This unit follows the United States from the consumer boom and culture clashes of the 1920s through the crash of 1929, the Great Depression, the New Deal and the Dust Bowl. By the end, you should be able to explain why the boom collapsed, how different groups experienced the 1920s and 1930s, and how the New Deal changed the federal government's role in American life.
Read the overview first for the big picture, then use each topic's notes and self-check question to test yourself before moving to the full study guides.
Unit 10 covers about twenty years, from 1920 to the late 1930s, but it holds two very different decades. The 1920s were about growth and cultural change, and the 1930s were about economic disaster and the government's response. The skill this unit asks for most is cause and effect, meaning how choices in the 1920s set up the crisis of the 1930s.
Honors US History Unit 10 covers the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression. You study the 1920s economic boom (cars, radio, advertising and buying on credit), cultural conflicts like Prohibition, the Scopes Trial, the revived Ku Klux Klan and the Immigration Act of 1924, and the Harlem Renaissance that grew out of the Great Migration. Then you study the stock market crash of October 1929, the deeper causes of the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover's limited response, Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs, and the Dust Bowl and other hardships that drove many Plains families west, including to California.
Mass production made cars and appliances affordable, and the installment plan let families buy them with monthly payments. Farmers, though, faced falling crop prices for most of the decade, and wages grew more slowly than factory output. Some historians and economists argue that this gap weakened demand and made the economy more vulnerable to a downturn.
Jazz, flappers and new ideas about science challenged some older customs and beliefs. Conflicts over Prohibition, evolution, the Klan and immigration quotas reflected disagreements about American identity. Those disagreements did not fall neatly along city and country lines.
Before 1933, most Americans did not expect Washington to provide jobs, insure bank deposits or pay pensions. FDR's New Deal did all three through programs like the WPA, the FDIC and Social Security. These programs did not end the Depression. Although the WPA ended in 1943, the FDIC and Social Security continued, and the New Deal changed expectations of government.
Speculation, debt, unequal wealth and overworked farmland all built up quietly during the good years. When the economy and the soil gave out in the 1930s, voters turned to Roosevelt and a far more active federal government. If you can trace a line from a 1920s cause to a 1930s effect, you understand this unit.
The 1920s were a boom decade for many Americans, especially in cities.
The Harlem Renaissance was a burst of Black literature, music, art and political thought centered in Harlem, New York City, during the 1920s and early 1930s.
The economy began to contract in August 1929.
The Dust Bowl was an environmental disaster on the southern Great Plains in the 1930s, centered on the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, western Kansas, southeastern Colorado and northeastern New Mexico.
The 1920s were a boom decade for many Americans, especially in cities. Republican presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover kept taxes low and regulation light, and Coolidge said that "the chief business of the American people is business." Harding's term also produced the Teapot Dome scandal, in which his Interior Secretary took bribes to lease federal oil reserves.
New technology drove the boom. Henry Ford's assembly line cut the price of a Model T to about $260 by the mid-1920s, and by 1929 the country had over 23 million registered cars. Radio (KDKA began commercial broadcasts in 1920) and movies, including The Jazz Singer (1927), a feature film with synchronized dialogue, created a shared national culture. Families bought radios and refrigerators on the installment plan, which piled up consumer debt.
Under the prosperity ran a clash between modern urban values and traditional rural ones. The 1920 census was the first to count more Americans in urban areas than rural ones. Flappers and the 19th Amendment (1920) signaled new roles for women. On the traditional side, Prohibition, in effect from 1920, banned the manufacture, sale and transportation of alcoholic drinks but fed speakeasies and organized crime involving figures like Al Capone. The Scopes Trial (1925) put the teaching of evolution on trial in Tennessee, the Ku Klux Klan grew to millions of members, and the Immigration Act of 1924 set quotas that sharply cut immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and barred most Asian immigrants.
Check yourself: How does the Scopes Trial show the decade's cultural divide? (Answer: It set modern, science-based ideas and urban critics like Clarence Darrow against traditional religious beliefs defended by William Jennings Bryan and a rural Tennessee law, though not everyone in cities or rural areas agreed with the views associated with their region.)
The Harlem Renaissance was a burst of Black literature, music, art and political thought centered in Harlem, New York City, during the 1920s and early 1930s. It grew out of the Great Migration, in which roughly 1.5 million African Americans left the rural South for Northern and Midwestern cities between about 1915 and 1930. They were escaping Jim Crow laws, lynching and sharecropping debt, and they were drawn by factory jobs that opened during World War I.
The movement's core idea was the "New Negro," a phrase popularized by Alain Locke's 1925 anthology. It meant Black Americans defining themselves with pride instead of accepting racist stereotypes. Langston Hughes wrote poetry shaped by jazz and blues rhythms, Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and collected Southern folklore, and Claude McKay's "If We Must Die" (1919) answered the racial violence of the Red Summer. Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong helped turn jazz into a respected American art form. W.E.B. Du Bois published young writers in The Crisis, the NAACP's magazine, while Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association promoted Black nationalism and a return to Africa.
The North was not free of racism. Ellington's band played the Cotton Club, which served white audiences only, and Northern cities had segregated housing and deadly race riots like Chicago in 1919. The pride and organizing of this era fed directly into the later Civil Rights Movement.
Check yourself: Why did the Harlem Renaissance happen in the North in the 1920s rather than earlier in the South? (Answer: The Great Migration concentrated hundreds of thousands of Black Southerners in Northern cities like New York, creating a large community, audiences and publishers in places like Harlem, and some escape from Jim Crow laws.)
