1920s: Innovations in Communication and Technology in two minutes
- Ford's moving assembly line cut chassis assembly time from about 12.5 hours to 1.5 hours, and the Model T's price fell from $850 in 1908 to $260 in 1925.
- General Motors offered yearly models, colors and installment credit; by the late 1920s Americans bought about two of every three new cars on installment plans, and advertising became big business.
- About two-thirds of homes had electricity by 1930 but only about one farm in ten, so appliances spread mostly in cities, while farmers struggled with surplus crops and debt.
- Radio became a national medium after KDKA aired the 1920 election returns; hundreds of stations followed within two years, and in 1925 Chicago's WGN broadcast the Scopes trial live.
- Americans bought about 80 million movie tickets a week by 1929, movies began to talk with The Jazz Singer in 1927, and records and radio spread blues and early country music nationwide.
- Cars remade the map with highways, gas stations and suburbs, while assembly-line work stayed fast and repetitive; Ford's five-dollar day (1914) doubled typical pay to keep workers.
- On the exam: Topic 7.7 asks for causes and effects of new technology and mass media; connect consumer culture to Gilded Age industrialization and the Great Depression.
Topic 7.7 key terms
- Butler Act (Tennessee, 1925)
A Tennessee law that made it a crime for public-school teachers to teach that humans descended from “a lower order of animals.” It set up the Scopes Trial, a national fight over evolution, the Bible and who decides what public schools teach.
- Scopes Trial (1925)
The 1925 trial in Dayton, Tennessee, of a high-school teacher charged with teaching evolution in violation of the Butler Act. Reporters called it the “Monkey Trial.” It became a national argument over science, religion and who decides what public schools teach.
- Mass media
Radio, movies, records and newspapers that reach millions of people at once. In the 1920s they helped spread one national culture, and they showed Americans how differently their neighbors lived.
- Assembly line
A way of making things in which the work moves past workers who each repeat one task. Ford's Highland Park plant put its chassis on a moving line in 1913–14.
- Scientific management
Also called Taylorism. Frederick W. Taylor timed each motion with a stopwatch, cut the waste and standardized the job, so factories could raise output.
- Mass production
Making huge numbers of identical goods with standard parts and machines, so each one costs less. Ford's Model T became the model example.
- Fordism
Mass production paired with wages high enough that workers could afford to buy the product. Ford's five-dollar day is the classic example.
- Installment buying
Buying on credit: a down payment, then monthly payments while you use the product. It put cars and appliances within reach of families who couldn’t pay all at once, and it left them owing money.
- Consumer culture
A way of life built around buying goods, pushed along by advertising, credit and mass production. In the 1920s it changed what an ordinary family expected to own.
- Advertising
Paid messages that sell products and ways of life. In the 1920s ad agencies grew into a major industry, and ads sold status and feelings as well as goods.
- Farm surpluses
More crops than the market could buy at a good price. After World War I, European demand fell, prices dropped, and farmers who had borrowed to plant more fell behind on their loans.
- Radio broadcasting
Sending programs through the air to anyone with a receiver, not one message to one person. KDKA’s 1920 election returns are a landmark of the early years.
- Race records
The record industry’s own 1920s label for blues and jazz sold to Black buyers. ‘Old-time’ records did the same for rural white buyers.
- Talkies
Movies with synchronized sound. The Jazz Singer (1927) is credited with starting the shift away from silent film.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
The Trial on the Radio
July 1925
Key terms: Butler Act (Tennessee, 1925), Scopes Trial (1925), Mass media
July 1925
Radio announcerDramatized
…hogs steady, cattle slow, lambs about steady…
July 1925, a farm outside Muncie, Indiana. The radio is picking up a courtroom in Tennessee.
Court officer reading the charge
…to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible,
Court officer reading the charge
and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.
A Chicago station, WGN, was broadcasting the trial live. No American trial had been on the radio before.
Dayton had about 1,800 people. That July it had more than two hundred reporters. The defendant was John Scopes, a 24-year-old science teacher and football coach.
