CHAPTER 6

The impact of the Revolution on

women, education, the arts,
music and literature
Once the horrible level of bloodletting was over by 1920, the Mexican government
turned its attention to fostering national cohesion. All Mexicans were affected by the
Revolution, but some groups, like women, lived the Revolution in ways specific to their
gender. They sought political rights, but these would take decades to become law.
More successful were the state-sponsored art projects and the expansion of the
educational system. The Revolution also spawned a great creative outpouring in music
and literature. In many ways, Mexico City became one of the premier global centers of
creativity and innovation, and attracted renowned artists and educators from around
the world. Nonetheless, there was no one Mexican school of artistic, literary or musical
expression. Mexico remained as diverse as its many political and regional strands, and
continued to reflect the tensions created by the Revolution. Certainly, different groups
had different goals, and these all played out in the arts, education, music and literature.
As you read this chapter, keep in mind the following questions:
✪ What was the impact of the Mexican Revolution on women?
✪ How did Mexican education change as a result of the Revolution?
✪ How did the Mexican Revolution impact the arts?
✪ How was the Revolution reflected in popular music?
✪ What impact did the Revolution have on Mexico’s literature?

1 1Women during the Mexican

Revolution
Key question: What was the impact of the Mexican Revolution on
women?

Mexican women in 1910 traditionally looked after their husbands and

families. At the same time, their husbands or fathers were there to protect
them. The Mexican Revolution broke down these roles, especially between
1910 and 1920.

Soldaderas
As men left to join the revolutionary armies or were conscripted into the
federal army, women were exposed to being kidnapped and raped in their

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 villages and rural dwellings. In cities, women often had the protection of
their extended families and city authorities, but these were not available for
Soldaderas Mexican poor rural women. Additionally, many peasant women felt they had to
women who followed their continue their nurturing role on the battlefield. So for their own and their
men into battle, made camp, children’s safety, as well as their traditional role as family caretakers, they
found food, cooked, washed became soldaderas, or camp followers, who cleaned, cooked and provided
clothing, cured wounds, and
medical care to their husbands (or brothers and fathers) while these men
buried dead soldiers.
performed the more masculine, traditional roles of soldiers.
While the men rode into battle, the women would walk all day hauling
equipment and food, eventually catching up to the soldiers to set up camp
for the night. These activities were often done on top of raising children.
Some soldaderas also went beyond submissive roles to join the military ranks
and were promoted as officers. Some also took on vital roles such as arms
smuggling and spying.
SOURCE A

Excerpt from Here’s to you, Jesusa!, by Elena Poniatowska, published by

What does the narrator in Penguin Books, New York, 1969, p. 75–77. Poniatowska is a Polish
Source A, the young girl Mexican journalist who wrote this novel based on the life of a real
Jesusa, reveal about the life
soldadera she interviewed.
of a soldadera?
That day the shooting started at two in the morning and went on all day until
five o’clock in the afternoon when General Morales y Molina ordered all the
women to move out, to abandon the plaza, and had everyone leave Chilpancingo;
we all went to Mochtitlán, but the shooting continued because the Zapatistas were
chasing us. We couldn’t return to Chilpancingo for six months. There were a lot of
casualties in that battle. The ones who fled as soon as they saw that the attack
was heavy lived. My father sent me on ahead with the family of a lieutenant. (…)
I started to get mean when I was with the troops. (…) My father got mad
because I was talking Zapotec with the boys from Tehuantepec. He caught up to
me and scolded me. I didn’t say anything. I was traveling with the vanguard
and I kept on walking and as I walked I got madder and madder, and when we
reached Tierra Colorada, I was burning with rage. (…) I sat there and made no
attempt to find him food or anything. He showed up and yelled at me again, but
he was so mad he grabbed a plant, one this big, he pulled it out of the ground,
root and all, and raised it up to hit me.

As the revolutionary armies provided no services to their troops, women

proved crucial in the success of many revolutionary factions by making
battlefield life easier. Northern revolutionaries, such as Villa’s, did not
incorporate soldaderas into their armies as Villa despised them, even
murdering 90 soldaderas in December 1916. Zapata, on the other hand,
encouraged brave soldaderas in his troops. The most famous soldadera was
Amelia Robles. She changed her name to Amelio Robles, rose to the rank of
colonel and, after the Revolution, earned a veteran’s pension.
Some feminist historians have classified soldaderas as followers of tradition,
rather than women making conscious decisions to step away from their
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submissive roles. Their revolutionary involvement has been said to be due to

their desire to depend on their husbands. These historians argue that women
remained in submissive roles and men in dominant roles, defining their social
relationships in respect to one another. This argument does not explain the
respect given to women who actually became soldiers, and officers, and fought
in the revolution. Whether driven by Mexican tradition or not, the importance
and influence of soldaderas on the battlefield must be acknowledged.

Women’s rights
As men left factories, mines and farms to join the Revolution, the women
who stayed behind often worked in traditionally male jobs. This opened
positions for women in the workforce after the revolution. The Constitution
of 1917, however, always gave women rights within their roles as mothers
and wives, such as protecting them from heavy labor and long hours when
they were pregnant (see page 73).
Middle class women joined the revolution in intellectual circles, writing in
newspapers and broadsheets, like Carmen Serdán (see Chapter 2, page 42).
These women founded liberal girls’ schools and women’s newspapers, in
particular La Siempreviva, founded by the feminist Rita Cetina Gutiérrez.
These women would form the core of feminist groups promoting women’s
votes in the next decades after the Revolution.
An interesting development during the Revolution was the Congreso
Femenino (Feminine Congress) in the Yucatán, sponsored by the revolutionary
governor, Salvador Alvarado, in 1916. This was a meeting attended by over
600 people, women and men, to discuss women’s rights.
Laws to improve the rights of women were only ever initially discussed in
terms of women’s rights within the traditional roles of wives and mothers, or
traditional professions such as teachers and nurses. Only in the late 1930s
would Mexican women take up issues such as voting rights, and Mexican
women would finally be able to vote in federal elections in 1958.

2 1The Revolution and Mexican

education
Key question: How did Mexican education change as a result of the
Revolution?

A new-found focus on improving the poor state of education in Mexico

emerged out of the chaotic years of the Revolution. With the establishment of
the Secretariat of Public Education (SEP), 15 per cent of the country’s budget
was devoted to addressing the huge needs of the mostly illiterate and rural
population. Many leaders knew that Mexico could not move forward
economically, socially and culturally unless serious attention was paid to

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 improving educational levels. Mexican reformers heroically tackled the
problems and experimented on how best to rebuild the nation from destruction
wrought by the Revolution. There were certainly setbacks but, overall, the
number of Mexicans who could read and write increased dramatically, and
many Mexicans began to see themselves as citizens of the country.

What did José Mexican education in the early 1900s

Vasconcelos do to
improve education? Mexican education before the Revolution
Under President Díaz, education was generally meant for the elite. Urban
schools were strongly favored over rural ones, and, by 1910, about 20 per
cent of students went to private institutions in the cities. There was no
federal oversight of the educational system: schools were run by the Catholic
Church, the various state governments and municipalities. Illiteracy was 80
per cent when the Revolution began, and of those who were fortunate
enough to attend school, most never stayed to the end. The instability of the
Revolution resulted in the number of schools dropping from 12,000 to 9,000,
from 1910 to 1920. The effects were also felt in Mexico City, where the
number of primary schools dropped from 226 to roughly half that number.

Who was José Vasconcelos?

José Vasconcelos (1882–1959) was a writer, philosopher and politician. An
early supporter of President Madero (see page 42), Vasconcelos strongly
believed that the central government had a duty to improve the poor
conditions of most Mexicans through education. He was appointed the
rector or head of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1920 and
encouraged professors and students to work towards fulfiling the goals of
the Revolution. To him, this meant volunteering as instructors to teach the
illiterate under the slogan of ‘Each One, Teach One’.
SOURCE B

Excerpt from the inaugural speech given by Vasconcelos at the National

Looking at Source B, what Autonomous University of Mexico, 1920. Accessed at www.sep.gob.mx/
type of education did
en/sep_en/History?page=2.
Vasconcelos think was most
important? By saying education I mean a direct teaching from those who know something,
in favor of those who know nothing, I mean a teaching that serves to raise the
productive capacity of each hand that works, of each brain that thinks …
Useful work, productive work, noble action and deep thinking, that is our
purpose … Let’s take the peasant under our care and let us teach him to
increase a hundredfold the amount of his production with the use of better tools
and methods. This is more important than distracting them by the conjugation
of verbs, because culture is the natural fruit of economic development.

Vasconcelos as head of the SEP

Vasconcelos was appointed by President Obregón to lead the newly created
SEP in 1921. The 1917 Constitution had to be amended first for the new

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government ministry to have state control over all educational institutions.

This was duly done and, as his mandate, Vasconcelos was in charge of:
Mandate Authority to carry
● national universities
out a policy.
● state agricultural and industrial colleges
● national museums and monuments
● fine arts and music conservatories
● primary and secondary education.
He also developed an expanded network of vocational schools and created
opportunities for adults to learn new skills.
Vasconcelos set himself high goals, accomplishing a tremendous amount in
his three years as SEP leader. An avalanche of initiatives was begun on all
fronts. Muralists, writers and musicians found state-sponsored work.
Thousands of new schools were built and new teachers hired to address the
severe problems, particularly in the countryside, where most of the
population lived. The country’s needs were so great that Vasconcelos allowed
the Catholic schools to continue operating independently, even though the
1917 Constitution stated that the government would be in charge.

Vasconcelos’ educational philosophy in action

At heart, Vasconcelos was an elitist who thought he knew what was best for
his countrymen, particularly the poor. He strongly believed that culturally,
socially and economically the Indians, in their current state, prevented
progress. Part of this was because, in his mind, they had not been
assimilated, lived in isolated villages, did not speak Spanish and had no
allegiance to the Mexican nation. He hoped to change all this.
Vasconcelos also stressed that educational programs would be based on the
realities of Mexico and not elsewhere. He even went so far as to criticize the
cooking curriculum in women’s vocational schools because they emphasized
European over Mexican foods, and asserted that US cakes should be
replaced with Mexican desserts.
SOURCE C

Excerpt from Crafting Mexico: Intellectuals, Artisans, and the State After
the Revolution by Rick A. López, University of North Carolina, Durham, According to Source C, how
North Carolina, 2010, page 134. López is a historian. and why did Vasconcelos
hope to change the masses?
The Mexican masses, in Vasconcelos’ estimation, were incapable of changing their
retrograde mindset on their own. Their uplift had to be managed by their moral
and racial superiors, motivated by a desire to avert the threat of being overrun
by ignorant, rapidly reproducing, inferior hordes. … Vasconcelos ascribed no
value to existing regional traditions or specific indigenous cultures since, in his
eyes, the lower classes were uniformly backward and in need of the edifying
values offered by Greek classics, Spanish culture, and modernist philosophy. He
aspired to foment an authentically Mexican art and culture, but felt that popular
traditions were to be endured only so long as they served as bridges leading the
lower order to higher civilization.

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 Rural schools
Central to Vasconcelos’ plans was the creation of the rural school, or Casa
del pueblo. He hoped to change the environment of the campesinos, who he
thought were plagued by diseases and often hungry. To accomplish this, he
established hundreds of schools, many of them in remote areas. Not only
would students be taught the basics in traditional school subjects, but they
would also learn about art, hygiene and the dangers of alcohol. All
students would have a sense of being part of the nation by learning
Spanish (for most, for the first time) and Mexican history and geography.
Adults would be instructed in better farming techniques and learn how to
read and write.
SOURCE D

‘The Rural School Teacher’ mural by Diego Rivera at the Ministry of

Explain why Rivera included Public Education, Mexico City, 1926
farmers and an armed man in
the portrayal of a rural school
teacher in Source D.

El Maestro
For the average rural teacher, many of whom were little better educated than
the children they taught, teaching in remote villages without much support
was difficult at best. SEP produced a magazine to assist, direct and
encourage them. This publication, El Maestro (‘The Teacher’), was printed on
a large scale. Each issue, from 1921 to 1923, had a print run of 75,000 copies.

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It included sections on practical advice, literature, general culture and

national history, and children’s pages.

Cultural missions
Vasconcelos described his educational mission as a crusade. He created a
program known as ‘cultural missions’ – groups that comprised teacher-
trainers, agricultural specialists, nurses, music and art teachers and
instructors in small businesses, who were sent out to the countryside. They
were known as ‘missionaries’. They would stay in villages for a specified
amount of time and expose the campesinos to different ways of thinking
and working. They were not always warmly received because they
represented outsiders intent on altering the villagers’ strongly-held
traditions.
SOURCE E

Excerpt from ‘A cultural missionary in Chiapas in the 1920s’, quoted in

The Ambivalent Revolution: Forging State and Nation in Chiapas, 1910–1945 What difficulties did the
by Stephen E. Lewis, New Mexico, 2005, pages 26–7. Lewis is an academic mestizo teacher face,
according to Source E?
specializing in Mexican history.
The mestizo teacher will not be accepted because the Indian is suspicious,
distrustful and does not tolerate the ‘ladino’, who he considers to be his enemy
capable of only doing harm and never good: in order to convince him that we are
his brothers, sons of the same motherland, an arduous and prolonged campaign Ladino A westernized,
will be necessary … Only with love, good faith, and honor we will incorporate Spanish-speaking Mexican,
and civilize our Indians. usually a mestizo.

Mexican education from 1920 What else did

Vasconcelos do to
SEP publications improve education?
As part of his civilizing mission, Vasconcelos believed it was very important
to expose the Mexican poor to literature, so that they might develop an
‘aesthetic culture’. He strongly felt that the citizen of the new Mexico
needed more than just basic instruction to advance. He chose a number of
Aesthetic culture A
books he felt would help uplift them. These included works by authors such
culture that has been purified
as Homer, Dante, Cervantes and Tolstoy. Thousands were printed in cheap of foreign elements, in this
editions by SEP. While these would probably have been too difficult for the case cleansed of non-
average campesino, SEP did publish readers and textbooks for students, Hispanic elements.
which numbered in the hundreds of thousands; for example, in 1922, SEP
Readers A book designed
printed 400,000 readers alone. to give students practice in
reading.
Libraries
During Vasconcelos’ time as minister of public education, hundreds of
libraries were built. For remote villages, books were boxed up and sent in by
mule. Larger and more accessible villages and towns would receive 100 to
1000 books. In 1922–23, 32,000 volumes were distributed to 285 new
libraries. The Mexican historian Enrique Krauze writing in 2011 dubbed

181
 Vasconcelos a cultural caudillo. This was not necessarily negative, as Krauze
noted that in 1920 there were only 39 public libraries, but by 1924 there were
Cultural caudillo An more than 1900.
overlord who controlled the
cultural policy of the Obstacles to Vasconcelos’ grand plans
government. The rapid pace of innovation and experimentation was one of the chief
PedagogyThe method and
obstacles the SEP faced. Rural schoolteachers were often unsure of how and
practice of teaching. what they should be teaching because of the constantly changing
instructions and preferred pedagogy from Mexico City. Because the growth
of rural schools was so quick, it was often difficult to find and train enough
teachers to carry out their duties.
There was also resistance among some Indians, who resented challenges to
their cultural and farming traditions, especially that the remote central
government was giving the instructions. Sufficient funds, even though they
had greatly expanded during Vasoncelos’ office, were never enough to meet
the enormous needs of the people. Some criticized Vasconcelos for
spending resources on printing classic texts that most of the intended
readers never read.
Finally, the outbreak of the de la Huerta rebellion in 1923 (see page 83)
created further disruptions and instability, which hampered the smooth
functioning of the SEP and resulted in a reduction in the education budget.
In 1923 and 1924, education was reduced to 9.3 per cent of the national
budget, and then to 6 per cent in 1925.

Vasconcelos’ resignation
In 1924, when it was apparent that Plutarco Calles would become the next
president after President Obregón (see page 87), Vasconcelos resigned. He
tried his hand at politics, but his runs for both governor of Oaxaca and
president were unsuccessful. In 1925, he produced his most well-known
work, La raza cósmica (‘The Cosmic Race’), in which he suggested that
mestizo Latin Americans were a new race that combined the best of both the
European and indigenous peoples. This was another indication of his views
on indigenous peoples.

Who else influenced A new direction for the SEP

Mexican education
after Vasconcelos? José Puig Casauranc
The physician José Puig Casauranc became the new head of the SEP in 1924
and would keep this post until 1928. During those four years, great changes
were made in Mexico’s educational programs, many of them driven by the
under-secretary of the SEP, Moisés Sáenz. Less attention would be paid to
Vasconcelos’ vision of a cultured peasant and more to expanding the network
of rural schools.

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SOURCE F

Excerpt from ‘Newer Aspects of Education in Mexico, Bulletin of the Pan

American Union, LXIII’ by Moisés Sáenz, February 1929, page 873, Why, according to Source F,
quoted in ‘Mexico Experiments in Rural and Primary Education: was traditional education
inadequate?
1921–1930’ by Louise Schoenhals in The Hispanic American Historical
Review, Vol. 44, No. 1, February 1964, page 41.
Mere education, if by that is meant the conventional three R’s, the bookish sort
of thing, holds little hope, indeed, for these people in their present condition. The
truth of the matter is that we have to change our whole concept of education,
and that is exactly what we are trying to do in Mexico. When the problem is one
of awakening, energizing, rehabilitating 8,000,000 human beings, education
must mean infinitely more than the acquisition of formal knowledge …
Functional education is, for us in Mexico, not a refinement but a need of the first
order.

Sáenz and Dewey

One of the most influential US philosophers and education reformers during
the first half of the twentieth century was John Dewey. He fervently believed
that traditional education was too static and that students needed practical
experiences to apply their learning to their daily lives. One of his students at
Columbia University in New York was the Mexican Moisés Sáenz, studying
for his doctorate. Sáenz returned to Mexico in 1924 and, having graduated
and become under-secretary of the SEP, started putting Dewey’s plans into
action.

Sáenz’s plans: rural schools

In his new post, Sáenz greatly expanded the network of rural schools. The
number of teachers serving in the countryside rose from around 1000 in 1924
to 6500 by 1930. The number of students also increased dramatically from
50,000 to 325,000. Students now not only attended regular classes, but also
had vegetable gardens, orchards, chickens and bees to care for. Produce was
sold in order to support the schools. Puig Casauranc hoped to make the
school system more efficient and less reliant of money from the central
authority.
Communities were encouraged to help build and maintain the new schools:
the schools often became the center of rural communities and offered
classes, often in art, music and basic health, to children and adults alike.
Public health campaigns took place in 3000 villages, and the school was
often the meeting place for these. Officials hoped to counter traditional
beliefs, such as that winds or evil spirits spread disease, with more scientific
explanations.

