Why did the USA experience a boom in the 1920s?

Question 1

Why did Mass Production occur

Answer 1

Mass Production – famously at Ford.
Natural resources of USA
American spirit of enterprise
Effect of WWI
Transport
‘Rugged individualism’

Question 2

How did advances in technology link to consumerism?

Answer 2

Electrification = demand = mass production.
Towns not rural.
Transport.

Question 3

What was the significance of car ownership?

Answer 3

8 million in 1920 – 28 million by 1929.

Showed affluence and jobs provision for those making the cars

Question 4

What did Hire Purchase goods enable?

Answer 4

1920 borrowing = $2 billion.
1929 - $8 billion.
Belief that the 1920s boom would be ‘never-ending’.

Question 5

How did the Laissez-Faire government (Silent Cal Coolidge) affect the boom?

Answer 5

Tariffs on foreign goods.
Low Taxation.
“The business of America is business” – Coolidge.

Question 6

Farmers’ experience of the boom?

Answer 6

Prices dropped as demand dropped after WWI.

Movement from some to cities to escape unemployment.

Question 7

Black Americans’ experience of the boom?

Answer 7

Legal/Social discrimination.
Sharecropping.
1920s mass migration to the north.

Question 8

What other limits were there to the boom?

Answer 8

Women’s role beyond consumerism?

Trade union power severely hindered.