AQA GCSE History Paper 1, Section AAmerica, 1920-1973: Opportunity and Inequality — every question, answered

Interpretation A suggests that Roosevelt had a bad effect on America because it says his policies damaged the economic freedom of Americans, criticising the New Deal for interfering with how businesses and individuals could operate. Interpretation B takes a completely different view, arguing that Roosevelt's changes brought hope and confidence to ordinary people, presenting his presidency as something to be celebrated rather than criticised.

This is a significant difference because Interpretation A focuses on the negative economic consequences of Roosevelt's government intervention, while Interpretation B focuses on the positive emotional and social impact his leadership had on people who were suffering during the Depression. Interpretation A therefore judges Roosevelt on economic freedom, whereas Interpretation B judges him on the hope he restored, which shows the two interpretations are not simply disagreeing about facts but about what mattered most when judging his presidency.

Interpretation A portrays immigrants as a threat, claiming they are undesirable arrivals with no respect for the law and no gratitude for what earlier generations built, even suggesting they secretly want to replace American government with Communism. Interpretation B completely disagrees, presenting immigrants as hardworking, loyal citizens who take on jobs others refuse and who are proud to have adapted to American society.

A further difference is that Interpretation A implies immigrants are disloyal outsiders who reject American values and laws, whereas Interpretation B stresses that immigrants want to settle permanently and become part of the nation, showing commitment rather than rejection. This is a genuinely separate contrast about loyalty and intention, not just a repeat of the first point, which is what pushes the answer into the top band.

Interpretation A claims that Rock and Roll shaped the whole of American society, changing what people bought and how they thought about social behaviour, across the entirety of the 1950s. Interpretation B disagrees with this scale of impact, presenting the music as something that only reached a small section of teenagers and that the vast majority of the population disliked it. This is a clear difference in how far each source believes the reach of Rock and Roll extended across the country.

The two interpretations also differ in their judgement of whether Rock and Roll was a positive or negative development. Interpretation A treats it as something enjoyable that brought happiness to those who listened to it, reflecting a welcoming attitude towards the new style. Interpretation B instead treats it as a harmful influence, going as far as to link the music to a rise in badly behaved and lawless teenagers. This shows that as well as disagreeing about scale, the sources disagree about whether the effect of Rock and Roll on society was good or bad.

Interpretation A gives a picture of daily fear and restriction. Nash explains that after moving to the Deep South she was left in a constant state of anxiety and felt hemmed in by her surroundings, and that following a segregation law meant accepting that she was inferior. Interpretation B is completely different in tone, since it presents Johnson as having a good life at NASA where she did not experience racial prejudice, because people there were valued for their intellect and the work they did rather than their skin colour.

The two interpretations also differ in scope. A describes segregation affecting almost every part of Nash's life across a whole region, the Deep South, during the late 1950s, whereas B focuses on a single workplace, NASA in Virginia, over a much longer period of more than thirty years. This means A gives an impression of racial prejudice as something that touched wider society, while B gives an impression that it was possible to escape that prejudice within one particular institution.

Interpretation A is written by Flynn, a critic who believed in laissez faire economics and opposed the growth of federal power under the New Deal. This belief shapes the whole interpretation, because someone who is fundamentally against government intervention in the economy will naturally interpret the Alphabet Agencies as a restriction of freedom rather than as a form of help, which explains why the interpretation reaches such a negative judgement of Roosevelt.

Interpretation B, by contrast, comes from a speech by Reagan celebrating Roosevelt's life, meaning its purpose was to honour him rather than to give a balanced assessment. A speech delivered on an occasion meant to celebrate someone's legacy is very unlikely to contain criticism, which explains why it focuses only on the hope and confidence Roosevelt's New Deal gave to ordinary Americans who had suffered during the Depression, rather than mentioning the economic drawbacks that Interpretation A raises.

Alma White was a Protestant bishop and founder of the Pillar of Fire Church who publicly supported the Ku Klux Klan, a group that promoted white Protestant supremacy and was hostile to Catholics, Jews and immigrants generally. Writing in 1928, at a time when nativist feeling was running high, her religious position and Klan sympathies gave her every reason to present immigrants as dangerous outsiders threatening a Protestant vision of America, rather than a genuinely balanced assessment of who they were.

