The Roaring Twenties? Economy, Consumers and New Technology

Roaring for whom?

The 1920s are often called the Roaring Twenties: jazz, cars, radios and good times. That picture is partly true, especially for middle-class people in cities after about 1924. But the decade began with a sharp recession, and prosperity never reached everyone. Historians ask: Roaring for whom? This lesson covers economic trends (B1.3) and new technology (B1.2).

From bust to boom

• Postwar recession (about 1920–1922). War orders stopped, factories closed, and prices for wheat and other exports fell. Unemployment rose; soldiers were still coming home. Union membership fell after the defeats of 1919.
• Recovery and boom (about 1924–1929). Demand for Canadian staples grew again, especially from the United States:
• Pulp and paper for American newspapers, from the forests of Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia.
• Mining: gold, nickel, copper and other metals in northern Ontario and Quebec (Timmins, Kirkland Lake, Sudbury, Rouyn-Noranda) and in British Columbia.
• Hydroelectric power, which ran new factories and lit homes.
• Wheat from the Prairies, still Canada's biggest export.
• New manufacturing: cars, electrical appliances, chemicals.
• Railways: several private railways had gone bankrupt; between 1919 and 1923 the federal government combined them into the publicly owned Canadian National Railways (CNR).

The American connection

Before the war, most foreign investment in Canada came from Britain. During the 1920s, the United States became the largest foreign investor. Canada's tariffs made imported goods expensive, so American companies built branch plants inside Canada: Ford had been building cars in Walkerville (now part of Windsor) since 1904, and General Motors of Canada was formed in 1918 from the McLaughlin company of Oshawa. American companies also bought into Canadian mines, forests and oil.

Benefits: jobs, technology and capital for growth. Costs: profits and key decisions went to the United States, and Canadian industry became tied to the American economy, which would matter in 1929.

The consumer society

• Cars changed daily life: people could live farther from work, take holidays, and travel between towns. Roads were paved and gas stations appeared. Henry Ford's assembly line made cars cheaper.
• Electric appliances: in cities with electricity, families bought radios, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, electric stoves and refrigerators. Rural homes often still had no electricity.
• Advertising in magazines, newspapers and on the radio encouraged people to want new things.
• Buying on credit: stores let customers pay in instalments. Many families went into debt. Some people also bought stocks on margin (with borrowed money), which made the 1929 crash worse.
• Prices had risen during the war; in the 1920s, wages for many skilled workers improved, but unskilled workers, farm labourers and many women earned little.

New technology and who it affected (B1.2)

• Farm mechanization: gasoline tractors, trucks and, by the late 1920s, combine harvesters on the Prairies. Farms could grow more with fewer workers, so many young people left for the cities (one cause of the urban trend you analysed in the first lesson). Machines were expensive, so farmers often borrowed.
• Radio: by the mid-1920s, families could hear music, news and hockey broadcasts (Foster Hewitt began broadcasting hockey in Toronto in 1923). Many listeners tuned in to stronger American stations. In 1928 the government set up a royal commission (the Aird Commission), which in 1929 recommended public broadcasting, a step toward the CBC.
• Movies became hugely popular; most were American. Sound films ("talkies") arrived in 1927.
• Insulin (1921–1922): at the University of Toronto, Frederick Banting and Charles Best, working in J. J. R. Macleod's laboratory, with biochemist James Collip, developed insulin to treat diabetes, which until then was usually fatal. In January 1922, the first patient, 14-year-old Leonard Thompson, was treated at Toronto General Hospital. Banting and Macleod won the Nobel Prize in 1923; Banting shared his prize money with Best, and Macleod with Collip. Insulin has saved millions of lives around the world.

The North: whaling and fur (B1.3)

Commercial whaling in the eastern Arctic, which had hired many Inuit and brought trade goods, had collapsed by about the time of the war, because whales had been overhunted. In the 1920s, the fur trade moved north instead. The Hudson's Bay Company and others opened new trading posts across the Arctic, and Arctic fox furs fetched high prices. Many Inuit families trapped for trade goods such as rifles, tools and flour, which changed seasonal movements and made families more dependent on trading posts and world fur prices. The RCMP also set up posts in the high Arctic in the 1920s, partly to assert Canadian sovereignty. When fur prices fell, Inuit families faced real hardship.

Uneven prosperity (B1.1)

• Regions: the Maritimes struggled with declining industries; many young Maritimers moved to New England or central Canada. The Prairies depended on one crop, wheat.
• Groups: First Nations communities on reserves were often excluded from the new prosperity by the Indian Act. Many recent immigrants, Black Canadians and women worked in low-paid jobs.
• Cities vs. countryside: by 1931 most Canadians were urban, and city life offered the most new comforts.