The Age of the Consumer 659sprang up. Langston Hughes, one of the most tal-
ented poets of the era, described the exhilaration of
his first arrival in this city within a city, a magnet for
every black intellectual and artist: “Harlem! I...
dropped my bags, took a deep breath, and felt happy
again.” In 1925 Zora Neale Hurston, who had
worked in menial jobs while attending Howard
University, came to New York, joined with Hughes to
create a literary magazine, and celebrated the lives of
ordinary black workers.
With some exceptions, African American writers
like Hughes and Hurston did not share in the disillu-
sionment that afflicted so many white intellectuals.
The persistence of prejudice angered them and made
them militant. But to be militant, one must be at
some level hopeful. Sociologists and psychologists
(for whom the ghettos were indispensable social labo-
ratories) were demonstrating that environment rather
than heredity was preventing black economic
progress. Together with the achievements of creative
blacks, which for the first time were being appreciated
by large numbers of white intellectuals, these discov-
eries seemed to herald the eventual disappearance of
racial prejudice. The black, Alain Locke wrote in The
New Negro(1925), “lays aside the status of benefi-
ciary and ward for that of a collaborator and partici-
pant in American civilization.” Alas, as Locke and
other black intellectuals were soon to discover, this
prediction, like so many made in the 1920s, did not
come to pass.
The Harlem Renaissanceat
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Economic Expansion
Despite the turmoil of the times and the dissatisfactions
expressed by some of the nation’s best minds, the 1920s
was an exceptionally prosperous decade. Business
boomed, real wages rose, unemployment declined. The
United States was as rich as all Europe; perhaps 40 per-
cent of the world’s total wealth lay in American hands.
Little wonder that business leaders and other conserva-
tives described the period as a “new era.”
The prosperity rested on many bases, one of
which was the friendly, hands-off attitude of the fed-
eral government, which bolstered the confidence of
the business community. The Federal Reserve Board
kept interest rates low, a further stimulus to economic
growth. Pent-up wartime demand helped to power
the boom; the construction business in particular
profited from a series of extremely busy years. The
continuing mechanization and rationalization of
industry provided a more fundamental stimulus to the
economy. From heavy road-grading equipment and
concrete mixers to devices for making cigars and glass
tubes, from pneumatic tools to the dial telephone,
WatchtheVideomachinery was replacing human hands at an ever more
rapid rate. Industrial output almost doubled between
1921 and 1929 without any substantial increase in the
industrial labor force. Greater use of power, especially
of electricity, also encouraged expansion—by 1929 the
United States was producing more electricity than the
rest of the world combined.
Most important, American manufacturing was
experiencing a remarkable improvement in efficiency.
The method of breaking down the complex processes
of production into many simple operations and the use
of interchangeable parts were nineteenth-century inno-
vations; in the 1920s they were adopted on an almost
universal scale. The moving assembly line which carried
the product to the worker, first devised by Henry Ford
in his automobile plant in the decade before World
War I, speeded production and reduced costs. In ten
years the hourly output of Ford workers quadrupled.
The time-and-motion studies of Frederick W. Taylor,
developed early in the century, were applied in hun-
dreds of factories after the war. Taylor’s method was to
make careful analyses of each step and movement in the
manufacturing process. Then workers would be taught
exactly how best to perform each function. Taylor
described his system as “enforced standardization”
made possible by the “enforced cooperation” of work-
ers. “Taylorism” alarmed some union leaders, but no
one could deny the effectiveness of “scientific shop
management” methods.The Age of the Consumer
The growing ability of manufacturers to produce
goods meant that great effort had to be made to cre-
ate new consumer demands. Advertising and sales-
manship were raised almost to the status of fine arts.
Bruce Barton, one of the advertising “geniuses” of
the era, wrote a best-selling book,The Man Nobody
Knows(1925), in which he described Jesus as the
“founder of modern business,” the man who
“picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks...
and forged them into an organization that con-
quered the world.”
Producers concentrated on making their goods
more attractive and on changing models frequently
to entice buyers into the market. The practice of sell-
ing goods on the installment plan helped bring
expensive items within the reach of the masses.
Inventions and technological advances created new
or improved products: radios, automobiles, electric
appliances such as vacuum cleaners and refrigerators,
gadgets like cigarette lighters, and new forms of
entertainment like motion pictures. These influences
interacted much as the textile industry in the early
nineteenth century and the railroad industry after the
Civil War had been the “multipliers” of their times.