Source A
Life improved for the majority, but not all, of Americans.
BBC Bitesize.
Source B
An estimated 60% of Americans lived below the poverty line during the 1920s, and didn't benefit from the economic boom. Some groups in particular were economically vulnerable
Clever Lili.
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Going Deeper
The following links will help you widen your knowledge:
Basic accounts from
BBC Bitesize:
-
Economic problems in the 1920s
-
People who prospered
-
People who missed out
-
Life
for Black Americans
-
Life
for Native Americans
Essay: What was the impact of the Boom on the lives of different groups of Americans?
Stuart Chase, Prosperity: Fact or Myth (1929)
The 'cruel illusion' of America's
'prosperity decade'
Vincent Geloso questions EVERYTHING (2020) - essential reading
'Labour' and 'Capital' - extensive resources
about unions, strikes, worker-employer relations, and the balance between labour and capital in the free marketplace
YouTube
Daily Life in the 1920s
- traditional account
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People who prospered [BUSY
FEW]
If you do a google search for "which groups prospered in
America during the 1920s" you turn up remarkably few sites – most seem
immediately to get down to the busness of who didn't prosper.
The economist and social theorist Stuart Chase found that, even amongst groups which were supposed to be prospering, some were struggling, and for others that increased propserity came at a price
– e.g. debt, or a more pressured way of working, the pressure of keeping up
with the Joneses, or a world where a household now NEEDS money, and can no
longer 'get by', producing enough itself to support itself. Business,
commerce, the cityscape, culture – all showed signs of huge progress ... but
as for "economic security and peace of mind", that had not happened for most people. The 1920s Boom, he concluded, was "a rate of advance rather than a state of
affairs".
Nevertheless, it is possible to identify some groups of people
who seem generally to have boomed with the Boom – basically, if you were in the
right place at the right time with the right skills and right drive (especially
if you came from an
advantaged background), you could do very well in America in the 1920s:
-
Business owners
Although times got worse for small businesses, wealthier businessmen and corporate executives (notably in steel, oil, automobiles construction and housing) were able to reap the rewards of huge profits. By 1930, 100 corporations controlled half of the USA’s business interests. In 1924 Henry Ford paid $2.6m in tax, his son Edsel $2.2m ... and John D
Rockereller Jr triple that. Bankers such as JP Morgan Jnr made
lots of money from the credit boom, the stock market boom … and lending
money to foreign countries.
Cartels, trusts and monopolies ‘fixed the market’ to keep prices high and
wages low.
Some large farmers prospered, and niche producers such as
salad growers and dairy farmers near cities.
-
Upper middle classes
Managers, engineers and professions such as lawyers,
accountants, advertisers – i.e. the upper ranks of white-collar workers – were
able to shop in department stores or own a motor car.
-
Stock Investors
The stock market seemed to be on a constant bull market, with
many investors making significant profits especially in the late 1920s.
-
Young and rich
For the children of the wealthy – such as the flappers and
college students – life was full of fun and opportunity.
-
Factory workers
The growth of cities meant that life for skilled urban workers improved – especially where unions had been set up. Wages largely rose as business owners came to understand that production improved with happier workers.
Working hours decreased by about 20 per cent, leaving more time for leisure.
Urban workers also benefited from better housing; e.g. electricity and new consumer goods such as vacuum cleaners and refrigerators.
There were expanded opportunities for entertainment and leisure … IF you had the
money.
-
Entertainment and Lesiure
A few actors, entertainers, musicians and sports personalities were able to prosper.
-
Women
BBC Bitesize suggests that “many women, benefiting from growing independence after World War One, were able to move into jobs too.
This gave them a greater sense of financial independence”.
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People who missed out [FLOP
NUTS]
Not every one shared in the prosperity, however, and there
were glaring weaknesses in the American economy in the 1920s.
However, there is plenty of evidence that all was not well
with the American economy in the 1920s, and in 1928 the 'boom' began to slow
down.
