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New towns sprang up throughout the gold andsilver regions.Within twenty-five years after the end of the Civil War the Great Plains weredivided into States and territories of the USA. Ranchers were feeding large herds of cattle onthe “sea of grass”; farmers were using the latest harvesting technology on the large irrigatedfields of “Great American Desert” to grow wheat. By 1890 the separate areas of settlementon the Pacific Coast and along the Mississippi River had moved together and the wildernesshad been largely conquered.In the 1880s great Mesabi deposits of iron were found near lake Superior. Soon theMesabi became one of the largest producers of iron ore in the world. Besides iron at that timea great amount of coal was being extracted in the USA.
Iron and coal were used to make steelfor the railroads, locomotive, freight wagons and passenger cars. The first railroad finished in1869 and was quickly joined by others. By 1884 four more major transcontinental lines hadcrossed the continent to link the Atlantic with the Pacific Coasts.
New towns appeared alongthe railroads. By 1890 the industries of USA were earning the country more than itsfarmlands. Within a few decades after the civil war the USA transformed from anundeveloped backwater into a primary world power..By 1913 more than one third of the whole world’s industrial production had beenoriginated from the mines and factories of the USA. The growth of American industry wasorganized and controlled by the number of powerful businessmen like Andrew Carnegie, theowner of the giant Carneqie steel corporation and D. Rockfeller, the “king” of the growing oilindustry. As the corporations grew bigger and more powerful, they often became “trusts”. Bythe early 20-century the trusts had controlled large parts of American industry.
The biggesttrusts were richer than most other nations. By their wealth and power - and especially theirpower to decide wages and prices - they controlled the lives of millions of people.The United States was created as a land of equal opportunities to everyone. Yet halfthe American people had hardly enough finance to buy sufficient food and clothing. In theindustrial cities of the North, such as Chicago and Pittsburgh, immigrant workers still laboredlong hours for low wages in steel mills, factories and slaughter houses.
The workers’ homeswere over-crowded slums. In the South thousands of poor farmers, both black and white,worked from sunrise to sunset to earn barely enough to live on.The handful of rich and powerful men bribed politicians to pass laws, which favoredthem. Others hired private armies to crush any attempts by their workers to obtain betterconditions. Their attitude to the rights of other people was summed up in a famous remark ofthe railroad “king” William H. Vanderbilt. When he was asked whether he thought thatrailroads should be run in the public interest, “The public be damned” he replied.Progressive Americans were alarmed by the power of the trusts and the contemptuousway in which leaders of industry like Vanderbilt rejected the criticism.
In the early years of thetwentieth century a stream of books and magazine articles drew people’s attention to a largenumber of national problems. Novelists like Mark Twain and Henry James analyzed theimpact of wealth and ambition on social life. Herbert G. Wells in his novel “The War in theAir”(1908) sharply criticized “ the unprecedental multitudousness of the thing, the inhumanforce of it all…” He wrote: “I see it, the vast rich various continent, the gigantic process ofdevelopment, the acquisitive successes, the striving failures, the multitudes of those rising andfalling who come between, all set in a texture of spacious countryside, of clangorous townsthat bristle to the skies, of great exploitation, of district and crowded factories, of wide desertsand mine-torn mountains, and huge half-tamed rivers”.The Progressive movement found a leader in the Republican Theodore Roosevelt T.Roosevelt who became president in 1901 got particularly concerned about the power of thetrusts.
His idea was to give the USA the best of both worlds. He wanted to allow thebusinessmen enough freedom of action to make their firms efficient and prosperous, but at thesame time to prevent them from taking unfair advantage of other people (the policy of socalled “square deal».
However the “square deal” of Roosevelt’s administration (1901-1909)failed to bring the trusts under control.President Woodrow Wilson who won the presidential elections in 1912 started hispolicy “The New Freedom». One of Wilson’s first steps was to reduce the powers of thetrusts, give more rights to labor unions and make it easier for farmers to borrow money fromthe federal government to work their land.The Progressive movement changed and improved American life in many ways, butdid not help unemployed or unprivileged very much. The ideals of equal opportunity,proclaimed in the USA, were often denied to Americans who were non-white.
