Problems faced by black Americans

• The South: the Jim Crow laws enforced segregation in schools, transport, restaurants and parks. Literacy tests, poll taxes and intimidation stripped black citizens of the vote in practice, whatever the Constitution said. Lynching continued, and the perpetrators were rarely punished.
• The Ku Klux Klan: refounded in 1915, the Klan grew enormously in the early 1920s — millions joined, and it was strong in the Midwest as well as the South. It targeted black Americans, Catholics, Jews and immigrants, using terror, boycotts and political muscle. Its national influence collapsed after 1925, when the Grand Dragon of Indiana, D. C. Stephenson, was convicted of a horrific murder.
• The North: in the Great Migration hundreds of thousands of black Americans moved to northern cities for factory jobs. There was no legal segregation — but there was poverty, slum housing, the worst-paid jobs and hostility from white workers.
• Responses: the NAACP campaigned in the courts and against lynching; Marcus Garvey’s UNIA preached black pride and self-reliance; and in the Harlem Renaissance black writers, artists and musicians created a cultural movement that reached the whole nation.

Problems faced by immigrants

The USA had been built by immigrants — but by the 1920s attitudes had hardened. Older “WASP” America blamed newer arrivals from southern and eastern Europe for crime, disease, low wages and radical politics.

• The Red Scare (1919–20): after the Russian Revolution, fear of communists and anarchists swept the USA. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer launched the Palmer Raids, arresting thousands of suspected radicals, often without warrants; hundreds of immigrants were deported.
• Sacco and Vanzetti: two Italian immigrants and anarchists were arrested in 1920 and convicted of murder in 1921 on thin, contested evidence. Despite worldwide protests, they were executed in 1927 — for many, proof that immigrants could not get a fair trial.
• Restriction: the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 capped immigration by nationality; the Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson–Reed) cut the quotas further and pegged them to an earlier census, deliberately favouring northern and western Europeans and effectively excluding immigrants from Asia.

Consequence: the door that had stood open for a century was pulled almost shut, and immigrants already in the USA lived with suspicion, discrimination and the worst jobs.

Problems faced by Native Americans

• Allotment. Under the policy begun by the Dawes Act of 1887, tribal land was broken up into individual plots and the “surplus” sold to white settlers. The result was catastrophic: Native Americans lost a huge proportion of their land, and much of what remained was poor. Communal tribal life was deliberately undermined.
• Education. Children were sent to boarding schools designed to assimilate them: their languages were forbidden, their hair cut, their names changed, their religions suppressed. The schools were often underfunded and unhealthy.
• Citizenship. The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 granted US citizenship to Native Americans — but it did not restore land, and several states still found ways to deny them the vote.
• Criticism. The Meriam Report of 1928 exposed the poverty, poor health and failing schools produced by allotment, and paved the way for later reform.

Exam point: Native Americans, black Americans and immigrants all suffered — but for different reasons and in different ways. CCEA rewards precise, group-specific detail, not one blurred story of “discrimination”.

Immigration restriction

Why was Prohibition introduced — and why did it fail?

The 18th Amendment banned the manufacture, sale and transport of intoxicating liquor; the Volstead Act defined and enforced it. Prohibition came into force in January 1920.

• Why? Decades of campaigning by the Anti-Saloon League and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union; the belief that drink caused poverty, violence and absenteeism; strong support in rural, Protestant, “Bible Belt” America; and wartime feeling against German-American brewers.
• Differing attitudes: rural and small-town America largely backed it (the “drys”); the big cities and immigrant communities largely resented it (the “wets”).
• Organised crime: banning a product people still wanted handed a fortune to gangsters. Al Capone dominated Chicago bootlegging; his rivals were murdered in the St Valentine’s Day Massacre of 14 February 1929. Speakeasies, moonshine and smuggling flourished.
• Why it failed: far too few federal agents to police a vast country; widespread corruption of police, judges and politicians; huge demand; and the sheer length of the borders and coastline. As the Depression bit, the argument that legal liquor would bring jobs and tax revenue became irresistible. Prohibition was repealed by the 21st Amendment in December 1933.

