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Prosperity during the 20's - Coggle Diagram
Prosperity during the 20's
What was done to helped the poor?
It would have been greater using the wealth of that time for helping the ones that needed it more, but that didn't apend
The agrarian and reforming lobby of both parties in Congress combined in an effort to relieve the suffering of the farmers, government action only aggravated the situation, to help farmers out of poverty deepened the divisions between the rural and urban areas of the country.
laissez-faire politics prevented any government intervention to help industrial workers on inadequately low wages.
The poor were helped by private charity. The poor were such a diverse group ethnically and confined to slum areas of towns and cities, that they were incapable of organizing to form self-help groups. They were entirely dependent on social workers or others to bring them relief.
Why was so little done to help the poor?
The answer to this question says much about the values and attitudes of American society in the 1920s
By the twenties, there was a deeper understanding of the causes and effects of poverty, largely as a result of investigative journalism. Social workers and activists were pressing for reform. However, they aspired to changes that would put an end to poverty.
As the prosperity of the twenties increased, there was a confident optimism that the USA was on the verge of permanently solving the problem of poverty
the Republican administrations believed that social responsibility was not the job of the state except in the fields of law and order and national defence.
Poverty kept the poor in their place and where the poor were African-Americans, Catholics, and Jewish immigrants, this was regarded as entirely desirable. Sadly, there was a resigned acceptance amongst many poor people that poverty was inevitable and their own poverty was their lot in life.
Context
Immediately after World War I, Americans went on a buying spree. Industrial production in the 1920s increased so dramatically that it is known as the era of the second industrial revolution. Not only did industrial wages, salaries, profits, and dividends rise substantially, but consumer credit and the consumption level of the average American family also soared to unprecedented heights.
But despite widespread prosperity and popular veneration of industrial and business leaders, a large segment of the American population remained throughout the 1920s in an economically depressed condition. Whilst the American economy was undoubtedly booming in the 1920s, not everyone shared in the affluence. Those who benefited most were businessmen and those who could afford to buy shares whose value trebled between 1923 and 1925.
Labels such as the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, or the Prosperity Decade suggest that the 1920s witnessed profound economic changes. The cruel fact is that the decade began with economic instability and ended in a catastrophic depression.
So, whilst the number of millionaires increased, this increase represented a widening gap between the rich and the poor. There were significant differences between the wealth of the rich, middle-class Americans and the rest who made up over 50% of the population.
How had this come about to be possible?
The high profits created by gains in productivity had been paid out to investors whilst the workers received comparatively small wage increases
This concentration of potential buying power in the hands of a relatively small proportion of the population was to have seriously adverse effects on the domestic market for goods produced in American factories.
Only the well-off could afford to buy. Consequently, as output increased, it was not matched by a proportionate increase in consumer buying power. The only way that the less wealthy could manage to buy mass-produced goods was by taking advantage of credit facilities.
The policy of rugged individualism, in which all Republican presidents believed, meant little or no welfare support for the poor and a laissez-faire approach to such issues as safety at work.
In the process, large sections of the population borrowed far in excess of what they could realistically afford. Their ability to repay depended entirely on their wages. 80% of Americans had no savings at all at this time. Lo siguiente ni tiene subtitulo