Assimilation through rural schools

Sáenz hoped to assimilate Indians through these rural schools, by having
them learn Spanish and by studying the nation’s history. By studying

183
 together in a school, they could be exposed to new ideas while not being
isolated in their sometimes remote villages. Dewey was impressed by this
Reservations Land set strategy during his 1926 visit to Mexico. He compared it favorably to how US
aside for Native Americans to Native Americans had been segregated from mainstream society on
restrict their movement. reservations.
SOURCE G

Excerpt from ‘Mexico’s Educational Renaissance’ by John Dewey from The

Looking at Source G, why did New Republic, No. 48, 22 September 1926, pages 117–18.
Dewey think that education
in Mexico was revolutionary? The most interesting as well as the most important educational development is
… the rural schools: which means of course, those for native Indians. This is the
cherished preoccupation of the present régime; it signifies a revolution rather
than a renaissance. It is not only a revolution for Mexico, but in some respects
one of the most important social experiments undertaken anywhere in the world.
For it marks a deliberate and systematic attempt to incorporate in the social body
the Indians who form 80 per cent of the total population. Previous to the
revolution, this numerically preponderant element was not only neglected but
despised … there is no educational movement in the world which exhibits more
of the spirit of intimate union of school activities with those of the community
than is found in this Mexican development.

Schools in cities and rural areas

For the first time, secondary schools were also established in rural areas.
Students could now continue their studies. Open-air schools – small schools
with outdoor areas where gardens could be raised and students could take
art classes – were established for the poor in Mexico City.
Twenty-four model primary schools were also established in state capitals
and large cities. These were designed to demonstrate effective teaching
methods to teachers. Indeed, Sáenz knew he had to raise the standards of the
mostly poorly trained teachers, so, in addition to these model schools, he
established institutes to help the teachers. These offered short professional-
development courses, designed to help teachers better serve their
communities.

What else happened Innovations in education

after Vasconcelos?
More innovations in education
La Casa del Estudiante Indígena (House of the Indigenous Student) opened in
1926 in Mexico City. This was an effort to explore how Indians would fare if
exposed to excellent instruction, both academic and vocational. Two hundred
non-Spanish-speaking students from a variety of tribes attended this
boarding school during the first year. While the students exceeded
expectations, once they had learned marketable skills they chose to take jobs
in Mexico City rather than return to their villages, as had been expected.
After this failure, the Casa closed in 1932.

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Another innovation was the creation of central agricultural schools. These

were a favorite of President Calles, an ex-schoolteacher. Each of the schools
comprised 2500 acres of agricultural land, where crops were raised and new
farming techniques tried. Like other educational programs, these were
designed to improve Mexico’s agricultural production and promote national
economic progress.

Catholic education
As a consequence of the Cristero Revolt, when Calles tried to limit the
Catholic Church’s power (see pages 90–92), Calles closed all Church schools
in Mexico. Severe disruptions to the educational system occurred because of
the violence, and the rural teacher often bore the brunt of anger directed at
the state. These teachers were viewed as anti-Catholic and representative of
the federal government. In some rebellious rural areas, the number of
children attending school dropped significantly, and it would take years to
regain previous levels of school attendance.

Nationalism and Mexican education

Similarly to previous efforts, the federal educational system promoted
nationalism. History lessons stressed the goals and achievements of the
Revolution. The Revolution was presented as equally important as Mexican
independence in the country’s history. In 1925, a pledge of allegiance to the
flag was introduced, and President Calles presided over a ceremony that
included tens of thousands of students reciting the pledge at the national
stadium. A new school calendar also now included the dates of Madero’s
birth and death to enforce the idea that the Mexican Revolution was a
particularly important event.

What did the SEP achieve by the 1930s?

Overly ambitious plans and frequent experimentation – not unlike the
frenetic years when Vasconcelos was in charge – led to unsuccessful
outcomes in SEP’s plans. Furthermore, the lack of trained teachers hurt
progress as the network of rural primary and secondary schools
expanded. While it is true that by the end of the 1920s there were
thousands of new schools, and hundreds of thousands of new students,
the quality of education was uneven. Urban schools tended to receive
more funds and better teachers. One area that suffered was higher
education. By 1928, there were only 14,000 students enrolled in university
in a population of over 14 million. Lack of effective leadership hampered
the SEP from 1928 to 1931, as four different ministers presided over the
large bureaucracy.

A ‘Socialist’ education What happened in

Mexican education
Narciso Bassols after Casauranc and
Narciso Bassols headed the SEP from 1931 to 1934. Under his guidance, a Sáenz?
new SEP publication, El Maestro Rural (‘The Rural Teacher’), was

185
 published. It was intended as a way for the SEP to communicate with both
the rural teachers and the campesinos. Campesinos and rural teachers were
both encouraged to raise issues by publishing articles, and as the magazine
was written in simple Spanish, it was a successful technique of
maintaining contact between Mexico City and rural areas. For some SEP
officials, it also a way of keeping political and ideological control of the
rural schools.
It was under Bassols that the first students of the Escuelas Normales or
Teacher Training Colleges graduated. These new teachers were much better
prepared than most of their peers in the rural schools and were seen as a
threat to the latter, who felt they might lose their jobs.
SOURCE H

Excerpt from Triumphs and Tragedy: A History of the Mexican People by

How does Source H E. Ruíz, New York, 1992, page 402.
illustrate the idea that the
SEP bureaucracy was out of Critics, he [Bassols] acknowledged, referred to the ill-equipped and poorly led
touch with reality? schools as schools of reading, writing, and arithmetic, rarely as institutions for
social change. Countless rural schools were simply out of touch with reality, as
one school inspector learned. During one of the periodic anti-alcohol campaigns,
he had stopped at a village notorious for its pulque drinkers, where he lectured
its inhabitants on the pitfalls of alcohol, urging them to drink water instead. His
Pulque An alcoholic drink audience listened attentively, saying nothing. After he had finished, the villages
derived from the agave plant. asked him to stay and eat with them. At the table, he noticed that his glass held
rancid water. Surprised and angered, the inspector demanded an explanation.
Maestro, they replied, ‘this is what you have asked us to drink’. For miles
around, there was nothing to drink but water from stagnant pools. The people
drank pulque instead.

Bassols and ‘Socialist’ education

Bassols was the first Marxist to hold a ministerial position in the Mexican
government, and helped to usher in a major shift in Mexican education
when he carried out Calles’ introduction of ‘Socialist’ education (see page
104). Article 3 of the 1917 Constitution dealing with education was again
changed, this time to incorporate this new direction. Bassols wanted to find
more scientific and technological solutions to Mexico’s problems, particularly
in the poor countryside. He knew that hungry children and parents
considered education secondary to the task of feeding themselves. What
Bassols and his successors tried to do was to help educate the peasants to
increase their agricultural outputs, and thus ensure that campesino
communities improved their local economies.

Sex education and teacher opposition: Bassols’ resignation

Bassols tried to counter an increasing rate of teenage pregnancy by
instituting a program of sex education in secondary schools in 1934. He was
met by huge opposition from outraged parents and the Catholic Church.

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Both groups thought teaching students about birth control and how to
prevent sexually transmitted diseases would lead to increased promiscuity.
Students, egged on by their parents, went on strike in various cities.
On top of this, many teachers opposed Bassols because he had demanded
more transparency and accountability for teachers, including assessing their
performance and abilities. There were also conservatives among the teachers
who felt a shift towards Socialist education was a dangerous new
development. They, alongside the striking students, called for Bassols’
resignation. Bassols’ days were numbered. He resigned in May 1934, though
he later served as interior minister, finance minister and ambassador to a
number of countries, including the Soviet Union.

The Cárdenas years, 1934–40 What did Cárdenas

do for education?
Lázaro Cárdenas faced massive challenges when elected President in 1934.
It was during his six-year term that many aspects of the Revolution were
re-energized, not least education. Together with land reform there was:
● an increased budget for education
● a refocus on rural schools
● the founding of the National Polytechnical Institute and the Workers’
University
● a recommitment to fostering productive work and social action.
Gonzalo Vázquez Vela served as Cárdenas’ secretary of public education for
five-and-a-half years. While some more radical educators hoped he would
follow Bassols’ ideas, he chose to be more of a pacifier. With up to 15 per cent
of the national budget at his disposal, Vázquez Vela oversaw the construction
of more than 4000 rural schools and a student enrolment that increased by
54 per cent to more than 1.2 million students. There are more details on
Cárdenas’ education policies on pages 117–21.
On the negative side, as more and more teachers joined different teachers’
unions with competing agendas, the SEP became embroiled in politics. This
sometimes distracted the ministry from its primary focus of lifting poor
Mexicans out of poverty through education, as it tried to placate those who
wanted to continue socialism in the schools and those who were more
socially and politically conservative.
SOURCE I

Excerpt from ‘The Socialist ABCs’ (anonymous), 1929, quoted in The

Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics by Gilbert Joseph and Timothy According to Source I, how
Henderson, eds, University of North Carolina, Durham, North Carolina, had the wealthy exploited the
poor?
2002, pages 412–13. This excerpt is from a school primer printed by the
state government of Tabasco, one of the most radical and anticlerical
states in the nation. While SEP controlled educational policy in general,
state governments also ran their own schools.

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 In our society, before the Revolution of 1910, an odious division of classes came
into being. There was one class that enjoyed every consideration and which had
the support of the government.
That was the privileged class.
The victim of the privileged class were the workers of the cities and of the
countryside; the latter were called ‘mozos’ [‘servants’ or ‘boys’] and they lived in
the saddest conditions you can imagine.
They were exploited without pity, and the greatest fortunes of Tabasco were built
upon their excessive labor.
The greedy capitalists packed many tears and sorrows away in their strong
treasure chests.
… they were helped by the clergy in their unhealthy passion to exploit; they
shared their riches with the clergy in exchange for absolution, and they were
blind and deaf to the sorrow of the oppressed. …
It was within this society, organized so unjustly and completely lacking in the
principles of love and justice that must exist among men, that the Revolution
broke out; the struggle was joined against the regime which protected this state of
affairs, and after several years and much blood, tears, and suffering, the
Revolution triumphed.

The SEP: a summary

The SEP hoped to redeem Mexicans from their supposed backward state,
bring them into the post-revolutionary society and help them become
productive members of the community. While it is certainly true that
millions were educated after the federal government took over school
education, some historians believe Mexico’s educational achievements
have been somewhat glorified. Historian Mary Kay Vaughan writing in
1975 discussed the idea that actually not much was different between
Díaz’s educational policies and those from Obregón onwards. She wrote
that the elites hoped to better train peasants so they could contribute to
the nation’s economy by producing more, and then, in turn, become
consumers of industrial goods. The elites were not interested in altering the
class structure because that would have meant surrendering power; for
example, she wrote that history texts ‘continued to reinforce tendencies
towards incorporation, pacification, and obedience to authority’. Ramón
Eduardo Ruíz in 1992, while agreeing that the State hoped to foster
nationalism, wrote that ‘The school had become a political weapon to use
against the status quo’. For Ruíz, the rural schools were at the forefront of
significant social and cultural change.

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Vasconcelos (1921–24) Puig Casauranc and Moisés Sáenz

(1924–28)
• Built new schools, especially rural
ones • Expanded network of rural schools
• Created libraries • Used schools as community
• Developed ‘aesthetic culture’ centers
among campesinos • Provided more adult education
• Published guides for teachers, • Created public health missions
school textbooks • Continued to promote Mexican
• Published hundreds of titles of nationalism
classic texts • Developed agricultural colleges
• Sent out cultural missions to the • Experimented with pedagogy
countryside
• Promoted Mexican identity
• Experimented with pedagogy

The Revolution
and Mexican Education

Narciso Bassols (1931–34) Vásquez Vela (1935–40)

• Published El Maestro Rural • Increased the number of rural
• Promoted Socialist education schools by 50 %
• Tried to improve the agricultural • Increased student numbers by
output of campesinos through more than 50 %
education efforts • Dropped Socialist education
• Promoted sex education because of conservative
• Provided hundreds of thousands opposition
of free texts to students • Tied in Cárdenas’ land reform
with expansion of rural school
network
• Promoted loyalty to the State

SUMMARY DIAGRAM

The Revolution and Mexican Education

189
 3 The creative outburst after the
Revolution
Key question: How did the Mexican Revolution impact the arts?

The sheer scale of the destruction and violence of the Mexican Revolution, as
well as the promises of a better future contained in the 1917 Constitution,
Muralist Movement A led to an outpouring of creativity in Mexico. Some historians dubbed the
Mexican art movement after 1920s the ‘Mexican Renaissance’, as embodied in the Muralist Movement.
the Revolution. Artists often Mexican artists, particularly the muralists known as Los Tres Grandes (The Big
created large murals Three), achieved fame beyond Mexican borders. The walls of public buildings
depicting events in Mexican
were offered as new canvases for artists to educate the mostly illiterate
history.
population, promote the gains of the Revolution, and develop a sense of
nationalism.

How did Vasconcelos The government’s role in the arts

influence Mexican art?
The SEP
José Vasconcelos, as head of the SEP (see page 177), introduced the use of
public spaces for art in 1922. He quickly instituted wide-ranging reforms and
new initiatives in education and the arts.
Vasconcelos was keenly aware of the need to reconstruct Mexico after almost
a decade of war. As head of the SEP, he was in charge of not only education
but also the promotion of the arts, music and the sciences. He hoped to
educate the average Mexican in what it meant to be a Mexican national,
instead of someone belonging to a particular village or region. With this in
mind, he supported artists by providing them with small wages, active
encouragement and fairly free rein in what they would paint.
SOURCE J

Excerpt from Artists, Intellectuals and Revolution: Recent Books on Mexico

According to Source J, how by Alistair Hennessy, from the Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 3,
does mural-painting No. 1, May 1971, page 76. Hennessy is a British historian.
contribute to nationalism?
The functional role of mural painting has been to disseminate a common,
national and secular culture, focusing on an idealized version of the past, an
exclusive interpretation of the national history, employing clusters of commonly
accepted national symbols and extolling immediately recognizable national
heroes. Although the influence exerted by mural painting eludes simple
quantification, it has played an important part in the elaboration of those secular
myths which contribute to national integration.

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The Muralist Movement Who were Los Tres

Los Tres Grandes were muralists who took up the challenge of creating huge Grandes (The Big
Three)?
murals under SEP sponsorship. They were Diego Rivera, David Alfaro
Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco. They became some of the most famous
artists who represented a break from the past.

Influences and accomplishments

Both Rivera and Siqueiros were accomplished Mexican artists living in
Europe when José Vasconcelos became head of the SEP. They were
influenced by current European artistic trends in the early 1900s, while
Orozco had not had such exposure to these outside influences. The master
printmaker José Guadalupe Posada (1852–1913) made a more immediate
impact on Orozco. As a young student, Orozco watched Posada at work and
was influenced by his satirical outlook on Mexican society.
Los Tres Grandes would find both fame and infamy because of their masterful
frescoes, both in Mexico and in the USA over the decades. Although these
Frescoes Artworks applied
artists are often lumped together in the public imagination, they were directly to wet plaster.
stylistically, temperamentally and, most significantly, politically quite
different from one another. While they knew each other, they could not be Broadside A strong written
attack.
described as close friends, because their analyses of what the Mexican
Revolution had done to the country were so different. Their interpretations
of the role of the artist in society also were at odds.

The Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors

In 1922, Rivera, Siqueiros, Orozco and other artists created the Syndicate of
Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors. They wanted to create a union of
like-minded artists who hoped to establish new, revolutionary standards of
exactly what art should be in Mexico. They issued a broadside, setting
down their ideology for all to read, which was later published in a new
newspaper they created, El Machete. Under the masthead ran the slogan
‘The machete serves to cut the sugar cane, to open paths through dark
forests, behead vipers, chop down weeds, and shame the arrogance of the
godless rich’. While the paper proclaimed that it was for the workers and
peasants, few could afford the price. El Machete soon became the official
mouthpiece of the Mexican Communist Party and at its height ran at 11,000
copies a week.
SOURCE K

Excerpt by David Siqueiros et al, originally published as a broadside in

Mexico City, 1922, published again in El Machete, No. 7, Barcelona, June From Source K, why was it
1924, English translation from Modern Mexican Art by Laurence E. important to bring about a
‘new order’?
Schmeckebier, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1939, page 31.
Accessed at http://backspace.com/notes/2004/09/manifesto-del-sindicato-
de-obreros-tecnicos-pintores-y-escultores.php.
Social, Political, and Aesthetic Declaration from the Syndicate of Technical
Workers, Painters, and Sculptors to the indigenous races humiliated through

191
 centuries; to the soldiers converted into hangmen by their chiefs; to the workers
and peasants who are oppressed by the rich; and to the intellectuals who are not
servile to the bourgeoisie:
‘We are with those who seek the overthrow of an old and inhuman system
within which you, worker of the soil, produce riches for the overseer and
politician, while you starve. Within which you, worker in the city, move the
wheels of industries, weave the cloth, and create with your hands the modern
comforts enjoyed by the parasites and prostitutes, while your own body is numb
with cold. Within which you, Indian soldier, heroically abandon your land and
give your life in the eternal hope of liberating your race from the degradations
and misery of centuries.
‘Not only the noble labor but even the smallest manifestations of the material or
spiritual vitality of our race spring from our native midst. Its admirable,
exceptional, and peculiar ability to create beauty – the art of the Mexican people
– is the highest and greatest spiritual expression of the world-tradition which
constitutes our most valued heritage. It is great because it surges from the people;
it is collective, and our own aesthetic aim is to socialize artistic expression, to
destroy bourgeois individualism.
‘We repudiate the so-called easel art and all such art which springs from
ultraintellectual circles, for it is essentially aristocratic.
‘We hail the monumental expression of art because such art is public property.
‘We proclaim that this being the moment of social transition from a decrepit to a
new order, the makers of beauty must invest their greatest efforts in the aim of
materializing an art valuable to the people, and our supreme objective in art,
which is today an expression for individual pleasure, is to create beauty for all,
beauty that enlightens and stirs to struggle.’

The Syndicate directed their efforts towards the indigenous peasant, soldier
and worker: the new ‘holy trinity’ in Mexican society. Initially, at least, the
muralists hoped to paint art that told the history of Mexico and clearly
defined the heroes and villains. They wished to paint the daily lives and
struggles of common people in a marked departure from pre-revolutionary
art, which often aped European trends. Many of the artists saw themselves
as workers, not unlike those they painted. Interestingly, several of them
would later accept commissions for works of art from the very same
capitalists they had savaged in their murals and paintings.

