The USA, 1918–41 — timeline

Key topic 1 · The Roaring Twenties

Reasons for the economic boom

1913

Ford's moving assembly line cuts Model T build time from about twelve hours to ninety-three minutes. Why this date: It is the mechanism by which a luxury became a mass product, and the price fall that followed is what created the consumer market.

1917–18

American participation in the First World War; the country ends it as the world's largest creditor. Why this date: It supplies the capital, the industrial plant and the weakened competitors that the 1920s boom rests on.

1925

A Model T sells for around $290. Why this date: Roughly three months' wages for many industrial workers, which is what makes the car the engine of a consumer economy.

1926–29

The steepest phase of the market's rise, increasingly financed on margin. Why this date: It converts a boom in goods into a boom in expectations, which is a far less stable thing.

Problems in farming and the decline of older industries

1920–21

Agricultural prices collapse as European production recovers. Why this date: The farm depression begins nine years before the Wall Street Crash, which is what makes the decade's prosperity partial from the start.

1922

The Fordney-McCumber tariff raises American duties. Why this date: Retaliation closed export markets that American farmers needed, deepening the over-production problem.

By 1929

Farm income has fallen by roughly half across the decade and about six million people have left the land. Why this date: It is the scale of the internal migration that makes rural depression a national fact rather than a regional one.

The leisure industry and the changing position of women

1920

The Nineteenth Amendment gives women the vote; commercial radio broadcasting begins. Why this date: The decade's most permanent change for women and the technology that created a national culture arrive in the same year.

1927

The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length film with synchronised dialogue. Why this date: It transforms the cinema industry and accelerates the standardisation of American speech and manners nationally.

1929

Weekly cinema attendance reaches about 95 million. Why this date: In a population of about 120 million, it measures how completely a single commercial culture had reached the country.

Key topic 2 · Increased social tensions in the 1920s

Attitudes and policies towards immigration

1921

The Emergency Quota Act sets quotas at three per cent of the 1910 census. Why this date: It establishes the quota principle, and its base year makes the 1924 change visible as a deliberate choice.

1924

The Johnson-Reed Act sets quotas at two per cent of the 1890 census and excludes Asian immigration. Why this date: Moving the base year back thirty-four years changes the composition rather than the volume, which is the evidence of purpose.

1924–29

Immigration falls to a small fraction of pre-war levels. Why this date: It ends mass immigration to the United States for four decades, which is a change of national character rather than of policy.

The Palmer Raids, the Red Scare and Sacco and Vanzetti

1919

More than three thousand strikes; parcel bombs; the bombing of Palmer's house. Why this date: It supplies the real disorder that the response was disproportionate to, and both halves are needed for a judgement.

November 1919 – January 1920

The Palmer Raids: several thousand arrested, several hundred deported. Why this date: It is the largest federal action against political opinion in the period and it collapsed when officials refused to sign the warrants.

1921 and 1927

Sacco and Vanzetti convicted, and executed six years later. Why this date: The interval is the point: six years of appeals turned a state murder trial into an international argument about American justice.

Attitudes towards black Americans and the Ku Klux Klan

1915

The Klan is refounded; The Birth of a Nation is released. Why this date: The revived organisation is a twentieth-century mass movement with a commercial recruitment structure, not a survival of Reconstruction.

1919

Racial violence in Chicago and other cities during and after the Great Migration. Why this date: It shows that migration north exchanged legal segregation for a different and violent set of constraints rather than escaping them.

1925

A Klan march in Washington; the conviction of D. C. Stephenson. Why this date: The peak of respectability and the scandal that destroyed it fall in the same year, which is what makes the collapse so instructive.

Morals, the Monkey Trial and Prohibition

January 1920

The Eighteenth Amendment takes effect under the Volstead Act. Why this date: It was ratified by forty-six of forty-eight states, which is the fact that makes it a national movement rather than an imposition.

1925

The Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee. Why this date: It is the other front of the same cultural conflict, decided in a courtroom and reported to a national audience by radio.

1929

The St Valentine's Day massacre in Chicago. Why this date: It marks the point at which organised crime's violence became a national political problem rather than a local one.

December 1933

The Twenty-first Amendment repeals Prohibition. Why this date: It is the only repeal of a constitutional amendment in American history, and the Depression's need for jobs and revenue is a large part of the reason.

Key topic 3 · The USA in Depression, 1929–33

The Wall Street Crash: causes and consequences

24 and 29 October 1929

Black Thursday and Black Tuesday; record volumes of shares are sold. Why this date: The forced-sale mechanism of margin buying is what turns a fall into a collapse in a single week.

1930

The Smoot-Hawley tariff raises American duties; other countries retaliate. Why this date: It converts an American collapse into a contraction of world trade, and is why the Depression is global.

By 1932

The Dow has fallen by about 89 per cent from its 1929 peak. Why this date: The floor came three years after the Crash, which shows that October 1929 was the start of a process rather than the event itself.

By 1933

About 5,000 banks have failed and unemployment reaches roughly 25 per cent. Why this date: These are the mechanisms by which a stock market fall reached people who had never owned a share.

