The development of the United States as a modern nation through the 1920s boom, the Great Depression and New Deal, and the Second World War to 1945

What this dot point is asking

SCSA wants you to explain how the United States developed as a modern nation across three phases: the prosperity and tensions of the 1920s, the collapse into the Great Depression and Roosevelt's New Deal response, and the transformation brought by the Second World War. You need command of economic, social and political change, the experience of different groups, and the debates over how far the period changed America. The option is examined through source analysis and essays in the external paper.

The United States emerged from World War I (it entered in 1917) as the world's leading creditor nation, but quickly turned inward. The "Red Scare" of 1919 to 1920, the Palmer Raids, and fear of radicalism shaped a conservative, isolationist mood. Congress rejected the League of Nations, and the Republican administrations of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover pursued low taxes, high tariffs (the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922) and minimal regulation.

The 1920s boom rested on new mass-production industries, above all the automobile. Henry Ford's assembly line made cars affordable, and the car drove demand for steel, oil, rubber and roads. Electrification, consumer durables, advertising and the spread of hire-purchase credit fuelled a consumer culture, while a rising stock market encouraged speculation, often "on the margin" with borrowed money. New mass entertainment (cinema, radio, jazz) and changing roles for women, symbolised by the "flapper" and the vote won in 1920, marked a cultural shift.

The decade's prosperity was uneven and contested. Farmers suffered from overproduction and falling prices throughout the 1920s. Prohibition (the Eighteenth Amendment, in force from 1920) fuelled organised crime figures such as Al Capone before its repeal in 1933. Nativism produced the restrictive Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924, and a revived Ku Klux Klan reached millions of members. African Americans faced segregation and violence in the South, prompting the Great Migration north, even as the Harlem Renaissance flourished.

The Wall Street Crash, peaking on Black Tuesday (29 October 1929), wiped out fortunes and confidence. The Great Depression followed: by 1933 around a quarter of the workforce was unemployed, thousands of banks had failed, industrial output had collapsed, and shanty towns nicknamed "Hoovervilles" appeared. President Herbert Hoover, committed to limited government and voluntary action, was widely blamed, and the violent dispersal of the Bonus Army of veterans in 1932 damaged him further.

Franklin D. Roosevelt won the 1932 election promising a "New Deal". From his inauguration in March 1933 he launched the "Hundred Days", restoring banking confidence through the Emergency Banking Act and "fireside chats". The New Deal pursued the "three Rs": relief, recovery and reform. Agencies such as the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Public Works Administration, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the National Recovery Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority created jobs and regulated the economy. The Second New Deal from 1935 brought the Social Security Act and the Wagner Act protecting unions. The New Deal was contested: critics on the right called it socialist, the Supreme Court struck down some measures, and figures such as Huey Long argued it did not go far enough.

The New Deal eased suffering and reshaped the role of the federal government, but did not end the Depression. Recovery came with the Second World War. After Pearl Harbor (7 December 1941) the United States mobilised totally: war production ended unemployment, drew millions of women into industry (symbolised by "Rosie the Riveter"), and accelerated the migration and employment of African Americans, though within continued segregation. The war also saw the internment of around 120,000 Japanese Americans after Executive Order 9066 in 1942. The United States emerged in 1945 as the dominant economic and military power, sole possessor of the atomic bomb, and a founder of the new international order.

Historiographically, debate centres on the New Deal. "Progressive" historians praise Roosevelt for saving capitalism and democracy; New Left historians argue it was a conservative rescue of the existing order that left inequality intact; others stress that only the war achieved full recovery. On the 1920s, historians dispute whether the decade was a confident "Jazz Age" or a brittle prosperity masking deep structural weakness.