America in the 1920s

Content to revise

• Causes of the Boom in the USA.

• Who benefited from the boom? Who didn’t?

• Prohibition: causes, events and reasons for failure

• Intolerance (life in the 1920s negative): Red Scare, KKK, Scopes etc

• Changing lives (life in the 1920s positive): women, leisure, sport

Causes of the Boom activity

• Use the resources provided to revise the key causes of the boom and the different groups which did/didn’t benefit.

• You will need:

1. Economic boom: seeds and compost activity

2. Economic boom resource page info sheet.

Causes of the Boom

• America’s wealth – deposits of coal, oil etc

• New Industries – total production increased by 50% in the 1920s driven by new inventions eg car, radio etc

• Increased wages – wages went up but prices remained the same.

• Hire Purchase Credit – 8/10 cars and 6/10 radios.

• Republican policies – trusts, laissez-faire, tariffs (Fordney-McCumber), low taxes

Boom time vs Doom time

Boom

• 1 in 5 Americans owned a car (comparted to 1 in 43 Britons)

• 20 million telephones by 1930 (doubled from 1915)

• New York doubled in size during the 1920s.

• By 1930 there were 162,000 civilian flights each year (0 in 1918)

• New material rayon meant 300 million stockings pairs of stockings were sold in 1930.

Doom

• The silk stocking industry was replaced by rayon (they had sold 12,000 pairs in 1900)

• Farming profits fell from $22 billion in 1919 to $13 billion in 1928.

• Canadian wheat was cheaper, exports fell at the end of WWI.

• 1921 farm profits fell by 50%

• Overproduction – average farmer producing enough to feed his family and 14 others.

• 6 million rural Americans forced off their land (750,000 African Americans -disproportionately high)

Leisure

• 508 licenced radio stations by the end of 1922.

• The Jazz age – the Charleston, flappers etc

• The motor car – increased flexibility

• Sport – New York Yankees, Babe Ruth etc

• Cinema – rise of Hollywood, 1927 first Talkie, Rudolf Valentino (1921), Clara Bow,100 million tickets per week by 1930.

Women

• New freedoms in dress and leisure time, labour saving devices.

• Allowed out with a chaperone and to drink and smoke in public.

• Divorces doubled between 1919 and 1929 (to 200,000)

• Didn’t change for everyone eg. South, anti-flirt league etc

Intolerance

• The Red Scare – fear of Communism (revolution in Russia), J Edgar Hoover, 60,000 files, 10,000 deported, 556 had basis in fact!

• The Johnson-Reid Act (1924), quota of 150,000 immigrants.

• Sacco and Vanzetti – self confessed anarchists, executed in 1927 despite evidence that they didn’t do it.

• Ku Klux Klan – 4.5 million members by 1924. WASPs and Bible Belt.

• Scopes Trial – fined $100 for teaching evolution.

Question 4

2. Ck to support that this is accurate (successfully enforced) + link to question

3. Ck to say that this is not accurate (no successfully enforced) +link to question

1. Identify what the source is telling us…

Question 4

More likely now to be ‘how typical is this source?’

2. Ck to support that this is accurate (not surprising) + link to question

3. Ck to say that this is not accurate (surprising) +link to question

1. Identify what the source is telling us…

This source is useful to a historian studying the economic boom in America because it highlights the methods that Henry Ford used to sell cars, and increased sales of cars and new inventions was a key driver for the boom. Ford states that “it is better to sell a large number of cars at a small profit” which highlights the fact that the price of cars was lower than expected because of the new methods of mass production (on the production line) which made them cheaper to build. In fact by 1927 there was one Ford Car coming off the production line every 10 seconds, and this meant that Ford could sell them cheaper. As such this is useful to a historian studying the boom because it explains how Ford sold so many cars.However, this source does not reference other factors that helped to cause the economic boom. For example, it does not mention Higher Purchase Credit which was necessary for the majority of people to buy cars and other leisure goods. In fact 8/10 cars and 6/10 radios were purchased on Higher Purchase Credit because even with mass production, people could not afford them without this. As such, this source is of limited reliability to a historian since it only explains one of the reasons for the economic boom.

ORHowever, this source is not useful to a historian studying America in the 1920s because it does not explain the impact of the new inventions and production methods on older industries. For example, the silk stocking industry was superseded by rayon tights, which sold 300 million a year since they were cheaper than silk stockings. Farming also suffered due to overproduction, and farm profits fell by 50% in 1921 alone. As such, this source is not really useful to a historian since it only explains the conditions for one group of people in America at the time.

Will now need relevant ck too.