Who was Rivera and Los Tres Grandes: Diego Rivera

what role did the
Diego Rivera (1886–1957) was born in Guanajuato in central Mexico. From
Revolution play in his
art? an early age, he studied art and showed such promise that he earned a
Mexican government grant to study in Europe in 1907. He stayed there for
the next fourteen years, mostly in Paris, and became a relatively well-known
artist. Vasconcelos urged Rivera to visit Italy with him so that he might see
and be inspired by Italian masters, then return to Mexico to help launch the

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SEP’s use of public spaces for art. In Italy, Rivera was impressed by the
frescoes of Renaissance painters and the depth of Roman antiquity. This trip
helped shape his outlook on murals and the role that ancient history can
play in art.

Rivera, the politically charged artist

Rivera was an outsized figure physically, politically and artistically (in terms
of how much art he created). He had a huge appetite for attractive women,
and was quite successful in seducing many. He had several marriages,
including to the artist Frida Kahlo, whom he married and divorced and
remarried. Rivera considered himself a die-hard Marxist, fully committed to
the cause of workers controlling the factories in which they worked. As one
of the original members of the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and
Sculptors, he subscribed, at least at first, to its views that large-scale public
art was much better than small-scale paintings as more people would see
it. Rivera was an early member of the Mexican Communist Party, but did
not always toe the Moscow-directed line. Even when he went to the Soviet
Union in 1927 as part of the Mexican Communist Party delegation, to mark
the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, he criticized Stalinist
Leon Trotsky Leader in the
excesses. By 1929, he had been thrown out of the Party. Rivera was more at Russian Revolution who fled
home with the internationalist approach of Leon Trotsky and joined with the Soviet Union after Stalin
fellow Mexican supporters when Trotsky was exiled. He was instrumental became dictator. He was a
in persuading Cárdenas’ government to offer Trotsky asylum in Mexico proponent of international
in!1936. revolution.

SOURCE L

Excerpt from the article ‘Art and Politics in Our Epoch’ by Leon Trotsky,
June 1938. Accessed at www.wsws.org/en/articles/2011/12/ltdr-d21.html. According to Source L, what
role did the Russian
In the field of painting, the October [Russian] revolution has found her greatest Revolution have in shaping
interpreter not in the USSR but in faraway Mexico, not among the official Rivera’s outlook on art?
‘friends’, but in the person of a so-called ‘enemy of the people’ whom the Fourth
International is proud to number in its ranks. Nurtured in the artistic cultures of
all peoples, all epochs, Diego Rivera has remained Mexican in the most profound
fibres of his genius. But that which inspired him in these magnificent frescoes,
which lifted him up above the artistic tradition, above contemporary art in a
certain sense, above himself, is the mighty blast of the proletarian revolution.
Without October, his power of creative penetration into the epic of work,
oppression and insurrection, would never have attained such breadth and
profundity. Do you wish to see with your own eyes the hidden springs of the
social revolution? Look at the frescoes of Rivera. Do you wish to know what
revolutionary art is like? Look at the frescoes of Rivera.

Rivera’s early murals

When Rivera returned to Mexico in 1922 from Italy, he toured the Yucatán
along with his sponsor, Vasconcelos. The trip inspired him to incorporate
many of the stunning ancient Mayan artistic achievements he saw. He was

193
 now beginning to sense the great and long history of his country. In his
autobiography, he wrote that ‘I roamed the country in search of material. I
wanted my painting to reflect the social life of Mexico as I saw it, and through
my vision of the truth to show the masses the outline of the future’.

Rivera at the National Preparatory School

The first piece of work Rivera did under the Mexican government’s
commission was at the National Preparatory School in the capital in 1922.
Vasconcelos offered him an interior wall. Siqueiros and Orozco, as well as
several other artists, were also given wall space for their murals.
Rivera’s work was called ‘Creation’ and attempted to convey the origins of
the sciences and the arts. The allegorical figures were over 12 feet tall and
included a mixture of racial groups. The conservative students at the school
were outraged by what Rivera and the other artists were painting, because
they were so unaccustomed to new visual displays. Students tried and
partially succeeded on several occasions to damage the murals, and even the
Damas Católicas, a religious group of right-wing women, voiced their
outrage. While Rivera often exaggerated, he did have reason to feel
threatened, and often armed himself while painting.
Rivera completed the 1000 square foot mural in a year but was dissatisfied
that his work was too derivative of Italian art. For his next project, he would
be sure to incorporate Mexican motifs more clearly.
SOURCE M

Excerpt from Une Renaissance Mexicaine: La Renaissance de l’art français

How do Brenner and et des industries de luxe by Anita Brenner and Jean Charlot, Paris,
Charlot portray Rivera in February 1928, pages 61–2. Brenner documented many of the muralists’
Source M?
lives and Charlot, a French muralist who worked alongside Rivera at
times, was considered to be the Muralist Movement’s historian.
Diego Rivera, a dynamo in a static mass of flesh, perched on the beam of
scaffolding near the roof of a tall building, produces fresco after fresco without
the least haste. A gigantic cow-boy’s hat shades his sleepy eyes and good-natured
smile. A stuffed cartridge-belt and the dark case of a Colt 45 encircles his figure,
beneath the weight of which the boards are bent.

Rivera’s themes
Vasconcelos withstood the withering attacks in the conservative press that
was unhappy with his new vision of the educated masses. He next presented
the artists with an even grander project in 1923, at the SEP headquarters. It
was here that Rivera created 135 frescoes that covered more than 5000 square
feet. Among the themes that Rivera stressed were Mexicans hard at work,
the natural glories of Mexico and the Revolution. Panels had such names as
‘Life of Zapata’, ‘This is how the Proletariat Revolution will be’, ‘The
Liberation of the rural worker’ and ‘The rural teacher’.

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At one point, the press realised there was a poem by the radical Gutiérrez
Cruz included on one mural. Under pressure, Vasconcelos asked Rivera to get
rid of this and he complied. Nonetheless, numerous Communist symbols,
such as the hammer and sickle, appear in the murals, revealing Rivera’s
political leanings.

Rivera alone at the National Preparatory School

When Vasconcelos resigned (see page 181), the artists’ major sponsor and
protector was gone. The new government demanded that the syndicate be
disbanded and the publication of El Machete halted. It was either that or they
would lose their jobs. Most refused the ultimatum and were fired. Rivera was
probably saved from this fate because he had resigned from the Communist
Party in 1925. He rejoined the Party the following year but was allowed to
continue his work, until he finished the murals in 1928.

Work at Chapingo
While he was working on the SEP murals, Rivera also created frescoes at the
National School of Agriculture at Chapingo. He worked there from 1924
until 1927 and painted what many art historians consider to be his finest
work, ‘The Liberated Earth and Natural Forces Controlled by Humanity’, in
the former chapel. One critic dubbed it the ‘Sistine Chapel of the Twentieth
Century’. Rivera focused on social justice through land reform and how
people could harness nature to do better.

The National Palace murals

At the National Palace in 1929, Rivera provided the public with a massive
pictorial history of Mexico from the pre-Columbian days until 1930, entitled
the ‘Epic of the Mexican People’. The artist and historian Desmond Rochfort
described his work in 1993 as ‘the first of the murals to place the Revolution
within some kind of historical perspective’. Mexicans could see how the
main events of their nation’s history developed. The murals were a clear
indication of the importance Rivera gave the Revolution and the centrality of
Marxism to achieving a better future.

A US-commissioned work
One other series of Rivera’s early mural work bears mentioning. The US
ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Morrow, commissioned Rivera to paint
murals on the walls of the Cortés Palace in Cuernavaca, capital of Morelos, in
1929. He entitled this work ‘The History of Morelos: Conquest and
Revolution’. He covered the history of the state from the time of the Spanish
conquistador Hernán Cortés’ landing at Veracruz until Zapata’s agrarian
revolution (see pages 45–48). Rivera’s fellow leftists felt that Rivera’s
accepting money from a representative of a capitalist country, as well as his
failure to condemn Leon Trotsky, were anathema, and led to his being
thrown out of the Communist Party in 1929. This self-imposed exile,
essentially, meant that he could not finish the ‘Epic of the Mexican People’
until 1935.

195
 What was significant Rivera in the USA
about Rivera’s time in
When political troubles at home made it uncomfortable for the muralists,
the USA?
they often headed north of the border. Diego Rivera spent much of
1930–34 in the USA; Orozco found a temporary home in the USA from
1927 to 1934.

The MOMA retrospective

The works of Mexican artists became increasingly in demand in the USA.
The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City created a one-man
retrospective around Rivera’s from late 1930 to early 1931. Rivera was the
second artist to be honored in this fashion (Matisse was the first and Picasso
the third). People attended the show in large numbers. Rivera received great
praise for the show and went on to create murals in San Francisco and
Detroit, though not without criticism:
● Some US citizens criticized the choice of non-US citizens to do
commissioned work when many US artists were unemployed because of
the Great Depression.
● Others found much to criticize in Rivera’s overt political message of the
evils of capitalism and the wonderful future offered by Marxism.
● Still others, particularly in Detroit, called for the destruction of Rivera’s
murals for their supposed anti-Catholic message.
However, it was in New York City that the most furore was generated.

The Rockefeller controversy

The wealthy and powerful Rockefeller family hoped to adorn the entry hall
to the newly built Rockefeller Center with modern art. Rivera was contracted
to produce one of the three murals in 1933. When the Rockefellers saw
Rivera’s ‘Man at the Crossroads’, they were stunned by the central position
given to the Communist leader Vladimir Lenin. They asked Rivera to remove
this affront to US capitalism but Rivera refused. The offending fresco was
covered up, then chipped from the wall and carted off to the garbage dump.
Rivera was fired, but still earned $20,000 for his work, a huge sum during the
Great Depression. This was a far cry from what he had received from the SEP
a decade earlier, when he and others received the same salary as a
stonemason.

The Mexican Renaissance

During the 1920s and 1930s, Rivera became Mexico’s most well-known
artist, admired (and reviled) both at home and abroad. The Revolution was
a great inspiration to Rivera, and he remained committed to its ideals of
social justice and the centrality of the Mexican Indian in the past and future
of Mexico. His name became synonymous with the Mexican Renaissance.

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As a committed Marxist, he also understood that the Mexican Revolution

only marked the beginning of a transformed society and culture. Yet, at the
same time, he did not seem to think that painting for the wealthy was a
contradiction. He painted portraits of businessmen both at home and in the
USA, even though this kind of ‘easel art’ ran counter to what the Syndicate
of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors swore in their 1922 manifesto.
SOURCE N

Diego Rivera drawing the cartoon of ‘Infant in the Bulb of a Plant’ on the
east wall of his Detroit Industry mural, 1932 What does Source N suggest
about the scale of Rivera’s
mural?

Los Tres Grandes: David Alfaro Siqueiros How did the Mexican
Revolution impact
Siqueiros, the committed Communist Siqueiros?
David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974) was a much more committed leftist than
Rivera. He not only served as a soldier during the Revolution, but also tried
to make his art revolutionary, both in content and technique. He was an early
member of the Mexican Communist Party and remained a staunch supporter
of the Soviet Union until his death. As an artist, he produced much less than
the workhorse Rivera because he was often consumed by political activities,
which caused him to go to prison and even leave Mexico several times.

197
 Siqueiros was rebellious from an early age. In 1911, at the age of fifteen, he
helped lead a six-month strike at his art school over poor instruction. Several
years later, he joined the Revolution and served for four years. By the end he
had become a captain. During the war, he co-founded the Congress of
Avant-garde Experimental Soldier Artists, an early attempt at political organizing. In 1919, he went to
or radical. Paris and broadened his artistic horizons as he learned of new trends in
French avant-garde art.
SOURCE O

Excerpt from Siqueiros: His Life and Works by Philip Stein, International
How, according to Source Publishers, New York, 1994, page vii. Stein was an artist and had worked
O, did Siqueiros combine his with Siqueiros from 1948–58.
politics with his art?
Siqueiros was a painter of socialist convictions who, in his leadership of the
Mexican Muralist Movement, confronted the schools of abstract art rooted in
capitalism. A force so strong and influential as that led by Siqueiros was
dangerous and had to be halted, at least if the predominant culture had any say in
the matter. Yet, in spite of a literary art criticism blackout, especially in the United
States, the genius and technical ability that his works revealed could not be denied:
taking the top honors at the Venice Biennale in 1950, and the creation of his final
spectacular mural, The March of Humanity. Of course, there was his politics; he
was a dedicated Marxist-Leninist throughout his life. How could he dare to mix
politics with ‘art’? How could he, Mexico’s greatest portrait painter, organize the
miners’ union, march on May Day, then lecture on aesthetic theory for a modern
world? Siqueiros was a smoldering creator, one who placed himself at the vortex of
events of the struggling masses that brought such turmoil to the world.

SOURCE P

‘Del porfirismo a la Revolución’, 1952–54, fresco

What do you think is the
political meaning of the mural
in Source P?

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Siqueiros’ art: influence, technique and message How did Siqueiros

While in Paris, Siqueiros met Rivera and other leading artists. He journeyed reveal his politics
to Italy with Rivera and was stunned by the murals of Renaissance artists like through his art?
Masaccio, Giotto and Michelangelo. Like Rivera, Vasconcelos enticed him
back to Mexico to contribute to creating art for the people. He was given
space in the National Preparatory School and tried to organize an artists’
collective to set up a common vision for the project.
SOURCE Q

Siqueiros quoted in Siqueiros: His Life and Works by Philip Stein, page 38.
What evidence is there in
There our first work was produced. Ignorant of muralism, ignorant of public art, Source Q of the difficulties
problems artists of our time did not care to occupy themselves with, we began in the artists faced?
the most stumbling manner that one can imagine. We distributed the walls of the
National Preparatory School as one would divide a loaf of bread, everyone a slice
… But this fixed method of distributing the work was not the only error we
committed as ardent muralists. We had yet to form a concept of the differences
between easel painting and the construction of murals. But the most
extraordinary and fundamental problem of all concerned our theme. The problem
of a new thematic concept was tremendous, new, and incalculable.

Siqueiros at the National Preparatory School

Siqueiros produced murals that were not necessarily political in nature,
though the ones that aroused the greatest reaction certainly were. He created
the grand mural ‘The Myths and Burial of a Martyred Worker’ in 1924. A
detail in this mural was a worker’s coffin, draped with a hammer and sickle.
Students at the school were not at all pleased with this and tried to destroy
his work as they had tried with Rivera’s. During this period, Siqueiros helped
create the union of artists, sculptors and technical workers with Rivera, and
put great time and energy into the newspaper El Machete. He and Rivera
both wrote for the paper and contributed artwork, as did other accomplished
writers, photographers and engravers.
When Vasconcelos resigned (see page 181), Siqueiros turned to political
activity and helped organize the silver miners in Jalisco state to strike for
better wages and living conditions. He was elected head of a national trade
union and travelled to the Soviet Union in 1928. The anti-Communist
government placed him in an internal exile in Taxco from which he was
forbidden to travel. In Taxco, Siqueiros turned back to art and produced
many paintings that were eventually shown in Mexico City in 1932.

Siqueiros in the USA

In 1932, Siqueiros was thrown out of Mexico for being a dangerous
subversive, and went to Los Angeles, California. Here, he created three
murals, including ‘América Tropical’ . In this mural, a crucified figure of an
Indian is displayed, and an eagle representing the USA sits atop his head. It
was clear he was attacking US imperialism in the Americas. Shortly
thereafter, the mural was whitewashed over (though it was recently restored).

199
 Another of the murals, ‘Street Meeting’ (also known as ‘Workers’ Meeting’),
stressed union organizing, interracial relationships and racial unity, topics
that were not popular for the Los Angeles city elders. This was almost
immediately covered over, although there is now hope that it too can be
restored.
The messages in Siqueiros’ murals did not go unnoticed by US authorities and
his visa was not extended. Siqueiros next spent time in South America, before
returning to the USA in 1936. He settled for some months in New York City,
where he gave lectures and workshops to aspiring artists. Jackson Pollock was
one of these students and incorporated what he learned in his own art.

Siqueiros’ experimentalism
It was during his US exile and subsequent years in Argentina, Chile and
Cuba that Siqueiros shifted to a truly different way of painting. He was
finally able to realize his goals of not only utilizing the Mexican Revolution
as an inspiration, but also breaking away from traditional fresco painting. He
used a spray gun to apply pyroxylin paint, an industrial substance, onto
walls. He also used the camera to help him plan his works instead of
sketchpads. Siqueiros used projectors to cast figures on walls and promoted
the notion that art should not be flat, as on a canvas, but should incorporate
rounded surfaces and be more alive.

The Spanish Civil War and the Second World War

The political situation in Mexico changed with the election of the progressive
Lázaro Cárdenas in 1934. Siqueiros returned home, but was drawn to the
Spanish Civil War Civil
Spanish Civil War. In Spain, he served in one of the international brigades,
war in Spain from 1936–39,
pitting the elected Republican
supporting the anti-fascist government and attained the rank of lieutenant-
goverment against colonel. He returned again to Mexico as the tides of war turned against the
Conservative rebels. Spanish government and the fascists led by General Franco won. In 1939, he
created ‘Portrait of the Bourgeoisie’ under the sponsorship of the National
Anti-fascist Against the
totalitarian ideology of Electrical Workers’ Union in Mexico City. The painting warned of the dangers
fascism. of fascism and how workers were being turned into gold coins by an
enormous machine. During the Second World War, much of Siqueiros’ work
Lieutenant-colonel A
focused on the struggle between the fascists and those supporting democracy.
commissioned officer’s rank,
above that of a major and Siqueiros and Trotsky
below a colonel.
Siqueiros was fully committed to Stalin and even went so far as to participate
in the unsuccessful attempt on Leon Trotsky’s life in 1940 in a town near
Mexico City. He and Communist workers machine-gunned Trotsky’s home
and came very close to killing the exiled Communist leader and his wife.
Siqueiros went into hiding. By the time he was captured, tried and found not
guilty several months later, Trotsky had been murdered by a Soviet agent.

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A decade of creation
The 1950s was a busy decade for Siqueiros. As well as numerous easel
paintings, he also created a number of memorable murals including ‘Man,
the Master and not the Slave of the Machine’; ‘The People and the
University, the University for the People’; and ‘Revolution Against the
Porfirian Dictatorship’. In the first of these murals, he used pyroxylin on
aluminum. The second was a mural made of mosaics and the third was
acrylic paint on plywood.
The Mexican Revolution certainly helped shape Siqueiros’ outlook, but he
continued to rail against the post-revolutionary governments’ failures to
enact the deep and far-reaching reforms he felt were needed. Siqueiros did
not slow down as he aged. In 1959, at 63 years old, he supported railroad
workers in a national strike and was accused of insulting the President. For
that, he spent the next five years in prison. But he was irrepressible. From as
soon as he got out in 1964, until 1971, he worked on ‘The March of
Humanity and Toward the Cosmos’ in Mexico City. This enormous mural
again upended traditional interpretations of art because, unlike murals
produced 50 years earlier, the message of the piece was open to wide
interpretations.

