What was the 1920s boom built on?

After a short post-war slump, the American economy surged:

• Mass production — Henry Ford's assembly line made the Model T affordable. Cars pulled along steel, rubber, glass, oil and road building.
• New consumer goods — radios, vacuum cleaners, washing machines — pushed by advertising and bought on hire purchase (credit).
• Republican policy — low taxes, laissez-faire, and high tariffs protecting American industry.
• Confidence — a soaring stock market, with ordinary people buying shares on the margin (with borrowed money).

Who was left out? Farmers, hit by overproduction and falling prices; old industries such as coal and textiles; black Americans, most of them still in the segregated South; and many recent immigrants. Wealth was very unequally shared — a weakness that helped turn a crash into a depression.

Credit and the boom

A changing society

Urban America in the 1920s felt genuinely new:

• Cinema — silent films, then "talkies" from 1927 — made Hollywood stars into national figures.
• Jazz, dance halls and the radio spread a common popular culture; the Harlem Renaissance gave black writers and musicians new prominence.
• Women gained the vote through the Nineteenth Amendment (1920). Young urban "flappers" cut their hair, wore shorter skirts, smoked, drank and drove.
• Cars gave young people independence — and horrified traditionalists.

But change was uneven: for most rural and poorer women, and for black women in the South, daily life and opportunities changed very little.

How much did women's lives change?

The Red Scare, the Klan and immigration

The same decade saw intense hostility to outsiders:

• The Red Scare (1919–20) — fear of communism after the Russian Revolution; the Palmer raids arrested thousands and deported hundreds of radicals, often with little evidence.
• Sacco and Vanzetti — Italian immigrant anarchists convicted of murder on weak evidence and executed in 1927. Many believed they were condemned for their politics and origins.
• Immigration restriction — the Emergency Quota Act (1921) and the Immigration Act (1924) slashed immigration, deliberately favouring northern and western Europeans.
• The Ku Klux Klan revived on a mass scale, terrorising black Americans, Catholics, Jews and immigrants; segregation and lynching persisted in the South.
• The "Monkey Trial" (1925) — a Tennessee teacher prosecuted for teaching evolution: modern urban America against traditional rural America.

Boom, intolerance or bust?

Tap an item, then tap where it belongs.

Prohibition and organised crime

The Eighteenth Amendment banned the manufacture, sale and transport of alcohol from 1920, enforced by the Volstead Act. It was driven by temperance campaigners, rural Protestant America and wartime hostility to German-American brewers.

• It failed. Speakeasies multiplied; bootleggers smuggled liquor; illegal "moonshine" poisoned and blinded drinkers.
• Gangsters grew rich and powerful — Al Capone in Chicago — and corrupted police, judges and politicians.
• There were far too few federal agents to enforce the law, and public opinion turned against it.
• Prohibition was repealed in 1933 by the Twenty-first Amendment.

When did Prohibition begin?

Why the boom ended

The boom rested on shaky foundations: overproduction, unequal wealth (too few Americans could keep buying the goods), weak agriculture and old industries, tariffs that choked export markets — and a stock market inflated by speculation and margin buying.

• In October 1929 confidence broke. Panic selling on Black Thursday (24 October) and Black Tuesday (29 October) wiped out fortunes.
• Investors who had borrowed to buy shares could not repay; banks failed and savings disappeared.
• Businesses cut production and sacked workers; demand fell further — a vicious circle.

Match the term to its meaning

Tap a term on the left, then its meaning on the right.

America, 1929–33

The Depression was devastating:

• Unemployment reached roughly 13 million by 1933 — around a quarter of the workforce.
• Homeless families built shanty towns nicknamed Hoovervilles; queues formed at soup kitchens.
• Farmers, already struggling, were ruined by collapsing prices, foreclosure and — later — the dust storms of the Plains.
• President Hoover believed in "rugged individualism" and voluntary action, and was slow to accept federal responsibility. When the army was used to drive the Bonus Marchers — unemployed war veterans — out of Washington in 1932, his reputation never recovered.
• Franklin D. Roosevelt won the 1932 election promising "a new deal for the American people" and took office in March 1933.

Why did Hoover lose in 1932?

When was the Wall Street Crash?

Why did Prohibition fail?

Balanced judgements on 1920–33

CCEA rewards supported judgement, so practise the qualifier:

• "How far did the USA boom?" — enormously in cars, consumer goods and construction; hardly at all in farming, coal and textiles, or for most black Americans.
• "How far did society change?" — dramatically for urban youth and some women; scarcely for rural America, while intolerance intensified.
• "Why did the boom end?" — separate the underlying weaknesses (overproduction, unequal wealth, tariffs, weak farming) from the trigger (the collapse of speculative confidence in October 1929).

The weakness beneath the boom

The big ideas to know

That is CCEA's Life in the United States of America, 1920–33. Press Finish to see your score.