The end of World War I brought with it a slacken-
ing of economic and industrial constraints and a
surging demand for consumer goods. Within just a
few years, a mass consumption economy emerged.
By the 1930s, hundreds of thousands of people had
acquired telephones, cars, phonographs, radios, and
a host of other products that had come on the mar-
ket in recent decades. During the Roaring Twenties a
get-rich-quick mentality bred scandal and corruption.
President Warren Harding’s inability to rein in his
underlings led to the Teapot Dome scandal of 1921,
during which the valuable naval oil reserves in Tea-
pot Dome, California, and Elk Hills, Wyoming, were
transferred from the Navy Department to the Interior
Department and then leased to two oil men, Harry Sin-
clair and Edward Doheny, after they paid a $100,000
bribe to Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall.
Urban Growth and Rural
Development
By the early 1920s, the U.S. population had reached
one million, with more than half of the people liv-
ing in urban areas. The new urban residents not
only provided a huge market for America’s expand-
ing industry, but they also pushed the borders of
cities into what had once been farmland, making it
necessary to transport agricultural produce longer
distances and placed increasing demands on metro-
politan water supplies and waste disposal systems.
As cars replaced horses on city streets, the manure
problem disappeared. Eventually, however, that
problem would be replaced by a new kind of pollu-
tion, auto emissions, but this would not become evi-
dent until after World War II. Although consumer
buying slowed during the Great Depression, New
Deal public works programs, such as the Tennessee
Valley Authority (TVA) program, brought electrifi-
cation to rural areas and in time swelled the demand
for electrical appliances.
In the 1930s the dust bowl crisis in the south-
central United States awakened America to the
wastefulness of current farming practices that
resulted in devastating soil erosion. John Steinbeck
in his novel The Grapes of Wrath [see Document 84]
decried both the environmental and the human deg-
radation resulting from these practices. In 1935, the
Soil Conservation Service was established within the