US and European reaction to Siqueiros

Commencing in the 1920s and continuing for decades, many US and
European painters, photographers, writers and educators flocked to Mexico.
They wanted to learn what exciting experiments were taking place there as a
result of, and reaction to, the promises and failures of the Mexican
Revolution. In 1934, the US painter Elsa Rogo, friends with both Rivera and
Siqueiros, summed up her reaction to Siqueiros. Her words could certainly
have described the muralist 30 years later.
SOURCE R

Excerpt from Diego Alvaro Siqueiros by Elsa Rogo, Parnassus, Vol. 6, No. 4,
April 1934, page 5. According to Source R, what
made Siqueiros a
The story of David Alfaro Siqueiros is to some extent the history of the whole revolutionary?
revolutionary movement in Mexico. He is identified with it as intimately and
completely as the Mexican mural ‘Renaissance’ is bound up with it. Rebellion is
in his blood; it is constantly being pumped by his heart not only through his
veins and arteries but on to the very canvases in a passionate frenzy of insurgent
emotion. Not satisfied with being merely a revolutionary in thought, he is
likewise intent on the exploration of new media and technical procedures. For
him there are no half measures – half a loaf is certainly not better than none, but
worse. Rebellious not only in the content of his paintings, he chooses to be
revolutionary in technique as well.

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 Who was Orozco and Los Tres Grandes: José Clemente Orozco
what role did the
Revolution play in his
José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949) was born in the state of Jalisco in modest
art? circumstances. He lost his left hand in an accident at school, and when his
father died he turned to making satirical political cartoons and pictures
depicting the seedier side of life in Mexico City to support himself. One of
his art teachers, the influential Gerardo Murillo, who called himself Dr Atl,
recognized Orozco’s promise and encouraged his efforts. Atl impressed
Orozco with his emphasis on the necessity of having pride in Mexican
culture, instead of looking to Europe for artistic inspiration. When the
Revolution broke out, Atl enlisted Orozco to help produce a decidedly
political publication, The Vanguard.

Orozco, the independent thinker

Orozco saw the horrors of the civil war during the Revolution first hand, and
his experiences shaped his outlook on politics and art. He could not stand
the hypocrisy of the generals and politicians as they began making money
for themselves during and after the Revolution. Unlike Rivera, he was
unwilling to portray the conflict in black and white terms, pitting good
versus evil. His autobiography explained how he viewed the Revolution.
SOURCE S

Excerpt from José Clemente Orozco: An Autobiography, Austin, Texas,

According to Source S, why 1962, page 54.
was there no right and no
wrong side during the People grew used to killing, to the most pitiless egotism, to the glutting of the
Revolution? sensibilities, to naked bestiality. Little towns were stormed and subjected to every
sort of excess. Trains back from the battlefield unloaded their cargoes in the
station in Orizaba: the wounded; the tired, exhausted, sweating and
tatterdemalion [dressed in ragged clothing]. In the world of politics it was the
same, war without quarter, struggle for power and wealth. … Underneath it all,
subterranean intrigues went on among the friends of today and the enemies of
tomorrow, resolved, when the time came, upon mutual extermination.

Orozco at the National Preparatory School

Unable to find work, Orozco travelled to the USA in 1917. At the border, US
customs officials examined his art and found them a threat to American
morality because some portrayed sex workers. They destroyed 60 of his prints
on the spot. Orozco made his way to California and worked as a house
painter. He later found a job painting dolls’ faces in a factory in New York
City. On his return to Mexico in 1919, he managed to scratch a living
producing art, and more importantly, becoming friends with a circle of artists
who included Rivera, Siqueiros and Xavier Guerrero. He joined the Syndicate
of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors and was invited to participate in
the new project at the National Preparatory School in 1923. He was 40 years
old when he worked on his first murals.

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Reaction to Orozco’s murals

One of Orozco’s murals, ‘The Reactionary Forces’, was soon seriously
damaged by students. The literary historian David Ellis wrote in 1998 that a
surviving sketch ‘shows vividly a grotesquely ugly woman in furs … kicking
the point of one of her high heels into the head of a female beggar who is
lying with a skeletal baby on the floor’. The students felt he was mocking
them and their mothers. Another mural, ‘Christ Destroys His Cross’, signified
that Christ realized that he had died in vain when he saw the conditions on
earth. Students were incensed and wrecked the mural.

Orozco’s views on Rivera

While Rivera said in 1925 that ‘José Clemente Orozco, along with the
popular engraver, José Guadalupe Posada, is the greatest artist, whose work
expresses genuinely the character and spirit of the people of the City of
Mexico’, Orozco felt Rivera was a bit of a self-promoter who overshadowed
other artists. During his US sojourn, he carried on a lively correspondence
with Jean Charlot (see Source L on page 193). In one letter, he wrote that ‘…
the idea that we are all his disciples is very well entrenched here [the USA].
To talk about “Indians”,“revolution”,“Mexican renaissance”,“folk arts” … is
to talk about Rivera’. He also called Rivera ‘Diegoff Riveritch Romanoff’, a dig
at his fellow artist’s pro-Soviet leanings.
Orozco and other muralists were fired from the National Preparatory project
when Vasconcelos resigned (see page 181), but he returned in 1926 as the
social and political climate changed. He completed eighteen large frescoes
that included ‘The Trench’ and ‘Cortés and Malinche’. Another noteworthy
mural of his from this period was ‘Omniscience’. However, Orozco was
drawn to the USA to continue his career because he felt he had been
underappreciated in his home country.

Orozco’s impact on US art

Orozco went to the USA in 1927 and remained there until 1934. In those
years, he created several murals that had a great impact on US art. He
worked at three educational establishments; Pomona College in California,
the New School for Social Research in New York and at Dartmouth College
in New Hampshire. His ‘Epic of American Civilization’ at Dartmouth
comprised 24 panels, 3200 square feet, and took him two years to complete.
In this mural, he told the tale of the history of Mexico, from the migration of
the Aztecs to the central valley, to an industrialized society.

Orozco in Guadalajara
Orozco was soon commissioned by the state government in Guadalajara for
a series of murals on public buildings. From 1936 to 1939, he worked at the
Hospicio Cabañas (a hospital complex), the university and the governor’s
palace. At the Hospicio, he created what many consider to be his one of his
greatest masterpieces, ‘Man of Fire’, part of a survey of Mexican history.
Orozco continued to work until he died of a heart attack in 1949.

203
 Orozco and politics
Unlike some of his fellow muralists, Orozco was modest, solitary and
apolitical. He believed, as he wrote in his autobiography, that ‘No artist has,
or ever has had, political convictions of any sort. Those who profess to have
them are not artists.’This is not to suggest that he was unwilling to portray
what he saw as the oppressors and the downtrodden. He was quite clear
that the workers and peasants had suffered as a consequence of the
Revolution and that others had unfairly prospered. At his core, he was a
humanitarian and, because of the Revolution, sensitive to people’s capacity
to harm other people.

SOURCE T

Excerpt from A History of Mexican Mural Painting by Antonio Rodríguez,

What, according to Source T, London, 1968, pages 191–2, quoted in Art and Revolution in Latin America:
did the Mexican Revolution 1910–1990 by David Craven, New Haven, 2002, page 47. Rodríguez
contribute to Orozco’s art?
compiled the first extensive examination of the Mexican Muralist
Movement in the late 1960s. David Craven was a distinguished professor
of Art History until his death in 2012.
He did not glorify revolution. He was sincere in saying that great social
phenomena need no glorification … If Orozco did not extol the Revolution, he
nevertheless fulfilled himself through it. How could we understand the Orozco of
‘La trinchera’, ‘Los soldados’, and ‘Adiós’ [three frescoes of Orozco] without the
Revolution? Diego Rivera idealized it; Orozco showed its … tragedy.

SOURCE U

Siqueiros, Orozco, Rivera

In what ways would
Source U, showing Los Tres
Grandes, be helpful for a
historian studying the
Mexican Muralist Movement?

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Other noteworthy artists Who else did the

There were most definitely other great artists beside Los Tres Grandes who Revolution inspire?
contributed to the flourishing of the arts in post-revolutionary Mexico.
Among them were the artists Frida Kahlo, Jean Charlot, Rufino Tamayo,
Orozco was the only
Alfredo Ramos Martinez, Roberto Montenegro, Dr Atl, Francsico Goitia, one of the Big Three
Antonio Ruíz; the print-maker Xavier Guerrero; the architect Juan Mexican muralists to
O’Gorman; and the photographers Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Lola Álvarez claim that his work was
Bravo. They all are worth further exploration. not political. Research
images of his art online,
Non-Mexican artists were also influenced by the creative impulses of and then state to what
Mexicans such as Ben Shahn, Tina Modotti, Edward Weston and Jackson extent you agree with
Pollock. During the Great Depression, the US government also turned over his assessment. (Arts,
public spaces to artists to use their creativity to boost the nation’s spirits, Social Sciences, Ethics,
driven in part by the success of Mexican muralists. Reason, Imagination.)

Criticism of Los Tres Grandes

In Mexico, not all artists shared the political beliefs of the Big Three. They felt
there was something disturbingly wrong for artists to be supported by the
Mexican government, which had its own agenda, namely to promote a
twisted and inaccurate view of the Revolution. It was not difficult to see the
continued poverty in the rural areas and the corrupt politicians and former
generals skimming money from state funds.
Octavio Paz, the Mexican Nobel laureate, summed up what he felt were the
real reasons for Vasconcelos and others to allow the muralists public spaces
when he wrote in his Essays on Mexican Art (1987) that ‘The government
allowed artists to paint on the walls of government buildings a pseudo-
Marxist version of the history of Mexico, in black and white, because such
painting gave it the look of being progressive-minded and revolutionary.’
Other muralists felt the sting of criticism when they did not keep in line with
a ‘correct’ interpretation of Mexico’s past.
SOURCE V

Rufino Tamayo in a 27 December 1990 New York Times interview.

Why, according to Source V,
I had difficulties with the Muralists, to the point that they accused me of being a was Tamayo considered a
traitor to my country for not following their way of thinking. But my only traitor?
commitment is to painting. That doesn’t mean I don’t have personal political
positions. But those positions aren’t reflected in my work. My work is painting.

Mexico in the years following the Revolution became one of the world’s
artistic centers. A new wave of artists had inspired many around the globe,
and their themes centering on native cultures, politics and novel techniques
became recognized and admired (and sometimes feared). Similar
experimentation in music also occurred as a direct result of the Revolution.

205
 Rivera
• National Preparatory School
• Secretariat of Public Education Building
• National School of Agriculture at Chapingo
• National Palace murals
• Cortés Palace
• Museum of Modern Art New York, Detroit
murals, Rockefeller Center in New York

Los Tres
Grandes and their most
important works

Orozco Siqueiros
• National Preparatory School • National Preparatory School
• Pomona College and Dartmouth College, • Los Angeles, California
USA • South American murals
• Hospicio Cabañas in Guadalajara • National Electrical Workers’ Union
• Venice Biennale
• National Autonomous University of Mexico

SUMMARY DIAGRAM

The creative outburst after the Revolution

4 The Revolution and Mexican

music
Key question: How was the Revolution reflected in popular music?

New music styles also developed during and after the Revolution. Musicians
and composers felt driven to perform music that reflected the new attention
given to what some considered the real roots of the country, instead of
mimicking European styles.

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Significant composers during the Revolution Which musical works

grew out of the
Indian music and politics Revolution?
The composer Carlos Chávez (1899–1978) praised Indian music and used
traditional rhythms in his work. His ‘Sinfonía India’ (1935) also incorporated
non-European instruments. As the founder of the Orquestra Sinfónica de
México, Chávez was in a prime position to promote indigenous musical
traditions and encourage the study of folk music.
Silvestre Revueltas (1899–1940) was another important Mexican composer.
He composed ‘Sensemayá’ in 1938, after returning from Spain where he
had performed with a Mexican group supporting the government against
Franco’s fascists (see page 199). ‘Sensemayá’ was based on an Afro-Cuban
poem, certainly not the normal fare in much of Latin America. The Chilean
Nobel Prize recipient, Pablo Neruda, devoted an elegiac poem to Revueltas
in his massive work Canto General (1950), an excerpt from which is below:

Canto General (1950)

When a man like Silvestre Revueltas

returns definitively to the earth,
there’s a murmur, a wave of voice and
weeping that prepares and propagates his departure
The little roots tell the grains: ‘Silvestre died’,
and wheat ripples his name on the slopes
and then the bread knows.
Now all America’s trees know,
and our arctic region’s frozen flowers too …

Pablo Neruda, extract from Canto General, translated by Jack Schmitt

(University of California Press, 1991).

Ballads and history

Popular music created and performed in the rural areas were often corridos
or narrative ballads. The Revolution spawned many ballads that often sung
the praises of the various heroes such as Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, Corridos Mexican ballads.
as well as women who participated in the conflict. La cucaracha was a
well-known corrido and its many versions reflect how lyrics were altered to
fit one’s political allegiances. In the Cárdenas period, 1934–40, there were
many ballads that sang the praises of land reform and the nationalization of
the petroleum industry.

207
 SOURCE W

Corrido by Mariano Zapata. Accessed at www.bibliotecas.tv/zapata/

What do you think the corridos/corr14.html and translated. This corrido was very popular among
people were promised in those who fought with Zapata.
Source W?
I’m a Zapatista from the State of Morelos,
because I have proclaimed the Plan de Ayala and San Luis;
if they don’t carry out what they promised the people,
we will do it with our guns.
To warn that the people will not be tricked,
nor treated with vigorous cruelty,
if we are the sons, not the stepsons of the Homeland,
the heirs of peace and liberty.
Noble general, patriotic guerrilla,
who with great loyalty fought to defend his native land;
I hope that you will succeed thanks to the Supreme Being,
in order for there to be peace in the State of Morelos.

Corridos and the Cristeros

Corridos often used simple words to tell recent historical events, which helps
explain their appeal to many. It was also one way of how news spread
through the countryside. During the Cristero Revolt (see page 90), the
Catholics also sang corridos. The Corrido of General Gorostieta is one example
of an anti-government song.
SOURCE X

Excerpt from the Corrido del General Gorostieta, 1929. Accessed at

Why would Source X have www.laits.utexas.edu/jaime/cwp5/crg/english/gorostieta/index.html.
appealed to Cristeros?
The ballad of General Gorostieta
The real story, truly told.
Of a valiant man who scaled honor’s heights
In defense of his holy religion.
In defense of his holy religion …
But when the religious struggle broke out
And the people shed their blood on the motherland
He unsheathed his victorious sword once again
And confronted the government’s injustice.
And as leader of the rebel forces
Whose cry was ‘Long live Christ the King!’
With his valiant and dedicated soldiers
Demanded a reform to the law.
In the prolonged and bloody struggle
An unholy war that gave no quarter.
And in spite of the lack of munitions
The rebellion triumphed in glory. …
But in a desire for peace
The Government and Church negotiated a truce.

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And as soon as General Gorostieta learned of this

Quickly dissolved his legions.
Trying to surrender, he was attacked
By forces of the Federal Government.
And in the struggle, Gorostieta was killed
Causing grief throughout the land.
This tragedy shook the land high and low
With great suffering throughout the nation.
To know that Gorostieta should die so
In defense of his holy religion.

The use of music played with ‘authentic’ Mexican instruments, the popular
and catchy corrido tunes and that the lyrics often had political undertones
helped popularize the Revolution in the minds of many.

Carlos Chávez
used native instruments
and Mexican themes

Government
Silvestre Revueltas
encouraged corridos that
organized anti-fascist
praised nationalization
groups of musicians
and land reform
The Revolution and
Mexican music

Cristeros and Corridos (ballads):

anti-Catholics used popular music used to
corridos to stress their promote political SUMMARY DIAGRAM
political position messages
The Revolution and
Mexican music

209
 5 The Revolution and Mexican
literature
Key question: What impact did the Revolution have on Mexico’s
literature?

The Revolution created a new type of literary genre known in Mexico as the
‘Novel of the Revolution’. Approximately 100 authors wrote almost 300
novels that were inspired by the upheavals of the Revolution. The period of
the Novel of the Revolution spanned from 1915 to 1947. Mariano Azuela’s
novel The Underdogs (Los de abajo), published in 1915, is considered by many
to be the first and one of the best examples of this new type of Mexican
fiction. For the first time, according to Gerald Martin, a professor of the
history of Latin American literature, writing in 1998, ‘the Revolution
produced fiction which … saw history not as something in the distant past
like the colonial of independence periods, but as both a reality and a concept
which could at once mobilize and fix the perception of social, political and
economic events’. The immediacy of the themes contributed to the impact of
these short stories and novels, both in Mexico and internationally.

Who were the Mexican fiction

authors inspired by
The scholar Manuel Gutiérrez in his The Novel of the Mexican Revolution
the Revolution?
(2011) wrote that there were three generations of writers impacted by the
Revolution:
● The first included those born during the Porfiriato; some of these authors
participated in the bloody years of the Revolution.
● The second comprised, for the most part, adolescents during the fighting
who witnessed but usually did not participate in the violence.
● The last generation was those who were too young to remember the
upheavals.

Mariano Azuela and The Underdogs

Mariano Azuela (1873–1952) came from a modest family but was able to
attend medical college and become a doctor. He was an early supporter of
Madero and became disillusioned after Madero’s assassination (see page 46).
Nonetheless, Azuela put his skills to use and served as a field doctor with
one of Pancho Villa’s generals. In the evenings, he worked on his novel The
Underdogs, using his own experiences to flavor his novel. He fled to El Paso,
Texas in 1915 because of the Huerta dictatorship, and published his book in a
serial format in a Spanish-language newspaper later that year. The book was
not widely known in Mexico at the time, though when it was ‘rediscovered’
in 1924, Azuela became a celebrated author. He continued to write and work
as a doctor among the underprivileged in Mexico City for the rest of his life.

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The Underdogs
The storyline of The Underdogs follows the activities of the peasant Demetrio
Macías as he fights against Huerta’s federal forces during the Revolution. At
one point, a disillusioned middle-class supporter, Solís, joins Macías and
comments on where the Revolution might be heading.
SOURCE Y

Excerpt from The Underdogs with Related Texts by Mariano Azuela,

translated with an introduction by Gustavo Pellón, Hackett, Indianapolis, According to Source Y, what
2006, pages 43–4. might be the results of the
Revolution?
‘How beautiful the Revolution is even in its savagery!’ declared Solís, moved.
Then in a low and vaguely melancholic voice:
‘What a shame that what is coming won’t be the same. We have to wait a bit.
Until there are no more combatants, until the only shots heard are those of the
mobs given over to the delights of looting. Until shining diaphanously, like a
drop of water, we can see the psychology of our race condensed in two words:
steal, kill! … My friend, what a disappointment, if we who offered all our
enthusiasm, our very lives to overthrow a miserable assassin, instead turn out to
be the builders of an enormous pedestal so that a hundred or two hundred
thousand monsters of the same species can raise themselves! … a nation of not
ideals, a nation of tyrants! … All that blood spilled, and all in vain!’

