1 ene 1928 año - Trends: Consumerism, Radio, Movies, Cars, Suburbanization

Descripción:

consumer credit: Forms of borrowing, such as auto loans and installment plans, that flourished in the 1920s and worsened the crash that led to the Great Depression.

hollywood: The city in southern California that became synonymous with the American movie industry in the 1920s.
flapper:A young woman of the 1920s who defied conventional standards of conduct by wearing knee-length skirts and bold makeup, freely spending the money she earned on the latest fashions, dancing to jazz, and flaunting her liberated lifestyle.
soft power: The exercise of popular cultural influence abroad, as American radio and movies became popular around the world in the 1920s, transmitting American consumer culture and its styles and values overseas

Spurred by rapid expansion during the war, and benefitting from a host of technological innovations in mass production such as the assembly line, American business thrived in the 1920s. Corporations eagerly expanded into overseas markets, and at home a truly national consumer culture — emphasizing convenience, leisure, and fun — took shape. Defined by the spread of cheaper goods, the rise of the automobile, and the growing influence of radio and movies, the decade marked a crucial turning point in the emergence of a mass consumer economy in the United States.

Spurred by rapid expansion during the war, and benefitting from a host of technological innovations in mass production such as the assembly line, American business thrived in the 1920s. Corporations eagerly expanded into overseas markets, and at home a truly national consumer culture — emphasizing convenience, leisure, and fun — took shape. Defined by the spread of cheaper goods, the rise of the automobile, and the growing influence of radio and movies, the decade marked a crucial turning point in the emergence of a mass consumer economy in the United States.
Large-scale corporations continued to replace small businesses in many sectors of the economy. By 1929, after successive waves of consolidation, the two hundred largest firms had come to control almost half of the country’s nonbanking corporate wealth. The greatest number of mergers occurred in rising industries such as chemicals (with DuPont in the lead) and electrical appliances (General Electric), as well as among Wall Street banks. Aided by Washington’s dollar diplomats, U.S. companies exercised growing global power. Seeking cheaper livestock, giant American meatpackers opened plants in Argentina; the United Fruit Company developed plantations in Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala; General Electric set up production facilities in Latin America, Asia, and Australia.

Despite the boom, some parts of the U.S. economy stumbled badly. Agriculture, which still employed one-fourth of all American workers, never fully recovered from the postwar recession. Once Europe’s economy revived after the war’s devastation, its farmers flooded world markets with grain and other produce, causing agricultural prices to fall. Other American industries, including coal and textiles, languished for similar reasons. Poorer Americans saw little of the decade’s prosperity. The bottom 40 percent of American families earned an average annual income of only $725 (about $10,000 today). Many, especially rural tenant farmers and sharecroppers, languished in poverty and malnutrition.

To afford those hopes, both poor and affluent families stretched their incomes through forms of borrowing relatively new to most Americans, such as auto loans and installment plans. “Buy now, pay later,” said the ads, and millions did. Anyone, no matter how rich, could get into debt, but consumer credit was particularly perilous for those living on the economic margins. In Chicago, one Lithuanian American described a neighbor’s plight: “She ain’t got no money. Sure she buys on credit, clothes for the children and everything.” Such borrowing brought a modern lifestyle within reach for countless Americans, but the heaping debt also worsened the eventual crash.

Radio, a new and fast-developing technology, hastened the spread of consumer culture in the years following World War I. Unlike magazines and newspapers, radio conveyed events as they happened, giving the medium an unprecedented immediacy and intimacy. In the first commercial radio broadcast in the United States, Pittsburgh’s KDKA announced the 1920 presidential returns before the morning papers did. Households with radios shot from 260,000 in 1922 to 6.5 million in 1927 and to 12 million by the early 1930s. As thousands of stations popped up across the country, radio broadcasts came to include live theater and sporting events, news, music, variety and quiz shows, scripted comedies, and the first “soap operas.” Advertising dollars fueled radio’s rapid rise, laying the groundwork for the medium’s “golden age” in the 1930s and 1940s.

