The Boom Flashcards
All 36 cards in this deck
What is hire purchase?
Buying goods by paying a deposit and then paying the rest in instalments. It let millions of Americans afford consumer goods like radios and cars.
What was the 'cycle of prosperity' in 1920s America?
Mass production made goods cheaper, so more people bought them, which created jobs and wages, which created more demand.
What production method did Henry Ford use to make the Model T?
The moving assembly line, which made cars quickly and cheaply so prices fell and demand soared.
True or false? All groups in American society shared in the prosperity of the 1920s boom.
False. Farmers suffered falling incomes from overproduction, and workers in old industries such as coal and cotton lost out to new industries like electricity and rayon.
Name two Republican government policies of the 1920s that helped the boom.
Low taxation and laissez-faire (little interference in business); high tariffs such as the Fordney–McCumber Tariff to protect American industry.
What does 'buying on the margin' mean?
Buying shares with only a small deposit and borrowing the rest, hoping to sell at a profit and repay the loan.
What was jazz and where was it most popular in 1920s America?
A new, fast-tempo style of music that appealed to young people and dominated nightclubs in big northern cities. It led to new dances such as the Charleston.
What were 'talkies'?
Films with sound, which replaced silent films from 1927 (The Jazz Singer).
What was the 'star system' in 1920s Hollywood?
Promoting movie actors through radio and magazines so fans copied their hairstyles and clothes.
What was a flapper?
A young 1920s woman who wore short skirts and bobbed hair, used make-up, smoked, drank and danced in public.
True or false? Most American women in the 1920s were flappers.
False. Flappers were mainly young, better-off women in cities; most women, especially in rural areas and the South, kept traditional roles.
What was Prohibition?
The ban on making, selling and transporting alcohol in the USA, introduced by the 18th Amendment in 1920 and enforced by the Volstead Act.
Who was Al Capone?
A Chicago gangster who made millions from bootlegging during Prohibition, bribing police and officials and using protection rackets and violence.
True or false? Prohibition was effectively enforced across America.
False. People drank in speakeasies, bootleggers smuggled alcohol and moonshine was made at home; there were too few agents and police were often bribed.
What was the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s?
A white supremacist organisation, revived in 1915, that used violence and lynching against African Americans, and also hated Catholics, Jews and immigrants.
What did the Immigration Acts of the 1920s do?
They limited immigration using quotas, aimed especially at reducing arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe.
Give one reason immigrants from Eastern Europe faced prejudice in 1920s America.
They spoke different languages and had different cultures from earlier Northern European immigrants, and were accused of working for low wages and stealing jobs.
What were the Palmer Raids (1919–20)?
Raids ordered by Attorney General Mitchell Palmer during the Red Scare: thousands of suspected communists and anarchists, many of them immigrants, were arrested and hundreds deported, though no revolutionary plot was found.
Who were Sacco and Vanzetti?
Two Italian immigrant anarchists executed in 1927 for robbery and murder despite a lack of conclusive evidence, showing prejudice against immigrants and radicals.
How did the motor industry help other industries grow in the 1920s boom?
Car-making used vast amounts of steel, rubber and glass, and motorists needed petrol, roads, garages and roadside services, so the car created jobs far beyond the car factories themselves.
How did the spread of electricity help the 1920s consumer boom?
The share of American homes with electricity roughly doubled, from about a third in 1920 to about two-thirds by 1930, creating a mass market for electrical goods such as radios, vacuum cleaners and refrigerators, and jobs making them.
How did advertising help the 1920s boom?
Adverts in magazines, newspapers, billboards and on the new radio stations made people want the latest products and feel they needed them, which pushed up sales.
How unequally was wealth shared in 1920s America?
Very unequally: the richest 5% received about a third of all income, while around 6 million families (roughly 1 in 5) lived on under $1,000 a year, too little for decent food and housing.
What was a sharecropper, and why were African-American sharecroppers poor in the 1920s?
A farmer who worked a landowner's land and paid with a share of the crop. Many Southern African Americans farmed this way; already very poor, they were hit hardest when farm prices fell in the 1920s.
Give one reason American Indians did not share in the 1920s boom.
Most had lost their best land and lived on reservations with poor farmland, so few could make a living; they had the worst poverty, schooling and life expectancy of any group.
When did all American women gain the right to vote nationally?
In 1920, through the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, partly in recognition of women's work during the First World War.
How did women's employment change in the 1920s?
The number of working women rose by about a quarter, to around 10.5 million by 1929, but most were in low-paid, low-skilled jobs and were usually paid less than men.
How did Hollywood respond to complaints that 1920s films were immoral?
Fearing state censorship, the studios hired Will Hays (1922) to clean up their image; his office's rules, which became the Hays Code (1930), banned things such as nudity from films.
Where did jazz come from, and how did it spread north?
It grew from African-American musical traditions in the South, centred on New Orleans. Black musicians such as Louis Armstrong took it to Chicago and New York as African Americans migrated north.
How did the radio change entertainment in the 1920s?
Millions of families bought a radio, which brought music such as jazz, live sport, comedy and adverts into the home and gave Americans a shared national entertainment.
Give one reason Prohibition was introduced.
Temperance campaigners such as the Anti-Saloon League, backed by many Protestant churches, argued that drink caused crime, poverty and family breakdown.
When and how did Prohibition end?
In December 1933, when the 21st Amendment repealed the 18th. Roosevelt had promised repeal in 1932; supporters argued Prohibition had failed and that legal alcohol could be taxed and would create jobs.
What helped revive the Ku Klux Klan from 1915?
The film The Birth of a Nation (1915), which portrayed Klansmen as heroes defending white families. It drew huge audiences, and the revived Klan had several million members by the mid-1920s.
Give one reason the Ku Klux Klan declined after 1925.
Indiana Klan leader D.C. Stephenson was convicted in 1925 of murdering a young woman he had abducted and assaulted; the scandal, and the Klan corruption it exposed, made membership collapse in the late 1920s.
What was the Harlem Renaissance?
The flowering of African-American writing, music and art in Harlem, New York, in the 1920s, which encouraged black pride and culture.
Why did many African Americans move from the South to Northern cities?
To escape Jim Crow segregation, violence and rural poverty, and for better-paid factory work in the North, though there they still met discrimination in jobs and housing.