"The Roaring'20s." That term is used to describe the 1920s, when American cities were expanding outward and upward, toward the skies. Automobiles ruled the streets. A lively bull market—a profitable period of aggressive buying and selling of stock—was creating new wealth by the hour. Babe Ruth (1895-1948) popularized baseball and smacked sixty home runs in 1927. That same year, Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974; see box) flew an airplane solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Even the 1919 constitutional amendment banning the manufacture or sale of alcohol did not slow revelers in "the Jazz Age," another colorful description of the era.

Calvin Coolidge, the man who led the nation during much of the decade, was the very opposite of the Roaring'20s image. A sober, reserved New England Republican with a distinct lack of charisma (personal charm), "Silent Cal" simply went about his business—working...