On what was the 1920s boom based?

After 1922 the American economy surged. The causes fed one another:

• Mass production — Henry Ford's assembly line made the Model T cheap. Cars then pulled along steel, rubber, glass, petrol and road building.
• New consumer goods — radios, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators — sold through advertising and hire purchase (buy now, pay later).
• Republican policies — low taxes, laissez-faire, and tariffs (such as Fordney–McCumber, 1922) protecting US industry.
• Confidence — a rising stock market, with millions buying shares on the margin (on credit).

Who missed out? Farmers (overproduction and falling prices), old industries (coal, textiles), black Americans and many recent immigrants. The boom was real — but it was never shared equally.

Why did farmers not share the boom?

The Roaring Twenties

Culture changed fast, especially in the cities:

• Entertainment — cinema (silent films, then talkies from 1927), jazz, dance halls, radio and spectator sport made national stars.
• Women — the Nineteenth Amendment (1920) gave women the vote. Young urban "flappers" cut their hair, wore shorter skirts, smoked and drove. But for most women — especially in rural areas — daily life changed far less.
• Cars gave young people freedom from parental supervision, which shocked traditionalists.

How far did women's lives change?

How widespread was intolerance?

The decade's freedoms sat alongside deep hostility to outsiders:

• The Red Scare (1919–20) — fear of communism after the Russian Revolution; the Palmer raids arrested and deported radicals.
• Sacco and Vanzetti — two Italian anarchists convicted of murder on weak evidence and executed in 1927; many believed they were condemned for who they were.
• Immigration quotas — the Emergency Quota Act (1921) and the Immigration Act (1924) sharply cut immigration, especially from southern and eastern Europe.
• The Ku Klux Klan revived, with millions of members, terrorising black Americans, Catholics, Jews and immigrants. Segregation and lynching persisted in the South.
• The Monkey Trial (1925) — a Tennessee teacher tried for teaching evolution: a clash between traditional and modern America.

Boom, bust or New Deal?

Tap a term, then tap where it belongs.

Prohibition and the gangsters

The Eighteenth Amendment banned the manufacture, sale and transport of alcohol from 1920 (enforced by the Volstead Act). It was pushed by rural, Protestant, temperance America — and by wartime hostility to German brewers.

• It failed. Speakeasies flourished, bootleggers smuggled liquor, and moonshine poisoned drinkers.
• Organised crime grew rich — Al Capone in Chicago — and bribed police, judges and politicians.
• With too few agents to enforce it and public opinion turning, Prohibition was repealed in 1933 by the Twenty-first Amendment.

When did the Wall Street Crash happen?

Why did the boom end?

Beneath the confidence, the economy was unbalanced: overproduction, unequal wealth (too few could buy the goods), weak farming and old industries, tariffs that choked exports — and a stock market bubble fuelled by buying on the margin.

In October 1929 share prices collapsed. The consequences were brutal:

• Banks failed and savings vanished; businesses closed.
• Unemployment reached roughly 13 million by 1933 — about a quarter of the workforce.
• Homeless families built shanty towns nicknamed Hoovervilles.
• Hoover believed in "rugged individualism" and acted late; the army's dispersal of the Bonus Marchers in 1932 destroyed his reputation.

Match the agency to its job

Tap a New Deal agency on the left, then what it did on the right.

Roosevelt and the New Deal

Franklin D. Roosevelt won the 1932 election promising a "new deal for the American people" and took office in March 1933.

• The Hundred Days: a bank holiday and the Emergency Banking Act restored confidence; fireside chats on the radio spoke directly to citizens.
• Relief, recovery, reform: the alphabet agencies — CCC, AAA, TVA, NRA, PWA and later the WPA — created jobs and rebuilt confidence.
• The Second New Deal (1935): the Wagner Act protected trade unions; the Social Security Act created pensions and unemployment insurance.

Opposition: the Supreme Court ruled parts of the New Deal unconstitutional (the NRA in 1935); Republicans and businessmen said it cost too much and undermined self-reliance; radicals like Huey Long said it did too little.

Judging the New Deal

Handling "how far" in Depth Study D

Almost every question here rewards qualified judgement:

• "How far did the US economy boom?" — hugely, in cars, consumer goods and construction; not in farming, coal, textiles, or for most black Americans.
• "How far did society change?" — dramatically for urban youth and some women; scarcely for rural America, and intolerance actually intensified.
• "How successful was the New Deal?" — measure it against relief (strong), recovery (partial) and reform (lasting).

When was Prohibition repealed?

Buying "on the margin"

The arc of Depth Study D

The story is one of confidence and its collapse:

• 1919–29: mass production, credit and laissez-faire built a boom — that excluded farmers, old industries and black Americans, and rested on speculation.
• 1929–32: the Crash exposed the imbalance; Hoover's caution turned recession into disaster.
• 1933–41: Roosevelt used the federal government as never before. The New Deal changed what Americans expected of their government — even though the war, not the New Deal, finally ended mass unemployment.

Why did Prohibition fail?

The big ideas to know

That is Depth Study D: The United States, 1919–41. Press Finish to see your score.