1920s Timeline, Digital History ID 2940
1920 U.S. population: 105,710,620.
Life expectancy had risen to 54 years from 49 years in 1901.
January 2: Government agents arrest members of the IWW and Communist Party in 33 cities. 556 aliens are deported for their political beliefs.
March 19: The Senate votes 49-35 to join the League of Nations, seven votes short of the two-thirds vote necessary for ratification. Defeat became certain when President Wilson instructed his supporters to vote down a League bill with Republican amendments attached.
August 18: The Woman's Suffrage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is ratified.
September 28: A Chicago grand jury indicts 8 players on the Chicago "Black Sox" for throwing the 1919 World Series. The players were acquitted but were later banned from baseball.
1921 May 19: Congress institutes a quota system that limits immigration to 3 percent of a nationality's number in the 1910 Census.
November 12: At the Washington Conference for Limitation of Armaments, conferees agree to restrict future construction of warships.
1924 May: Congress reduces immigration to approximately 150,000 people a year limiting each nationality to 2 percent of the number of persons in the U.S. in 1890.
May: "The Crime of the Century." Prodigies Nathan Leopold, Jr., and Richard Loeb confess to kidnapping and killing 13-year-old Bobby Franks for "the thrill of it."
November: Two states, Wyoming and Texas elected women governors.
1925 July: At the "Monkey" Trial in Dayton, Tenn., schoolteacher John Scopes is tried for violating a Tennessee law prohibiting the teaching of evolution. Scope's defense attorney Clarence Darrow called prosecuting attorney William Jennings Bryan to the stand, and ridiculed Bryan's fundamentalist religious beliefs. Scopes was found guilty of violating the law and fined $100. The sentence was later overturned.
1926 Henry Ford introduces the 49-hour work week in the auto industry.
1927 May 21: 25-year-old Charles Lindbergh flies from Long Island to Paris in 33 hours and 29 minutes.
August 23: Anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are executed in Massachusetts for the 1920 killing of a factory guard, despite protests that they were being punished for their radical beliefs.
October 6: The Jazz Singer, the first "talkie," premieres. The first words: "You ain't heard nothing yet."
1928 August 27: Fifteen nations sign the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which renounces war "as an instrument of national policy." Eventually sixty nations ratified that agreement, which lacked any enforcement mechanism.
1929 February 14: St. Valentine's Day Massacre. 14 members of a Chicago gang are shot to death in a Chicago warehouse on orders from Al Capone.
October 29: Black Tuesday. The bull market of the late 1920s comes to a crashing end. Between September 3 and December 1, stocks declined $26 billion in value.