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The Consumer Economy and Mass Entertainment

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The Consumer Economy and Mass Entertainment

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Americans in the 1920s were the first to wear ready-made, exact-size clothing. They were the first to play electric phonographs, to use electric vacuum cleaners, to listen to commercial radio broadcasts, and to drink fresh orange juice year round. In countless ways, large and small, American life wa…

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F. Scott Fitzgerald 1896-1940

Best known for The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934)-two keystones of modernist fiction-Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was the poet laureate of the "Jazz Age," a term he popularized to convey the post-World War I era's newfound prosperity, consumerism, and shifting sexual mores.

Fitzgerald first rose to fame at twenty-three by chronicling those changes in This Side of Paradise (1920). Before the age of thirty he published his masterpiece, Gatsby, but its artistic maturity was stymied for a decade by alcoholism, financial problems, and the mental illness of his wife, Zelda Sayre (1900-1948). By the time he completed Tender, the Depression had rendered the Roaring Twenties irrelevant, and Fitzgerald was considered a has-been. A half-decade later, he died in semi-obscurity, considered a failure, despite publishing 160+ short stories in his twenty-year career. Only posthumously would critics appreciate his merits, although understanding of his talent would compete with popular interest in his life and marriage.

Fitzgerald's main themes are ambition and loss, discipline vs. self-indulgence, love and romance, and money and class. Much like Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, his work is instantly recognizable due to its distinctive prose style. Whereas Hemingway's is sparse and Faulkner's veers toward psychological abstraction, Fitzgerald's is intensely poetic to the point of rhapsodic, elevating his laments into veritable threnodies for the sureties and stable values that he felt modernity superannuated.

Born September 24, 1896, Fitzgerald suffered from a life-long inferiority complex that he later claimed distinguished him from Hemingway, his chief rival. "I talk with the authority of failure," he insisted. "Ernest with the authority of success" ( Notebooks 318). His sense of defeat was the product of several formative setbacks that became the building blocks of his fiction. The son of an unsuccessful businessman who had to rely upon his wife's inheritance to support his children, Fitzgerald was sensitive to his family's outsider status among the monied elite of his native St. Paul, Minnesota. An indifferent student, he found his craving for recognition hampered by poor grades that interfered with his extracurricular pursuits of popularity, especially after he flunked out of Princeton University in 1917.

Nor were his aspirations for military heroism any more successful. Although commissioned as a second lieutenant during the Great War, he described himself as the "army's worst aide-de-camp" ( Crack-Up 85)-largely because he preferred writing his first novel to tactics and training. As his 1936 story "I Didn't Get Over" suggests, the fact that he never saw combat-the Armistice arrived as his infantry regiment was preparing to ship abroad-was an additional lifelong regret.

Of even greater influence were his early romantic disappointments. Fitzgerald's desire for acceptance in the haute monde led him to court debutantes from whose circles he was doomed to be rejected. At nineteen, while dating Ginevra King, the daughter of a wealthy Illinois banker, he overheard a family member of hers (accounts differ as to whom) remark, "Poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls" ( Ledger 17). Two years later, while he was stationed at Camp Sheridan in Montgomery, Alabama, Zelda Sayre declined his initial marriage proposal because of his poor career prospects.

These snubs combined to become his most characteristic plotline, which typically revolves around the efforts of young men of humble backgrounds to prove themselves worthy of the daughters of a wealthier class. That Fitzgerald explored this theme both farcically ("The Offshore Pirate" [1920]) as well as tragically ("Winter Dreams" [1922], Gatsby) is indicative of how thoroughly his perceived unworthiness stamped him.

Because Fitzgerald promoted his fiction as autobiographical, early critics tended to dismiss him as a "facile" writer. Yet he never would have attracted the wide audience he did during his peak years of popularity (1920-1925) had he not possessed a talent for presenting personal milestones as representative of peers' collective experience. This Side of Paradise sold upwards of fifty thousand copies because protagonist Amory Blaine's thwarted ambitions are depicted as generational dilemmas: his failures in love and college are attributed not simply to personal shortcomings but to the sweeping changes of modern life, which caused young people to grow up "to discover all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths shaken" (260). With its unflattering portraits of adults and unrepentant vignettes of teenage initiation rituals-drinking and petting, most notoriously- Paradise gave voice to postwar youth by offering a realistic treatment of adolescent disaffection. In doing so, the book established the template for such 20th-century coming-of-age novels as J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963)-works that, like Paradise, resist the traditional Bildungsroman model by declining to conclude with their heroes entering adulthood.

More immediately, both the novel and Fitzgerald's earliest short stories-most published in The Saturday Evening Post-popularized a character type with which he remains inexorably associated: the flapper. With their bobbed hair, knee-baring skirts, and unapologetic coquetry, heroines such as Paradise's Rosalind Connage, Marcia Meadow in "Head and Shoulders," Ardita Farnam in "The Offshore Pirate," and Sally Carrol Happer in "The Ice Palace" (all 1920) modeled for female readers a self-consciously rebellious subcultural identity that freed them from the strictures of Victorian femininity. Nowhere is that freedom more obvious than when a character invokes Louisa May Alcott in "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" (also 1920): "Oh, please don't quote Little Women!" Marjorie Harvey responds. "What modern girl could live like those inane females?" ( Short Stories 33).

Fitzgerald capitalized upon adult worries over "flaming youth" by entitling his first story collection Flappers and Philosophers (1920), his second Tales of the Jazz (1922), and by opining on adolescent mores in interviews and articles. Even after the vogue for flappers faded, he remained fascinated with youth. Between 1927 and 1931, he wrote a series of thirteen "juveniles" for the Post that follow Basil Duke Lee and Josephine Perry through their late teens. Although nowhere near as well-known as Gatsby or Tender, these pieces, posthumously collected as The Basil and Josephine Stories (1973), offer as nuanced a portrait of the paysage moralisée as one will find on any shortlist of "young-adult" classics.

Despite his fixation with youth, Fitzgerald knew that to be regarded as more than a "flapper novelist" he must reach beyond his immediate generational focus to address broader cultural concerns. One interest that allowed him to do this was money. Keenly aware of the expanding consumer market, he examined the ways in which the Victorian values of hard work and frugality were losing their moral valence to a new mindset of abundance and leisure-time indulgence. At times he parodied the previously unimaginable wealth amassed by barons such as John D. Rockefeller. "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" (1922) tells the fantastical story of the world's richest man, who lives on a mountain-sized diamond in the Montana Rockies. The irony is that Braddock Washington's net worth is far from stable, for his diamond is so large that "if it were offered for sale not only would the bottom fall out of the market, but also, if the value should vary ... there would not be enough gold in the world to buy a tenth of it" ( Short Stories 193). Washington must thus keep the diamond's existence secret, which in turn requires him to either imprison or kill anyone who trespasses upon his Xanadu-like estate-a commentary both on the cutthroat extremes men like Rockefeller were said to go to protect their fortunes from the volatility of commodity markets but also the increasingly abstract and transitory nature of monetary values themselves.

In other cases, Fitzgerald preferred to moralize rather than satirize. His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), traces the decay of an upperclass New York couple, Anthony and Gloria Patch, as they await an inheritance from Anthony's wealthy grandfather. Without any guiding motivation in life, Anthony and Gloria succumb to drink, concupiscence, and adultery, their degeneration only accelerating after they discover themselves excluded from their patriarch's will. Heavily influenced by naturalist fiction, The Beautiful and Damned is marred by didactic authorial intrusions and a confusing ending whose irony escaped many contemporary readers. (The Patches win a legal battle that recovers their lost fortune, but only after a breakdown that renders Anthony an invalid). Yet, despite its flaws, the novel captures the fear that prosperity encouraged laxity and dissipation.

Fitzgerald would explore this theme more successfully in his most anthologized short story, "Babylon Revisited" (1931). Charles Wales is a more sympathetic character than Anthony Patch because he recognizes how the extravagance afforded by the bull market cost him his family and landed him in a sanitarium. Even if his nostalgia for reckless living undermines his insistence that he has regained his moorings, his regret inspires incisive criticism of how affluence distorted his sense of reality: "The snow of twenty-nine wasn't real snow," Charlie concludes. "If you didn't want it to be snow, you just paid some money" ( Short Stories 633). In still other efforts, Fitzgerald trumpeted the Protestant work ethic as intently as any Babbittesque Rotarian that Sinclair Lewis might skewer. One of his most widely read stories during his lifetime, "George Jackson's Arcady" (1924), concerns a disillusioned businessman who discovers how many lives he has benefited by epitomizing the virtues of honorable effort and civic giving. Although virtually forgotten today, this proto- It's a Wonderful Life tale was deemed so inspirational that in 1928 it was republished in pamphlet form as part of a series promoting public readings of motivational texts.

One reason that Fitzgerald's critiques of Roaring Twenties mores continue to resonate has to do with what critics call his "dual perspective" or "double vision." His work does not merely sermonize against easy money and irrational exuberance. Instead, it acknowledges their appeal with great empathy, allowing readers to experience their allure rather than condemning them from a distance. The result, as Malcolm Cowley observed, is a mixture of a "maximum of immersion" combined with a "maximum of critical attachment" that creates a beguiling aura of ambiguity ("Double Man" 9).

The pinnacle of this trait is The Great Gatsby, in which narrator Nick Carraway stands both inside and outside of the action, at once enabling the enigmatic, nouveau riche Jay Gatsby in his quest to win back lost love Daisy Fay Buchanan with a fortune built from bootlegging and shady bonds while recognizing the unlikelihood of its success. Whether attending Gatsby's lavish Long Island parties, traveling into New York City with Daisy's philandering husband, Tom, or lending Gatsby his cottage for a rendezvous with Daisy, Nick is implicated in the intrigue in ways he cannot admit, especially when he is prone make statements such as, "Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known" (59). Whether such comments are meant sincerely or ironically is impossible to determine, suggesting that the dramatis personae are so caught in the flux of uncertainty that pragmatism and willful blindness have become their survival mechanism. In the end, Gatsby conveys a world so prone to cynical expedience and plausible deniability that the optimism of its titular hero can only seem tragically naïve.

Gatsby is considered Fitzgerald's crowning achievement because of its stylistic and structural concision. Both This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned suffer from episodic forms that dilute their drama, while characterization is frequently conveyed through omniscient exposition rather than organic development. By narrowing the temporal scope of his timeline (the story occurs over the summer of 1922) and employing Nick Carraway as an observer-narrator, Fitzgerald was able to both intensify and internalize the tensions surrounding Gatsby's pursuit of Daisy. At once imagistic, dream-like, and profoundly sad, the novel contains several of the most evocative symbols in all of American literature, including the green light at the end of Daisy's dock, the valley of ashes that separates Long Island from New York City, and the disembodied eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg that peer out from an abandoned billboard. The plot, moreover, asks to be read on different thematic levels: ostensibly a love story, Gatsby explores the limits of self-making, the delusions of materialism, and the intangibility of aspiration in a supposedly classless society. In the final paragraphs-Fitzgerald's most cited passage-Gatsby's ambition is even elegized as an expression of the American Dream:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter-tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning-

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. (189)

Fitzgerald's other major novel, Tender Is the Night, is the obverse of Gatsby in almost every imaginable way. Written over the course of a tempestuous nine-year period that saw the author handicapped by alcoholism and Zelda's descent into mental illness, the book is chaotic, non-chronological, and fraught with "ruminations" and rhetorical "sideshows" that expound upon the historical, cultural, and philosophical import of its action ( Life in Letters 467). Nevertheless, the story of the degeneration of a promising psychologist, Dr. Dick Diver, and his unstable wife, Nicole Warren, explores how the ruptures of modernity render past ideals of character obsolete. On one level, the book refutes the "Great Man" theory of historical progressivism, showing how the moral fiber of Romantic destiny in which Fitzgerald wanted to believe had given way to fashionable decadence and self-destruction. It also captures the peculiar placelessness of the 1920s' globalization, depicting the drift of privileged Americans who expatriated to Europe (much as Fitzgerald and Zelda did throughout the second half of the decade).

Although Tender was at best a middling success when first published, its stature has grown over the years, with critics looking to its tangled subplots to appreciate how diverse phenomena shaped the era's sense of fragmentation. Based closely on Zelda's hospitalization in various Swiss sanitariums, Nicole's treatment for schizophrenia invites exploration of the psychoanalytic concepts of transference and counter-transference in her and her husband-doctor's mutual dependency. Dick Diver's infatuation with ingénue actress Rosemary Hoyt, meanwhile, illustrates the role of the cinema in fostering the unreality of modern life. Even the leitmotif of romantic warfare is illustrative, suggesting how the Great War militarized everyday interaction-including the battle between the sexes.

After Tender, Fitzgerald only attempted one more novel. The Last Tycoon remained unfinished at the time of his December 21, 1940, death, however. Posthumously published a year later, it is notable for its treatment of the Hollywood studio system in which the author had intermittently toiled since the mid-1920s. As such, it is the culmination of several notable stories that explore his ambivalence toward both the industry and the medium, including "Jacob's Ladder" (1927), "Magnetism" (1928), and a series of 1939-1940 tales featuring failed PR flak Pat Hobby.

Fitzgerald's nonfiction is also considered a major part of his oeuvre, in particular the Esquire triptych "The Crack-Up," which ignited controversy in 1936 for its beguiling confessions of squandered talent. His more commercial short stories-once derided as distractions from his "serious" work-are increasingly recognized for their craft and wit. Although Fitzgerald will remain best known for the elegiac melancholy of The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, his short fiction reveals that he was as adept at comedy and fantasy as at tragedy-a testament to the breadth and range of his talent.

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
Cowley, Malcolm. (1951). "The Double Man." Saturday Review of Literature 34 (February 14), 9-10, 42-44.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. All the Sad Young Men. (1926, 2007). (ed.) James L. W. West III. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
_____. The Basil and Josephine Stories. (1973). (ed.) Jackson R. Bryer and John Kuehl. New York: Scribner's, 1973.
_____. The Beautiful and Damned. (1922, 2008). (ed.) James L. W. West III. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
_____. The Crack-Up. (1945). (ed.) Edmund Wilson. New York: New Directions.
_____. Flappers and Philosophers. (1920, 1999). (ed.) James L. W. West III. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
_____. F. Scott Fitzgerald's Ledger: A Facsimile. (1973). (Intro.) Matthew J. Bruccoli. Washington D. C.: NCR Microcard Books/Bruccoli Clark.
_____. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters. (1994) (ed.) Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Scribner's.
_____. The Great Gatsby. (1925, 1991). (ed.) Matthew J. Bruccoli. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
_____. The Last Tycoon. (1941). Republished (1993) as The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
_____. The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald. (1979). (ed.) Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
_____. The Pat Hobby Stories. (1962). (ed.) Arnold Gingrich. New York: Scribner's.
_____. The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A New Collection. (1989) (ed.) Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Scribner's.
_____. Tales of the Jazz Age. (1922, 2002). (ed.) James L. W. West III. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
_____. Taps at Reveille. (1935). New York: Scribner's.
_____. Tender Is the Night. (1934). New York: Scribner's.
_____. This Side of Paradise. (1920, 1995). (ed.) James L. W. West III. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
_____. The Vegetable. (1923). New York: Scribner's.

SELECTED RESOURCES
Criticism
Berman, Ronald. (1994). The Great Gatsby and Modern Times. Urbana.: University of Illinois Press.
Bruccoli, Matthew J. (2002). Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. 2nd rev. ed. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2002.
Bryer, Jackson R. and Cathy W. Barks (eds.) (2002) Dear Scott/Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. New York: Scribner's.
Curnutt, Kirk. (2007). The Cambridge Introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Curnutt, Kirk. (ed). (2004). An Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Oxford University Press.
Donaldson, Scott. (1983) Fool for Love. New York: Congdon and Weed.
Prigozy, Ruth. (ed). (2002) The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Oxford University Press.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald - F. Scott Fitzgerald Society

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F. Scott Fitzgerald 1896-1940 Best known for The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934)-two keystones of modernist fiction-Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was the poet laureate of the "Jazz Age," a term he popularized to convey the post-World War I era's newfound prosperity, consumerism, and shifting sexual mores.

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A Brief Life of Fitzgerald - University Libraries | University of South Carolina

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The dominant influences on F. Scott Fitzgerald were aspiration, literature, Princeton, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, and alcohol.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald's life is a tragic example of both sides of the American Dream - the joys of young love, wealth and success, and the tragedies associated with excess and failure. Named for another famous American, a distant cousin who authored the Star Spangled Banner, Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul Minnesota on September 24, 1896. The son of a failed wicker furniture salesman (Edward Fitzgerald) and an Irish immigrant with a large inheritance (Mary "Mollie" McQuillan), Fitzgerald grew up in a solidly Catholic and upper middle class environment.

1935 Portrait by David Silvette, courtesy National Portrait Gallery.

Fitzgerald started writing at an early age. His high school newspaper published his detective stories, encouraging him to pursue writing more enthusiastically than academics. He dropped out of Princeton University to join the army and continued to pursue his obsession, writing magazine articles and even musical lyrics.

At 21 years of age, he submitted his first novel for publication and Charles Scribner's Sons rejected it, but with words of encouragement. Beginning a pattern of constant revising that would characterize his writing style for the rest of his career, Fitzgerald decided to rewrite "The Romantic Egoist" and resubmit it for publication. Meanwhile, fate, in the form of the U.S. army, stationed him near Montgomery, Alabama in 1918, where he met and fell in love with an 18-year-old Southern belle - Zelda Sayre. Scribners rejected his novel for a second time, and so Fitzgerald turned to advertising as a steady source of income. Unfortunately, his paltry salary was not enough to convince Zelda to marry him, and tired of waiting for him to make his fortune, she broke their engagement in 1919. Happily, Scribners finally accepted the novel after Fitzgerald rewrote it for the third time as "This Side of Paradise", and published it a year later. Fitzgerald, suddenly a rich and famous author, married Zelda a week after its publication.

In between writing novels, Fitzgerald was quite prolific as a magazine story writer. The Saturday Evening Post in particular served as a showcase for his short works of fiction, most of which revolved around a new breed of American woman - the young, free-thinking, independent "flapper" of the Roaring Twenties.

The Fitzgeralds enjoyed fame and fortune, and his novels reflected their lifestyle, describing in semi-autobiographical fiction the privileged lives of wealthy, aspiring socialites. Fitzgerald wrote his second novel - "The Beautiful and the Damned" a year after they were married. Three years later, after the birth of their first and only child, Scottie, Fitzgerald completed his best-known work: "The Great Gatsby."

The extravagant living made possible by such success, however, took its toll. Constantly globe-trotting (living at various times in several different cities in Italy, France, Switzerland, and eight of the United States), the Fitzgeralds tried in vain to escape or at least seek respite from Scott's alcoholism and Zelda's mental illness.

Zelda suffered several breakdowns in both her physical and mental health, and sought treatment in and out of clinics from 1930 until her death (due to a fire at Highland Hospital in North Carolina in 1948). Zelda's mental illness, the subject of Fitzgerald's fourth novel, "Tender is the Night," had a debilitating effect on Scott's writing. He described his own "crack-up" in an essay that he wrote in 1936, hopelessly in debt, unable to write, nearly estranged from his wife and daughter, and incapacitated by excessive drinking and poor physical health.

Things were looking up for Fitzgerald near the end of his life - he won a contract in 1937 to write for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood and fell in love with Sheilah Graham, a movie columnist. He had started writing again - scripts, short-stories, and the first draft of a new novel about Hollywood - when he suffered a heart attack and died in 1940 at the age of 44, a failure in his own mind. Most commonly recognized only as an extravagant drunk, who epitomized the excesses of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald's work did not earn the credibility and recognition it holds today until years after his death.

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald
Artist, Writer, Dancer and Wife

"By the time a person has achieved years adequate for choosing a direction, the die is cast and the moment has long since passed which determined the future." -Zelda Fitzgerald

This quote perfectly illustrates Zelda Fitzgerald's lifelong struggle to create her own artistic identity. Born in 1900 in Montgomery, Alabama, she entered a world that was just starting to consider the possibility that women might have the right to be independent citizens capable of making their own decisions. The youngest of six children, her parents raised Zelda as a free-spirited, imaginative and thoroughly spoiled little girl. By the age of eighteen, when she met F. Scott Fitzgerald at one of the many parties she attended, she embodied the quintessential southern belle.

Zelda as a young girl.

A constant stream of passionate and argumentative love letters punctuated the period of their engagement while Scott worked in Manhattan and Zelda remained at her parents' home in Montgomery. For Zelda, marriage represented a new lease on life, the only way out of her small-town existence as someone's daughter, without any rights of her own. For a year, Scott struggled unsuccessfully to make his fortune in the advertising business, but Zelda grew tired of waiting. When he professed that he could not be successful without her by his side and proposed, she broke the engagement because she felt too much pressure. She insisted that he find success first on his own.

His first novel made Scott rich within the year, and Zelda married him a week after its publication. As his wife, she embarked on a new life as a flapper - a freethinking woman with the world at her disposal. She was a huge influence on his writing, providing much of the material for his novels and short stories throughout their engagement and marriage. Scott frequently quoted her and her letters directly, using her words as the voice for several of his female characters.

Zelda bore her first and only child at 21, naming Scottie after her husband. By 1924, Zelda's influence on Scott's writing had become less positive. An affair with a French naval aviator strained their marriage, so Zelda sought fulfillment in other venues.

In 1928, she decided to pursue a lifelong dream of becoming a professional ballerina, and began taking lessons in Paris from a famous dancer. At the late age of 27, three years of intense ballet work (eight hours a day) damaged her health, and prompted her first mental breakdown, diagnosed as "nervous exhaustion", in 1930. Zelda was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia, and would reside in and out of hospitals for the rest of her life.

During her stay at Johns Hopkins hospital in 1932, she wrote her first and only novel: "Save Me the Waltz." A fairly prolific writer, Zelda also wrote eleven short stories and twelve articles during her lifetime.

Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, circa 1921.

Writing was not Zelda's only form of artistic expression - she was also a painter. She painted brilliantly colored whimsical, sometimes fantastical works of art. Her granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan, describes Zelda's paintings as "theatrical. They're like on a raised stage floor, and the characters are actors who are before you, waiting to perform." Several different areas of Zelda's life influenced her choice of subject matter. She painted one series based on children's fairy tales such as "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and "The Lobster Quadrille," from Alice in Wonderland. The Bible and Zelda's strong religious beliefs inspired another series of illustrations. She also painted from life, creating portraits of both herself and her husband, and depicting scenes from New York in the 1940s. A fire destroyed most paintings, and Zelda even donated some to the army during World War II to be painted over and used as canvas.

Perhaps if Zelda had focused on just one form of artistic expression, she would have found her own success and fame independent of her marriage to a famous author. Her accomplishments are still impressive, especially when one takes the context of her life into consideration. As an icon of the Jazz Age, she struggled against her traditional southern upbringing and its societal constraints to create a new, independent identity not just for herself, but for all American women.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald's life is a tragic example of both sides of the American Dream - the joys of young love, wealth and success, and the tragedies associated with excess and failure. Named for another famous American, a distant cousin who authored the Star Spangled Banner, Fitzgerald was born in St.

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Gene Smiley, Marquette University

Introduction

The interwar period in the United States, and in the rest of the world, is a most interesting era. The decade of the 1930s marks the most severe depression in our history and ushered in sweeping changes in the role of government. Economists and historians have rightly given much attention to that decade. However, with all of this concern about the growing and developing role of government in economic activity in the 1930s, the decade of the 1920s often tends to get overlooked. This is unfortunate because the 1920s are a period of vigorous, vital economic growth. It marks the first truly modern decade and dramatic economic developments are found in those years. There is a rapid adoption of the automobile to the detriment of passenger rail travel. Though suburbs had been growing since the late nineteenth century their growth had been tied to rail or trolley access and this was limited to the largest cities. The flexibility of car access changed this and the growth of suburbs began to accelerate. The demands of trucks and cars led to a rapid growth in the construction of all-weather surfaced roads to facilitate their movement. The rapidly expanding electric utility networks led to new consumer appliances and new types of lighting and heating for homes and businesses. The introduction of the radio, radio stations, and commercial radio networks began to break up rural isolation, as did the expansion of local and long-distance telephone communications. Recreational activities such as traveling, going to movies, and professional sports became major businesses. The period saw major innovations in business organization and manufacturing technology. The Federal Reserve System first tested its powers and the United States moved to a dominant position in international trade and global business. These things make the 1920s a period of considerable importance independent of what happened in the 1930s.

National Product and Income and Prices

We begin the survey of the 1920s with an examination of the overall production in the economy, GNP, the most comprehensive measure of aggregate economic activity. Real GNP growth during the 1920s was relatively rapid, 4.2 percent a year from 1920 to 1929 according to the most widely used estimates. (Historical Statistics of the United States, or HSUS, 1976) Real GNP per capita grew 2.7 percent per year between 1920 and 1929. By both nineteenth and twentieth century standards these were relatively rapid rates of real economic growth and they would be considered rapid even today.

There were several interruptions to this growth. In mid-1920 the American economy began to contract and the 1920-1921 depression lasted about a year, but a rapid recovery reestablished full-employment by 1923. As will be discussed below, the Federal Reserve System's monetary policy was a major factor in initiating the 1920-1921 depression. From 1923 through 1929 growth was much smoother. There was a very mild recession in 1924 and another mild recession in 1927 both of which may be related to oil price shocks (McMillin and Parker, 1994). The 1927 recession was also associated with Henry Ford's shut-down of all his factories for six months in order to changeover from the Model T to the new Model A automobile. Though the Model T's market share was declining after 1924, in 1926 Ford's Model T still made up nearly 40 percent of all the new cars produced and sold in the United States. The Great Depression began in the summer of 1929, possibly as early as June. The initial downturn was relatively mild but the contraction accelerated after the crash of the stock market at the end of October. Real total GNP fell 10.2 percent from 1929 to 1930 while real GNP per capita fell 11.5 percent from 1929 to 1930.

Price changes during the 1920s are shown in Figure 2. The Consumer Price Index, CPI, is a better measure of changes in the prices of commodities and services that a typical consumer would purchase, while the Wholesale Price Index, WPI, is a better measure in the changes in the cost of inputs for businesses. As the figure shows the 1920-1921 depression was marked by extraordinarily large price decreases. Consumer prices fell 11.3 percent from 1920 to 1921 and fell another 6.6 percent from 1921 to 1922. After that consumer prices were relatively constant and actually fell slightly from 1926 to 1927 and from 1927 to 1928. Wholesale prices show greater variation. The 1920-1921 depression hit farmers very hard. Prices had been bid up with the increasing foreign demand during the First World War. As European production began to recover after the war prices began to fall. Though the prices of agricultural products fell from 1919 to 1920, the depression brought on dramatic declines in the prices of raw agricultural produce as well as many other inputs that firms employ. In the scramble to beat price increases during 1919 firms had built up large inventories of raw materials and purchased inputs and this temporary increase in demand led to even larger price increases. With the depression firms began to draw down those inventories. The result was that the prices of raw materials and manufactured inputs fell rapidly along with the prices of agricultural produce-the WPI dropped 45.9 percent between 1920 and 1921. The price changes probably tend to overstate the severity of the 1920-1921 depression. Romer's recent work (1988) suggests that prices changed much more easily in that depression reducing the drop in production and employment. Wholesale prices in the rest of the 1920s were relatively stable though they were more likely to fall than to rise.

Economic Growth in the 1920s

Despite the 1920-1921 depression and the minor interruptions in 1924 and 1927, the American economy exhibited impressive economic growth during the 1920s. Though some commentators in later years thought that the existence of some slow growing or declining sectors in the twenties suggested weaknesses that might have helped bring on the Great Depression, few now argue this. Economic growth never occurs in all sectors at the same time and at the same rate. Growth reallocates resources from declining or slower growing sectors to the more rapidly expanding sectors in accordance with new technologies, new products and services, and changing consumer tastes.

Economic growth in the 1920s was impressive. Ownership of cars, new household appliances, and housing was spread widely through the population. New products and processes of producing those products drove this growth. The combination of the widening use of electricity in production and the growing adoption of the moving assembly line in manufacturing combined to bring on a continuing rise in the productivity of labor and capital. Though the average workweek in most manufacturing remained essentially constant throughout the 1920s, in a few industries, such as railroads and coal production, it declined. (Whaples 2001) New products and services created new markets such as the markets for radios, electric iceboxes, electric irons, fans, electric lighting, vacuum cleaners, and other laborsaving household appliances. This electricity was distributed by the growing electric utilities. The stocks of those companies helped create the stock market boom of the late twenties. RCA, one of the glamour stocks of the era, paid no dividends but its value appreciated because of expectations for the new company. Like the Internet boom of the late 1990s, the electricity boom of the 1920s fed a rapid expansion in the stock market.

