World War I was a downer. It left America disillusioned with its government, with the Progressives, and with the whole hunkering down in trenches thing.

And you know how people are: when they're disillusioned, they look for a brand new illusion. The illusion in the 1920s was of infinite prosperity and opportunity, and the sense that America was entering a new, wonderfully modern era. To a certain extent, they were right.

Industry was booming, thanks to new assembly line production and some very, very pro-business policy-makers. New, affordable goods made luxuries available to the middle class, and radio and cinema were making a whole new entertainment culture.

But, like the Force, the 1920s had a dark side. On that dark side were things like:

• the resurgence of racist violence, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.
• the fact that most of the new wealth was based on speculation (predictions of future growth) rather than actual growth.
• people going deep into debt to gamble on the stock market.
• American farmers facing a panic-inducing crisis as newly peaceful European countries flooded the global market with cheap crops.
• pro-business policies of the Republicans making American exports really expensive, which irritated our struggling European trade partners and led to a big economic backlash against American goods.

Note to self: what goes around comes around.

Reality brought the Roaring '20s to an ugly end in 1929, when a stock market crash bankrupted investors, evaporated the middle class, and led to a new decade with more conservative values, not to mention some thrifty cooking skills. (Ritz cracker apple pie, anyone?) 

But we won't get into that here. We're all about the good times right now...the illusion of good times, anyway.

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." 

That was the opening line of L.P. Hartley's novel The Go-Between. It's also a decent description of how a lot of us feel about many topics in American history. It's not easy for us to understand, for example, exactly why our 19th-century forebears got so worked up over issues like tariff policy or the gold standard.

But the 1920s don't seem so foreign at all: more like a goofy reflection of our own times, viewed through a funhouse mirror.

In both eras, the 1920s and today, we've seen:

• presidents elected because the voters liked their personalities, while some of those administrations go on to become mired in corruption and scandal.
• soaring stock markets, providing euphoric investors with incredible financial returns.
• a widening gulf between the incomes of the rich and the poor and middle-class.
• a populace enthralled by celebrity, zealously tracking every move of America's sports and entertainment heroes.
• a showdown between the secular values of the marketplace—in which everything is for sale, and sex sells—and the old-fashioned religious principles of fundamentalist Christianity.
• powerful movements to restrict immigration amid fears that the arrival of too many newcomers to this nation will undermine American society and culture.

History never simply repeats itself, of course, and there are plenty of differences between the 1920s and our own time, too. Still, the similarities are striking.

It's impossible for us now to look back on the 1920s without being influenced by our knowledge of how the Roaring '20s came to an end—with a Great Crash and Great Depression. The incredible affluence was only a mirage, the decadent culture only an ironic prelude to a decade of hard times ahead.

But history never simply repeats itself. Right?