American History

3/31/22, 6:17 PM Chapter 22: A Clash of Cultures, 1920–1929

https://ncia.wwnorton.com/ebooks/epub/amerele2v2/EPUB/content/chapter22-01.xhtml 1/12

A “New Era” of Consumption



M VIDEO: A New Outlook in the Early 20th Century

CORE OBJECTIVE

1. Assess the impact of the consumer culture that emerged in America during the

1920s, and explain the factors that contributed to its growth.

During the twenties, the thriving U.S. economy became the envy of the world. Following the brief postwar recession in 1920–1921, Americans benefited from the fastest economic growth in history. Jobs were plentiful, inflation was low, and income rose throughout the decade. The nation’s total wealth almost doubled between 1920 and 1930, while wage workers enjoyed a whopping 30 percent increase in income, the sharpest rise in history. By 1929, the United States had the highest standard of living in the world.

3/31/22, 6:17 PM Chapter 22: A Clash of Cultures, 1920–1929

https://ncia.wwnorton.com/ebooks/epub/amerele2v2/EPUB/content/chapter22-01.xhtml 2/12

3/31/22, 6:17 PM Chapter 22: A Clash of Cultures, 1920–1929

https://ncia.wwnorton.com/ebooks/epub/amerele2v2/EPUB/content/chapter22-01.xhtml 3/12

A Growing Consumer Culture



Construction led the way. By 1921, a building boom was under way that would last the rest of the decade. At the same time, the remarkable growth of the automotive industry created an immediate need for roads, highways, service stations, and motels that stimulated other industries such as steel, concrete, and furniture. Technology also played a key role in the prosperity of the twenties by enabling mass production through the assembly-line process. New machines (electric motors, steam turbines, dump trucks, tractors, bulldozers, steam shovels) and more efficient ways of operating farms, factories, plants, mines, and mills generated dramatic increases in productivity.

In the late nineteenth century, the U.S. economy had been driven by commercial agriculture and large-scale industrial production—the building of railroads and bridges, the manufacturing of steel, and the construction of housing and businesses in cities. During the twenties, such industrial production continued, but the dominant aspect of the economy involved an explosion of new consumer goods made available through a national marketplace.

M VIDEO: 1920s Consumer Culture

Perhaps the most visible change during the twenties was the emergence of a powerful, urban- dominated “consumer culture” in which the mass production and consumption of nationally advertised products came to dictate much of social life and social status. A 1920 newspaper editorial insisted that the American’s “first importance to his country is no longer that of citizen but that of consumer. Consumption is a new necessity.” The U.S. economy had entered what many called a

A MODERN HOME This 1925 Westinghouse advertisement urges homemakers to buy its “Cozy Glow, Jr.” heater and “Sol-Lux Luminaire” lamp, among other electrical appliances that “do anything for you in return.”

3/31/22, 6:17 PM Chapter 22: A Clash of Cultures, 1920–1929

https://ncia.wwnorton.com/ebooks/epub/amerele2v2/EPUB/content/chapter22-01.xhtml 4/12

The Rise of Mass Culture



“New Era” in which the consumption of goods became a national obsession. To keep factory production humming required converting people into carefree shoppers. “People may ruin themselves by saving instead of spending,” warned one economist.

Rise of mass culture: New emphasis

on spending, advertising, credit, and

conveniences

In the twenties, old virtues such as hard work, plain living, and frugal money management were challenged by a new system of values celebrating leisure, self- expression, and self-indulgence, all achieved through the purchase of “name-brand” products. “During the war,” a journalist noted in 1920, “we accustomed ourselves to doing without, to buying carefully, to using economically. But with the close of the war came reaction. A veritable orgy of extravagant buying is going on. Reckless spending takes the place of saving, waste replaces conservation.”

