By 1920, for the first time in the
nation’s history, a majority of Americans were city dwellers. In the fol-
lowing decade, some six million more American farmers quit the land
and moved to the city.
Yet the urbanization of early twentieth-century America can be ex-
aggerated. More than one in five working Americans still toiled on the
land in the 1920s. Forty-four percent of the population was still counted
as rural in 1930. Well over half the states of the Union remained pre-
ponderantly rural in population, economy, political representation, and
ways of life.
In many respects, those country ways of life remained untouched by
modernity. The fitty million Americans who dwelt in what F. Scott Fitz-
gerald called “that vast obscurity beyond the city” still moved between
birth and death to the ancient rhythms of sun and season. More than
forty-five million of them had no indoor plumbing in 1930, and almost
none had electricity. p. 16 Kennedy
https://www.fulcrum.org/epubs/kk91fp06v?locale=en#page=36
After the armistice of November 1918, however, world agricultural
production returned to its familiar prewar patterns. American farmers
found themselves with huge surpluses on their hands. Prices plum-
meted. Cotton slumped from a wartime high of thirty-five cents per
pound to sixteen cents in 1920. Corn sank from $1.50 per bushel to
fifty-two cents. Wool slid from nearly sixty cents per pound to less than
twenty cents. Although prices improved somewhat after 1921, they did
not fully recover until war resumed in 1939. Farmers suffocated under
their own mountainous surpluses and under the weight of the debts
they had assumed to expand and to mechanize. Foreclosures increased,
and more and more freeholders became tenants. ‘The depopulation of
the countryside proceeded ever more rapidly.
No comments:
Post a Comment