America in the 1920s revision

1. America in the 1920s

2. 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

3. 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.

4. 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

5. 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)

6. 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.

7. 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

8. 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.

9. 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…

10. 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…

12. 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.
OR
However, 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.

14. Will now need
relevant ck too.