USA 1917–1932: divisions, the Twenties and the Crash

1. The USA in 1917 and how the early period is examined

The earlier United States period in Section A runs from 1917 to 1932: from entry into the First World War in April 1917 to Herbert Hoover's defeat in the presidential election of November 1932. It is a period of sharp swings. A nation that had mobilised for a European war in 1917–18 turned inward in 1919–20, enjoyed an uneven consumer boom through the 1920s and then fell into the deepest depression in its history after October 1929. Every one of those swings is a change, and Criterion 5 asks you to explain what drove each change, what kind of change it was and whom it affected.

In 1917 the USA was already the world's largest industrial economy, but it was a deeply divided society. Roughly one in seven residents had been born overseas, most of them in southern and eastern Europe. About nine in ten African Americans still lived in the South under segregation laws. Farmers, who had prospered while the war lifted crop prices, made up a large share of the population, and the 1920 census was the first to record that a (narrow) majority of Americans lived in urban places. Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, was president; he had won re-election in 1916 partly on the claim that he had kept the country out of the war.

Use a three-part frame from the course document whenever you plan:

• Drivers — what caused change: the war economy, fear of radicalism, mass production and consumer credit, Republican economic policy, the Crash.
• Nature — what kind of change: sudden or gradual, imposed or popular, violent or peaceful (the course glossary uses exactly these dimensions).
• Impact — on whom, how far and for how long: industrial workers, farmers, African Americans, recent immigrants, Native Americans, women, industrialists.

The TASC papers since 2021 have asked whether internal division drove change, whether change left the nation stronger or weaker, whether governments provided for those with little, and how far poverty drove change. Each of those prompts rewards the same preparation: a clear grasp of the causes and consequences of division, boom and bust, tied to precise dates and named people.

2. Fault lines: race, nativism and the Red Scare

The internal divisions named in the course document (African Americans, urban and rural workers, immigrants, industrialists, Native Americans) all sharpened between 1917 and 1925. They are drivers of change in their own right, because the political system responded to them.

• The Great Migration. Wartime labour shortages and the cut-off of European immigration pulled hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the rural South to Chicago, Detroit, New York and other northern cities. Competition for housing and jobs produced the violence of the Red Summer of 1919 (in Chicago alone 38 people were killed in July) and the destruction of the Greenwood district in Tulsa in 1921.
• Ossian Sweet, 1925. When the Black physician Ossian Sweet bought a house in a white Detroit neighbourhood, a crowd gathered and a shot from the house killed a white man. Clarence Darrow defended Sweet and his co-accused; the first trial ended in a mistrial and Henry Sweet was acquitted in 1926, after which the remaining charges were dropped. The case is evidence of both northern segregation and the growing legal assertiveness of the NAACP.
• The revived Ku Klux Klan. Refounded in 1915, the Klan grew in the early 1920s into a mass movement that was anti-Black, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish and anti-immigrant, with strength in the Midwest as well as the South. Scandal in Indiana in 1925 began its rapid decline.
• The Red Scare. Strikes in 1919 (Seattle, Boston police, steel) and anarchist bombings led Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer to raid radical groups in 1919–20 and deport hundreds of foreign-born radicals. The trial and 1927 execution of the Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti became an international cause.
• Immigration restriction. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 capped entries at 3 per cent of each nationality in the 1910 census; the Johnson–Reed Act of 1924 cut this to 2 per cent of the 1890 census and barred immigration from Asia. This is a clear political response to nativist pressure.
• Native Americans were granted citizenship by the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, yet many states still kept them from voting and the allotment system continued to strip reservation land.

3. Prohibition, the Jazz Age and a contest over American values

The course document asks you to assess how Prohibition and the Jazz Age shaped American values. The best way to do that is to treat the 1920s as a contest between a rural, Protestant, 'dry' America and an urban, ethnically mixed, 'wet' America, rather than as a single 'Roaring Twenties'.

