I'm just an ordinary person, how "Roaring" are the 1920s for me?

by Canadairy

I live on a farm, or work in a factory. Maybe I'm employed in a shop, or work as a servant. The point is, I'm not wealthy, nor upper middle class.

alex1596

Perhaps (unsurprisingly) this answer might vary depending on where you're located, your gender, your race, and what you want to consider as "roaring".

Coming from a North American perspective, the short answer is "relatively roaring". While you might not be taking transatlantic vacations, several aspects of everyday life make even those earning a modest living a chance to increase their purchasing power.

Earlier in the decade however this was not necessarily the case. While America saw a period of an economic boom during WWI supplying the war effort, after the war the U.S had a surplus of goods it couldn't sell to a devasted Europe so unemployment rises and people couldn't pay back their loans or creditors.

After a short recession in the early 20s President Coolidge famously said "The chief business of the American people is business". Market regulations under him were being removed and the economy enters a more "laissez-faire" period. This in turn meant that money and credit is cheap to borrow by 1927.

Though Europe might be recovering from the war, American consumerism is on the rise as they still have the infrastructure in place to mass-produce things making them cheaper and more accessible to the common person. For example, owning a radio goes from 60,000 people at the beginning of the decade to 10 million by the later half of the 1920s. People are in a spending mood and again, consumer credit is a major driving factor behind everyday people buying things like cars to furniture, radios, to household domestic items. In short, borrowing money or credit is no longer seen as something only poor people do.

The driving factor behind all of this credit and borrowing is of course; the stock market. Historian Charles R Geist notes that "the excess spending of the decade was based on the perception that economic life was getting better all the time and the stock market was proof of that". The stock market becomes a sort of symbol of the American dream. American businessman John Raskob noted in 1929 (before the crash) notes that "if a man saved 15$ a week and invested in common stocks and allows the dividend and rights to accumulate, he will be rich" While Raskob was a bit deluded on just how easy it is to become rich (given the average salary at the time was 20$) the ordinary person can now speculate and invest in the pursuit of wealth.

So the average U.S citizen has more money now. So what do to with all of it? Spend it of course!

In 1928 65 million movie ticket sales are reported weekly, and as people like Fitzgerald will have you believe nightclub culture booms and along with most people owning radios, jazz becomes synonymous with the times as it's played in nightclubs and radios across America and Europe.

What's also notable about the economic boom is that now women have more money than they ever did. The "flapper" lifestyle is not only an aesthetic choice but one that subverts the traditionally female role into one where women have more independence.

Though there is an economic boom, it doesn't spread to everyone, everywhere.

Rural America struggles to make it out of the post-war recession. Many parts of the south and the midwest languish in poverty while other places in the country boom with prosperity. 90% of the wealth is held by only 5% of the population.

Despite the popularity of jazz music, African-Americans remain on the economic margins often being barred from the most popular jazz clubs and being mistreated by their white managers.

While the decade saw enormous amounts of prosperity, it was not distributed evenly and was mostly concentrated. And while credit was cheap, and spending was rampant, the bubble would eventually burst.

The average person could buy more things than ever before and spend leisurely time on entertainment like never before. But this was not the standard way of life across the board.


  • Stanley K. Schultz (1999). "Crashing Hopes: The Great Depression"

  • Wall Street: A History - From Its Beginnings to the Fall of Enron Book by Charles R. Geisst

  • Biocca, Frank (1990). "Media and Perceptual Shifts: Early Radio and the Clash of Musical Cultures". The Journal of Popular Culture

EDIT: some spelling

pinkycatcher

It's been a long time since I've done economic history research and I'll leave interpretation up to the reader and any followup historians, but I'll lay out some facts. Please note I'm only pulling data for the US. I also apologize, I'm not great at narrative history, so please don't expect this to be an exciting explanation.

Of course averages aren't everything, median is much more important to the question you're asking, unfortunately for us a lot of the modern datasets don't include data as far back as the 1920s, but I'll try to find some where I can. I can't easily find median income data until 1953 (FRED datasets dealing with median income sorted by observation start). So we'll just have to make do with averages which will still give us a good picture. The share of disposable income going to the richest 5% went from 24% in 1920 to 34% in 1929, so the rich did get richer than the poor got richer, but that is certainly not to say the average person did not benefit greatly from the economic climate (source for this is Gilder-Lehrman linked below)

The 1920 IRS Statistics of income probably gives a good breakdown of income classes. ~72% of people made less than $3,000 with about an even split between the $1,000 - $2,000 range and the $2,000 - $3,000 range. This $2-3,000 range is likely the grouping you're interested in. By 1929 though that similar percentile had moved up to the $3-5,000 range. So someone in that 9 year time period had a good chance of seeing their income grow by 60%.

One thing that I think is important is to remember the context, when dealing with the idea of a "roaring" public perception we should compare it to what people were used to, I think one easy way is to compare it to the 1910s or so. Where there is data I will use that.

In the late 1910s the lowest income tax bracket rate shot up to 6% (modern rate is 10%), but by the mid 1920s it fell to a low of 1.125%. This will give you an idea of the lower bound of what people paid, a more median income would of course be higher.