Fed by continuing productivity advances and new products and services and facilitated by an environment of stable prices that encouraged production and risk taking, the American economy embarked on a sustained expansion in the 1920s.

Population and Labor in the 1920s

At the same time that overall production was growing, population growth was declining. As can be seen in Figure 3, from an annual rate of increase of 1.85 and 1.93 percent in 1920 and 1921, respectively, population growth rates fell to 1.23 percent in 1928 and 1.04 percent in 1929.

These changes in the overall growth rate were linked to the birth and death rates of the resident population and a decrease in foreign immigration. Though the crude death rate changed little during the period, the crude birth rate fell sharply into the early 1930s. (Figure 4) There are several explanations for the decline in the birth rate during this period. First, there was an accelerated rural-to-urban migration. Urban families have tended to have fewer children than rural families because urban children do not augment family incomes through their work as unpaid workers as rural children do. Second, the period also saw continued improvement in women's job opportunities and a rise in their labor force participation rates.

Immigration also fell sharply. In 1917 the federal government began to limit immigration and in 1921 an immigration act limited the number of prospective citizens of any nationality entering the United States each year to no more than 3 percent of that nationality's resident population as of the 1910 census. A new act in 1924 lowered this to 2 percent of the resident population at the 1890 census and more firmly blocked entry for people from central, southern, and eastern European nations. The limits were relaxed slightly in 1929.

The American population also continued to move during the interwar period. Two regions experienced the largest losses in population shares, New England and the Plains. For New England this was a continuation of a long-term trend. The population share for the Plains region had been rising through the nineteenth century. In the interwar period its agricultural base, combined with the continuing shift from agriculture to industry, led to a sharp decline in its share. The regions gaining population were the Southwest and, particularly, the far West.- California began its rapid growth at this time.

During the 1920s the labor force grew at a more rapid rate than population. This somewhat more rapid growth came from the declining share of the population less than 14 years old and therefore not in the labor force. In contrast, the labor force participation rates, or fraction of the population aged 14 and over that was in the labor force, declined during the twenties from 57.7 percent to 56.3 percent. This was entirely due to a fall in the male labor force participation rate from 89.6 percent to 86.8 percent as the female labor force participation rate rose from 24.3 percent to 25.1 percent. The primary source of the fall in male labor force participation rates was a rising retirement rate. Employment rates for males who were 65 or older fell from 60.1 percent in 1920 to 58.0 percent in 1930.

With the depression of 1920-1921 the unemployment rate rose rapidly from 5.2 to 8.7 percent. The recovery reduced unemployment to an average rate of 4.8 percent in 1923. The unemployment rate rose to 5.8 percent in the recession of 1924 and to 5.0 percent with the slowdown in 1927. Otherwise unemployment remained relatively low. The onset of the Great Depression from the summer of 1929 on brought the unemployment rate from 4.6 percent in 1929 to 8.9 percent in 1930. (Figure 5)

Earnings for laborers varied during the twenties. Table 1 presents average weekly earnings for 25 manufacturing industries. For these industries male skilled and semi-skilled laborers generally commanded a premium of 35 percent over the earnings of unskilled male laborers in the twenties. Unskilled males received on average 35 percent more than females during the twenties. Real average weekly earnings for these 25 manufacturing industries rose somewhat during the 1920s. For skilled and semi-skilled male workers real average weekly earnings rose 5.3 percent between 1923 and 1929, while real average weekly earnings for unskilled males rose 8.7 percent between 1923 and 1929. Real average weekly earnings for females rose on 1.7 percent between 1923 and 1929. Real weekly earnings for bituminous and lignite coal miners fell as the coal industry encountered difficult times in the late twenties and the real daily wage rate for farmworkers in the twenties, reflecting the ongoing difficulties in agriculture, fell after the recovery from the 1920-1921 depression.

The 1920s were not kind to labor unions even though the First World War had solidified the dominance of the American Federation of Labor among labor unions in the United States. The rapid growth in union membership fostered by federal government policies during the war ended in 1919. A committee of AFL craft unions undertook a successful membership drive in the steel industry in that year. When U.S. Steel refused to bargain, the committee called a strike, the failure of which was a sharp blow to the unionization drive. (Brody, 1965) In the same year, the United Mine Workers undertook a large strike and also lost. These two lost strikes and the 1920-21 depression took the impetus out of the union movement and led to severe membership losses that continued through the twenties. (Figure 6)

Under Samuel Gompers's leadership, the AFL's "business unionism" had attempted to promote the union and collective bargaining as the primary answer to the workers' concerns with wages, hours, and working conditions. The AFL officially opposed any government actions that would have diminished worker attachment to unions by providing competing benefits, such as government sponsored unemployment insurance, minimum wage proposals, maximum hours proposals and social security programs. As Lloyd Ulman (1961) points out, the AFL, under Gompers' direction, differentiated on the basis of whether the statute would or would not aid collective bargaining. After Gompers' death, William Green led the AFL in a policy change as the AFL promoted the idea of union-management cooperation to improve output and promote greater employer acceptance of unions. But Irving Bernstein (1965) concludes that, on the whole, union-management cooperation in the twenties was a failure.

To combat the appeal of unions in the twenties, firms used the "yellow-dog" contract requiring employees to swear they were not union members and would not join one; the "American Plan" promoting the open shop and contending that the closed shop was un-American; and welfare capitalism. The most common aspects of welfare capitalism included personnel management to handle employment issues and problems, the doctrine of "high wages," company group life insurance, old-age pension plans, stock-purchase plans, and more. Some firms formed company unions to thwart independent unionization and the number of company-controlled unions grew from 145 to 432 between 1919 and 1926.

Until the late thirties the AFL was a voluntary association of independent national craft unions. Craft unions relied upon the particular skills the workers had acquired (their craft) to distinguish the workers and provide barriers to the entry of other workers. Most craft unions required a period of apprenticeship before a worker was fully accepted as a journeyman worker. The skills, and often lengthy apprenticeship, constituted the entry barrier that gave the union its bargaining power. There were only a few unions that were closer to today's industrial unions where the required skills were much less (or nonexistent) making the entry of new workers much easier. The most important of these industrial unions was the United Mine Workers, UMW.

The AFL had been created on two principles: the autonomy of the national unions and the exclusive jurisdiction of the national union.-Individual union members were not, in fact, members of the AFL; rather, they were members of the local and national union, and the national was a member of the AFL. Representation in the AFL gave dominance to the national unions, and, as a result, the AFL had little effective power over them. The craft lines, however, had never been distinct and increasingly became blurred. The AFL was constantly mediating jurisdictional disputes between member national unions. Because the AFL and its individual unions were not set up to appeal to and work for the relatively less skilled industrial workers, union organizing and growth lagged in the twenties.

Agriculture

The onset of the First World War in Europe brought unprecedented prosperity to American farmers. As agricultural production in Europe declined, the demand for American agricultural exports rose, leading to rising farm product prices and incomes. In response to this, American farmers expanded production by moving onto marginal farmland, such as Wisconsin cutover property on the edge of the woods and hilly terrain in the Ozark and Appalachian regions. They also increased output by purchasing more machinery, such as tractors, plows, mowers, and threshers. The price of farmland, particularly marginal farmland, rose in response to the increased demand, and the debt of American farmers increased substantially.

This expansion of American agriculture continued past the end of the First World War as farm exports to Europe and farm prices initially remained high. However, agricultural production in Europe recovered much faster than most observers had anticipated. Even before the onset of the short depression in 1920, farm exports and farm product prices had begun to fall. During the depression, farm prices virtually collapsed. From 1920 to 1921, the consumer price index fell 11.3 percent, the wholesale price index fell 45.9 percent, and the farm products price index fell 53.3 percent. (HSUS, Series E40, E42, and E135)

Real average net income per farm fell over 72.6 percent between 1920 and 1921 and, though rising in the twenties, never recovered the relative levels of 1918 and 1919. (Figure 7) Farm mortgage foreclosures rose and stayed at historically high levels for the entire decade of the 1920s. (Figure 8) The value of farmland and buildings fell throughout the twenties and, for the first time in American history, the number of cultivated acres actually declined as farmers pulled back from the marginal farmland brought into production during the war. Rather than indicators of a general depression in agriculture in the twenties, these were the results of the financial commitments made by overoptimistic American farmers during and directly after the war. The foreclosures were generally on second mortgages rather than on first mortgages as they were in the early 1930s. (Johnson, 1973; Alston, 1983)

A Declining Sector

A major difficulty in analyzing the interwar agricultural sector lies in separating the effects of the 1920-21 and 1929-33 depressions from those that arose because agriculture was declining relative to the other sectors. A relatively very slow growing demand for basic agricultural products and significant increases in the productivity of labor, land, and machinery in agricultural production combined with a much more rapid extensive economic growth in the nonagricultural sectors of the economy required a shift of resources, particularly labor, out of agriculture. (Figure 9) The market induces labor to voluntarily move from one sector to another through income differentials, suggesting that even in the absence of the effects of the depressions, farm incomes would have been lower than nonfarm incomes so as to bring about this migration.

The continuous substitution of tractor power for horse and mule power released hay and oats acreage to grow crops for human consumption. Though cotton and tobacco continued as the primary crops in the south, the relative production of cotton continued to shift to the west as production in Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California increased. As quotas reduced immigration and incomes rose, the demand for cereal grains grew slowly-more slowly than the supply-and the demand for fruits, vegetables, and dairy products grew. Refrigeration and faster freight shipments expanded the milk sheds further from metropolitan areas. Wisconsin and other North Central states began to ship cream and cheeses to the Atlantic Coast. Due to transportation improvements, specialized truck farms and the citrus industry became more important in California and Florida. (Parker, 1972; Soule, 1947)

The relative decline of the agricultural sector in this period was closely related to the highly inelastic income elasticity of demand for many farm products, particularly cereal grains, pork, and cotton. As incomes grew, the demand for these staples grew much more slowly. At the same time, rising land and labor productivity were increasing the supplies of staples, causing real prices to fall.

Table 3 presents selected agricultural productivity statistics for these years. Those data indicate that there were greater gains in labor productivity than in land productivity (or per acre yields). Per acre yields in wheat and hay actually decreased between 1915-19 and 1935-39. These productivity increases, which released resources from the agricultural sector, were the result of technological improvements in agriculture.

Technological Improvements In Agricultural Production

In many ways the adoption of the tractor in the interwar period symbolizes the technological changes that occurred in the agricultural sector. This changeover in the power source that farmers used had far-reaching consequences and altered the organization of the farm and the farmers' lifestyle. The adoption of the tractor was land saving (by releasing acreage previously used to produce crops for workstock) and labor saving. At the same time it increased the risks of farming because farmers were now much more exposed to the marketplace. They could not produce their own fuel for tractors as they had for the workstock. Rather, this had to be purchased from other suppliers. Repair and replacement parts also had to be purchased, and sometimes the repairs had to be undertaken by specialized mechanics. The purchase of a tractor also commonly required the purchase of new complementary machines; therefore, the decision to purchase a tractor was not an isolated one. (White, 2001; Ankli, 1980; Ankli and Olmstead, 1981; Musoke, 1981; Whatley, 1987). These changes resulted in more and more farmers purchasing and using tractors, but the rate of adoption varied sharply across the United States.

Technological innovations in plants and animals also raised productivity. Hybrid seed corn increased yields from an average of 40 bushels per acre to 100 to 120 bushels per acre. New varieties of wheat were developed from the hardy Russian and Turkish wheat varieties which had been imported. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Experiment Stations took the lead in developing wheat varieties for different regions. For example, in the Columbia River Basin new varieties raised yields from an average of 19.1 bushels per acre in 1913-22 to 23.1 bushels per acre in 1933-42. (Shepherd, 1980) New hog breeds produced more meat and new methods of swine sanitation sharply increased the survival rate of piglets. An effective serum for hog cholera was developed, and the federal government led the way in the testing and eradication of bovine tuberculosis and brucellosis. Prior to the Second World War, a number of pesticides to control animal disease were developed, including cattle dips and disinfectants. By the mid-1920s a vaccine for "blackleg," an infectious, usually fatal disease that particularly struck young cattle, was completed. The cattle tick, which carried Texas Fever, was largely controlled through inspections. (Schlebecker, 1975; Bogue, 1983; Wood, 1980)

Federal Agricultural Programs in the 1920s

Though there was substantial agricultural discontent in the period from the Civil War to late 1890s, the period from then to the onset of the First World War was relatively free from overt farmers' complaints. In later years farmers dubbed the 1910-14 period as agriculture's "golden years" and used the prices of farm crops and farm inputs in that period as a standard by which to judge crop and input prices in later years. The problems that arose in the agricultural sector during the twenties once again led to insistent demands by farmers for government to alleviate their distress.

Though there were increasing calls for direct federal government intervention to limit production and raise farm prices, this was not used until Roosevelt took office. Rather, there was a reliance upon the traditional method to aid injured groups-tariffs, and upon the "sanctioning and promotion of cooperative marketing associations." In 1921 Congress attempted to control the grain exchanges and compel merchants and stockyards to charge "reasonable rates," with the Packers and Stockyards Act and the Grain Futures Act. In 1922 Congress passed the Capper-Volstead Act to promote agricultural cooperatives and the Fordney-McCumber Tariff to impose high duties on most agricultural imports.-The Cooperative Marketing Act of 1924 did not bolster failing cooperatives as it was supposed to do. (Hoffman and Liebcap, 1991)

Twice between 1924 and 1928 Congress passed "McNary-Haugan" bills, but President Calvin Coolidge vetoed both. The McNary-Haugan bills proposed to establish "fair" exchange values (based on the 1910-14 period) for each product and to maintain them through tariffs and a private corporation that would be chartered by the government and could buy enough of each commodity to keep its price up to the computed fair level. The revenues were to come from taxes imposed on farmers. The Hoover administration passed the Hawley-Smoot tariff in 1930 and an Agricultural Marketing Act in 1929. This act committed the federal government to a policy of stabilizing farm prices through several nongovernment institutions but these failed during the depression. Federal intervention in the agricultural sector really came of age during the New Deal era of the 1930s.

Manufacturing

Agriculture was not the only sector experiencing difficulties in the twenties. Other industries, such as textiles, boots and shoes, and coal mining, also experienced trying times. However, at the same time that these industries were declining, other industries, such as electrical appliances, automobiles, and construction, were growing rapidly. The simultaneous existence of growing and declining industries has been common to all eras because economic growth and technological progress never affect all sectors in the same way. In general, in manufacturing there was a rapid rate of growth of productivity during the twenties. The rise of real wages due to immigration restrictions and the slower growth of the resident population spurred this. Transportation improvements and communications advances were also responsible. These developments brought about differential growth in the various manufacturing sectors in the United States in the 1920s.

Because of the historic pattern of economic development in the United States, the northeast was the first area to really develop a manufacturing base. By the mid-nineteenth century the East North Central region was creating a manufacturing base and the other regions began to create manufacturing bases in the last half of the nineteenth century resulting in a relative westward and southern shift of manufacturing activity. This trend continued in the 1920s as the New England and Middle Atlantic regions' shares of manufacturing employment fell while all of the other regions-excluding the West North Central region-gained. There was considerable variation in the growth of the industries and shifts in their ranking during the decade. The largest broadly defined industries were, not surprisingly, food and kindred products; textile mill products; those producing and fabricating primary metals; machinery production; and chemicals. When industries are more narrowly defined, the automobile industry, which ranked third in manufacturing value added in 1919, ranked first by the mid-1920s.

Productivity Developments

Gavin Wright (1990) has argued that one of the underappreciated characteristics of American industrial history has been its reliance on mineral resources. Wright argues that the growing American strength in industrial exports and industrialization in general relied on an increasing intensity in nonreproducible natural resources. The large American market was knit together as one large market without internal barriers through the development of widespread low-cost transportation. Many distinctively American developments, such as continuous-process, mass-production methods were associated with the "high throughput" of fuel and raw materials relative to labor and capital inputs. As a result the United States became the dominant industrial force in the world 1920s and 1930s. According to Wright, after World War II "the process by which the United States became a unified 'economy' in the nineteenth century has been extended to the world as a whole. To a degree, natural resources have become commodities rather than part of the 'factor endowment' of individual countries." (Wright, 1990)

In addition to this growing intensity in the use of nonreproducible natural resources as a source of productivity gains in American manufacturing, other technological changes during the twenties and thirties tended to raise the productivity of the existing capital through the replacement of critical types of capital equipment with superior equipment and through changes in management methods. (Soule, 1947; Lorant, 1967; Devine, 1983; Oshima, 1984) Some changes, such as the standardization of parts and processes and the reduction of the number of styles and designs, raised the productivity of both capital and labor. Modern management techniques, first introduced by Frederick W. Taylor, were introduced on a wider scale.

One of the important forces contributing to mass production and increased productivity was the transfer to electric power. (Devine, 1983) By 1929 about 70 percent of manufacturing activity relied on electricity, compared to roughly 30 percent in 1914. Steam provided 80 percent of the mechanical drive capacity in manufacturing in 1900, but electricity provided over 50 percent by 1920 and 78 percent by 1929. An increasing number of factories were buying their power from electric utilities. In 1909, 64 percent of the electric motor capacity in manufacturing establishments used electricity generated on the factory site; by 1919, 57 percent of the electricity used in manufacturing was purchased from independent electric utilities.

The shift from coal to oil and natural gas and from raw unprocessed energy in the forms of coal and waterpower to processed energy in the form of internal combustion fuel and electricity increased thermal efficiency. After the First World War energy consumption relative to GNP fell, there was a sharp increase in the growth rate of output per labor-hour, and the output per unit of capital input once again began rising. These trends can be seen in the data in Table 3. Labor productivity grew much more rapidly during the 1920s than in the previous or following decade. Capital productivity had declined in the decade previous to the 1920s while it also increased sharply during the twenties and continued to rise in the following decade. Alexander Field (2003) has argued that the 1930s were the most technologically progressive decade of the twentieth century basing his argument on the growth of multi-factor productivity as well as the impressive array of technological developments during the thirties. However, the twenties also saw impressive increases in labor and capital productivity as, particularly, developments in energy and transportation accelerated.

Warren Devine, Jr. (1983) reports that in the twenties the most important result of the adoption of electricity was that it would be an indirect "lever to increase production." There were a number of ways in which this occurred. Electricity brought about an increased flow of production by allowing new flexibility in the design of buildings and the arrangement of machines. In this way it maximized throughput. Electric cranes were an "inestimable boon" to production because with adequate headroom they could operate anywhere in a plant, something that mechanical power transmission to overhead cranes did not allow. Electricity made possible the use of portable power tools that could be taken anywhere in the factory. Electricity brought about improved illumination, ventilation, and cleanliness in the plants, dramatically improving working conditions. It improved the control of machines since there was no longer belt slippage with overhead line shafts and belt transmission, and there were less limitations on the operating speeds of machines. Finally, it made plant expansion much easier than when overhead shafts and belts had been relied upon for operating power.

The mechanization of American manufacturing accelerated in the 1920s, and this led to a much more rapid growth of productivity in manufacturing compared to earlier decades and to other sectors at that time. There were several forces that promoted mechanization. One was the rapidly expanding aggregate demand during the prosperous twenties. Another was the technological developments in new machines and processes, of which electrification played an important part. Finally, Harry Jerome (1934) and, later, Harry Oshima (1984) both suggest that the price of unskilled labor began to rise as immigration sharply declined with new immigration laws and falling population growth. This accelerated the mechanization of the nation's factories.

Technological changes during this period can be documented for a number of individual industries. In bituminous coal mining, labor productivity rose when mechanical loading devices reduced the labor required from 24 to 50 percent. The burst of paved road construction in the twenties led to the development of a finishing machine to smooth the surface of cement highways, and this reduced the labor requirement from 40 to 60 percent. Mechanical pavers that spread centrally mixed materials further increased productivity in road construction. These replaced the roadside dump and wheelbarrow methods of spreading the cement. Jerome (1934) reports that the glass in electric light bulbs was made by new machines that cut the number of labor-hours required for their manufacture by nearly half. New machines to produce cigarettes and cigars, for warp-tying in textile production, and for pressing clothes in clothing shops also cut labor-hours. The Banbury mixer reduced the labor input in the production of automobile tires by half, and output per worker of inner tubes increased about four times with a new production method. However, as Daniel Nelson (1987) points out, the continuing advances were the "cumulative process resulting from a vast number of successive small changes." Because of these continuing advances in the quality of the tires and in the manufacturing of tires, between 1910 and 1930 "tire costs per thousand miles of driving fell from $9.39 to $0.65."

John Lorant (1967) has documented other technological advances that occurred in American manufacturing during the twenties. For example, the organic chemical industry developed rapidly due to the introduction of the Weizman fermentation process. In a similar fashion, nearly half of the productivity advances in the paper industry were due to the "increasingly sophisticated applications of electric power and paper manufacturing processes," especially the fourdrinier paper-making machines. As Avi Cohen (1984) has shown, the continuing advances in these machines were the result of evolutionary changes to the basic machine. Mechanization in many types of mass-production industries raised the productivity of labor and capital. In the glass industry, automatic feeding and other types of fully automatic production raised the efficiency of the production of glass containers, window glass, and pressed glass. Giedion (1948) reported that the production of bread was "automatized" in all stages during the 1920s.

Though not directly bringing about productivity increases in manufacturing processes, developments in the management of manufacturing firms, particularly the largest ones, also significantly affected their structure and operation. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. (1962) has argued that the structure of a firm must follow its strategy. Until the First World War most industrial firms were centralized, single-division firms even when becoming vertically integrated. When this began to change the management of the large industrial firms had to change accordingly.

Because of these changes in the size and structure of the firm during the First World War, E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company was led to adopt a strategy of diversifying into the production of largely unrelated product lines. The firm found that the centralized, divisional structure that had served it so well was not suited to this strategy, and its poor business performance led its executives to develop between 1919 and 1921 a decentralized, multidivisional structure that boosted it to the first rank among American industrial firms.

General Motors had a somewhat different problem. By 1920 it was already decentralized into separate divisions. In fact, there was so much decentralization that those divisions essentially remained separate companies and there was little coordination between the operating divisions. A financial crisis at the end of 1920 ousted W. C. Durant and brought in the du Ponts and Alfred Sloan. Sloan, who had seen the problems at GM but had been unable to convince Durant to make changes, began reorganizing the management of the company. Over the next several years Sloan and other GM executives developed the general office for a decentralized, multidivisional firm.

Though facing related problems at nearly the same time, GM and du Pont developed their decentralized, multidivisional organizations separately. As other manufacturing firms began to diversify, GM and du Pont became the models for reorganizing the management of the firms. In many industrial firms these reorganizations were not completed until well after the Second World War.

Competition, Monopoly, and the Government

The rise of big businesses, which accelerated in the postbellum period and particularly during the first great turn-of-the-century merger wave, continued in the interwar period. Between 1925 and 1939 the share of manufacturing assets held by the 100 largest corporations rose from 34.5 to 41.9 percent. (Niemi, 1980) As a public policy, the concern with monopolies diminished in the 1920s even though firms were growing larger. But the growing size of businesses was one of the convenient scapegoats upon which to blame the Great Depression.

However, the rise of large manufacturing firms in the interwar period is not so easily interpreted as an attempt to monopolize their industries. Some of the growth came about through vertical integration by the more successful manufacturing firms. Backward integration was generally an attempt to ensure a smooth supply of raw materials where that supply was not plentiful and was dispersed and firms "feared that raw materials might become controlled by competitors or independent suppliers." (Livesay and Porter, 1969) Forward integration was an offensive tactic employed when manufacturers found that the existing distribution network proved inadequate. Livesay and Porter suggested a number of reasons why firms chose to integrate forward. In some cases they had to provide the mass distribution facilities to handle their much larger outputs; especially when the product was a new one. The complexity of some new products required technical expertise that the existing distribution system could not provide. In other cases "the high unit costs of products required consumer credit which exceeded financial capabilities of independent distributors." Forward integration into wholesaling was more common than forward integration into retailing. The producers of automobiles, petroleum, typewriters, sewing machines, and harvesters were typical of those manufacturers that integrated all the way into retailing.

In some cases, increases in industry concentration arose as a natural process of industrial maturation. In the automobile industry, Henry Ford's invention in 1913 of the moving assembly line-a technological innovation that changed most manufacturing-lent itself to larger factories and firms. Of the several thousand companies that had produced cars prior to 1920, 120 were still doing so then, but Ford and General Motors were the clear leaders, together producing nearly 70 percent of the cars. During the twenties, several other companies, such as Durant, Willys, and Studebaker, missed their opportunity to become more important producers, and Chrysler, formed in early 1925, became the third most important producer by 1930. Many went out of business and by 1929 only 44 companies were still producing cars. The Great Depression decimated the industry. Dozens of minor firms went out of business. Ford struggled through by relying on its huge stockpile of cash accumulated prior to the mid-1920s, while Chrysler actually grew. By 1940, only eight companies still produced cars-GM, Ford, and Chrysler had about 85 percent of the market, while Willys, Studebaker, Nash, Hudson, and Packard shared the remainder. The rising concentration in this industry was not due to attempts to monopolize. As the industry matured, growing economies of scale in factory production and vertical integration, as well as the advantages of a widespread dealer network, led to a dramatic decrease in the number of viable firms. (Chandler, 1962 and 1964; Rae, 1984; Bernstein, 1987)

It was a similar story in the tire industry. The increasing concentration and growth of firms was driven by scale economies in production and retailing and by the devastating effects of the depression in the thirties. Although there were 190 firms in 1919, 5 firms dominated the industry-Goodyear, B. F. Goodrich, Firestone, U.S. Rubber, and Fisk, followed by Miller Rubber, General Tire and Rubber, and Kelly-Springfield. During the twenties, 166 firms left the industry while 66 entered. The share of the 5 largest firms rose from 50 percent in 1921 to 75 percent in 1937. During the depressed thirties, there was fierce price competition, and many firms exited the industry. By 1937 there were 30 firms, but the average employment per factory was 4.41 times as large as in 1921, and the average factory produced 6.87 times as many tires as in 1921. (French, 1986 and 1991; Nelson, 1987; Fricke, 1982)

The steel industry was already highly concentrated by 1920 as U.S. Steel had around 50 percent of the market. But U. S. Steel's market share declined through the twenties and thirties as several smaller firms competed and grew to become known as Little Steel, the next six largest integrated producers after U. S. Steel. Jonathan Baker (1989) has argued that the evidence is consistent with "the assumption that competition was a dominant strategy for steel manufacturers" until the depression. However, the initiation of the National Recovery Administration (NRA) codes in 1933 required the firms to cooperate rather than compete, and Baker argues that this constituted a training period leading firms to cooperate in price and output policies after 1935. (McCraw and Reinhardt, 1989; Weiss, 1980; Adams, 1977)

Mergers

A number of the larger firms grew by merger during this period, and the second great merger wave in American industry occurred during the last half of the 1920s. Figure 10 shows two series on mergers during the interwar period. The FTC series included many of the smaller mergers. The series constructed by Carl Eis (1969) only includes the larger mergers and ends in 1930.

This second great merger wave coincided with the stock market boom of the twenties and has been called "merger for oligopoly" rather than merger for monopoly. (Stigler, 1950) This merger wave created many larger firms that ranked below the industry leaders. Much of the activity in occurred in the banking and public utilities industries. (Markham, 1955) In manufacturing and mining, the effects on industrial structure were less striking. Eis (1969) found that while mergers took place in almost all industries, they were concentrated in a smaller number of them, particularly petroleum, primary metals, and food products.

The federal government's antitrust policies toward business varied sharply during the interwar period. In the 1920s there was relatively little activity by the Justice Department, but after the Great Depression the New Dealers tried to take advantage of big business to make business exempt from the antitrust laws and cartelize industries under government supervision.

With the passage of the FTC and Clayton Acts in 1914 to supplement the 1890 Sherman Act, the cornerstones of American antitrust law were complete. Though minor amendments were later enacted, the primary changes after that came in the enforcement of the laws and in swings in judicial decisions. Their two primary areas of application were in the areas of overt behavior, such as horizontal and vertical price-fixing, and in market structure, such as mergers and dominant firms. Horizontal price-fixing involves firms that would normally be competitors getting together to agree on stable and higher prices for their products. As long as most of the important competitors agree on the new, higher prices, substitution between products is eliminated and the demand becomes much less elastic. Thus, increasing the price increases the revenues and the profits of the firms who are fixing prices. Vertical price-fixing involves firms setting the prices of intermediate products purchased at different stages of production. It also tends to eliminate substitutes and makes the demand less elastic.

