Conventional wisdom about the twenties offers several reasons why the decade was a time of faddish games and goofiness.

For one thing, people had more time to kill; the work week dropped from 60 to 48 hours. Rising wages made more disposal income available for leisure. "Grim Youth" or "The Lost Generation," disillusioned after The Great War, sought to affirm life by living it to the hilt through crazy thrills. New products and trends reached more people and faster--thanks to the explosion in mass marketing via the new medium of radio and growing national newspaper chains and magazines. A general consumer culture was arising and people indulged in materialist hedonism regardless of ability to pay--charge it to the "installment plan" they would say. Thanks to credit buying, everyone could own a car, and people now freely motoring about had to find things to do and places to go.

The pursuit and making of booze became a faddish preoccupation as Americans, many of whom would otherwise abstain, were drawn to the taboo of illegal bar culture during Prohibition. In the U.S., the isolationist mood of staying out of "foreign entanglements" was part of a general attitude of ignoring big issues and concentrating on little ones. Nobody wanted to hear about that boring old Teapot Dome scandal in Washington, but everyone wanted to know the details about the adultery and courtroom innuendo of the New Jersey Hall-Mills or the New York Snyder-Gray murder cases. Free-living and free-loving bohemians such as Pablo Picasso, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Isadora Duncan, Fannie Hurst were giving youth new ideas about how to live. The radical American Mercury magazine questioned the status quo. Everything seemed topsy turvy, and the fads of the 1920s reflected the new state of things.