Breaking Jazz
The Modernists and The Fundamentalists Fight It Out In Court!
Mobsters
Mobsters and organized crime became extremely prevalent as people who needed to find ways to provide for their family became desperate due to the lack of jobs during the Depression. The Mafia grew to become the most famous “gang” ever to conduct criminal activity in a major scale in the U.S. with Al Capone, the most famous mob leader in U.S. history, became the face of organized crime. Al Capone ruled the streets of Chicago with his massive group of Gangsters and also through his group and presence controlled Miami. He inspired many others to join in with organized crime due to his rapid increase in wealth and evident prosperity.
The Father Of A New Type Of Education
Radicalism and Anti- Radicalist movements
The National Pastime in the 1920s: The Rise of the Baseball Fan
Baseball’s growing popularity in the 1920s can be measured by structural and cultural changes that helped transform the game, including the building of commodious new ballparks; the emergence of sports pages in daily urban newspapers; and the enormous popularity of radio broadcasts of baseball games.Baseball commentators and critics expended much ink during the 1920s discussing the exact nature and composition of this new and expanding fan population. Some derided the influx of new fans to urban ballparks, in part because of the growing visibility in the bleachers of the sons and daughters of working-class Italian, Polish, and Jewish immigrants, and in part because the game seemed to be straying from its origins in traditional rural and small-town America. On the other hand, writer Edgar F. Wolfe argued in the 1923 Literary Digest that the urban ballpark was a meeting ground for Americans of all classes and backgrounds.
The causes of the banking crises of the 1920’s in the United States were numerous and despite the passing of time, remain contentious amongst academics, legislators and policy makers.
Keynesians tend to argue that lower aggregate expenditure at that time, exacerbated by sharp retrenchment by the Federal Reserve (the Fed) at precisely the time when it should have been stepping in to make up for a collapse in demand, dragged the economy down to a lower equilibrium, resulting in turn in unemployment and a further driving down of demand within the economy. This constituted a vicious circle which, at its most severe point, led to an unemployment rate of 25%, which was even higher in some agriculture-oriented states. At the international level there was a corresponding collapse in global trade, which again negatively impacted upon the domestic US economy. Historians of this era tend to locate the start of the Depression in October 29, 1929 with the collapse in stock market prices. However, in addition to Federal Reserve inaction there were other factors at play in the lead-up to the Depression. These included a rapid expansion of credit in the 1920’s and the overreaction to this by the Fed in the 1930’s, and the consequent credit crunch. During this period prudent lending criteria gave way to more scientific methods for evaluating risk. Regarding the former, lenders focused upon the so-called ‘3 C’s’ of lending: character (the personal characteristics, honesty, previous reliability of the borrower), capacity (the borrower’s ability to service interest payments from existing income, and the stability of that income over the life of the loan) and capital (the amount which the borrower was able to contribute to the venture from his or her own resources). The new scientific methods focused instead upon a quantitative analysis of the borrower’s balance sheet and profit and loss account, prioritized over whether or not the borrower was known to the lender or had a track record of successfully servicing previous loans. This problem of over-supply of credit was exacerbated by ‘over-banking’, or the provision of too many licenses to financial institutions at state level. States tended to stipulate low capital requirements and deposit safety nets which subsidized entry into the market, and protected incompetent bankers. The banking system was also fragmented at state level, overcapitalized, and over-burdened with risk resulting from previous imprudent lending decisions.