A Snapshot of The Roaring Twenties - 1920/1925/1929

1920
January 1:
U.S. census reported a 117.8 million population. For the first time in U.S. history, the urban population exceeded rural population.

January 2:
The Red Scare continued. U.S. Attorney-General A. Mitchell Palmer ordered Justice Department raids on meeting halls and homes in 30 cities nationwide to round up all suspected communists. 2,700 people were arrested without being charged with any explicit crime. In all, more than 6,000 were arrested. The raids ended after a May 5 government ruling that mere membership in the party was not in itself a crime. Most arrested were released. Hysterical propaganda by Palmer and others set the tone for the rest of the twenties, spurring a spate of anti-immigration laws.

January 5:
Boston Red Sox star Babe Ruth sold to the New York Yankees for $125,000 - the biggest trade deal in baseball up to that time.

The Babe Bows Out

January 15:
The League of Nations first met in Paris.

January 17:
Prohibition began. The 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution went into effect, prohibiting the making, selling, possession and consumption of alcoholic beverages. The most flouted law in history was repealed in 1933.

February 25:
Passage of the Oil and Coal Land Leasing Act laid the foundation for the biggest Washington scandal of the decade - the Teapot Dome affair, uncovered in 1923. The Act opened up mineral deposits on public lands to private mining interests, a system that would later become rife with bribery and corruption.

April 1:
The "Red scare" continued, and five legitimately elected members of the New York state legislature were expelled for being members of the Socialist Party.

April 2:
Physicist Albert Einstein arrived in New York to lecture at Columbia University on his theory of relativity.

April 15:
The Sacco & Vanzetti saga began, and would become the "trial of the century." On this date, shoe factory paymaster F.A. Parmenter and a guard were murdered in South Braintree, Mass. Suspected radicals, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were arrested for the crime on May 5. On July 14, 1921, the two were convicted of the murder, arousing a firestorm of protests from leftists and a divisive debate worldwide. Many unsuccessful appeals later, they were executed in 1927, despite what was widely thought to be inconclusive evidence. Many believed they were tried for their anarchist political beliefs (They were exonerated posthumously in 1977).

April 20:
Grand Canyon National Park dedicated.

June 5:
The decade of anti-immigration laws began. The Immigration Act was amended, allowing for deportation of anarchists and aliens advocating terrorism. It was the first of several acts and amendments passed during the decade to restrict immigration.

July 29:
First transcontinental, New York to San Francisco, air mail service began.

August:
"The Tommy Gun," the Thompson portable submachine gun (invented by J. T. Thompson), was demonstrated at a national gun show in Ohio. It would soon become the weapon of choice for bootlegging gangsters.

August 26:
Womens' Suffrage victorious. The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (ratified on August 18) was adopted, giving women the right to vote.

September 17:
The American Professional Football Association – the first U.S. professional football league – was organized, with Jim Thorpe as president. (Renamed the National Football League in 1922.)

September:
"Shoeless" Joe Jackson and 7 other members of the Chicago White Sox baseball team were accused of conspiring to lose the 1919 World Series as part of a deal with gamblers. On September 28, 1920, three players confessed and implicated the other five before a grand jury. On Nov. 12, 1920, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis was appointed baseball commissioner, and was granted dictatorial control to restore the game's reputation. On August 2, 1921, a Chicago jury acquitted the players of wrongdoing, but commissioner Landis ignored the court decision and banned Jackson and other Chicago players from baseball forever.

Joe Jackson

November 2:
The Westinghouse company opened radio station KDKA in Pittsburgh, commonly referred to as the first U.S. station with regularly scheduled broadcasting. On this date, KDKA reported the election returns of the 1920 U.S. presidential election.

November 25:
WTAW-AM radio station in College Station, Tex. broadcasted the first live play-by-play of a football game (Texas U. vs. Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas). The first football game broadcast occurred earlier (Nov. 23, 1919; Texas A & M over U. of Texas 7-0).

December 24:
The opera tenor, Enrico Caruso, sang his last performance - La Juive - at New York's Metropolitan Opera.

1925
February 2:
A team of sled dogs, led by husky Balto, raced 650 miles with medicine and saved the diphtheria-ravaged citizens of isolated, snowed-in Nome, Alaska. The story captivated the public.

