Prologue -- 1920 - 1939: Peace, Prohibition, Prosperity... and a Crash

From darkness to light, from bitter cold to blazing warmth, from depth to height. Whatever metaphor you choose, America in 1920 had emerged from four long cruel war years to the threshold of a dazzling new era, one that was marked by peace and prosperity and tempered by prohibition. It seemed as if it would last forever, but finally, an era characterized by flappers and the Charleston would evaporate into the worst of times: the Great Depression and World War II.

A confluence of events fueled the amazing decade that would become known as "The Roaring Twenties."

The great immigration wave of the last half of the 19th century, which had seen the United States population more than triple between 1850 and 1900, continued unabated as another 30 million people streamed onto America's shores in the first two decades of the 20th century.

California's growth was even more astounding. From just under 1.5 million people at the turn of the century, the state's population more than doubled to more than 3.4 million by 1920. Another 2.2 million would become California residents in the next 10 years.

Moreover, this was a confident, buoyant nation. A people who had just "won" the "war to end all wars" and had swept aside the ravages of "demon rum" were now ready to reap the benefits of those "great crusades." American industry -- riding the magic words of "assembly-line production" best exemplified by Henry Ford's thriving automobile company -- was ready to oblige. Mass production, coupled with the easy availability and growing acceptance of installment credit, sent the American economy soaring into the stratosphere.

Perhaps nothing so characterized America in the Roaring Twenties as its love affair with sports. Whether it was the victory aspect that satisfied America's pent-up need for winning or the outdoor element that appealed to an increasingly urbanized society, sports became deeply embedded into the American psyche during the 1920s. Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Notre Dame's Four Horsemen and a golfer named Jones all captured the imagination of the American public.

Even before Bobby Jones burst onto the scene in the 1920s, an amateur golfer named Francis Ouimet had captured the fancy of Americans by winning the 1913 U.S. Open, defeating famed British pros Harry Vardon and Ted Ray in a playoff at The Country Club in Brookline, Mass. Ouimet's victory gave golf a prominence with the American public that it has never lost.

It's also worth noting that the popularity of sports in general -- and golf in particular -- is due in large measure to the millions of prosaic words penned by such newspaper reporters such as Grantland Rice, Herbert Warren Wind, Dan Jenkins and Jim Murray. As Murray once noted: "Sportswriters may owe a lot to athletes but athletes owe everything to sportswriters."

From automobiles to sporting events, from John D. Rockefeller to Bobby Jones, the 20s proved to be a golden age, one that seemingly would never end... until "Black Monday" -- October 29, 1929 -- brought it all to a crashing halt.

Chapter One - A Golden Age of Golf Courses

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