It Happened in 1920 . . .
Poor White and Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence. In non-fiction, John Maynard Keynes' The Economic Consequences of the Peace was near the top of the list, but H.G. Wells' The Outline of History would sell very strongly right through 1924 . . . menckensacco & vanzetti
H.L. Mencken didn't like all the back-slapping in the business community. "The first Rotarian," said the Sage of Baltimore, "was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack" . . . George White paid George Gershwin fifty dollars a week to write tunes for the Scandals of 1920 . . . Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, and Georges Carpentier went before the Hollywood cameras. The pay is high, the product low . . . The Ku Klux Klan came back—with a large distaste for Negroes, Catholics, Jews, and the foreigners in the big cities . . . A jury in Hammond, Indiana, acquitted a man who had killed an alien for saying "To hell with the United States."
In Massachusetts, there was an incident that would reverberate around the world for seven years and write a sorry chapter into our history. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were charged with shooting down two guards during a payroll holdup in Braintree. The nation paid no attention. Sacco and Vanzetti were just two more Anarchists hauled into the net—for an alleged murder rather than a political misdeed.