Price-fixing continued to be considered illegal throughout the period, but there was no major judicial activity regarding it in the 1920s other than the Trenton Potteries decision in 1927. In that decision 20 individuals and 23 corporations were found guilty of conspiring to fix the prices of bathroom bowls. The evidence in the case suggested that the firms were not very successful at doing so, but the court found that they were guilty nevertheless; their success, or lack thereof, was not held to be a factor in the decision. (Scherer and Ross, 1990) Though criticized by some, the decision was precedent setting in that it prohibited explicit pricing conspiracies per se.

The Justice Department had achieved success in dismantling Standard Oil and American Tobacco in 1911 through decisions that the firms had unreasonably restrained trade. These were essentially the same points used in court decisions against the Powder Trust in 1911, the thread trust in 1913, Eastman Kodak in 1915, the glucose and cornstarch trust in 1916, and the anthracite railroads in 1920. The criterion of an unreasonable restraint of trade was used in the 1916 and 1918 decisions that found the American Can Company and the United Shoe Machinery Company innocent of violating the Sherman Act; it was also clearly enunciated in the 1920 U. S. Steel decision. This became known as the rule of reason standard in antitrust policy.

Merger policy had been defined in the 1914 Clayton Act to prohibit only the acquisition of one corporation's stock by another corporation. Firms then shifted to the outright purchase of a competitor's assets. A series of court decisions in the twenties and thirties further reduced the possibilities of Justice Department actions against mergers. "Only fifteen mergers were ordered dissolved through antitrust actions between 1914 and 1950, and ten of the orders were accomplished under the Sherman Act rather than Clayton Act proceedings."
Energy
The search for energy and new ways to translate it into heat, light, and motion has been one of the unending themes in history. From whale oil to coal oil to kerosene to electricity, the search for better and less costly ways to light our lives, heat our homes, and move our machines has consumed much time and effort. The energy industries responded to those demands and the consumption of energy materials (coal, oil, gas, and fuel wood) as a percent of GNP rose from about 2 percent in the latter part of the nineteenth century to about 3 percent in the twentieth.

Changes in the energy markets that had begun in the nineteenth century continued. Processed energy in the forms of petroleum derivatives and electricity continued to become more important than "raw" energy, such as that available from coal and water. The evolution of energy sources for lighting continued; at the end of the nineteenth century, natural gas and electricity, rather than liquid fuels began to provide more lighting for streets, businesses, and homes.

In the twentieth century the continuing shift to electricity and internal combustion fuels increased the efficiency with which the American economy used energy. These processed forms of energy resulted in a more rapid increase in the productivity of labor and capital in American manufacturing. From 1899 to 1919, output per labor-hour increased at an average annual rate of 1.2 percent, whereas from 1919 to 1937 the increase was 3.5 percent per year. The productivity of capital had fallen at an average annual rate of 1.8 percent per year in the 20 years prior to 1919, but it rose 3.1 percent a year in the 18 years after 1919. As discussed above, the adoption of electricity in American manufacturing initiated a rapid evolution in the organization of plants and rapid increases in productivity in all types of manufacturing.

The change in transportation was even more remarkable. Internal combustion engines running on gasoline or diesel fuel revolutionized transportation. Cars quickly grabbed the lion's share of local and regional travel and began to eat into long distance passenger travel, just as the railroads had done to passenger traffic by water in the 1830s. Even before the First World War cities had begun passing laws to regulate and limit "jitney" services and to protect the investments in urban rail mass transit. Trucking began eating into the freight carried by the railroads.

These developments brought about changes in the energy industries. Coal mining became a declining industry. As Figure 11 shows, in 1925 the share of petroleum in the value of coal, gas, and petroleum output exceeded bituminous coal, and it continued to rise. Anthracite coal's share was much smaller and it declined while natural gas and LP (or liquefied petroleum) gas were relatively unimportant. These changes, especially the declining coal industry, were the source of considerable worry in the twenties.

Coal

One of the industries considered to be "sick" in the twenties was coal, particularly bituminous, or soft, coal. Income in the industry declined, and bankruptcies were frequent. Strikes frequently interrupted production. The majority of the miners "lived in squalid and unsanitary houses, and the incidence of accidents and diseases was high." (Soule, 1947) The number of operating bituminous coal mines declined sharply from 1923 through 1932. Anthracite (or hard) coal output was much smaller during the twenties. Real coal prices rose from 1919 to 1922, and bituminous coal prices fell sharply from then to 1925. (Figure 12) Coal mining employment plummeted during the twenties. Annual earnings, especially in bituminous coal mining, also fell because of dwindling hourly earnings and, from 1929 on, a shrinking workweek. (Figure 13)

The sources of these changes are to be found in the increasing supply due to productivity advances in coal production and in the decreasing demand for coal. The demand fell as industries began turning from coal to electricity and because of productivity advances in the use of coal to create energy in steel, railroads, and electric utilities. (Keller, 1973) In the generation of electricity, larger steam plants employing higher temperatures and steam pressures continued to reduce coal consumption per kilowatt hour. Similar reductions were found in the production of coke from coal for iron and steel production and in the use of coal by the steam railroad engines. (Rezneck, 1951) All of these factors reduced the demand for coal.

Productivity advances in coal mining tended to be labor saving. Mechanical cutting accounted for 60.7 percent of the coal mined in 1920 and 78.4 percent in 1929. By the middle of the twenties, the mechanical loading of coal began to be introduced. Between 1929 and 1939, output per labor-hour rose nearly one third in bituminous coal mining and nearly four fifths in anthracite as more mines adopted machine mining and mechanical loading and strip mining expanded.

The increasing supply and falling demand for coal led to the closure of mines that were too costly to operate. A mine could simply cease operations, let the equipment stand idle, and lay off employees. When bankruptcies occurred, the mines generally just turned up under new ownership with lower capital charges. When demand increased or strikes reduced the supply of coal, idle mines simply resumed production. As a result, the easily expanded supply largely eliminated economic profits.

The average daily employment in coal mining dropped by over 208,000 from its peak in 1923, but the sharply falling real wages suggests that the supply of labor did not fall as rapidly as the demand for labor. Soule (1947) notes that when employment fell in coal mining, it meant fewer days of work for the same number of men. Social and cultural characteristics tended to tie many to their home region. The local alternatives were few, and ignorance of alternatives outside the Appalachian rural areas, where most bituminous coal was mined, made it very costly to transfer out.

Petroleum

In contrast to the coal industry, the petroleum industry was growing throughout the interwar period. By the thirties, crude petroleum dominated the real value of the production of energy materials. As Figure 14 shows, the production of crude petroleum increased sharply between 1920 and 1930, while real petroleum prices, though highly variable, tended to decline.

The growing demand for petroleum was driven by the growth in demand for gasoline as America became a motorized society. The production of gasoline surpassed kerosene production in 1915. Kerosene's market continued to contract as electric lighting replaced kerosene lighting. The development of oil burners in the twenties began a switch from coal toward fuel oil for home heating, and this further increased the growing demand for petroleum. The growth in the demand for fuel oil and diesel fuel for ship engines also increased petroleum demand. But it was the growth in the demand for gasoline that drove the petroleum market.

The decline in real prices in the latter part of the twenties shows that supply was growing even faster than demand. The discovery of new fields in the early twenties increased the supply of petroleum and led to falling prices as production capacity grew. The Santa Fe Springs, California strike in 1919 initiated a supply shock as did the discovery of the Long Beach, California field in 1921. New discoveries in Powell, Texas and Smackover Arkansas further increased the supply of petroleum in 1921. New supply increases occurred in 1926 to 1928 with petroleum strikes in Seminole, Oklahoma and Hendricks, Texas. The supply of oil increased sharply in 1930 to 1931 with new discoveries in Oklahoma City and East Texas. Each new discovery pushed down real oil prices, and the prices of petroleum derivatives, and the growing production capacity led to a general declining trend in petroleum prices. McMillin and Parker (1994) argue that supply shocks generated by these new discoveries were a factor in the business cycles during the 1920s.

The supply of gasoline increased more than the supply of crude petroleum. In 1913 a chemist at Standard Oil of Indiana introduced the cracking process to refine crude petroleum; until that time it had been refined by distillation or unpressurized heating. In the heating process, various refined products such as kerosene, gasoline, naphtha, and lubricating oils were produced at different temperatures. It was difficult to vary the amount of the different refined products produced from a barrel of crude. The cracking process used pressurized heating to break heavier components down into lighter crude derivatives; with cracking, it was possible to increase the amount of gasoline obtained from a barrel of crude from 15 to 45 percent. In the early twenties, chemists at Standard Oil of New Jersey improved the cracking process, and by 1927 it was possible to obtain twice as much gasoline from a barrel of crude petroleum as in 1917.

The petroleum companies also developed new ways to distribute gasoline to motorists that made it more convenient to purchase gasoline. Prior to the First World War, gasoline was commonly purchased in one- or five-gallon cans and the purchaser used a funnel to pour the gasoline from the can into the car. Then "filling stations" appeared, which specialized in filling cars' tanks with gasoline. These spread rapidly, and by 1919 gasoline companies were beginning to introduce their own filling stations or contract with independent stations to exclusively distribute their gasoline. Increasing competition and falling profits led filling station operators to expand into other activities such as oil changes and other mechanical repairs. The general name attached to such stations gradually changed to "service stations" to reflect these new functions.

Though the petroleum firms tended to be large, they were highly competitive, trying to pump as much petroleum as possible to increase their share of the fields. This, combined with the development of new fields, led to an industry with highly volatile prices and output. Firms desperately wanted to stabilize and reduce the production of crude petroleum so as to stabilize and raise the prices of crude petroleum and refined products. Unable to obtain voluntary agreement on output limitations by the firms and producers, governments began stepping in. Led by Texas, which created the Texas Railroad Commission in 1891, oil-producing states began to intervene to regulate production. Such laws were usually termed prorationing laws and were quotas designed to limit each well's output to some fraction of its potential. The purpose was as much to stabilize and reduce production and raise prices as anything else, although generally such laws were passed under the guise of conservation. Although the federal government supported such attempts, not until the New Deal were federal laws passed to assist this.

Electricity

By the mid 1890s the debate over the method by which electricity was to be transmitted had been won by those who advocated alternating current. The reduced power losses and greater distance over which electricity could be transmitted more than offset the necessity for transforming the current back to direct current for general use. Widespread adoption of machines and appliances by industry and consumers then rested on an increase in the array of products using electricity as the source of power, heat, or light and the development of an efficient, lower cost method of generating electricity.

General Electric, Westinghouse, and other firms began producing the electrical appliances for homes and an increasing number of machines based on electricity began to appear in industry. The problem of lower cost production was solved by the introduction of centralized generating facilities that distributed the electric power through lines to many consumers and business firms.

Though initially several firms competed in generating and selling electricity to consumers and firms in a city or area, by the First World War many states and communities were awarding exclusive franchises to one firm to generate and distribute electricity to the customers in the franchise area. (Bright, 1947; Passer, 1953) The electric utility industry became an important growth industry and, as Figure 15 shows, electricity production and use grew rapidly.

The electric utilities increasingly were regulated by state commissions that were charged with setting rates so that the utilities could receive a "fair return" on their investments. Disagreements over what constituted a "fair return" and the calculation of the rate base led to a steady stream of cases before the commissions and a continuing series of court appeals. Generally these court decisions favored the reproduction cost basis. Because of the difficulty and cost in making these calculations, rates tended to be in the hands of the electric utilities that, it has been suggested, did not lower rates adequately to reflect the rising productivity and lowered costs of production. The utilities argued that a more rapid lowering of rates would have jeopardized their profits. Whether or not this increased their monopoly power is still an open question, but it should be noted, that electric utilities were hardly price-taking industries prior to regulation. (Mercer, 1973) In fact, as Figure 16 shows, the electric utilities began to systematically practice market segmentation charging users with less elastic demands, higher prices per kilowatt-hour.

Energy in the American Economy of the 1920s

The changes in the energy industries had far-reaching consequences. The coal industry faced a continuing decline in demand. Even in the growing petroleum industry, the periodic surges in the supply of petroleum caused great instability. In manufacturing, as described above, electrification contributed to a remarkable rise in productivity. The transportation revolution brought about by the rise of gasoline-powered trucks and cars changed the way businesses received their supplies and distributed their production as well as where they were located. The suburbanization of America and the beginnings of urban sprawl were largely brought about by the introduction of low-priced gasoline for cars.
Transportation
The American economy was forever altered by the dramatic changes in transportation after 1900. Following Henry Ford's introduction of the moving assembly production line in 1914, automobile prices plummeted, and by the end of the 1920s about 60 percent of American families owned an automobile. The advent of low-cost personal transportation led to an accelerating movement of population out of the crowded cities to more spacious homes in the suburbs and the automobile set off a decline in intracity public passenger transportation that has yet to end. Massive road-building programs facilitated the intercity movement of people and goods. Trucks increasingly took over the movement of freight in competition with the railroads. New industries, such as gasoline service stations, motor hotels, and the rubber tire industry, arose to service the automobile and truck traffic. These developments were complicated by the turmoil caused by changes in the federal government's policies toward transportation in the United States.

With the end of the First World War, a debate began as to whether the railroads, which had been taken over by the government, should be returned to private ownership or nationalized. The voices calling for a return to private ownership were much stronger, but doing so fomented great controversy. Many in Congress believed that careful planning and consolidation could restore the railroads and make them more efficient. There was continued concern about the near monopoly that the railroads had on the nation's intercity freight and passenger transportation. The result of these deliberations was the Transportation Act of 1920, which was premised on the continued domination of the nation's transportation by the railroads-an erroneous presumption.

The Transportation Act of 1920 presented a marked change in the Interstate Commerce Commission's ability to control railroads. The ICC was allowed to prescribe exact rates that were to be set so as to allow the railroads to earn a fair return, defined as 5.5 percent, on the fair value of their property. The ICC was authorized to make an accounting of the fair value of each regulated railroad's property; however, this was not completed until well into the 1930s, by which time the accounting and rate rules were out of date. To maintain fair competition between railroads in a region, all roads were to have the same rates for the same goods over the same distance. With the same rates, low-cost roads should have been able to earn higher rates of return than high-cost roads. To handle this, a recapture clause was inserted: any railroad earning a return of more than 6 percent on the fair value of its property was to turn the excess over to the ICC, which would place half of the money in a contingency fund for the railroad when it encountered financial problems and the other half in a contingency fund to provide loans to other railroads in need of assistance.

In order to address the problem of weak and strong railroads and to bring better coordination to the movement of rail traffic in the United States, the act was directed to encourage railroad consolidation, but little came of this in the 1920s. In order to facilitate its control of the railroads, the ICC was given two additional powers. The first was the control over the issuance or purchase of securities by railroads, and the second was the power to control changes in railroad service through the control of car supply and the extension and abandonment of track. The control of the supply of rail cars was turned over to the Association of American Railroads. Few extensions of track were proposed, but as time passed, abandonment requests grew. The ICC, however, trying to mediate between the conflicting demands of shippers, communities and railroads, generally refused to grant abandonments, and this became an extremely sensitive issue in the 1930s.

As indicated above, the premises of the Transportation Act of 1920 were wrong. Railroads experienced increasing competition during the 1920s, and both freight and passenger traffic were drawn off to competing transport forms. Passenger traffic exited from the railroads much more quickly. As the network of all weather surfaced roads increased, people quickly turned from the train to the car. Harmed even more by the move to automobile traffic were the electric interurban railways that had grown rapidly just prior to the First World War. (Hilton-Due, 1960) Not surprisingly, during the 1920s few railroads earned profits in excess of the fair rate of return.

The use of trucks to deliver freight began shortly after the turn of the century. Before the outbreak of war in Europe, White and Mack were producing trucks with as much as 7.5 tons of carrying capacity. Most of the truck freight was carried on a local basis, and it largely supplemented the longer distance freight transportation provided by the railroads. However, truck size was growing. In 1915 Trailmobile introduced the first four-wheel trailer designed to be pulled by a truck tractor unit. During the First World War, thousands of trucks were constructed for military purposes, and truck convoys showed that long distance truck travel was feasible and economical. The use of trucks to haul freight had been growing by over 18 percent per year since 1925, so that by 1929 intercity trucking accounted for more than one percent of the ton-miles of freight hauled.

The railroads argued that the trucks and buses provided "unfair" competition and believed that if they were also regulated, then the regulation could equalize the conditions under which they competed. As early as 1925, the National Association of Railroad and Utilities Commissioners issued a call for the regulation of motor carriers in general. In 1928 the ICC called for federal regulation of buses and in 1932 extended this call to federal regulation of trucks.

Most states had began regulating buses at the beginning of the 1920s in an attempt to reduce the diversion of urban passenger traffic from the electric trolley and railway systems. However, most of the regulation did not aim to control intercity passenger traffic by buses. As the network of surfaced roads expanded during the twenties, so did the routes of the intercity buses. In 1929 a number of smaller bus companies were incorporated in the Greyhound Buslines, the carrier that has since dominated intercity bus transportation. (Walsh, 2000)

A complaint of the railroads was that interstate trucking competition was unfair because it was subsidized while railroads were not. All railroad property was privately owned and subject to property taxes, whereas truckers used the existing road system and therefore neither had to bear the costs of creating the road system nor pay taxes upon it. Beginning with the Federal Road-Aid Act of 1916, small amounts of money were provided as an incentive for states to construct rural post roads. (Dearing-Owen, 1949) However, through the First World War most of the funds for highway construction came from a combination of levies on the adjacent property owners and county and state taxes. The monies raised by the counties were commonly 60 percent of the total funds allocated, and these primarily came from property taxes. In 1919 Oregon pioneered the state gasoline tax, which then began to be adopted by more and more states. A highway system financed by property taxes and other levies can be construed as a subsidization of motor vehicles, and one study for the period up to 1920 found evidence of substantial subsidization of trucking. (Herbst-Wu, 1973) However, the use of gasoline taxes moved closer to the goal of users paying the costs of the highways. Neither did the trucks have to pay for all of the highway construction because automobiles jointly used the highways. Highways had to be constructed in more costly ways in order to accommodate the larger and heavier trucks. Ideally the gasoline taxes collected from trucks should have covered the extra (or marginal) costs of highway construction incurred because of the truck traffic. Gasoline taxes tended to do this.

The American economy occupies a vast geographic region. Because economic activity occurs over most of the country, falling transportation costs have been crucial to knitting American firms and consumers into a unified market. Throughout the nineteenth century the railroads played this crucial role. Because of the size of the railroad companies and their importance in the economic life of Americans, the federal government began to regulate them. But, by 1917 it appeared that the railroad system had achieved some stability, and it was generally assumed that the post-First World War era would be an extension of the era from 1900 to 1917. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Spurred by public investments in highways, cars and trucks voraciously ate into the railroad's market, and, though the regulators failed to understand this at the time, the railroad's monopoly on transportation quickly disappeared.

Communications

Communications had joined with transportation developments in the nineteenth century to tie the American economy together more completely. The telegraph had benefited by using the railroads' right-of-ways, and the railroads used the telegraph to coordinate and organize their far-flung activities. As the cost of communications fell and information transfers sped, the development of firms with multiple plants at distant locations was facilitated. The interwar era saw a continuation of these developments as the telephone continued to supplant the telegraph and the new medium of radio arose to transmit news and provide a new entertainment source.

Telegraph domination of business and personal communications had given way to the telephone as long distance telephone calls between the east and west coasts with the new electronic amplifiers became possible in 1915. The number of telegraph messages handled grew 60.4 percent in the twenties. The number of local telephone conversations grew 46.8 percent between 1920 and 1930, while the number of long distance conversations grew 71.8 percent over the same period. There were 5 times as many long distance telephone calls as telegraph messages handled in 1920, and 5.7 times as many in 1930.

The twenties were a prosperous period for AT&T and its 18 major operating companies. (Brooks, 1975; Temin, 1987; Garnet, 1985; Lipartito, 1989) Telephone usage rose and, as Figure 19 shows, the share of all households with a telephone rose from 35 percent to nearly 42 percent. In cities across the nation, AT&T consolidated its system, gained control of many operating companies, and virtually eliminated its competitors. It was able to do this because in 1921 Congress passed the Graham Act exempting AT&T from the Sherman Act in consolidating competing telephone companies. By 1940, the non-Bell operating companies were all small relative to the Bell operating companies.

Surprisingly there was a decline in telephone use on the farms during the twenties. (Hadwiger-Cochran, 1984; Fischer 1987) Rising telephone rates explain part of the decline in rural use. The imposition of connection fees during the First World War made it more costly for new farmers to hook up. As AT&T gained control of more and more operating systems, telephone rates were increased. AT&T also began requiring, as a condition of interconnection, that independent companies upgrade their systems to meet AT&T standards. Most of the small mutual companies that had provided service to farmers had operated on a shoestring-wires were often strung along fenceposts, and phones were inexpensive "whoop and holler" magneto units. Upgrading to AT&T's standards raised costs, forcing these companies to raise rates.

However, it also seems likely that during the 1920s there was a general decline in the rural demand for telephone services. One important factor in this was the dramatic decline in farm incomes in the early twenties. The second reason was a change in the farmers' environment. Prior to the First World War, the telephone eased farm isolation and provided news and weather information that was otherwise hard to obtain. After 1920 automobiles, surfaced roads, movies, and the radio loosened the isolation and the telephone was no longer as crucial.

Othmar Merganthaler's development of the linotype machine in the late nineteenth century had irrevocably altered printing and publishing. This machine, which quickly created a line of soft, lead-based metal type that could be printed, melted down and then recast as a new line of type, dramatically lowered the costs of printing. Previously, all type had to be painstakingly set by hand, with individual cast letter matrices picked out from compartments in drawers to construct words, lines, and paragraphs. After printing, each line of type on the page had to be broken down and each individual letter matrix placed back into its compartment in its drawer for use in the next printing job. Newspapers often were not published every day and did not contain many pages, resulting in many newspapers in most cities. In contrast to this laborious process, the linotype used a keyboard upon which the operator typed the words in one of the lines in a news column. Matrices for each letter dropped down from a magazine of matrices as the operator typed each letter and were assembled into a line of type with automatic spacers to justify the line (fill out the column width). When the line was completed the machine mechanically cast the line of matrices into a line of lead type. The line of lead type was ejected into a tray and the letter matrices mechanically returned to the magazine while the operator continued typing the next line in the news story. The first Merganthaler linotype machine was installed in the New York Tribune in 1886. The linotype machine dramatically lowered the costs of printing newspapers (as well as books and magazines). Prior to the linotype a typical newspaper averaged no more than 11 pages and many were published only a few times a week. The linotype machine allowed newspapers to grow in size and they began to be published more regularly. A process of consolidation of daily and Sunday newspapers began that continues to this day. Many have termed the Merganthaler linotype machine the most significant printing invention since the introduction of movable type 400 years earlier.

For city families as well as farm families, radio became the new source of news and entertainment. (Barnouw, 1966; Rosen, 1980 and 1987; Chester-Garrison, 1950) It soon took over as the prime advertising medium and in the process revolutionized advertising. By 1930 more homes had radio sets than had telephones. The radio networks sent news and entertainment broadcasts all over the country. The isolation of rural life, particularly in many areas of the plains, was forever broken by the intrusion of the "black box," as radio receivers were often called. The radio began a process of breaking down regionalism and creating a common culture in the United States.

The potential demand for radio became clear with the first regular broadcast of Westinghouse's KDKA in Pittsburgh in the fall of 1920. Because the Department of Commerce could not deny a license application there was an explosion of stations all broadcasting at the same frequency and signal jamming and interference became a serious problem. By 1923 the Department of Commerce had gained control of radio from the Post Office and the Navy and began to arbitrarily disperse stations on the radio dial and deny licenses creating the first market in commercial broadcast licenses. In 1926 a U.S. District Court decided that under the Radio Law of 1912 Herbert Hoover, the secretary of commerce, did not have this power. New stations appeared and the logjam and interference of signals worsened. A Radio Act was passed in January of 1927 creating the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) as a temporary licensing authority. Licenses were to be issued in the public interest, convenience, and necessity. A number of broadcasting licenses were revoked; stations were assigned frequencies, dial locations, and power levels. The FRC created 24 clear-channel stations with as much as 50,000 watts of broadcasting power, of which 21 ended up being affiliated with the new national radio networks. The Communications Act of 1934 essentially repeated the 1927 act except that it created a permanent, seven-person Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Local stations initially created and broadcast the radio programs. The expenses were modest, and stores and companies operating radio stations wrote this off as indirect, goodwill advertising. Several forces changed all this. In 1922, AT&T opened up a radio station in New York City, WEAF (later to become WNBC). AT&T envisioned this station as the center of a radio toll system where individuals could purchase time to broadcast a message transmitted to other stations in the toll network using AT&T's long distance lines and an August 1922 broadcast by a Long Island realty company became the first conscious use of direct advertising.

Though advertising continued to be condemned, the fiscal pressures on radio stations to accept advertising began rising. In 1923 the American Society of Composers and Publishers (ASCAP), began demanding a performance fee anytime ASCAP-copyrighted music was performed on the radio, either live or on record. By 1924 the issue was settled, and most stations began paying performance fees to ASCAP. AT&T decided that all stations broadcasting with non AT&T transmitters were violating their patent rights and began asking for annual fees from such stations based on the station's power. By the end of 1924, most stations were paying the fees. All of this drained the coffers of the radio stations, and more and more of them began discreetly accepting advertising.

RCA became upset at AT&T's creation of a chain of radio stations and set up its own toll network using the inferior lines of Western Union and Postal Telegraph, because AT&T, not surprisingly, did not allow any toll (or network) broadcasting on its lines except by its own stations. AT&T began to worry that its actions might threaten its federal monopoly in long distance telephone communications. In 1926 a new firm was created, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), which took over all broadcasting activities from AT&T and RCA as AT&T left broadcasting. When NBC debuted in November of 1926, it had two networks: the Red, which was the old AT&T network, and the Blue, which was the old RCA network. Radio networks allowed advertisers to direct advertising at a national audience at a lower cost. Network programs allowed local stations to broadcast superior programs that captured a larger listening audience and in return received a share of the fees the national advertiser paid to the network. In 1927 a new network, the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) financed by the Paley family began operation and other new networks entered or tried to enter the industry in the 1930s.

Communications developments in the interwar era present something of a mixed picture. By 1920 long distance telephone service was in place, but rising rates slowed the rate of adoption in the period, and telephone use in rural areas declined sharply. Though direct dialing was first tried in the twenties, its general implementation would not come until the postwar era, when other changes, such as microwave transmission of signals and touch-tone dialing, would also appear. Though the number of newspapers declined, newspaper circulation generally held up. The number of competing newspapers in larger cities began declining, a trend that also would accelerate in the postwar American economy.
Banking and Securities Markets
In the twenties commercial banks became "department stores of finance."- Banks opened up installment (or personal) loan departments, expanded their mortgage lending, opened up trust departments, undertook securities underwriting activities, and offered safe deposit boxes. These changes were a response to growing competition from other financial intermediaries. Businesses, stung by bankers' control and reduced lending during the 1920-21 depression, began relying more on retained earnings and stock and bond issues to raise investment and, sometimes, working capital. This reduced loan demand. The thrift institutions also experienced good growth in the twenties as they helped fuel the housing construction boom of the decade. The securities markets boomed in the twenties only to see a dramatic crash of the stock market in late 1929.

There were two broad classes of commercial banks; those that were nationally chartered and those that were chartered by the states. Only the national banks were required to be members of the Federal Reserve System. (Figure 21) Most banks were unit banks because national regulators and most state regulators prohibited branching. However, in the twenties a few states began to permit limited branching; California even allowed statewide branching.-The Federal Reserve member banks held the bulk of the assets of all commercial banks, even though most banks were not members. A high bank failure rate in the 1920s has usually been explained by "overbanking" or too many banks located in an area, but H. Thomas Johnson (1973-74) makes a strong argument against this. (Figure 22)- If there were overbanking, on average each bank would have been underutilized resulting in intense competition for deposits and higher costs and lower earnings. One common reason would have been the free entry of banks as long as they achieved the minimum requirements then in force. However, the twenties saw changes that led to the demise of many smaller rural banks that would likely have been profitable if these - changes had not occurred. Improved transportation led to a movement of business activities, including banking, into the larger towns and cities. Rural banks that relied on loans to farmers suffered just as farmers did during the twenties, especially in the first half of the twenties. The number of bank suspensions and the suspension rate fell after 1926. The sharp rise in bank suspensions in 1930 occurred because of the first banking crisis during the Great Depression.

