USA (798448), страница 5
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In the 1880s great Mesabi deposits of iron were found near Lake Superior. Soon the Mesabi became one of the largest producers of iron ore in the world. Besides iron at that time a great amount of coal was being extracted in the USA. Iron and coal were used to make steel for the railroads, locomotive, freight wagons and passenger cars. The first railroad finished in 1869 and was quickly joined by others. By 1884 four more major transcontinental lines had crossed the continent to link the Atlantic with the Pacific Coasts. New towns appeared along the railroads. By 1890 the industries of the USA were earning the country more than its farmlands. Within a few decades after the civil war the USA transformed from an undeveloped backwater into a primary world power.
By 1913 more than one third of the whole world’s industrial production had been originated from the mines and factories of the USA. The growth of American industry was organized and controlled by the number of powerful businessmen like Andrew Carnegie, the owner of the giant Carnegie Steel Corporation and D. Rockfeller, the “king” of the growing oil industry. As the corporations grew bigger and more powerful, they often became “trusts”. By the early 20-century the trusts had controlled large parts of American industry. The biggest trusts were richer than most other nations. By their wealth and power - and especially their power 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 half the American people had hardly enough finance to buy sufficient food and clothing. In the industrial cities of the North, such as Chicago and Pittsburgh, immigrant workers still labored long hours for low wages in steel mills, factories and slaughter houses. The workers’ homes were 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 favored them. Others hired private armies to crush any attempts by their workers to obtain better conditions. Their attitude to the rights of other people was summed up in a famous remark of the railroad “king” William H. Vanderbilt. When he was asked whether he thought that railroads 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 contemptuous way in which leaders of industry like Vanderbilt rejected the criticism. In the early years of the twentieth century a stream of books and magazine articles drew people’s attention to a large number of national problems. Novelists like Mark Twain and Henry James analyzed the impact of wealth and ambition on social life. Herbert G. Wells in his novel “The War in the Air” (1908) sharply criticized “the unprecedental multitudousness of the thing, the inhuman force of it all…” He wrote: “I see it, the vast rich various continent, the gigantic process of development, the acquisitive successes, the striving failures, the multitudes of those rising and falling who come between, all set in a texture of spacious countryside, of clangorous towns that bristle to the skies, of great exploitation, of district and crowded factories, of wide deserts and 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 the trusts. He wanted to allow the businessmen enough freedom of action to make their firms efficient and prosperous, but at the same time to prevent them from taking unfair advantage of other people (the policy of so-called “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 his policy “The New Freedom». One of Wilson’s first steps was to reduce the powers of the trusts, give more rights to labor unions and make it easier for farmers to borrow money from the federal government to work their land.
The Progressive movement changed and improved American life in many ways, but did 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 the Blacks still lived in great poverty. Most of them still lived in Southern farms. In cities they lived in so-called “black ghettos”, because many whites resented their moving into white neighborhoods.
The First World War and the Roaring Twenties.
The World War 1 contributed to the USA to become even more powerful. While the war started on the continent of Europe, brought death and sufferings to millions of European people, 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-German allies. The demand for industrial production grew fast. Guns, ships, shells, and other essential goods were made for the war.
When in May 1919 the Versailles Peace Treaty was signed in Europe, the USA met it as the country with a primary world economy, with enormous productive capacity and extensive 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 world manufacture. Business boomed. Automobiles and trucks transformed the life of the nation. Airplanes, used during the war, were now geared to peacetime purposes. Chemical and electrical processes, together with light machinery were changing the character of factories. Mass production proved itself in building ships and airplane motors. Electricity also speeded the revolution in production: in 1914 some 30% of manufacturing was electrified, in 1929 70% of all factories benefited from the power sources. In the field of finance, 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 the USA that individuals were responsible for their own life success, and that unemployment or poverty were the result of personal failings. The newspaper and magazine writers maintained that although not all Americans could become rich, at least middle-class Americans ought to be rich.