To keep people buying, executives focused their resources on two crucial innovations: marketing and advertising campaigns to increase consumer demand and new ways for buyers to finance purchases over time (“layaway”) rather than having to pay cash up front. Installment buying promised instant gratification for consumers (“Buy Now, Pay Later”). Paying with cash and staying out of debt came to be seen as needlessly “old-fashioned” practices. Consumer debt almost tripled during the twenties. Mass advertising, first developed in the late nineteenth century, grew into a huge enterprise driving the mass-production/mass-consumption economy. (Popular new weekday radio programs, for example, were sponsored by national companies trying to sell laundry detergent and hand soap—hence the term soap operas.) Because women purchased two thirds of consumer goods during the twenties, advertisers aimed commercials at them. An ad in Photoplay magazine targeted the “woman of the house” because “she buys most of the things which go to make the home happy, healthful, and beautiful. Through her slim, safe fingers goes most of the family money.”

Perhaps no decade in American history witnessed such dramatic changes in everyday life. Electricity during the twenties was a revolutionary new force. In 1920, only 35 percent of homes had electricity; by 1930, the number was 68 percent. Similar increases occurred in the number of households with indoor plumbing, washing machines, and automobiles. Moderately priced creature comforts and conveniences, such as flush toilets, electric irons and fans, handheld cameras, wristwatches, cigarette lighters, vacuum cleaners, and linoleum floors, became more widely available, especially among the rapidly growing urban middle class.

M VIDEO: New Social and Cultural Trends During the 1920s

3/31/22, 6:17 PM Chapter 22: A Clash of Cultures, 1920–1929

https://ncia.wwnorton.com/ebooks/epub/amerele2v2/EPUB/content/chapter22-01.xhtml 5/12



3/31/22, 6:17 PM Chapter 22: A Clash of Cultures, 1920–1929

https://ncia.wwnorton.com/ebooks/epub/amerele2v2/EPUB/content/chapter22-01.xhtml 6/12

CHARLIE CHAPLIN An English-born actor who rose to international fame as the “Tramp,” Chaplin is pictured above in the 1921 silent film The Kid.

3/31/22, 6:17 PM Chapter 22: A Clash of Cultures, 1920–1929

https://ncia.wwnorton.com/ebooks/epub/amerele2v2/EPUB/content/chapter22-01.xhtml 7/12

A Love Affair with Movies

The Radio Craze

Taking to the Air

Mass advertising and marketing campaigns increasingly led to a mass culture: Americans now not only saw and heard the same advertisements and shopped at the same companies’ stores, but they also read the same magazines, listened to the same radio programs, and watched the same movies. Through these media, they could follow the lives and careers of the nation’s first celebrities and superstars. At the same time, Americans were increasingly on the move: automobiles enabled more people to travel easily, exposing them to new values and different viewpoints. America in the twenties, explained the celebrated New York journalist Walter Lippmann, was experiencing “a vast dissolution of ancient habits” as more and more Americans embraced the New Era’s consumer culture.

In 1896, a New York City audience viewed the first moving-picture show. By 1924, there were 20,000 movie theaters (the largest of which were called “motion picture palaces”) across the nation, showing 700 new “silent” films a year that used captions to show the dialogue. By 1930, even most small towns had theaters, and movies had become the nation’s chief form of mass entertainment. Movie attendance during the 1920s averaged 80 million people a week, more than half the national population, and attendance surged even more after 1928, when “talking” movies appeared. Americans spent ten times as much on movies as they did on tickets to baseball and football games.

Radio broadcasting experienced even more spectacular growth. Between 1922 and 1930, the number of families owning a radio soared from 60,000 to nearly 14 million. The widespread ownership of radios changed the patterns of everyday life. At night after dinner, families gathered around the radio to listen to music, speeches, news broadcasts, weather forecasts, and comedy shows. One ad claimed that the radio “is your theater, your college, your newspaper, your library.”

Charles Lindbergh’s and Amelia

Earhart’s boost to the new aviation

industry

Advances in transportation were as significant as the impact of radio and movies. In 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright, owners of a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, had built and flown the first airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The first flight went only a few hundred feet at 34 miles per hour. Airplane technology advanced slowly until the outbreak of war in 1914, after which Europeans rapidly adapted the airplane as a military weapon. When the United States entered the war, it had no combat planes—American pilots flew British or French planes. An American aircraft industry arose during the war but collapsed in the postwar demobilization. Under the Kelly Act of 1925, however, the federal government began to subsidize the industry through the awarding of airmail contracts. The Air Commerce Act of 1926 provided federal funds for the advancement of air transportation and navigation, including the construction of airports.

