1920
American women win the vote
Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, and half the population of the United States gained the franchise. Seventy-two years of petitions, marches, hunger strikes, and jail time had paid off. Susan B. Anthony had died fourteen years too early to vote. Her nieces walked into polling places.
League of Nations convenes
Woodrow Wilson's brainchild took its first breath in Geneva, a parliament of nations meant to make war impossible through talk. The United States, whose president had dreamed it up, refused to join. Without American muscle the League became a well-dressed debating society. It would fail its first real test in Manchuria.
Greco-Turkish War rages in Anatolia
Encouraged by the Allies at Versailles, Greek armies pushed deep into Anatolia, aiming to revive Byzantium. Mustafa Kemal rallied Turkish nationalists and drove them back to Smyrna, which burned in 1922. Over a million Greeks were expelled from Asia Minor. An ancient Greek presence in Ionia ended in a few catastrophic months.
American Prohibition begins
At midnight on January 17 the sale, manufacture, and transport of alcohol became illegal across the United States under the Eighteenth Amendment. Within weeks bootleggers, speakeasies, and corrupt cops were multiplying in every major city. Organized crime found its first reliable cash cow. For thirteen years a nation pretended to stop drinking while drinking more colorfully than ever.
First commercial radio broadcast
On election night KDKA in Pittsburgh went on the air announcing Warren Harding's victory over James Cox to perhaps a thousand listeners on crystal sets. Within two years there were hundreds of stations across America, and within five nearly every parlor had a radio. Mass entertainment had acquired a new pipeline into the home.
Prohibition bootleggers fund jazz clubs
Speakeasies, the illicit bars that flourished across American cities under Prohibition, became the incubators of jazz. Harlem's Cotton Club, Chicago's Dreamland, and hundreds of smaller venues employed Black musicians and drew mixed crowds. The music form that would conquer the century was getting its professional foothold in rooms run by gangsters.
F. Scott Fitzgerald publishes This Side of Paradise
At twenty-three, a Princeton dropout put out his first novel and became, overnight, the voice of the new generation of disillusioned youth. He married Zelda Sayre in a church on Fifth Avenue a week after publication. The Jazz Age had its chronicler. Fitzgerald spent the rest of his life trying to live up to the initial success.