Journalist L. Allen wrote that at that time “business had become almost the national religion of America”. Men like automobile-maker Henry Ford, steel industry owner Andrew Carnegie, oil and finance tycoon Rockefeller, George Pullman, W. Colgate, Procter and Gamble and others were widely admired as the creators of nation’s prosperity, the models of so-called “American Dream.” In 1913 Ford began using interchangeable parts and assembly-line method in his plant. By 1920 the halves of the cars produced in the world were his cars, by 1930 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 automobile revolution started the consumer revolution. Appliances-radios, telephones, electric refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners led the parade. The consumer boom stimulated advertising. Americans had to be convinced to spend their money, to buy all-electric 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 goods on the installment plan (monthly payments). Thousands of Americans invested money in successful firms so that they could share their profits. There was also an orgy of speculation in real estate and stocks, buying and selling shares - “playing the market” became a national hobby and a sort of fever. Many Americans borrowed the large sums of money from the banks 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 20th century came into American history not only as the years of industrial and manufacturing boom. On the surface it seemed that prosperity would continue forever but below the surface there were already a lot of troubles. Bank debts were mounting. Low wages of most workers led to underconsumption. Excessive industrial profits and low industrial wages distributed one third of all personal income to only 5% of the population. The agricultural sector was also suffering with overproduction.
One of the serious problems of the 20s was the terrible growth of crime. “The Roaring Twenties” was the general name which many historians called that time. After adoption of the 18th Amendment to the USA Constitution, prohibiting selling of alcoholic drinks, so-called “speakeasies” (illegal bars) were opened in basements and backrooms all over the country. The drinks were obtained from criminals, united in gangs or mobs, called “bootleggers”. One of the best-known mobs worked in Chicago. It was led by the gangster “Scarface” Al Capone, who turned into the great celebrities of the 1920s. His income was over 100 million dollars a year. He had a private army of nearly a thousand thugs and was the real ruler of Chicago. Competition between rival mobs sometimes caused bloody street wars, fought out with armored cars and machine guns. The winners of the gangster wars became so powerful that they bribed police and other public officers. Organized crime opened the way for the new kind of American business. And American newspaper headlines and crime stories bespeak America’s fascination with these new celebrities. Americans loved energetic people who got ahead.
Depression and the Policy of New Deal
In October 1924 stock prices dropped dramatically. The nation began to panic. The money crash unlashed a devastating depression. Between 1929 and 1933 the shock of the depression was felt in all areas of American life. Distress influenced such industries like coal, railroads, construction and textiles. By the end of 1931 nearly eight million Americans were out of work, but unlike unemployed British or German workers in Europe they received no government unemployment pay. Millions spent hours shuffling slowly forward in “breadlines” where they received free pieces of bread or bowls of soup, paid for by the money collected from those who could afford charity.
By 1932 the situation became still harder. Thousands of banks and over 100000 businesses had closed down. Industrial production had fallen down by half and wage payments by 60%. Twelve million people, one out of every four of the country’s workers, were unemployed. The factories were silent, shops and banks closed. With the number of people out of work rising day by day, farmers could not sell their produce. Some paraded together with the workers in angry demonstrations, demanding that President Hoover (1929-33) take strong action against depression. Hoover who strongly believed in market economy said that he could do two things to end the Depression: to balance the budget and to restore businessmen’s confidence in the future. Time and time again in the early 1930s Hoover told people that recovery from the Depression was “just around the corner”. But the factories remained closed and the breadlines grew longer.
A change took place with the election of Franklin Roosevelt as president in1933. Although Roosevelt was crippled by polio he was energetic and determined to care for the welfare of ordinary people. Roosevelt’s main idea was that the federal government should take the lead in the fight against the Depression. His program, which he called “The New Deal”, consisted of a number of legislative measures. At first Roosevelt took active steps to stabilize banking. He also put right agricultural production by paying subsidies to farmers and introduced a system of regulated prices for corn, cotton, wheat, rice and diary products. Believing that his most urgent task was to give employment to the American people, he proposed a plan for public works and relief payments to the needed citizens. Roosevelt was especially anxious about the young people. The Civilian Conservation Corps found work for many young people. Part-time employment was provided for students who were invited to build roads and construct hospitals and schools. Roosevelt’s New deal program financed the painting of murals and the staging of plays. Writers were paid to write guidebooks and regional ethnic. In 1935 new trade unions were organized.
During his first term Franklin Roosevelt did not manage to fight unemployment and solve some other tasks completely As a result of all his measures unemployment dropped from 13 million people in 1933 to 9 million in 1936, but there were still over four million jobless people in the country and there was no real increase in the life of Afro-Americans, Indians and other minorities.
Ultimately it was the Second World War that put the American people back to work.
The Second World War and the USA
W 
hen the Second World War broke out in 1939 F. Roosevelt, who had been reelected for the second term, persuaded the USA Congress to approve the first peacetime military conscription act in the USA history and later to accept his Lend Lease Plan. The USA quickly became the main supplier of weapons and other goods to the countries fighting Hitler Germany. American factories began working at full swing again. The unemployment practically ended.
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