By Panagioti Tsiamis
As the election of 1920 approached, a global pandemic was sweeping the nation, only barely tapering off toward the end of the year. Some people wore masks and whole cities, such as San Francisco, were put under strict quarantine. Other US cities including Detroit, Milwaukee, Kansas City, Minneapolis and St. Louis were hit particularly hard, with death rates higher than all of 1918, the peak of the Spanish Flu. Due in part to a lack of preparation and precaution, more than 600,000 eventually would die. As the U.S. comes to terms with the election of 2020 and battles through another global pandemic, COVID-19, it’s easy to ask whether history will repeat itself. As vaccines are rolled out, will the roar of 2020 rival that of a century prior?
A theory was proposed in 1926 by economist George Taylor that linked hemlines and economic progress. The hemline index suggests that the skirt length of women’s dresses tends to rise along with stock prices. As the market recovers and the miniskirt comes back into style, it's a struggle to disagree. The fashion of the 1920s continues to be characterized by an abundance of glamor. Movies like the Great Gatsby feature glitter, gold, and plenty of booze. The flapper dress in particular was composed of expensive fabrics with plenty of embellishments, like beading and fringe, with an addition of pearls (a trend slowly but surely coming back into vogue). Evening wear was fashioned from fabrics such as silk, satin and beaded textiles. Art Deco style was reflected in the geometric shapes used in clothes – in the forms of bead arrangement or as color-blocked patterns. It’s not a stretch to see these themes mimicked in upcoming fashion, with absolute decadence finding a home at events like the Met Gala. Even controversies of the 1920s meet their match in contemporary discourse. The rise of trousers in womens wear, started by Chanel, can be easily compared to the spotlight on Harry Styles in his Gucci dress on the cover of Vogue. The strides made a century ago have failed to cease.
The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have called the 1920s “the most expensive orgy in history.” The prosperity of the decade, however, was arguably a cruel illusion. Even during the most fruitful years of the Roaring Twenties, most Americans lived below what we today would define as the poverty line. During the decade, there was a pronounced and undeniably shift in wealth and income toward the top one percent. Between 1919 and 1929, the share of income received by the wealthiest of Americans rose from 12 percent of the national economy to 19 percent, while the share received by the top five percent jumped from 24 percent to 34 percent. A century later, new research indicates that our country’s ultra-rich haven’t held as much of the country’s wealth since then. The income inequality of today resembles more of those freewheeling times before America’s finances collapsed than any other decade.
Perhaps the most important lesson we can learn from the 1920s, however, is the peril of isolationism. In only four years, Trump symbolically revived isolationism, even resurrecting the “America First” motto that Harding campaigned on in 1920. Today America remains what it was it was over a century ago: its own worst enemy.