IGCSE HISTORY

1. Cambridge ICGSE History
Depth Study: The USA, 1919-41
How far did the US economy
boom in the 1920s?

2. A New Era
Henry Ford: “We are
entering a new era. Our new
thinking and new doing are
bringing us a new world,
and a new heaven, and a
new earth, for which
prophets have been looking
from time immemorial.”
Herbert Hoover:
“Our country has
entered upon an
entirely new era.”
Henry Ford
Warren Harding:
“At the moment,
we are on the
threshold of a
new era.”
Herbert Hoover
Warren Harding

3. The Gospel of Scientific Management
In 1914, Henry Ford successfully
installed a moving assembly line in his
Highland Park plant outside Detroit
which reduced the time needed to
assemble a car from twelve hours to
ninety-three minutes.
Assembly Line
Ford’s Highland Park Plant
Scientific management
was institutionalized in
a Taylor Society in 1911.
Frederick W. Taylor

4. Ford’s Philosophy
“The natural thing to do is work.
Human ills flow largely from
attempting to escape the natural
course. The day’s work is a great
thing—a very great thing! Work is
our sanity, our self-respect, our
salvation…. The net result is the
reduction of the necessity for
thought on the part of the worker
and the reduction of his
movements to a minimum. The
most beautiful things in the world
are those from which all excess has
been eliminated. We must cut out
useless parts and simplify
necessary ones.”—Henry Ford
The souls of workers are
saved by forcing them to
accept the discipline of the
assembly line. Workers try
to escape from the
naturalness of work
through the unnaturalness
of their imaginations. But
the application of Taylor’s
time and motion studies
to the workday allows the
worker no free time for
daydreaming. The well-
organized factory keeps
the employee busy every
moment.

5. Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936)

6. System: Modern Business Management
The significant new magazine of the 1920s was System, dedicated
to helping business accept rational leadership. In System, AT&T
President Walter Gifford explained “new conditions have called a
new type of man to lead the new kind of business organization.
These men must take a long view ahead because the company is
going to be in business long after they are dead.” The new
statesmen of industry were to be the kind of leader exemplified by
Herbert Hoover; they were to
be men with “greater reverence
for scientific method than for
the traditions of their class.”
AT&T President Walter Gifford in New York (left)
watches the moving image of Secretary of
Commerce Herbert Hoover (right) in Washington,
D.C., during the first demonstration of television
transmission in the United States, 7 April 1927.

7. Business Productivity
“The man who
builds a factory
builds a temple, and
the man who works
there worships
there. We have seen
the people of
America create a
new heaven and a
new earth.”
—Calvin Coolidge
“The almost unbelievable
magic of industry during
the truly incredible
decade just past has
been so continuously
amazing as to lead the
mere inexpert bystander
to be ready for almost
anything in the field of
material achievement.”
—Herbert Hoover
Assembly Line in a
Radio Factory (1925)
Productivity increased dramatically from 1920 to 1928. Cars,
refrigerators, telephones, and radios became a part of the lives of
most Americans. All limits on human experience seemed to have
been broken by the productive capacity of the assembly line.

8. Billboard along US Highway 99
(California, 1937)
Corporate profits increased at least 60 percent
in the 1920s as industrial production increased
40 percent. The national government reduced
its debt from $24 billion to $16 billion between
1920 and 1930. With surpluses flowing into the
national treasury, income, estate, and gift taxes
for the rich were reduced in 1926.
“We are a happy
people—the
statistics prove it.
We have more
cars, more
bathtubs, oil
furnaces, silk
stockings, bank
accounts than any
other people on
earth.”
—Herbert Hoover

9. Economic Boom
In 1915, there
were 10 million
telephones; by
1930, there
were 20 million
telephones.
There were
60 thousand
radios in 1920;
by 1929, there
were 10 million
radios.
For every 1
refrigerator in
1921, in 1929,
there were 167
refrigerators.
There were
9 million cars in
1919; by 1929,
there were 26
million cars.
In 1900, 12,000
silk stockings
were sold; 300
million rayon
stockings were
sold in 1930.
In 1919, there
were 1 million
trucks; by 1929,
there were 3.5
million trucks.
There was more
building done
during the
boom years of
the 1920s than
at any other
time in the
history of the
US. During the
1920s, the total
extent of roads
doubled in the
US. In 1918,
only a few
homes had
electricity; by
1929, almost all
urban homes
had electricity.

