ABSTRACT
Americans’ fascination with the culture of the 1920s—speakeasies, flappers and jazz—persists in the early twenty-first century, evidenced by HBO’s period crime drama Boardwalk Empire (2010–14), Ken Burns’s three-part television documentary on Prohibition (2011), Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 interpretation of The Great Gatsby and a renewed interest in classic cocktails and home brewing operations. While captivating, this outsized focus on the decade’s excesses and drama overshadows the ongoing struggles for and challenges to America’s democratic institutions in the post-World War I period. Although the decade opened with the largest expansion of voting rights in United States history, Congress also passed federal legislation designed to reengineer the ethnic composition of the nation and significantly expanded federal policing mechanisms, which disproportionately targeted immigrants, African Americans and radicals.
