THE ROARING TWENTIES

Girls dancing the Charleston. Gangsters carrying machine guns. Charlie Chaplin playing comical tricks. These are some of the pictures that come into people's minds when they think of the United States in the 1920s. The "roaring twenties." Good times. Wild times.

The United States was very rich in these years. Because of the First World War, other countries owed it a lot of money. It had plenty of raw materials and plenty of factories. Its national income - the total earnings of all its citizens - was much higher, than that of Britain, France, Germany and Japan put together.

American factories produced more goods every year. The busiest were those making automobiles. Between 1922 and 1927, the number of cars on the roads rose from under eleven million to over twenty million. The electrical industry also prospered. It made hundreds of thousands of refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, stoves and radios.

The United States became the first nation in history to build its way of life on selling vast quantities of goods that gave ordinary people easier and more enjoyable lives. These "consumer goods" poured off the assembly lines of big new factories. Between 1919 and 1929 such mass-production factories doubled their output.

The growth of industry made many Americans well-off. Millions earned good wages. Thousands invested money in successful firms so that they could share in their profits. Many bought cars, radios and other new products with their money. Often they obtained these goods by paying a small deposit and agreeing to pay the rest of the cost through an "instalment plan." Their motto was "Live now, pay tomorrow" - a tomorrow which most were convinced would be like today only better, with even more money swelling their wallets.

Businessmen became popular heroes in the 1920s. Men like Henry Ford were widely admired as the creators of the nation's prosperity. "The man who builds a factory builds a temple," said Calvin Coolidge, the President from 1923 to 1929. "The man who works there, worships there."

Coolidge's words help to explain the policies of American governments in the 1920s. These governments were controlled by the Republican Party. Republicans believed that if the government looked after the interests of the businessman, everybody would become richer. Businessmen whose firms were doing well, they claimed, would take on more workers and pay more wages. In this way their growing wealth would benefit everybody.

To help businessmen Congress placed high import taxes on goods from abroad. The aim was to make imported goods more expensive, so that American manufacturers would have less competition from foreign rivals. At the same time Congress reduced taxes on high incomes and company profits. This gave rich men more money to invest.

Yet there were lots of poor Americans. A survey in 1929 showed that half the American people had hardly enough money to buy sufficient food and clothing. In the industrial cities of the North, such as Chicago and Pittsburgh, immigrant workers still labored long hours for low wages in steel mills, factories and slaughter houses. In the South thousands of poor farmers, both black and white, worked from sunrise to sunset to earn barely enough to live on. The wealth that Republicans said would benefit everybody never reached people like these.

The main reason for poverty among industrial workers was low wages. Farmers and farm workers had a hard time for different reasons. In the South many farmers did not own the land they farmed. They were sharecroppers. For rent, a sharecropper gave the landowner part of what he grew - often so much that he was left with hardly enough to feed his family.

In the West most farmers owned their land. But they, too, faced hard times. During the First World War they had been able to sell their wheat to Europe for high prices. By 1921, however, the countries of Europe no longer needed so much American food. And farmers were finding it more difficult to sell their produce at home. Immigration had fallen, so the number of people needing food was growing more slowly. All the new cars didn't help either. Cars ran on gasoline, not on corn and hay like horses.

American farmers found themselves growing products they could not sell. By 1924, around 600,000 of them were bankrupt.

But to Americans who owned shares or "stock", in industrial companies the future looked bright. Sales of consumer goods went on rising. This meant bigger profits for the firms that made them. This in turn sent up the value of shares in such firms.

In 1928 the American people elected a new President, Herbert Hoover. Hoover was sure that American prosperity would go on growing and that the poverty in which some Americans still lived would be remembered as something in the past. He said that there would soon be "a chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage."

Looking at the way their standard of living had risen during the 1920s, many other Americans thought the same.

Bryn O'Callaghan: An illustrated history of the USA; Longman, Harlow, 1990/1996, page 92 f.