The 1920s brought in a new era in American politics and economics that made the country very different from how it had been before World War One. These changes were mainly led by the Republican Party, with the US electing Republican presidents throughout the 1920s and the Congress and Senate often having Republican majorities.

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Isolationism

One of the most important feature of the United States in the 1920s was that the country wanted to cut itself off from the rest of the world – a practice we call isolationism. Now, if we think about the mess that Europe got itself into at the start of the twentieth century, it’s probably not surprising. And many Americans were less than impressed with the after-war shenanigans at the Treaty of Versailles. Isolationism became stronger after the war, and this is shown by two key events:

* The US Congress refused to accept the Treaty of Versailles, mainly because of concerns that Article 10 of the Treaty, which said that League of Nations countries could be sent to war without the approval of Congress.

* The US Senate voted against the United States joining the League of Nations in November 1919.

These were both important signs that America did not want to get involved with the rest of the world’s problems, even if they did at other points in the 1920s become involved in international treaties such as the anti-war Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928.