ShmoopTube

00:00

[ musical flourish ]

00:02

And here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by a demographic shift,

00:06

the button on your keyboard that really shakes things up.

00:09

Yeah, like that. All right.

00:11

Well, take a look at this excerpt.

00:12

[ mumbles ]

00:17

[ mumbling continues ]

00:22

And the question:

00:24

The "capacity of industry" that President Truman refers to

00:27

coincided with and was enabled by

00:30

what demographic shift?

00:32

And here are your potential answers.

00:34

[ mumbles ]

00:38

All right, well, first up. What exactly does

00:40

"capacity of industry" mean?

00:44

Well the excerpt says

00:45

"and hardly less marvelous has been the capacity of industry

00:48

to design and of labor to operate."

00:50

So Truman is talking about some increase

00:52

or expansion that allowed big business to grow,

00:56

well, bigger.

00:57

Have you ever seen The Biggest Loser? Yeah, like that.

00:59

We also know that this expansion was a result of

01:01

a demographic shift, which basically means

01:04

a change in the make-up of the population.

01:06

No, not switching from L'Oreal to Clinique.

01:08

Although, that's a move that's pulled religious debate.

01:11

We won't get into it. The other kind of make-up.

01:14

Like an increase in young people or a specific

01:16

ethnic group.

01:18

So let's see which answer can clue us in to what was going on back then.

01:21

Was the capacity of industry enabled by the demographic shift

01:24

of A - growth in the rural population

01:28

to meet agricultural demand?

01:30

Hmm. Well, actually, with most jobs now in the cities,

01:33

the U.S. as a whole shifted toward urbanization,

01:36

like factories and stuff like that. So country life -

01:39

farming - was headed out to pasture.

01:41

That knocks out A.

01:43

Could this boom in business have happened because of B -

01:45

emigration from the United States to find jobs?

01:49

Hmm. "Emigration" with an "E" means

01:52

that you're leaving the country.

01:54

And this period featured an increase in

01:56

"immigration" with an "I," especially in the wake of World War II.

01:59

So, guess that I before E rule applies here, as well. Hehe.

02:03

Cross out B.

02:05

Did the increase in production coincide with C -

02:07

a "baby boom" that swelled overall population?

02:11

Like everyone was having 3.4 kids,

02:13

instead of the 1.5 we do today.

02:15

Truman made this speech the day we dropped the bomb,

02:17

so many of the nation's men were still overseas.

02:20

When they came back, though, you better believe they saw

02:22

a whole different kind of action. [ clicks tongue ]

02:25

Giggity. So it's not C, either.

02:27

Which means that the capacity of industry

02:29

coincided with and was enabled by D -

02:32

a massive wave of African American migration out of the South.

02:37

That is, in the pre-World War II South,

02:40

African Americans faced intense discrimination

02:43

when seeking employment. Remember Jim Crow laws

02:46

and sharecropping and all that? Stayed with 'em.

02:48

But when the U.S. went to war, the economy picked up steam

02:51

and jobs became available across the whole country.

02:54

So five million African Americans migrated North

02:57

and West for jobs,

02:58

referred to as the Second Great Migration.

03:01

And by the end of the war, 80 percent of African Americans

03:04

lived in cities, a great proportion than

03:06

any other ethnic group. So D is the correct answer.

03:09

The city might've been less picturesque

03:11

than the countryside, but it was definitely a better change of scenery for, uh,

03:15

everyone involved.

03:16

[ boing ]

Full Transcript