Analyze the uneven distribution of the 1920s economic prosperity. Which Americans gained the most and which were largely left out?
How did an expanding mass culture change the contours of everyday life in the decade following WWI? What role did new technologies of mass communication play in shaping these changes? What connections can you draw between the “culture of consumption” then and today?
To what extent were the grim realities of the depression reflected in pop-culture? To what degree were they absent?
Discuss the long and short range effects of the New Deal on American political and economic life. What were the key successes and failure? What legacies of New Deal-era policies and political struggles can you find in contemporary America?
In August 1929, Ladies Home Journal published an article titled “Everybody Ought to Be Rich.” In it, businessman John J. Raskob told Americans that if they invested $15 in the stock market every month, in 20 years they could have $80,000 (over $1 million today). Raskob insisted that “almost anyone who is employed can do that if he tries.”
For wealthy, white Americans like Raskob, the “Roaring ‘20s” was a time of immense economic prosperity. Yet for most Americans, it wasn’t. Low-wage jobs paid an average of $25 a week for men and $18 for women. So if low-wage workers had followed Raskob’s advice, they would have been placing most of a week’s earnings in the stock market every month.
In fact, income inequality increased so much during the 1920s, that by 1928, the top one percent of families received 23.9 percent of all pretax income. About 60 percent of families made less than $2,000 a year, the income level the Bureau of Labor Statistics classified as the minimum livable income for a family of five.
As W.E.B. Du Bois observed in a 1926 essay: “We have today in the United States, cheek by jowl, Prosperity and Depression.”
The speakeasy party culture popularized in books, movies and magazines was only accessible to a small portion of wealthy, urban and mostly white Americans. Black Americans and immigrants faced violence from the newly revived Ku Klux Klan, and many workers’ wages either didn’t keep up with productivity or fell off completely. For farmers in particular, the Great Depression basically began after World War I.
