During the 1920s a French writer visited the United States and was astounded. The nation “has again become a new world,” wrote André Siegfried. “The American people are creating on a vast scale an entirely new social structure....it may even be a new age.”

This “new age” saw the emergence of a consumer economy, the growth of mass entertainment, and stunning changes in manners and morals. Perhaps inevitably, all this change led to bitter cultural conflict; the “Roaring Twenties” was the decade of the Ku Klux Klan, and battles over prohibition, evolution, and immigration.

From our vantage point of nearly a century later, we’ll examine these dramatic changes and the deep divisions they caused. We’ll also consider the Republican governments of the era, whose policies of tax reduction, a unilateral approach to foreign relations, high tariffs, and severe restriction of immigration seem to have contemporary relevance.