Why Didn't Everyone Benefit From the Economic Boom?
Farmers
Blacks
New Inmigrants
People who worked in old industries
- 30 million people worked on farms
Workers in raw material industries suffering
- Half of the Americans lived on farms making money selling machines or providing services to farmers
- cotton
- most blacks lived in the southern states of the USA
- Machines made farming efficient but at the same time produced more food than what was needed
- coal
- mostly labourers or sharecroppers
- USA competed with the Canadien markets who supplied grain to world market
- three quarters of a million black farm workers lost their jobs during the 1920's
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- Price of grain collapsed and caused farmers to earn less than $1000 a year
- they faced discrimination
Overproduction (more was produced, than could be sold), price dropped and wages fell
- 25 percent of black people were livingin the northern cities searching for wrok opportunities
- Farmers could no keep up their mortgage payments
- Some were evicted and some sold their land to clear debts
Nobody bought coal any more, and too much was being produced
- Number of farms declined
- tin
- sixty percent of black woman worked as low paid domestic cervants in white households
- copper
oil, gas and electricity were increasingly used instead
Mines closed and wages were cut.
Safety standards dropped & working days were much longer
In 9922, 600,000 miners went on 4 month strike for better conditions. But faild
coal was 65 per cent in 1926
Faced discrimination
Less educated than other workers
Took whatever they could
A lot worked on construction but with low wages
cheap labour, and now more work was becoming mechanised
Wages only rose four per cent in the 1920s