Robert Clancy was a Republican politician, lawyer and businessman from an industrial city, who would have seen at first hand how immigrant labour powered the industrial boom of the 1920s in factories and construction, and as an adviser on economic matters he had professional reasons to highlight their contribution to production rather than their supposed threat. His background in journalism and law also meant his purpose was likely to persuade voters and defend immigrant communities against nativist politics, explaining his far more positive tone.

One reason the two writers give different views is because of who Ventura was and what his career depended on. Ventura became a journalist who worked from the 1970s through to the 2010s for magazines that specialised in covering new and emerging styles of music. Because his professional life was built around promoting fresh musical trends, it makes sense that he would look back on Rock and Roll positively, as the birth of a movement that fits the same pattern of exciting new music he spent his career championing. He was also a teenager himself in the 1950s, so he is describing something he personally experienced and enjoyed rather than something he encountered from a distance.

Sinatra's background points to the opposite kind of bias. In the 1940s he had been one of the most famous singers in America, attracting so many devoted young fans that the press called it Sinatramania, but by the early 1950s his style had fallen out of fashion and he actually lost his recording contract. When Rock and Roll then became the dominant sound of the decade, it was the kind of music that had displaced performers like Sinatra, so he had a personal and financial reason to resent it rather than judge it neutrally. As an older adult by the late 1950s who had lived through his own career being overtaken by this new sound, he was always likely to give a more critical account of Rock and Roll's effect on society than someone like Ventura.

One reason for the difference is who wrote each interpretation and why. Interpretation A comes from a 2017 interview with Diane Nash, given almost sixty years after the events she describes, for a TV series about women who changed the world, published in a British newspaper. Nash was arrested in 1961 for organising the Freedom Rides, so her own direct experience was of confronting segregation laws in the Deep South. Because the purpose of the interview is to explain the personal cost of racial injustice to a modern television audience, it is likely to emphasise her fear and hardship.

Interpretation B comes from an account of Katherine Johnson's life published in 2019 in a book called Reaching for the Moon, written specifically for younger readers. Johnson worked at NASA in Virginia for over thirty years as a mathematician and helped make possible the Moon landing mission. Because the book is aimed at children and intended to celebrate her achievements and inspire them about science and space exploration, it is likely to focus on the positive and successful side of her career rather than on any difficulties she may have faced because of her race.

Interpretation A is convincing to an extent because there is strong contextual evidence that Roosevelt's use of government power did provoke serious opposition on the grounds of economic freedom. In 1935 the Supreme Court ruled in the Schechter Poultry case that the National Industrial Recovery Act was unconstitutional, arguing that Roosevelt's Alphabet Agencies had given the federal government powers that infringed on the rights of individual states and businesses. Wealthy businessmen also formed the American Liberty League in 1934 specifically to campaign against what they saw as excessive government interference in the economy, which supports Interpretation A's claim that Roosevelt damaged economic freedom.

However, this criticism mainly came from wealthy businessmen and Republican politicians who had a vested interest in less regulation, so it does not necessarily represent how most ordinary Americans experienced the New Deal. This makes Interpretation B, which claims Roosevelt brought hope and confidence to people, more convincing when tested against the evidence of ordinary voters rather than business elites. Roosevelt won a landslide re-election in 1936, taking 46 of the 48 states, and went on to be elected four times in total, which suggests genuine and growing public confidence in his leadership rather than manufactured praise. His fireside chats, broadcast on the radio from 1933, reassured millions of Americans during the banking crisis, and the Civilian Conservation Corps, launched in 1933, enrolled over 250,000 young men within months and hundreds of thousands more over the following years.

Even so, Interpretation B is a celebratory speech, so it is worth asking whether the hope it describes applied equally to everyone. African American tenant farmers, for example, were often excluded from Agricultural Adjustment Act payments because these were paid to white landowners rather than the tenants who worked the land, showing that the New Deal did not create confidence for all Americans equally. Weighing this up, I think Interpretation B is ultimately more convincing overall, because Roosevelt's repeated election victories provide independent evidence of widespread public confidence that goes beyond the speech's own claims, whereas Interpretation A's criticism reflects the genuine but narrower concerns of business elites whose economic freedom was restricted, rather than the experience of the country as a whole.