Juan Rulfo
Azuela’s early work contrasts greatly with one of the last writers of the
period, Juan Rulfo (1917–1986). His short story ‘They Gave Us the Land’
successfully demonstrates the harshness of life for peasants in post-
revolutionary Mexico. The story is about four peasants who fought in the
Revolution who are given land by the government. Even though they protest
that the land has no water and is therefore useless, the government official is
proud to have distributed the land.

Agustín Yáñez
Agustín Yáñez (1904–1980) also wrote at the end of the Novel of the
Revolution period. His psychological novel The Edge of the Storm was
published in 1947. Like other writers, he wanted to help create a national
consciousness among Mexicans – a nationalist literature that was not so
beholden to European literary trends.

Vasconcelos and others

Other significant writers of the Novel of the Revolution period include José
Vasconcelos, Rafael Muñoz, Martín Luis Guzmán and Nellie Campobello,
the sole woman among the group. Guzman’s work was particularly biting in
its criticism of political corruption. He wrote The Shadow of the Caudillo in

211
 1929. Readers had little difficulty seeing the combination of Obregón and
Calles as the manipulative tyrant.
Later authors were certainly influenced by the Mexican Revolution. Carlos
Fuentes wrote The Death of Artemio Cruz in 1962 and The Old Gringo in 1985.
Both novels deal with changes wrought by the upheavals of the 1910s.
Foreign writers, such as the British author Graham Greene, were intrigued
by the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath. Greene wrote one of his
masterpieces, The Power and the Glory (1940), after visiting Mexico. The book
discusses the religious–State conflict in 1930s Mexico. The US journalist John
Reed reported on the Mexican Revolution in its early years, before heading
to Europe to cover the Russian Revolution. The Mexican Revolution’s impact
was felt throughout the world.
SOURCE Z

Excerpt from Literature of Latin America by Rafael Ocasio, Greenwood

What impact did Mexican Press, Westport, Connecticut, 2004, page 51. Ocasio is a Latin
literature have on non- Americanist and professor of Spanish.
Mexicans, according to
Source Z? The Mexican Revolution became an important subject in Mexican literature. It
led to a sub-genre known as the literature of the Mexican Revolution. This
production also had strong influence throughout Latin America. It brought
attention to new literary trends and a renewed interest in sociocultural
documentation of Latin American culture. The literature of the Mexican
Revolution also documented the complex events that were taking place in Mexico.
Perhaps for the first time, international readers met Mexican characters, in
particular the peasants and native groups representative of an emerging Mexican
national identity. They also had a close glimpse of events in the complicated
movements of the Mexican Revolution.

An ambiguous outlook on the achievements of the

Revolution
The Revolution brought a renaissance in literature, in much the same way as
the Mexican Muralist Movement. Many authors penned dark stories that
reflected the losses of their countrymen, as well as some of the dubious
heroic actions of generals and politicians. The Mexican Secretariat of Public
Education, led by José Manuel Puig Casauranc after Vasconcelos, enticed
writers with paid work if they wrote about revolutionary themes, and many
accepted his offer. Yet what distinguished some of the novelists from some of
their fiery compatriots in the art world was that many of the novels portrayed
the Revolution in ambiguous terms. Was the Revolution a glorious chapter in
Mexican history or was it merely a means for people without ideals to seize
power?

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100 main writers,

many supported
by the State

Martín Luis
Guzmán: The Shadow Mariano Azuela:
of the Caudillo The Underdogs

Major works (1915–47)

Agustín Yáñez: Juan Rulfo: They

The Edge of the Storm Gave Us the Land

SUMMARY DIAGRAM

The Revolution and Mexican literature

Chapter summary these areas. The upheavals of the Mexican Revolution

and the adoption of the 1917 Constitution articles
required a response from post-revolutionary
governments. The State tried to create stability,
The impact of the Revolution on women,
provide economic and social progress and promote
education, the arts, music and literature
its own narrative of the Mexican Revolution’s
The Mexican Revolution had an enormous effect on accomplishments. To a certain extent this did take
women and their roles in Mexican society. place, with the SEP directing many initiatives through
The period from 1920 until 1940 also saw great education and art. Actual achievements, though, were
experimentation in the arts, education, literature and mixed, because some efforts were not fully thought
music. The extent to which these changes were out and various sectors of Mexican society, such as
revolutionary or not is debatable. What is certain is the Catholic Church and conservatives, resisted
that the Revolution did spark a flurry of activities in all change.

213
 CHAPTER 1 Chapter 1: The USA in the 1920s: prosperity?

The USA in the 1920s:

prosperity?
In popular mythology, the 1920s in the USA saw a period of unparalleled economic
prosperity that ended suddenly in October 1929 with the collapse of the New York
Stock Exchange. This picture is far too simple. There certainly was a boom period and
the New York Stock Exchange did indeed collapse. However, these two events are not
necessarily directly connected; the relationship between them is complex. This
chapter examines the USA during the 1920s. You need to consider the following
questions throughout this chapter:
� How prosperous was the USA in the 1920s?
� How far did economic factors in the 1920s contribute to prosperity?

1 The extent of prosperity

Key question: How prosperous was the USA in the 1920s?

In the 1920s there was a real feeling of prosperity and optimism among
many groups in the USA. It had emerged from the First World War as the
most prosperous country on earth. Many believed that the USA would set an
example to the world with its emphasis on technological developments,
economic efficiency and minimal government interference
in business.
The figures for prosperity appear to speak for themselves. KE Y T ERM

l Following a brief post-war recession in 1920 and 1921, average Recession Downturn in the
unemployment never rose above 3.7 per cent in the years 1922–9. economy.
l Inflation never rose higher than one per cent. Real wages The value of
l Employees were working fewer hours: an average of 44 per week in 1929 wages in terms of how much
compared with 47 in 1920. they will actually buy.
l Employees were paid more. The real wages of industrial workers rose by Gross national product
14 per cent between 1914 and 1929, and on average they were two or (GNP) The total value of
three times higher than those in Europe. goods and services produced
l There was huge economic growth. Production of industrial goods rose by in a country.
50 per cent between 1922 and 1929. Gross national product (GNP)
stood at $73 billion in 1920 and $104 billion in 1929. Consumption of
electricity doubled, and in 1929 alone $852 million worth of radios
were sold.

9
 Many Americans had more time for leisure and more money to spend on it.
Electrical labour-saving devices, such as vacuum cleaners and washing
machines, were introduced and became affordable by more and more
people. Motor cars eased travel both to and from work and for leisure
pursuits. It was the golden age of cinema: by 1929, 80 million tickets were
sold weekly for the movies. Sport attracted vast crowds of paying spectators.
When Gene Tunney defended his heavyweight boxing title against Jack
Dempsey in September 1927, the attendance was 107,943 and receipts were
a record $2,658,660.

Problems with evidence

Caution is needed when using figures, such as those quoted above, and the
specific examples that support them. They might give us an overall picture,
but they cannot tell us about individual circumstances. For example, the
unemployment figure of 3.7 per cent does not tell us whether it applied to all
sectors of the economy or whether some industries suffered high or seasonal
unemployment. Were many employees just part-time? What could they buy
with their wages? Was the overall prosperity spread throughout the nation or
was it principally located in specific parts of the country? Did it apply to all
ethnic groups? How did women fare? The statistics above answer none of
these questions.

Extent of prosperity

Inflation Unemployment 1914–29 1920–9

1% 3.7% real wages GNP rose
increased $31 billion
14%
SUMMARY DIAGRAM

The extent of prosperity

2 Reasons for prosperity

Key question: How far did economic factors in the 1920s contribute to
prosperity?

The prosperity of the 1920s was based on several factors such as:
K E Y TE RM
l favourable government policies that included high tariffs, tax reductions
Tariffs Import and export
and a benevolent foreign policy
duties.
l technological advances

10
 Chapter 1: The USA in the 1920s: prosperity?

l new business methods

l easy credit
l advantageous foreign markets.
In this section these factors will be considered in turn.

Government policies How far did the

governments of the
Republican presidents of the 1920s believed in as little government
1920s intervene in the
involvement as possible in the running of the economy. According to economy?
President Calvin Coolidge (1923–8), ‘The chief business of the American
people is business.’ It was the policy of his government to let business
operate, as far as possible, free of regulation. Both he and his Treasury KE Y T ERM
Secretary, Andrew Mellon, believed firmly in the free market. Mellon, a
Pittsburgh banker and industrialist, was one of the richest men in the USA. Free market A system that
allows the economy to run
He believed that wealth filtered down naturally to all classes in society and
itself with minimal
that therefore the best way to ensure increased living standards for all was to government interference.
allow the rich to continue to make money to invest in industrial
development. Laissez-faire An approach
where the government
There appeared to be much sense to this argument. Industrial expansion deliberately avoids getting
meant more job opportunities, which in turn meant more employment, more involved in economic
wage earners, more consumption, more industrial expansion and so on. planning, thus allowing the
During the 1920s this policy seemed to work and Mellon had few free market to operate.
contemporary critics.
The basic government policy was laissez-faire. However, the picture was
not quite as simple as that, and the government did intervene to support
business with benevolent policies in four main ways.

High tariffs
The Fordney–McCumber Act, passed in 1922, raised tariffs to cover the
difference between domestic and foreign production costs. In almost every
case it became cheaper for American consumers to buy goods produced
within the USA than from abroad. The tariff level made foreign goods more
expensive than goods produced in the USA, even when they could be
produced in their home countries more cheaply. In effect, this meant that for
some products import duties were so high that domestic producers were
given an almost guaranteed market.
Throughout the 1920s the general level of tariffs was upwards. The level of
foreign trade was obviously reduced by this, while domestic demand for
goods remained high. However, as we shall see in a later section (pages 19–
20), the power and influence of USA businesses meant they still exported
goods abroad while importing less. American industry stood to make huge
profits from the high-tariff policy. It also meant of course that Americans
bought comparatively few foreign goods. The USA’s main trading partners
responded to protectionist measures by raising their own tariffs.

11
 Tax reductions
The government reduced federal taxes significantly in 1924, 1926 and 1928.
These reductions mainly benefited the wealthy. During his eight years in
office, Mellon handed out tax reductions totalling $3.5 billion to large-scale
industrialists and corporations. Despite this, Coolidge’s government actually
K E Y TE RM
operated on a surplus; in 1925, this was $677 million and in 1927,
National debt The amount $607 million. The avowed aim of the government was to reduce the national
of money owed by the debt, and it seemed on course to do so. However, federal tax cuts meant
government. little to people who were too poor to pay taxes in the first place.
Federal Trade
Commission Body charged Fewer regulations
to ensure businesses were Economies in government meant fewer regulations and fewer personnel to
operating fairly. enforce them. The Federal Trade Commission, for example, was
increasingly unable and unwilling to operate effectively. This trend meant
Price fixing Where
companies agree to fix prices that businesses were often left unhindered to carry on their affairs as they
between them, thereby saw fit. Laws concerning sharp business practice, such as price fixing, were
preventing fair competition. often ignored. Where the government did prosecute, the offenders usually
won on appeal.
This lack of regulation could be an important contributor to a company’s
profits. Many people welcomed less government. However, it should also be
remembered that there was, for example, no organization with the authority
to stop child labour in the textile mills of the southern states, where, in the
1920s, a 56-hour week was common and wages rarely rose to more than
18 cents an hour.

Foreign policies
President Coolidge avoided intervention in foreign affairs wherever possible.
This was in part due to budget cutting and a recognition that Americans did
not want to see their troops getting caught up in foreign disputes.
Outstanding disputes with Mexico over the rights of American businesses to
own land there, for example, were solved by diplomacy. This policy of
conciliation helped American investment abroad by removing any ill feeling
towards the USA. However, there were exceptions to this; for example
Coolidge continued the American occupation of Nicaragua and Haiti by US
Marines.

How far did Technological advances

developments in
During this period, technological advances in industrial production made
technology enable
industrial expansion? possible huge increases both in the quantity and in the variety of products
on sale. The motor vehicle industry and electrical consumer goods are
particularly striking examples of this.

The motor vehicle industry

The motor vehicle industry grew dramatically in the 1920s. By the end of the
decade there were 23 million cars on the road and the industry was the
biggest in the USA. It was the largest market for commodities, such as steel

12
 Chapter 1: The USA in the 1920s: prosperity?

and rubber, and cars were one of the most desirable products among
consumers. Asked about workers’ aspirations, one official said that 65 per
cent are working to pay for cars.
KE Y T ERM
Henry Ford revolutionized the motor vehicle industry. He had begun to use
methods of mass production long before the 1920s and his famous Model T Mass production Making
car had first appeared in 1908. Previously, cars had been only for the wealthy, large numbers of the same
but Ford wanted ordinary Americans to be able to afford one. item using machinery and
conveyor belts.
Henry Ford and mass production
When Henry Ford introduced his moving line assembly in 1914, the cost of
the Model T came down from $950 to $500. By 1920 Ford was producing
1,250,000 cars per year, or one every 60 seconds. By 1925, when the price had
fallen to $290, the Ford factory could produce one every 10 seconds. Petrol,
meanwhile, cost between 20 and 25 cents a gallon at a time when average
wages in manufacturing industries were in the region of 50 cents an hour.
By this time, Ford was facing increasing competition from General Motors
and Chrysler. These ‘Big Three’ firms dominated the American motor industry
and it was very difficult for independent companies to survive unless they
produced specialist vehicles for the wealthy. In 1930, 26.5 million cars were
on American roads.
Despite the demand, the supply always exceeded it, and in this industry as in
many others, it was increasingly obvious that demand had to be actively
encouraged. Henry Ford was slow to learn this lesson. His Model T was
renowned for durability and trustworthiness. However, there was no variety:
only black ones were ever produced. The car came without frills. It was
certainly adaptable; farmers could even attach a plough to it. However, his
rivals, in their models, emphasized variety, comfort and style.
When, in 1927, Ford noticeably began to lose his share of the market, he
closed down his factory for five months, laying off 60,000 workers. During
this layoff, the factory was retooled for the new Model A vehicle. If the
market was to remain buoyant, car design had to stay ahead of it and
customers had to want to buy the new model rather than keep the old one.
Ford also introduced a minimum wage of $5.00 per day and acted as a
benevolent dictator to his workforce. His factories were very clean, with
excellent safety records, and nutrition experts ensured every employee’s
lunchbox contained 800 calories. He would not accept unions, however, and
used strong-arm men to stop any union activity.
Ford is generally recognized as changing not only the motor industry but
industrial organization in total. Few historians would disagree with their
colleague Michael Parrish, who wrote that, ‘Ford transformed industry by
providing cheap reliable transportation options for the masses.’
Some historians, such as Hugh Brogan, also recognize that while Ford may
have led the motor car industry in terms of technological developments he

13
 was slow in terms of marketing and organization. By the late 1920s Ford was
copying his competitors – and of course had to shut down the entire plant in
1927 to retool for the Model A.

The effects of the growth in car ownership

In economic terms, by 1929, the motor industry employed seven per cent of
all workers and paid them nine per cent of all wages. By far the largest
industry in the USA, it also stimulated many others, as shown in Source A.
This shows the percentages of the total production of various items in the
USA that were used by the car industry alone. The temporary closure of Ford
was indeed a contributory factor to the recession of 1927. Not only were his
workforce laid off, but the loss of business by companies providing
components to Ford created real problems in the economy.
SOURCE A

What can you learn from Use of materials by the car industry.
Source A about the 100
importance of the car
industry to the national
80
economy?
Percentage

60

40

20

0
Nickel
Upholstery
Rubber

Copper
Petrol

Tin
Plate glass

Hardwood

Item

Road building
Breaking with the policy of laissez-faire, the federal government expended a
great deal of energy on road building in the 1920s. Until 1921 this had largely
been the responsibility of the individual states and many had made little
progress since the previous century. Of three million miles of road in 1920,
the vast majority were intended solely for the horse. Only about one per cent
of roads were suitable to take the pounding of motor vehicles. The horse was
by far the main form of road transport and the quantity of its dung on the
highways was felt to be a national health hazard.
The Federal Highway Act of 1921 gave responsibility for road building to
central government, and highways were being constructed at the rate of
10,000 miles per year by 1929. But this was not enough. New roads could not

14
 Chapter 1: The USA in the 1920s: prosperity?

keep pace with the growth of traffic. Congestion was common, particularly
in the approaches to large urban centres. In 1936 the Chief Designer in the
Bureau of Public Roads reported that between 25 and 50 per cent of modern
roads built over the previous 20 years were unfit for use because of the
amount of traffic that was quite simply wearing them out.
Motor vehicles also created the growth of new service industries such as
garages, motels, petrol stations and used-car salerooms. They gradually
changed the landscape alongside the highways of the USA.
Improved transportation also afforded new opportunities for industry, for
example, goods could be much more easily moved from factories to their
markets. The number of truck registrations increased from less than KE Y TE RM
one million in 1919 to 3.5 million by 1929, when 15 billion gallons of petrol
were used and 4.5 million new cars were sold. Management science The
application of technological
Electrical consumer goods and scientific ideas to running
The development of new technologies such as mass production led to the a company successfully
– such as time and motion,
large-scale development of labour-saving devices, for example vacuum
where the amount of time it
cleaners and washing machines. This is because they were much cheaper to should take to complete a
produce. In 1912, 2.4 million items of electrical goods were sold; in 1929 the process in manufacturing is
figure was 160 million. timed and subsequently
monitored. The aim is to use
However, this trend should not be exaggerated. Much of rural America was
scientifically proven methods
still without electricity in the 1920s. Even where electrical power was to run the company.
available, many items we take for granted today were not widely in use. In
1925, for example, Clarence Birdseye patented his freezing process but in Trusts Companies that
collude to control
1928 there were only 20,000 refrigerators in the whole country. While there
manufacture, supplies and
was an industrial capacity to produce millions of electrical goods, by the end prices to ensure that other
of the decade nearly everyone who could afford them or who had access to firms cannot compete,
electricity already had them. This meant there was serious overproduction. thereby guaranteeing profits
As we shall see in the next chapter (page 35), this was to lead to problems in for themselves.
the economy by the late 1920s.

New business methods How far did new

business methods
This was a period that saw the growth of huge corporations, of management
contribute to
science and of advertising, which through the exploitation of the new mass economic growth?
media, gained an influence previously unimagined. The effect was to make
business more efficient and well run, which in turn helped profits to grow.