Did the lives of women really change?

What changed:

• The 19th Amendment (1920) gave women the vote across the USA.
• More women worked, especially in clerical jobs — typists, secretaries, telephone operators — and in shops.
• The flappers — young, mostly wealthy urban women — cut their hair, shortened their skirts, smoked, drank and danced in public, and shocked their parents doing it.
• Labour-saving devices, contraception and easier divorce loosened old constraints for some.

What did not change:

• Women in rural areas and in the Bible Belt lived much as their mothers had, under conservative moral expectations.
• Working-class and black women mostly did hard, low-paid work — domestic service, laundry, farm labour — not glamorous city jobs.
• Women were paid less than men for the same work, were rare in the professions, and were still expected to leave work when they married.

Judgement: the flapper is the image of the 1920s, but she was a small minority. The honest answer to “how far did life change for women?” is: a great deal for some, hardly at all for most.

Jazz, radio, Hollywood and sport

• Jazz and dance: born in black communities, above all in New Orleans, jazz spread north with the Great Migration. Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith became stars; the Charleston filled dance halls. To the young it was freedom; to conservatives it was proof of moral decay.
• Radio: commercial broadcasting began in 1920 and spread with astonishing speed. For the first time, families across the country heard the same music, news, comedy and sport on the same night.
• Hollywood: the cinema became the great mass entertainment. Silent stars like Charlie Chaplin drew vast audiences, and “The Jazz Singer” (1927) — the first feature-length “talkie” — changed the industry overnight.
• Spectator sport: radio and newspapers turned athletes into national celebrities — the baseball slugger Babe Ruth, the heavyweight boxer Jack Dempsey. Crowds and prize money grew enormously.

Attitudes divided: cities embraced the new culture; rural and religious America saw jazz, cinema and flappers as a threat to decency. This cultural clash runs right through the 1920s — and is the same divide you see over Prohibition and immigration.

Why did the economy boom in the 1920s?

• Mass production. The assembly line — perfected by Henry Ford for the Model T — slashed the time and cost of building a car. Cheaper cars meant more buyers, which meant more cars.
• The knock-on effect. The car industry devoured steel, rubber, glass, leather, petrol and drove road building, garages, motels and suburbs. Its health was the health of the economy.
• New consumer goods. Electricity brought radios, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators and washing machines into millions of homes. New chemical industries (plastics, synthetic fabrics such as rayon, paints) and a booming construction industry grew alongside them.
• Credit and advertising. Hire purchase let ordinary families buy now and pay later; mass advertising created the appetite. The construction industry boomed too.
• Republican policies. Under Harding, Coolidge and then Hoover, the government pursued laissez-faire: low taxes, few regulations, and tariffs (the Fordney–McCumber Tariff of 1922) to keep out foreign competition. Business, said Coolidge, was America’s business.

Boom, weakness, or bust?

Tap a card, then tap the column it belongs in.

The problems behind the prosperity

• Unequal wealth. A small minority owned a huge share of the nation’s income. Millions of families simply could not afford the goods the factories were pouring out.
• Overproduction and underconsumption. Once those who could afford a car or a radio had bought one, the market was saturated — but the factories kept producing. Stockpiles grew.
• Agriculture in crisis. Farmers had expanded during the war; afterwards, European demand fell, and new machinery and Canadian competition added to the glut. Prices collapsed; farmers who had borrowed to buy land and tractors could not repay. Sharecroppers, black and white, were poorest of all.
• Old industries declining. Coal lost ground to oil and electricity; textiles faced falling demand and cheap competition. Wages and jobs in these industries fell even in the boom.
• Republican economics. Tariffs protected US industry, but provoked retaliation that hurt US farmers’ exports. Low taxes on the rich did nothing to spread purchasing power, and the refusal to regulate allowed reckless speculation on Wall Street — including buying shares “on the margin” with borrowed money.

