The ‘Boom’

Overview

Hire purchase, Henry Ford's Model T and the moving assembly line, advertising and the new household goods, tariffs and laissez-faire, the Americans left out of the prosperity, and the buying of shares on the margin that fed the speculation of the late 1920s.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What is meant by hire purchase?

   Model answer

   Buying goods with a small deposit and then paying the rest in weekly or monthly instalments, which let ordinary families take an expensive item home at once.

2. 2

   Which car did Henry Ford build in enormous numbers in the 1920s?

   Model answer

   The Model T, which grew cheaper year after year until around half the cars in the world were Fords.

3. 3

   How did the moving assembly line cut the cost of building a car?

   Model answer

   Each worker repeated a single simple task as the vehicle moved past, so a car took far fewer hours of labour to finish.

4. 4

   Why was advertising so important to the consumer society of the 1920s?

   Model answer

   Newspapers, magazines, billboards and radio persuaded Americans to want goods they had never owned, creating the demand that kept the factories profitable.

5. 5

   Name three new household goods that spread through American homes during the 1920s.

   Model answer

   Vacuum cleaners, refrigerators and radios.

6. 6

   What was a tariff meant to do for American industry?

   Model answer

   Taxing foreign goods made them dearer than home-produced ones, so Americans bought American and domestic firms kept the market to themselves.

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