10. There were no civilian
airlines in 1918; by
1930, the new aircraft
companies flew
162,000 flights a year.
The car made it possible for more Americans to
live in their own houses in the suburbs on the
edge of towns. For example, Queens outside
New York doubled in size in the 1920s, and
Grosse Point Park outside Detroit grew by 700
percent.

11. Farmers were encouraged to join associations
in the way that large corporations did through
their trade associations. What proved easy for
corporate producers of cars and steel proved
impossible for the hundreds of thousands of
farmers who produced cotton or wheat or
corn. They kept competing with one another,
trying to produce more, and continued to
drive the price of their crops down. A new
breakthrough in farm mechanization caused
by the introduction of the gasoline-powered tractor also increased
farm productivity. Increased production resulted in farm income
dropping from $22 billion in 1919 to $8 billion in 1928, and by
1933, to $3 billion. This economic downslide forced 6 million rural
Americans off their land in the 1920s. These unskilled workers
migrated into cities, where there was little demand for their labor.
Farm Productivity
Scientific American
(10 January 1920)

12. Unemployment and Poverty
Representatives attending the 1921 Conference
on Unemployment held in Washington, D.C.
Most immigration was cut off by legislation in 1921 and 1924 and
the birthrate declined, but unemployment persisted throughout
the 1920s. With only a 10 percent increase in average wages for
the decade, most city dwellers could not afford new housing, so
there was significant unemployment in the construction industry.
The dynamic rate of growth in radios, refrigerators, and cars
leveled off by 1928. An estimated 42 percent of Americans lived
below the poverty line, without the money needed to pay for
essentials or luxury consumer goods.

13. Increasingly, the new consumer economy
depended upon advertising to create
demand for the products of the assembly
line and for credit to make it possible for
low income people to indulge these
cultivated desires. In 1914, $250 million was
spent on advertising in magazines. This
figure doubled by 1919 and reached $3
billion by 1929. The mass magazines —
Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Ladies’
Home Journal, Woman’s Home Companion
— no longer considered their readers, as
had the nineteenth-century magazines, to
be patrons of literature or citizens to be
enlightened. Rather they approached their
readers as a great market of consumers.
Advertising and Credit

14. But the upper classes, profiting
the most from the prosperity of
the 1920s, went furthest into
debt. They gambled on the
unlimited nature of the stock
market. In 1924, the average of
industrial stocks was 106; by
1927, it rose to 245. Banks and
insurance companies increased
their loans to people investing
in the market from $1 billion in
1924 to $9 billion in 1929. By
the summer of 1929, the market
had reached 449, driven up by
the frenzy of investment.
Consumers incurred $5 billion
of time-payment debt by 1929.
Consumer Debt and Speculation
Floor of the New York Stock Exchange
(c. August 1929)

15. The United States had been a debtor
nation in 1914, having borrowed
money from Europe to develop its
industrial potential. By 1920, however,
this position was reversed, and
European nations owed the United
States $10 billion. American bankers
continued to lend money in Europe,
especially Germany, keeping the
European economy, which had been
badly weakened by World War I, from
collapsing. American bankers also
moved to replace European investment
in Latin America and Asia, and the
world owed American investors more
than $20 billion by 1929.
A Debtor to Creditor Nation
Business and political
leaders stressed the
soundness of an
independent American
economy, but they also
emphasized the need
for American business
to expand overseas if it
was to remain healthy.

16. The Republican Presidents of the 1920s
Within the political context of
corporate growth and
confidence, the Republican
party at its convention in 1920
choose an obvious nonleader,
Warren G. Harding, for its
presidential candidate. Harding
and the other Republican
Presidents of the 1920s—Calvin
Coolidge and Herbert Hoover—
symbolized the confidence of
the corporate leaders that
direct political power was no
longer necessary to protect the
marketplace from its domestic
or international enemies.
Republican Campaign
Poster (1920)
Republican Campaign
Poster (1928)

17. Herbert Hoover
The son of an Iowa blacksmith, Herbert Hoover had become a
multimillionaire by 1914, developing his talents first as a mining
engineer in Africa, Asia, and Europe and then as a shrewd investor
and administrator of his international business interests. As
Secretary of Commerce under Harding and Coolidge, Hoover
worked energetically to persuade large corporations to cooperate
in trade associations. The three or four companies that dominated
each of the areas of major production such as autos, steel, and
rubber could plan their futures methodically if they would agree
to share the market, fix wages, and set prices. With such
coordination, Hoover was certain that the nation had forever left
business cycles behind. Within the framework of the corporation,
the assembly line would streamline production and distribute an
unceasing flow of goods for American consumers. Elected
President in 1928, it was believed that Hoover would bring the
rationality of the business world to the irrational world of politics.

