The 1920s The Old Problems and The New Era

The New Era and The Old Problems—The s 2

The New Era and The Old Problems—The 1920s

According to Reinhold Niebuhr, they visited some automobile factories, and to their surprise, things looked artificial that they felt like strangers. He argues that everyone is looking up to what comes out of the factories minus the consideration of how much the efficiency of modern factories costs in human value (Locke & Wright, 2019). Even though the church preserves spiritual amenities and cultivates graces within the society, it is not impacting the critical facts of current civilization even by an inch. Reinhold Niebuhr claimed that church morality is anachrostic.

Later on, the new Ford car was invented, and everyone in the town was talking about it, with its total cost estimated to be around one hundred million dollars. From Reinhold Niebuhr’s arithmetics, he realized the car cost employees a minimum of fifty million within the past year as a form of wages lost (Locke & Wright, 2019).

While on the other hand, the number of homeless people due to unemployment is unknown; the number of school children who drop out due to lack of fees remains scanty. According to him, Mr. Ford made the mistake of coming up with the car model too late. Subsequently, no one seems to mind asking if such a company that can keep a reserve of cash nearing a billion needed not to have made some provisions for its jobless. However good a new car is, the cry of the hungry can be heard. Reinhold Niebuhr later claimed that the then industries were non-Christian, more so in America.

During that time, Warren G. Harding had just become the president, and everyone else was anticipating things would soon get back to normal. It was when the country had just come out of World War I (Locke & Wright, 2019). Warren declared it was time for restoration, return to normalcy, and healing. During this period, several soldiers from the United States had lost their lives while in a war in Europe, followed by a massive loss of American lives due to a flu epidemic that had hit almost 20 percent of the United States’ population.

Moreover, labor strikes were everywhere in the country, while Anarchists were also sending bombs via emails. As a result, the economy shrank, unemployment scaled up, and farmers’ bankruptcy rates skyrocketed. Warren G. Harding could hardly deliver the promised peace, even though his message still touched the suffering population.

Nonetheless, the decade of the 1920s later changed the lives of the people in America, and they started calling it various names like the new era, a decade of prosperity, the roaring twenties, the age of the flapper, and the jazz age, among others. There were increased production and consumption of automobiles in large numbers, including the introduction of radios, household appliances, and films that improved the living standards and the economy.

Conversely, more than ever witnessed, most Americans fought for equal rights, what cultural observers termed as the “the New Woman” and “the New Negro.” Nevertheless, some of the prior immigrant communities that already occupied new immigration quotas stuck to their native faiths and cultures (Locke & Wright, 2019). It could not be considered normal because the 1920s was full of tension and conflict.