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USA 1919 – 1941Causes of the Boom - ACCESS
KEY TERM
Automobiles (1919 = 9m, 1929 = 26m)
Boom - an economic state of
Cycle of prosperity (more sales = more production = more wages = more spending)
growth with rising profits
Consumer goods/Credit (fridges, radios, telephones etc)
and full employment
Entertainment (Hollywood, cinemas, jazz clubs, speakeasies)
Stock market (Wall Street)
Sky scrapers
Plus
WWI – During WWI the USA had made a lot of money through loans to Europe and by selling weapons and
exporting food to European countries.
Republican economic policies
Laissez-faire – literally meaning ‘leave alone’. The Republicans believed that businessmen should be left alone
by the government to get on with making money and so they made as few restrictive laws as possible.
Tariffs – in order to encourage consumers to buy American goods the government put a tax on foreign goods
that entered the USA so that they would be more expensive than domestic products.
Low taxation – The Republicans believed that if people were able to keep more money then they would spend it
on American goods and wealthy people would reinvest their money in industries.
Trusts – These were super-corporations which dominated certain industries (Carnegie – steel, Rockefeller – oil).
The Republicans allowed the trusts to do what they wanted as they believed that the ‘captains of industry’ knew
better than politicians what was good for America.
Henry Ford and the car
Henry Ford had a dream of producing a cheap car which could be afforded by ordinary Americans. He
pioneered the development of the assembly line. This reduced the time it took to make a car from 13 hours to
1 hour and 33 minutes. The assembly line meant that the cost of the car decreased. 1908 = $850 by 1925 =
$290. To make up for the boredom of the work Ford doubled workers wages to $5 a day. That meant they
could buy more consumer goods.
Advertising
The 1920s saw a massive increase in advertising,
including a massive growth in advertising on the radio
and in the cinema.
Adverts were aimed at men and women and showed
people what new consumer goods were available for
them.
Ford Model T
Credit
Many people did not have the money
needed to buy the many new
consumer goods that they saw advertised. They got around this problem by spending on
credit and by buying things from catalogues on credit. This meant they paid for consumer
goods bit by bit but would eventually pay for the whole amount and some more in interest.
It was also known as instalment plan buying.
, This led to many Americans being in debt. It wasn’t
seen as a problem by many people, however, because
the economy was booming and people had jobs and so
30
could make the repayments.
25
20 Cars
millions
15 Telephones
Radios
10
5
0
1915 1929
The ideas of the assembly line were used in many
different industries and the development of electricity in
factories also helped to increase production.
The Building Boom
The 1920s was also a decade of building and construction. By 1929 the amount of roads had doubled. There
was a demand for new factories, offices and shops. As towns grew in size then they needed public buildings
such as schools and hospitals. The 1920s were the decade of the skyscraper and companies competed with
each other to have the grandest and largest.
Hollywood and the rise of cinema
Cinema was the main form of entertainment in America by the end of the 1920s. Many Americans went to the
cinema a few times every week. Until 1927 all of the movies were silent and the sound came from a piano
accompaniment. The movies were made in Hollywood. Comedies, romance, westerns and slapstick comedies
were all popular. Mass market advertising built up the reputations of movie stars. They came to symbolize
the “roaring twenties.”
Why was the cinema so popular?
“The motion
• Advertising made heroes of actors and actresses like Gloria
picture
Swanson, Rudolph Valentino and Charlie Chaplin.
industry is
• Advertising was used by the emerging companies like MGM and
already the
Warner. fourth largest
• America was quite prosperous and going to the cinema was in the country”
cheap.
• People had more leisure time because of the new consumer goods.
• Talkies were invented in 1929 and this made cinema even more for people. Joseph Kennedy
writing in 1927
Did everyone approve?
A celebrity culture developed in the 1920s and stars had their whole lives under scrutiny. Some people were
shocked by the films and thought they lowered moral standards. The public expected very high standards
from their movie stars and scandals had to be covered up and the real lives of the stars censored as well as
the movies.
One of the rules about kisses on screen was they could not last for more than 10 feet of film. This meant quite
a short kiss…
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