18. The “Farm Bloc” Opposition
The only challenge to the political domination of the corporation
came from within the Republican party itself. Senators like
LaFollette of Wisconsin, Norris of Nebraska, Borah of Idaho, and
Johnson of California cooperated in the establishment of a “farm
bloc” that was critical of “monopoly” capitalism while calling for
government support of farmers caught
in a deteriorating economic situation.
In Congress, the “farm bloc” passed the
McNary-Haugen plan by which the
government would buy surplus farm
crops to sell, if need be, at a loss on
world markets. But President Coolidge
successfully vetoed this legislation in
1927 and in 1928.
“Unanimous Verdict,” Sheboygan Press (Sheboygan, Wisconsin, 1925)
published after the death of Senator Robert LaFollete, Sr. (R-WI).

19. US Foreign Policy in the 1920s
Harding’s Secretary of State
Charles Evans Hughes and
Secretary of Commerce Herbert
Hoover shaped foreign policy.
They rejected participation in
Woodrow Wilson’s League of
Nations because they feared
that political commitments
might introduce irrational and
unpredictable elements into the
world marketplace, but they
shared Wilson’s desire to
contain radicalism and to
stabilize the world by
expanding the American
economy into foreign markets.
They believed this expansion
would preserve the political
order of the rest of the world
and at the same time benefit
the American economy
because “the vast increase in
the surpluses of manufactured
goods must find a market
outside the United States.”
Herbert Hoover and
Charles Evans Hughes

20. Republican leaders moved vigorously to use American influence to
stabilize Europe and Asia. To restore the economic health of the
Western European nations and contain Communism, they
advocated the restoration of the German economy. They
encouraged American bankers to make large loans to Germany
and pressured England and France to reduce the reparations they
were demanding of Germany. In addition to the Dawes Plan of
1924 and the Young Plan of 1929 designed to accomplish these
economic goals, American foreign-policy makers urged the
Western European nations to guarantee their mutual borders in
the Locarno Pact of 1925. The treaty significantly left the borders
of Eastern Europe without guarantees in the hope that the Soviet
Union might be reduced in size.

21. At the Washington Conference
of 1921, Japan, England, and
France agreed to guarantee
the political status quo in East
Asia, to allow China to be
developed under the
philosophy of the Open Door,
and to stop an arms race by
limiting the size of each
nation’s navy.
OPEN HOUSE
Emissary from Washington. “I HAVE COME TO INFORM YOU
THAT THE POWERS IN CONFERENCE INSIST ON YOUR BEING MASTER
IN YOUR OWN HOUSE; AND IN ORDER THAT THEY MAY SECURE THIS
OBJECT THEY REQUIRE YOU TO PROVIDE EACH OF THEM WITH A
LATCH-KEY.”
China. “HONOURABLE CONFERENCE IS TOO KIND TO
CONTEMPTIBLE WORM.”
—Punch, 30 November 1921

22. The Japanese Invasion of Manchuria
Soon after Hoover took office in
1929, he faced a major threat to
his ideal of a rational market.
Imperial Japan, heedless of
American plans, moved troops
into the northern Chinese
province of Manchuria in 1931.
But Hoover refused to use
military power to check this
Japanese expansion.
A WORD FROM THE WEST
John Bull and Uncle Sam (to Japan). “WHILE ADMITTING THAT
THE PROVOCATION TO HONOURABLE FEELINGS MAY HAVE BEEN ALMOST
UNBEARABLE, WE VENTURE TO SUBMIT THAT HONOURABLE RETALIATION
HAS SHOCKED WESTERN HUMANITY.”
—Punch, 10 February 1932

23. An important reason for his
refusal was his fear of the Soviet
Union. Hoover, like other
American business leaders, had
been terrified by the success of
the Bolshevik revolution. The
United States had managed to
contain the revolution within
Russian borders, keeping it from
spreading in Germany and
destroying it where it had gained
a foothold in countries like
Hungary. Hoover had decided
during the 1920s that World War
I had been a civil war in which
the European capitalist nations
had destroyed one another.
This anarchy and self-destruction
by the supposedly reasonable
middle classes had allowed Russia
to fall into Communist hands.
What would happen if another
such civil war, comparable to
World War I, broke out among the
capitalist nations? Would such
conflict provide an environment
for another rapid spread of
Communist influence? Hoover
feared such an outcome.