February 16:
Floyd Collins, trapped for 18 days in a sand cave in Kentucky, died. A media circus surrounded the ongoing rescue effort, and supposedly respectable newspapers acted like tabloids, with daily cliff-hanger updates.

February 17:
Harold Ross published the first issue of The New Yorker magazine, a weekly for "caviar sophisticates" that extolled urban twenties New York City.

March:
Johnny Torrio left Chicago for New York and left control of the Chicago mob to Al Capone.

March 18:
The worst tornado in U.S. history killed 700 - 800 people in the Midwest.

April:
Adolph Hitler founded the SS (Schutz Staffel), his protective guard and eventually the elite police corps of the Nazis. 

April 10:
F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby was published. The dispassionate examination of blandness and emptiness in the lives of tycoons and flappers was acclaimed by critics, but was not a popular success in its day.

Advertisement from Good Housekeeping
Magazine, February, 1926

April 15:
The German serial killer, Fritz Haarmann, "The Butcher of Hanover," who murdered at least 26 young boys and sold the flesh of some as meat, was executed by decapitation.

Fritz Haarmann

June 13:
An image of a revolving windmill was transmitted from Anacostia, Maryland , to Washington, D.C. It was a first public demonstration of a television system, developed by Charles Francis Jenkins.

June 17:
Nations agreed to ban the use of chemical and bacteriological weapons in war. Agreement was signed at an international arms control and trade convention in Geneva.

August 8:
An estimated 40,000 Ku Klux Klan members marched through Washington, D.C., as part of the organization's first national congress. 

September 3:
The navy dirigible Shenandoah crashed in Ohio and killed 14 airmen, setting up a confrontation between U.S. Air Service General William "Billy" Mitchell and the military establishment. Mitchell, a hero of World War I and early air power advocate, had long been a thorn in the side of his older superiors, most of whom didn't believe that airplanes would ever be decisive factors in warfare. When Mitchell criticized government administration of its air fleet as incompetent, following the airship crash, superiors summoned him to Washington on Sept. 21 to testify. His criticisms continued, and he was subsequently found guilty by court martial of insubordinate conduct on December 17. He resigned his commission, rather than agree to a five-year suspension. His prophetic view of air power made Mitchell a legendary martyr in the annals of military history.

Other Notable Events of 1925:
Ho Chi Minh founded the Vietnamese Nationalist Party (later known as the IndoChinese Communist Party).
The Chrysler Corporation was founded by Walter Chrysler.

1929
February 1:
Early talkie musical, The Broadway Melody, proved a sensation for M.G.M. Studios, earning $3 million. The film won the second Academy Award for Best Picture, and was the first musical to do so.

February 4:
Charles Lindbergh started Central American air mail service.

February 14:
The "St. Valentine's Day Massacre" gangland hit, ordered by Al Capone against North Side boss Bugs Moran, left 7 machinegun-riddled corpses on the floor of a north Chicago garage – but, Moran was not one of them.

Al Capone "mugshot", 1931

March 11:
English racecar driver H.O.D. Segrave set a  world car speed record at 231.3 miles an hour (372.1 km.) at Daytona Beach, Florida. 

March 26:
The New York Stock Exchange set a  record volume of 8.2 million shares traded. 

May 8:
U.S. Navy Lieutenant Apollo Soucek set the airplane altitude record at 39,190 feet. 

May 16:
The first Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awards (Academy Awards) ceremony was held to honor films for the years 1927 and 1928. 

August 20:
The BBC broadcast the  first transmission of inventor J.L. Baird's 30-line color television. 

September 24:
Lt. Gen. James Doolittle made the first airplane flight piloted only by radio-controlled instruments. 

October 24:
The U.S. stock market started its steep downward crash on "Black Thursday," with 13 million shares sold. By Tuesday Oct. 29, the market seemed to have bottomed out, with 16 million shares sold. A few days of apparent recovery followed, with a slight rebound in prices, but the market dropped again and, by November 13, prices reached their lowest point for the year – and, $30 billion in stock values were wiped out. The crash, combined with other negative factors in the U.S. and world economies, brought to an end the decade of the 1920s and hastened the Great Depression.

November 10:
Count Basie, jazz pianist and future bandleader/composer, made his first record, "Blue Devil Blues," with Walter Page's Blue Devils, in Kansas City, Mo., for Vocalion Records.