Buying “on the margin”

The Wall Street Crash, October 1929

Through 1928–29 share prices had soared far beyond what company profits justified. Confidence wobbled in the autumn; then it broke. On Thursday 24 October 1929 panic selling began, and on Tuesday 29 October 1929 — Black Tuesday — millions of shares were dumped and prices collapsed.

Causes: wild speculation and margin buying; shares priced far above their real worth; the underlying weaknesses (overproduction, unequal wealth, farm depression); and the sudden loss of confidence that turned a fall into a stampede.

Effects:

• Short term: fortunes were wiped out; speculators who had borrowed were ruined; banks that had lent to them, and had speculated themselves, began to fail.
• Longer term: as banks collapsed, ordinary depositors lost their savings. Confidence, credit and spending drained away — and the Crash slid into the Great Depression.

Be precise: the Crash did not by itself cause the Depression. It exposed and triggered weaknesses that were already there.

The Depression: industry and workers

The Depression fed on itself in a vicious cycle: firms could not sell, so they cut wages and sacked workers; the unemployed could not buy, so more firms failed.

• Demand for cars and consumer goods collapsed, and with it the industries that supplied them.
• By 1933 roughly a quarter of the workforce was unemployed — around 13 million people — with no national system of unemployment benefit.
• Families evicted from their homes built shanty towns of scrap and packing cases on the edges of cities. Bitterly, people called them Hoovervilles.
• The Bonus Army, 1932. Thousands of unemployed First World War veterans marched on Washington to demand early payment of a promised war bonus and camped in the city. In July 1932 the army was sent in to clear them out. The sight of veterans being driven from the capital with tear gas and burning shelters horrified the nation — and wrecked what was left of Hoover’s reputation.

The Depression: farmers and the Dust Bowl

• Farm prices, already low, fell through the floor. Farmers who could not meet their mortgage payments were evicted; sharecroppers were thrown off the land entirely.
• Tariffs made it worse. The Hawley–Smoot Tariff of 1930 raised US duties to record levels; other countries retaliated, world trade shrank, and American farmers lost export markets they badly needed.
• The Dust Bowl. Decades of ploughing up the grassland of the Great Plains had destroyed the deep roots that held the soil. When severe drought struck from the early 1930s, the topsoil simply blew away in vast black dust storms, burying farms and machinery. Thousands of ruined families packed up and headed west in search of work.

Link it up: agriculture was in trouble before 1929. The Depression and the Dust Bowl turned a long farming slump into a catastrophe.

Hoover and the Depression, to March 1933

Hoover was no do-nothing fool — he was a brilliant administrator who had organised famine relief in Europe. But his beliefs limited him.

• Laissez-faire and “rugged individualism”: he believed the economy would right itself, that relief was the job of charities and state governments, and that federal handouts (the “dole”) would sap self-reliance.
• Voluntarism: he urged employers not to cut wages and set up the President’s Organization on Unemployment Relief (POUR) to encourage private charity. Good will was no match for mass unemployment.
• What he actually did: the Federal Farm Board tried to prop up farm prices; the Hawley–Smoot Tariff (1930) tried to protect industry and backfired; the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (1932) lent federal money to banks, railroads and businesses; public works such as the great dam on the Colorado River were pushed forward.
• Why it was not enough: the RFC came late and lent mainly to institutions, not to hungry families; relief was left to states and charities that had run out of money; and Hoover never accepted large-scale direct federal relief.

The verdict in 1932: Hoover became a hated figure — his name was attached to the shanty towns and to the newspapers the homeless slept under. In the election of November 1932, his gloomy, defensive campaign was swept aside by Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose energy and promise of action won a landslide. Roosevelt took office in March 1933.

Where this option stops

Cause → consequence

Tap a cause on the left, then its consequence on the right.

Name the shanty towns

Build the timeline

Tap the events in order, earliest first.

Why did Prohibition fail?

Judging Hoover

The essentials to remember

You have covered the whole of Life in the USA, 1920–33. Press Finish to see your score.