Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

THE POSTWAR WORLD
THE TIDE
OF COMMERCE AND
INDUSTRY (1920—30)
The United States emerged from its brief participation in the war by far
the world's richest and most powerful Nation. Disillusioned with the chronic
sickness of Europe and rejecting the power a world in chaos offered, America
deliberately turned its back and set about building a national structure of
self-sufficiency and plenty on the broad industrial base and the techniques
of mass production it had acquired during the war. In the mid-1920's a
social historian spoke simple truth when he said that "A dynamic history of
the period might give a volume or two to the automobile and a foot-note to
affairs of state." 1
New industries born of the war were soon to make the Nation inde-
pendent in nearly every manufactured necessity. The revolution in the
coking industry and the confiscation of German patents upon our entrance
into the war made possible the production of many of the dyes, medicines,
and industrial solvents formerly obtained from Germany, and led to such
important new industries as the making of synthetic plastics and fibers.2 The
new chemistry and advances in metallurgy joined with electric power to
revolutionize the extraction and refining of copper and iron ores, the cracking
of petroleum, and to make giants of the automobile, motion picture, radio,
and telephone industries. With the introduction of the closed car at popular
prices in 1922, the automobile by itself almost created a new industrial
revolution through its mass consumption of steel, nickel, lead and other
metals, plate glass, leather, textiles, rubber, gasoline, and oil, and its demand
for roads and highways, gas stations, garages, and roadside accommodations.
Surpassing even the growth of the automobile and electrical industries
in the decade after the war was the building and construction industry.
Government construction of streets, highways, and public buildings alone are
'Robert L. Duffus, "1900—1925," Century, 109, 488 (1925).
'Preston W. Slosson, The Great Crusade and After: 1914—1928 (New York: Macmillan,
1930), p. 18. The Trading-with-the-Enemy Act of Oct. 6, 1917 permitted the President
to license the use of German patents by American firms, under the administration of the
Federal Trade Commission. Frederic L. Paxson, American Democracy and the World
War, II, 132.
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CHAPTER V