Interpretation B is only partly convincing because Clancy's own background as a Republican politician who advised the government on the economy gives him a direct interest in defending immigration, since 1920s industry relied heavily on immigrant labour to staff factories and keep wage costs down. His praise for immigrants as hard workers reads less as a neutral judgement and more as a defence of an economic arrangement his own party and business allies benefited from.

Interpretation A is more convincing as a reflection of dominant attitudes because the fears it expresses were not fringe views. The Ku Klux Klan, which White's own church supported, grew to several million members nationwide by the mid 1920s, campaigning openly against Catholic and Jewish immigrants as well as against Black Americans, showing that hostility toward newcomers of the kind Interpretation A voices had genuine mass support rather than being an isolated opinion.

This attitude was translated directly into government policy, since the fears voiced in Interpretation A match the thinking behind the Immigration Act of 1924, which set strict national quotas based on the 1890 census specifically to reduce arrivals from southern and eastern Europe, the very groups accused of bringing crime and Communism. The fact that a real law was built on these prejudices makes Interpretation A more convincing as an accurate representation of 1920s opinion, even though Interpretation B's account of immigrant contribution to the economy is also factually true.

Overall Interpretation A is more convincing not because it is fairer or kinder, but because it better reflects the mainstream prejudice of the period that actually shaped events, from the scale of Klan membership to the 1924 quotas, whereas Interpretation B, though accurate about individual immigrant experience, represents a minority, more tolerant Republican voice that did not reflect national policy or opinion at the time.

Interpretation A is partly convincing when it claims Rock and Roll changed consumer habits, because 1950s teenagers genuinely had far more spending money than earlier generations thanks to the post-war economic boom, and they used it on records, clothes, cars and days out, which is why companies increasingly designed adverts and products specifically aimed at 'teenagers' as a new group of customers. However, A's claim that the whole country was affected cannot really be tested just from the source itself, because plenty of adults in the 1950s carried on buying records by more traditional singers rather than switching to Rock and Roll, which suggests the change in taste was concentrated among the young rather than universal, so 'the whole country' is an exaggeration of how far the influence actually spread.

Interpretation B's claim that Rock and Roll was a bad influence is also partly convincing, because there really was a backlash against the music from parts of American society. Some radio stations refused to play Rock and Roll records, church and community leaders spoke out against it, and its association with rebellious behaviour is reflected in the popularity of films like Rebel Without a Cause in 1955, which starred James Dean as a troubled teenager. This shows that fear of Rock and Roll encouraging lawlessness was a real attitude held by part of society, not something Sinatra invented. However, B's claim that only a few teenagers were affected does not fit with how commercially successful the music became. Elvis Presley alone sold millions of records in the mid 1950s, which cannot be explained if only a small number of teenagers were listening, so this part of Sinatra's account looks exaggerated, especially given that Sinatra had personally lost his own record contract and popularity once this newer style of music took over.

Weighing the two together, I think Interpretation A gives the more convincing overall picture, because the scale of Rock and Roll's commercial success, shown by record sales and the way businesses reorganised around teenage spending, is easier to verify than Sinatra's claim that hardly anyone was affected. Interpretation B is still useful because it accurately captures that a real division existed between generations, but its attempt to minimise the size of that impact is undermined by its own provenance, since Sinatra had good personal reason to play down the importance of a musical style that had cost him his own fame.

My contextual knowledge supports the picture given in Interpretation A. The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 to 1956 and the forced integration of the Little Rock Nine into Central High School in 1957, which needed federal troops to enforce, both show that African-Americans faced real hostility and danger simply for challenging segregation. Nash herself organised the Freedom Rides of 1961, during which buses were attacked and riders beaten, so her description of feeling scared and confined is backed up by events that actually happened to her and to others across the Deep South.

However, my contextual knowledge also lets me interrogate Interpretation B rather than simply accept it. Even inside NASA's research centre in Virginia, African-American mathematicians including Johnson originally worked in a segregated unit and had to use separate bathrooms and canteen facilities, a situation which only ended around 1958. This means that although Johnson may genuinely have felt respected for her mathematical work, she was still working inside an organisation that mirrored the wider segregation of the South for at least part of her career, something Interpretation B leaves out almost entirely. This makes its claim that skin colour did not matter appear too simple when checked against what is actually known about NASA facilities at the time.

