The USA in transition 1890 to 1990: industrial growth and reform, the Depression and New Deal, the world wars, the civil rights movement, and Cold War superpower status.

What this dot point is asking

This WJEC period study asks you to explain change and continuity across a century of United States history, from the industrial Gilded Age of the 1890s to the USA's position as the dominant world power in 1990. You need command of the long arc (growth, crisis, reform and global power) and the synoptic skill of weighing what changed against what stayed the same, especially over race and the role of government.

The answer

Industrial growth and reform, 1890 to 1929

• Big business and reform. Industrial giants and trusts prompted Progressive regulation under Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
• The 1920s. Mass production and credit fuelled a consumer boom, but it rested on uneven prosperity and speculation.
• The Crash. The 1929 Wall Street Crash triggered the Great Depression, with unemployment reaching around 25 per cent and waves of bank failures.

Depression and the New Deal, 1929 to 1941

Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal from 1933 used federal "alphabet agencies" to deliver relief, recovery and reform. It rescued banking and finance (the Emergency Banking Act, Glass-Steagall, the SEC), built lasting institutions (Social Security 1935) and restored confidence, but unemployment remained high until rearmament, and it did little for African Americans. The Depression ended with the economic mobilisation of the Second World War.

The world wars and superpower status, 1917 to 1990

The USA's economic and military dominance, and the global spread of American culture, marked it as the pre-eminent power of the late twentieth century, the surviving superpower as the Soviet bloc collapsed.

Civil rights and social change, 1945 to 1990

The civil rights movement challenged the legal segregation of the South. Landmark moments such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955 to 1956), the leadership of Martin Luther King, and the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965) dismantled Jim Crow, though economic and de facto inequality persisted.

Examples in context

Model paragraph (did the New Deal solve the Depression?). The New Deal rescued the American system more than it cured the Depression. Its achievements were real and lasting: emergency relief through the CCC and WPA put millions to work, the banking reforms of 1933 and the creation of the SEC restored confidence in finance, and Social Security (1935) built a permanent welfare floor. Politically it preserved democratic capitalism at a moment when many states were turning to dictatorship. Yet it did not end the Depression on its own terms: unemployment, though down from its 1933 peak, remained around 14 per cent after the "Roosevelt recession" of 1937, recovery was uneven, and African Americans and southern sharecroppers were largely excluded from its benefits. What finally restored full employment was the vast spending of the Second World War. The fairest judgement is therefore that the New Deal saved the political and economic system and reshaped the role of government, but that wartime mobilisation, not the New Deal itself, cured the Depression.

Try this

Q1. What three aims did the New Deal pursue? [3 marks]

• Cue. Relief, recovery and reform.

Q2. Name two civil rights laws of the 1960s. [2 marks]

• Cue. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Q3. To what extent did the New Deal solve the problems of the Great Depression? [20 marks]

• What the marker wants. A judgement weighing relief, reform and restored confidence against persistent unemployment and the role of the war, with dated evidence.