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Two anarchists ( see anarchism ), Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who were convicted of a robbery and two murders in Massachusetts in the early 1920s and sentenced to death. Sacco and Vanzetti were born in Italy but had been living in the United States for years when they were tried.

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A 1930s exhibit by the Eugenics Society. Two of the signs read "Healthy and Unhealthy Families" and "Heredity as the Basis of Efficiency".

Eugenics ( yoo-JEN-iks; from Ancient Greek εύ̃ (eû) 'good, well', and -γενής (genḗs) 'come into being, growing') is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have attempted to alter human gene pools by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or promoting those judged to be superior. In recent years, the term has seen a revival in bioethical discussions on the usage of new technologies such as CRISPR and genetic screening, with heated debate around whether these technologies should be considered eugenics or not.

The principles of eugenics have been in practice since ancient Greece. Plato suggested applying the principles of selective breeding to humans around 400 BCE. Nobility is also historically based on pedigree. Early advocates of eugenics in the 19th century regarded it as a way of improving groups of people. In contemporary usage, the term eugenics is closely associated with scientific racism. Modern bioethicists who advocate new eugenics characterize it as a way of enhancing individual traits, regardless of group membership.

The contemporary history of eugenics began in the late 19th century, when a popular eugenics movement emerged in the United Kingdom, and then spread to many countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia, and most European countries (e.g. , Sweden and Germany). In this period, people from across the political spectrum espoused eugenic ideas. Consequently, many countries adopted eugenic policies, intended to improve the quality of their populations' genetic stock. Such programs included both positive measures, such as encouraging individuals deemed particularly "fit" to reproduce, and negative measures, such as marriage prohibitions and forced sterilization of people deemed unfit for reproduction. Those deemed "unfit to reproduce" often included people with mental or physical disabilities, people who scored in the low ranges on different IQ tests, criminals and "sexual and social deviants", and members of disfavored minority groups.

The eugenics movement became associated with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust when the defense of many of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials of 1945 to 1946 attempted to justify their human-rights abuses by claiming there was little difference between the Nazi eugenics programs and the US eugenics programs. In the decades following World War II, with more emphasis on human rights, many countries began to abandon eugenics policies, although some Western countries (the United States, Canada, and Sweden among them) continued to carry out forced sterilizations.[citation needed ]

A criticism of eugenics policies is that, regardless of whether negative or positive policies are used, they are susceptible to abuse because the genetic selection criteria are determined by whichever group has political power at the time. Furthermore, many criticize negative eugenics in particular as a violation of basic human rights, seen since 1968's Proclamation of Tehran, as including the right to reproduce. Another criticism is that eugenics policies eventually lead to a loss of genetic diversity, thereby resulting in inbreeding depression due to a loss of genetic variation. Yet another criticism of contemporary eugenics policies is that they propose to permanently and artificially disrupt millions of years of human evolution, and that attempting to create genetic lines "clean" of "disorders" can have far-reaching ancillary downstream effects in the genetic ecology, including negative effects on immunity and on species resilience.

Francis Galton, an early eugenicist, coined the term itself.[14][need quotation to verify ][15]

Logo from the Second International Eugenics Conference, 1921, depicting eugenics as a tree which unites a variety of different fields[16]

G. K. Chesterton, an opponent of eugenics, photographed by Ernest Herbert Mills in 1909

Types of eugenic practices have existed for millennia. Some indigenous peoples of Brazil are known to have practiced infanticide against children born with physical abnormalities since precolonial times. In ancient Greece, the philosopher Plato suggested selective mating to produce a "guardian" class. In Sparta, every Spartan child was inspected by the council of elders, the Gerousia, who determined whether or not the child was fit to live.

The geographer Strabo ( c. 64 BCE - c. 24 CE) states that the Samnites would take ten virgin women and ten young men who were considered to be the best representation of their sex and mate them. Following this, the best woman would be given to the best male, then the second-best woman to the second-best male. It is possible[original research? ] that the "best" men and women were chosen based on athletic capabilities. This would continue until all 20 people had been assigned to one another. Any selected male dishonoring himself,[clarification needed ] would be separated from his partner.

In the early years of the Roman Republic, a Roman father was obliged by law to immediately kill any "dreadfully deformed" child. According to Tacitus ( c. 56 - c. 120), a Roman of the Imperial Period, the Germanic tribes of his day killed any member of their community they deemed cowardly, unwarlike or "stained with abominable vices", usually by drowning them in swamps. Modern historians, however, see Tacitus' ethnographic writing as unreliable in such details.