Prior to the twenties, the main assets of commercial banks were short-term business loans, made by creating a demand deposit or increasing an existing one for a borrowing firm. As business lending declined in the 1920s commercial banks vigorously moved into new types of financial activities. As banks purchased more securities for their earning asset portfolios and gained expertise in the securities markets, larger ones established investment departments and by the late twenties were an important force in the underwriting of new securities issued by nonfinancial corporations.

The securities market exhibited perhaps the most dramatic growth of the noncommercial bank financial intermediaries during the twenties, but others also grew rapidly. (Figure 23) The assets of life insurance companies increased by 10 percent a year from 1921 to 1929; by the late twenties they were a very important source of funds for construction investment. Mutual savings banks and savings and loan associations (thrifts) operated in essentially the same types of markets. The Mutual savings banks were concentrated in the northeastern United States. As incomes rose, personal savings increased, and housing construction expanded in the twenties, there was an increasing demand for the thrifts' interest earning time deposits and mortgage lending.

But the dramatic expansion in the financial sector came in new corporate securities issues in the twenties-especially common and preferred stock-and in the trading of existing shares of those securities. (Figure 24) The late twenties boom in the American economy was rapid, highly visible, and dramatic. Skyscrapers were being erected in most major cities, the automobile manufacturers produced over four and a half million new cars in 1929; and the stock market, like a barometer of this prosperity, was on a dizzying ride to higher and higher prices. "Playing the market" seemed to become a national pastime.

The Dow-Jones index hit its peak of 381 on September 3 and then slid to 320 on October 21. In the following week the stock market "crashed," with a record number of shares being traded on several days. At the end of Tuesday, October, 29th, the index stood at 230, 96 points less than one week before. On November 13, 1929, the Dow-Jones index reached its lowest point for the year at 198-183 points less than the September 3 peak.

The path of the stock market boom of the twenties can be seen in Figure 25. Sharp price breaks occurred several times during the boom, and each of these gave rise to dark predictions of the end of the bull market and speculation. Until late October of 1929, these predictions turned out to be wrong. Between those price breaks and prior to the October crash, stock prices continued to surge upward. In March of 1928, 3,875,910 shares were traded in one day, establishing a record. By late 1928, five million shares being traded in a day was a common occurrence.

New securities, from rising merger activity and the formation of holding companies, were issued to take advantage of the rising stock prices.-Stock pools, which were not illegal until the 1934 Securities and Exchange Act, took advantage of the boom to temporarily drive up the price of selected stocks and reap large gains for the members of the pool. In stock pools a group of speculators would pool large amounts of their funds and then begin purchasing large amounts of shares of a stock. This increased demand led to rising prices for that stock. Frequently pool insiders would "churn" the stock by repeatedly buying and selling the same shares among themselves, but at rising prices. Outsiders, seeing the price rising, would decide to purchase the stock whose price was rising. At a predetermined higher price the pool members would, within a short period, sell their shares and pull out of the market for that stock. Without the additional demand from the pool, the stock's price usually fell quickly bringing large losses for the unsuspecting outside investors while reaping large gains for the pool insiders.

Another factor commonly used to explain both the speculative boom and the October crash was the purchase of stocks on small margins. However, contrary to popular perception, margin requirements through most of the twenties were essentially the same as in previous decades. Brokers, recognizing the problems with margin lending in the rapidly changing market, began raising margin requirements in late 1928, and by the fall of 1929, margin requirements were the highest in the history of the New York Stock Exchange. In the 1920s, as was the case for decades prior to that, the usual margin requirements were 10 to 15 percent of the purchase price, and, apparently, more often around 10 percent. There were increases in this percentage by 1928 and by the fall of 1928, well before the crash and at the urging of a special New York Clearinghouse committee, margin requirements had been raised to some of the highest levels in New York Stock Exchange history. One brokerage house required the following of its clients. Securities with a selling price below $10 could only be purchased for cash. Securities with a selling price of $10 to $20 had to have a 50 percent margin; for securities of $20 to $30 a margin requirement of 40 percent; and, for securities with a price above $30 the margin was 30 percent of the purchase price. In the first half of 1929 margin requirements on customers' accounts averaged a 40 percent margin, and some houses raised their margins to 50 percent a few months before the crash. These were, historically, very high margin requirements. (Smiley and Keehn, 1988)-Even so, during the crash when additional margin calls were issued, those investors who could not provide additional margin saw the brokers' sell their stock at whatever the market price was at the time and these forced sales helped drive prices even lower.

The crash began on Monday, October 21, as the index of stock prices fell 3 points on the third-largest volume in the history of the New York Stock Exchange. After a slight rally on Tuesday, prices began declining on Wednesday and fell 21 points by the end of the day bringing on the third call for more margin in that week. On Black Thursday, October 24, prices initially fell sharply, but rallied somewhat in the afternoon so that the net loss was only 7 points, but the volume of thirteen million shares set a NYSE record. Friday brought a small gain that was wiped out on Saturday. On Monday, October 28, the Dow Jones index fell 38 points on a volume of nine million shares-three million in the final hour of trading. Black Tuesday, October 29, brought declines in virtually every stock price. Manufacturing firms, which had been lending large sums to brokers for margin loans, had been calling in these loans and this accelerated on Monday and Tuesday. The big Wall Street banks increased their lending on call loans to offset some of this loss of loanable funds. The Dow Jones Index fell 30 points on a record volume of nearly sixteen and a half million shares exchanged. Black Thursday and Black Tuesday wiped out entire fortunes.

Though the worst was over, prices continued to decline until November 13, 1929, as brokers cleaned up their accounts and sold off the stocks of clients who could not supply additional margin. After that, prices began to slowly rise and by April of 1930 had increased 96 points from the low of November 13,- "only" 87 points less than the peak of September 3, 1929. From that point, stock prices resumed their depressing decline until the low point was reached in the summer of 1932.

-There is a long tradition that insists that the Great Bull Market of the late twenties was an orgy of speculation that bid the prices of stocks far above any sustainable or economically justifiable level creating a bubble in the stock market. John Kenneth Galbraith (1954) observed, "The collapse in the stock market in the autumn of 1929 was implicit in the speculation that went before."-But not everyone has agreed with this.

In 1930 Irving Fisher argued that the stock prices of 1928 and 1929 were based on fundamental expectations that future corporate earnings would be high.- More recently, Murray Rothbard (1963), Gerald Gunderson (1976), and Jude Wanniski (1978) have argued that stock prices were not too high prior to the crash.-Gunderson suggested that prior to 1929, stock prices were where they should have been and that when corporate profits in the summer and fall of 1929 failed to meet expectations, stock prices were written down.- Wanniski argued that political events brought on the crash. The market broke each time news arrived of advances in congressional consideration of the Hawley-Smoot tariff. However, the virtually perfect foresight that Wanniski's explanation requires is unrealistic.- Charles Kindleberger (1973) and Peter Temin (1976) examined common stock yields and price-earnings ratios and found that the relative constancy did not suggest that stock prices were bid up unrealistically high in the late twenties.-Gary Santoni and Gerald Dwyer (1990) also failed to find evidence of a bubble in stock prices in 1928 and 1929.-Gerald Sirkin (1975) found that the implied growth rates of dividends required to justify stock prices in 1928 and 1929 were quite conservative and lower than post-Second World War dividend growth rates.

However, examination of after-the-fact common stock yields and price-earning ratios can do no more than provide some ex post justification for suggesting that there was not excessive speculation during the Great Bull Market.- Each individual investor was motivated by that person's subjective expectations of each firm's future earnings and dividends and the future prices of shares of each firm's stock. Because of this element of subjectivity, not only can we never accurately know those values, but also we can never know how they varied among individuals. The market price we observe will be the end result of all of the actions of the market participants, and the observed price may be different from the price almost all of the participants expected.

In fact, there are some indications that there were differences in 1928 and 1929. Yields on common stocks were somewhat lower in 1928 and 1929. In October of 1928, brokers generally began raising margin requirements, and by the beginning of the fall of 1929, margin requirements were, on average, the highest in the history of the New York Stock Exchange. Though the discount and commercial paper rates had moved closely with the call and time rates on brokers' loans through 1927, the rates on brokers' loans increased much more sharply in 1928 and 1929.- This pulled in funds from corporations, private investors, and foreign banks as New York City banks sharply reduced their lending. These facts suggest that brokers and New York City bankers may have come to believe that stock prices had been bid above a sustainable level by late 1928 and early 1929. White (1990) created a quarterly index of dividends for firms in the Dow-Jones index and related this to the DJI. Through 1927 the two track closely, but in 1928 and 1929 the index of stock prices grows much more rapidly than the index of dividends.

The qualitative evidence for a bubble in the stock market in 1928 and 1929 that White assembled was strengthened by the findings of J. Bradford De Long and Andre Shleifer (1991). They examined closed-end mutual funds, a type of fund where investors wishing to liquidate must sell their shares to other individual investors allowing its fundamental value to be exactly measurable.- Using evidence from these funds, De Long and Shleifer estimated that in the summer of 1929, the Standard and Poor's composite stock price index was overvalued about 30 percent due to excessive investor optimism. Rappoport and White (1993 and 1994) found other evidence that supported a bubble in the stock market in 1928 and 1929. There was a sharp divergence between the growth of stock prices and dividends; there were increasing premiums on call and time brokers' loans in 1928 and 1929; margin requirements rose; and stock market volatility rose in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash.

There are several reasons for the creation of such a bubble. First, the fundamental values of earnings and dividends become difficult to assess when there are major industrial changes, such as the rapid changes in the automobile industry, the new electric utilities, and the new radio industry.- Eugene White (1990) suggests that "While investors had every reason to expect earnings to grow, they lacked the means to evaluate easily the future path of dividends." As a result investors bid up prices as they were swept up in the ongoing stock market boom. Second, participation in the stock market widened noticeably in the twenties. The new investors were relatively unsophisticated, and they were more likely to be caught up in the euphoria of the boom and bid prices upward.- New, inexperienced commission sales personnel were hired to sell stocks and they promised glowing returns on stocks they knew little about.

These observations were strengthened by the experimental work of economist Vernon Smith. (Bishop, 1987) In a number of experiments over a three-year period using students and Tucson businessmen and businesswomen, bubbles developed as inexperienced investors valued stocks differently and engaged in price speculation. As these investors in the experiments began to realize that speculative profits were unsustainable and uncertain, their dividend expectations changed, the market crashed, and ultimately stocks began trading at their fundamental dividend values. These bubbles and crashes occurred repeatedly, leading Smith to conjecture that there are few regulatory steps that can be taken to prevent a crash.

Though the bubble of 1928 and 1929 made some downward adjustment in stock prices inevitable, as Barsky and De Long have shown, changes in fundamentals govern the overall movements. And the end of the long bull market was almost certainly governed by this. In late 1928 and early 1929 there was a striking rise in economic activity, but a decline began somewhere between May and July of that year and was clearly evident by August of 1929. By the middle of August, the rise in stock prices had slowed down as better information on the contraction was received. There were repeated statements by leading figures that stocks were "overpriced" and the Federal Reserve System sharply increased the discount rate in August 1929 was well as continuing its call for banks to reduce their margin lending. As this information was assessed, the number of speculators selling stocks increased, and the number buying decreased. With the decreased demand, stock prices began to fall, and as more accurate information on the nature and extent of the decline was received, stock prices fell more. The late October crash made the decline occur much more rapidly, and the margin purchases and consequent forced selling of many of those stocks contributed to a more severe price fall. The recovery of stock prices from November 13 into April of 1930 suggests that stock prices may have been driven somewhat too low during the crash.

There is now widespread agreement that the 1929 stock market crash did not cause the Great Depression. Instead, the initial downturn in economic activity was a primary determinant of the ending of the 1928-29 stock market bubble. The stock market crash did make the downturn become more severe beginning in November 1929. It reduced discretionary consumption spending (Romer, 1990) and created greater income uncertainty helping to bring on the contraction (Flacco and Parker, 1992). Though stock market prices reached a bottom and began to recover following November 13, 1929, the continuing decline in economic activity took its toll and by May 1930 stock prices resumed their decline and continued to fall through the summer of 1932.
Domestic Trade
In the nineteenth century, a complex array of wholesalers, jobbers, and retailers had developed, but changes in the postbellum period reduced the role of the wholesalers and jobbers and strengthened the importance of the retailers in domestic trade. (Cochran, 1977; Chandler, 1977; Marburg, 1951; Clewett, 1951) The appearance of the department store in the major cities and the rise of mail order firms in the postbellum period changed the retailing market.

Department Stores

A department store is a combination of specialty stores organized as departments within one general store. A. T. Stewart's huge 1846 dry goods store in New York City is often referred to as the first department store. (Resseguie, 1965; Sobel-Sicilia, 1986) R. H. Macy started his dry goods store in 1858 and Wanamaker's in Philadelphia opened in 1876. By the end of the nineteenth century, every city of any size had at least one major department store. (Appel, 1930; Benson, 1986; Hendrickson, 1979; Hower, 1946; Sobel, 1974) Until the late twenties, the department store field was dominated by independent stores, though some department stores in the largest cities had opened a few suburban branches and stores in other cities. In the interwar period department stores accounted for about 8 percent of retail sales.

The department stores relied on a "one-price" policy, which Stewart is credited with beginning. In the antebellum period and into the postbellum period, it was common not to post a specific price on an item; rather, each purchaser haggled with a sales clerk over what the price would be. Stewart posted fixed prices on the various dry goods sold, and the customer could either decide to buy or not buy at the fixed price. The policy dramatically lowered transactions costs for both the retailer and the purchaser. Prices were reduced with a smaller markup over the wholesale price, and a large sales volume and a quicker turnover of the store's inventory generated profits.

Mail Order Firms

What changed the department store field in the twenties was the entrance of Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, the two dominant mail order firms in the United States. (Emmet-Jeuck, 1950; Chandler, 1962, 1977) Both firms had begun in the late nineteenth century and by 1914 the younger Sears Roebuck had surpassed Montgomery Ward. Both located in Chicago due to its central location in the nation's rail network and both had benefited from the advent of Rural Free Delivery in 1896 and low cost Parcel Post Service in 1912.

In 1924 Sears hired Robert C. Wood, who was able to convince Sears Roebuck to open retail stores. Wood believed that the declining rural population and the growing urban population forecast the gradual demise of the mail order business; survival of the mail order firms required a move into retail sales. By 1925 Sears Roebuck had opened 8 retail stores, and by 1929 it had 324 stores. Montgomery Ward quickly followed suit. Rather than locating these in the central business district (CBD), Wood located many on major streets closer to the residential areas. These moves of Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward expanded department store retailing and provided a new type of chain store.

Chain Stores

Though chain stores grew rapidly in the first two decades of the twentieth century, they date back to the 1860s when George F. Gilman and George Huntington Hartford opened a string of New York City A&P (Atlantic and Pacific) stores exclusively to sell tea. (Beckman-Nolen, 1938; Lebhar, 1963; Bullock, 1933) Stores were opened in other regions and in 1912 their first "cash-and-carry" full-range grocery was opened. Soon they were opening 50 of these stores each week and by the 1920s A&P had 14,000 stores. They then phased out the small stores to reduce the chain to 4,000 full-range, supermarket-type stores. A&P's success led to new grocery store chains such as Kroger, Jewel Tea, and Safeway.

Prior to A&P's cash-and-carry policy, it was common for grocery stores, produce (or green) grocers, and meat markets to provide home delivery and credit, both of which were costly. As a result, retail prices were generally marked up well above the wholesale prices. In cash-and-carry stores, items were sold only for cash; no credit was extended, and no expensive home deliveries were provided. Markups on prices could be much lower because other costs were much lower. Consumers liked the lower prices and were willing to pay cash and carry their groceries, and the policy became common by the twenties.

Chains also developed in other retail product lines. In 1879 Frank W. Woolworth developed a "5 and 10 Cent Store," or dime store, and there were over 1,000 F. W. Woolworth stores by the mid-1920s. (Winkler, 1940) Other firms such as Kresge, Kress, and McCrory successfully imitated Woolworth's dime store chain. J.C. Penney's dry goods chain store began in 1901 (Beasley, 1948), Walgreen's drug store chain began in 1909, and shoes, jewelry, cigars, and other lines of merchandise also began to be sold through chain stores.

Self-Service Policies

In 1916 Clarence Saunders, a grocer in Memphis, Tennessee, built upon the one-price policy and began offering self-service at his Piggly Wiggly store. Previously, customers handed a clerk a list or asked for the items desired, which the clerk then collected and the customer paid for. With self-service, items for sale were placed on open shelves among which the customers could walk, carrying a shopping bag or pushing a shopping cart. Each customer could then browse as he or she pleased, picking out whatever was desired. Saunders and other retailers who adopted the self-service method of retail selling found that customers often purchased more because of exposure to the array of products on the shelves; as well, self-service lowered the labor required for retail sales and therefore lowered costs.

Shopping Centers

Shopping Centers, another innovation in retailing that began in the twenties, was not destined to become a major force in retail development until after the Second World War. The ultimate cause of this innovation was the widening ownership and use of the automobile. By the 1920s, as the ownership and use of the car began expanding, population began to move out of the crowded central cities toward the more open suburbs. When General Robert Wood set Sears off on its development of urban stores, he located these not in the central business district, CBD, but as free-standing stores on major arteries away from the CBD with sufficient space for parking.

At about the same time, a few entrepreneurs began to develop shopping centers. Yehoshua Cohen (1972) says, "The owner of such a center was responsible for maintenance of the center, its parking lot, as well as other services to consumers and retailers in the center." Perhaps the earliest such shopping center was the Country Club Plaza built in 1922 by the J. C. Nichols Company in Kansas City, Missouri. Other early shopping centers appeared in Baltimore and Dallas. By the mid-1930s the concept of a planned shopping center was well known and was expected to be the means to capture the trade of the growing number of suburban consumers.

International Trade and Finance

In the twenties a gold exchange standard was developed to replace the gold standard of the prewar world. Under a gold standard, each country's currency carried a fixed exchange rate with gold, and the currency had to be backed up by gold. As a result, all countries on the gold standard had fixed exchange rates with all other countries. Adjustments to balance international trade flows were made by gold flows. If a country had a deficit in its trade balance, gold would leave the country, forcing the money stock to decline and prices to fall. Falling prices made the deficit countries' exports more attractive and imports more costly, reducing the deficit. Countries with a surplus imported gold, which increased the money stock and caused prices to rise. This made the surplus countries' exports less attractive and imports more attractive, decreasing the surplus. Most economists who have studied the prewar gold standard contend that it did not work as the conventional textbook model says, because capital flows frequently reduced or eliminated the need for gold flows for long periods of time. However, there is no consensus on whether fortuitous circumstances, rather than the gold standard, saved the international economy from periodic convulsions or whether the gold standard as it did work was sufficient to promote stability and growth in international transactions.

After the First World War it was argued that there was a "shortage" of fluid monetary gold to use for the gold standard, so some method of "economizing" on gold had to be found. To do this, two basic changes were made. First, most nations, other than the United States, stopped domestic circulation of gold. Second, the "gold exchange" system was created. Most countries held their international reserves in the form of U.S. dollars or British pounds and international transactions used dollars or pounds, as long as the United States and Great Britain stood ready to exchange their currencies for gold at fixed exchange rates. However, the overvaluation of the pound and the undervaluation of the franc threatened these arrangements. The British trade deficit led to a capital outflow, higher interest rates, and a weak economy. In the late twenties, the French trade surplus led to the importation of gold that they did not allow to expand the money supply.

Economizing on gold by no longer allowing its domestic circulation and by using key currencies as international monetary reserves was really an attempt to place the domestic economies under the control of the nations' politicians and make them independent of international events. Unfortunately, in doing this politicians eliminated the equilibrating mechanism of the gold standard but had nothing with which to replace it. The new international monetary arrangements of the twenties were potentially destabilizing because they were not allowed to operate as a price mechanism promoting equilibrating adjustments.

There were other problems with international economic activity in the twenties. Because of the war, the United States was abruptly transformed from a debtor to a creditor on international accounts. Though the United States did not want reparations payments from Germany, it did insist that Allied governments repay American loans. The Allied governments then insisted on war reparations from Germany. These initial reparations assessments were quite large. The Allied Reparations Commission collected the charges by supervising Germany's foreign trade and by internal controls on the German economy, and it was authorized to increase the reparations if it was felt that Germany could pay more. The treaty allowed France to occupy the Ruhr after Germany defaulted in 1923.

Ultimately, this tangled web of debts and reparations, which was a major factor in the course of international trade, depended upon two principal actions. First, the United States had to run an import surplus or, on net, export capital out of the United States to provide a pool of dollars overseas. Germany then had either to have an export surplus or else import American capital so as to build up dollar reserves-that is, the dollars the United States was exporting. In effect, these dollars were paid by Germany to Great Britain, France, and other countries that then shipped them back to the United States as payment on their U.S. debts. If these conditions did not occur, (and note that the "new" gold standard of the twenties had lost its flexibility because the price adjustment mechanism had been eliminated) disruption in international activity could easily occur and be transmitted to the domestic economies.

In the wake of the 1920-21 depression Congress passed the Emergency Tariff Act, which raised tariffs, particularly on manufactured goods. (Figures 26 and 27) The Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922 continued the Emergency Tariff of 1921, and its protection on many items was extremely high, ranging from 60 to 100 percent ad valorem (or as a percent of the price of the item). The increases in the Fordney-McCumber tariff were as large and sometimes larger than the more famous (or "infamous") Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930. As farm product prices fell at the end of the decade presidential candidate Herbert Hoover proposed, as part of his platform, tariff increases and other changes to aid the farmers. In January 1929, after Hoover's election, but before he took office, a tariff bill was introduced into Congress. Special interests succeeded in gaining additional (or new) protection for most domestically produced commodities and the goal of greater protection for the farmers tended to get lost in the increased protection for multitudes of American manufactured products. In spite of widespread condemnation by economists, President Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff in June 1930 and rates rose sharply.

Following the First World War, the U.S. government actively promoted American exports, and in each of the postwar years through 1929, the United States recorded a surplus in its balance of trade. (Figure 28) However, the surplus declined in the 1930s as both exports and imports fell sharply after 1929. From the mid-1920s on finished manufactures were the most important exports, while agricultural products dominated American imports.

The majority of the funds that allowed Germany to make its reparations payments to France and Great Britain and hence allowed those countries to pay their debts to the United States came from the net flow of capital out of the United States in the form of direct investment in real assets and investments in long- and short-term foreign financial assets. After the devastating German hyperinflation of 1922 and 1923, the Dawes Plan reformed the German economy and currency and accelerated the U.S. capital outflow. American investors began to actively and aggressively pursue foreign investments, particularly loans (Lewis, 1938) and in the late twenties there was a marked deterioration in the quality of foreign bonds sold in the United States. (Mintz, 1951)

The system, then, worked well as long as there was a net outflow of American capital, but this did not continue. In the middle of 1928, the flow of short-term capital began to decline. In 1928 the flow of "other long-term" capital out of the United States was 752 million dollars, but in 1929 it was only 34 million dollars. Though arguments now exist as to whether the booming stock market in the United States was to blame for this, it had far-reaching effects on the international economic system and the various domestic economies.

The Start of the Depression

The United States had the majority of the world's monetary gold, about 40 percent, by 1920. In the latter part of the twenties, France also began accumulating gold as its share of the world's monetary gold rose from 9 percent in 1927 to 17 percent in 1929 and 22 percent by 1931. In 1927 the Federal Reserve System had reduced discount rates (the interest rate at which they lent reserves to member commercial banks) and engaged in open market purchases (purchasing U.S. government securities on the open market to increase the reserves of the banking system) to push down interest rates and assist Great Britain in staying on the gold standard. By early 1928 the Federal Reserve System was worried about its loss of gold due to this policy as well as the ongoing boom in the stock market. It began to raise the discount rate to stop these outflows. Gold was also entering the United States so that foreigners could obtain dollars to invest in stocks and bonds. As the United States and France accumulated more and more of the world's monetary gold, other countries' central banks took contractionary steps to stem the loss of gold. In country after country these deflationary strategies began contracting economic activity and by 1928 some countries in Europe, Asia, and South America had entered into a depression. More countries' economies began to decline in 1929, including the United States, and by 1930 a depression was in force for almost all of the world's market economies. (Temin, 1989; Eichengreen, 1992)
Monetary and Fiscal Policies in the 1920s Fiscal Policies
As a tool to promote stability in aggregate economic activity, fiscal policy is largely a post-Second World War phenomenon. Prior to 1930 the federal government's spending and taxing decisions were largely, but not completely, based on the perceived "need" for government-provided public goods and services.

Though the fiscal policy concept had not been developed, this does not mean that during the twenties no concept of the government's role in stimulating economic activity existed. Herbert Stein (1990) points out that in the twenties Herbert Hoover and some of his contemporaries shared two ideas about the proper role of the federal government. The first was that federal spending on public works could be an important force in reducin investment. Both concepts fit the ideas held by Hoover and others of his persuasion that the U.S. economy of the twenties was not the result of laissez-faire workings but of "deliberate social engineering."

The federal personal income tax was enacted in 1913. Though mildly progressive, its rates were low and topped out at 7 percent on taxable income in excess of $750,000. (Table 4) As the United States prepared for war in 1916, rates were increased and reached a maximum marginal rate of 12 percent. With the onset of the First World War, the rates were dramatically increased. To obtain additional revenue in 1918, marginal rates were again increased. The share of federal revenue generated by income taxes rose from 11 percent in 1914 to 69 percent in 1920. The tax rates had been extended downward so that more than 30 percent of the nation's income recipients were subject to income taxes by 1918. However, through the purchase of tax exempt state and local securities and through steps taken by corporations to avoid the cash distribution of profits, the number of high income taxpayers and their share of total taxes paid declined as Congress kept increasing the tax rates. The normal (or base) tax rate was reduced slightly for 1919 but the surtax rates, which made the income tax highly progressive, were retained. (Smiley-Keehn, 1995)

President Harding's new Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, proposed cutting the tax rates, arguing that the rates in the higher brackets had "passed the point of productivity" and rates in excess of 70 percent simply could not be collected. Though most agreed that the rates were too high, there was sharp disagreement on how the rates should be cut. Democrats and Progressive Republicans argued for rate cuts targeted for the lower income taxpayers while maintaining most of the steep progressivity of the tax rates. They believed that remedies could be found to change the tax laws to stop the legal avoidance of federal income taxes. Republicans argued for sharper cuts that reduced the progressivity of the rates. Mellon proposed a maximum rate of 25 percent.

Though the federal income tax rates were reduced and made less progressive, it took three tax rate cuts in 1921, 1924, and 1925 before Mellon's goal was finally achieved. The highest marginal tax rate was reduced from 73 percent to 58 percent to 46 percent and finally to 25 percent for the 1925 tax year. All of the other rates were also reduced and exemptions increased. By 1926, only about the top 10 percent of income recipients were subject to federal income taxes. As tax rates were reduced, the number of high income tax returns increased and the share of total federal personal income taxes paid rose. (Tables 5 and 6) Even with the dramatic income tax rate cuts and reductions in the number of low income taxpayers, federal personal income tax revenue continued to rise during the 1920s. Though early estimates of the distribution of personal income showed sharp increases in income inequality during the 1920s (Kuznets, 1953; Holt, 1977), more recent estimates have found that the increases in inequality were considerably less and these appear largely to be related to the sharp rise in capital gains due to the booming stock market in the late twenties. (Smiley, 1998 and 2000)

Each year in the twenties the federal government generated a surplus, in some years as much as 1 percent of GNP. The surpluses were used to reduce the federal deficit and it declined by 25 percent between 1920 and 1930. Contrary to simple macroeconomic models that argue a federal government budget surplus must be contractionary and tend to stop an economy from reaching full employment, the American economy operated at full-employment or close to it throughout the twenties and saw significant economic growth. In this case, the surpluses were not contractionary because the dollars were circulated back into the economy through the purchase of outstanding federal debt rather than pulled out as currency and held in a vault somewhere.
Monetary Policies
In 1913 fear of the "money trust" and their monopoly power led Congress to create 12 central banks when they created the Federal Reserve System. The new central banks were to control money and credit and act as lenders of last resort to end banking panics. The role of the Federal Reserve Board, located in Washington, D.C., was to coordinate the policies of the 12 district banks; it was composed of five presidential appointees and the current secretary of the treasury and comptroller of the currency. All national banks had to become members of the Federal Reserve System, the Fed, and any state bank meeting the qualifications could elect to do so.

