by Norman Lowe
Figure 22.2 The three separate branches of the US federal government
Although the President can veto laws, Congress can over-rule this veto if it can raise a two-thirds majority in both houses. Nor can the President dissolve Congress; it is just a question of hoping that things will change for the better at the next set of elections. On the other hand, Congress cannot get rid of the President unless it can be shown that he or she has committed treason or some other serious crime. In that case the President can be threatened with impeachment (a formal accusation of crimes before the Senate, which would then carry out a trial). It was to avoid impeachment that Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace (August 1974) because of his involvement in the Watergate Scandal (see Section 23.4). A President’s success has usually depended on how skilful he is at persuading Congress to approve his legislative programme. The Supreme Court keeps a watchful eye on both President and Congress, and can make life difficult for both of them by declaring a law ‘unconstitutional’, which means that it is illegal and has to be changed.
22.2 INTO THE MELTING POT: THE ERA OF IMMIGRATION
(a) A huge wave of immigration
During the second half of the nineteenth century there was a huge wave of immigration into the USA. People had been crossing the Atlantic to settle in America since the seventeenth century, but in relatively small numbers. During the entire eighteenth century the total immigration into North America was probably no more than half a million; between 1860 and 1930 the total was over 30 million. Between 1840 and 1870 the Irish were the predominant immigrant group. After 1850 Germans and Swedes arrived in vast numbers, and by 1910 there were at least 8 million Germans in the USA. Between 1890 and 1920 it was the turn of Russians, Poles and Italians to come flooding in. Table 22.1 shows in detail the numbers of immigrants arriving in the USA and where they came from.
Peoples’ motives for leaving their home countries were mixed. Some were attracted by the prospect of jobs and a better life. They hoped that if they could come through the ‘Golden Door’ into the USA, they would escape from poverty. This was the case with the Irish, Swedes, Norwegians and Italians. Persecution drove many people to emigrate; this was especially true of the Jews, who left Russia and other eastern European states in their millions after 1880 to escape pogroms (organized massacres). Immigration was much reduced after 1924 when the US government introduced annual quotas. Exceptions were still made, however, and during the 30 years following the end of the Second World War, a further 7 million people arrived.
Having arrived in the USA, many immigrants soon took part in a second migration, moving from their ports of arrival on the east coast into the Midwest. Germans, Norwegians and Swedes tended to move westwards, settling in such states as Nebraska, Wisconsin, Missouri, Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois. This was all part of a general American move westwards: the US population west of the Mississippi grew from only about 5 million in 1860 to around 30 million in 1910.
(b) What were the consequences of immigration?
The most obvious consequence was the increase in population. It has been calculated that if there had been no mass movement of people to the USA between 1880 and the 1920s, the population would have been 12 per cent lower than it actually was in 1930.
Immigrants helped to speed up economic development. Economic historian William Ashworth calculated that without immigration, the labour force of the USA would have been 14 per cent lower than it actually was in 1920, and ‘with fewer people, much of the natural wealth of the country would have waited longer for effective use’.
The movement of people from countryside to town resulted in the growth of huge urban areas, known as ‘conurbations’. In 1880 only New York had over a million inhabitants; by 1910, Philadelphia and Chicago had passed that figure too.
The movement to take jobs in industry, mining, engineering and building meant that the proportion of the population working in agriculture declined steadily. In 1870, about 58 per cent of all Americans worked in agriculture; by 1914 this had fallen to 14 per cent, and to only 6 per cent in 1965.
The USA acquired the most remarkable mixture of nationalities, cultures and religions in the world. Immigrants tended to concentrate in the cities, though many Germans, Swedes and Norwegians moved westwards in order to farm. In 1914 immigrants made up over half the population of every large American city, and there were some 30 different nationalities. This led idealistic Americans to claim with pride that the USA was a ‘melting pot’ into which all nationalities were thrown and melted down, to emerge as a single, unified American nation. In fact this seems to have been something of a myth, certainly until well after the First World War. Immigrants would congregate in national groups living in city ghettos. Each new wave of immigrants was treated with contempt and hostility by earlier immigrants, who feared for their jobs. The Irish, for example, would often refuse to work with Poles and Italians. Later the Poles and Italians were equally hostile to Mexicans. Some writers have said that the USA was not really a ‘melting pot’ at all; as historian Roger Thompson puts it,the country was ‘more like a salad bowl, where, although a dressing is poured over the ingredients, they nonetheless remain separate’.
There was growing agitation against allowing too many foreigners into the USA, and there were demands for the ‘Golden Door’ to be firmly closed. The movement was racial in character, claiming that America’s continuing greatness depended on preserving the purity of its Anglo-Saxon stock, known as White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPS). This, it was felt, would be weakened by allowing the entry of unlimited numbers of Jews and southern and eastern Europeans. From 1921 the US government gradually restricted entry, until it was fixed at 150 000 a year in 1924. This was applied strictly during the depression years of the 1930s when unemployment was high. After the Second World War, restrictions were gradually relaxed; the USA took in some 700 000 refugees escaping from Castro’s Cuba between 1959 and 1975 and over 100 000 refugees from Vietnam after the communists took over South Vietnam in 1975.