24. The Fordney-McCumber Act
The history of the tariff during the 1920s became a classic
example of how Americans tried to have everything and ended up
with almost nothing. In 1922, the Fordney-McCumber Act raised
tariff walls around American producers, who loudly demanded
protection from cheap foreign goods.
This act made little sense. Europeans
could not repay their debts if they
could not sell their goods in the rich
US market. The Hoover-Hughes policy
of gently guiding the world into a
happier, freer-market economy was in
shambles by 1928. The two men had
been unable to control President
Calvin Coolidge and Secretary of the
Treasury Andrew Mellon.
Editorial Cartoon on the Emergency Tariff of 1921

25. Prosperity and Fun
• The standard picture of the
twenties is as a time of
prosperity and fun: the Jazz
Age, the Roaring Twenties.
• Unemployment fell from
4,270,000 in 1921 to a little
over 2 million in 1927.
• The general level of wages for
workers rose; some farmers
made a lot of money.
• With incomes of more than
$2,000 a year, 40 percent of
American families could buy
automobiles, radios, and
refrigerators.
• Millions of people were not
doing badly, and they could
shut out of the picture the
others without work or not
making enough to get basic
necessities: the tenant
farmers, black and white, and
the immigrant families in the
big cities.
An American Family (c. 1925)

26. 0%
10%
20% Real Wages in Manufacturing (+1.4%)
Income of Holders of Common Stock (+16.4%)
Annual Income
of American Families
< $1,000 (6 million families)
> $1,000 (8 million families)
Total Income of Top 1/10th of 1% (14 thousand families) =
Total Income of Bottom 42% (6 million families)
Prosperity at the Top
Per Capita Increase Per Annum (1922 to 1928)

27. Every year in the 1920s,
about 25,000 workers were
killed on the job and 100,000
permanently disabled.
Two million workers in New
York City lived in tenements
condemned as firetraps.
An Italian American Family in a
New York Tenement (c. 1920)
Burial Service for the 171 Miners Killed in
the Castle Gate Mine Explosion (Utah, 1924)

28. The Middletown Studies
In the 1920s, the US was full of little industrial towns like Muncie,
Indiana, where, according to sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd,
the class system was revealed by the time people got up in the
morning: for two-thirds of the city’s families, “the father gets up in
the dark in winter,
eats hastily in the
kitchen in the
gray dawn, and is
at work from an
hour to two and
a quarter hours
before his children
have to be at
school.”
A 1921 Postcard of Muncie, Indiana

29. “I am not going to have my people
who work in the shoe factories of
Lynn and in the mills of Lawrence
and the leather industry of Peabody,
in these days of so-called Republican
prosperity when they are working
but three days in the week think that
I am in accord with the provisions of
this bill…. When I see a provision in
the Mellon tax bill which is going to
save Mr. Mellon himself $800,000 on
his income tax and his brother
$600,000 on his, I cannot give it my
support.”
—Rep. William P. Connery, Jr. (D-MA)
The “Mellon Plan”
One of the richest men
in America was Andrew
Mellon, Secretary of the
Treasury (1921-1932)
during the presidencies
of Harding, Coolidge,
and Hoover. In 1923,
Congress passed the
“Mellon Plan,” lowering
the tax rate on the top
income brackets from 50
percent to 25 percent
and on the lowest-
income group from 4
percent to 3 percent.