Weighing the two together, I think Interpretation A is the more convincing. The fear and restriction it describes is confirmed by a wide range of separate evidence across this period, including the Little Rock Nine in 1957, the Freedom Rides in 1961 in which Nash herself took part, and the fact that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 were only passed because such widespread injustice still needed to be legislated against. Interpretation B is a valuable personal account, but it describes an unusually successful individual in a specialised job, and even then it omits evidence of segregation that historians know existed inside NASA itself. For these reasons Interpretation A gives the more convincing picture of African-American lives as a whole during the 1950s and 1960s.

One problem faced by immigrants, especially those from Eastern Europe, was suspicion that they held communist or anarchist beliefs. During the Red Scare of 1919 to 1920, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer ordered the Palmer Raids, in which thousands of suspected radicals, many of them recent immigrants, were arrested and hundreds were deported without proper trials. This meant immigrants faced real fear of being targeted purely because of where they had come from.

A second problem was the introduction of strict immigration quotas that limited how many people could enter the country. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 restricted immigration to 3 percent of each nationality's population already living in America in 1910, and the National Origins Act of 1924 reduced this further to 2 percent based on the 1890 census, deliberately favouring Northern and Western Europeans and almost entirely excluding immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe as well as banning Japanese immigration completely.

One major problem tackled was the lack of reproductive rights, since abortion was illegal in most states, forcing many women to use dangerous and often fatal illegal procedures; this was eventually addressed by the Supreme Court's 1973 ruling in Roe v Wade, which legalised abortion nationwide, although this decision was strongly opposed by conservative and religious groups in several states.

A second problem was workplace inequality, including unequal pay and job discrimination, which the National Organisation for Women, founded in 1966 by Betty Friedan, campaigned against; feminists also pushed for the Equal Rights Amendment to guarantee constitutional equality between the sexes, though this failed to be ratified by enough states partly because critics like Phyllis Schlafly argued it could remove protections such as exemption from the military draft.

One problem faced during the Depression was mass unemployment. After the Wall Street Crash in October 1929, businesses cut back production and closed down, and by 1933 around 13 million Americans, roughly a quarter of the workforce, were out of work. Without wages, many families could not afford basic essentials like food and heating, and this problem was made worse because there was no national system of unemployment benefit to support people who lost their jobs.

A second problem was the loss of homes through eviction. Because so many people were unemployed, they could not keep up mortgage or rent payments, so families were regularly evicted from their houses. Many of those made homeless built makeshift shanty towns out of scrap materials, which became known as Hoovervilles, a mocking reference to President Hoover, who ordinary people blamed for failing to take effective action to help them.

One problem caused by McCarthyism was that people could be publicly accused of being communists with little or no real evidence, which could destroy their career. In 1947 the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated Hollywood, and the Hollywood Ten were imprisoned for contempt of Congress after refusing to answer questions about their political beliefs. Actors and directors accused in this way were often blacklisted by film studios, meaning they could no longer find work even though nothing had actually been proven against them.

A second problem was the atmosphere of fear and suspicion that McCarthy's accusations created across the whole country. In a speech in Wheeling in February 1950, McCarthy claimed to have a list of over two hundred communists working inside the State Department, although he never produced real proof. This encouraged ordinary Americans to suspect their neighbours, colleagues and even family members of being secret communists, and it was only after the televised Army-McCarthy hearings that the Senate finally voted to censure McCarthy in December 1954 for his conduct.

The economic boom transformed everyday life through mass production, particularly of cars. Henry Ford's use of the moving assembly line meant that a basic Model T Ford cost around 290 dollars by the mid 1920s, low enough for many ordinary working families to afford, and by 1929 around 23 million cars were registered in the United States. This gave people new freedom to travel, encouraged the growth of suburbs away from city centres, and created millions of jobs in related industries such as steel, rubber and glass, as well as new businesses like petrol stations and motels along the roads cars used.

The boom also changed how Americans consumed goods because of the spread of hire purchase, which let people buy expensive items on credit and pay in instalments. By the late 1920s around 60 percent of cars and about 80 percent of radios were bought this way, meaning families who could not previously afford these items now had them in their homes. Rising wages and more leisure time meant people also spent money on entertainment, going to the cinema to watch the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer, in 1927, and listening and dancing to jazz music in nightclubs, which became symbols of the new, more liberated culture of the decade.

