American History: the 1920s
...isolationist policy as the backdrop, certain aspects of the traditional and the modern butted heads - capital goods versus mass consumerism, old-stock Americans versus immigrants, and religious Fundamentalists versus Modernists (Kennedy et al. 392)
The result of this conflict was a period that, while colorful and progressive, reeked of anxiety, intolerance, hedonism, and liberalism.
In all, it can be said... that, with the exclusion of organized crime, the root of America's anxiety in the 1920's was its shift to an ultraconservative, suspicious, isolationist mindset.
America, disillusioned by the aftermath of World War I, and by the tenuous peace if afforded...