The 1920s People

Warren G. Harding (1865-1923) was the 29th President of the United States. A personable, conservative senator from Ohio, Harding won the presidential election of 1920 in a landslide by promising a...

Herbert Hoover (1874-1964) was a self-made millionaire in the mining industry, a very successful Secretary of Commerce from 1921-28, and a very unsuccessful president of the U.S. from 1929 to 1933....

Andrew Mellon (1855-1937) was a millionaire financier who served as Secretary of the Treasury for eleven years under Republican presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.As Treasury Secretary, Mello...

Eugene Debs (1855-1926), a longtime labor organizer and left-wing political activist, was the leader of the American Socialist Party and an unsuccessful candidate for president on the Socialist tic...

Al Smith (1873-1944) was a four-term governor of New York and the Democratic candidate for president in 1928.Smith, a fierce opponent of Prohibition and the first Roman Catholic to win a major-part...

Henry Ford (1863-1947) was one of America's greatest businessmen, the founder of Ford Motor Company and the man largely responsible for initiating the era of mass-consumption and mass-production in...

D.W. Griffith (1875-1948) was an important movie director of the early twentieth century and one of the founders of the Hollywood film industry.Griffith's 1915 film Birth of a Nation—which de...

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was a prominent American writer of the "Lost Generation," the author of novels including This Side of Paradise, Tender is the Night, and—most famously—Th...

Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) was the nation's most important birth control advocate in the early twentieth century. At a time when basic information about sex, sexuality, and even anatomy was often...

Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974) was an American pilot and the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.Lindbergh's solo transatlantic flight in 1927 made him one of America's early celebrity h...

Babe Ruth (1895-1948) was one of the greatest baseball players of all time, a fearsome power hitter whose home run records stood for decades.Ruth's feats on the diamond (and his garrulous charisma...

Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) was the most popular black nationalist leader of the early twentieth century, and the founder of the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). A Jamaican immigrant, Gar...

Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was an African-American poet, novelist, and playwright. He remains beloved especially for his poetry, and is considered one of America's greatest poets.During the 1920s,...

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was an African-American writer, best known for the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God.During the 1920s, Hurston was one of the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissa...

Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) was an American novelist and playwright, and the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.During the 1920s, Lewis's works Main Street and Babbitt, skewered wha...