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Girls dancing the Charleston. Gangsters carrying machine guns. Charlie Chaplin
playing comical tricks. These are some of the pictures that come into people’s minds
when they think of the United States in the 1920s. The “roaring twenties.” Good
times. Wild times.
Ревущие двадцатые
The United States was very rich in these years. Because of the First World War, other
coun-tries owed it a lot of money It had plenty of raw materials and plenty of
factories. Its national income — the total earnings of all its citizens - was much
higher, than that of Britain, France, Germany and Japan put together.
Соединенные Штаты были очень богаты в эти годы. Из-за Первой мировой
войны другие страны были должны ей много денег. У нее было много
сырья и много заводов. Его национальный доход - общий доход всех его
граждан - был намного выше, чем у Британии, Франции, Германии и
Японии вместе взятых.
American factories produced more goods every year. The busiest were those making
auto-mobiles. Between 1922 and 1927, the number of cars on the roads rose from
under eleven mil-lion to over twenty million. The electrical industry also prospered. It
made hundreds of thou-sands of refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, stoves and radios,
The United States became the first nation in history to build its way of life on selling
vast quantities of goods that gave ordinary people easier and more enjoyable lives.
These “consumer goods” poured off the assembly linesof big new factories. Between
1919 and 1929 such mass-production factories doubled their output.
The growth of industry made many Americans well-off. Millions earned good wages.
Thou-sands invested money in successful firms so that they could share in their
profits. Many bought cars, radios and other new products with their money. Often
they obtained these goods by paying a small deposit and agreeing to pay the rest of
the cost through an “installment plan.” Their mot-to was “Live now, pay tomorrow” -
a tomorrow which most were convinced would be like to-day only better, with even
more money swelling their wallets.
Businessmen became popular heroes in the 1920s. Men like Henry Ford were widely
ad-mired as the creators of the nation’s prosperity. “The man who builds a factory
builds a temple,” said Calvin Coolidge, the President from 1923 to 1929. ”The man
who works there, worships there.”
Coolidge’s words help to explain the policies of American governments in the 1920s.
These governments were controlled by the Republican Party. Republicans believed
that if the govern-ment looked after the interests of the businessman, everybody
would become richer. Business-men whose firms were doing well, they claimed,
would take on more workers and pay more wages. In this way their growing wealth
would benefit everybody.
Yet there were lots of poor Americans. A survey in 1929 showed that half the
American people had hardly enough money to buy sufficient food and clothing. In the
industrial cities of the North, such as Chicago and Pittsburgh, immigrant workers still
labored long hours for low wages in steel mills, factories and slaughter houses. In the
South thousands of poor farmers, both black and white, worked from sunrise to sunset
to earn barely enough to live on. The wealth that Republicans said would benefit
everybody never reached people like these.
The main reason for poverty among industrial workers was low wages. Farmers and
farm workers had a hard time for different reasons. In the South many farmers did not
own the land they farmed. They were sharecroppers. For rent, a sharecropper gave the
landowner part of what he grew — often so much that he was left with hardly enough
to feed his family.
And farmers were finding it more difficult to sell their produce at home. Immigration
had fallen, so the number of people needing food was growing more slowly. All the
new cars didn’t help either. Cars ran on gasoline, not on corn and hay like horses.
American farmers found themselves growing products they could not sell. By 1924,
around 600,000 of them were bankrupt.
But to Americans who owned shares or “stock,” in industrial companies the future
looked bright. Sales of consumer goods went on rising. This meant bigger profits for
the firms that made them. This in turn sent up the value of shares in such firms.
In 1928 the American people elected a new President, Herbert Hoover. Hoover was
sure that American prosperity would go on growing and that the poverty in which
some Americans still lived would be remembered as something in the past. He said
that there would soon be “a chick-en in every pot and two cars in every garage.”
Looking at the way their standard of living had risen during the 1920s many other
Ameri-cans thought the same.
Глядя на то, как в 20-е годы уровень их жизни повышался, многие другие
американцы считали то же самое.
In 1919 the American people voted in favor of a new amendment to the Constitution.
The Eighteenth Amendment prohibited the making or selling of alcoholic drink in the
United States. People who supported “prohibition” claimed that it would stop
alcoholism and drunkenness and make the Unites States a healthier, happier country.
But many Americans were not inning to give up alcoholic drinks. Millions began to
break the prohibition law deliberately and regularly. Illegal drinking placed called
“speakeasies” opened in basements and backrooms all over the country. The city of
Chicago had 10,000 of them. New York had 32,000.
By the end of the 1920s most Americans regarded prohibition as half scandal, half
joke. The dishonesty and corruption which grew with it made them lose their respect
both for the law and for the people who were supposed to enforce it. Prohibition was
finally given up in l933. But it had done the United States lasting harm. It made
lawbreaking a habit for many otherwise re-spectable Americans. And gangsters
remained powerful. Many used the money they had made as bootleggers to set up
other criminal businesses.