The 1920's was an area of great advancement, certainly wealth piled up on average, the average earnings in 1912 were $592, but by 1924 they were $1,033 (much of this basic data is from Gilder-Lehrman). The model T dropped in price from $600 to $290, or basically 1 years average wages to ~3 months of wages, compare that to today's averages of $40,000 for an average new care and median income of ~$36,000. From this same source the number of homes with radios about doubled, the number of cars on the street almost quadrupuled.

Disposable income during the 1920s skyrocketed to never seen before heights with the US as a whole starting in 1921 with a mere $50b of total disposable income, but by the start of the great depression only 8 years later that had almost doubled to nearly $84b of disposable income.

Manufacturing jobs had a brief dip in the post-WW1 era but had started to rebound during this time due to consumer demand rather than government demand (please note this is just an extrapolation from Manufacturing Corporate Net Income, and not an actual jobs dataset).

Consumer prices as a whole had risen dramatically through the end of WW1 but by the start of 1921 they fell and stayed stable throughout the 1920s. Groceries also were fairly stable during this period.

So to overall wrap this up, people of all class levels got wealthier, the middle and low income classes made dramatic gains in income, prices of goods stayed flat, more people had access to more technology than ever before, luxuries in 1919 were common fare by 1929. People were making goods for other consumers and these consumers had more and more disposable income to purchase goods.

jbdyer

This hits upon a genuinely interesting issue with cultural history, in that while we often remember the more colorful parts of eras, their prominence tends to obscure the wide variety of experiences possible living at the time. One could imagine people 100 years from now (hopefully not historians) wondering if every person from our era lived like an "influencer".

The "Roaring 1920s" are a different matter, insofar as in the most general sense they're not referring to a particular movement but a period of great optimism and economic growth. (Before the 1920s the title has been used before to refer to England's "roaring seventies" -- that's the 1870s -- meaning the same thing.) They weren't even bequeathed the title until about halfway through and it wasn't in common use until after the Great Depression, and it's possible some who lived in the cultural fog didn't know it surrounded them.

For those it benefited, the economy was definitely noticed. In 1928, Hoover, when accepting the Republic nomination for president, said

We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.

Yes, the economy improved. Who did it improve for?

The general consensus is that income inequality had a large drop by the end of World War I, and then through the 1920s there was a surge. You can see a chart here of the share of income held by the top 10%; notice they have 40% of the share of incoming all the way up to WWII. (To be fair, there were some adjustment made to income tax in that time period which counts some income which wasn't included before, so the jump isn't as bad as it looks, but still, we're talking about a "peak moment" in US inequality.)

That should hint that if you're more on the bottom end of the scale, you did not do as well. The average worker wage was flat.

If you were a farmer, you had done well in the War, but not after -- farm income went from $17.7 billion (1919) to $10.5 billion (1921). Prohibition meant a significant drop in barley demand (9.2 million acres harvested in 1918 down to 6.6 million in 1919, the year Prohibition was passed) and you were affected by a tariff war kicked off by the Emergency Tariff in 1921. (The tariffs were well-meaning at first intended to benefit farmers who getting hurt by dropping exports to Europe, but Europe responded with their own tariffs and farmers ended up hurting as a whole.)

For context, farmers made about 30% of the US population in 1920. (It dropped to 21.5% by the end of the decade.)

If you were growing cotton, you were already having a tough time -- the dread boll weevil insect was spreading in a "wave of evil" and was particularly prominent in the 1920s. This also affected black sharecroppers; about three-quarters of a million lost their jobs. A great many "traditional" industries had overproduction remaining as a legacy of the war; coal in particular also faced the rise of oil.

Poor immigrants? Not only did they suffer economically, there was an upsurge in anti-immigrant bigotry, and at a more practical level, the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 (targeting what was considered undesirable Europeans) and National Origins Act of 1924 (targeting both Asians and Europeans). The 1920s also had the second-wave revival of the KKK, which expanded from just targeting black people to immigrants. (Here's a 25,000 person march at the National Mall.)

The effect on farms in particular was so pronounced it essentially was its own depression within the boom. If you focus on the city workers and on non-immigrant whites you can get something approaching an economic "roar", but of course that all went away once the Great Depression started in 1929, and it was only in contrast to what happened after did the term "roaring 20s" become common.

...

The Oxford English Dictionary claims the earliest "roaring '20s" reference is from The Evening State Journal (Lincoln, Nebraska) although it wasn't common; The Reader's Digest has a "roaring '20s" reference from 1930 in referring to automobile production.

Dimitri, C., Effland, A., & Conklin, N. C. (2005). The 20th century transformation of US agriculture and farm policy (No. 1476-2016-120949).

Payne, P. G. (2015). Crash! How the Economic Boom and Bust of the 1920s Worked. United States: Johns Hopkins University Press. (This is non-technical and recommended for general reading.)

Piketty, T., & Saez, E. (2003). Income inequality in the United States, 1913–1998. The Quarterly journal of economics, 118(1), 1-41.

Payne, B. (2013). Poverty in the Prosperous Years: The Working Poor of the 1920s and Today. Bridgewater Review 32.2.

Smiley, G. (2000). A Note on New Estimates of the Distribution of Income in the 1920s. The Journal of Economic History, 60(4), 1120-1128.