The idea of a modern project for improving the human population through selective breeding was originally developed by Francis Galton (1822-1911), and was initially inspired by Darwinism and its theory of natural selection.[need quotation to verify ] Galton had read his half-cousin Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which sought to explain the development of plant and animal species, and desired to apply it to humans. Based on his biographical studies, Galton believed that desirable human qualities were hereditary traits, although Darwin strongly disagreed with this elaboration of his theory. In 1883, one year after Darwin's death, Galton gave his research a name: eugenics. With the introduction of genetics, eugenics became associated with genetic determinism, the belief that human character is entirely or in the majority caused by genes, unaffected by education or living conditions. Many of the early geneticists were not Darwinians, and evolution theory was not needed for eugenics policies based on genetic determinism. Throughout its recent history, eugenics has remained controversial.

Eugenics became an academic discipline at many colleges and universities and received funding from many sources. Organizations were formed to win public support for and to sway opinion towards responsible eugenic values in parenthood, including the British Eugenics Education Society of 1907 and the American Eugenics Society of 1921. Both sought support from leading clergymen and modified their message to meet religious ideals. In 1909, the Anglican clergymen William Inge and James Peile both wrote for the Eugenics Education Society. Inge was an invited speaker at the 1921 International Eugenics Conference, which was also endorsed by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York Patrick Joseph Hayes. The book The Passing of the Great Race ( Or, The Racial Basis of European History) by American eugenicist, lawyer, and amateur anthropologist Madison Grant was published in 1916. Although subsequently influential, the book was largely ignored when it first appeared, and it went through several revisions and editions. Nevertheless, the book was used by people who advocated restricted immigration as justification for what became known as " scientific racism".

Three International Eugenics Conferences presented a global venue for eugenicists, with meetings in 1912 in London, and in 1921 and 1932 in New York City. Eugenic policies in the United States were first implemented by state-level legislators in the early 1900s. Eugenic policies also took root in France, Germany, and Great Britain. Later, in the 1920s and 1930s, the eugenic policy of sterilizing certain mental patients was implemented in other countries including Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Japan and Sweden. Frederick Osborn's 1937 journal article "Development of a Eugenic Philosophy" framed eugenics as a social philosophy-a philosophy with implications for social order. That definition is not universally accepted. Osborn advocated for higher rates of sexual reproduction among people with desired traits ("positive eugenics") or reduced rates of sexual reproduction or sterilization of people with less-desired or undesired traits ("negative eugenics").

In addition to being practiced in a number of countries, eugenics was internationally organized through the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations. Its scientific aspects were carried on through research bodies such as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, the Cold Spring Harbor Carnegie Institution for Experimental Evolution, and the Eugenics Record Office. Politically, the movement advocated measures such as sterilization laws. In its moral dimension, eugenics rejected the doctrine that all human beings are born equal and redefined moral worth purely in terms of genetic fitness. Its racist elements included pursuit of a pure " Nordic race" or " Aryan" genetic pool and the eventual elimination of "unfit" races. Many leading British politicians subscribed to the theories of eugenics. Winston Churchill supported the British Eugenics Society and was an honorary vice president for the organization. Churchill believed that eugenics could solve "race deterioration" and reduce crime and poverty.

Early critics of the philosophy of eugenics included the American sociologist Lester Frank Ward, the English writer G. K. Chesterton, the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas, who argued that advocates of eugenics greatly over-estimate the influence of biology, and Scottish tuberculosis pioneer and author Halliday Sutherland. Ward's 1913 article "Eugenics, Euthenics, and Eudemics", Chesterton's 1917 book Eugenics and Other Evils, and Boas' 1916 article " Eugenics" (published in The Scientific Monthly) were all harshly critical of the rapidly growing movement. Sutherland identified eugenicists as a major obstacle to the eradication and cure of tuberculosis in his 1917 address "Consumption: Its Cause and Cure", and criticism of eugenicists and Neo- Malthusians in his 1921 book Birth Control led to a writ for libel from the eugenicist Marie Stopes. Several biologists were also antagonistic to the eugenics movement, including Lancelot Hogben. Other biologists such as J. B. S. Haldane and R. A. Fisher expressed skepticism in the belief that sterilization of "defectives" would lead to the disappearance of undesirable genetic traits.

