The Twentieth Century
It may not have been apparent to everyone at the time, but the first few years of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of many of the features that came to characterize modern America. In 1903 alone, Wilbur and Orville Wright achieved the first successful powered flight , and Henry Ford established his Ford Motor Company. Ford's enthusiastic adoption of the latest technology in mass production - the assembly line - gave Detroit a head start in the new automobile industry, which swiftly became the most important business in America. Both jazz and blues music came to the attention of a national audience for the first time during that same period, while Hollywood acquired its first movie studio in 1911, and its first major hit in 1915 with D. W. Griffith's unabashed glorification of the Ku Klux Klan in Birth of a Nation . This was also a time of growing radicalism . Both the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and the socialist International Workers of the World ("the Wobblies") were founded in the early 1900s, while the campaign for women's suffrage also came to the forefront. Writers such as Upton Sinclair, whose The Jungle exposed conditions in Chicago's stockyards, and Jack London proselytized to the masses; contemporary improvements in the educational system suggest this may well have been the most literate period in US history. President Wilson managed to keep the US out of the Great War for several years but, when the time came, American intervention was decisive. With the Russian Revolution illustrating the dangers of anarchy, the US also took charge of supervising the peace. However, although Wilson presided over the postwar negotiations that resulted in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, isolationist sentiment at home kept the US from joining his pet scheme to preserve future world peace, the League of Nations. Back home, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, in 1920, forbade the sale and distribution of alcohol, while the Nineteenth finally gave all American women the vote. Quite how Prohibition ever became the law of the land is something of a mystery; certainly, in the buzzing metropolises of the Roaring Twenties, it enjoyed little conspicuous support. There was no noticeable elevation in the moral tone of the country, and Chicago in particular became renowned for the street wars between bootlegging gangsters such as Al Capone and his rivals.
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