3/31/22, 6:17 PM Chapter 22: A Clash of Cultures, 1920–1929

https://ncia.wwnorton.com/ebooks/epub/amerele2v2/EPUB/content/chapter22-01.xhtml 8/12

The Car Culture

The aviation industry received a huge psychological boost in 1927 when twenty-six-year-old Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. made the first solo transatlantic flight, traveling from New York City to Paris in thirty-three and a half hours. The heroic feat, which won him $25,000 and a Congressional Medal of Honor, was truly dramatic: already exhausted from lack of sleep when he took off, Lindbergh flew through severe storms as well as blinding fog for part of the way. When he landed in France, more than 100,000 people greeted him with thunderous cheers, and a New York City parade celebrating Lindbergh’s accomplishment surpassed even the celebration of the end of the Great War. Youngsters developed a new dance step in his honor, called the Lindy Hop. Five years after Lindbergh’s famous flight, New York City celebrated another pioneering aviator—Amelia Earhart, who became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic.

By far the most significant economic and social development of the early twentieth century was the widespread ownership of automobiles. The first motorcar had been manufactured for sale in 1895, but the founding of the Ford Motor Company in 1903 revolutionized the infant industry, for Henry

AMELIA EARHART The pioneering aviator would tragically disappear in her 1937 attempt to fly around the world.

3/31/22, 6:17 PM Chapter 22: A Clash of Cultures, 1920–1929

https://ncia.wwnorton.com/ebooks/epub/amerele2v2/EPUB/content/chapter22-01.xhtml 9/12

Ford vowed to democratize the automobile. “When I’m through,” he predicted, “everybody will be able to afford one, and about everyone will have one.”

Ford’s Model T, the celebrated “Tin Lizzie,” cheap and long-lasting, appeared in 1908 at a price of $850 (about $22,000 at today’s prices). By 1924, Ford’s increasingly efficient production techniques enabled him to sell the same car for $290 (less than $4,000 today). The Model T changed little from year to year, and it came in only one color: black. Ford ads assured buyers that they “could have any color [they] want, as long as it is black.”

In 1916, the total number of cars in the United States passed 1 million; by 1920, more than 8 million were registered, and in 1929 there were more than 23 million. The automobile revolution benefited from the discovery of vast oil fields in Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, and California. By 1920, the United States was producing two thirds of the world’s oil and gasoline.

Henry Ford and the automotive

revolution

The automobile industry became the leading example of modern mass-production techniques and efficiency. Ford’s Highland Park plant outside Detroit increased output dramatically by creating a moving assembly line

rather than having a crew of workers assemble each car in a fixed position. With conveyors pulling the parts along feeder lines and the chassis moving steadily down an assembly line, each worker performed a single particular task, such as installing a fender or a wheel. This system could produce a new car in ninety-three minutes.

Such efficiency enabled Ford to lower the price of his cars, thereby increasing the number of people who could afford them. For the workers, however, producing cars this way made for a monotonous, mind-numbing experience, especially since Ford prohibited them from talking, sitting, smoking, or singing on the job. But his efficient methods accomplished his goal. During the twenties, the United States built ten times more automobiles than did all of Europe.

Just as the railroad helped transform the pace and scale of life in the second half of the nineteenth century, the mass production of automobiles changed social life during the twentieth century. During the 1920s, Americans literally developed a love affair with cars. In the words of one man, young people viewed the car as “an incredible engine of escape” from parental control and a safe place to “take a girl and hold hands, neck, pet, or . . . go the limit.”