Movies became a centerpiece of consumer culture. In the 1910s, the moviemaking industry had begun relocating to southern California to take advantage of low costs and sunny skies. The large studios — United Artists, Paramount, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer — were run mainly by Eastern European Jewish immigrants like Adolph Zukor, who arrived from Hungary in the 1880s. Zukor, a successful merchant, began his entertainment empire by investing with a partner in five-cent theaters in Manhattan. “I spent a good deal of time watching the faces of the audience,” Zukor recalled. “With a little experience I could see, hear, and ‘feel’ the reaction to each melodrama and comedy.” He used his firsthand knowledge in launching Paramount Pictures, with an eye for the emerging stars who made the studio’s films successful.
By 1920, Hollywood was the world’s movie capital, producing nearly 90 percent of all films globally. Across the country, ornate movie palaces attracted both middle-class and working-class audiences. Idols such as Rudolph Valentino, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks set national trends in style. Thousands of young women followed the lead of actress Clara Bow, Hollywood’s famous flapper, who flaunted her boyish figure. Decked out in knee-length skirts, this small but influential group shocked the older generation by openly smoking and wearing bold makeup, especially around the eyes and on their lips and fingernails. Thanks to the movies and advertising, the flapper became an influential symbol of women’s sexual and social emancipation. In cities, young immigrant and African American women eagerly bought makeup and the latest flapper fashions, a style that jazz stars helped popularize as much as Hollywood actresses. Mexican American teenagers joined the trend in major cities such as San Antonio and Los Angeles.

Politicians quickly saw the potential power of radio and film to shape foreign relations. In 1919, with government support, General Electric spearheaded the creation of Radio Corporation of America (RCA) to expand U.S. presence in foreign radio markets. RCA — which had a federal appointee on its board of directors — emerged as a major provider of radio transmission in Latin America and East Asia. Meanwhile, by 1925, American films made up 95 percent of the movies screened in Britain, 80 percent in Latin America, and 70 percent in France. The United States was expanding what historians call soft power — the exercise of popular cultural influence — as radio and film exported the styles and values of American consumer culture to the world.

Appliances saved time, and movies thrilled audiences, but the automobile revolutionized American life inside and out. No product of the consumer boom proved more popular. The Ford Motor Company introduced the first widely affordable automobile, the Model T, in 1908, but the industry experienced its most dramatic growth in the 1920s. Car sales played a major role in the decade’s economic surge: in 1929 alone, Americans spent $2.58 billion on automobiles. By the end of the decade, they owned 26 million cars — about 80 percent of the world’s automobiles — or an average of one for every five people (it was one for every forty in France). The number of cars on American roads tripled in ten years

The auto industry’s exuberant expansion rippled through the economy. It stimulated steel, petroleum, chemical, rubber, and glass production and, directly or indirectly, created 3.7 million jobs. Highway construction became a billion-dollar-a-year enterprise, financed by federal subsidies and state gasoline taxes. Auto ownership encouraged sprawl and, in 1924, the first suburban shopping center opened: Country Club Plaza outside Kansas City, Missouri. Cars were expensive, and most Americans bought them on credit. Alfred Sloan, the president of General Motors and Henry Ford’s great rival, founded the first national consumer credit agency to help Americans buy more Chevrolets. Other car companies followed GM’s example. Amid a decade-long boom, few Americans worried about making big-ticket purchases on credit. When asked why her family purchased a car before installing indoor plumbing, one woman replied simply, “you can’t go to town in a bathtub.”

Cars changed the way Americans spent their leisure time, as proud drivers took their machines on the road. An infrastructure of gas stations, motels, and drive-in restaurants soon sprouted to serve motorists. Railroad travel faltered. The American Automobile Association, founded in 1902, estimated that by 1929 almost a third of the population took vacations by car. “I had a few days after I got my wheat cut,” reported one Kansas farmer, “so I just loaded my family … and lit out.” An elite Californian complained that automobile travel was no longer “aristocratic.” “The clerks and their wives and sweethearts,” observed a reporter, “driving through the Wisconsin lake country, camping at Niagara, scattering tin cans and pop bottles over the Rockies, made those places taboo for bankers.”

Rising middle-class incomes, new forms of borrowing, and the automobile combined powerfully in the 1920s to produce a major suburban housing boom. Cars were central to the explosive growth. The nineteenth-century “streetcar suburbs” allowed the nation’s affluent to live outside city centers, but only in communities narrowly built along the iron rail tracks of streetcar lines. After World War I, automobile suburbs grew like the crabgrass of suburban lawns — fast and everywhere. “Cities are spreading out,” National Geographic announced in a 1923 special feature. Long Island’s Nassau County, a suburban area of New York City, tripled in population, and the fifteen fastest-growing towns in Connecticut were all suburbs.

The spreading-out happened everywhere — from New York to Chicago, St. Louis to Seattle — but the growth of Los Angeles epitomized how automobiles remade American cities. New housing subdivisions opened monthly across a vast expanse of southern California, and the automobile facilitated a sprawling metropolis predicated on car travel. Los Angeles County’s extensive and highly regarded electric streetcar system began to decline, as motorists clogged the roads. The region’s population more than doubled in the 1920s alone, and Los Angeles went from the tenth largest American city to the fifth in just ten years. Southern California was forever linked with what historians call “automobility,” and Los Angeles led the way in defining America’s new “car culture.”

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