A further way lives changed was through the stock market boom, as rising confidence encouraged millions of ordinary Americans, not just wealthy investors, to buy shares by borrowing most of the purchase price, known as buying on margin. This meant that for the first time people outside the traditional financial elite felt they could get rich through investment, and the number of Americans owning shares rose into the millions during the decade, fuelling a widespread sense of optimism about the future.

These changes were all connected in a cycle of prosperity: mass production created jobs and wages, which created demand for consumer goods bought on credit, which in turn kept factories producing and share prices rising. This cycle affected almost every part of American life, from where people lived to how they spent their evenings, but it also meant that many people's new lifestyles were built on debt and speculation rather than real savings, which left their prosperity more fragile than it appeared.

The lives of black Americans were transformed by legal changes won through peaceful protest. Martin Luther King's leadership of the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 to 1956, following Rosa Parks' arrest, led the Supreme Court to rule bus segregation unconstitutional, and his continued campaigning helped secure the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination in public places such as restaurants, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which removed literacy tests used to stop black voters registering in the South.

White Americans' lives were also affected because the movement forced the nation, and the world, to confront racial violence happening within it. Television coverage of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march, where police attacked peaceful protesters with tear gas and clubs, shocked domestic and international opinion and put pressure on President Johnson to push through the Voting Rights Act within months.

Not all effects were positive or peaceful, however, since the slower pace of change frustrated many, particularly in northern cities, leading to riots such as the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965, which killed 34 people and destroyed large areas of property, and to the rise of the Black Power movement. The Black Panther Party, founded in 1966, armed itself and clashed repeatedly with police, showing that Civil Rights campaigning also brought increased fear and social division to many communities.

These different effects were connected: it was precisely because peaceful methods like King's produced real but limited change that impatience grew, fuelling the more confrontational Black Power approach, so the lives of Americans, black and white alike, were reshaped both by the legal gains of the mid 1960s and by the unrest and division that followed when those gains were seen as too slow or insufficient.

One clear way feminist movements changed lives was through gains in reproductive rights. In 1973 the Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v Wade established that women had a constitutional right to a legal and safe abortion, at least in the earlier stages of pregnancy. This was a direct result of campaigning by groups such as the National Organisation for Women, which had been founded in 1966 by Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, to fight for women's equality under the law. For many women this gave far greater control over their own reproductive choices than they had experienced before.

However, legal change did not always translate into equal treatment in everyday life. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 made it illegal to pay men and women different wages for doing the same job, but by the early 1970s women were still typically earning significantly less than men on average, partly because women were often pushed into lower paid roles or held back from promotion in the first place. This shows that although the law had changed, deep inequality in pay and opportunity continued to affect women's daily working lives.

Feminist campaigning also produced a backlash that shaped how far change could go. When Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972 to guarantee full legal equality between men and women, a campaign called Stop-ERA, led by Phyllis Schlafly, argued that it would strip away protections that traditional housewives relied on, and this campaign contributed to the amendment failing to be ratified by enough states. At the same time, protests such as the 1968 demonstration outside the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, where campaigners publicly threw items like high heels and bras into a 'Freedom Trash Can' to symbolise rejection of how women were judged on their appearance, raised public awareness of the movement's aims even though the protest was often mocked in the media at the time.

One way ordinary Americans were affected was through mass unemployment. As businesses cut back production because people could no longer afford to buy goods, unemployment rose to around 13 million by 1933, roughly a quarter of the entire workforce. This meant millions of families lost their main source of income almost overnight.

A second effect was the loss of personal savings caused by the collapse of the banking system. Because banks had invested customers' deposits in the stock market, panic withdrawals during bank runs meant that many banks ran out of money, and over 5,000 banks failed by 1933. Families who had saved for years lost everything they had, which made the unemployment crisis even worse because people had no savings to fall back on.

This loss of income and savings led directly to widespread homelessness. Unable to pay rent or mortgages, many families ended up living in shanty towns nicknamed Hoovervilles after President Hoover, who was blamed for failing to act. In 1932 unemployed First World War veterans known as the Bonus Army marched on Washington DC to demand early payment of a bonus they had been promised, and were forcibly removed by the US Army, showing how desperate and visible the crisis had become.

Rural Americans were affected in a different way. Farmers in the Midwest, who were already struggling with low crop prices throughout the 1920s, were hit by a severe drought in the early 1930s that turned farmland into what became known as the Dust Bowl. Thousands of farming families were forced to abandon their land and migrate west to states such as California in search of work, showing that the Depression's effects reached beyond the cities and into farming communities as well.