The act specified fixed reserve requirements on demand and time deposits, all of which had to be on deposit in the district bank. Commercial banks were allowed to rediscount commercial paper and given Federal Reserve currency. Initially, each district bank set its own rediscount rate. To provide additional income when there was little rediscounting, the district banks were allowed to engage in open market operations that involved the purchasing and selling of federal government securities, short-term securities of state and local governments issued in anticipation of taxes, foreign exchange, and domestic bills of exchange. The district banks were also designated to act as fiscal agents for the federal government. Finally, the Federal Reserve System provided a central check clearinghouse for the entire banking system.

When the Federal Reserve System was originally set up, it was believed that its primary role was to be a lender of last resort to prevent banking panics and become a check-clearing mechanism for the nation's banks. Both the Federal Reserve Board and the Governors of the District Banks were bodies established to jointly exercise these activities. The division of functions was not clear, and a struggle for power ensued, mainly between the New York Federal Reserve Bank, which was led by J. P. Morgan's protege, Benjamin Strong, through 1928, and the Federal Reserve Board. By the thirties the Federal Reserve Board had achieved dominance.

There were really two conflicting criteria upon which monetary actions were ostensibly based: the Gold Standard and the Real Bills Doctrine. The Gold Standard was supposed to be quasi-automatic, with an effective limit to the quantity of money. However, the Real Bills Doctrine (which required that all loans be made on short-term, self-liquidating commercial paper) had no effective limit on the quantity of money. The rediscounting of eligible commercial paper was supposed to lead to the required "elasticity" of the stock of money to "accommodate" the needs of industry and business. Actually the rediscounting of commercial paper, open market purchases, and gold inflows all had the same effects on the money stock.

The 1920-21 Depression

During the First World War, the Fed kept discount rates low and granted discounts on banks' customer loans used to purchase V-bonds in order to help finance the war. The final Victory Loan had not been floated when the Armistice was signed in November of 1918: in fact, it took until October of 1919 for the government to fully sell this last loan issue. The Treasury, with the secretary of the treasury sitting on the Federal Reserve Board, persuaded the Federal Reserve System to maintain low interest rates and discount the Victory bonds necessary to keep bond prices high until this last issue had been floated. As a result, during this period the money supply grew rapidly and prices rose sharply.

A shift from a federal deficit to a surplus and supply disruptions due to steel and coal strikes in 1919 and a railroad strike in early 1920 contributed to the end of the boom. But the most-common view is that the Fed's monetary policy was the main determinant of the end of the expansion and inflation and the beginning of the subsequent contraction and severe deflation. When the Fed was released from its informal agreement with the Treasury in November of 1919, it raised the discount rate from 4 to 4.75 percent. Benjamin Strong (the governor of the New York bank) was beginning to believe that the time for strong action was past and that the Federal Reserve System's actions should be moderate. However, with Strong out of the country, the Federal Reserve Board increased the discount rate from 4.75 to 6 percent in late January of 1920 and to 7 percent on June 1, 1920. By the middle of 1920, economic activity and employment were rapidly falling, and prices had begun their downward spiral in one of the sharpest price declines in American history. The Federal Reserve System kept the discount rate at 7 percent until May 5, 1921, when it was lowered to 6.5 percent. By June of 1922, the rate had been lowered yet again to 4 percent. (Friedman and Schwartz, 1963)

The Federal Reserve System authorities received considerable criticism then and later for their actions. Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz (1963) contend that the discount rate was raised too much too late and then kept too high for too long, causing the decline to be more severe and the price deflation to be greater. In their opinion the Fed acted in this manner due to the necessity of meeting the legal reserve requirement with a safe margin of gold reserves. Elmus Wicker (1966), however, argues that the gold reserve ratio was not the main factor determining the Federal Reserve policy in the episode. Rather, the Fed knowingly pursued a deflationary policy because it felt that the money supply was simply too large and prices too high. To return to the prewar parity for gold required lowering the price level, and there was an excessive stock of money because the additional money had been used to finance the war, not to produce consumer goods. Finally, the outstanding indebtedness was too large due to the creation of Fed credit.

Whether statutory gold reserve requirements to maintain the gold standard or domestic credit conditions were the most important determinant of Fed policy is still an open question, though both certainly had some influence. Regardless of the answer to that question, the Federal Reserve System's first major undertaking in the years immediately following the First World War demonstrated poor policy formulation.

Federal Reserve Policies from 1922 to 1930

By 1921 the district banks began to recognize that their open market purchases had effects on interest rates, the money stock, and economic activity. For the next several years, economists in the Federal Reserve System discussed how this worked and how it could be related to discounting by member banks. A committee was created to coordinate the open market purchases of the district banks.

The recovery from the 1920-1921 depression had proceeded smoothly with moderate price increases. In early 1923 the Fed sold some securities and increased the discount rate from 4 percent as they believed the recovery was too rapid. However, by the fall of 1923 there were some signs of a business slump. McMillin and Parker (1994) argue that this contraction, as well as the 1927 contraction, were related to oil price shocks. By October of 1923 Benjamin Strong was advocating securities purchases to counter this. Between then and September 1924 the Federal Reserve System increased its securities holdings by over $500 million. Between April and August of 1924 the Fed reduced the discount rate to 3 percent in a series of three separate steps. In addition to moderating the mild business slump, the expansionary policy was also intended to reduce American interest rates relative to British interest rates. This reversed the gold flow back toward Great Britain allowing Britain to return to the gold standard in 1925. At the time it appeared that the Fed's monetary policy had successfully accomplished its goals.

By the summer of 1924 the business slump was over and the economy again began to grow rapidly. By the mid-1920s real estate speculation had arisen in many urban areas in the United States and especially in Southeastern Florida. Land prices were rising sharply. Stock market prices had also begun rising more rapidly. The Fed expressed some worry about these developments and in 1926 sold some securities to gently slow the real estate and stock market boom. Amid hurricanes and supply bottlenecks the Florida real estate boom collapsed but the stock market boom continued.

The American economy entered into another mild business recession in the fall of 1926 that lasted until the fall of 1927. One of the factors in this was Henry's Ford's shut down of all of his factories to changeover from the Model T to the Model A. His employees were left without a job and without income for over six months. International concerns also reappeared. France, which was preparing to return to the gold standard, had begun accumulating gold and gold continued to flow into the United States. Some of this gold came from Great Britain making it difficult for the British to remain on the gold standard. This occasioned a new experiment in central bank cooperation. In July 1927 Benjamin Strong arranged a conference with Governor Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, Governor Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank, and Deputy Governor Charles Ritt of the Bank of France in an attempt to promote cooperation among the world's central bankers. By the time the conference began the Fed had already taken steps to counteract the business slump and reduce the gold inflow. In early 1927 the Fed reduced discount rates and made large securities purchases. One result of this was that the gold stock fell from $4.3 billion in mid-1927 to $3.8 billion in mid-1928. Some of the gold exports went to France and France returned to the gold standard with its undervalued currency. The loss of gold from Britain eased allowing it to maintain the gold standard.

By early 1928 the Fed was again becoming worried. Stock market prices were rising even faster and the apparent speculative bubble in the stock market was of some concern to Fed authorities. The Fed was also concerned about the loss of gold and wanted to bring that to an end. To do this they sold securities and, in three steps, raised the discount rate to 5 percent by July 1928. To this point the Federal Reserve Board had largely agreed with district Bank policy changes. However, problems began to develop.

During the stock market boom of the late 1920s the Federal Reserve Board preferred to use "moral suasion" rather than increases in discount rates to lessen member bank borrowing. The New York City bank insisted that moral suasion would not work unless backed up by literal credit rationing on a bank by bank basis which they, and the other district banks, were unwilling to do. They insisted that discount rates had to be increased. The Federal Reserve Board countered that this general policy change would slow down economic activity in general rather than be specifically targeted to stock market speculation. The result was that little was done for a year. Rates were not raised but no open market purchases were undertaken. Rates were finally raised to 6 percent in August of 1929. By that time the contraction had already begun. In late October the stock market crashed, and America slid into the Great Depression.

In November, following the stock market crash the Fed reduced discount rates to 4.5 percent. In January they again decreased discount rates and began a series of discount rate decreases until the rate reached 2.5 percent at the end of 1930. No further open market operations were undertaken for the next six months. As banks reduced their discounting in 1930, the stock of money declined. There was a banking crisis in the southeast in November and December of 1930, and in its wake the public's holding of currency relative to deposits and banks' reserve ratios began to rise and continued to do so through the end of the Great Depression.

Conclusion

Though some disagree, there is growing evidence that the behavior of the American economy in the 1920s did not cause the Great Depression. The depressed 1930s were not "retribution" for the exuberant growth of the 1920s. The weakness of a few economic sectors in the 1920s did not forecast the contraction from 1929 to 1933. Rather it was the depression of the 1930s and the Second World War that interrupted the economic growth begun in the 1920s and resumed after the Second World War. Just as the construction of skyscrapers that began in the 1920s resumed in the 1950s, so did real economic growth and progress resume. In retrospect we can see that the introduction and expansion of new technologies and industries in the 1920s, such as autos, household electric appliances, radio, and electric utilities, are echoed in the 1990s in the effects of the expanding use and development of the personal computer and the rise of the internet. The 1920s have much to teach us about the growth and development of the American economy.

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Ulman Lloyd. The Rise of the National Trade Union. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955.

U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, 2 volumes. Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 1976.

Walsh, Margaret. Making Connections: The Long Distance Bus Industry in the U.S.A. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000.

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The interwar period in the United States, and in the rest of the world, is a most interesting era. The decade of the 1930s marks the most severe depression in our history and ushered in sweeping changes in the role of government. Economists and historians have rightly given much attention to that decade.

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How the Great War Turned America Into an Economic Superpower

The front page of The Evening World on July 3, 1915. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

On the morning of July 3, 1915, an intruder holding two pistols barged into the Long Island mansion of America's most powerful banker, J.P. Morgan, Jr. In the ensuing struggle, the attacker was subdued, but not until he wounded Morgan twice in the thigh.

The gunman turned out to be a former German teacher at Harvard, who had set off a bomb at the U.S. Capitol the day before. Although no direct link to the German government was proven, the attack on Morgan appeared to be part of a larger effort by Germany to stop American support for the Allied forces of Britain and France in the Great War.

The U.S. was not providing military support - not yet. In 1915, America was still politically neutral. It was not, however, economically neutral, having offered the Allies financial support since the earliest days of the war. As the conflict dragged on, the British and French had required larger and larger loans to keep themselves afloat. And no one was happier to provide it than Morgan. A committed anglophile, he would eventually secure a $500 million dollar line of credit for the French and British - the biggest foreign loan in Wall Street history.

"If you sympathized with Germany, then Morgan was your ultimate enemy," says Christopher Capozzola, associate professor of history at MIT, in American Experience's film The Great War. "And because he was so powerful as an individual, it was actually possible to believe that assassinating him could actually stop the war."

But Morgan lived and the war continued, sustained by American dollars - and supplies. Morgan himself served as a purchasing agent, helping to procure the millions of pounds of food and armaments the Allies required every month.

Before the war, America had been stuck in a recession; World War I swiftly put an end to that. Even before the U.S. entered the conflict, its factories had switched from civilian to military production, and its farmers were growing food to feed armies. These events marked a momentous shift in global might. As economic historian Adam Tooze writes in his book The Deluge, for a century, the British Empire had been the largest economic power in the world; in 1916, its output was overtaken by that of the United States.

When the U.S. did enter the war on the side of the Allies in April of 1917, it had an economic interest in winning it. According to Tooze, "By the end of 1916, American investors had wagered $2 billion on an Entente victory" - a staggering sum in those days.

That bet paid off; by the time of the Washington Naval Conference in November of 1921, the governments of Britain, France, and Italy owed the American taxpayer a combined $9.8 billion. The war had turned the U.S. into a creditor, instead of a debtor, for the first time in its history.

Unlike its European counterparts, who suffered massive casualties, as well as economic and political hardship, America had emerged from World War I more powerful than ever before. "The American state was perhaps the only state that really won the First World War," says Jay Winter, professor of history at Yale University, who appears in The Great War. "Everybody else lost, including the winners, because they lost so much."

The world order had been fundamentally realigned, with a new superpower at its center. As Tooze writes, from 1916 "down to the beginning of the twenty-first century, American economic might would be the decisive factor in the shaping of the world order."

Source:
Tooze, Adam, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 (New York, New York: Viking Penguin, 2014).

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An Economic Superpower | American Experience | PBS

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How the Great War Turned America Into an Economic Superpower On the morning of July 3, 1915, an intruder holding two pistols barged into the Long Island mansion of America's most powerful banker, J.P. Morgan, Jr. In the ensuing struggle, the attacker was subdued, but not until he wounded Morgan twice in the thigh.

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1920s consumption (article) | 1920s America | Khan Academy

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While World War I redrew political borders and introduced modern weaponry such as poison gas, machine guns and tanks, it also spurred the development of practical innovations. From Pilates to Kleenex to drones, these World War I innovations now permeate everyday life.

1. Trench Coats

Now a fashion icon, the trench coat first gained popularity among British officers during World War I because of its functionality. "They were different in cut and weight than the heavy overcoats worn by enlisted men," says Jonathan Casey, director of the archives and Edward Jones Research Center at the National World War I Museum and Memorial. The water-resistant overcoats proved superior to the standard wool coats in repelling the rain and chill of the trenches -from which the garment gained its name. They also featured flaps and rings for securing weapons and map cases. Within months of the war's start, London retailers such as Burberry and Aquascutum were advertising trench coats to the British public.

2. Daylight Saving Time

Come November, most Americans gain an extra hour-and then lose it again the following March. Although the idea of shifting time dates back centuries, Daylight Saving Time was first implemented in Germany in April 1916 as a wartime measure to conserve coal by having an extra hour of daylight in the evenings. Weeks later, the United Kingdom and other European countries followed suit. The United States implemented Daylight Saving Time in 1918.

3. Blood Banks

Doctors rarely performed blood transfusions prior to World War I. However, following the discovery of different blood types and the ability of refrigeration to extend shelf life, Captain Oswald Robertson, a U.S. Army doctor consulting with the British Army, established the first blood bank in 1917 on the Western Front. "The point was to have a blood supply as close to the front as possible for wounded patients," Casey says. To facilitate storage, blood was kept on ice for up to 28 days and sodium citrate was added to prevent clotting.

4. Sanitary Pads

During a European tour in 1914, Kimberly-Clark executives discovered a material made from processed wood pulp that was five times more absorbent than cotton and cost half as much to produce. With cotton in short supply during World War I, the company trademarked the creped wadding as Cellucotton and sold it to the American military for surgical dressing. Red Cross nurses, however, found another use for the cotton substitute as makeshift sanitary pads.

After the war's conclusion, Kimberly-Clark repurchased Cellucotton surplus from the military and, in 1920, launched its first commercial product-Kotex (short for "cotton texture") sanitary pads-made from 40 plies of Cellucotton hand-wrapped in fine gauze. The company initially struggled to get drug and department stores to stock the product and magazines refused to accept advertising until the Ladies Home Journal finally agreed. "It's an example of a product intended for one purpose ending up with a practical application for a second use," Casey says.

5. Kleenex

Kotex was not the only iconic product that Kimberly-Clark developed from Cellucotton. After experimenting with a thin, flattened version of Cellucotton for possible use as gas mask filters, the company launched it in 1924 as a disposable makeup and cold-cream remover under the brand name "Kleenex." (Using "clean" as a base word, Kimberly-Clark employed the "K" and "ex" from Kotex.) When women started complaining about their husbands blowing their noses in their Kleenex, Kimberly-Clark repositioned the tissues as handkerchief alternatives that prevented the spread of germs.

6. Pilates

Joseph Hubertus Pilates, a German bodybuilder who worked as a circus performer and boxer in Great Britain, was interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man after the outbreak of World War I. Frail as a child, Pilates had taken up bodybuilding, martial arts and yoga to build his strength. During his more than three years at the internment camp, Pilates developed a regimen of muscle strengthening through slow and precise stretching and physical movements, which he called "Contrology." He further aided the rehabilitation of bedridden internees by rigging springs and straps to their headboards and footboards for resistance training. In 1925, he opened an exercise studio in New York City that taught fitness techniques that would eventually bear his last name.

7. Stainless Steel

During the war, the British military was in search of harder alloys for their guns so they would be less susceptible to distortion from the heat and friction of firing. English metallurgist Harry Brearley discovered that adding chromium to molten iron produced steel that wouldn't rust. Although stainless steel was not used for guns, its use during World War I to manufacture aircraft engines, mess kit silverware and medical instruments launched its popularity.

8. Zippers

Although not called the zipper until the B.F. Goodrich Company coined the term in 1923, the "hookless fastener" was perfected by Gideon Sundback during World War I. The first major order of zippers came for money belts worn by soldiers and sailors who lacked uniform pockets. While buttons remained the convention on military uniforms during the war, zippers began to be sewn into the flying suits of aviators and took off in popularity in the 1920s.

9. Wristwatches

Prior to World War I, wristwatches were worn almost exclusively by women as fashion accessories. Most men used pocket watches on chains as their timekeepers, but they proved impractical in trench warfare. "It was a lot easier to wear a wristwatch than use a pocket watch in the heat of battle, particularly for an officer who might have a sidearm in one hand and a whistle in another," Casey says. Wristwatches also proved necessary for aviators who needed both hands at all times. After proving their utility in warfare, wristwatches gained acceptance as men's fashion accessories.

10. Drones

Fewer than 15 years after Orville Wright soared over the dunes of Kitty Hawk, he participated in the American military's first experiments with unmanned aircraft. Charles Kettering supervised the experiments and, in 1918, successfully tested an unmanned aerial torpedo that could strike a target at a distance of 75 miles. Launched by a dolly-and-track system, the "Kettering Bug" consisted of a papier-mâché fuselage and cardboard wings. It relied on a barometer and gyroscope for guidance. The war ended, however, before it could be ready for combat.

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WWI Inventions, From Pilates to Zippers, That We Still Use Today | HISTORY

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Small inventions made life easier during-and after-the war.

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World War I, originally called the Great War, resulted in more than nine million deaths. The official starting point was the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. However, this was simply the spark that lit a tinder keg of overbuilt armies, im…

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The Eighteenth Amendment was ratified on January 16, 1919, and prohibited the making of, sale, or transportation of alcohol. The amendment came as a result of roughly a century of reform movements. Early temperance advocates aimed to reduce alcohol consumption and prevent alcoholism, drunkenness, and the disorder and violence it could result in. Theses early efforts promoted temperate consumption with hopes for eventual prohibition.

By the mid 1830s, over 200,000 people belonged to the American Temperance Society. Many of the most prominent proponents of temperance were women, seen as the more virtuous sex and responsible for children's moral education. Lacking in rights and protections, women were also frequently those most affected by the symptoms of alcoholic family members.

By the late 1800s, support for prohibition was strong, particularly amongst progressives who favored social reform and a greater nationwide morality. The Anti-Saloon League, backed by many women and Protestants, was a driving force in abolishing alcohol manufacture. After a temporary wartime prohibition to save grain during World War I, the Eighteenth Amendment was submitted by Congress for state ratification. It was quickly ratified within a year and would stand as law for the next 13 years.

The Twenty-First Amendment, which repealed the Eighteenth Amendment, was ratified on December 5, 1933. The decision to repeal a constitutional amendment was unprecedented and came as a response to the crime and general ineffectiveness associated with prohibition. The Twenty-First Amendment also has the distinction of being the only amendment ratified, not by state legislature, but by state ratifying conventions.

Despite the continued strength of the temperance lobby, prohibition had lost its popular support by 1933. Though it had reduced alcoholism and drunkenness, it had also created new problems in lawlessness and fortified the system of organized crime. A black market for alcohol sprung up quickly after prohibition went into effect, especially within the mob, and alcohol remained easily accessible to citizens willing to visit a speakeasy or make it themselves. Organized crime members made so much money on liquor that they were able to bribe police forces, accomplishing non- and selective enforcement of the law. Whether favorable towards prohibition or not, citizens were alarmed by a breakdown in the rule of law. The Great Depression, and a resulting economic need for tax revenue and jobs, also influenced desires for a legal alcohol industry.

In the years after ratification, the Twenty-First Amendment was interpreted as giving states the authority to regulate their own prohibitory practices. For this reason, our modern-day policies vary across the country.
Below is a collection of resources recognizing these important pieces of American law and the Prohibition era. Browse these resources or jump from section to section by clicking the links below:

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The Eighteenth and Twenty-First Amendments: Prohibition in America - Jack Miller Center

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The Eighteenth Amendment was ratified on January 16, 1919, and prohibited the making of, sale, or transportation of alcohol. The amendment came as a result of roughly a century of reform movements. Early temperance advocates aimed to reduce alcohol consumption and prevent alcoholism, drunkenness, and the disorder and violence it could result in.

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Unintended Consequences | Prohibition | Ken Burns | PBS

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The story of the rise, rule, and fall of prohibition and the entire era it encompassed. Full film now streaming.

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Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Amy K. Post, September 24, 1848, in For an overview of this early spread of women's rights activism, the best source is still the first volume of the Wisconsin's provision for noncitizens to vote spread, until by 1890 in seventeen states a declared Notes:
Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, ed. Ann D. Gordon et al. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 1:123. Hereafter SAP. History of Woman Suffrage, ed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda J. Gage (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1881).
intention to become a citizen was sufficient to qualify men to vote. The variety of ways that states found to exclude residents from voting in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are conveniently tabulated in Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), appendix.

[4] Native Americans living under tribal government were defined as not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the federal government and therefore not citizens despite their birthplace.
[5] Remarks to Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, November 22, 1866, SAP, 1:605.
[6] Joint Resolution, H.R. 371, 40th Cong., 3rd sess. (1868).
[7] Joint Resolution, H.R. 15, 41st Cong., 1st sess. (1869). A word about numbers: Sixteenth Amendment was the designation of a proposed woman suffrage amendment from 1870 until 1913, when two amendments were added to the Constitution. An amendment allowing a federal income tax became the sixteenth and a change in how senators were elected, from legislative action to direct popular vote, became the seventeenth. In 1919, an amendment to prohibit the making and selling of liquor became the eighteenth.
[8] Examples of direct action by women in this period are compiled in Appendix C, "Women Who Went to the Polls, 1868 to 1873," SAP, 2:645-654. Also available at http://ecssba.rutgers.edu/resources/wompolls.html.
[9] Two cases from the protest in the District of Columbia were on the docket for the Supreme Court for fall 1873, but after two postponements, the court passed over the case. Minutes of the Supreme Court of the United States, vol. 31, December 11, 1873, and vol. 32, October 16, 1874, RG 267, National Archives.
[10] United States v. Susan B. Anthony, 11 Blatchford 200, 204 (1873). For more on this trial and its context, see the Federal Judicial Center's site .
[11] Virginia Minor v. Reese Happersett, 21 Wallace 162, 178 (1875). See also the National Park Service site.
[12] "Is It a Crime for a U.S. Citizen to Vote?" January 16, 1873, SAP, 2:569.
[13] Congressional Record, 49th Cong., 2nd sess., January 25, 1887, pp. 986-1003. See also coverage in Washington Post, January 26, 1887.
[14] National American Woman Suffrage Association Business Committee to Editor, Times-Democrat (New Orleans), March 18, 1903, SAP, 6:470.
[15] See Allison L. Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 129-134.
[16] Broadside, " Equal Suffrage and the Negro Vote," Equal Suffrage League of Virginia, Virginia Historical Library, Encyclopedia Virginia.
[17] William Pickens, Nation, October 6, 1920.

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Looking for a Right to Vote: Introducing the Nineteenth Amendment (U.S. National Park Service)

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Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Amy K. Post, September 24, 1848, in For an overview of this early spread of women's rights activism, the best source is still the first volume of the Wisconsin's provision for noncitizens to vote spread, until by 1890 in seventeen states a declared Notes: Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B.

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Unintended Consequences | Prohibition | Ken Burns | PBS

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The story of the rise, rule, and fall of prohibition and the entire era it encompassed. Full film now streaming.

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Republican ascendancy: politics in the 1920s

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Republican ascendancy: politics in the 1920s

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The FBI and the American Gangster, 1924-1938

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The FBI and the American Gangster, 1924-1938

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The term "organized crime" didn't really exist in the United States before Prohibition. Criminal gangs had run amok in American cities since the late 19th-century, but they were mostly bands of street thugs running small-time extortion and loansharking rackets in predominantly ethnic Italian, Jewish, Irish and Polish neighborhoods.

In fact, before the passing of the 18th Amendment in 1919 and the nationwide ban that went into effect in January 1920 on the sale or importation of "intoxicating liquor," it wasn't the mobsters who ran the most organized criminal schemes in America, but corrupt political "bosses," explains Howard Abadinsky, a criminal justice professor at St. John's University and author of Organized Crime.

"The gangs were thugs in the employ of the political machines," says Abadinsky, intimidating opposition candidates and funneling votes to the boss. In return, the politicians and police chiefs would turn a blind eye to illegal gambling and prostitution rings.
READ MORE: Al Capone
But the underworld power dynamics shifted dramatically with the onset of Prohibition and the overnight outlawing of every bottle of beer, glass of wine and shot of booze in America. With legitimate bars and breweries out of business, someone had to step in to fuel the substantial thirst of the Roaring Twenties. And no one was better equipped than the mobsters.

Mobsters Hired Lawyers

The key to running a successful bootlegging operation, Abadinsky explains, was a paramilitary organization. At first, the street gangs didn't know a thing about business, but they knew how to handle a gun and how to intimidate the competition. They could protect illegal breweries and rum-running operations from rival gangs, provide security for speakeasies and pay off any nosey cops or politicians to look the other way.

It wasn't long before the mobsters were raking in absurd amounts of money and it was bosses and cops who were taking the orders. As the money kept pouring it, these formerly small-time street thugs had to get smart. They had to hire lawyers and accountants to launder the millions in ill-gotten cash piling up each month. They had to start thinking about strategic partnerships with other gangs and shipping logistics and real estate investment.

"They had to become businessmen," says Abadinsky. "And that gave rise to what we now call organized crime."

Before Prohibition, criminal gangs were local menaces, running protection rackets on neighborhood businesses and dabbling in vice entrepreneurship. But the overwhelming business opportunity of illegal booze changed everything. For one thing, sourcing and distributing alcohol is an interstate and even international enterprise. Mobsters couldn't work in isolation if they wanted to keep the liquor flowing and maximize profits.

"Suddenly gang leaders are making deals with each other," says Abadinsky, forging mutual protection pacts across state and international borders, and across ethnic lines, to ensure that shipments of illegal alcohol poured freely into the big cities.

"These are very violent people who are used to solving problems by killing them, but eventually they sit down and say, 'We'll guarantee peace in your area if you guarantee peace in our area.' That's called syndicated crime, this cooperation between criminal groups," says Abadinsky. "In the absence of Prohibition, we wouldn't have had the kind of syndicated criminality that occurred. Prohibition was the catalyst."

Turf Wars Turn Deadly

In the 1920s, Charles "Lucky" Luciano was famous for bringing together some of New York's biggest Italian and Jewish mobsters to dominate the city's bootlegging business. In Chicago, Johnny Torrio kept a fragile peace between his Italian-run bootlegging operation in the city's South Side and the Irish and Polish gangs working the North Side. But it didn't last. By the time Torrio's protege Al Capone took over, it was an all-out turf war. In the infamous St. Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929, Capone's men dressed as police officers and gunned down seven of the rival gang's henchmen.
READ MORE: See the St. Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929 in Color
Some of the biggest and most lucrative Prohibition-era bootlegging operations imported illegal booze from Canada via the Great Lakes. Underworld profiteer Arnold Rothstein, famous for fixing the 1919 World Series, ran shipments of alcohol through Lake Ontario, over to the Hudson River and down into the thousands of speakeasies of New York City. And the Mayfield Road Gang in Cleveland became famous for its rum-running speedboats criss-crossing Lake Erie.

Kingpins Made Millions Each Year

The demand for illegal beer, wine and liquor was so great during the Prohibition that mob kingpins like Capone were pulling in as much as $100 million a year in the mid-1920s ($1.4 billion in 2018) and spending a half million dollars a month in bribes to police, politicians and federal investigators.

