1920 Read Online Free Page B

commonplace, factory production increased, and stores and shops were able to stay open later and make more money—their merchandise, thanks to electricity, now brightly lit and the ambience cheerful and welcoming even after hours. The entire nation hummed with an energy that had never existed before.
    BUT THE ENERGY WOULD NOT have been possible without coal either, which was being dug out of the ground in record amounts. In 1910, Americans excavated 500,000,000 so-called “short tons” from its burial places; a decade later, the number had climbed to 657,000,000. At first, it was more tonnage than could be efficiently transported, which caused such an increase in demand for railroad cars that even United States Steel struggled at times to meet it.
    And, as if that weren’t enough to solidify U.S. manufacturing dominance, the biggest oil deposits in the world outside of Texas would be found in Alaska in 1920. “While in Juneau Tuesday,” the
New York Times
reported, several “Cabinet officers were informed of the discovery of oil in Southern and Southwestern Alaska and the
Juneau Daily Empire
said that 35,000 acres had been filed upon by prospectors.” So far. More would be filed upon soon. Nineteen twenty was to oil in the United States what 1849 had been to gold.
    By the end of the twenties, the stock market had climbed an astonishing 400 per cent. But the gross domestic product had risen only 60 percent, and as historian Bill Bryson points out, there was “little correspondence” between the two figures: the “inflated rises [of the market] had nothing to do with any underlying productivity; all that kept them so giddily buoyant was the willingness of fresh buyers to bid the prices even higher.” The giddiness, as it would turn out, was a form of manic-depression; before the decade ended, the latter of the two hyphenated traits would be settling in to devastate the thirties.
    There were, in fact, hints of the crisis to come well before it arrived, the faintest of scents in America’s continuing gusts of optimism. In the year that is this book’s subject, the November 13 issue of
The Magazine of Wall Street
provided one of them. “Fluctuations in sugar during 1920,” it reported,
    were probably more violent than in any other commodity. Prices ranged from 4⅝ cents to 24½ cents for duty paid raw sugar and from 7½ cents to 27½ cents refiners’ list price for refined sugar. To give an accurate understanding of the violence of these fluctuations the American Sugar Refining Co. points out in its annual report that an investigation of the prices of one hundred years, including the years of the Mexican and Civil Wars, failed to reveal a change in any one year one-half so great as the fluctuation of 19.875 cents per pound of [1920].
    It should never have happened.
    Neither should the wild swings in bond prices that were also a subject of the same issue of
The Magazine of Wall Street
. The bond market, after all, was known for stability, even more then than it is today. Was there something unsettling under the country’s surface?
    Meanwhile, as the United States was making its transition from rural to urban, from a nation primarily agricultural to one dependent on industry, lands devoted to farming began a startling and economically unsettling drop.
    In New York, for example, in a trend beginning in 1920 and continuing for the next thirty-two years, crops were grown on a total, after those three decades-plus, of 4,600,000 fewer acres, about 13 percent of the total area of the state.
    But 1920 provided only the first few signs of decline, and even if more people had spotted them, it is unlikely that they would have recognized them for what they were.
The Magazine of Wall Street
, after all, was hardly the
Saturday Evening Post
. As for the vast majority of Americans, they were willing to let the streamers fly and the confetti drop with complete