Among institutions, the Catholic Church was an opponent of state-enforced sterilizations, but accepted isolating people with hereditary diseases so as not to let them reproduce. Attempts by the Eugenics Education Society to persuade the British government to legalize voluntary sterilization were opposed by Catholics and by the Labour Party. The American Eugenics Society initially gained some Catholic supporters, but Catholic support declined following the 1930 papal encyclical Casti connubii. In this, Pope Pius XI explicitly condemned sterilization laws: "Public magistrates have no direct power over the bodies of their subjects; therefore, where no crime has taken place and there is no cause present for grave punishment, they can never directly harm, or tamper with the integrity of the body, either for the reasons of eugenics or for any other reason."

As a social movement, eugenics reached its greatest popularity in the early decades of the 20th century, when it was practiced around the world and promoted by governments, institutions, and influential individuals (such as the playwright G. B. Shaw). Many countries enacted various eugenics policies, including: genetic screenings, birth control, promoting differential birth rates, marriage restrictions, segregation (both racial segregation and sequestering the mentally ill), compulsory sterilization, forced abortions or forced pregnancies, ultimately culminating in genocide. By 2014, gene selection (rather than "people selection") was made possible through advances in genome editing, leading to what is sometimes called new eugenics, also known as "neo-eugenics", "consumer eugenics", or "liberal eugenics"; which focuses on individual freedom and allegedly pull away from racism, sexism, heterosexism or a focus on intelligence.

Anti-miscegenation laws in the United States made it a crime for individuals to wed someone categorized as belonging to a different race. These laws were part of a broader policy of racial segregation in the United States to minimize contact between people of different ethnicities. Race laws and practices in the United States were explicitly used as models by the Nazi regime when it developed the Nuremberg Laws, stripping Jewish citizens of their citizenship.

Schloss Hartheim, a former center for Nazi Germany's Aktion T4 campaign

A Lebensborn birth house in Nazi Germany. Created with the intention of raising the birth rate of "Aryan" children from the extramarital relations of "racially pure and healthy" parents.

The scientific reputation of eugenics started to decline in the 1930s, a time when Ernst Rüdin used eugenics as a justification for the racial policies of Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler had praised and incorporated eugenic ideas in Mein Kampf in 1925 and emulated eugenic legislation for the sterilization of "defectives" that had been pioneered in the United States once he took power. Some common early 20th century eugenics methods involved identifying and classifying individuals and their families, including the poor, mentally ill, blind, deaf, developmentally disabled, promiscuous women, homosexuals, and racial groups (such as the Roma and Jews in Nazi Germany) as "degenerate" or "unfit", and therefore led to segregation, institutionalization, sterilization, and even mass murder. The Nazi policy of identifying German citizens deemed mentally or physically unfit and then systematically killing them with poison gas, referred to as the Aktion T4 campaign, is understood by historians to have paved the way for the Holocaust.

By the end of World War II, many eugenics laws were abandoned, having become associated with Nazi Germany. H. G. Wells, who had called for "the sterilization of failures" in 1904, stated in his 1940 book The Rights of Man: Or What Are We Fighting For? that among the human rights, which he believed should be available to all people, was "a prohibition on mutilation, sterilization, torture, and any bodily punishment". After World War II, the practice of "imposing measures intended to prevent births within [a national, ethnical, racial or religious] group" fell within the definition of the new international crime of genocide, set out in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union also proclaims "the prohibition of eugenic practices, in particular those aiming at selection of persons". In spite of the decline in discriminatory eugenics laws, some government mandated sterilizations continued into the 21st century. During the ten years President Alberto Fujimori led Peru from 1990 to 2000, 2,000 persons were allegedly involuntarily sterilized. China maintained its one-child policy until 2015 as well as a suite of other eugenics-based legislation to reduce population size and manage fertility rates of different populations.

While there is ostensibly less support for eugenics today, forced sterilization remains a problem around the world. It has been used against Indigenous women in Canada as recently as 2019. Until 2014, the Netherlands required sterilization of transgender people as a prerequisite for legal recognition of their genders. A similar law persists in Japan and was upheld in 2019 as constitutional. In the United States, most people affected by forced sterilization are under guardianship, though procedures were also performed on inmates in the California prison system. According to a report from The National Women's Law Center, 31 states and D.C. have laws allowing forced sterilization, and in most other states it is not clear whether it is legal or not. Seventeen states allow the sterilization of children under the age of 18, and some do not even require a legal guardian to make that decision.