Making money was easy, says Abadinsky. The hard part was figuring out what to do with all the cash. Money laundering was another way in which organized crime was forced to get far more organized. When gambling was legalized in Nevada in 1931, loads of Prohibition-era mob money was funneled into the new casinos and hotels. Underworld accountants like Meyer Lansky wired money to brokers in Switzerland who would cover the mobster's tracks and reinvest the cash in legitimate business. Others, like Capone, weren't as savvy and got sent up river on tax evasion charges.

When Prohibition was finally repealed in 1933, the cash grab was over, but the sophisticated black-market business schemes and money-laundering tactics of organized crime were here to stay. The biggest gangs shifted their operations away from alcohol and into secondary businesses like drugs, gambling and prostitution. They also profited greatly from the Great Depression.

"The gangs had cash in a cash-starved economy," says Abadinsky. "If you wanted to set up a legitimate business, have to go to organized crime. Loansharking becomes a major industry."

In hindsight, it's clear that Prohibition, a national temperance campaign aimed at reforming America's worst tendencies, that gave birth to one of the nation's worst criminal traditions.
READ MORE: The Night Prohibition Ended

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How Prohibition Put the 'Organized' in Organized Crime | HISTORY

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Before the 18th amendment made alcohol into a high-demand illegal item, criminal gangs in the United States were mostly small and local.

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Warren G. Harding, an Ohio Republican, was the 29th President of the United States (1921-1923). Though his term in office was fraught with scandal, including Teapot Dome, Harding embraced technology and was sensitive to the plights of minorities and women.

Before his nomination, Warren G. Harding declared, "America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality...."

A Democratic leader, William Gibbs McAdoo, called Harding's speeches "an army of pompous phrases moving across the landscape in search of an idea." Their very murkiness was effective, since Harding's pronouncements remained unclear on the League of Nations, in contrast to the impassioned crusade of the Democratic candidates, Governor James M. Cox of Ohio and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Thirty-one distinguished Republicans had signed a manifesto assuring voters that a vote for Harding was a vote for the League. But Harding interpreted his election as a mandate to stay out of the League of Nations.

Harding, born near Marion, Ohio, in 1865, became the publisher of a newspaper. He married a divorcee, Mrs. Florence Kling De Wolfe. He was a trustee of the Trinity Baptist Church, a director of almost every important business, and a leader in fraternal organizations and charitable enterprises.

He organized the Citizen's Cornet Band, available for both Republican and Democratic rallies; "I played every instrument but the slide trombone and the E-flat cornet," he once remarked.

Harding's undeviating Republicanism and vibrant speaking voice, plus his willingness to let the machine bosses set policies, led him far in Ohio politics. He served in the state Senate and as Lieutenant Governor, and unsuccessfully ran for Governor. He delivered the nominating address for President Taft at the 1912 Republican Convention. In 1914 he was elected to the Senate, which he found "a very pleasant place."

An Ohio admirer, Harry Daugherty, began to promote Harding for the 1920 Republican nomination because, he later explained, "He looked like a President."

Thus a group of Senators, taking control of the 1920 Republican Convention when the principal candidates deadlocked, turned to Harding. He won the Presidential election by an unprecedented landslide of 60 percent of the popular vote.

Republicans in Congress easily got the President's signature on their bills. They eliminated wartime controls and slashed taxes, established a Federal budget system, restored the high protective tariff, and imposed tight limitations upon immigration.

By 1923 the postwar depression seemed to be giving way to a new surge of prosperity, and newspapers hailed Harding as a wise statesman carrying out his campaign promise-"Less government in business and more business in government."

Behind the facade, not all of Harding's Administration was so impressive. Word began to reach the President that some of his friends were using their official positions for their own enrichment. Alarmed, he complained, "My...friends...they're the ones that keep me walking the floors nights!"

Looking wan and depressed, Harding journeyed westward in the summer of 1923, taking with him his upright Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover. "If you knew of a great scandal in our administration," he asked Hoover, "would you for the good of the country and the party expose it publicly or would you bury it?" Hoover urged publishing it, but Harding feared the political repercussions.

He did not live to find out how the public would react to the scandals of his administration. In August of 1923, he died in San Francisco of a heart attack.

Learn more about Warren G. Harding's spouse, Florence Kling Harding.

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Warren G. Harding, an Ohio Republican, was the 29th President of the United States (1921-1923). Though his term in office was fraught with scandal, including Teapot Dome, Harding embraced technology and was sensitive to the plights of minorities and women.

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As America's 30th President (1923-1929), Calvin Coolidge demonstrated his determination to preserve the old moral and economic precepts of frugality amid the material prosperity which many Americans were enjoying during the 1920s era.

At 2:30 on the morning of August 3, 1923, while visiting in Vermont, Calvin Coolidge received word that he was President. By the light of a kerosene lamp, his father, who was a notary public, administered the oath of office as Coolidge placed his hand on the family Bible.

Coolidge was "distinguished for character more than for heroic achievement," wrote a Democratic admirer, Alfred E. Smith. "His great task was to restore the dignity and prestige of the Presidency when it had reached the lowest ebb in our history ... in a time of extravagance and waste...."

Born in Plymouth, Vermont, on July 4, 1872, Coolidge was the son of a village storekeeper. He was graduated from Amherst College with honors, and entered law and politics in Northampton, Massachusetts. Slowly, methodically, he went up the political ladder from councilman in Northampton to Governor of Massachusetts, as a Republican. En route he became thoroughly conservative.

As President, Coolidge demonstrated his determination to preserve the old moral and economic precepts amid the material prosperity which many Americans were enjoying. He refused to use Federal economic power to check the growing boom or to ameliorate the depressed condition of agriculture and certain industries. His first message to Congress in December 1923 called for isolation in foreign policy, and for tax cuts, economy, and limited aid to farmers.

He rapidly became popular. In 1924, as the beneficiary of what was becoming known as "Coolidge prosperity," he polled more than 54 percent of the popular vote.

In his Inaugural he asserted that the country had achieved "a state of contentment seldom before seen," and pledged himself to maintain the status quo. In subsequent years he twice vetoed farm relief bills, and killed a plan to produce cheap Federal electric power on the Tennessee River.

The political genius of President Coolidge, Walter Lippmann pointed out in 1926, was his talent for effectively doing nothing: "This active inactivity suits the mood and certain of the needs of the country admirably. It suits all the business interests which want to be let alone.... And it suits all those who have become convinced that government in this country has become dangerously complicated and top-heavy...."

Coolidge was both the most negative and remote of Presidents, and the most accessible. He once explained to Bernard Baruch why he often sat silently through interviews: "Well, Baruch, many times I say only 'yes' or 'no' to people. Even that is too much. It winds them up for twenty minutes more."

But no President was kinder in permitting himself to be photographed in Indian war bonnets or cowboy dress, and in greeting a variety of delegations to the White House.

Both his dry Yankee wit and his frugality with words became legendary. His wife, Grace Goodhue Coolidge, recounted that a young woman sitting next to Coolidge at a dinner party confided to him she had bet she could get at least three words of conversation from him. Without looking at her he quietly retorted, "You lose." And in 1928, while vacationing in the Black Hills of South Dakota, he issued the most famous of his laconic statements, "I do not choose to run for President in 1928."

By the time the disaster of the Great Depression hit the country, Coolidge was in retirement. Before his death in January 1933, he confided to an old friend, ". . . I feel I no longer fit in with these times."
The Presidential biographies on WhiteHouse.gov are from "The Presidents of the United States of America," by Frank Freidel and Hugh Sidey. Copyright 2006 by the White House Historical Association.
Learn more about Calvin Coolidge 's spouse, Grace Anna Goodhue Coolidge.

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At 2:30 on the morning of August 3, 1923, while visiting in Vermont, Calvin Coolidge received word that he was President. By the light of a kerosene lamp, his father, who was a notary public, administered the oath of office as Coolidge placed his hand on the family Bible.

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Before serving as America's 31st President from 1929 to 1933, Herbert Hoover had achieved international success as a mining engineer and worldwide gratitude as "The Great Humanitarian" who fed war-torn Europe during and after World War I.

Son of a Quaker blacksmith, Herbert Clark Hoover brought to the Presidency an unparalleled reputation for public service as an engineer, administrator, and humanitarian.

Born in an Iowa village in 1874, he grew up in Oregon. He enrolled at Stanford University when it opened in 1891, graduating as a mining engineer.

He married his Stanford sweetheart, Lou Henry, and they went to China, where he worked for a private corporation as China's leading engineer. In June 1900 the Boxer Rebellion caught the Hoovers in Tientsin. For almost a month the settlement was under heavy fire. While his wife worked in the hospitals, Hoover directed the building of barricades, and once risked his life rescuing Chinese children.

One week before Hoover celebrated his 40th birthday in London, Germany declared war on France, and the American Consul General asked his help in getting stranded tourists home. In six weeks his committee helped 120,000 Americans return to the United States. Next Hoover turned to a far more difficult task, to feed Belgium, which had been overrun by the German army.

After the United States entered the war, President Wilson appointed Hoover head of the Food Administration. He succeeded in cutting consumption of foods needed overseas and avoided rationing at home, yet kept the Allies fed.

After the Armistice, Hoover, a member of the Supreme Economic Council and head of the American Relief Administration, organized shipments of food for starving millions in central Europe. He extended aid to famine-stricken Soviet Russia in 1921. When a critic inquired if he was not thus helping Bolshevism, Hoover retorted, "Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!"

After capably serving as Secretary of Commerce under Presidents Harding and Coolidge, Hoover became the Republican Presidential nominee in 1928. He said then: "We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land." His election seemed to ensure prosperity. Yet within months the stock market crashed, and the Nation spiraled downward into depression.

After the crash Hoover announced that while he would keep the Federal budget balanced, he would cut taxes and expand public works spending.

In 1931 repercussions from Europe deepened the crisis, even though the President presented to Congress a program asking for creation of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to aid business, additional help for farmers facing mortgage foreclosures, banking reform, a loan to states for feeding the unemployed, expansion of public works, and drastic governmental economy.

At the same time he reiterated his view that while people must not suffer from hunger and cold, caring for them must be primarily a local and voluntary responsibility.

His opponents in Congress, who he felt were sabotaging his program for their own political gain, unfairly painted him as a callous and cruel President. Hoover became the scapegoat for the Depression and was badly defeated in 1932. In the 1930's he became a powerful critic of the New Deal, warning against tendencies toward statism.

In 1947 President Truman appointed Hoover to a commission, which elected him chairman, to reorganize the Executive Departments. He was appointed chairman of a similar commission by President Eisenhower in 1953. Many economies resulted from both commissions' recommendations. Over the years, Hoover wrote many articles and books, one of which he was working on when he died at 90 in New York City on October 20, 1964.

For more information about President Hoover, please visit Herbert Hoover Library and Museum

Learn more about Herbert Hoover's spouse, Lou Henry Hoover.

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Before serving as America's 31st President from 1929 to 1933, Herbert Hoover had achieved international success as a mining engineer and worldwide gratitude as "The Great Humanitarian" who fed war-torn Europe during and after World War I.

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Statistics have been split into urban and rural categories in decennial census publications for over a century.

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Just over 100 years ago, the birth of the 'Jazz Age' occurred and secret Speakeasies were beginning to pop-up all-over America. Upon entrance, you would be greeted with the sound of laughing, the clinking of drinks and most importantly Jazz. This new way of life allowed for social interactions to occur between people of different race, ethnicity, gender and socioeconomic statuses and without them, we may not have gotten where we are today in terms of integration.
What is a Speakeasy and why were they created?

Throughout the early years of the 20th Century, America was in turmoil in terms of political and social reform with more and more people rebelling against the traditional ways of life which stemmed from the Victorian times. At the beginning of the decade known as the 'Roaring Twenties' the United States of America had just entered the Prohibition era where liquor and other alcoholic beverages were illegal between the years of 1920 and 1933. This resulted in the formation of illicit Speakeasies and at one point, there were thought to be over 100,000 Speakeasies in New York alone.

The phrase, 'Speakeasy' originates from a term that bartenders used where people needed to, "speak easy" (quietly), when ordering at the bar in order to not draw attention to the prohibited act of buying alcohol. In order to gain access to these illicit bars, a password, specific handshake or secret knock was required. Furthermore, slang words for alcohol such as 'coffin varnish,' 'monkey rum' and 'tarantula juice' were created to fool police and neighbours.

As well as the term, 'Speakeasy', these illegal taverns were also called "Blind Pigs" or "Gin Joints" and were often set up by crime members such as the infamous Al Capone. The venues ranged from Jazz clubs with dancefloors to dark backrooms, basements and a new Prohibition-created venue: The House Party.

Due to the fact that alcohol was illegal, organisers of such events had to come up with inventive ways to transport and store the goods. Many Speakeasies operated under the guise of being a pharmacy and claimed alcohol was being sold for, "medicinal purposes." Others used false books, coconut shells, garden hoses and even prams with their babies perched on top to transport the illegal liquor from one event to another.

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History of the 1920s Speakeasies - MyCharleston

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Just over 100 years ago, the birth of the 'Jazz Age' occurred and secret Speakeasies were beginning to pop-up all-over America. Upon entrance, you would be greeted with the sound of laughing, the clinking of drinks and most importantly Jazz.

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No cultural symbol of the 1920s is more recognizable than the flapper. A young woman with a short "bob" hairstyle, cigarette dangling from her painted lips, dancing to a live jazz band. Flappers romped through the Roaring Twenties, enjoying the new freedoms ushered in by the end of the First World War and the dawn of a new era of prosperity, urbanism and consumerism.

The decade kicked off with the passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave white women the vote. Women also joined the workforce in increasing numbers, participated actively in the nation's new mass consumer culture, and enjoyed more freedom in their personal lives. Despite the heady freedoms embodied by the flapper, real liberation and equality for women remained elusive in the 1920s, and it would be left to later generations of women to fully benefit from the social changes the decade set in motion.

The exact origins of the word 'flapper' remain unknown.

While the exact origin of the term "flapper" is unknown, it is assumed to have originated in Britain before World War I, when it was used to describe gawky young teenage girls. After the war, the word would become synonymous with the new breed of 1920s women who bobbed their hair above their ears, wore skirts that skimmed their knees, smoked cigarettes and drank alcohol while dancing in jazz clubs, always surrounded by admiring male suitors.

Flappers were defined by how they dressed, danced and talked.

As Joshua M. Zeitz writes in Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity and the Women Who Made America Modern, flapper fashion wouldn't have been complete without the creeping hemline, which by 1925 or 1936 reached a shocking height of 14 inches above the ground. Sheer stockings, sometimes even rolled below the knees, completed the scandalous look.

Flappers wore their skirts shorter so they could show off their legs and ankles-but also so they could dance. They particularly loved the Charleston, a 1920s dance craze involving waving arms and fast-moving feet that had been pioneered by African Americans, first in the South and later in Harlem.

Dancing proved challenging in traditional women's fashion, not only with long dresses but also with traditional corsets that tightly bound a woman's midsection and accentuated her waist. Around 1923, French designer Coco Chanel introduced what became known as the "garçonne look," featuring not just high hemlines but dropped or nonexistent waistlines and straight, sleeveless tops. With lighter and more flexible undergarments that created a straight, slim silhouette, this new design allowed women to dance freely.

It wasn't just their fashion that made flappers; It was also their behavior and attitude. Flappers were young, fast-moving, fast-talking, reckless and unfazed by previous social conventions or taboos. They smoked cigarettes, drank alcohol, rode in and drove cars and kissed and "petted" with different men.

Women move to cities and into the workforce, but stayed in traditional 'women's roles.'

The flapper was born out of a growing landscape in America. By 1920, for the first time in the nation's history, more Americans (51 percent) were living in cities rather than in rural areas. As part of the nation's urbanization and economic growth, more and more women were entering the workforce. By 1929, more than a quarter of all women, and more than half of single women, were gainfully employed.

For the most part, however, the increase in working women didn't represent a challenge to traditional gender roles. Nearly a third of working women in the 1920s were domestic servants, while the rest were clerical workers, factory workers, store clerks and other "feminized" professions. "Women are working, but they're working in what are called 'women's jobs,'" says Lynn Dumenil, professor emerita of history at Occidental College and author of The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I.

Even women who blazed a trail in politics faced barriers due to their gender: Most female officeholders worked primarily on what were seen as "women's issues," preventing them from acquiring too much power within their political parties. It progressed though, with a handful of women would be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (none to the Senate), and many more served at the state and local levels.

Not only were women hitting a glass ceiling with job fields, but workplace discrimination and wage inequality also ran rampant throughout the '20s. As Gail Collins writes in her book America's Women, the average weekly wage for men in 1927 was $29.35, compared to only $17.34 for women.

While their wages were not high, women joined the new mass consumer culture.

Their wages might not have matched that of their male counterparts, but working women used their purchasing power to join the nation's new mass consumer culture. "The nature of domestic life changes for urban women, certainly, in the '20s," Dumenil says. By 1927, nearly two-thirds of American homes would have electricity, and new consumer goods like the washing machine, refrigerator and vacuum cleaner were revolutionizing housework and home life. Women were the major target audience for many of the new products, including household appliances, clothing and cosmetics.

The rise of the automobile contributed to the sense of freedom and possibility that suffused the Roaring Twenties. "The car is central to Americans' lives in the 1920s, across the board," Dumenil explains. "Not everyone can afford one, but consumer credit also expands in the '20s," leading to a new generation of American debtors. Meanwhile, the information revolution brought about by the emergence of the radio allowed a newly vibrant, youth-centered, urban culture to spread across the United States.

The flapper lifestyle also affected marriages and sexuality.

Housework wasn't the only factor changing for women on the home front. "The nature of marriage starts to change," Dumenil explains. "There's more of a sense, not of equality, but more of companionship between men and women in marriage. The assumption about women's sexuality changes." Birth control was becoming more widely available, at least for more privileged women, which helped limit family size and allowed women the freedom to explore their sexuality without facing the consequences of unwanted pregnancies.

"At least for some women, there's more freedom in their personal lives [in the 1920s]," Dumenil says. "A little less restriction. And it's not just about sex, although that's part of it, but clothing, dancing, the social world and the like."

This freedom had limits, however, and marriage always remained the ultimate goal. As Collins writes, only about 10 percent of women in the 1920s kept their jobs after marriage, most of them working-class women whose family needed their paycheck.

Dumenil also points out that the fear of one's reputation still worried flappers. "There's a sense that you have to be really careful about your sexual activity, for fear that you'll lose your reputation and won't get married...So the flapper's wildness is always, I would say, contained by that."

Zelda Fitzgerald and the end of the Roaring Twenties.

Arguably the most famous flapper of all was Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, who, before meeting and marrying the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, spent her nights whirling around country club dances (and sneaking out to drink and "neck") with any number of young Alabama gentlemen. After their marriage in 1920, the hard-partying couple lived the ultimate Roaring Twenties lifestyle in both New York City and France. Though Zelda was an artist, a dancer and a writer herself, she would be best known as the muse inspiring her husband's vivid stories of life in the Jazz Age, which are often credited with creating the enduring image of the flapper. By the late '20s, however, Scott's drinking and Zelda's mental illness drove them apart. In 1930, Zelda had a nervous breakdown, and she would spend the rest of her life in sanatoriums.

In some ways, Zelda's decline paralleled that of the flapper image she embodied. The stock market crash of October 1929 effectively marked the end of the Roaring Twenties, an era F. Scott Fitzgerald would later call "the most expensive orgy in history." By the onset of the Great Depression, Hollywood and the mass media had moved on from the flappers, and in the 1930s women's fashion would revert to more traditional styles, with accentuated waists and longer hemlines.

The spirit of the flappers lives on.

Some changes that occurred in the 1920s endured. Though the Depression wiped out much of America's prosperity and consumer confidence, the nation's mass consumer culture would eventually re-emerge, stronger than ever.

In the decades to come, more and more women would pursue higher education and enter political life as activists, lobbyists or lawmakers. The transformation of sexual mores and family life that occurred in the 1920s also persisted. "Changes in the family, the movement toward smaller families, birth control, fewer restraints in private life," Dumenil says-these changes were "permanent."

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How Flappers of the Roaring Twenties Redefined Womanhood | HISTORY

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Young women with short "bob" hairstyles, cigarettes dangling from their painted lips, dancing to a live jazz band, explored new-found freedoms.

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The young, fashionable women of the 1920s define the dress and style of their peers in their own words

smithsonian.com

In the age before the Roaring Twenties, women were still wearing floor-length dresses. Waists were cinched. Arms and legs were covered. Corsets were standard on a daily basis. Hair was long. The Gibson girl was the idealized image of beauty. And the Victorian attitudes toward dress and etiquette created a strict moral climate.

Then the 1920s hit and things changed rapidly. The 19th Amendment passed in 1920 giving women the right to vote. Women began attending college. The Equal Rights Amendment was proposed by Alice Paul in 1923. World War I was over and men wanted their jobs back. Women, though, who had joined the workforce while the men were at war, had tasted the possibility of life beyond homemaking and weren't ready to relinquish their jobs. Prohibition was underway with the passing of the 18th Amendment in 1919 and speakeasies were plentiful if you knew where to look. Motion pictures got sound, color and talking sequences. The Charleston's popularity contributed to a nationwide dance craze. Every day, more women got behind the wheels of cars. And prosperity abounded.

All these factors-freedoms experienced from working outside the home, a push for equal rights, greater mobility, technological innovation and disposable income-exposed people to new places, ideas and ways of living. Particularly for women, personal fulfillment and independence became priorities-a more modern, carefree spirit where anything seemed possible.

The embodiment of that 1920s free spirit was the flapper, who was viewed disdainfully by an older generation as wild, boisterous and disgraceful. While this older generation was clucking its tongue, the younger one was busy reinventing itself, and creating the flapper lifestyle we now know today.

It was an age when, in 1927, 10-year-old Mildred Unger danced the Charleston on the wing of an airplane in the air. What drove that carefree recklessness? For the most authentic descriptions that not only define the flapper aesthetic, but also describe the lifestyle, we turn to flappers themselves.

In A Flapper's Appeal to Parents, which appeared in the December 6, 1922, issue of Outlook Magazine, the writer and self-defined flapper Elllen Welles Page makes a plea to the older generation by describing not only how her outward appearance defines her flapperdom, but also the challenges that come with committing to a flapper lifestyle.

If one judge by appearances, I suppose I am a flapper. I am within the age limit. I wear bobbed hair, the badge of flapperhood. (And, oh, what a comfort it is!), I powder my nose. I wear fringed skirts and bright-colored sweaters, and scarfs, and waists with Peter Pan collars, and low-heeled "finale hopper" shoes. I adore to dance. I spend a large amount of time in automobiles. I attend hops, and proms, and ball-games, and crew races, and other affairs at men's colleges. But none the less some of the most thoroughbred superflappers might blush to claim sistership or even remote relationship with such as I. I don't use rouge, or lipstick, or pluck my eyebrows. I don't smoke (I've tried it, and don't like it), or drink, or tell "peppy stories." I don't pet.

But then-there are many degrees of flapper. There is the semi-flapper; the flapper; the superflapper. Each of these three main general divisions has its degrees of variation. I might possibly be placed somewhere in the middle of the first class.

She concludes with:

I want to beg all you parents, and grandparents, and friends, and teachers, and preachers-you who constitute the "older generation"-to overlook our shortcomings, at least for the present, and to appreciate our virtues. I wonder if it ever occurred to any of you that it required brains to become and remain a successful flapper? Indeed it does! It requires an enormous amount of cleverness and energy to keep going at the proper pace. It requires self- knowledge and self-analysis. We must know our capabilities and limitations. We must be constantly on the alert. Attainment of flapperhood is a big and serious undertaking!

The July 1922 edition of Flapper Magazine, whose tagline was "Not for old fogies," contained "A Flappers' Dictionary." According to an uncredited author, "A Flapper is one with a jitney body and a limousine mind."

And from the 1922 "Eulogy on the Flapper," one of the most well-known flappers, Zelda Fitzgerald, paints this picture:

The Flapper awoke from her lethargy of sub-deb-ism, bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and went into the battle. She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure, she covered her face with powder and paint because she didn't need it and she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring. She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do. Mothers disapproved of their sons taking the Flapper to dances, to teas, to swim and most of all to heart. She had mostly masculine friends, but youth does not need friends-it needs only crowds.

While these descriptions provide a sense of the look and lifestyle of a flapper, they don't address how we began using the term itself. The etymology of the word, while varied, can be traced back to the 17th century. A few contenders for early usages of the term include:

A young bird, or wild duck, that's flapping its wings as it's learning to fly. (Consider how dancing the Charleston is reminiscent of a bird flapping its wings.)

A prostitute or immoral woman.

A wild, flighty young woman.

A woman who refused to fasten her galoshes and the unfastened buckles flapped as she walked.

While the origin story differs depending on where you look, cumulatively, they all contribute to our perceptions of this independent woman of the 1920s. In the posts that follow, we'll turn our attention to how those parameters set forth by Ellen, Zelda and Flapper Magazine are reflected in women's attire we now associate with the 1920s, from undergarments to makeup and hair.

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About Emily Spivack

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The History of the Flapper, Part 1: A Call for Freedom

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smithsonian.com In the age before the Roaring Twenties, women were still wearing floor-length dresses. Waists were cinched. Arms and legs were covered. Corsets were standard on a daily basis. Hair was long. The Gibson girl was the idealized image of beauty. And the Victorian attitudes toward dress and etiquette created a strict moral climate.

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1920s music was called, "a combination of nervousness, lawlessness, primitive savage animalism, and lasciviousness."

Jazz was the music of the 1920's: loud and syncopated. This was the Jazz Age!

The jazz recordings were often called "race records," and were sold and played typically in the black neighborhoods of large cities like New York and Chicago.

Controversial throughout its history, jazz was America's first contribution to the music world. And it all got started in the 1920's.

The Famous Places and Musicians of the 1920s

When you think of jazz you probably think of people and places like:

Controversy In the 1920's Music Jazz Scene

The top 4 songs on the pop charts of the 1920's, compiled utilizing research of Billboard Charts from a bygone era, you will see the names of recording artists like Al Jolson, Paul Whiteman, Mamie Smith, and Ted Lewis and his Orchestra.

These songs and their songwriters reflect an age of change in the ever-burgeoning music industry. Many soldiers put down their weapons and took up an instrument.

Dance bands, Jazz, and Blues artists took to the main stages, front and center, post-World-War-I. Despite the prohibition in American, the music of the age was upbeat, dance-able, booming with life, and in celebration of a newfound optimism and hope for the future.

It was the great classic Jazz singers of the 1920's , Mamie Smith, Ida Cox, Ma Rainey, and Bessie Smith, whose vocal styling inspired the likes of future Jazz greats and singers like Billie Holiday and Nina Simone.

Did you know that Mamie Smith was the first African American artist to make vocal blues recordings? She could do it all: she was a vaudeville singer, a dancer, a pianist, and even an actress.

In Mamie Smith's hit song "Crazy Blues" written in 1920, alongside the swinging tempo and infectious beat, you hear many of the common themes that were threaded within the major hit songs of this time period.

The lyrics are simple, sometimes a bit dirty, direct, and usually revolve around a current or past lover. The lover in almost every case has been wronged or mistreated, is pining for love, or is experiencing the sorrow and the aftermath of love lost.

Also rampant in the songwriting is the usage of many, many good old-fashioned euphemisms.

Take a listen. "Honey" is not always honey, and that "Daddy" might not have been biological, if you get my drift.

"Race" Records and the Musical Underbelly

In addition to taking on a more unfiltered and raw approach to once taboo topics like sex and race, as acoustical recording technology improved (and went electric) and the overall sound of recorded music improved, independent recording labels began to make their mark on the industry.

These new labels weren't afraid of taking risks on new, emerging artists and styles. Along with the popularization and commercialization of radio in the mix, the music market was ready and set for growth.

In America, the hidden "speakeasies" that emerged as part of the landscape provided the perfect environment for jazz to flourish.

With a secret knock or a word, one could enter a new world where the rules were relaxed and the booze was always flowing.

Bigger bands were replaced with small jazz duos and trios. In these illegal havens rife with dancing and gambling, and even gangsters, there was also freedom for the races to intermingle, inspiring songs like Duke Ellington's "Black and Tan Fantasy."

The issues revolving around race and class were always prevalent during this time of segregation, when popular white musicians like Paul Whiteman -band leader and orchestral director of one of the most popular bands of the 1920's- were later criticized by traditional jazz musicians saying that it was a mockery of what jazz was intended to be - free and impressionable - not burdened by what the listeners want.