Hoover's response: intervention and volunteerism

1930

The Smoot-Hawley tariff raises duties; retaliation follows. Why this date: It is the clearest case of a Hoover measure that made the situation worse, and it is used against him in almost every interpretation.

1932

The Reconstruction Finance Corporation lends to banks, railroads and insurers. Why this date: It is substantial federal intervention, and it was aimed at institutions rather than individuals, which is why it did not change how he was seen.

July 1932

The Bonus Marchers are cleared from Washington by troops under MacArthur. Why this date: It is the image that fixed Hoover's reputation, four months before an election he then lost heavily.

The impact on banking, agriculture, industry and people's lives

1929–33

About 5,000 banks fail; depositors lose savings with no federal insurance. Why this date: It explains why the American collapse reached households that had never invested, and why deposit insurance in 1933 mattered so much.

1932

Industrial production has roughly halved; unemployment approaches a quarter of the workforce. Why this date: It measures the depth of the collapse in the year of the presidential election.

1932–36

Drought and erosion produce the Dust Bowl; hundreds of thousands leave the southern Plains. Why this date: It adds an ecological disaster to an economic one, and produces the migration the most famous photographs record.

July 1932

The Bonus Marchers are cleared from Washington. Why this date: It is the moment the crisis's human cost became a national political image.

Key topic 4 · Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1933–41

Roosevelt's aims, the Hundred Days and the Alphabet Agencies

4 March 1933

Roosevelt is inaugurated with most banks closed by state action. Why this date: It fixes the depth of the crisis at the moment of the change of administration.

12 March 1933

The first fireside chat; the banks reopen and deposits exceed withdrawals. Why this date: The first achievement of the New Deal was to end a panic by explanation, which cost nothing and shaped everything after it.

1933

The CCC, AAA, NRA, FERA and TVA are created within a hundred days. Why this date: The volume and speed of legislation are themselves part of the effect: it signalled that the federal government had accepted responsibility.

1933

The Glass-Steagall Act creates federal deposit insurance. Why this date: It removes the mechanism by which bank runs had destroyed savings, and bank failures fell dramatically afterwards.

The second New Deal and the 1935 statutes

May 1935

The Supreme Court strikes down the National Recovery Administration. Why this date: It removes the centrepiece of the first New Deal and is one of the reasons a second one was needed.

1935

The WPA, the Social Security Act, the Wagner Act and the Banking Act. Why this date: It is the most consequential single year of American domestic legislation in the century, and most of it survives.

1936

Roosevelt wins re-election with 46 of the 48 states. Why this date: It is the electoral verdict on the second New Deal and the largest landslide of the period.

By 1941

Union membership has roughly trebled since 1935. Why this date: It measures the Wagner Act's effect, and it is the mechanism behind the rise in industrial wages after 1941.

The achievements and shortcomings of the New Deal

1933–37

Unemployment falls from roughly 25 per cent to about 14 per cent; output roughly doubles. Why this date: It establishes that there was a real recovery, which the failure to reach full employment can obscure.

1937–38

The Roosevelt recession: unemployment rises again to about 19 per cent after spending is cut. Why this date: It is the sharpest piece of evidence in the whole assessment, and it supports arguments on both sides.

1939

Unemployment still stands at around 15 per cent. Why this date: Six years of the New Deal had not restored full employment, which is the fact any defence must accommodate.

1941–42

War orders absorb the labour force and unemployment falls to negligible levels. Why this date: Recovery arrived with military spending rather than with any New Deal programme, which is the most damaging single fact for its defenders.

Key topic 5 · The Opposition to the New Deal

The Supreme Court, business and the Liberty League

1934

The American Liberty League is founded with corporate funding. Why this date: It organises business opposition and supplies much of the anti-New Deal material a source question will use.

May 1935

Schechter v United States strikes down the National Recovery Administration. Why this date: It removes the centrepiece of the first New Deal and is a large part of the reason a second one was drafted.

February 1937

Roosevelt proposes to enlarge the Supreme Court; the Senate rejects it. Why this date: It is his heaviest political defeat and it creates the conservative congressional coalition that limits him thereafter.

Spring 1937

The Court upholds the Wagner Act and the Social Security Act. Why this date: The constitutional obstacle disappears, and the New Deal's permanent structures become secure just as its author loses the fight over the Court.

Radical criticism: Huey Long and Father Coughlin

1934

Long launches Share Our Wealth; Coughlin founds the National Union for Social Justice. Why this date: It dates the emergence of an organised critique from the left, a year before the second New Deal answers it.

1935

The Social Security Act and the Revenue Act are passed. Why this date: A federal pension and a sharp rise in top-rate taxation occupy the ground the radical movements had opened.

September 1935

Huey Long is assassinated in Baton Rouge. Why this date: It removes the only figure who might plausibly have split the Democratic vote in 1936, which is why that election was so one-sided.

1936

The Union Party, drawing on Coughlin's and Townsend's support, wins under two per cent of the vote. Why this date: It measures how little the movements were worth electorally once the second New Deal had taken their programmes.