When the automobile came about everybody thought it was amazing and favored it by forgetting about other industries.
Through Henry Ford's intelligence, automobile became America’s biggest single manufacturing industry in the 1920s. By the twenties, automakers used 16% of America’s steel, 80% of its rubber, half of its glass, 65% of its leather upholstery, and 7 billion gallons of its gasoline every year. Naturally, the industries that provided those materials, such as steel-making and oil refining, also grew.
While most Americans enjoyed a better standard of living, others struggled to survive. For some sectors of the farm economy, the 1920s brought not prosperity but devastation.
Farm prices had stayed high during the war and just afterward, as American farmers supplied food to the United States and to war—torn Europe. After the war, however, the recovering European farm industry and cheaper food imports helped to push American products out of the European market. The huge wartime demand shrank, and American farm prices, especially for wheat and hogs, plummeted.
During more prosperous times, many farmers had borrowed money to buy new tractors and other machinery. Their new equipment allowed them to expand their operations, so they bought more land as well.
In the late 1920s, when most Americans spent freely on consumer goods, these farmers could not even pay back their loans. Many of them abandoned agriculture. Others hung on to the only way of life they had ever known, going even further into debt every day.
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