What this is referring to is the fact Whiteman took an underground style of music which was not typically played by white guys, and fused it with other styles of music more palatable to the average (white) population.

When coupled with the fact that the people who listened to this music prior to it being put on the radio had to do so in illegal clubs and many African Americans were arrested for playing it in years prior - you could imagine why people might have an issue.

A modern example of this happening would be the punk revolution of the early (19) 90's. Nirvana popularized punk which was a primarily underground genre of music and made it more mainstream than had ever been heard in the past by omitting the jagged guitars, pitter patter drums and shrieking vocals you might hear from a band like Dead Kennedy's or The Melvins.

Obviously your individual feelings about music will allow you to create your own reasoning about this situation but, this exact cycle has repeated itself countless times throughout music genres over the centuries.

These days they call it cultural appropriation but regardless of what you call it, because of the fusing of Whiteman, underground music had a major impact on the cultural scene and helped close the distance between people in this age.

However, even Duke Ellington, in his own autobiography, proclaimed that Whiteman, in his estimation, at least, deftly held the title of "King of Jazz" despite the naysayers: "Paul Whiteman was known as the King of Jazz," Ellington said, "and no one as yet has come near carrying that title with more certainty and dignity."

In one of Whiteman's most popular songs, "Whispering," you can hear the technical expertise and precision of his ensemble.

There was a reason the 1920's were "Roaring" - the musical varieties were expanding, dance crazes were popularized, and the world was alive with innovation.

This musical introduction to modernization and industrialization created a further divide between the old and the new, the past and the present, creating a new space for artists to work and play.

1920s Music: King Oliver

Oliver's big hit was called "Dippermouth Blues," the band played the song nightly at the request of the crowd.

"Dippermouth Blues" was actually the first jazz song to feature a fully-developed trumpet solo. We owe a lot to this song alone!

At the time, King Oliver was the most famous jazz player in the world, but right behind him in "The Creole Jazz Band" was Louis Armstrong.

1920s Music:Louis Armstrong

In many ways Armstrong is responsible for popularizing jazz throughout the world. He played everywhere and with everyone.

He was a great 1920s musician and ambassador of music throughout the world.

1920s Music:Leon "Bix" Beiderbecke

His playing style was softer and more relaxed than Armstrong's, it's been described as "a bullet hitting a chime."

Beiderbecke's music was the forebearer and paved the way for the "cool" jazz musicians that would become wildly popular in the 1940s and 1950s.

As you can see there is a tons of information about 1920s music. This page is dedicated to bring it to you. Check back often as I'm writing more on figures such as Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Jelly Roll Morton, and others.

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1920s Music: Jazz in the Roaring Twenties

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1920s music ushered in jazz. The Roaring Twenties became America's first unique contribution to the musical world.

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The Jazz Age | American Experience | PBS

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The Scopes trial was a signature event of the Jazz Age. It had that “ballyhoo” spirit so typical of the 1920s.

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The Lost Generation refers to the generation of artists, writers, and intellectuals that came of age during the First World War (1914-1918) and the "Roaring Twenties."

The utter carnage and uncertain outcome of the war was disillusioning, and many began to question the values and assumptions of Western civilization.

Economic, political, and technological developments heightened the popularity of jazz music in the 1920s, a decade of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity in the United States.

African Americans were highly influential in the music and literature of the 1920s.

The First World War

The experience of the Western democracies in the First World War was disheartening and disillusioning. So-called "civilized" countries had declared war on each other for uncertain reasons, had fought to a stalemate in brutal trench warfare conditions, and had then negotiated a peace settlement that neither settled the underlying causes of tension nor truly brought peace.

The nationalistic fervor that had motivated many Americans and Europeans to enlist in the war effort dissipated in the muddy trenches of battle, where the purpose and aims of the war seemed distant and unclear. Technological advances in armaments made World War I the deadliest conflict in human history, claiming millions of casualties on all sides. The very nature of the war called into question the West's perception of itself as "civilized." Small wonder, then, that many in the United States and Europe began to question the values and assumptions of Western civilization.

The Lost Generation

The Lost Generation refers to the generation of writers, artists, musicians, and intellectuals that came of age during the First World War and the "Roaring Twenties." The unprecedented carnage and destruction of the war stripped this generation of their illusions about democracy, peace, and prosperity, and many expressed doubt and cynicism in their artistic endeavors.

Some of the most famous Lost Generation writers were F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and John Steinbeck. Many of these writers lived as expatriates in Paris, which played host to a flourishing artistic and cultural scene. The themes of moral degeneracy, corruption, and decadence were prominent in many of their works. F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby is a classic of the genre.

Jazz and the "Roaring Twenties"

Jazz music became wildly popular in the "Roaring Twenties," a decade that witnessed unprecedented economic growth and prosperity in the United States. Consumer culture flourished, with ever greater numbers of Americans purchasing automobiles, electrical appliances, and other widely available consumer products. The achievement of material affluence became a goal for many US citizens as well as an object of satire and ridicule for the writers and intellectuals of the Lost Generation.

Technological innovations like the telephone and radio irrevocably altered the social lives of Americans while transforming the entertainment industry. Suddenly, musicians could create phonograph recordings of their compositions. For jazz music, which was improvisational, the development of phonograph technology was transformative. Whereas previously, music-lovers would actually have to attend a nightclub or concert venue to hear jazz, now they could listen on the radio or even purchase their favorite recordings for at-home listening.

After Congress passed the Volstead Act in 1919, which banned the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, many Americans sought refuge in speakeasies and other entertainment venues that hosted jazz bands. Harlem's Cotton Club was one famous venue, where both whites and blacks gathered to listen to jazz, dance the Charleston, and illicitly guzzle booze. Women attended jazz clubs in large numbers, and the "flapper girl" became a staple of US pop culture. These women flouted orthodox gender norms, bobbing their hair, smoking cigarettes, and engaging in other behaviors traditionally associated with men.

The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was a flourishing of African American art, music, literature, and poetry, centered in New York City's Harlem neighborhood. Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes were among the most famous African American authors associated with this movement. African Americans also dominated the jazz scene in the 1920s. Duke Ellington, who frequently performed at the Cotton Club, was one of the most influential jazz bandleaders and composers of all time.

The Roaring Twenties screeched to a halt on October 29, 1929, also known as Black Tuesday, when the collapse of stock prices on Wall Street ushered in the period of US history known as the Great Depression.

What do you think?

What unifying themes linked the works of the Lost Generation writers?

How did the experience of World War I influence popular culture in the United States?

Why do you think jazz became so popular in the 1920s?

Was mainstream American culture distinct from African American culture during this period?

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America in the 1920s: Jazz age & roaring 20s (article) | Khan Academy

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Learn for free about math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, finance, history, and more. Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Lost Generation refers to the generation of artists, writers, and intellectuals that came of age during the First World War (1914-1918) and the "Roaring Twenties."

The utter carnage and uncertain outcome of the war was disillusioning, and many began to question the values and assumptions of Western civilization.

Economic, political, and technological developments heightened the popularity of jazz music in the 1920s, a decade of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity in the United States.

African Americans were highly influential in the music and literature of the 1920s.

The First World War

The experience of the Western democracies in the First World War was disheartening and disillusioning. So-called "civilized" countries had declared war on each other for uncertain reasons, had fought to a stalemate in brutal trench warfare conditions, and had then negotiated a peace settlement that neither settled the underlying causes of tension nor truly brought peace.

The nationalistic fervor that had motivated many Americans and Europeans to enlist in the war effort dissipated in the muddy trenches of battle, where the purpose and aims of the war seemed distant and unclear. Technological advances in armaments made World War I the deadliest conflict in human history, claiming millions of casualties on all sides. The very nature of the war called into question the West's perception of itself as "civilized." Small wonder, then, that many in the United States and Europe began to question the values and assumptions of Western civilization.

The Lost Generation

The Lost Generation refers to the generation of writers, artists, musicians, and intellectuals that came of age during the First World War and the "Roaring Twenties." The unprecedented carnage and destruction of the war stripped this generation of their illusions about democracy, peace, and prosperity, and many expressed doubt and cynicism in their artistic endeavors.

Some of the most famous Lost Generation writers were F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and John Steinbeck. Many of these writers lived as expatriates in Paris, which played host to a flourishing artistic and cultural scene. The themes of moral degeneracy, corruption, and decadence were prominent in many of their works. F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby is a classic of the genre.

Jazz and the "Roaring Twenties"

Jazz music became wildly popular in the "Roaring Twenties," a decade that witnessed unprecedented economic growth and prosperity in the United States. Consumer culture flourished, with ever greater numbers of Americans purchasing automobiles, electrical appliances, and other widely available consumer products. The achievement of material affluence became a goal for many US citizens as well as an object of satire and ridicule for the writers and intellectuals of the Lost Generation.

Technological innovations like the telephone and radio irrevocably altered the social lives of Americans while transforming the entertainment industry. Suddenly, musicians could create phonograph recordings of their compositions. For jazz music, which was improvisational, the development of phonograph technology was transformative. Whereas previously, music-lovers would actually have to attend a nightclub or concert venue to hear jazz, now they could listen on the radio or even purchase their favorite recordings for at-home listening.

After Congress passed the Volstead Act in 1919, which banned the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, many Americans sought refuge in speakeasies and other entertainment venues that hosted jazz bands. Harlem's Cotton Club was one famous venue, where both whites and blacks gathered to listen to jazz, dance the Charleston, and illicitly guzzle booze. Women attended jazz clubs in large numbers, and the "flapper girl" became a staple of US pop culture. These women flouted orthodox gender norms, bobbing their hair, smoking cigarettes, and engaging in other behaviors traditionally associated with men.

The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was a flourishing of African American art, music, literature, and poetry, centered in New York City's Harlem neighborhood. Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes were among the most famous African American authors associated with this movement. African Americans also dominated the jazz scene in the 1920s. Duke Ellington, who frequently performed at the Cotton Club, was one of the most influential jazz bandleaders and composers of all time.

The Roaring Twenties screeched to a halt on October 29, 1929, also known as Black Tuesday, when the collapse of stock prices on Wall Street ushered in the period of US history known as the Great Depression.

What do you think?

What unifying themes linked the works of the Lost Generation writers?

How did the experience of World War I influence popular culture in the United States?

Why do you think jazz became so popular in the 1920s?

Was mainstream American culture distinct from African American culture during this period?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
America in the 1920s: Jazz age & roaring 20s (article) | Khan Academy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Learn for free about math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, finance, history, and more. Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Lost Generation refers to the generation of artists, writers, and intellectuals that came of age during the First World War (1914-1918) and the "Roaring Twenties."

The utter carnage and uncertain outcome of the war was disillusioning, and many began to question the values and assumptions of Western civilization.

Economic, political, and technological developments heightened the popularity of jazz music in the 1920s, a decade of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity in the United States.

African Americans were highly influential in the music and literature of the 1920s.

The First World War

The experience of the Western democracies in the First World War was disheartening and disillusioning. So-called "civilized" countries had declared war on each other for uncertain reasons, had fought to a stalemate in brutal trench warfare conditions, and had then negotiated a peace settlement that neither settled the underlying causes of tension nor truly brought peace.

The nationalistic fervor that had motivated many Americans and Europeans to enlist in the war effort dissipated in the muddy trenches of battle, where the purpose and aims of the war seemed distant and unclear. Technological advances in armaments made World War I the deadliest conflict in human history, claiming millions of casualties on all sides. The very nature of the war called into question the West's perception of itself as "civilized." Small wonder, then, that many in the United States and Europe began to question the values and assumptions of Western civilization.

The Lost Generation

The Lost Generation refers to the generation of writers, artists, musicians, and intellectuals that came of age during the First World War and the "Roaring Twenties." The unprecedented carnage and destruction of the war stripped this generation of their illusions about democracy, peace, and prosperity, and many expressed doubt and cynicism in their artistic endeavors.

Some of the most famous Lost Generation writers were F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and John Steinbeck. Many of these writers lived as expatriates in Paris, which played host to a flourishing artistic and cultural scene. The themes of moral degeneracy, corruption, and decadence were prominent in many of their works. F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby is a classic of the genre.

Jazz and the "Roaring Twenties"

Jazz music became wildly popular in the "Roaring Twenties," a decade that witnessed unprecedented economic growth and prosperity in the United States. Consumer culture flourished, with ever greater numbers of Americans purchasing automobiles, electrical appliances, and other widely available consumer products. The achievement of material affluence became a goal for many US citizens as well as an object of satire and ridicule for the writers and intellectuals of the Lost Generation.

Technological innovations like the telephone and radio irrevocably altered the social lives of Americans while transforming the entertainment industry. Suddenly, musicians could create phonograph recordings of their compositions. For jazz music, which was improvisational, the development of phonograph technology was transformative. Whereas previously, music-lovers would actually have to attend a nightclub or concert venue to hear jazz, now they could listen on the radio or even purchase their favorite recordings for at-home listening.

After Congress passed the Volstead Act in 1919, which banned the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, many Americans sought refuge in speakeasies and other entertainment venues that hosted jazz bands. Harlem's Cotton Club was one famous venue, where both whites and blacks gathered to listen to jazz, dance the Charleston, and illicitly guzzle booze. Women attended jazz clubs in large numbers, and the "flapper girl" became a staple of US pop culture. These women flouted orthodox gender norms, bobbing their hair, smoking cigarettes, and engaging in other behaviors traditionally associated with men.

The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was a flourishing of African American art, music, literature, and poetry, centered in New York City's Harlem neighborhood. Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes were among the most famous African American authors associated with this movement. African Americans also dominated the jazz scene in the 1920s. Duke Ellington, who frequently performed at the Cotton Club, was one of the most influential jazz bandleaders and composers of all time.

The Roaring Twenties screeched to a halt on October 29, 1929, also known as Black Tuesday, when the collapse of stock prices on Wall Street ushered in the period of US history known as the Great Depression.

What do you think?

What unifying themes linked the works of the Lost Generation writers?

How did the experience of World War I influence popular culture in the United States?

Why do you think jazz became so popular in the 1920s?

Was mainstream American culture distinct from African American culture during this period?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
America in the 1920s: Jazz age & roaring 20s (article) | Khan Academy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Learn for free about math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, finance, history, and more. Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When Were Cars Invented?

The 1901 Mercedes, designed by Wilhelm Maybach for Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft, deserves credit for being the first modern motorcar in all essentials.

Its thirty-five-horsepower engine weighed only fourteen pounds per horsepower, and it achieved a top speed of fifty-three miles per hour. By 1909, with the most integrated automobile factory in Europe, Daimler employed some seventeen hundred workers to produce fewer than a thousand cars per year.

Nothing illustrates the superiority of European design better than the sharp contrast between this first Mercedes model and Ransom E. Olds ' 1901-1906 one-cylinder, three-horsepower, tiller-steered, curved-dash Oldsmobile, which was merely a motorized horse buggy. But the Olds sold for only $650, putting it within reach of middle-class Americans, and the 1904 Olds output of 5,508 units surpassed any car production previously accomplished.

The central problem of automotive technology over the first decade of the twentieth century would be reconciling the advanced design of the 1901 Mercedes with the moderate price and low operating expenses of the Olds. This would be overwhelmingly an American achievement.

Henry Ford and William Durant

Bicycle mechanics J. Frank and Charles Duryea of Springfield, Massachusetts, had designed the first successful American gasoline automobile in 1893, then won the first American car race in 1895, and went on to make the first sale of an American-made gasoline car the next year.

Thirty American manufacturers produced 2,500 motor vehicles in 1899, and some 485 companies entered the business in the next decade. In 1908 Henry Ford introduced the Model T and William Durant founded General Motors.

The new firms operated in an unprecedented seller's market for an expensive consumer goods item. With its vast land area and a hinterland of scattered and isolated settlements, the United States had a far greater need for automotive transportation than the nations of Europe. Great demand was ensured, too, by a significantly higher per capita income and more equitable income distribution than European countries.

Model T

Given the American manufacturing tradition, it was also inevitable that cars would be produced in larger volume at lower prices than in Europe. The absence of tariff barriers between the states encouraged sales over a wide geographic area. Cheap raw materials and a chronic shortage of skilled labor early encouraged the mechanization of industrial processes in the United States.

This in turn required the standardization of products and resulted in the volume production of such commodities as firearms, sewing machines, bicycles, and many other items. In 1913, the United States produced some 485,000 of the world total of 606,124 motor vehicles.

The Ford Motor Company greatly outpaced its competitors in reconciling state-of-the-art design with moderate price. Cycle and Automobile Trade Journal called the four-cylinder, fifteen-horsepower, $600 Ford Model N (1906-1907) "the very first instance of a low-cost motorcar driven by a gas engine having cylinders enough to give the shaft a turning impulse in each shaft turn which is well built and offered in large numbers." Deluged with orders, Ford installed improved production equipment and after 1906 was able to make deliveries of a hundred cars a day.

Encouraged by the success of the Model N, Henry Ford was determined to build an even better "car for the great multitude." The four-cylinder, twenty-horsepower Model T, first offered in October 1908, sold for $825. Its two-speed planetary transmission made it easy to drive, and features such as its detachable cylinder head made it easy to repair. Its high chassis was designed to clear the bumps in rural roads. Vanadium steel made the Model T a lighter and tougher car, and new methods of casting parts (especially block casting of the engine) helped keep the price down.

Committed to large-volume production of the Model T, Ford innovated modern mass production techniques at his new Highland Park, Michigan, plant, which opened in 1910 (although he did not introduce the moving assembly line until 1913-1914). The Model T runabout sold for $575 in 1912, less than the average annual wage in the United States.

By the time the Model T was withdrawn from production in 1927, its price had been reduced to $290 for the coupe, 15 million units had been sold, and mass personal "automobility" had become a reality.

Automotive Industry Growing Pains

Ford's mass production techniques were quickly adopted by other American automobile manufacturers. (European automakers did not begin to use them until the 1930s.) The heavier outlays of capital and larger volume of sales that this necessitated ended the era of easy entry and free-wheeling competition among many small producers in the American industry.

The number of active automobile manufacturers dropped from 253 in 1908 to only 44 in 1929, with about 80 percent of the industry's output accounted for by Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler, formed from Maxwell in 1925 by Walter P. Chrysler.

Most of the remaining independents were wiped out in the Great Depression, with Nash, Hudson, Studebaker, and Packard hanging on only to collapse in the post- World War II period.

The Model T was intended to be "a farmer's car" that served the transportation needs of a nation of farmers. Its popularity was bound to wane as the country urbanized and as rural regions got out of the mud with passage of the 1916 Federal Aid Road Act and the 1921 Federal Highway Act.

Moreover, the Model T remained basically unchanged long after it was technologically obsolete. Model T owners began to trade up to larger, faster, smoother riding, more stylish cars. The demand for basic transportation the Model T had met tended increasingly in the 1920s to be filled from the backlog of used cars piling up in dealers' lots as the market became saturated.

Car Sales Stall

By 1927 replacement demand for new cars was exceeding demand from first-time owners and multiple-car purchasers combined. Given the incomes of the day, automakers could no longer count on an expanding market. Installment sales had been initiated by the makers of moderately priced cars in 1916 to compete with the Model T, and by 1925 about three-quarters of all new cars were bought "on time" through credit.

Although a few expensive items, such as pianos and sewing machines, had been sold on time before 1920, it was installment sales of automobiles during the twenties that established the purchasing of expensive consumer goods on credit as a middle-class habit and a mainstay of the American economy.

GM Introduces 'Planned Obsolescence'

Market saturation coincided with technological stagnation: In both product and production technology, innovation was becoming incremental rather than dramatic. The basic differences that distinguish post-World War II models from the Model T were in place by the late 1920s-the self-starter, the closed all-steel body, the high-compression engine, hydraulic brakes, syncromesh transmission and low-pressure balloon tires.

The remaining innovations-the automatic transmission and drop-frame construction-came in the 1930s. Moreover, with some exceptions, cars were made much the same way in the early 1950s as they had been in the 1920s.

To meet the challenges of market saturation and technological stagnation, General Motors under the leadership of Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., in the 1920s and 1930s innovated planned obsolescence of product and put a new emphasis on styling, exemplified in the largely cosmetic annual model change-a planned triennial major restyling to coincide with the economics of die life and with annual minor face-liftings in between.

The goal was to make consumers dissatisfied enough to trade in and presumably up to a more expensive new model long before the useful life of their present cars had ended. Sloan's philosophy was that "the primary object of the corporation ... was to make money, not just to make motorcars." He believed that it was necessary only that GM's cars be "equal in design to the best of our competitors ... it was not necessary to lead in design or to run the risk of untried experiments."

Thus engineering was subordinated to the dictates of stylists and cost-cutting accountants. General Motors became the archetype of a rational corporation run by a technostructure.

As Sloanism replaced Fordism as the predominant market strategy in the industry, Ford lost the sales lead in the lucrative low-priced field to Chevrolet in 1927 and 1928. By 1936 GM claimed 43 percent of the U.S. market; Ford with 22 percent had fallen to third place behind Chrysler with 25 percent.

Although automobile sales collapsed during the Great Depression, Sloan could boast of GM that "in no year did the corporation fail to earn a profit." (GM retained industry leadership until 1986 when Ford surpassed it in profits.)

World War II and the Auto Industry

The automobile industry had played a critical role in producing military vehicles and war matériel in the First World War. During World War II, in addition to turning out several million military vehicles, American automobile manufacturers made some seventy-five essential military items, most of them unrelated to the motor vehicle. These materials had a total value of $29 billion, one-fifth of the nation's war production.

Because the manufacture of vehicles for the civilian market ceased in 1942 and tires and gasoline were severely rationed, motor vehicle travel fell dramatically during the war years. Cars that had been nursed through the Depression long after they were ready to be junked were patched up further, ensuring great pent-up demand for new cars at the war's end.

Detroit's Big Three carried Sloanism to its illogical conclusion in the postwar period. Models and options proliferated, and every year cars became longer and heavier, more powerful, more gadget-bedecked, more expensive to purchase and to operate, following the truism that large cars are more profitable to sell than small ones.

Rise of Japanese Automakers

Engineering in the postwar era was subordinated to the questionable aesthetics of nonfunctional styling at the expense of economy and safety. And quality deteriorated to the point that by the mid-1960s American-made cars were being delivered to retail buyers with an average of twenty-four defects a unit, many of them safety-related. Moreover, the higher unit profits that Detroit made on gas-guzzling "road cruisers" were made at the social costs of increased air pollution and a drain on dwindling world oil reserves.

The era of the annually restyled road cruiser ended with the imposition of federal standards of automotive safety (1966), emission of pollutants (1965 and 1970), and energy consumption (1975); with escalating gasoline prices following the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979; and especially with the mounting penetration of both the U.S. and world markets first by the German Volkswagen "Bug" (a modern Model T) and then by Japanese fuel-efficient, functionally designed, well-built small cars.

After peaking at a record 12.87 million units in 1978, sales of American-made cars fell to 6.95 million in 1982, as imports increased their share of the U.S. market from 17.7 percent to 27.9 percent. In 1980 Japan became the world's leading auto producer, a position it continues to hold.

U.S. Carmakers Retool

In response, the American automobile industry in the 1980s underwent a massive organizational restructuring and technological renaissance. Managerial revolutions and cutbacks in plant capacity and personnel at GM, Ford and Chrysler resulted in leaner, tougher firms with lower break-even points, enabling them to maintain profits with lower volumes in increasingly saturated, competitive markets.

Manufacturing quality and programs of employee motivation and involvement were given high priority. The industry in 1980 undertook a five-year, $80 billion program of plant modernization and retooling. Functional aerodynamic design replaced styling in Detroit studios, as the annual cosmetic change was abandoned.

Cars became smaller, more fuel-efficient, less polluting and much safer. Product and production were being increasingly rationalized in a process of integrating computer-aided design, engineering and manufacturing.

Legacy of the U.S. Auto Industry

The automobile has been a key force for change in twentieth-century America. During the 1920s the industry became the backbone of a new consumer goods-oriented society. By the mid-1920s it ranked first in value of product, and in 1982 it provided one out of every six jobs in the United States.

In the 1920s the automobile became the lifeblood of the petroleum industry, one of the chief customers of the steel industry, and the biggest consumer of many other industrial products. The technologies of these ancillary industries, particularly steel and petroleum, were revolutionized by its demands.

The automobile stimulated participation in outdoor recreation and spurred the growth of tourism and tourism-related industries, such as service stations, roadside restaurants and motels. The construction of streets and highways, one of the largest items of government expenditure, peaked when the Interstate Highway Act of 1956 inaugurated the largest public works program in history.

The automobile ended rural isolation and brought urban amenities-most important, better medical care and schools-to rural America (while paradoxically the farm tractor made the traditional family farm obsolete). The modern city with its surrounding industrial and residential suburbs is a product of the automobile and trucking.

The automobile changed the architecture of the typical American dwelling, altered the conception and composition of the urban neighborhood, and freed homemakers from the narrow confines of the home. No other historical force has so revolutionized the way Americans work, live, and play.

In 1980, 87.2 percent of American households owned one or more motor vehicles, 51.5 percent owned more than one, and fully 95 percent of domestic car sales were for replacement. Americans have become truly auto-dependent.

But though automobile ownership is virtually universal, the motor vehicle no longer acts as a progressive force for change. New forces-the electronic media, the laser, the computer, and the robot probably foremost among them-are charting the future. A period of American history that can appropriately be called the Automobile Age is melding into a new Age of Electronics.

The Reader's Companion to American History. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors. Copyright © 1991 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

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The 1901 Mercedes, designed by Wilhelm Maybach for Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft, deserves credit for being the first modern motorcar in all essentials. Its thirty-five-horsepower engine weighed only fourteen pounds per horsepower, and it achieved a top speed of fifty-three miles per hour.

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The Roaring Twenties ushered in an age of excess and abandon, cultural dynamism and sensational design - and the cars from the 1920s were no exception. Built to change the world and define the sheer power of the decade, they remain some of the most beautiful automobiles ever made. Here's our list of the most incredible 1920s cars and the stories behind them.

Finally, automobiles in the 1920s became mainstream. They weren't just for the rich and famous, every family could own one. The car companies in the 1920s found ways to make them more affordable, safer, more comfortable and more powerful and it's no understatement to say that car ownership revolutionised people's lives.
Suddenly, thanks to people like Henry Ford - who mass-produced the Model T, one of the most popular cars in the 1920s - families had the type of freedom they had never before experienced. Industry exploded, cars used 90% of America's petrol, 80% of its rubber and 75% of its glass. Innovative new production techniques were developed. Countries like Britain and America boomed.

But 1920s cars weren't just affordable and practical run-arounds. There were also the standout performers, 1920s luxury cars which were - and remain - some of the most beautiful automobiles ever made. The Great Gatsby showed us that cars could be bold, ostentatious and flashy. If you needed to make a grand entrance, a Bugatti, Rolls-Royce, Duesenberg or Auburn was the way movie moguls and big businessmen did it. Like the most famous iconic cars that came later, a number of these superstars of 20s motoring became etched into history as the cars from the 1920s that stunned the world - read on to discover our list of the most famous 20s cars.

Ford Model T

No article about 1920s vintage cars would be complete without mentioning one of the most popular automobiles in the 1920s. Launched on an unsuspecting world in 1908, the Model T was the car that put the world on wheels.

Henry Ford wanted the Model T - nicknamed 'Tin Lizzie' - to be affordable, durable and simple to operate. It was the first mass-produced vehicle in the world. Ford's 60-acre factory in Highland Park, Michigan, was the first factory in the world to assemble cars on a moving assembly line. Within six months, build time reduced dramatically, as did the price. In 1909 the Model T cost $825 (broadly equivalent to 18 months' salary for the average American). In 1927 it was $360 (four months).

The Ford Model T quickly became one of the most popular cars in the 1920s and by the early years of the decade, over half the registered cars in the world were Fords. By 1925, between 9,000 and 10,000 cars were coming off the production line every day. When production ceased in 1927, over 15 million Model Ts were built and sold.

There were lots of cars from the 1920s that were more beautiful, faster and more desirable, but the Model T became a folkloric symbol of Henry Ford's vision to 'democratise the automobile.'

Duesenberg Model J

Luxury cars in the 1920s rarely got any more grandiose than the Duesenberg Model J. Affectionately referred to as 'Duesy', the company was founded by German-American brothers August and Frederick Duesenberg in Saint Paul, Minnesota in 1913. They built racing cars and high-end automobiles, a world away from Henry Ford's 'car for everyone'. The Model J was for a select few.

