It was the jazz age…flappers dancing the Charleston, bootleggers smuggling ’hootch’ into the country by boats and across the Canadian border. Eddie Cantor was singing Toot, Toot, Tootsie. Josephine Baker was headlining at Les Folies Bergère in Paris, while Rudolph Valentino was making women with bobbed hair and knee-length skirts swoon at the Nickelodeon.
Women got the right to vote. Handsome President Warren Harding kept a mistress, Carrie Phillips, at the Willard Hotel, reachable from the White House via an underground tunnel. He died mysteriously while still in office. His successor, ‘Silent’ Cal Coolidge, let the economy roll on.
It was the decade of the Scopes ‘monkey’ trial, pitting those who believed in evolution against those who believed in the literal word of the Bible. It was the trial of the twin killers, Leopold and Loeb, who had murdered a young boy for the thrill. Their guilt was certain, but their trial would be a clarion call against Capital Punishment. Bessie Coleman became the first female Negro pilot, Madame C.J. Walker, the first female Negro millionaire. More than 500 Negroes were lynched across the south.
Al Capone, aka Scarface, ran Chicago. Murders were rampant, payoffs a necessity, corruption unstoppable. Five families, known as the ‘Commission,’ ran New York city, led by Charlie ‘Lucky’ Luciano and young soldiers, Meyer Lansky and ‘Bugsy’ Seigel.
Across most of the country it was a time of prosperity. Steel mills roared, skyscrapers crowded the sky, and Henry Ford’s assembly line was producing automobiles for more than 100 million Americans with money to spend and a yen for travel.
The League of Nations was established, sans the United States, thanks to an isolationist Congress. The Treaty of Versailles, following the First World War, demanded heavy compensation from Germany for the havoc they’d wreaked. Those payments created massive inflation in Germany and threatened the survival of its fledgling democratic Weimar Republic.
F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby. Hemingway published When The Sun Also Rises. ‘Talkies’ energized the embryonic movie industry. In 1921 the stock market climbed and climbed and climbed further…doubling and doubling again, on speculation…on margin…betting on tomorrow.
Why not? This was the greatest country in the world. New inventions were changing our daily lives. Our homes now have radios. We listened to news and music…to Amos ‘n Andy, Fibber McGee and Molly and soap operas. Our streets were lit and we could reach distant relatives on our telephones. We could even mail a letter for only $.02.
Flying had evolved. Planes were now faster, larger, and safer. Airlines ferried passengers and cargo across the country. Our country was on automatic pilot. Herbert Hoover’s election in 1928 brought little change.
And then, Black Friday. All those dreams, gone, like a puff of smoke. October 1929! Stocks plummeted, margin calls wiped out tens of thousands. Men, worth millions today, were wiped out tomorrow. Some plunged to their deaths from rooftops. Banks shuttered their doors as depositors tried to withdraw their life savings.
Before the market plunge unemployment was no more than 1 ½ million. A year later it would reach 8 million. Government throughout the 19th century had never interfered with the economy. It was reluctant to do so now. Across the globe economies were in free fall as trade ground to a halt.
The decade that had begun with unbridled enthusiasm was ending with fears that Armageddon had arrived.