The trial began as a sales pitch. The ACLU offered to pay for a test of the law, and Dayton's businessmen planned one at Robinson's drugstore. Scopes agreed to be the defendant. He couldn't remember whether he'd ever taught evolution.
Ten years earlier, a fight in a small-town Tennessee courtroom would have stayed in Tennessee. Now the whole country could listen at once.
New machines were putting the same cars, movies, songs and voices in front of every American. They also let Americans hear how differently they lived, and what they believed.
One country, one audience. So whose country was it going to be?
The Line
1908–1914
Key terms: Assembly line, Scientific management, Mass production, Fordism
Highland Park, Michigan, 1914. Henry Ford had been building his Model T since 1908. Simple, tough, and high off the ground for bad country roads.
Henry Ford
I will build a motor car for the great multitude.
At first, teams of men built each car where it stood.
Then Ford's engineers turned that around. The car would move. The men would stay put.
Henry Ford
The man who puts in a bolt does not put on the nut;
Henry Ford
the man who puts on the nut does not tighten it.
A chassis had taken about twelve and a half hours of work. On the moving line it took about an hour and a half.
Ford passed the savings on. A Model T cost $850 in 1908 and as little as $260 by 1925. He built fifteen million.
The work was fast, and it never changed. Workers quit in droves.
A Highland Park worker's wife
The chain system you have is a slave driver! My God!, Mr. Ford.
A Highland Park worker's wife
My husband has come home & thrown himself down & won't eat his supper—so done out!
Ford's answer, in January 1914, was the five-dollar day, about double the going wage. Thousands lined up in the snow.
A Highland Park worker's wife
That $5 a day is a blessing—a bigger one than you know but oh they earn it.
To get the full five dollars, workers had to live as Ford approved. Company investigators checked their homes. Immigrants who finished Ford's English school walked into a giant "melting pot" and came out in American suits.
Any Color
1914–1929
Key terms: Installment buying, Consumer culture, Advertising, Farm surpluses
Henry Ford
Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.
General Motors sold the opposite: colors, a new model every year, and a car for every budget. And you didn’t have to pay all at once.
By the late 1920s, Americans bought about two of every three new cars on the installment plan. Hold on to that.
In 1927 Chevrolet outsold Ford. After nearly nineteen years, Ford stopped making the Model T.
City homes got electric power, and then things to plug in: washing machines, vacuum cleaners, irons, refrigerators.
By 1930 about two-thirds of American homes had electricity. On farms, about one in ten.
Cars remade the map: highways, gas stations, tourist camps, suburbs. In Muncie, a Sunday-school teacher asked what temptation Jesus never faced. A boy answered, “Speed!”
Advertising became big business. One of its stars, Bruce Barton, wrote a best-seller about Jesus.
Bruce Barton
He picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.
Not everyone shared the boom. Farmers had borrowed to expand during the war. When crop prices fell, the debts stayed.
The catalog had a page of radios.
One Audience
1920–1927
Key terms: Radio broadcasting, Mass media, Race records, Talkies
In 1920 radio was a hobby for boys with headphones and a coil of wire.
That November, Pittsburgh’s KDKA read the presidential election returns into the air. Within two years there were hundreds of stations, and listeners wanted something to hear.
Radio made one audience out of a continent, all hearing the same game. Radio and records carried Nashville fiddles and the blues to people who had never heard them.
Record companies found two new markets: blues for Black buyers, fiddle bands for rural whites.
The movies did the same for faces. By 1929 Americans bought some 80 million tickets a week.
Rudolph Valentino, an immigrant from Italy, became the screen’s great lover. Anna May Wong, born in Los Angeles, starred at seventeen, then spent years cast as villains and victims.
In 1927 the movies began to talk.
Al Jolson
Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!
Later in The Jazz Singer, Jolson sang in blackface, a minstrel habit the movies carried to millions.
Radio and newsreels made national heroes: Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Gertrude Ederle, Charles Lindbergh.
Now everyone could hear everyone, including the people they disagreed with.