Millions of theBlacks still lived in great poverty. Most of them still lived in Southern farms. In cities theylived in so-called “black ghettos”, because many whites resented their moving into whiteneighborhoods.The First World War and the Roaring Twenties.The World War 1 contributed to the USA to become even more powerful. While thewar started on the continent of Europe, brought death and sufferings to millions of Europeanpeople, the USA, physically untouched by combat and greatly enriched by wartime profits,quickly became the main supplier of weapon and capital to the countries of the Anti-Germanallies. The entire railroad system came under government supervision, the demand forindustrial production grew fast.
Guns, ships, shells, and other essential goods were made forthe war.When in May 1919 the Versailles Peace Treaty was signed in Europe, the USA met itas the country with a primary world economy, with enormous productive capacity andextensive markets for manufactured goods. Having less than 10% of the world’s population,the USA produced about 25% of the world’s goods and more than 40% of the worldmanufacture. Business boomed. Automobiles and trucks transformed the life of the nation.Airplanes, used during the war, were now geared to peacetime purposes. Chemical andelectrical processes, together with light machinery made of alloyed metals, were changing thecharacter of factories.
Mass production proved itself in building ships and airplane motors.Electricity also speeded the revolution in production: in 1914 some 30% of manufacturingwas electrified, in 1929 70% of all factories benefited from the power sources. In the field offinance, New York began to replace London as the hub of the world’s finance market.Businessmen became popular heroes in the 1920s.There were widespread beliefs in theUSA that individuals were responsible for their own life success, and that unemployment orpoverty were the result of personal failings.
The newspaper and magazine writers maintainedthat although not all Americans could become rich, at least middle-class Americans ought tobe rich.Journalist L .Allen wrote that at that time “business had become almost the nationalreligion of America”. Men like automobile-maker Henry Ford, steel industry owner AndrewCarnegie, oil and finance tycoon Rockefeller, George Pullman, W. Colgate, Procter andGamble and others were widely admired as the creators of nation’s prosperity, the models ofso-called “American Dream.” In 1913 Ford began using interchangeable parts and assemblyline method in his plant. By 1920 the half of the cars produced in the world were his cars, by1930 there were over 26.7 million cars, registered in the USA.
Cars in America became the“family horses, used for more than commuting to work or driving for leisure. The automobilerevolution started the consumer revolution. Appliances-radios, telephones, electricrefrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners led the parade. The consumer boomstimulated advertising.
Americans had to be convinced to spend their money, to buy allelectric kitchen, “to keep up with the Joneses” (to live better than the neighbors). “Live now,pay tomorrow” was the general motto. Incredible number of Americans began to buy goodson the installment plan (monthly payments). Thousands of Americans invested money insuccessful firms so that they could share their profits. There was also an orgy of speculation inreal estate and stocks, buying and selling shares - “playing the market” became a nationalhobby and a sort of fever. Many Americans borrowed the large sums of money from thebanks to buy shares on credit and to get “easy money” on selling them later “on the margin”(a higher price).The first two decades of the 20 th century came into American history not only asPPthe years of industrial and manufacturing boom.
On the surface it seemed that prosperitywould continue forever but below the surface there were already a lot of troubles. Bank debtswere mounting. Low wages of most workers led to underconsumption. Excessive industrialprofits and low industrial wages distributed one third of all personal income to only 5% of thepopulation.
The agricultural sector was also plagued with overproduction.One of the serious problems of the 20s was the terrible growth of crime. “TheRoaring Twenties” was the general name which many historians called that time. Afteradoption of the 18 th Amendment to the USA Constitution, prohibiting selling of alcoholicPPdrinks, so-called “speakeasies” (illegal bars) were opened in basements and backrooms allover the country. The drinks were obtained from criminals, united in gangs or mobs, called“bootleggers”.
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