Prohibition. The Eighteenth Amendment was ratified in January 1919 and national Prohibition began in January 1920 under the Volstead Act. It was driven by the long campaigns of the Anti-Saloon League and the Women's Christian Temperance Union, by wartime anti-German feeling (many brewers were German American) and by a belief that drink caused poverty. Its impact was the opposite of its aim in many cities: speakeasies, bootlegging, corruption of police and judges, and organised crime run by figures such as Al Capone in Chicago. The Twenty-first Amendment repealed it in December 1933, which is evidence that the experiment had lost legitimacy.

The Jazz Age. Radio, cinema, mass-circulation magazines and cheap cars spread a national popular culture. The Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington) gave African American artists an unprecedented national audience. The Nineteenth Amendment (ratified August 1920) gave women the vote, and the 'flapper' symbolised new freedoms in dress and behaviour, although most women's lives were shaped far more by domestic work and low-paid employment than by fashion.

The backlash. The Scopes 'Monkey' Trial (Dayton, Tennessee, July 1925) tested a state law banning the teaching of evolution. William Jennings Bryan assisted the prosecution and Clarence Darrow defended the teacher John Scopes, who was convicted and fined $100 (the verdict was later set aside on a technicality). The trial dramatised the gap between fundamentalist and modernist America.

A model analytical sentence: Prohibition shows that change in the 1920s was often imposed by an organised moral minority and then eroded by mass non-compliance, so its impact was to weaken respect for federal law rather than to reform behaviour.

4. Boom economics and its hidden weaknesses

Republican presidents Warren Harding (1921–23), Calvin Coolidge (1923–29) and Herbert Hoover (from March 1929) presided over the boom. Their economic approach is usually described as laissez-faire, although it was more interventionist on behalf of business than the label suggests.

• Policy drivers: Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon's tax cuts, which favoured high incomes; the Fordney–McCumber Tariff of 1922, which raised duties on imports; light regulation of banks and stock markets; and a belief that government should encourage business co-operation (Hoover's 'associative state' as Commerce Secretary).
• Technological drivers: electrification of factories and homes, the moving assembly line (Ford's Model T fell steadily in price), and new consumer goods such as radios, refrigerators and vacuum cleaners.
• Financial drivers: hire purchase (instalment credit), advertising, and speculation in land (the Florida boom) and shares, including buying shares 'on margin' with borrowed money.

The weaknesses matter just as much, because they explain why the Crash turned into a depression:

When you assess the boom, separate who gained (urban middle classes, industrialists, skilled workers in new industries) from who did not (farmers, coal and textile workers, most African Americans in the South). That separation directly answers the 2023 question about whether governments provided enough for those who had little.

5. The Crash and the Depression to 1932

The Dow Jones Industrial Average peaked at 381.17 on 3 September 1929. Panic selling on 24 October ('Black Thursday') and 29 October ('Black Tuesday') began a slide that reached 41.22 on 8 July 1932 — a fall of about 89 per cent from the peak. The Crash itself destroyed paper wealth; the Depression came from the way the shock travelled through weak banks, collapsing demand and world trade.

• About 9,000 banks failed between 1930 and 1933, wiping out uninsured savings.
• Unemployment rose from about 3 per cent in 1929 to about 24 per cent in 1932 and 25 per cent in 1933 (the standard historical estimates), leaving roughly one worker in four without a job.
• Shanty towns nicknamed 'Hoovervilles' appeared on city edges; farm foreclosures spread through the Midwest.

Hoover's response is often caricatured as doing nothing. That is inaccurate and markers reward precision here. Hoover urged business leaders to hold wages up, backed public works, signed the Smoot–Hawley Tariff (June 1930), which provoked retaliation and deepened the fall in world trade, and created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (January 1932) to lend to banks, railways and later state governments. What he refused was large-scale direct federal relief to individuals, which he believed would damage self-reliance. His approach was therefore limited by ideology, not by inactivity.

