Group items tagged

60 percent of the nation's families earned less than $2,000 a year

Prosperity bypassed specific groups of Americans entirely.

The farm sector had been mired in depression since 1921

The decline in farm income reverberated throughout the economy.

Between 1920 and 1929, more than 5,000 of the country's 30,000 banks failed.

small businesspeople failed because they could not secure loans.

consumer debt also weakened the economy

poor distribution of income

During the 1920s, there was a pronounced shift in wealth and income toward the very rich

poorest 93 percent of the non-farm population actually saw its disposable income fall.

business investment had begun to decline.

housing starts

1924 immigration law

Soaring inventories

reduce investment and production

stock market speculation

The Federal Reserve, the nation's central bank, played a critical, if inadvertent, role in weakening the economy.

allowed the money supply to fall dramatically

"liquidity crisis."

the Federal Reserve allowed the country's money supply to decline by 27 percent between 1929 and 1933.

tariff policies damaged the economy by depressing foreign trade

Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922

Hawley-Smoot Tariff of 1930

By 1933, international trade had plunged 30 percent.

the United States had no federal system of unemployment insurance.

Community Ches

Red Cross

He sought and achieved Congressional authority to create the First Bank of the United States in 1791; the charter lasted until 1811.[17]

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison opposed a strong central government (and, consequently, most of Hamilton's economic policies), but they could not stop Hamilton,

As president in 1811 Madison let the bank charter expire, but the War of 1812 proved the need for a national bank and Madison reversed positions. The Second Bank of the United States was established in 1816, with a 20 year charter.[18]

Cotton, at first a small-scale crop in the South, boomed following Eli Whitney's invention in 1793 of the cotton gin,

Millions moved to the more fertile farmland of the Midwest. States built roads and waterways, such as the Cumberland Pike (1818) and the Erie Canal (1825), opening up markets for western farm products.

The Whig Party supported Clay's American System, which proposed to build internal improvements (e.g. roads, canals and harbors), protect industry, and create a strong national bank

President Andrew Jackson (1829–1837), leader of the new Democratic Party, opposed the Second Bank of the United States, which he believed favored the entrenched interests of rich. When he was elected for a second term, Jackson blocked the renewal of the bank's charter. Jackson opposed paper money and demanded the government be paid in gold and silver coins. The Panic of 1837 stopped business growth for three years

Railroads made a decisive impact on the U.S. economy especially in the 1850-1873 era, making possible the transition to an urban industrial nation with high finance and advanced managerial skills. Railroads opened up remote areas, drastically cut the cost of moving freight as well as passenger travel, and stimulated new industries such as steel and telegraphy, as well as the profession of civil engineering.

Atlanta, Billings, Chicago, and Dallas

the railroad became the first large-scale business enterprise and the model for most large corporations.[24]

Panics did not curtail rapid U.S. economic growth during the 19th century. Long term demographic growth, expansion into new farmlands, and creation of new factories continued. New inventions and capital investment led to the creation of new industries and economic growth. As transportation improved, new markets continuously opened.

By 1860, on the eve of Civil War, 16% of the people lived in cities with 2500 or more people; a third of the nation's income came from manufacturing. Urbanized industry was limited primarily to the Northeast; cotton cloth production was the leading industry, with the manufacture of shoes, woolen clothing, and machinery also expanding. Most of the workers in the new factories were immigrants or their children. Between 1845 and 1855, some 300,000 European immigrants arrived annually. Many remained in eastern cities, especially mill towns and mining camps, while those with farm experience and some savings bought farms in the West.[26]

The industrial advantages of the North over the South helped secure a Northern victory in the American Civil War

Industrialists came to dominate many aspects of the nation's life, including social and political affairs.[26]

the region maintained its dependence on cotton

An explosion of new discoveries and inventions took place, a process called the "Second Industrial Revolution."

By 1890, the USA leaped ahead of Britain for first place in manufacturing output.[2

The rapid economic development following the Civil War laid the groundwork for the modern U.S. industrial economy.

Parallel to these achievements was the development of the nation's industrial infrastructure

revolutions in American industry

Technological innovations

national investments

slashed the costs of production and distribution

National credit agencies

Taylorism

Frederick Taylor

Taylorism increased the scale and scope of manufacturing and allowed for the flowering of mass production.

use of interchangeable parts in Civil War–era weapons manufacturing

sewing machines

packers’ “disassembly” lines

grain reapers

Duke cigarette rollers

Henry Ford made the assembly line famous

Cyrus McCormick

Industrialization and mass production pushed the United States into the forefront of the world

massive economies of scale

New industrial companies therefore hungered for markets to keep their high-volume production facilities operating

A new class of managers—comprising what one prominent economic historian called the “visible hand”—operated between the worlds of workers and owners

between 1898 and 1902, a wave of mergers rocked the American economy

Industrial capitalism realized the greatest advances in efficiency and productivity

But it also created millions of low-paid, unskilled, unreliable jobs with long hours and dangerous working conditions

new ideas arose to bestow moral legitimacy upon them

One of Darwin’s greatest popularizers, the British sociologist and biologist Herbert Spencer, applied Darwin’s theories to society and popularized the phrase survival of the fittest.

