USA 1920s-1970s

• The 1920s gave us jazz, movies, radio, making out in cars, illegal liquor, and the 1920s also gave us prosperity--although not for everybody-- and gangsters, and a consumer culture based on credit, and lots of prejudice against immigrants, and eventually the worst economic crisis the US has ever seen.
• The Republican Party dominated politics in the 1920s, with all the presidents elected in the decade being staunch conservative Republicans.
• The federal government hewed to the policies favored by business lobbyists, including lower taxes on personal income and business profits, and efforts to weaken the power of unions.
• The 1920s were also marked by quite a bit of government corruption, most of which can be pinned to the administration of Warren G. Harding.
• Productivity rose dramatically largely because older industry's adopted Henry Ford's assembly line techniques and newer industries like aviation, chemicals, and electronics grew up to provide Americans with new products and new jobs.
• During the 1920s annual production of cars tripled to 4.8 million, and automobile companies were gradually consolidated into the big three that we know today: Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors.
• By 1929 half of all American families owned a car and thus began the American love affair with the automobile.
• The American film industry moved out to Hollywood before World War one because land was cheap and plentiful all that sunshine meant that you could shoot outside all year round and it was close to everything: desert, mountains, ocean, plastic surgeons.
• The widespread use of credit and lay away buying plans meant that it was acceptable to go into debt to maintain what came to be seen as the American standard of living and this was a huge change in attitude.
• The decade of the 1920s saw continued migration of African American people from the South to cities in the North, and Harlem became the capital of Black America.
• Flappers kept their hair and skirts short, smoked and drank illegally in public, and availed themselves of birth control.
• Prosperity in the 1920s wasn't equally distributed through the population. Real industrial wages rose by a quarter between 1922 and 1929 but corporate profits rose at twice that rate.
• By 1929, one percent of the nation's banks controlled fifty percent of the nation's financial resources and the wealthiest five percent of Americans share of national income exceeded that of the bottom sixty percent.
• An estimated forty percent of Americans lived in poverty.
• During the 1920s the number of manufacturing workers declined by 5%, the first time this class of workers had seen its numbers drop, but not the last.
• In 1930, seventy-five percent of american homes didn't have a washing machine, and only forty percent of them had a radio.
• Farmers incomes dropped steadily and many saw banks foreclose upon their property. For the first time in American history the number of farms declined during the 1920s.
• The Supreme Court was the only segment of the government that kept any progressive ideas alive as they began to craft a system of ideas that we call the jurisprudence of civil liberties.
• The 1920s saw the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in a new and improved form and by improved I mean much more terrible.
• The first immigration restriction bill was passed in 1921, limiting the number of immigrants from Europe to 357,000. In 1924, a new immigration law dropped that number to 150,000 and established quotas based on national origin.
• The Scopes trial is often seen as a victory for free thinking and science and modernism, but for me it's more a symbol of the contradictions of the 1920s.
• The Great Depression was only "great" if you enjoy being a hobo or selling pencils
• There is no real consensus about the causes of the Great Depression
• The stock market crash in October 1929 did not cause the Great Depression
• Economic conditions in the U.S. before the stock market crash

  • Large-scale domestic consumption of relatively new consumer products, fueled by credit and installment buying which was unsustainable
  • Agricultural sector suffered throughout the 1920s with dropping farm prices and farmers going into debt to finance mechanization
• By 1925, the growth of car manufacturing slowed, along with residential construction
• By 1929, commercial bankers were loaning more money for stock market and real estate investments than for commercial ventures
• Margin buying

  Buying stock with borrowed money
• Only 3% of Americans actually owned stock, and the markets recovered a lot of their value by 1930
• America's weak banking system

  • Majority of banks were small, individual institutions that had to rely on their own resources
  • When there was a panic and depositors rushed to withdraw money, banks went under if they didn't have enough money on reserve
• Deflationary cycle

  1. Banks weren't lending money, so employers couldn't borrow it to make payroll

  2. More businesses went bankrupt, leaving more workers unable to purchase goods and services

  3. This led to further price drops and more layoffs
• The Hoover Administration did not have a TARDIS, so they could not engage in Keynesian pump priming
• Reparations

  Payments Germany had to make to France and Britain after World War I, which it couldn't pay without borrowing money from American banks
• Once American credit dried up, the economies of Germany, France, and Britain also fell off a cliff
• America responded to the global economic crisis by raising tariffs to their highest levels ever with the Hawley Smoot tariff
• Hoover couldn't always get Congress to do what he wanted, and the first elected office he ever held was President of the United States
• Hoover proposed a moratorium on intergovernmental debt payments, but it wasn't enough because the central bankers in Europe and America refused to let go of the gold standard
• The first elected office that Herbert Hoover ever held in his life was President of the United States
• Hoover proposed a moratorium on intergovernmental debt payments and got Congress to go along with it
• The central bankers in Europe and America refused to let go of the gold standard, which would have allowed the governments to devalue their currency and pump needed money into their economies