The advancement of technology meant that new electricity, movie and chemical industries among others, were the new trend as they supplied the public with much needed goods like medicines and radios. The popularity of cinema was due to the fact that films were relatively new and provided a source of entertainment, particularly in films that reinforced the patriotism and victory of World War I.
America was lucky in that it got off lightly from the First World War: the country was intact, most of the soldiers returned home safely, and everyone owed America money. Allied countries had borrowed money off America to pay for the war effort.
The greatest boom in business took place in the motorcar industry. Henry Ford of the Henry Ford Motor Company first came up with the idea of ‘mass-production’, which later became one of the greatest landmarks in industrial history. He suggested that it would benefit both the producers and the consumers of a product if that product were to be built on a production line. This meant that workers could specialise in a certain part of production and would therefore increase the efficiency of the workforce as a whole. It would also mean that products could come off the assembly line a lot quicker, and therefore meet the demands of the customers. By doing this, Ford was able to sell more cars, resulting in the increase of wages and the cut in cost of the cars themselves. As the price of cars dropped, more people were able to afford them.
Other industries benefited from the boom in the motorcar industry due to their materials being used to produce the cars. These were industries such as the oil, glass, steel, rubber and chemical industries.
However, the economic boom of the 1920s didn’t benefit everyone. Farmers made less money as people tended to buy more mass-produced goods, causing them to have to close down their farms in places. This meant the farm labourers, most of whom were black, lost their jobs as well. Black people in general didn’t benefit from the boom either, as many of them worked as unskilled workers making less money than the workers in the factories. Also, most black people were living in the South of the country where there weren’t large factories and business to work in like the more industrialised North of the country.