Cars helped fuel the economic boom of the 1920s by creating tens of thousands of new jobs and a huge demand for steel, rubber, leather, oil, and gasoline. The ever-expanding car culture stimulated road construction (financed in large part by gasoline taxes), sparked a real estate boom in Florida and California, and dotted the landscape with gasoline stations, traffic lights, billboards, and motor hotels (“motels”). By 1929, the federal government was constructing 10,000 miles of paved highways each year.

3/31/22, 6:17 PM Chapter 22: A Clash of Cultures, 1920–1929

https://ncia.wwnorton.com/ebooks/epub/amerele2v2/EPUB/content/chapter22-01.xhtml 10/12

Spectator Sports

Mass popularity of baseball, football,

and boxing

The widespread ownership of automobiles as well as rising incomes changed the way people spent their leisure time. City dwellers could easily drive into the countryside; visit friends and relatives; and go to ballparks, stadiums, or boxing rings to see baseball or football games and prizefights. During the 1920s, Americans fell in love with mass spectator sports.

Created in the 1870s in rural areas, baseball had, by the 1920s, gone urban and earned its label of “the national pastime.” With larger-than-life heroes such as New York Yankee stars George Herman “Babe” Ruth Jr. and Henry Louis “Lou” Gehrig, professional baseball teams attracted huge crowds.

In 1922, the Yankees built a new stadium, called the “house that Ruth built,” and they went on to win World Series championships in 1923, 1927, and 1928. More than 20 million people attended professional baseball games in 1927, the year that Ruth, the “Sultan of Swat,” set a record by hitting sixty home runs and leading the league in most other hitting categories. Because baseball was still a racially segregated sport, so-called Negro leagues provided leagues for African Americans to play in and watch.

HIGHLAND PARK PLANT, 1913 The Ford Motor Company led the way in efficient and cost-cutting production methods. Here, gravity slides and chain conveyors move each automobile down the assembly line. What was it like to work in one of Ford’s factories?

3/31/22, 6:17 PM Chapter 22: A Clash of Cultures, 1920–1929

https://ncia.wwnorton.com/ebooks/epub/amerele2v2/EPUB/content/chapter22-01.xhtml 11/12

Football, especially at the college level, also attracted huge crowds. It, too, benefited from superstars such as Harold Edward “Red” Grange, the phenomenal running back for the University of Illinois and the first athlete to appear on the cover of Time magazine. In a 1924 game against the University of Michigan, the bruising “Galloping Ghost” scored a touchdown each of the first four times he carried the ball; after Illinois won, students carried Grange on their shoulders for two miles across the campus. “What a football player,” a sports writer marveled. “He is melody and symphony. He is crashing sound. He is brute force.” When Grange signed a contract with the Chicago Bears in 1926, he single-handedly made professional football competitive with baseball as a spectator sport.

What Ruth and Grange were to their sports, William Harrison “Jack” Dempsey was to boxing. In 1919, he won the world heavyweight title from Jess Willard, a giant of a man weighing 300 pounds and standing six and a half feet tall. Dempsey knocked him down seven times in the first round. After Willard, his face bruised and bloodied, threw in the towel in the fourth round, Dempsey became a national celebrity and a wealthy man.

Like Babe Ruth, the brawling Dempsey was especially popular with working-class men, for he too had been born poor and lived for years as a “hobo,” wandering the rails in search of work and challenging toughs in bars to fight for money. In 1927, when James Joseph “Gene” Tunney defeated Dempsey, more than 105,000 people attended, including a thousand reporters, ten state governors,

BABE RUTH This star pitcher and outfielder won the hearts of Americans with the Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees, and finally the Boston Braves. Here, he autographs bats and balls for military training camps.

3/31/22, 6:17 PM Chapter 22: A Clash of Cultures, 1920–1929

https://ncia.wwnorton.com/ebooks/epub/amerele2v2/EPUB/content/chapter22-01.xhtml 12/12

and numerous Hollywood celebrities. Some 60 million people listened to the fight over the radio. Dempsey was more than a champion; he was a hero to millions. A leading sportswriter stressed that he was “warm and generous, a free spender when he had it and a soft touch for anybody down on his luck.”