30. Rep. Fiorello La Guardia (R-NY)
Few political figures spoke
out for the poor of the
twenties. One was Fiorello
La Guardia, a Congressman
from a district of poor
immigrants in East Harlem
(who ran, oddly, on both
Socialist and Republican
tickets). In 1928, La Guardia
toured the poorer districts
of New York and said: “I
confess I was not prepared
for what I actually saw. It
seemed almost incredible
that such conditions of
poverty could really exist.” Fiorello La Guardia

31. “I asked for help and you
send me a bulletin. The
people of New York City
cannot feed their children on
department bulletins…. Your
bulletins … are of no use to
the tenement dwellers of this
great city. The housewives of
New York have been trained
by hard experience on the
economical use of meat.
What we want is the help of
your department on the
meat profiteers who are
keeping the hard-working
people of this city from
obtaining proper
nourishment.”
La Guardia was made aware by
people in his district of the high
price of meat. When he asked
Secretary of Agriculture William
Jardine to investigate, the
Secretary sent him a pamphlet on
how to use meat economically. La
Guardia wrote back:
Holcomb and Hoke’s Cooling Glass Meat Cases
and Freezer Counters (introduced in 1921)

32. Coal Miners Strike (1922)
In 1922, coal miners and railroad men
went on strike, and Senator Burton
Wheeler (D-MT), a Progressive elected
with labor votes, visited the strike area
and reported:
“All day long I have
listened to heart-
rending stories of
women evicted from
their homes by the
coal companies. I
heard pitiful pleas of
little children crying
for bread. I stood
aghast as I heard
most amazing stories
from men brutally
beaten by private
policemen. It has been
a shocking and nerve-
racking experience.”
Miners Going on Strike in Scranton,
Pennsylvania (31 March 1922)

33. A textile strike in Rhode Island in 1922 among Greek, Irish, Italian
Polish, and Portuguese workers failed, but class feelings were
awakened and some of the strikers joined radical movements.
Luigi Nardella recalled: “My oldest brother, Guido,…started the
strike…. When the strike started we didn’t have any union
organizers…. Somebody from the Young Workers’ League came
out…and invited me to a meeting, and I went. Then I joined…. We
were anti-fascists. I spoke on street corners…to good crowds. And
we led the
support for
Sacco and
Vanzetti.”
Textile Strike (1922)
Funeral of Murdered Textile Striker, Rhode Island (1922)

34. After the first world war,
an American Communist
party was organized, and
Communists were involved
in the organization of the
Trade Union Education
League, which tried to
build a militant spirit
inside the American
Federation of Labor. When
a Communist named Ben
Gold, of the furriers’
section of the TUEL,
challenged the AFL union
leadership at a meeting,
he was knifed and beaten.
Furriers’ Strike (1926)
Ben Gold
But in 1926, Gold and other
Communists organized a strike of
New York City furriers who formed
mass picket lines, battled police to
hold their lines, were arrested and
beaten, but kept striking, until they
won a forty-hour week and a wage
increase.

35. New England textile
mill owners moved
their operations to the
South to escape
unions and to find
more subservient
workers among poor,
Southern whites. But
these workers rebelled
as well, resisting the
long hours and the
low pay. Workers
particularly resented
the intensification of
work known as the
“stretch-out.”
Textile Strike (1929)
Loray Mill Strike, Gastonia,
North Carolina (1929)
For instance, a weaver who had
operated twenty-four looms and got
$18.91 a week would be raised to
$23.00, but he would be “stretched out”
to a hundred looms and had to work at
a punishing pace.

36. Then at Gastonia, North
Carolina, workers joined a
new union, the National
Textile Workers Union, led
by Communists, which
admitted both Blacks and
whites to membership.
When some of them were
fired, half of the two
thousand workers went out
on strike. An atmosphere of
anti-Communism and
racism built up and violence
began. Textile strikes spread
across South Carolina. One
by one, the various strikes
were settled, but not at
Gastonia.
The first of the textile strikes was in
Tennessee, where five hundred
women in one mill walked out in
protest against wages of $9.00 to
$10.00 a week.
Loray Mill Strike, Gastonia,
North Carolina (1929)

37. Released on bail, they left the
state, the Communists escaping to
Soviet Russia. Through all the
defeats, the beatings, the murders,
however, it was the beginning of
textile mill unionism in the South.
The Gastonia strikers, living
in a tent colony, refused to
renounce the Communists
in their leadership. The
strike went on, but
strikebreakers were
brought in and the mills
kept operating.
Desperation grew; there
were violent clashes with
the police. One dark night,
the chief of police was
killed in a gun battle.
Sixteen strikers and
sympathizers were indicted
for murder; seven were
tried and given sentences
from five to twenty years.
The children of murdered union supporter
Ella Mae Wiggins stand by their mother’s grave
(Loray Mill Strike, Gastonia, North Carolina, 1929)

38. Liberal economist John
Kenneth Galbraith studied
the 1920s, concluding that
“the economy was
fundamentally unsound.”
He pointed to very
unhealthy corporate and
banking structures, an
unsound foreign trade,
much economic
misinformation, and the
“bad distribution of
income” (the highest 5
percent of the population
received about one-third of
all personal income).
An Unsound Economy
A socialist critic would go
further and say that the
capitalist system was by its
nature unsound: a system driven
by the one overriding motive of
corporate profit and therefore
unstable, unpredictable, and
blind to human needs. The
result of all that: permanent
depression for many of its
people, and periodic crises for
almost everybody. Capitalism,
despite its attempts at self-
reform, its organization for
better control, was and is a sick
and undependable system.

