rise and fall of the american economy
- Created by: Elisabeth Skenderi
- Created on: 03-05-13 21:55
View mindmap
- Rise and Fall of the American economy
- Advertising & its impact on the consumer society
- Firms invested in advertising campaigns to increase sales & profits
- Greater access to the media through newspapers, magazines, the radio & the cinema
- Development of sophisticated advertising techniques - catchphrases, colourful adverts, targeting audience
- Growing popularity of catalogues led to growth in 'mail order' sales
- Availabiity of credit meant that people could 'buy now, pay later' using hire purchases
- Henry Ford & the importance of the car industry
- He created the se of the electric conveyor belt & Assembly line
- Ford's Model T was reduced from 13 hours to 1 hour 33 min to make
- Wages $5 a day by 1914
- Factory in Detroit - 24 hours a day, 3x8 hours shift, employing 80,000 people
- First mass produced car using standardised parts & one colour - Black
- 1925 - Half the worlds cars were Model T's
- Led to the building of - gas stations, motels, and restaurants - encourages development of suburbs
- Famers felt less isolated & more mobile
- Why the USA went into depression
- US stock market collaped - shares were worth only a fraction of what they had been
- Many shareholder lost everything. Increase in suicides
- Loss in confidence in the financial sector. Banks went bust
- Less consumer spending
- Unemployment rose sharply- firms began to lay of workers
- Did all people benefit from the 'Boom'?
- Farmers
- Decline in European markets after 1918 - fall in food prices
- Forced to brrow money & struggled to keep up with their morgage payments
- Those who lost their farms = Hobos (unemployed/ seeking a job)
- Farm income 1919- $32 billion - 1928- $13 billion
- Black Americans
- Segregation( group seperate from the rest of the society )
- Labourers/ sharecroppers(crop as rent) - lived in slum conditions
- Northen Cities: lived in Ghettos & 'The last to be Hired, the first to be Fired'
- 750,000 lost their jobs during the 1920s
- Immigrants
- Viewed as a source of cheap labour
- Low wages
- Prejudice & discrimination
- Unemployment remained high throughout the 1920s
- Trade Unions
- Large number of strikes in the early 1920s, & the Red Scare damaged union membership
- Employers(Henry Ford) were anti-union & refused to employ union members
- Farmers
- Advertising & its impact on the consumer society
Comments
No comments have yet been made