Prosperity and Thrift: Merchandising and Advertising. Prosperity and Thrift Home Page Merchandising and Advertising The policies of the Coolidge administration supported business and spurred tremendous commercial growth. Automobiles and radios emerged as the top-selling consumer products of the 1920s. By 1925 there was one automobile for every six persons in the country (as compared to one for every one hundred in Great Britain), and by 1930 this had increased to one for every 4.6 people. The popularity of automobiles and radios encouraged the spread of chain stores around the country.
Many companies organized extravagant advertising spectacles and other enterprises to attract consumers. Businesses also enlisted the expertise of public-relations agents like Edward L. Prosperity and Thrift Home Page. African American Odyssey: World War I and Postwar Society (Part 2) Biographies of the Harlem Renaissance. Prohibition. Table of Contents | Temperance & Prohibition. Prohibition. Protest Buttons. Prohibition. Clash of Cultures Homepage. Illinois Trails History and Genealogy presents "The 1920s" The Roaring Twenties — History.com Articles, Video, Pictures and Facts.
Prohibition was not the only source of social tension during the 1920s. The Great Migration of African Americans from the Southern countryside to Northern cities and the increasing visibility of black culture—jazz and blues music, for example, and the literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance—discomfited some white Americans.
Millions of people in places like Indiana and Illinois joined the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. To them, the Klan represented a return to all the “values” that the fast-paced, city-slicker Roaring Twenties were trampling. Likewise, an anti-Communist “Red Scare” in 1919 and 1920 encouraged a widespread nativist, or anti-immigrant, hysteria. This led to the passage of an extremely restrictive immigration law, the National Origins Act of 1924, which set immigration quotas that excluded some people (Eastern Europeans and Asians) in favor of others (Northern Europeans and people from Great Britain, for example).