Campaigns for civil rights and equality brought significant change to American society by directly challenging segregation through mass action. After Rosa Parks was arrested in December 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger, Martin Luther King helped organise the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted 381 days and ended in 1956 when the Supreme Court ruled that segregated buses were unconstitutional. This showed ordinary African Americans that organised, non violent protest could force real legal change, and it launched King as a national leader of the movement.

Further campaigning kept up pressure through the 1960s. In August 1963, around 250,000 people took part in the March on Washington, where King delivered his I Have a Dream speech, which was broadcast nationally and increased public sympathy for civil rights. Sit ins, such as the Greensboro sit in of 1960, and the Freedom Rides of 1961, directly challenged segregation in restaurants and interstate buses. Equality campaigns were not limited to race either, as the feminist movement, through groups such as the National Organization for Women founded in 1966, campaigned for equal rights, eventually contributing to the Supreme Court's 1973 ruling in Roe v Wade that legalised abortion nationally.

The actions of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson also brought change, often by using federal power to enforce what campaigners were demanding. In 1962, President Kennedy sent federal troops to the University of Mississippi to protect James Meredith, its first African American student, and in 1963 he confronted Governor Wallace's attempt to block black students entering the University of Alabama. This showed that the federal government was now prepared to use its authority against Southern state governments that resisted desegregation.

President Johnson went further by turning protest into law. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination in public places and employment, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed literacy tests and allowed federal officials to oversee voter registration in Southern states, dramatically increasing black voter registration. Johnson's Great Society programme also introduced Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 and the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, targeting investment in education, housing and healthcare at the poorest Americans, many of whom were African American.

Overall, I think the two factors worked together rather than one causing more change alone, but the actions of the Presidents were what turned the campaigns' demands into lasting legal change. The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the March on Washington created the public pressure and moral case for change, generating publicity that politicians could not ignore if they wanted to win elections, but it was Johnson's Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act that gave African Americans enforceable legal rights across the whole country, not just in individual cities or states. Without the campaigns, Presidents would have had little reason to act, but without presidential and legal action, the campaigns' victories would have stayed local and vulnerable to being ignored, which is why I judge the Presidents' actions as bringing the more lasting and widespread change, built on the foundations the campaigns created.

President Hoover's response to the Depression had only a limited effect on ordinary Americans' suffering because he was committed to the idea of 'rugged individualism' and believed the economy would recover without direct government relief. Although he set up the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in 1932 to lend money to banks and businesses, this did little to help the millions of unemployed directly, and his decision to send the army under General MacArthur to forcibly remove the Bonus Army, a group of World War One veterans camped in Washington DC in 1932 demanding early payment of promised bonuses, badly damaged his reputation and showed how little sympathy his administration seemed to offer.

As a direct result of this limited action, homelessness and poverty worsened visibly, with shanty towns nicknamed 'Hoovervilles' springing up in cities such as New York and Seattle, and unemployment rising to around 25 per cent of the workforce by 1933, meaning Hoover's actions had comparatively little positive impact on the effects of the Depression.

In contrast, Roosevelt's New Deal had a far greater and more direct impact because it abandoned laissez-faire economics in favour of active government intervention. Within his first hundred days in office in 1933 he closed and reformed failing banks through the Emergency Banking Act, and he created Alphabet Agencies with specific practical purposes, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps, which employed around 2.5 million young men in environmental projects like planting trees and building trails, and the Works Progress Administration, established in 1935, which employed millions in construction of schools, roads and hospitals. His radio broadcasts, known as 'Fireside Chats', also directly reassured the public and restored confidence in the banking system, something Hoover never achieved.

However, the New Deal's impact should not be overstated, since unemployment never fell below around 14 per cent during the 1930s, and when Roosevelt cut back New Deal spending in 1937 in an attempt to balance the budget, the economy sharply worsened in what became known as the 'Roosevelt Recession', with unemployment rising again and industrial production falling. This shows that even Roosevelt's more active approach did not fully solve the underlying economic problems.

Overall, Roosevelt's actions had considerably more impact on the effects of the Depression than Hoover's, because his willingness to intervene directly through relief, recovery and reform measures provided real jobs, rebuilt confidence in banks and gave ordinary Americans practical help that Hoover's more limited, hands-off approach never delivered, even though neither president fully ended the Depression, which was only resolved by the economic demands of the Second World War.