Problem areas included:
-
Farming
Machinery and overproduction led to rapidly falling prices (wheat prices fell from $183. a bushel in 1920 to 38 cents ain 1929). In 1929 average income in of farmers was only 40% of the national average, and many farmers could not afford their mortgage; in 1924 600,000 farmers went bankrupt.
Note also that rural areas did not have electricity, so most
country-dwellers were excluded from the consumer boom.
-
Low wage earners
e.g. unskilled and casual workers, or the 2 million who were unemployed - could not share in the prosperity. There were great inequalities of wealth; the top 5% of the population earned 33% of the income, while 60% of Americans earned less than $2000, and 40% were below the poverty line (notably farmers/ Black Americans/ immigrants).
Only 3% of semi-skilled workers owned a car.
-
Old Industries
Overproduction of coal (which was being replaced by oil and gas) led to mine closures and falling wages. In 1929 a coal miner's wage was barely a third of the national average income.
There were also problems in the textiles industry (where 'flapper' fashions were
reducing the amount of cloth used to make clothes).
-
Poor Black Americans
It is difficult for us to appreciate the degree of
discrimination and hardship facing African Americans (see Source C). One million black farm workers lost their jobs in the 1920s. Black workers in the towns in the north were the lowest paid; the only work available
to them were low-paying, menial jobs. New York's black Harlem district was a severely overcrowded and segregated community, with more than 250,000 citizens crammed into an area 50 blocks long and eight blocks wide.
In 1928, there was one hospital bed for every 139 white people,and one for every
1,941 black people. Life expectancy in 1929 was 59 for white people, 47
for black people. ![](America4_files/image004.jpg)
'A bread line' queueing in front of an
advertising billboard. This photo is from the
1930s, but it sums up the position of Black people in the 1920s - they can
SEE the prosperity, but they don't SHARE in it.
-
Native
Americans
also lived in extreme poverty, trying to survive on
government-controlled reservations.
-
Unemployed
New technology was throwing more and more people out of work; the number of unemployed stood at 2 million throughout 1920s. There was no welfare state to act as a safety net. If you were unemployed,
you were literally 'on the bread line'. In addition, there were
problems building in: -
Trade problems
High tariffs were causing other countries to retaliate, as well as reducing the purchasing power of those countries, which made it hard for American companies to export their products abroad.
Farmers, who relied on exporting wheat, were especially hard-hit by this.
-
Stock Market
And, finally, there was one group that thought they were doing welll, but were actually heading for catastrophe. Wall Street was 'over-heating. So great was over-confidence that people were even buying shares in imaginary companies. Many were buying shares ‘on margin’ (a person could get a loan of up to 90% to buy shares) expecting to make enough profit to repay the loan when the shares were resold
– brokers’ loans almost trebled 1926-9. All this threatened disaster if
share prices ever stopped rising. |
Source C
Doctors and nurses in Tuskegee [Alabama] recruited 622 poor black male sharecroppers living nearby to participate in a syphilis study. Two-thirds of these men had the disease; the rest were disease-free and used as controls.
The study promised free health care and treatment but instead, and without the men's knowledge or consent, for close to forty years doctors and nurses gave the infected men sugar pills, conducted invasive and painful examinations to study the course of the disease, and autopsied them when they died.
The public and the surviving men did not learn of the horrifying deception until a newspaper broke the story in 1972. To some, at least, black people remained little above laboratory rats. Regarding every single aspeact
of health care, race still mattered.
Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, To Ask for an Equal Chance: African Americans in the Great Depression (2009).
Source D
![](images/Bootblack.JPG)
A Black bootblack, 1920 What mood is the photographer trying to create? Why?
Consider:
1. Do Sources A and B contradict each other?
2. Discuss what Stuart Chase meant when he
said that prosperity in the 1920s was "a rate of advance rather than a state of affairs".
3. Source D is a glamorised image. Does
that mean it is useless to an historian ... and, if it is not useless,
what is it useful for?
4. How far were the 1920s a 'boom' time?
Write an 'on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand' essay:
"Was prosperity a fact' or a 'myth' in 1920s
America?"
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