Growth of huge corporations

Most large corporations, such as Firestone which produced rubber, were
manufacturing businesses. They could invest in and exploit the plentiful raw
materials of the USA on a vast scale. By 1929 the largest 200 corporations
possessed 20 per cent of the nation’s wealth and 40 per cent of the wealth
generated by business activities. Mergers in manufacturing and mining
enterprises trebled to over 1200 during the decade, leading to even larger
business concerns. Many became Trusts.

15
 Large corporations could dominate an industry in various ways:
K E Y TE RM
l They could operate a cartel to fix prices. Although this was technically
Cartel Group of companies
illegal, the government tended to turn a blind eye. They could, as in the
agreeing to fix output and
prices, to reduce competition case of the petroleum companies, control the entire industrial process.
and maximize their profits. This involved the exploitation of the raw materials, the manufacture of the
product, its distribution to wholesale and retail outlets, and its sale to the
Holding companies
consumer.
Where one huge company
would obtain a controlling
l Some organizations, for example US Steel, were so huge that they could
interest in smaller companies dictate output and price levels throughout the industry. They could create
to control the market. holding companies. For example, Samuel Insull built up a vast empire
based on electrical supply. Eventually he controlled 111 different
companies with as many as 24 layers between him and the company
actually distributing the electricity. The chain became so complex that
even he lost an overall understanding of it. Many businessmen turned up
on the boards of directors of numerous companies. The result was that
firms supposedly competing with each other were in effect one and the
same, with the power to fix output and prices.
It is important to remember that government policies made these
developments possible and that they acted against the interests of small
businesses. However, at the time many people saw businessmen as heroes
who had made possible the great boom period they were enjoying. There
was even a prayer especially for businessmen.
SOURCE B

‘A Man’s Thanksgiving’, American Mercury 16 (April 1929): 427–8.

What are the values and
limitations of Source B as God of businessmen, I thank Thee for the fellowship
evidence of how of red blooded men with songs in their
businessmen viewed hearts and handclasps that are sincere; […]
themselves?
I thank Thee for telephones and telegrams that link
me with home and office, no matter where I am. […]
I thank Thee for competition and its spur to greater achievement.
I thank Thee for the joy and battle of the business arena, the thrill of victory and
the courage to
take defeat like a good sport; […]
I thank Thee for hard, relentless toil and the inspiration of creating something
worthwhile;
I thank Thee for children, friendships, books, fishing,
The game of golf, my pipe and the open
Fire on a chilly evening.
AMEN

16
 Chapter 1: The USA in the 1920s: prosperity?

Advertising and salesmanship

The new mass media, principally cinema and radio, brought about a
revolution in advertising.

Cinema
By 1928 there were 17,000 cinemas in the USA. Few areas were out of the
reach of the ‘movies’. A 10-cent ticket could buy admission to a fantasy world
far beyond the previous experience of the vast majority of the audience. The
darkened auditorium enabled people to forget their troubles for a few hours
and to enter into a world of beauty and glamour where seemingly no one
had to work or pay the mortgage.
With millions of cinema-goers aching to copy the appearances and lifestyles
of the movie stars, the potential for advertising was enormous. The big
producers were not slow to exploit this, and the time between the features
was soon filled with commercials.

Radio
The radio business effectively began when the KDKA station in Pittsburgh
announced the results of the 1920 presidential election. As other stations
started to broadcast, a demand for radio sets was created. These began to be
mass produced in 1920.
By 1929 there were 618 radio stations throughout the USA, some of them
broadcasting from coast to coast. The vast majority of them were controlled
by two companies, the National Broadcasting Company and Columbia
Broadcasting System. The potential audience was vast. An estimated
50 million people listened to live commentary on the 1927 Dempsey–Tunney
heavyweight fight referred to earlier on page 10. In 1922 the radio station
WEAF in New York began the most important trend when it broadcast the
first sponsored programme, advertising the delights of Jackson Heights, a
housing development.
As more advertisers began to sponsor programmes, radio networks began to
poll listeners to see what sort of programmes they wanted. With more and
more programmes catering to mass appeal, which was based firmly in the
areas of light music and humour, there was considerable criticism from those
who felt radio should be educational and enlightening. However, these
critics were firmly in the minority. By the end of the decade, radio costs were
generally covered by advertising and many programmes were firmly linked
in people’s minds with the name of the sponsor.

The constant need to create demand

The growth in industrial production needed a continuous market. It was no
longer enough, as Ford had done with his Model T, to sell a durable
unchanging product that might last the purchaser for life. Now, to fuel the
boom, it was necessary for people to buy new things frequently. They had to
be convinced that they could not do without the latest model of an electrical
appliance or the new design in clothing.

17
 This necessitated far-reaching developments in advertising and
salesmanship. Indeed, with most products virtually the same in quality, these
often became the deciding factors in the market. A successful advertising
campaign might well be the only difference between huge profit and huge
loss. Possibly the most important aspect of a campaign was to find some way
to differentiate between one’s product and that of one’s competitors: to
promote a unique selling point.
For many consumers advertising techniques worked. Not only did they
associate products with a slogan, but they also believed they could not
manage without the advertised product. The Kansas City Journal-Post was
hardly exaggerating when it wrote, ‘Advertising and mass production are the
twin cylinders that keep the motor of modern business in motion.’
SOURCE C
How effective is the ‘I am the Playboy.’ A classic 1920s’ advertisement which connected
advertisement in Source C in Jordan cars with adventure and excitement. It was one of the first adverts
making you want to buy the
to concentrate on image rather than give information about the product.
Jordan car? Examine the sales
techniques used and content
in your answer.

18
 Chapter 1: The USA in the 1920s: prosperity?

Easy credit How important was

the availability of
The massive consumer boom was financed largely by easy credit facilities.
credit in facilitating
By 1929 almost $7 billion worth of goods were sold on credit; this included consumption?
75 per cent of cars and half of major household appliances. One study
showed that men earning $35 a week were paying the same amount per
month for the family car.
Unfortunately, while the ready availability of credit enabled consumers to
buy goods they otherwise could not have afforded, it often led to problems if
the borrowers took on debts they could not repay. Companies, as well as
individuals, used easy-credit facilities to finance many of their operations. It
seemed that almost everyone was in debt, but there was little concern over
this. It was assumed that everyone’s credit must be good. Banks and loan
companies seemed to be falling over backwards to lend money, often with
few questions asked.
SOURCE D

A popular joke in the 1920s.

What point is being made in
Husband: ‘I just paid the doctor ten dollars on his bill.’
the joke in Source D?
Wife: ‘Oh, goody, two more payments and the baby’s ours.’

Advantageous foreign markets How far was the USA

Reference has already been made to high tariffs that protected US markets. involved in
international trade
However, the government also encouraged businessmen to develop
and investment?
extensive interests abroad, particularly in terms of raw materials that fuelled
technological developments. Business corporations bought oil concessions
in many countries, including Canada, Venezuela, Iraq and the Dutch East
KE Y T ERM
Indies. The Firestone Corporation developed a rubber industry in Liberia,
while the Guggenheims invested in South America for nitrates, copper and Oil concessions
lead. The United Fruit Company had a larger budget in Costa Rica than the Involvement in foreign oil
government of that country. Often US investment saw the development of industries on favourable
public health schemes and schools in developing countries to provide and terms.
maintain a healthy and adequately educated workforce. Five-Year Plan Where the
government plans the
The USA also exported vast amounts of manufactured products. The USA economy, setting targets to
dominated Canadian markets; indeed, US automobile firms effectively be achieved over a five-year
destroyed the native Canadian industry, which simply could not compete period.
with them (see page 149). Similarly, the Canadian electrical industry was
dominated by US firms in terms of both supply of power and manufacture of
products.
Of particular interest is the economic relationship between the USA and
Soviet Russia. While Coolidge’s government refused to recognize the Soviet
state, American businessmen were nevertheless encouraged to develop
commercial ties. The First Five-Year Plan for Soviet economic growth was so

19
 dependent on its success for exports from the USA that the Soviet Amtorg
Trading Corporation set up offices in New York City. By 1928, 25 per cent of
all foreign investment in Soviet Russia emanated from the USA and,
astonishingly, 33 per cent of all exported Ford tractors went to Soviet Russia;
indeed, by 1927, 85 per cent of all tractors in Soviet Russia were
manufactured by Ford.
In all, private investment by the USA in foreign countries rose from $7 billion
in 1919 to $17.2 billion by 1930. As we will see in the next chapter, this
international reliance on American investment would have devastating
effects on the global economy when the Great Depression arrived.

Government Technical New business Easy Influence in foreign

policies advances methods credit economies

SUMMARY DIAGRAM

Reasons for prosperity

Low inflation, high tariffs keeping foreign goods out of

the USA and benevolent government policies were
other factors that fuelled the consumer boom. The
USA was enjoying the greatest ‘boom’ period in its
The USA in the 1920s: prosperity? history and for those working in the new industries
We have seen that during the 1920s the USA seemed such as the motor industry and appliance
to be enjoying a boom period, particularly in the manufacturing, the prosperity seemed real and
development and marketing of consumer goods. never-ending. The period wore a happy face.
Unemployment remained low and industry seemed However, as we will see in the next chapter, one did
efficient, often through the introduction of new not have to delve very far beneath the surface to
technological, marketing and management techniques. discover real problems within the system.

20
 CHAPTER 2 Chapter 2: The Wall Street Crash and the causes of the Great Depression in the USA

The Wall Street Crash and the

causes of the Great Depression
in the USA
This chapter has three aims: to give an account of the Wall Street Crash; to examine
the causes of the Great Depression; and to consider the effects of the Crash. It
considers the events leading to the Crash and examines how healthy the US economy
actually was before it by looking at some of the underlying causes of the Great
Depression. Finally, it discusses the relationship of the Wall Street Crash to the onset
of the Great Depression.
You need to consider the following questions throughout this chapter:
� What chain of events led to the Wall Street Crash?
� How widespread were the signs that the economy was faltering?
� What was the relationship between the Wall Street Crash and the onset of the Great
Depression?
� How strong was the American economy in the 1920s and how real was the prosperity?

1 The Wall Street Crash

Key question: What chain of events led to the Wall Street Crash?

In October 1929, the New York Stock Exchange crashed. It handled about
61 per cent of stocks and shares transactions in the USA. Crashes in other
stock exchanges throughout the country and abroad soon followed. While
the collapse in Wall Street had been forecast by many financial experts, their
warnings had gone largely unheeded. The event was to affect millions of
people, most of whom did not own stocks and shares.

The stampede to sell What happened

between 24 and
On Thursday 24 October 1929, a massive amount of selling began in the 29 October 1929?
New York Stock Exchange. This forced prices down and led to more selling
still as brokers feared they would be left with worthless stock. By 11a.m.,
a mad panic had set in. US Steel, which had opened that morning at
KE Y T ERM
205.5 points, was down to 193.5, General Electric had fallen from 315 points
to 283 and Radio Corporation of America had collapsed from 68.75 points to Broker A person who buys
44.5. No one appeared to understand what was going on. and sells stocks and shares.

21
 People are afraid of the unknown, of things they cannot control, and what
was going on here was certainly out of control. On one wall of the Stock
K E Y TE RM
Exchange was a large board recording transactions; this was called the
Ticker Ticker-tape on which ticker. Unfortunately, as the volume of sales mushroomed, it could no longer
stocks and shares transactions keep pace with them and began to fall badly behind. At 10-minute intervals,
were recorded. a separate bond ticker in the corner would punch out a list of selected
Bankrupt When firms or up-to-date prices. As brokers hushed to hear these read out, they realized
individuals have insufficient with horror that stocks bought possibly just moments earlier were now
money to pay their debts. worth considerably less than they had agreed to pay for them.
As more and more brokers rushed to sell, the scenes became so wild that the
police had to be called in to restore order. As news of the panic spread, an
excited crowd gathered outside the building. A workman repairing a high
building was believed to be a broker contemplating suicide. He was possibly
inadvertently responsible for the myth that bankrupted brokers were
throwing themselves from the rooftops. Comparatively few brokers did, in
fact, go bankrupt. It was largely their clients’ wealth that was being lost.
SOURCE A

The original 1929 caption reads: ‘Photograph shows the street scene on
Look closely at the
Black Thursday, the day the New York stock market crashed, and the day
photograph in Source A. Are
that led to the Great Depression.’
there any indications of actual
panic? Explain your answer
carefully.

22
 Chapter 2: The Wall Street Crash and the causes of the Great Depression in the USA

SOURCE B

Extract from Only Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen, published in 1931.

What are the advantages and
This is a classic account of the 1920s in the USA by a leading journalist of
disadvantages of using
the period and has been republished many times.
descriptive sources like
As the price structure crumbled, there was a sudden stampede to get out from Source B in understanding
under. By eleven of clock traders on the floor of the Stock Exchange were in a wild what happened during the
scramble to ‘sell at the market’. Long before the lagging ticker could tell what was Wall Street Crash?
happening, word had gone out by telephone and telegraph that the bottom was
dropping out of things and the selling orders redoubled in volume . . . Down,
down, down . . Where were the bargain hunters who were supposed to come to
their rescue at times like this? . . . There seemed to be no support whatsoever.
Down, down, down. The roar of voices which rose from the floor of the Exchange
had become a roar of panic.

Efforts to protect the market

A meeting of six important bankers took place in the offices of
J.P. Morgan Ltd in the afternoon of 24 October. Each of them agreed to put
up $40 million to shore up the market by buying stocks and shares.
Thomas W. Lamont, senior partner at J.P. Morgan Ltd, held a press
conference. ‘There has been a little distress on the stock market’, he said,
with a masterly sense of understatement. He went on to explain that this
was due entirely to a technical difficulty, and the situation was ‘susceptible to
betterment’, by which he meant things would improve.
Meanwhile, the vice-president of the Stock Exchange, Richard Whitney, a
floor broker for J.P. Morgan Ltd, was buying stock above current prices in lots
of 10,000 in an attempt to restore confidence in the market. The bankers
having come to the rescue, confidence returned and the situation improved.
At the close of the day, the market had fallen by 33 points to 299.5, or
nine per cent of its value.
The ticker, however, did not record the final transactions until eight minutes
past seven in the evening – dealing closed at 3p.m. – and clerks worked long
into the night on the accounts resulting from all this business.
Altogether nearly 13 million shares had changed hands. By comparison, a
normal day’s transactions would be about three million. Stock market
employees caused the police to be called to Wall Street again because of their
boisterous behaviour in letting off steam after such a frenzied day.
For the next few days calm was restored in the market. Everyone who had
weathered the storm breathed a sigh of relief. A Boston investment trust
placed an advertisement in the Wall Street Journal: ‘S-T-E-A-D-Y Everybody!
Calm thinking is in order. Heed the words of America’s greatest bankers.’
On Sunday, churchgoers heard that a divine warning had been sent
concerning the dangers of financial greed and speculation. However, there
was little evidence that many would heed the warning. Most newspapers

23
 appeared confident that the stock market was healthy and the days ahead
would see a rush to buy at the new lower prices.

K E Y TE RM
The Crash
While the volume of trading on Monday was less than that of the previous
Dow Jones Industrial Thursday, the fall in prices was far more severe. The Dow Jones Industrial
Average An index showing Average showed a drop of 38 points on the day’s trading, down to 260. This
how shares in the top 30 time no Richard Whitney had appeared with orders to buy. It was not their
large companies have traded business, the bankers explained, to protect stock-market prices, but simply to
on the Wall Street Stock
ensure the market was orderly.
Market.
Next day, confidence collapsed completely. This was Tuesday 29 October, the
day that the stock market on Wall Street crashed. Altogether, 16,410,030
shares were sold and the Dow Jones Industrial Index fell a further 30 points
to 230, a fall of 11.73 per cent. In the chaos of frenzied selling, there was talk
of closing the exchange at noon, but it was felt this would simply increase
the panic. Prices continued to fall, and despite occasional rallies the overall
trend was downward. In a few weeks, as much as $30 billion had been lost
out of over $100 billion. This represented a sum almost as great as that which
the USA had spent on its involvement in the First World War. Source C gives
some indication of the level of losses.
SOURCE C

The fall in share prices.

Look at Source C. Which
company saw the biggest fall? Company Share price on Share price on
What might be the effect of 3 September 1929 13 November 1929
share price falls such as this?
American Can 181.87 86.00
Anaconda Copper 131.50 70.00
General Motors 72.50 36.00
Montgomery Ward 137.87 49.25
Radio 101.00 28.00
Woolworth 100.37 52.25
Electric Share and Bond 186.75 50.25

How far reaching was Extent of the Wall Street Crash

the Wall Street Crash? Even after October 1929, prices still stood higher than they had done at any
time during the previous year. What had been wiped out were the
spectacular gains of the first nine months of 1929. After the Crash, experts
did not believe that lasting damage had been done. On 26 October, for
example, the Harvard Economic Society felt that the fall in prices would be
temporary and would not cause any economic depression. Prices did not
really plunge until 1932, when it was clear that the Great Depression was
going to continue into the long term and recovery was not, as President

24
 Chapter 2: The Wall Street Crash and the causes of the Great Depression in the USA

Hoover (see Chapter 3) had continued to insist, just around the corner. On
8 June 1932, for example, the New York Times Index closed at 58.46. By
contrast it had stood at 164.43 in November 1929, less than a month after
the Wall Street Crash.
It is often popularly believed that the Wall Street Crash led to the Great
Depression. However, many historians have argued that it was simply one
sign of a depression already well on the way. Moreover, stock markets had
crashed before and have done since without any ensuing economic
depression. In order to analyse the part played in this history by the Wall
Street Crash, it is necessary to examine its impact within the context of an
economy whose growth was, as we shall see in the next section, already
slowing.

Wall Street Crash 24–29 October 1929

Bankers
24th Thursday Panic selling Order returned
bought stock

25th Friday and

Selling No rescue attempts
28th Monday

Mass panic 16,410,030 million

29th Tuesday No rescue
selling shares sold! SUMMARY DIAGRAM

The Wall Street Crash

2 Problems in the economy

Key question: How widespread were the signs that the economy was
faltering?

While it appeared on the surface that the economy was booming during the
1920s, there were many warning signs that things were not so healthy. These
included:
l uneven distribution of wealth
l rural poverty
l the instability of ‘get-rich-quick’ schemes
l problems with the banking system
l the cycle of international debt
l a slowdown in the economy.
In this section these will be dealt with in turn.