The economy began to contract in August 1929. The stock market crash that October worsened the downturn, but it was not the only cause of the Great Depression. Wages lagged behind production, so factories and farms made more than people could buy. The richest 1% held a large share of the wealth, many investors had bought stocks on margin with borrowed money, and bank regulation had major gaps. Thousands of banks failed as the Depression deepened, some after runs by depositors. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff (1930) prompted retaliatory tariffs, while the Depression and trade barriers contributed to a collapse in world trade. By 1933 unemployment hit about 25%.
Herbert Hoover was not idle. He created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (1932) to lend to banks and big businesses, but he opposed federal payments directly to individuals, relying on volunteer efforts and local relief. In 1932, he approved federal loans to states for relief. His image collapsed after troops drove the Bonus Army of World War I veterans out of Washington in 1932, and shantytowns were mockingly called Hoovervilles.
Franklin D. Roosevelt won in 1932 and launched the New Deal around relief, recovery and reform. A Second New Deal in 1935 added Social Security and the Wagner Act. The Supreme Court struck down the NIRA in Schechter v. United States (1935), and FDR's 1937 plan to add justices failed. Critics came from both sides. Huey Long and Father Coughlin wanted more radical redistribution, while the American Liberty League called the New Deal government overreach. Unemployment stayed above 14% until World War II spending finally ended the Depression.
Check yourself: Is the FDIC an example of relief, recovery or reform, and why? (Answer: Reform, because it changed the banking system permanently by insuring deposits so bank runs would be less likely in the future, rather than giving immediate aid or restarting a specific industry.)
| Goal | What it meant | Example programs |
|---|---|---|
| Relief | Immediate help for people who were jobless or hungry | FERA (1933), CCC (1933), WPA (1935) |
| Recovery | Restarting farms and industry so the economy could grow again | AAA (1933), NIRA and the NRA (1933) |
| Reform | Permanent changes to prevent another collapse and protect citizens | FDIC (1933), SEC (1934), Social Security Act (1935), Wagner Act (1935) |
The Dust Bowl was an environmental disaster on the southern Great Plains in the 1930s, centered on the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, western Kansas, southeastern Colorado and northeastern New Mexico. Drought set it off, but people made it far worse. During the World War I wheat boom and the 1920s, farmers used tractors to plow up millions of acres of native grassland whose deep roots had held the soil in place. When rain failed and crop prices fell, the loose topsoil blew away in "black blizzards." On Black Sunday, April 14, 1935, a single storm darkened the sky across the Plains, and dust from other storms reached the East Coast.
Families faced crop failure, foreclosure and "dust pneumonia." Many families left the Plains, and hundreds of thousands of migrants from the region went to California. There, migrants were often called "Okies" regardless of which state they came from. Many were tenant farmers pushed off the land by debt and mechanization as much as by dust. In California they found low-wage farm work, crowded roadside camps and open hostility.
The federal government responded with the Soil Conservation Service (1935), which taught contour plowing and crop rotation, and the Shelterbelt Project, which planted over 200 million trees as windbreaks. The Farm Security Administration built migrant camps and hired photographers like Dorothea Lange, whose "Migrant Mother" (1936) became the face of the Depression. John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) brought the migrants' story to millions of readers.
Check yourself: Why is it wrong to say the Dust Bowl was simply a natural disaster? (Answer: Drought started it, but decades of plowing up native grasses, planting wheat year after year and overgrazing removed what held the soil down, so human farming practices turned a dry spell into a disaster.)
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Flapper | A young woman in the 1920s who wore short skirts and bobbed hair and rejected older rules about how women should behave in public. |
| Immigration Act of 1924 | A law, also called the Johnson-Reed Act, that set national-origin quotas based on the 1890 census to limit immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and that barred most Asian immigrants. |
| Harlem Renaissance | A flowering of African American literature, music, art and thought centered in Harlem in the 1920s and early 1930s. |
| Black Tuesday | October 29, 1929, a day of heavy selling during the stock market crash, when investors traded over 16 million shares. |
| Hooverville | A shantytown of homeless people during the Depression, named to mock President Hoover. |
| New Deal | Franklin D. Roosevelt's set of federal programs from 1933 to the late 1930s aimed at relief, recovery and reform. |
| Social Security Act | A 1935 law that created old-age pensions, unemployment insurance and aid to some needy groups. Payroll taxes funded the social insurance programs, while aid programs also used other government revenue. |
| Wagner Act | The 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which protected workers' right to join unions and bargain collectively. |
| Dust Bowl | The 1930s environmental disaster on the southern Great Plains, caused by drought combined with over-plowing that let wind strip away the topsoil. |
The crash is the easy date to remember, so it gets all the credit. The downturn began before the crash, and the economy had weaknesses that may have made it more severe, including unequal wealth, margin buying, gaps in bank regulation and a farm economy in trouble throughout the 1920s. Historians and economists differ over the weight they give each cause. In an essay, distinguish the crash from the broader weaknesses and events that deepened the Depression.
Hoover's reputation makes it sound like he sat still, but he created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and pushed public works projects like what became Hoover Dam. Hoover opposed federal payments directly to individuals because he believed they would weaken self-reliance, though in 1932 he approved federal loans to states for relief. FDR's New Deal gave aid straight to people through jobs programs and later Social Security.
The New Deal brought relief and lasting reforms, but unemployment was still around 17% in 1939, and a new recession hit in 1937-1938 after FDR cut spending. Massive government spending for World War II is what finally brought full employment. A strong answer separates what the New Deal fixed (banking, security for the elderly, workers' rights) from what it did not (full recovery).
The decade's nickname and images of flappers and jazz hide who was left out. Farmers saw crop prices drop after World War I, many factory wages stayed flat, and Black Americans faced Jim Crow in the South and segregation and riots in the North. When you describe the boom, name who benefited and who did not.