H. L. Mencken wrote in 1907. “All growth must occur at the top. The strong must grow stronger, and that they may do so, they must waste no strength in the vain task of trying to uplift the weak.”11

By the time Mencken wrote those words, the ideas of social Darwinism had spread among wealthy Americans and their defenders

American workers toiled in difficult jobs for long hours and little pay. Mechanization and mass production threw skilled laborers into unskilled positions

skyrocketing rents trapped families in crowded slums.

Strikes ruptured American industry throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Knights of Labor enjoyed considerable success in the early 1880s

It welcomed all laborers,

In the summer of 1886, the campaign for an eight-hour day,

culminated in a national strike on May 1, 1886.

The deaths of the Chicago policemen sparked outrage across the nation, and the sensationalization of the Haymarket Riot helped many Americans to associate unionism with radicalism

Labor leaders and radicals called for a protest at Haymarket Square

The American Federation of Labor (AFL) emerged as a conservative alternative to the vision of the Knights of Labor. An alliance of craft unions (unions composed of skilled workers), the AFL rejected the Knights’ expansive vision of a “producerist” economy and advocated “pure and simple trade unionism,” a program that aimed for practical gains (higher wages, fewer hours, and safer conditions) through a conservative approach that tried to avoid strikes.

Homestead, Pennsylvania.

Henry Clay Frick

Pinkerton detectives,

1894, workers in George Pullman’s Pullman car factories struck when he cut wages by a quarter but kept rents and utilities in his company town constant. The American Railway Union (ARU), led by Eugene Debs, launched a sympathy strike: the ARU would refuse to handle any Pullman cars on any rail line anywhere in the country.

workers were not the only ones struggling to stay afloat in industrial America. American farmers also lashed out against the inequalities of the Gilded Age and denounced political corruption for enabling economic theft.

began to denounce the North’s form of capitalism as “wage slavery.”

Beginning in 1837, southern leaders held the first of a series of commercial conventions in an attempt to diversify the southern economy and to rescue the South from northern “pecuniary and commercial supremacy.”

Efforts to develop the southern economy were surprisingly successful. Southern railroad mileage quadrupled between 1850 and 1860--although southern track mileage still trailed that of the free states by 14,000. By 1860 Richmond manufactured more tobacco than any other America city and exported more goods to South America than any other American port, including New York.

Regional independence was also called for in religion. Due in large part to fear of antislavery agitation, southern Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians sought to sever their denominational affiliations with northern churches

Southerners also called for a distinctive and peculiarly southern literature. More than 30 periodicals were founded with the word “Southern” in their title, all intended to “breathe a Southern spirit, and sustain a strictly Southern character.”

1860 the North had approximately 1.3 million industrial workers, whereas the South had 110,000, and northern factories manufactured nine-tenths of the industrial goods produced in the United States.

1850, 20 percent of all southern white adults could not read or write, while the illiteracy rate in New England was less than half of 1 percent.

1850, 17 percent of the farming population held two-thirds of all acres in the rich cotton-growing regions of the South.

Louisiana, for example, nearly half of all rural white families owned no land. During the 1850s, the percentage of the total white population owning slaves declined significantly. By 1860, the proportion of whites holding slaves had fallen from about one-third to one-fourth.

Wampanoag

Narragansett

assuring landlords a windfall of an extra $142 a month. Buildings that previously held 60 families now contained 300

Mexican Americans faced serious opposition from organized labor

repatriated

One response to the depression was military dictatorship

collapse in raw material and agricultural commodity prices led to social unrest,

fascism and militarism

Hitler outlawed labor unions

restructured German

industry into a series of cartels

massive program of military rearmament

totalitarian communism.

Stalin's

welfare capitalism

Canada

Great Britain

France

the economic decline brought on by the Depression was steeper and more protracted in the United States.

European countries significantly reduced unemployment by 1936. However, the American jobless rate still exceeded 17 percent as late as 1939, when World War II began in Europe. It did not drop below 14 percent until 1941.

It produced a major political realignment

committed, to varying degrees, to interventionist government.