25
 How were income and Uneven distribution of wealth
industry distributed
Industry and income were all distributed unevenly within the USA, which
within the USA?
meant that some regions were much more prosperous than others. In
addition, patterns of employment could be unstable, for example with
short-time working. Different sections of society were better off than
K E Y TE RM
others. Many women, for example, did not share in the prosperity of the
Short-time working 1920s, nor did ethnic groups such as Native Americans and African-
Where the hours of work are Americans.
reduced.
Distribution of income
Per capita income Income
Income was distributed very unevenly throughout the country. The north-
per head of the population.
east and far west enjoyed the highest per capita incomes; in 1929 these
were $921 and $881, respectively. In comparison, the figure for the south-
east was $365. To paint an even gloomier picture, within the region of the
south-east, in South Carolina, while the per capita income for the non-
agricultural sectors of the economy averaged $412, that of farmers was
only $129.
In 1929, the Brookings Institute, a research organization, found that income
distribution was actually becoming more unequal. Its survey discovered that
60 per cent of American families had annual incomes of less than $2000. Two
sociologists, Robert S. Lynd and Helen Lynd, conducted major surveys about
how people lived in the town of Muncie, Indiana, which they identified as
‘Middletown’. As part of their investigations, they sampled 100 families and
discovered that 75 per cent earned less than the amount the Federal Bureau
of Labor recommended as the minimum income needed to support an
acceptable standard of living. Nevertheless, they found that most residents,
whatever their social class, shared conservative values that people should
fend for themselves and problems could be overcome by hard work.

Women
Women did not, on the whole, enjoy improved career opportunities during
this period. By 1930, for example, there were only 150 women dentists and
fewer than 100 female accountants in the whole of the USA. In 1928, the
League of Women Voters reported that while 145 women held seats in state
legislatures, there were only two women among the 435 delegates in the
House of Representatives.
There were more jobs for women as clerical workers and salespeople, but
overall they tended to remain in comparatively low-paid and often menial
jobs; 700,000 women were domestic servants. There were few female
industrialists or managing directors. The number of women receiving a
college education actually fell by five per cent during the decade. Even when
women worked in the same job as men, they normally received less money.
Despite the image of fun-loving young women known as ‘flappers’, women
were generally expected to concentrate on marriage and homemaking. It is

26
 Chapter 2: The Wall Street Crash and the causes of the Great Depression in the USA

largely a myth that the 1920s saw more opportunities for women to get to
the top in terms of employment opportunities. Fewer than two per cent of
judges or lawyers were female.
Legislation did little to help women, although the Sheppard–Towner Act of
KE Y TE RM
1921 funded healthcare for pregnant women and gave women some control
over the clinics it set up. However, some feminists feared this measure Feminists Those who
simply reinforced the stereotypical view of women’s main role as having sought to improve women’s
children and drew attention away from the need for birth control. Legislation opportunities.
to protect women in the workplace such as the banning of night shift work Suffragists Those who
was similarly attacked. This was because it often meant women simply lost sought the vote for women.
their jobs when they were no longer allowed to work such shifts. Therefore Assimilation The idea that
they became more economically dependent on men. Despite the efforts of Native Americans should
the Women’s Party set up by former suffragist Alice Paul, women never adopt American lifestyles and
voted as a block and women’s movements remained fragmented throughout values; their traditional way
this period. of life should disappear.
Allotment Each Native
Native Americans and African-Americans American family was given a
Native Americans and African-Americans did not share in the prosperity. plot of 160 acres to farm.
This went against the
Native Americans traditional idea of common
Policy towards Native Americans was based on the Dawes Severalty Act of land ownership.
1887. This had as its lynchpin the twin notions of assimilation and
allotment. Native American children, for example, were taught in Christian
schools and forced to adopt ‘Western’ dress.
More significantly, the policy of allotment meant that the old tribal units
were broken up and the reservations divided into family-sized farms of
160 acres. Surplus land was to be sold off.
The destruction of Native American culture had often left the people listless
and apathetic. Allotment had been a failure particularly for those Native
Americans who were not farmers by tradition. Moreover, much of the land
allocated to them was unsuitable for productive farming. In fact, of
138 million acres owned by Native Americans at the time of the Dawes
Severalty Act, 90 million acres had fallen out of their hands by 1932.
Many Native Americans lived in squalor and idleness. Often unscrupulous
whites had swindled them out of their land or had acquired it below market
prices. By 1926 a Department of the Interior inquiry found that the Act had
been a disaster for Native Americans and that the policy of allotment in
particular should be reversed.

African-Americans
African-Americans made up 10 per cent of the total population, but 85 per
cent still lived in the south, itself the poorest region in the USA. There was
considerable migration north in search of better opportunities, particularly to
the large cities, but here too African-Americans faced discrimination in
housing and employment. Often they were concentrated in ‘ghetto’ areas

27
 K E Y TE RM
such as Harlem in New York, whose African-American population had
swelled from 50,000 in 1914 to 165,000 in 1930. Here overcrowding and poor
Ku Klux Klan Racist group living conditions added to the problems in the mainstream economy.
advocating white supremacy.
It adopted methods of terror A study showed that, in Pittsburgh, African-Americans remained unskilled
to intimidate other groups through lack of employment opportunities and were forced to operate in the
such as African-Americans casual labour market such as working in hotel kitchens. This left them more
and Jews. During the 1920s exposed to joblessness and fears of destitution than before they had begun
it was particularly prevalent in their migration north. The Ku Klux Klan still terrorized much of the
the southern and midwestern
midwest and south, although the number of lynchings was falling.
states.
Comparatively few African-Americans were allowed to share in any
prosperity; 14 per cent of farmers were African-Americans.

What were economic Rural poverty

conditions like in The census showed in 1920 that for the first time the USA was essentially an
farming communities?
urban nation. The total population was 106,466,000; of these 31,614,000 lived
on the land, but the rest lived in towns. As the majority of Americans had
hitherto lived in rural areas, the farm lobby had been very powerful in
K E Y TE RM
influencing the government. However, it now felt that its influence was
Lynchings Illegal hangings, under threat from other groups such as those representing urban interests.
often used by the Ku Klux
Klan as a means of terror. Economic problems facing farmers
Census Survey undertaken
The years preceding the 1920s had been relatively good ones for farmers.
every 10 years to enumerate During the war years prices had risen over 25 per cent, and more land had
everyone in the country. been taken into cultivation. However, after the war, falling demand led to
falling prices. For example, wheat fell from $2.50 to $1 per bushel. There were
Farm lobby Politicians and
interest groups who put several reasons for this:
forward the farmers’ case to l Prohibition cut the demand for grain previously used in the manufacture
the federal government and of alcohol. In addition, higher living standards meant Americans ate more
Congress.
meat and comparatively fewer cereals.
Prohibition The banning of l The development of synthetic fibres lessened the market for natural ones,
the manufacture, such as cotton.
transportation and sale of l At the same time, technical advances meant that more crops could be
alcohol for consumption.
produced on the same or even a reduced acreage. During the 1920s,
Wage labourers People 13 million acres were taken out of production. Farm population fell by
who worked for wages. five per cent yet production increased by nine per cent.
Tenant farmers People l Greater use of tractors meant fewer horses were necessary and this in turn
who rented the land they meant less demand for animal food.
farmed. l Ironically, because many farmers became more efficient through
Share-croppers Farmers mechanization and new techniques, such as the use of improved fertilizers
who rented land and were and better animal husbandry, they simply produced too much.
paid by the landowners a
percentage of what they As a result of these factors, possibly as many as 66 per cent of farms operated
produced. at a loss. Wage labourers, tenant farmers and share-croppers – in the
south, these were mainly African-Americans – fared particularly badly. Some

28
 Chapter 2: The Wall Street Crash and the causes of the Great Depression in the USA

farmers grew rich by selling their land for housing and industrial
development, but most appeared not to share in any prosperity in the 1920s.

Overproduction
The biggest problem for farmers was overproduction. Too much food meant
prices were too low. Farmers were reluctant to underproduce voluntarily
because they could not trust their neighbours to do the same. Ideally, they
sought guaranteed prices, with the state possibly selling their surplus abroad
for whatever price it could get. American farmers produced so much that
there were surpluses despite the rising population. However, prices had
fallen to below those of 1914. Farmers considered the 1914 price to be the
‘parity’ price, by which they meant the price that enabled them to break even
on the costs of production.
President Coolidge did little to relieve farmers from their distress. More and
more farmers saw their mortgages foreclosed and lost the land their families
had farmed for generations. Many farmers naturally became very bitter.

‘Agricultural businesses’
The days of the small-scale, self-reliant farmer had already largely passed. In
KE Y T ERM
order to survive in the long term, farmers needed to make a profit. The 1920s
saw the growth of ‘agricultural businesses’ – large-scale, well-financed Agricultural businesses
cereal cultivation, ranching and fruit production enterprises – using the Large-scale farms using
techniques of mass production. They required comparatively little labour, machinery and techniques of
mass production.
except possibly in the case of fruit gathering at harvest time.
It was mainly the small-scale farmers who went bankrupt. These often asked
the state for help, as they thought of big business and the banks as being in
league against them.

Role of the government

Many farmers blamed the government for their plight. During the war, it had
urged them to produce more but now it did little to compensate them for
their losses. Many farmers were particularly angered by the fact that tariffs
protected industry but not agriculture.
Government policy was to encourage farms to co-operate to market their
produce. To this end the Agricultural Credits Act of 1923 funded
12 Intermediate Credit Banks to offer loans to co-operatives. However, the
measure was of little benefit to small farmers. The last thing they needed was
more debt. But large agricultural businesses could afford to take loans to
market their produce more effectively, thus squeezing the small farmers
even more.
Two measures of the early 1920s did, in theory, protect farmers from foreign
competition: the 1921 Emergency Tariff Act and the 1922 Fordney–
McCumber Act (see page 11) placed high tariffs on food imports. However,
because foreigners retaliated by placing similar tariffs on American
foodstuffs, farmers could not export their surpluses.

29
 Although the farm lobby was reluctant to accept it, if the USA continued to
develop as an industrial nation, manpower and resources would have to be
shifted away from farming. Agriculture would have to change, and change
eventually it did.

Distribution of industry
The older industries of the USA had been centred in the north-east and
midwest, especially in the states of Illinois, Michigan and Pennsylvania. They
had grown originally on the basis of nineteenth-century technology,
powered by coal and steam. Old industries were generally experiencing hard
times. Coal, for example, suffered from competition from newly discovered
energy sources, notably oil. The introduction of synthetic fibres lessened the
demand for cotton. Moreover, changes, particularly in young women’s
fashions, such as shorter skirts, reduced the quantity of material required.
The textile mills of the south employed cheap labour, including children, and
many northern mills, whose workforce enjoyed higher wages and shorter
hours of work, simply could not compete in a shrinking market. Railways
faced competition from motor transport, although it must be said that,
because of the expansion of the economy, rail-freight traffic increased by
10 per cent during the decade. As we have seen, farmers fared particularly
badly during this period.
The new industries, such as those of motor vehicles and appliances, were
also drawn to the regions of the north-east and midwest. This was due to the
availability of minerals such as coal, the well-established transport network,
a mobile, often immigrant labour force, and proximity to centres of large
population, such as Boston, Philadelphia and New York. As a result, other
regions of the USA, notably the west and the south, had only sparse
industrial development, with comparatively small towns still acting as
commercial centres for wide rural areas. In other words, things had not
altered in much of the USA since the previous century, and for much of the
country the major occupation was still agriculture.

Stability of employment
Employment was often unstable owing to fluctuating demand for goods.
Robert and Helen Lynd found that, during the first nine months of 1924, of
165 families they surveyed, 72 per cent of the workers had been unemployed
at some stage in their working lives. Of these, 43 per cent had been jobless for
over a month. This was at a time when there was very little welfare or
unemployment benefit and most relief was supplied by charitable
organizations.
K E Y TE RM Labour Unions
Workers could not, on the whole, look to labour unions for help. The
‘Yellow dog’ clauses
Where employees had to government did nothing to protect them, and indeed the Supreme Court
agree not to join a labour had blocked attempts by unions to ban child labour and impose a minimum
union. wage for women as being unconstitutional. Many employers operated
‘yellow dog’ clauses by which their employees were not allowed to join a

30
 Chapter 2: The Wall Street Crash and the causes of the Great Depression in the USA

union. During the 1920s union membership, which in the early 1920s stood
at four million, declined overall by one million. In 1910, 8.5 per cent of the
industrialized workforce was unionized; in 1930 this figure had fallen to
7.1 per cent.
Interestingly, the employers in the new industries tended to be most anti-
union, which explains why during this period unions failed to get more than
a toehold in these. The older industries tended, as we have seen, to be in
trouble during the decade. The government successfully sought injunctions
against union activities earlier in the 1920s and by the close of the decade,
employees generally were more anxious to keep their jobs than embark on
union agitation.

The instability of ‘get-rich-quick’ schemes What problems were

caused by ‘get-rich-
While many people saw easy credit as a strength in the economy, there were
quick’ schemes?
also considerable drawbacks. ‘Get rich quick’ was the aim of many Americans
in the 1920s; they invested in hugely speculative ventures and inevitably
many lost their money. Moreover, this situation provided golden
opportunities for confidence tricksters and crooks. In the early 1920s, for
example, Charles Ponzi, a former vegetable seller, conned thousands of
gullible people into investing in his ventures. He promised a 50 per cent
profit within 90 days. Few, of course, ever saw a cent of their money again.
When sentencing him to prison, the judge criticized his victims for their
greed. Ponzi had not forced people to part with their money.
The period saw other more large-scale speculations, notably during the
Florida land boom and on the stock exchange in the latter part of the decade.

The Florida land boom

While on bail awaiting trial, Ponzi found employment selling land in Florida.
This was a venture well suited to his talents. Until this time, Florida was a
relatively undeveloped state with a small population. In 1910, Miami was by
far the biggest city but with a population of only 54,000. Then wealthy
industrialists such as Henry M. Flagler of Standard Oil built elegant hotels in
the state for the rich to enjoy holidays there. With the coming of the motor
car, Florida’s all-year-round sunshine became accessible to the nation’s
middle classes and massive interest grew in the state as a paradise for
vacations and retirement.
This led to a land boom. Between 1920 and 1925, the population of the state
increased from 968,000 to 1.2 million. There were large-scale coastal
developments. Parcels of land began to be sold to wealthy northerners on
the basis of glossy brochures and salesmen’s patter. People began to
invest their money in unseen developments, hoping to sell and make a
quick profit. Often they paid on credit, with a 10 per cent deposit known
as a ‘binder’. Success stories abounded to fuel the boom. It was said that

31
 someone who had bought a parcel of land for $25 in 1900 had sold it for
$150,000 25 years later.
The land boom could be sustained only as long as there were more buyers
than sellers. But demand tailed off in 1926. There were scandals of land
advertised as within easy access of the sea that was really many miles inland
or in the middle of swamps. One company, Manhattan Estates, advertised
land as being three-quarters of a mile from the ‘prosperous and fast growing’
town of Nettie, a place that did not exist. Then nature played its part, with
hurricanes in 1926 killing 400 people and leaving 50,000 homeless. With
thousands of people bankrupted, the Florida land boom collapsed, leaving a
coastline strewn with half-finished and storm-battered developments. With
a Mediterranean fruit-fly epidemic devastating the state’s citrus industry in
the 1930s, recovery did not begin until the Second World War when Florida
became a major military training centre.
SOURCE D

Building taking place on the Miami seafront during the Florida land boom.
What impression does the
photograph in Source D give
about the extent of new
building in Florida?

Stock market speculation

It seemed that few people were prepared to learn the lessons of Florida. As
one way to get rich quickly closed so another seemed to open up. In the
period from 1927 to 1929 many Americans went ‘Wall Street crazy’. Easy
credit meant many were able to invest in stocks and shares. They could be
bought ‘on the margin’ – on credit with loans from their broker.
Increasingly, people purchased stocks and shares not to invest in a company
but as a speculation. If the price rose shares were sold, so making a quick
and easy profit. For a time this seemed to work. Share prices seemed
constantly to rise, some spectacularly so. According to the Wall Street Index,

32
 Chapter 2: The Wall Street Crash and the causes of the Great Depression in the USA

stock in the Radio Corporation of America rose from 85 to 420 points in

the course of 1928. There were stories of ordinary people making immense
profits.
Of course, in reality relatively few ordinary people ever dealt in shares; the
figure was probably never higher than 1.5 million. What was more significant
was that large concerns were investing their profits in the stock of others. For
example, Bethlehem Steel Corporation and Electric Bond and Share each
had invested $157 million in the market by late 1929. If prices should fall,
these firms might lose their investments and go bankrupt.

Problems with the banking system How did the banking

system lead to
The banking system of the USA was out of date by the 1920s even though
problems in the
the central banking system had only been created in 1913. Twelve regulatory economy?
reserve banks were headed by the Federal Reserve Board – usually known as
‘the Fed’ – with seven members appointed by the president. The system, it
was felt, allowed banks to regulate themselves without the government
having to interfere. However, there was a significant potential problem. The
reserve banks represented the interests of the bankers and so could not be
completely relied on to act in the best interests of the nation if there was a
conflict of interests. As we shall see (page 58), the reserve banks limited the
amount of money in circulation during the Great Depression. This meant
high interest rates for the banks as less money was available for borrowing.
However, critics argued that more money in circulation would encourage
more economic activity, which might help to cure the Depression.
While national banks had to join the centralized system, local state banks
did not. Most ordinary people’s money, particularly in rural and semi-rural
areas, was invested in the latter. In the 1920s, there were almost 30,000
banks in the USA. Most were very small and therefore unable to cope with
financial problems. If they collapsed their depositors would probably lose
virtually all their savings.
The Federal Reserve Board wanted to keep the market buoyant so it favoured
low interest rates. This fuelled the easy credit discussed above. The Fed also
wanted to see a flow of gold from the USA to Europe, so Europeans could
afford to pay back their debts.

The cycle of international debt What was the cycle of

international debt
The cycle of international debt was at the heart of the economic problems of
and how did it lead to
the USA. America’s priority was for Europeans to repay the loans they had problems in the US
taken out to finance the First World War. When the problem of European economy?
countries’ ability to repay came up, Coolidge is reported to have said, ‘They
hired the money, didn’t they?’ Although the quotation is possibly fictitious, it
did accurately express the sentiment of many Americans that the countries
should repay their loans. However, most European countries, still suffering

33
 from depressed economic conditions arising from the war, could not afford
to repay them.
In February 1922, Congress created the Debt Funding Commission. It
suggested that the maximum deadline for repayment should be 1947 at an
interest rate of 4.25 per cent. However, the simple truth was that Europeans
just could not afford to repay the loans. The prohibitive tariffs made matters
worse. European countries could not export their manufactured goods to the
USA in great quantities; therefore they found it impossible to earn the
money to repay the loans. Much of their gold reserves went to the USA as
loan repayments.
However, an agreement was made with Britain in January 1923 for it to repay
its $4.6 billion debt within 62 years at an interest rate of 3.3 per cent.
Following this, agreements were made within the next five years with 15
countries under which interest rates were to be scaled down and more
generous repayment time limits allowed.