The Bonus Army of July 1932 — thousands of First World War veterans camped in Washington to demand early payment of a promised bonus — was cleared by troops under General Douglas MacArthur. The images damaged Hoover badly. In November 1932 Franklin D. Roosevelt won 472 electoral votes to Hoover's 59, a political change driven directly by economic collapse.

When you write on this, judge relative significance: was the Crash the cause of the Depression, or the trigger that exposed the weaknesses of the 1920s? Most historians favour the second view, and saying why is what lifts an answer above description.

6. Foreign policy: from crusade to 'independent internationalism'

The course asks you to trace changing foreign policy across 1917–1945, and the early period supplies its first half.

• Entry into war, April 1917. Drivers included Germany's resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare in early 1917, the Zimmermann Telegram (a German proposal of an alliance with Mexico) and American financial and trading ties with Britain and France. Wilson framed entry as a crusade to make the world safe for democracy.
• Wilson's peace programme. The Fourteen Points (January 1918) proposed open diplomacy, free trade, self-determination and a League of Nations. At Paris in 1919 Wilson secured the League Covenant inside the Treaty of Versailles.
• Rejection. The Senate twice failed to ratify the treaty (November 1919 and March 1920), mainly because Republicans led by Henry Cabot Lodge objected that Article X of the Covenant could commit the USA to war without Congress's approval. The USA never joined the League.
• The 1920s. The Washington Naval Conference (1921–22) limited battleship tonnage among the major naval powers; the Dawes Plan (1924) used American loans to stabilise German reparations; the Kellogg–Briand Pact (1928) renounced war as an instrument of policy. In 1932 the Stimson Doctrine refused to recognise Japan's conquest of Manchuria.

Was this 'isolationism'? Political isolation from European alliances and the League was real, and public opinion was suspicious of foreign entanglements. Economically and diplomatically, however, the USA was deeply involved — lending to Europe, demanding repayment of war debts and shaping naval limits. Some historians, notably William Appleman Williams, argued that the term isolationism hides this active pursuit of open markets; others describe the period as 'independent internationalism'. In an essay, the precise way to put it is that the USA avoided binding political commitments while expanding its economic reach, and that this combination helped transmit the 1929 shock to Europe when American loans were recalled.

7. Turning 1917–1932 knowledge into a rated essay

TASC's assessment reports repeat the same message about the USA question: candidates know the period but too often narrate it. The 2023 report observed a tendency to narrate the Depression without discussion and to offer a generalised view of Jim Crow and the Great Migration. The 2024 report noted that few candidates made the final judgement the question asked for (how far poverty drove change) and that only a couple suggested other drivers. The 2022 report rewarded the small number who explicitly judged whether the USA was left stronger or weaker.

A workable plan for most stimulus questions on this period:

1. Introduction: state the period (1917–1932), your thesis in direct response to the stimulus, and the two or three arguments that will prove it.
2. Argument paragraphs organised by driver, not by the labels 'social', 'economic', 'political'. For example: (a) post-war fear and nativism drove political and social restriction; (b) a business-led boom created prosperity that was narrow and fragile; (c) the Depression exposed the limits of voluntarism and drove political realignment.
3. Inside each paragraph: name the driver, give specific evidence, explain the nature of the change, assess its impact on named groups, then link back to the stimulus.
4. Conclusion: a weighed judgement on relative significance, not a summary.

Historians you can use accurately. William Leuchtenburg's The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–32 presents the 1920s as a conflict between a rising urban culture and an older rural order. Lizabeth Cohen's study of Chicago workers, Making a New Deal, argues that the failures of welfare capitalism and ethnic institutions by the early 1930s pushed workers towards the federal government and the Democratic Party. Historians of Hoover such as Joan Hoff Wilson and David Burner have presented him as a progressive engineer constrained by voluntarist beliefs rather than an indifferent conservative. State their positions in your own words and test them against your evidence.

Model sentence: While the stimulus is right that cooperation between business and government was the ideal of the 1920s, it was cooperation on business's terms, and by 1932 its failure to protect farmers and the unemployed had become the strongest driver of political change.