Q3 Which interpretation is more convincing Practice Questions: America, 1920–1973

Read Interpretations A and B below, then answer parts (a), (b) and (c).

Interpretation A: From the memoirs of a man who worked on a car assembly line in Detroit during the 1920s, published in 1962.

Written for practice: not a real historical interpretation.

When I started on the assembly line in 1923 I could not believe my luck. The wages were better than anything my father had earned, and the work was steady. Within two years I had bought a Ford of my own, paying a little each month, and my wife had a vacuum cleaner and a radio. On Saturdays we went to the picture house. Ordinary working families like mine had never lived so well. The twenties made us comfortable, and we knew it.

Interpretation B: From an article written in 1928 by a reporter who had spent the summer travelling among cotton and wheat farms, published in a magazine read by farmers in the South.

Written for practice: not a real historical interpretation.

I have spent the summer among the cotton and wheat farms, and I have not found the prosperity that people talk about in the cities. Prices for crops have been falling since the war ended, and the more a man grows the less he is paid for it. Families here are deep in debt to the banks for machinery they cannot pay off, and their children leave for the towns. Whatever the newspapers say about a boom, millions of Americans have had no share in it at all.

Read Interpretations A and B below, then answer parts (a), (b) and (c).

Interpretation A: From a book defending the Republican record in government, written in 1936 by a man who had worked as an official in Hoover's administration.

Written for practice: not a real historical interpretation.

It is simply untrue that the President stood by and did nothing. He cut taxes so that people would have more to spend, he urged employers not to cut wages, and he pressed on with great public works such as the dam on the Colorado River. In 1932 he created a corporation to lend federal money to banks, railroads and businesses so that jobs might be saved. No president could have cured a depression that struck the whole world. He was blamed for a storm he did not raise.

Interpretation B: From an interview given to a local radio station in 1971 by a man who lost his job in a Detroit factory in 1931 and joined the veterans who camped in Washington in 1932.

Written for practice: not a real historical interpretation.

I was thrown out of the motor works in 1931 and there was nothing for us. We put up shacks out of packing crates and tin on the edge of town, and everybody called them Hoovervilles, because he was the man who had let it happen. He kept telling us that prosperity was just around the corner. When we veterans went to Washington in 1932 to ask for our bonus to be paid early, he sent the army against us and our camp was burned. That is the Hoover I remember.

Read Interpretations A and B below, then answer parts (a), (b) and (c).

Interpretation A: From the memoirs of a State Department official who was dismissed in 1952, after Senator McCarthy's campaign against communists in government had led to an investigation of his loyalty. Published in 1979.

Written for practice: not a real historical interpretation.

In 1950 Senator McCarthy began claiming that the State Department was full of communists, and I had worked there for twelve years. I had never belonged to any group plotting against my country. It made no difference. I was asked to name my friends, and when I refused I was dismissed. No one in government would employ me again. Teachers, scientists and actors lost their livelihoods in the same way. The hunt found almost no spies, but it ruined a great many innocent Americans.

Interpretation B: From an article in a small-town newspaper in Wisconsin, Senator McCarthy's home state, written in February 1954 by the newspaper's editor, who supported McCarthy's investigations into communists in government.

Written for practice: not a real historical interpretation.

Ordinary, loyal Americans have nothing whatever to fear. In this town nobody has been questioned, nobody has lost a job, and life goes on as it always has. Only a handful of people, most of them in Washington, have been asked to account for their past friendships, and that is a small price to pay. The Russians have the atom bomb and our boys have been fighting communists in Korea. A government that did not search its own offices would be failing in its duty.

Read Interpretations A and B below, then answer parts (a), (b) and (c).

Interpretation A: From the memoirs of a woman who worked as a typist in New York City during the 1920s, published in 1973.

Written for practice: not a real historical interpretation.

We were the first generation of American women who could please ourselves. I had the vote before I was twenty-five and my own wage packet every Friday, and nobody at home could tell me how to spend it. We cut our hair short, shortened our skirts, smoked in public and danced the Charleston until two in the morning. My mother had never once entered a restaurant without my father beside her. The war had changed everything, and we were never going back.

Interpretation B: From an article written in 1928 for a church magazine by a woman who organised women's groups in a farming county in Kansas.

Written for practice: not a real historical interpretation.

The city newspapers write as though every young woman in America now bobs her hair and drives a motor car. That is not the life I see. The women of this county rise before dawn to draw water, cook and raise their children exactly as their mothers did, and few of our farms have any electricity at all. The girls who do go out to work are paid far less than the men beside them and are expected to give up their jobs the day they marry. The flapper is an invention of the magazines.

Read Interpretations A and B below, then answer parts (a), (b) and (c).

Interpretation A: From a book of memories written by a man who joined the Civilian Conservation Corps as a teenager in 1935 and who later worked as an official on one of President Johnson's anti-poverty programmes. The book was published in 1972.

Written for practice: not a real historical interpretation.

I was nineteen when I joined the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1935, planting trees and sending most of my pay home to my mother. Before Roosevelt, Washington left families like mine to sink. The New Deal proved that the federal government could put men to work and give them back their dignity. That lesson was not forgotten. The Great Society's spending on Medicare, housing and schools carried on the same work, and it reached the poorest Americans of all.

Interpretation B: From an article in an American business magazine, written in 1968 by an economist who advised Republican politicians and whose readers were mainly company owners and managers.

Written for practice: not a real historical interpretation.

Thirty-five years of federal spending have not abolished poverty; they have simply made Washington bigger. The New Deal did not end the Depression. It was war orders and private industry that put America back to work after 1941. Today's Great Society programmes repeat the old mistake, handing out money that teaches families to depend on the government instead of on themselves, while the taxpayer and the businessman are left to pay the bill.