Table 22.1 US population and immigration, 1851–1950
a Includes Norway for this decade
b Eire only
c Includes Austria
Source:Roger Thompson, The Golden Door(Allman & Son, 1969), p. 309
22.3 THE USA BECOMES ECONOMIC LEADER OF THE WORLD
(a) Economic expansion and the rise of big business
In the half-century before the First World War, a vast industrial expansion took the USA to the top of the league table of world industrial producers. The statistics in Table 22.2 show that already in 1900 they had overtaken most of their nearest rivals.
This expansion was made possible by the rich supplies of raw materials – coal, iron ore and oil – and by the spread of railways. The rapidly increasing population, much of it from immigration, provided the workforce and the markets. Import duties (tariffs) protected American industry from foreign competition, and it was a time of opportunity and enterprise. As American historian John A. Garraty puts it: ‘the dominant spirit of the time encouraged businessmen to maximum effort by emphasising progress, glorifying material wealth and justifying aggressiveness’. The most successful businessmen, like Andrew Carnegie (steel), John D. Rockefeller (oil), Cornelius Vanderbilt (shipping and railways), J. Pierpoint Morgan (banking) and P. D. Armour (meat), made vast fortunes and built up huge industrial empires which gave them power over both politicians and ordinary people.
Table 22.2 The USA and its chief rivals, 1900
USA nearest rival
Coal production (tons)
262 million
219 million (Britain)
Exports (£)
311 million
390 million (Britain)
Pig-iron (tons)
16 million
8 million (Britain)
Steel (tons)
13 million
6 million (Germany)
Railways (miles)
183 000
28 000 (Germany)
Sil
ver (fine oz)
55 million
57 million (Mexico)
Gold (fine oz)
3.8 million
3.3 million (Australia)
Cotton production (bales)
10.6 million
3 million (India)
Petroleum (metric tons)
9.5 million
11.5 million (Russia)
Wheat (bushels)
638 million
552 million (Russia)
Source: J. Nichol and S. Lang, Work Out Modern World History (Macmillan, 1990).
(b) The great boom of the 1920s
After a slow start, as the country returned to normal after the First World War, the economy began to expand again: industrial production reached levels which had hardly been thought possible, doubling between 1921 and 1929 without any great increase in the numbers of workers. Sales, profits and wages also reached new heights, and the ‘Roaring Twenties’, as they became known, gave rise to the popular image of the USA as the world’s most glamorous modern society. There was a great variety of new things to be bought – radio sets, refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, smart new clothes, motorcycles, and above all, motor cars. At the end of the war there were already 7 million cars in the USA, but by 1929 there were close on 24 million; Henry Ford led the field with his Model T. Perhaps the most famous of all the new commodities on offer was the Hollywood film industry, which made huge profits and exported its products all over the world. By 1930 almost every town had a cinema. And there were even new forms of music and dance; the 1920s are also sometimes known as the Jazz Age as well as the age of the daring new dances – the Charleston and the Turkey Trot.
What caused the boom?
It was the climax of the great industrial expansion of the late nineteenth century, when the USA had overtaken her two greatest rivals, Britain and Germany. The war gave American industry an enormous boost: countries whose industries and imports from Europe had been disrupted bought American goods, and continued to do so when the war was over. The USA was therefore the real economic victor of the war.
The Republican governments’ economic policies contributed to the prosperity in the short term. Their approach was one of laissez-faire, but they did take two significant actions: the Fordney–McCumber tariff (1922) raised import duties on goods coming into America to the highest level ever, thus protecting American industry and encouraging Americans to buy home-produced goods;
a general lowering of income tax in 1926 and 1928 left people with more cash to spend on American goods.
American industry was becoming increasingly efficient, as more mechanization was introduced. More and more factories were adopting the moving production-line methods first used by Henry Ford in 1915, which speeded up production and reduced costs. Management also began to apply F. W. Taylor’s ‘time and motion’ studies, which saved more time and increased productivity.
As profits increased, so did wages (though not as much as profits). Between 1923 and 1929 the average wage for industrial workers rose by 8 per cent. Though this was not spectacular, it was enough to enable some workers to buy the new consumer luxuries, often on credit.
Advertising helped the boom and itself became big business during the 1920s. Newspapers and magazines carried more advertising than ever before, radio commercials became commonplace and cinemas showed filmed advertisements.
The motor-car industry stimulated expansion in a number of allied industries – tyres, batteries, petroleum for petrol, garages and tourism.
Many new roads were built and mileage almost doubled between 1919 and 1929. It was now more feasible to transport goods by road, and the numbers of trucks registered increased fourfold during the same period. Prices were competitive and this meant that railways and canals had lost their monopoly.