K E Y TE RM
The problems caused by Germany
Repayment of debts was only part of the problem. Germany had, by the
Reparations Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, been forced to pay reparations of $33 billion
post-war settlements to the victorious nations of Europe. Under the Dawes and Young Plans, the
Germany had been required USA lent it the money to do so. With this money, the European victors
to pay compensation of repaid the USA what they could of the loans. The USA was thus effectively
$33 billion or 132 billion
paying itself back with its own money. Indeed, the $250 million it lent to
marks to the victorious
countries. Germany under the Dawes Plan corresponded to the amount Germany
actually paid the Allies in reparations, which in turn corresponded to the
Dawes Plan 1924 Offered amount the USA received from the Allies in debt repayments.
Germany scaled-down
reparations and provided it This situation became even more confused through the Dawes and Young
with a loan of $250 million to Plans scaling down German reparations. With Germany paying the
help stabilize its currency. European victors less, this meant that they in turn could repay less of their
Young Plan 1929 Offered own debts to the USA. All in all, no one gained from an incredibly complex
further scaled-down situation that, according to one commentator, would have made more
reparations to 37 billion sense if ‘the US had taken the money out of one Treasury building and put it
marks, with annual payments in another’.
to be made for 59 years.
The banks hoped the movement of American funds to Europe would help
the victors to repay the loans. American investors did increasingly put their
money in European ventures. However, this investment took place
particularly in Germany where $39 billion was invested after the Dawes Plan.
Wall Street brokers earned fat commissions for putting investors in touch
with businesses requiring investment. Massive overinvestment took place.
Once again it was often a case of investors hoping to make a quick profit
without going too carefully into the actual details of the transaction. As a
result, there were absurd examples such as the Bavarian village that asked for
$125,000 to build a swimming pool, and received $3 million.

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 Chapter 2: The Wall Street Crash and the causes of the Great Depression in the USA

However, with reparations reduced, investment in Germany hardly helped

the European victors to repay their American loans. Its main effect was to
make the tangle of international debt even more complex.

A slowdown in the economy What were the signs

that the economic
The boom was dependent on continuing domestic consumption. High tariffs
boom of the 1920s
and generally depressed economies in Europe meant that American was slowing down?
producers could sell comparatively little abroad. There were, by the late
1920s, three indicators that the boom was slowing down.

Problems in small businesses

The decade witnessed the growth of huge corporations with considerable
marketing power. As a result, smaller businesses often faced hard times.
During the course of the 1920s, for every four businesses that succeeded,
three failed. The number of motor vehicle companies, for example, fell from
108 in 1920 to 44 by the end of the decade in part because of the growth of
the larger companies which absorbed many of the smaller ones, but also
because many of the smaller ones could not compete in a diminishing
market. Tariffs notwithstanding (see page 11), the government was in reality
no more prepared to help out failing industrial concerns than it was to help
the farmers.

The construction industry

Economic historians tend to agree that the state of the construction industry
is generally a good indicator of the overall health of the economy. The
mid-1920s saw a great boom in construction, particularly in housing, office
building and highways. However, after 1926 demand began to tail off. This
led to a fall in demand for building materials, skills such as plumbing and the
transportation of building materials. This, in turn, led to higher
unemployment in construction-related businesses and had serious knock-on
effects on concerns dependent on the construction industry.

Falling domestic demand

By the late 1920s, production was outstripping demand. The domestic
market was becoming flooded with goods that could not be sold. More and
more people were in no position to spend on non-essential items. In April
1929, for example, it was estimated that 10 per cent of Philadelphia’s labour
force was unemployed. Even though the national unemployment statistics
remained low, Irving Fisher, a University of Yale economist, estimated that in
1929 as many as 80 per cent of the American people were living close to
subsistence, even when they were in work.

Downward spiral
With growth in the new industries beginning to slow, full-time employment
fell and the economy entered into a downward spiral. A fall in income led to
a fall in demand, which in turn led to a fall in production that added to

35
 unemployment and underemployment (short-time working). However, the
fact that the economy was experiencing problems was concealed by
superficial optimism and the frenzy of stock market speculation.

Problems in the economy

Uneven Rural ‘Get-rich-quick’ Banking Cycle of Slowing down

distribution poverty schemes system international of growth
of wealth debt

• Income • Farmers’ • Florida land • Federal • Loan • Small

distribution economic boom Reserve repayment businesses
• Employment problems • Stock market Board • Dawes and • Construction
• Old industries • Role of speculation • State banks Young Plans industry
• Women government • US investment • Falling
• Native and • Agriculture abroad domestic
African- businesses demand
Americans

SUMMARY DIAGRAM

Problems in the economy

3 Effects of the Wall Street

Crash
Key question: What was the relationship between the Wall Street
Crash and the onset of the Great Depression?

Despite the myth, the Crash did not actually cause the Great Depression.
This was widely recognized at the time and has been largely accepted by
historians ever since. American business was too big and too diversified to
be influenced to a significant extent by the stock market alone. There is little
doubt that by the time of the Crash, the Depression was well on the way.
As well as overspeculation, living on credit and get-rich-quick schemes,
there were the great inequalities of wealth and prosperity; problems with
international trade; depression in staple industries, such as agriculture;
overproduction and falling domestic demand, which had already resulted in
serious problems in the building and, to a certain extent, the car industries.

36
 Chapter 2: The Wall Street Crash and the causes of the Great Depression in the USA

The Crash was essentially a financial issue, while the Depression had much
deeper causes, of which financial problems were only one.
However, although there is little doubt that the Crash was more of an effect
than a cause of the Depression, we have to recognize that effects can worsen
the problems they have resulted from. In this respect the Crash was an
important trigger in worsening the Depression.

Effects of the Crash on the economy How significant were

the effects of the Wall
There is some disagreement about the relative significance of the effects of
Street Crash on the
the Wall Street Crash on the economy, although most commentators are in US economy?
broad agreement about what they actually were.
SOURCE E

Bankrupt investor Walter Thornton tries to sell his luxury roadster for $100 cash on the streets of
New York City following the 1929 stock market crash.

Collapse of businesses How well does this

Individuals and business concerns lost billions. Thousands were bankrupted photograph in Source E
reflect the human despair
and even those who remained solvent were often hard hit. Clarence
engendered by the Wall
Mitchell’s bank lost half its assets; the President of Union Cigar plunged to Street Crash?
his death from the ledge of a New York hotel when stock in his company fell
from $113.50 to $4 in a single day. Even the very wealthy financial family, the
Rockefellers lost over $50 million in a vain effort to shore up the market.

37
 The point is, of course, that people who had lost heavily could no longer
K E Y TE RM
afford to consume or invest further. So much of the prosperity of the 1920s
Consumer durables had been based on continuing demand for consumer durables, and these
Goods that can last a long tend not to be replaced when times are hard. Therefore, the industries that
time, for example, motor supplied these products in the USA found demand slipping further. The
cars and electrical appliances. power of advertising, for example, had little influence on a people who
Credit squeeze When it is increasingly had nothing to spend. All this was eventually to lead to a
difficult to obtain credit. massive level of company cutbacks and often bankruptcy. As workforces
were laid off, there was even less money within the economy for spending.
This led in turn to a further slowing of the economy as it ground its
inexorable way into a depression.

Collapse of credit
The stock market crash led to the collapse of credit. Loans were called in and
new ones refused. Although stock might now have little value, it was
nevertheless accepted by banks as repayments from brokers who could not
otherwise repay their debts. With their own assets thereby reduced, banks
were even less likely to make further loans. This led to a credit squeeze and
to an accompanying fall in demand and business activity. No one, it seemed,
was prepared to take a financial risk.

How significant was Effects of the Crash on confidence in the USA

the loss of confidence
The Crash signified an end of confidence. To many people, Wall Street had
in the US economy?
symbolized the prosperity of the 1920s. The stock market had seemed
invulnerable. The influential economic historian J.K. Galbraith has argued
that even though the number of stock market players was comparatively few,
the idea of stock market speculation had become central to how confident
society felt. In other words, belief in the continuing success of the stock
market had become almost a certainty, like a belief in the ideas behind the
Declaration of Independence.
The warning voices had been ignored. People had chosen to listen instead to
the soothing tones coming from the White House and big business. When
those same voices continued in the wake of the Crash, they were no longer
believed. Their credibility was fatally undermined; but more, they were
despised as belonging to those who had let the nation down by destroying
its fundamental beliefs. In this situation, national confidence sank to rock
bottom. This in turn deepened the Depression to whose onset people had for
too long been oblivious.
With the country increasingly in the grip of the Depression, with confidence
shattered and new uncertainties pervading society, attention now began to
focus on the president in the White House, Herbert Hoover.

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 Chapter 2: The Wall Street Crash and the causes of the Great Depression in the USA

Stock market collapse

Massive losses Collapse of credit Crisis of confidence

1. Little money for 1. Little money for 1. People felt

further investment investment shocked, betrayed
2. Collapse in 2. Severe credit 2. Loss of confidence
demand for goods squeeze in government and
3. Bankruptcies ‘big business’
4. Rising 3. Loss of confidence
unemployment in themselves

All these factors added to the onset of the Depression

SUMMARY DIAGRAM

Effects of the Wall Street Crash

4 Key debate
Key question: How strong was the American economy in the 1920s
and how real was the prosperity?

How strong was the American economy?

It is easy with hindsight to see the problems in the American economy. At
the time, however, detailed understanding of how a developed economy
works was far less sophisticated than it is today. While there was concern
among experts, some even forecasting accurately the coming collapse, they
had little influence. Many historians would agree with Hugh Brogan, who
wrote in 1985 that, ‘At every stage the story displays the devastating
consequences of a bland unawareness of economic and political essentials.’
J.K. Galbraith was particularly scathing about the role of the banking system,
with too many small, weak banks with the possibility of collapse at the first
sign of trouble.
Other economic historians, however, have been less critical. The American
economy seemed to be doing well especially when compared to others,
notably those in Europe. After all, the figures denoting growth seem to speak
for themselves. It is also important to note that the capitalist system survived
the coming financial collapse almost intact. Many of the manufacturing and
marketing companies of the 1920s have continued to operate to the present
day, as have the banking and investment houses.

39
 President Hoover had no doubts as to the strength of the economy; at the
end of the 1928 presidential election campaign he made a speech as reported
in Source F.
SOURCE F

An extract from a speech made by President Hoover in 1928.

How reliable is the account
in Source F? Explain your We have … in the 1920s … decreased the fear of poverty, fear of unemployment,
answer with particular the fear of old age … Prosperity is no idle expression. It is a job for every worker,
reference to the provenance it is the safety and safeguard of every business and home … We are nearer today
of the source. to the ideal of the abolition of poverty and fear from the lives of men and women
than ever before in any land.

How real was the 1920s’ prosperity?

Commentators at the time and historians since have spent much time
debating how real the prosperity was in the 1920s. Some, like Paul Johnson,
believe it was sound enough for the economy to correct itself in response to
the Wall Street Crash, while others feel it was flawed and the collapse was
bound to happen. Some historians feel those in charge of the economy did
not understand how market forces actually worked.

Lewis Frederick Allen

Allen was a journalist who wrote one of the most significant accounts of the
USA in the 1920s, Only Yesterday, published in 1931. In arguing that the
economy was fundamentally unsound, he gave seven reasons in support:
l Overproduction of capital and goods – too much was being produced
which not enough people could afford to buy, while eventually all those
who could afford stock had it.
l Pools of shady financiers operated to keep prices of goods artificially high.
l Asian markets paid largely in silver. There was a collapse in the price of silver,
making it harder for them to buy American goods as prices rose accordingly.
l There was a shift in gold from other countries to the USA, making it
harder for countries such as Britain to buy US goods (see page 34).
l International unrest meant unstable market conditions.
l Once the slowdown occurred it had a cumulative effect – as demand fell,
more people lost their jobs so could afford to buy less.
l The lack of confidence resulting from the downturn meant people would
no longer take financial risks.
Allen returned to this theme in 1952 in his book The Great Change: America
Transforms Itself. Here he argued that the prosperity was unsound because
business was preoccupied with paper, or artificial rather than real financial
values. There was a willingness to speculate and propensity to shady
financial practices such as the following:
l Developing holding companies which benefited a few but had a harmful
effect on the many.

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 Chapter 2: The Wall Street Crash and the causes of the Great Depression in the USA

l Banks speculating and inflating corporation profits by selling them back

KE Y TE RM
and forth among themselves.
l Stock market bull pools which bought stock to increase the price, and Bull pools Method by
then flooded the market with it, reducing the value for the majority who which unscrupulous brokers
had held onto the stock – and often bankrupting the companies in the bought and sold stocks to
and from each other to keep
process.
prices high.
The government meanwhile did not get involved or intervene to prevent
such occurrences.

Thurman Arnold
Thurman Arnold was Dean of the Law College at the University of West
Virginia. He later became an enthusiastic supporter of Roosevelt and the
New Deal (see Chapter 4). He wrote an article on the 1920s’ economy in ‘The
Aspirin Age’, a series of essays published in 1949.
While Arnold agreed that the government had too limited a role, he felt that
business – which did have the responsibility of regulating the economy –
was entangled in a web it did not understand. Large-scale production and
mass consumption had changed the economy but many of the structures
were locked in the nineteenth century:
l The banking system regulated the economy, for example by withdrawing
access to funding for those in whose success they had no faith.
l Overall the system was based on faith in institutions such as the banks,
but in 1929, the collapse did not respond to their attempts to restore
confidence.
l The solutions were based on beliefs held in the past. It was thought
imperative for example to maintain prices. This meant people whose
incomes were reduced, could no longer afford to buy, which led to greater
unemployment and the massive downturn.

Hugh Brogan
In his history of the USA, Brogan entitles his chapter on the 1920s,
‘Irresponsibility’, making his feelings plain in arguing that the prosperity was
not real. He noted that there were clear signs the prosperity was slackening
as early as 1926, for example in the fall in the housing market. He goes on to
say that the government was powerless to act even had it so wished. It had
already lowered taxes as far as was possible. Neither of its other two
alternatives was possible:
l The government could lower tariffs. The introduction of cheaper foreign
imports would have stimulated their economies and forced US
manufacturers to reduce their prices. American business would not
tolerate this.
l The government could have intervened, for example with public works.
This was the opposite of what they intended, that the federal government
should do less not more. National debt shrank from $24 billion to
$16 billion between 1921 and 1929.

41
 l In arguing that, ‘At every stage the story displays the devastating
consequences of a bland unawareness of economic and political
essentials’, he would have agreed that business and bankers did not
understand the way the economy worked. Even in the years of prosperity,
600 banks a year failed, while $3.9 billion was invested in German
concerns, irrespective of whether they could ever make a profit, by US
financiers using investors’ money.

Paul Johnson
Paul Johnson is a British historian, who, writing in the 1990s, disagreed with
Brogan by arguing that the 1920s’ economy was sound and the prosperity
was real. He argued that it was wrong to judge it by subsequent events (the
Depression, which he later argued that federal governments made worse
through their interventions – see page 61). Johnson felt that wealth was
distributed more evenly than at any time in history so far, and people felt real
economic security. He gives the example that 11 million families acquired
houses in 1924. He also suggests that it was people such as clerks and factory
workers who were buying shares in the biggest public utility companies. He
argued that in the 1920s the USA was well on the way to becoming a
property-owning democracy, and the Wall Street Crash would have righted
itself, with prosperity returning by 1930.

Liaquat Ahamed
Ahamed, a financier himself, wrote a very influential book entitled The Lords
of Finance in 2009. In arguing that even in the 1920s the economy was global
and interrelated, he focused on the careers of four major central bankers in
the USA, Britain, France and Germany. Ahamed argued that these men were
K E Y TE RM
prisoners of the orthodox belief that sound monetary policy had to revolve
Gold Standard Where the around the Gold Standard. This meant that the central bank of each country
value of money is based on had to keep enough gold to support the amount of its paper currency. This
the amount of gold in the meant borrowing was expensive because interest rates had to remain high to
nation’s reserves. maintain the value of the currency which had to match the amount of gold.
This limited trade and economic activities.
The big problem was there simply was not enough gold to finance world
trade. Stocks of gold moreover tended to be concentrated in the USA and
France – so countries such as Britain had to borrow heavily to buy it. This
meant there was less money to invest in their own economies.
Overall, Ahamed argued that the strength of any individual economy was in
a way irrelevant because of their interconnectedness, and the Depression
was caused by economic mismanagement.

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 Chapter 2: The Wall Street Crash and the causes of the Great Depression in the USA

Year 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928

Political Fordney– Dawes McNary– Tax cuts End of

McCumber Plan Haugen Coolidge's
Act bill presidency
Tax cuts

Social/economic Florida Collapse of Speculation

land Florida on Stock
boom land boom Exchange
Peak of Ford closure
construction until introduction
boom of Model A

Mass production

High tariffs
Industrial Growth of advertising
Tax cuts
expansion
Less government

Consumer boom

Rural poverty

Little help Agricultural Small farms went out of business

Government
for farmers depression

Rural unrest

Great extremes of wealth and poverty

Policies of Unregulated Unchecked speculation

laissez-faire economy

Little government help for needy

members of society

SUMMARY DIAGRAM

Prosperity?

43
 construction sector, the cycle of international debt
Chapter summary limiting trade, and overproduction leading to
unemployment and a downturn in demand.
The Crash itself reflected weaknesses in the
The Wall Street Crash and the causes of the structure of the stock market that prompted unwise
Great Depression in the USA practices such as buying on the margin and exploitation
The prosperity of the 1920s was based on shaky by ‘streetwise’ dealers such as operating the bull pool.
foundations, although that prosperity seemed real to Also much of the prosperity was fuelled by a boom in
people at the time. However, it was uneven and some credit which saw comparatively little real wealth
sectors of the economy, such as agriculture, appeared actually being created.
never to share in it. There were indicators that The Wall Street Crash did not cause the Depression
problems in the economy pre-dated the Wall Street but was rather an indicator of its onset.
Crash. These included slowdowns in the crucial

Examination advice
How to answer ‘to what extent’ questions
The command term to what extent is a popular one on IB exams. You are
asked to evaluate one argument or idea over another. Stronger essays will
also address more than one interpretation. This is often a good question in
which to discuss how different historians have viewed the issue.

Example
To what extent was the prosperity of the USA in the 1920s based
on solid foundations?

1 Beyond stating the degree to which you agree with the premise, you must
focus on the words prosperity and solid foundations in the question. You
should define these terms in your introduction.
2 First take at least five minutes to write a short outline. One strategy in
your outline might be to consider the elements you think comprise solid
foundations. Once you have listed these, then you can judge the degree to
which these were present in the USA in the 1920s. Also be sure to write
down evidence of prosperity. An example of an outline for an answer to
this question might be as given opposite (page 45).

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