grappling with a punishing new wave of cases. And even in places where cases are falling and vaccinations are expanding, deep wounds remain from more than a year of death, illness and isolation.
COVID-19 won’t disappear. More infectious variants are circulating. Herd immunity may be elusive. Long-term health effects will linger. There will be no Hollywood ending.
But a coming summer and a soaring stock market have lifted optimism and fueled predictions of a new Roaring Twenties. Summer travel is booming. A summer of love “sexplosion” is predicted. Even the bob is back in style.
Is it fair to connect these twin ’20s,
both decades that follow closely on the heels of a pandemic? Could two ’20s really roar? Do we all need to start buying flapper dresses and brushing up on our F. Scott Fitzgerald?
Some of the parallels are legitimate, says Nicholas Christakis, professor of sociology and medicine at Yale University and author of “Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live.” After an interim
period of “coping with the clinical, psychological and economic shock of the virus,” he says, we’ll see an uplift this summer, with a post-pandemic period taking root by 2023. It will, he says, be “a bit of a party.”
“Understandably, people will be very relieved when this is all finally over. People have been cooped one way or another for a very long time,” Christakis says. “We’re going to see people relentlessly seeking out social opportunities in nightclubs and restaurants and bars and sporting events and musical concerts and political rallies. We might see some sexual licentiousness, some loosening of sexual mores.”
Such prognostications have tantalized many eager for the fabled liberation of a century ago. Outside of the 1960s, perhaps, no decade looms larger in the collective imagination than the 1920s, thanks in part to the emerging mass culture that captured the time — the swinging speakeasies, the Harlem Renaissance, the first “talkie” in 1927’s “The Jazz Singer.”
There’s truth in that portrait of the ’20s, but mainly to wealthier white Americans.
The decade was punishing to farmers; for the first time, more people lived in cities. Membership surged for the Ku Klux Klan, which targeted African Americans, immigrants, Jews and Catholics — anyone who didn’t meet its definition of a “real American.” In 1921, one of the worst incidents of racial violence occurred: the Tulsa Race Massacre. Three years later, the Immigration Act of 1924 restricted immigrants from Asia and Eastern Europe.
People also experienced the 1918 influenza differently. Lockdowns then never lasted more than a few weeks. The societal surge that followed in the ’20s? Most historians ascribe that to the postwar period.
“The Roaring Twenties is just a metaphor,” Christakis says. “Grief walks the streets during times of plague, so people will rightly be relieved when this period of loss is behind us.”