This reactionary period manifested itself in a number of ways:
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Rejection by the U.S. Senate of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations proposed therein.
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Ratification in January 1920 of the Eighteenth Amendment, which forbade the manufacture and sale of all intoxicating beverages.
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The so-called Great Red Scare, set off by the spread of communism in Europe following the 1917 Russian Revolution, and by labor unrest in the States. Like the McCarthy Era of the late 1940s, the Red Scare period involved widespread suspicion and denunciation of Americans as communists and/or socialists.
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The rise of the Ku Klux Klan, formed in 1915 and dedicated to attacking African-Americans, Jews, Roman Catholics, and others. The Klan's membership had grown to five million by 1924, the year before The Sun Also Rises takes place.
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Legislative restrictions on immigration, especially from southern and eastern Europe, in the Immigration Act of 1921 and the Johnson Act (1924).
One result of the ugly postwar mood was a series of novels by U.S. writers critical of American provincialism, xenophobia, religious intolerance, and racism. These include Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919); Sinclair Lewis's Main Street (1920) and Babbit (1922); and An American Tragedy (1925) by Theodore Dreiser. The journalist H.L. Mencken was the unofficial leader of this movement to satirize, criticize, and thereby strike blows against what many saw as a moral failure on the part of American society at large.