Giant corporations with their methods of mass production played an important part in the boom by keeping costs down. Another technique, encouraged by the government, was the trade association. This helped to standardize methods, tools and prices in smaller firms making the same product. In this way the American economy became dominated by giant corporations and trade associations, using mass-production methods for the mass consumer.
(c) Free and equal?
Although many people were doing well during the ‘Roaring Twenties’, the wealth was not shared out equally; there were some unfortunate groups of people who must have felt that their freedom and their liberty did not extend very far. In fact, in many ways it was an age of intolerance.
1 Farmers were not sharing in the general prosperity
They had done well during the war, but during the 1920s prices of farm produce gradually fell. Farmers’ profits dwindled and farm labourers’ wages in the Midwest and the agricultural South were often less than half those of industrial workers in the north-east. The cause of the trouble was simple – farmers, with their new combine harvesters and chemical fertilizers, were producing too much food for the home market to absorb. This was at a time when European agriculture was recovering from the war and when there was strong competition from Canada, Russia and Argentina on the world market. It meant that not enough of the surplus food could be exported. The government, with its laissez-faire attitude, did hardly anything to help. Even when Congress passed the McNary–Haugen Bill, designed to allow the government to buy up farmers’ surplus crops, President Coolidge twice vetoed it (1927 and 1928) on the grounds that it would make the problem worse by encouraging farmers to produce even more.
2 Not all industries were prosperous
Coal mining, for example, was suffering competition from oil, and many workers were laid off.
3 The black population was left out of the prosperity
In the South, where the majority of black people lived, white farmers always laid off black labourers first. About three-quarters of a million moved north during the 1920s looking for jobs in industry, but they almost always had to make do with the lowest-paid jobs, the worst conditions at work and the worst slum housing. Black people also had to suffer the persecutions of the Ku Klux Klan, the notorious white-hooded anti-black organization, which had about 5 million members in 1924. Assaults, whippings and lynchings were common, and although the Klan gradually declined after 1925, prejudice and discrimination against black people and against other coloured and minority groups continued (see Section 22.5).
4 Hostility to immigrants
Immigrants, especially those from eastern Europe, were treated with hostility by descendants of the original white settlers who came from Britain and the Netherlands. These WASPS – White Anglo-Saxon Protestants – felt under threat from the enormous numbers of immigrants. These included Catholic Irish and Italians and Orthodox and Jewish Russians, together with Poles and Hungarians. It was thought that, not being Anglo-Saxon, these people were threatening the American way of life and the greatness of the American nation. In 1924 the Johnson–Reed Act set an annual quota of 150 000 immigrants.
5 Super-corporations
Industry became increasingly monopolized by large trusts or super-corporations. By 1929 the wealthiest 5 per cent of corporations took over 84 per cent of the total income of all corporations. Although trusts increased efficiency, there is no doubt that they kept prices higher, and wages lower than was necessary. They were able to keep trade unions weak by forbidding workers to join. The Republicans, who were pro-business, did nothing to limit the growth of the super-corporations because the system seemed to be working well.
6 Widespread poverty in industrial areas and cities
Between 1922 and 1929, real wages of industrial workers increased by only 1.4 per cent a year; 6 million families (42 per cent of the total) had an income of less than $1000 a year. Working conditions were still appalling – about 25 000 workers were killed at work every year and 100 000 were disabled. After touring working-class areas of New York in 1928, Congressman La Guardia remarked: ‘I confess I was not prepared for what I actually saw. It seemed almost unbelievable tha
t such conditions of poverty could really exist.’ In New York City alone there were 2 million families, many of them immigrants, living in slum tenements that had been condemned as firetraps.
7 The freedom of workers to protest was extremely limited
Strikes were crushed by force, militant trade unions had been destroyed and the more moderate unions were weak. Although there was a Socialist Party, there was no hope of it ever forming a government. After a bomb exploded in Washington in 1919, the authorities whipped up a ‘Red Scare’; they arrested and deported over 4000 citizens of foreign origin, many of them Russians, who were suspected of being communists or anarchists. Most of them, in fact, were completely innocent.
8 Prohibition was introduced in 1919
This ‘noble experiment’, as it was known, was the banning of the manufacture, import and sale of all alcoholic liquor. It was the result of the efforts of a well-meaning pressure group before and during the First World War, which believed that a ‘dry’ America would mean a more efficient and moral America. But it proved impossible to eliminate ‘speakeasies’ (illegal bars) and ‘bootleggers’ (manufacturers of illegal liquor), who protected their premises from rivals with hired gangs, who shot each other up in gunfights. Organized crime was rife and gang violence became part of the American scene, especially in Chicago. It was there that Al Capone made himself a fortune, much of it from speakeasies and protection rackets. It was there too that the notorious St Valentine’s Day Massacre took place in 1929, when hitmen hired by Capone arrived in a stolen police car and gunned down seven members of a rival gang who had been lined up against a wall.