39. Controlling Information
In the 1920s, according
to historian Merle Curti,
“it was, in fact, only the
upper ten percent of
the population that
enjoyed a marked
increase in real income.
But the protests which
such facts normally
have evoked could not
make themselves
widely or effectively
felt. This was in part the
result of the grand
strategy of the major
political parties.
NBC’s First Logo
(15 Nov 1926)
First Issue of Time
(3 Mar 1923)
In part it was the result of the fact that
almost all the chief avenues to mass
opinion were now controlled by large-
scale publishing industries.”

40. “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1931)
“It was borrowed time anyway—the whole upper tenth of a nation
living with the insouciance of a grand duc and the casualness of
chorus girls…. A classmate killed his wife and himself on Long
Island, another tumbled ‘accidentally’ from a skyscraper in
Philadelphia, another purposely from a skyscraper in New York.
One was killed in a speak-easy in Chicago; another was beaten to
death in a speak-easy in
New York and crawled
home to the Princeton
Club to die; still another
had his skull crushed by
a maniac’s axe in an
insane asylum where he
was confined.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald F. Scott Fitzgerald

41. Babbitt (1922)
“It was the best of nationally
advertised and quantitatively
produced alarm-clocks, with all
modern attachments, including
cathedral chime, intermittent
alarm, and a phosphorescent dial.
Babbitt was proud of being
awakened by such a rich device.
Socially it was almost as creditable
as buying expensive cord tires….
He sulkily admitted now that there
was no more escape, but he lay
and detested the grind of the real
estate business, and disliked his
family, and disliked himself for
disliking them.”—Sinclair Lewis Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

42. Summary
oOn what factors was the economic boom based?
• The owners of US corporations dominated politics to the
benefit of industry.
• Tariffs were raised to protect US industries from foreign
competition.
• Taxes were lowered to benefit the rich.
• Republican leaders encouraged corporations to collude to
form monopolies.
• Radicals were deported, and labor was controlled by force.
• European economies were devastated by World War I, and the
US emerged from the war as a creditor nation.
• New methods of scientific management and the assembly line
increased productivity.
• Advertising and purchasing on credit or installment buying
created demand for consumer goods.

43. oWhy did some industries prosper while others did not?
• The development of new man-made materials competed with
older industries. For example, rayon replaced silk in women’s
stockings, and the use of electricity limited the use of coal.
oWhy did agriculture not share in the prosperity?
• Overproduction in the agricultural sector drove down prices.
oDid all Americans benefit from the boom?
• No, only about 10 percent of Americans benefited from the
boom. Rises in productivity primarily benefited the owning
class.
oHow did the development of credit and hire purchases
contribute to economic expansion?
• The development of credit and hire purchases allowed more
Americans to buy luxury consumer goods.
oHow did mass production in industries for cars and consumer
durables contribute to economic expansion?
• Mass production increased demand for inputs and lowered
prices just enough for Americans to become consumers.

44. oWhat were the fortunes of older industries in the 1920s?
• The older industries, coal and textile, were hit with strikes.
oHow and why did agriculture decline in the 1920s?
• Overproduction in the agricultural sector drove down prices,
forcing six million farmers off their land.
oWhat were the weaknesses in the economy by the late 1920s?
• Unemployment and poverty rates were high, limiting the
consumption-led economy. Labor was kept down by force.
• Only the top 10 percent benefited from the economic boom,
and most of the benefit went to the top 1/10 of 1 percent.
• Speculation and debt created economic instability.
• The agricultural sector was devastated; farmers driven from
their land could not find employment as the new industries,
relying on productivity improvements, did not create jobs.
• Work without thought for the purpose of consumption does
not meet human needs.
• American businesses needed international markets, but high
tariffs hurt the global economy.