Prohibition, introduced by the Volstead Act which enforced the 18th Amendment from January 1920, had a huge impact on American society because it created a hugely profitable illegal trade in alcohol that gangsters exploited. In Chicago, Al Capone built a criminal empire around bootlegging alcohol that was estimated to earn him around 60 million dollars a year by the late 1920s, and gangs used bribery to corrupt police officers and local officials so that speakeasies, illegal drinking bars such as the thousands that existed in New York City, could operate largely undisturbed.

Prohibition also endangered ordinary citizens rather than just criminals, because homemade alcohol known as moonshine was often poorly made and sometimes poisonous, leading to a number of deaths from alcohol poisoning during the 1920s. The law was also very difficult to enforce properly, since there were only a small number of federal Prohibition agents responsible for policing the whole country, and the failure of the policy was eventually admitted when the 21st Amendment repealed Prohibition in 1933.

Immigration also had a significant impact on society in the 1920s, mainly through the fear and prejudice it generated rather than through the numbers of immigrants themselves, since laws such as the 1921 Emergency Quota Act and the 1924 Immigration Act sharply limited how many people, especially from Southern and Eastern Europe, could enter the country. The Red Scare of 1919 to 1920, fuelled by fear that immigrants were bringing communist ideas after the Russian Revolution of 1917, led Attorney General Mitchell Palmer to order the Palmer Raids, in which thousands of suspected radicals, many of them immigrants, were arrested and some deported, such as the anarchist Emma Goldman. Prejudice against immigrants was also shown by the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, whose membership grew to several million by the mid 1920s and targeted Catholics and Jewish immigrants as well as Black Americans.

Overall I think prohibition had more impact on American society than immigration, because prohibition affected almost everyone's daily life throughout the whole decade, whether through the growth of organised crime, the corruption of the police, or the risks of drinking illegally made alcohol, and its failure was so total that it had to be reversed by constitutional amendment in 1933. Immigration restriction certainly caused real fear and injustice, especially through episodes like the Palmer Raids, but its worst effects were concentrated mainly in 1919 and 1920 and fell most heavily on immigrant communities specifically, rather than reshaping the everyday experience of the whole of American society in the way prohibition did.

Economic changes had a huge effect on the daily lives of many Americans. Henry Ford's assembly line techniques cut the price of the Model T from 850 dollars in 1908 to around 290 dollars by the late 1920s, and by 1929 there were 23 million cars registered in the USA. Buying on credit, known as hire purchase, became normal, with around 60 per cent of cars bought this way, and Republican governments kept taxes and regulation low while raising tariffs, such as the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922, to protect American industry. This meant that for many ordinary families, especially in growing cities, life became noticeably more comfortable and consumer driven within a single decade.

Social and cultural changes were also significant, but they affected society in a more divided way. The Nineteenth Amendment of 1920 gave women the vote, and flappers symbolised a new, more independent role for young women. Prohibition, introduced by the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act in 1920, was meant to improve society but instead fuelled organised crime, most famously under gangsters such as Al Capone in Chicago. At the same time, the Immigration Act of 1924 restricted immigration using national quotas, and membership of the Ku Klux Klan grew to several million in the mid-1920s, showing that not everyone welcomed these changes and that prejudice against immigrants, Catholics, Jews and African-Americans remained strong.

These two areas were closely connected, since it was economic prosperity that made much of the cultural change possible. Rising wages and cheap consumer goods meant families could afford radios and cinema tickets, which helped spread jazz music and new fashions across the country, so the economic boom was really the foundation on which the cultural changes were built. However, unlike the economic boom, which touched almost every region and class to some degree through cheaper goods and credit, cultural changes such as Prohibition and immigration restriction actually divided opinion and created conflict rather than shared benefit.

Overall, I think economic changes had more impact on America in the 1920s than social and cultural changes. This is because the economic boom altered the practical, everyday experience of the majority of Americans through cars, credit and consumer goods, and it was this prosperity that gave rise to many of the cultural changes in the first place. Social and cultural changes such as Prohibition and the rise of the Klan were certainly important, but they often provoked resistance and division rather than being embraced by the whole country, which makes their overall impact narrower than the economic transformation of the decade.