The Boom Practice Questions

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 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.