In 1926, Duesenberg, one of the most famous car companies in the 1920s was bought by automotive entrepreneur EL Cord for the brothers' engineering skills and their burgeoning brand name. He wanted to build a top-drawer luxury performance car to rival the European heavyweights of Rolls-Royce and Hispano-Suiza. The Model J immediately became one of the most coveted luxury cars of the 1920s.

It was only for the very wealthy. The bare chassis and running gear cost over $9,000 and with a custom body, the total cost of the car could easily top $13,000 - today in the region of £175,000 - 911 Turbo money. To compare, one of the most popular cars in the 1920s, the Ford Model T, cost well under $400.

Launched in 1928 at the New York Car Show, the 6.9-litre straight-eight produced 265 bhp (the same as the insanely good-looking Jaguar E-Type 30 years into the future). In an advert for the Model J, they boasted 'So confident is Duesenberg of the unquestioned supreme position its product occupies, that a nameplate is considered superfluous. Nowhere on the car do you find the name Duesenberg. But everywhere throughout the car you discover those master strokes of engineering and design and construction obtainable nowhere else than in a Duesenberg.'

Driven by the likes of Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, even Al Capone, the Duesenberg Model J was at the zenith of 1920s luxury cars. In 1929, the stock market crashed and plunged American into the Great Depression. Not a great time to be trying to sell an incredibly expensive car. Fortunately the Hollywood elite and old money aristos kept the car in production until 1937.

One of the most exciting and lavish of all 1920s cars, it was almost impossible to find a faster, more beautifully engineered, more impressive car anywhere in the world.

Bentley 3-Litre

The 3-Litre was Bentley's first chassis and represented Walter Owen Bentley's post-WWI vision of creating a 'fast car, a good car, the best in its class.' One of the best vintage cars of the 1920s, the 3-Litre won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1924 and 1927.

'WO,' as he was affectionately known, began his career selling French DFP cars with his brother Horace (as Bentley & Bentley) in Cricklewood, north London. After being discharged from the Royal Naval Air Service, he founded Bentley Motors Limited which became one of the most famous car companies of the 1920s.

Former World War I pilot Clive Gallop joined the team to develop the 3-litre, straight-four engine, which ran for the very first time just off Baker Street in London. The first production version of the Bentley 3-Litre was delivered in September 1921 to owner Noel van Raalte and emerged quickly as one of the most popular cars of the Twenties.

As was usual with luxury 1920s cars, Bentley supplied the chassis, engine, suspension and drivetrain (at an eventual cost of £1,100) and customers would then take them to specialist coachbuilders. Production was at first relatively slow but soon, the order books started to fill up. Due to its weight, size and speed, legendary car maker Ettore Bugatti called it 'the fastest lorry in the world.' Nevertheless, it was among the best vintage cars of the 1920s.

Quickly elevating the 3-Litre into the upper echelons of one of the luxury cars in the 1920s, clients included Prince George (later the Duke of Kent), the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII) and the Duke of York (later King George VI). The 3-Litre remained in production until 1929 when it was superseded by the superb Bentley 4½ litre, itself one of the greatest automobiles of the 1920s.

Hispano-Suiza H6

When it comes to classic 1920s luxury cars, names like Bugatti, Rolls-Royce, Mercedes-Benz and Alfa Romeo roll off the tongue, but Hispano-Suiza? Unlikely. However this largely unknown Spanish car manufacturer was one of the most famous car companies in the 1920s and produced arguably the most innovative and perfectly engineered car of its age.

Only a very small number of automobile gourmets will have heard of Swiss-born founder Marc Birkigt. He was a brilliant visionary who built a car of such stature that for a time it eclipsed Rolls-Royce as the luxury car marque of choice for the rich to drive through the age of the Charleston. The H6 really was one of the great cars from the 1920s.

Introduced at the 1919 Paris Motor Show, the H6 featured an aluminium 6.6-litre straight-six (upgraded to a whopping 8.0-litre in 1922) and was the first car in the world to employ servo-assisted, light alloy drum brakes on all four wheels. In fact the technology was so advanced for 1920s cars, Rolls-Royce licenced the design and carried it all the way through to the 1965 Silver Cloud.

Like all other luxury cars in the 1920s, the chassis was bought and then bodied by some of the finest European coachbuilders of the day including Chapron, Binder, Letourneur et Marchand and Hibberd & Darrin. After approximately 2,350 H6 and variant models were built, production ceased in 1933.

There is a sense of melancholy that one of the finest luxury cars in the 1920s has been largely forgotten but those in the know - then and now - consider the Hispano-Suiza H6 to be one of the best cars ever created.

Bugatti Type 41 Royale

In 1927, Ettore Bugatti unveiled the Type 41, known as the Royale. Like the Veyron eight decades later, the Type 41 was unlike anything the world had ever seen. Bugatti were already positioned as one of the premier car companies in the 1920s and in the Royale, they offered a fortunate few the largest and most exquisitely luxurious car in the world.

It is said that the Type 41 only came about after Ettore Bugatti took exception to the comments of an unknown English lady who compared his cars unfavourably to those of 1920s luxury car competitor Rolls-Royce.

The majority of the most popular cars in the 1920s were practical motorcars for the people, but this car knew no competition. It was intended, quite literally, for kings, queens and emperors. Commercially however, it turned into a very, very expensive mistake.

As most manufacturers were making automobiles in the 1920s, Bugatti was waiting to complete a deal with the French military to build 16-cylinder plane engines. For reasons unknown, the deal never happened. In his infinite wisdom, Ettore thought that he could use half the engine, a straight-eight, to power the world's most opulent car. Like a lot of 20s cars, it may not have had one of the coolest car names ever, but the resulting Bugatti Type 41 was certainly a head-turner at the time.

Over six metres long, the Type 41 had a mammoth 12.8-litre engine and weighed, dependent on the body, around 3.5 tonnes. Famous for being the only Bugatti adorned with a hood ornament - a dancing elephant designed by Ettore's brother Rembrandt - they intended to build 25 of these luxury 1920s cars. But, as the global economic crisis hit, there was no market for such a machine.

At a basic chassis price of $30,000, even kings, queens and emperors weren't buying this most amazing of 1920s cars and only seven were eventually built (including one prototype). Ettore had intended to give one to King Alfonso of Spain but he was deposed before he could take delivery. The one opportunity to sell one to a bona fide royal, King Zog of Albania, was refused by Bugatti, allegedly on the basis that the king had disgraceful table manners.

The prototype was destroyed in an accident in 1931 but the original six remain. Two are in the Musée National de l'Automobile de Mulhouse in France; Volkswagen AG, owners of the Bugatti brand have one; one is in the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan and the last two are in unknown private hands. Should one ever come up for sale, this king of luxury 1920s cars would almost certainly become the most expensive second-hand car ever sold at auction, eclipsing the 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO which sold for $48,405,000 in 2018.

Mercedes-Benz SSK

For four short years, Mercedes-Benz - already established as one of the largest car companies in the 1920s - built a two-door roadster that took the automotive world by storm. One of the best cars from the 1920s, the Mercedes-Benz SSK (an abbreviation of Super Spurt Kurz, German for 'Super Sport Short') was one of greatest sports cars of its age.

Built between 1928 and 1932, the SSK was a short wheelbase version of the 1927 Modell S and was designed by arguably the most famous name in automotive history, Ferdinand Porsche. It was the last car he designed for Mercedes-Benz before he left to set up his own company.

The supercharged 7.1-litre straight-six had a top speed of around 120 mph and at the time it was the world's fastest car. Not only was it one of the best cars from the 1920s, it was also the dominant race car of its era winning the 1929 500 Miles of Argentina, the 1929 and 1930 Cordoba Grands Prix, the 1930 Irish Grand Prix, the 1931 German Grand Prix and the famous 1931 Mille Miglia.

Despite being in production for four years, fewer than 40 were built (some say as few as 31) and around half of those were sold as ' Rennwagen' or racing cars. Most were destroyed beyond recognition while racing and the few that weren't totalled or burned out were cannibalised for spares. It's believed that only four or five of these stunning vintage cars from the 1920s remain as they were built.

In 1941 at the height of World War II, Norfolk native George Milligan travelled to Brighton to buy an SSK for the princely sum of £400. The seller wasn't there so trusted Milligan to put the money through the letterbox (which he did). When he got one of the most beautiful 1920s cars back to Norfolk, one version of the story said he hid it in a lock-up for 60 years and another said he drove it enthusiastically for 60 years. Either way, that £400 investment in 1941 turned into a car worth $7.4m when he sold it in 2004.

Because of its racing heritage, its badge and its rarity, cars from the 1920s such as the Mercedes-Benz SSK are among the most sought after in the world.

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Famous 1920s Cars - Motorcars from the Roaring Twenties - Discovery UK

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The Roaring Twenties ushered in an age of excess and abandon, cultural dynamism and sensational design - and the cars from the 1920s were no exception. Built to change the world and define the sheer power of the decade, they remain some of the most beautiful automobiles ever made.

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This article was written by Tim Samuel, but is no longer available online at his website, which appears to be defunct.
There was no greater symbol of the 1920's than the automobile. The impressive leather coaching and customized interiors radiated luxury and prosperity. The relative ease of operation and reliability meant freedom. Beneath their hoods many of the cars exhibited impressively large engines, delivering speed and excitement.

The automobile was arguably the most important catalyst for social change in the 1920's, liberating Americans from often restrictive home or neighborhood situations. Many women used the cars to save time in their daily domestic chores -- in turn giving them more free time, in which they could educate themselves, or find a job. The younger generations loved the car as an escape from the chaperones. A juvenile court judge criticized the auto as a "house of prostitution on wheels," due to the relatively large quantity of "inappropriate" sex occurring in the car. Businessmen, possessing a faster, more personal form of transportation, could live farther from the city and subway stops. Consequently the suburb lifestyle began in places like Queens and the Bronx. Rural Americans loved the car as a ride to town and the social circles.

Automobiles had existed before the Twenties, but were expensive, unreliable, and generally only toys for the rich. What made the auto so influential in the 1920's was its increased availability and dependability. Scientific management and the assembly line increased factory productivity and decreased cost, making the auto more affordable. By 1930 every 1.3 households owned a car, versus 44 households in 1910. Henry Ford was largely responsible for this movement, pioneering efficient production methods and striving to produce a reliable and practical car for the masses. His legendary Model-T, produced between 1913 and 1927, was sold as low as $290 (+-$2,900 today). Its successor, the Model-A, sold for as little as $460 ($4,600). There was a movement in America to make Henry Ford president.

However, there was also a large high-priced auto market. The Coolidge Prosperity fueled the prices of such monsters as the Locomobile Model 48, for $13,000($130,000), and the 1929 Rolls-Royce Phantom, selling between $17-18,000(180,000). These luxurious cars undoubtedly functioned as status symbols, transporting the occupants in a style that cannot be found today.

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This article was written by Tim Samuel, but is no longer available online at his website, which appears to be defunct. There was no greater symbol of the 1920's than the automobile. The impressive leather coaching and customized interiors radiated luxury and prosperity. The relative ease of operation and reliability meant freedom.

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The mass production of the bicycle in the early 1890s improved mobility and raised awareness of the need for better roads. By 1890, over 1 million bicycles were being manufactured in the country each year. This new and innovative mode of travel was well received by the U.S.

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On June 29, 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed legislation funding the construction of the U.S. Interstate Highway System (IHS)--something Americans had dreamed of since Detroit starting building cars.

The Missouri Highway Commission awarded the first contract to begin building the interstate along the famous Route 66 in rural Laclede County, 160 miles southwest of St. Louis. However, construction on the first section of interstate actually began in St. Charles County, Missouri, on Aug. 13. Kansas and Pennsylvania have also made competing claims that their states were first to possess sections of interstate.

No matter who was first, the enthusiasm for a uniform system of roads, bridges, and tunnels was very high in 1956, nearly fifty years after the introduction of Henry Ford's Model T automobile. The building of the IHS, formally known as the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, proceeded rapidly throughout the country, and by the early 1990s, nearly 45,000 miles of interstate highway were complete.

In order to understand the IHS's importance in U.S. society, let's examine its history. President Eisenhower is widely regarded as the catalyst for the IHS. His motivations for a highway network stemmed from three events: his assignment as a military observer to the First Transcontinental Motor Convoy, his experience in World War II where he observed the efficiencies of the German autobahn, and the Soviet Union's 1953 detonation of the hydrogen bomb, which instigated a fear that insufficient roads would keep Americans from being able to escape a nuclear disaster.

THE FIRST TRANSCONTINENTAL MOTOR CONVOY

In the summer of 1919, Lt. Col. Eisenhower was a dejected midcareer Army officer. He narrowly missed out on overseas service during World War I and anticipated a reduction in rank as the Army shrank and prepared for peacetime operations. Adding to his discontent, he was physically separated from his wife and infant child because of a shortage of military housing.

Eisenhower was assigned as an observer to an unprecedented military experiment--the First Transcontinental Motor Convoy. The operation was a road test for military vehicles and was used to identify the challenges in moving troops from coast to coast on the existing infrastructure. The excursion covered 3,200 miles from Washington D.C. to San Francisco. It included 79 vehicles of all sizes and 297 personnel.

During the expedition, Eisenhower gained some insight for the creation of a network of connected roads and bridges. Eisenhower's report to Army leaders focused mostly on mechanical difficulties and the condition of the patchwork of existing roads. He reported a mix of paved and unpaved roads, old bridges, and narrow passages.

Narrow roads caused oncoming traffic to run off the road and encounter added difficulty when reentering the roadway. Some bridges were too low for trucks to pass under. Eisenhower pointed out that the roads in the Midwest region of the United States were impracticable, but the roads in the east were sufficient for truck use.

Eisenhower singled out a western section of the Lincoln Highway, a transcontinental road with routes through Utah and Nevada, as being so poor that it warranted a thorough investigation before government money should be expended. He praised California for having excellent paved roads. Lastly, he observed that the different grades of road determined much of the convoy's success.

WORLD WAR II

During World War II, as the supreme Allied commander, Gen. Eisenhower was the architect of the defeat of Nazi Germany. As Allied armies raced across France and into Germany, he marveled at the vast highway system built by the Germans prior to the war. Eisenhower wrote in his presidential memoirs, "During World War II, I had seen the superlative system of German autobahn--[the] national highways crossing that country."

This advanced European highway system helped the Allies. The autobahn aided the Allied victory by enabling the Allies to efficiently resupply forces that pursued the German Wehrmacht across France and into Germany. The famous Red Ball Express was a magnificent achievement that kept swift-moving Allied field armies resupplied.

In August and September of 1944, an around-the-clock operation of 6,000 trucks delivered materiel to forces on the move. It involved a 300-mile divided road that eventually converted to a super highway. The road extended from the Normandy beachhead to terminals near Paris. Later, a second super highway extended from Paris into Germany.

THE CLAY COMMITTEE

Instrumental in the logistics success following the D-Day landings was Lt. Gen. Lucius Clay. He was a key aid to Eisenhower during the war and later when Eisenhower ascended to the presidency. Eisenhower knew Clay, a West Point-trained engineer, was a respected troubleshooter, an effective administrator, and politically adept.

In 1954, Eisenhower appointed Clay to head the President's Advisory Committee on the National Highway System. The so-called "Clay Committee" began work to develop a national highway plan, and its outcome was a report to Congress on the National Highway Program.

The resulting "Grand Plan" obligated $50 billion of federal funds over 10 years to build a "vast system of interconnected highways." The committee based its proposal on four points. The first point appealed to safety. It cited 36,000 traffic fatalities each year and the multibillion dollar effect on the economy.

Next, the report cited the physical conditions of existing roads and their effect on the cost of vehicle ownership. It was thought poorly maintained roads adversely affected the economy by increasing transportation costs, which were ultimately borne by the consumer.

The third point involved national security. The pervasive threat of nuclear attack in the United States called for the ability to execute the emergency evacuation of large cities and the quick movement of troops essential to national defense.

The last point appealed to the health of the U.S. economy. Improvements in transportation must keep up with the expected increase in U.S. population. Moreover, road improvement is essential to the economy and an efficient use of taxpayer money.

The Clay Committee concluded its report by stating that the positive economic attributes of the highway system were the potential for economic growth and the well-being of the economy through "speedy, safe, transcontinental travel" that could improve "farm-to-market movement."

THE COLD WAR

The IHS was the largest public works project undertaken in the Unites States and came at a time when the Cold War consumed not only a large part of the federal budget but also the attention of the U.S. public.

The Cold War played a pivotal role in the creation of the IHS. Shortly after Eisenhower took office in 1953, Soviet leader Josef Stalin died, setting off a power struggle in the Kremlin. It was not until September that Nikita Khrushchev emerged as the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

On Aug. 12, 1953, the Soviets exploded their first hydrogen bomb, thus moving closer to the United States in nuclear parity. It was unsettling to have a superpower with an unstable government armed with the latest nuclear weapons technology. This event further jolted an already rattled U.S. public, which routinely engaged in civil defense drills. Citizens built bomb shelters, stockpiled food, and prepared for imminent nuclear war.

In a July 1954 speech to the Governors' Conference, Vice President Richard Nixon expressed concern over the "appalling inadequacies" of the existing U.S. road infrastructure and its inability to meet the needs for responding to a national emergency on the scale of atomic war. Nixon mentioned atomic or atomic war no less than 10 times in the speech.

This topic was on the minds of most Americans. Seventy-nine percent of the public thought a nuclear conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was imminent. In the event of war, 70 million urban residents required evacuation by road.

The Clay Committee also warned of the need for large-scale evacuation of cities in the event of nuclear war. Furthermore, it cited federal civil defense authorities who were worried that a withdrawal from urban areas would be the largest ever attempted. The Committee soberly stated, "The rapid improvement of the complete 40,000-mile interstate system, including the necessary urban connections thereto, is therefore vital as a civil-defense measure."

NATIONAL DEFENSE AND THE TESTING PHASE

A large scale urban evacuation drill conducted in June 1955 drove home the importance of an evacuation plan. The ensuing confusion coupled with crowded evacuation routes seemed to make President Eisenhower's case for the IHS. Moreover, the administration was serious about the role of a uniform system of roads for national defense and directed Department of Defense (DOD) involvement.

When the IHS began in earnest, a testing facility was created in central Illinois to evaluate pavement, road standards, and construction techniques, among other things. The DOD contributed equipment and personnel for the tests. Military leaders knew from their experiences in the two previous world wars that roads were vital to national defense. During World War I, military truck traffic destroyed roads. In World War II, defense plants were often supplied by truck, but the lack of road standards sometimes impeded timely delivery.

Over a two-year period, Army trucks drove 17 million miles on the test roads. Some vehicles carried blocks of concrete in an effort to see how long a 24-ton truck would take to destroy roads and bridges. Highway building and maintenance standards were developed from the tests.

THE INTERSTATE WE KNOW

Congress passed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 creating federal funds for interstate highway construction. As the IHS developed so did its ability to support national defense. For example, throughout the system, mile-long stretches of concrete pavement double as emergency landing strips for military aircraft. Many Army posts, especially where division-level units are garrisoned, are near interstate highways.

For example, the 1st Infantry Division at Fort Riley, Kansas, is adjacent to I-70, and the 1st Armored Division at Fort Bliss, Texas, is close to I-10.

During Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, the IHS contributed to the success of mobilizing the military for war in the Middle East. Military planners were emboldened by the ability to move personnel and materiel with ease during national emergencies.

AN AGING SYSTEM

Despite the convenience and ease of movement, the IHS is showing its age. When funding was appropriated in 1956, planners knew that, at some point, roads, bridges, and various infrastructure would deteriorate. The IHS was expected to last only into the 1970s when improvements would be needed. The 1956 appropriation ran out in 1972 and current funding is sustained by the motor fuel tax, which is funneled into a trust fund.

The IHS's disrepair was highlighted in July 2007 with an unfortunate tragedy in Minnesota. On a summer day near Minneapolis, a section of a steel arch bridge on Interstate 35 collapsed into the Mississippi River. The accident killed 13 people and injured another 145.

The accident remains one of the worst bridge failures in the U.S. history, and it highlights the poor condition of the nation's infrastructure. At the time of the incident, approximately 150,000 of the nation's nearly 600,000 bridges "were considered either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete," according to a 2012 ABC News report. Since the I-35 incident, political leaders have called for a major investment in the nation's infrastructure.

Most Americans see the IHS for what it is: a quick, efficient, and convenient means of travel. The automobile culture, which hit its stride in the 1960s, thrived on networks of paved roads and inexpensive gasoline. Along the way, an entire segment of the economy was born. Businesses catered to travelers. Hotels, motels, restaurants, and service stations appeared at interstate exits to serve weary motorists.

The IHS is an icon and marvel of man's ingenuity. Great leaders such as Dwight Eisenhower and Lucius Clay had the foresight to conceive and build a network of interconnecting highways that helped to shape and define postwar America. Who from the current generation of leaders will repair, rebuild, and expand the IHS?

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Lee Lacy is a retired Army Reserve lieutenant colonel and an assistant professor at the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He is a graduate of the University of Arkansas and holds a master's degree from Webster University.

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This article was published in the March-April 2018 issue of Army Sustainment magazine.

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Dwight D. Eisenhower and the birth of the Interstate Highway System

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On June 29, 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed legislation funding the construction of the U.S. Interstate Highway System (IHS)--something Americans had dreamed of since Detroit starting building cars. The Missouri Highway Commission awarded the first contract to begin building the interstate along the famous Route 66 in rural Laclede County, 160 miles southwest of St.

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A duster is a light, loose-fitting long coat. The original dusters were full-length, light-colored canvas or linen coats worn by horsemen to protect their clothing from trail dust. These dusters were typically slit up the back to hip level for ease of wear on horseback. Dusters intended for riding may have features such as a buttonable rear slit and leg straps to hold the flaps in place. For better protection against rain, dusters were made from oilcloth and later from waxed cotton.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, both men and women wore dusters to protect their clothes when riding in open motorcars on the dirt roads of the day.

Western horsemen's dusters figured little in Western films until Sergio Leone re-introduced them in his movies The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). The latter played for many months in Paris and was in part credited with a revival of the duster in men's fashions in that city. Similarly, in the film genre of heroic bloodshed, primarily through Chow Yun Fat and John Woo, the hero is often seen wearing a duster.[citation needed ] That is also true of the fictional anti-hero Omar Little, who wears dusters both as outerwear and as a silk sleepwear coverup in the HBO series, .

Dusters gained renewed popularity in the late 20th century and are now a standard item of Western wear. The Tenth Doctor played by David Tennant wore a cinnamon brown duster coat on . Van Pelt, the main enemy onJumanji: Welcome to the Jungle wore a dark brown duster coat. Harry Dresden from Jim Butcher's Dresden Files wears a duster, as well as other cowboy-like attire.

In modern times, leather dusters are worn by motorcyclists to prevent road rash.

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A duster is a light, loose-fitting long coat. The original dusters were full-length, light-colored canvas or linen coats worn by horsemen to protect their clothing from trail dust. These dusters were typically slit up the back to hip level for ease of wear on horseback.

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The Scopes Monkey Trial started as an effort by the ACLU to challenge the constitutionality of a Tennessee law that forbade teaching the theory of evolution in public schools. The Tennessee Supreme Court found the law forbidding the teaching of evolution to be constitutional. In 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court found a similar law in Arkansas to be a violation of the First Amendment. In this photo, evangelist T.T. Martin's books against the theory of evolution are sold in Dayton, Tennessee, at the Scopes trial. (AP Photo, used with permission from the Associated Press)

The Scopes "monkey trial" was the moniker journalist H. L. Mencken applied to the 1925 prosecution of a criminal action brought by the state of Tennessee against high school teacher John T. Scopes for violating the state's Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution in public schools.

In the case Scopes v. State (1925), Scopes was found guilty and fined $100, but, on appeal, the Supreme Court of Tennessee, pointing to a technicality in the issuance of the fine, overturned Scopes's conviction, while finding the Butler Act constitutional.

Scopes challenged Tennessee law forbidding the teaching of evolution

The case arose when, seeking to test the constitutional validity of the Butler Act, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) placed advertisements in Tennessee newspapers offering to pay the expenses of any teacher willing to challenge the law.

George W. Rappleyea (sometimes spelled Rappalyea), who managed the Cumberland Coal and Iron Company in Dayton, Tennessee, read the ad. His industry had fallen on hard times, and, because it was Dayton's economic base, the town's population had fallen by almost half.

Sensing an opportunity to put a revived Dayton on the map, Rappleyea convened a meeting at the town's drugstore, owned by Rhea County School Board president Frank Earl Robinson, of several prominent residents, including school superintendent William White.

Civic boosters recruited teacher to challenge law

High school biology teacher John T. Scopes, shown here in 1925, was recruited to teach the theory of evolution as a way to challenge a Tennessee law that forbade it in public schools. (AP Photo, file, used with permission from the Associated Press)

Following Rappleyea's lead, this group of civic boosters recruited as their defendant Scopes, the 24-year-old football coach at Rhea County High School. Scopes also taught math and general science, and, on occasion, substituted for the principal in biology.

Among the many ironies at the Scopes trial, two surrounded the textbook at the center of the controversy.

First, Tennessee mandated that George W. Hunter's A Civic Biology (1914) be used statewide to teach biology, but the text endorsed evolution, effectively requiring biology teachers to violate the Butler Act.

Second, Hunter's endorsement of evolution - a doctrine championed by Scopes's supporters as the enlightened view - was derived from his embrace of eugenics as a means of protecting the white race, which he deemed superior, through hereditary selection.

Famous attorneys joined prosecution, defense

Into the tempest that was soon to become a cause célèbre stepped famed attorneys William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow.

Clarence Darrow, left, and William Jennings Bryan speak with each other at the "monkey trial" in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925. Darrow was one of three lawyers sent to Dayton by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Bryan testified for the prosecution as a Bible expert. (AP Photo, used with permission from the Associated Press)

Bryan, the populist and three-time Democratic Party presidential nominee who was skewered by Darrow during direct examination about the Bible (Bryan professed to be an expert) on the trial's seventh day, has been caricatured as a small-minded bigot. Yet Bryan volunteered to join the prosecution team because he opposed the theory of evolution for its association with eugenics and with social Darwinism.

Darrow was a legendary lawyer. Before volunteering to serve as John Scopes's attorney, Darrow had built a national practice by losing only a single murder defense. Labor leaders Eugene V. Debs and William D. Haywood, wealthy University of Chicago students and accused murderers Nathan Freudenthal Leopold Jr. and Richard A. Loeb (known more commonly as Leopold and Loeb), and Henry Sweet, a Detroit African American accused of murder in a civil rights upheaval, numbered among his most well-known clients.

Atmosphere of trial was festive

The trial began on July 10, 1925. The atmosphere was circus-like. Banners festooned Dayton, proclaiming "God Is Love," "Read your BIBLE for a Week," "You Need God in Your Business," and "Where Will You Spend Eternity?"

The courtroom was packed, as shown in this July 1925 photo, and the trial was broadcast over the radio. (AP Photo, used with permission from the Associated Press)

More than six hundred spectators shoehorned themselves into the courtroom. The presiding judge, John T. Raulston, had proposed holding the trial outdoors in a tent that would accommodate twenty thousand.

The trial was broadcast over the radio - the nation's first such live broadcast. Reporters assembled from as far away as London and Hong Kong. H. L. Mencken chronicled the trial for the Baltimore Sun.

The jury needed only nine minutes to find Scopes guilty.

Tennessee Supreme Court overturned teacher conviction but upheld law against teaching evolution

The judge then fined him $100, but that step turned out to be the procedural error that prompted the Tennessee Supreme Court to overturn Scopes's conviction.

Although it found the Butler Act constitutional, the higher court held that only juries may impose fines of over $50. As a coda, the Supreme Court added: "We see nothing to be gained by prolonging the life of this bizarre case."

Years later, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a similar Arkansas law in Epperson v. Arkansas (1968), finding that it violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment.
This article was originally published in 2009. James C. Foster is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Oregon State University-Cascades.
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The Scopes Monkey Trial started as an effort by the ACLU to challenge the constitutionality of a Tennessee law that forbade teaching the theory of evolution in public schools. The Tennessee Supreme Court found the law forbidding the teaching of evolution to be constitutional. In 1968, the U.S.

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1920s consumption (article) | 1920s America | Khan Academy

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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A New African American Identity: The Harlem Renaissance

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Between the end of World War I and the mid-1930s, African Americans produced one of the most significant eras of cultural expression in the nation’s history—the Harlem Renaissance.