Developments in genetic, genomic, and reproductive technologies at the beginning of the 21st century have raised numerous questions regarding the ethical status of eugenics, effectively creating a resurgence of interest in the subject. Some, such as UC Berkeley sociologist Troy Duster, have argued that modern genetics is a back door to eugenics. This view was shared by then-White House Assistant Director for Forensic Sciences, Tania Simoncelli, who stated in a 2003 publication by the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College that advances in pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) are moving society to a "new era of eugenics", and that, unlike the Nazi eugenics, modern eugenics is consumer driven and market based, "where children are increasingly regarded as made-to-order consumer products".

In a 2006 newspaper article, Richard Dawkins said that discussion regarding eugenics was inhibited by the shadow of Nazi misuse, to the extent that some scientists would not admit that breeding humans for certain abilities is at all possible. He believes that it is not physically different from breeding domestic animals for traits such as speed or herding skill. Dawkins felt that enough time had elapsed to at least ask just what the ethical differences were between breeding for ability versus training athletes or forcing children to take music lessons, though he could think of persuasive reasons to draw the distinction.

Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore, promoted eugenics as late as 1983. A proponent of nature over nurture, he stated that "intelligence is 80% nature and 20% nurture", and attributed the successes of his children to genetics. In his speeches, Lee urged highly educated women to have more children, claiming that "social delinquents" would dominate unless their fertility rate increased. In 1984, Singapore began providing financial incentives to highly educated women to encourage them to have more children. In 1985, incentives were significantly reduced after public uproar.

In October 2015, the United Nations' International Bioethics Committee wrote that the ethical problems of human genetic engineering should not be confused with the ethical problems of the 20th century eugenics movements. However, it is still problematic because it challenges the idea of human equality and opens up new forms of discrimination and stigmatization for those who do not want, or cannot afford, the technology.

The American National Human Genome Research Institute says that eugenics is "inaccurate", "scientifically erroneous and immoral".

Transhumanism is often associated with eugenics, although most transhumanists holding similar views nonetheless distance themselves from the term "eugenics" (preferring " germinal choice" or " reprogenetics") to avoid having their position confused with the discredited theories and practices of early-20th-century eugenic movements.

Prenatal screening has been called by some a contemporary form of eugenics because it may lead to abortions of fetuses with undesirable traits.

A system was proposed by California State Senator Nancy Skinner to compensate victims of the well-documented examples of prison sterilizations resulting from California's eugenics programs, but this did not pass by the bill's 2018 deadline in the Legislature.

Karl Pearson in 1912

The term eugenics and its modern field of study were first formulated by Francis Galton in 1883, drawing on the recent work of his half-cousin Charles Darwin. Galton published his observations and conclusions in his book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development.

The origins of the concept began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance and the theories of August Weismann. The word eugenics is derived from the Greek word eu ("good" or "well") and the suffix -genēs ("born"); Galton intended it to replace the word " stirpiculture", which he had used previously but which had come to be mocked due to its perceived sexual overtones. Galton defined eugenics as "the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations".

The most disputed aspect of eugenics has been the definition of "improvement" of the human gene pool, such as what is a beneficial characteristic and what is a defect. Historically, this aspect of eugenics was tainted with scientific racism and pseudoscience.

Historically, the idea of eugenics has been used to argue for a broad array of practices ranging from prenatal care for mothers deemed genetically desirable to the forced sterilization and murder of those deemed unfit. To population geneticists, the term has included the avoidance of inbreeding without altering allele frequencies; for example, J. B. S. Haldane wrote that "the motor bus, by breaking up inbred village communities, was a powerful eugenic agent." Debate as to what exactly counts as eugenics continues today.

Edwin Black, journalist, historian, and author of War Against the Weak, argues that eugenics is often deemed a pseudoscience because what is defined as a genetic improvement of a desired trait is a cultural choice rather than a matter that can be determined through objective scientific inquiry. Black states the following about the pseudoscientific past of eugenics: "As American eugenic pseudoscience thoroughly infused the scientific journals of the first three decades of the twentieth century, Nazi-era eugenics placed its unmistakable stamp on the medical literature of the twenties, thirties and forties." Black says that eugenics was the pseudoscience aimed at "improving" the human race, used by Adolf Hitler to "try to legitimize his anti- Semitism by medicalizing it, and wrapping it in the more palatable pseudoscientific facade of eugenics."

Early eugenicists were mostly concerned with factors of perceived intelligence that often correlated strongly with social class. These included Karl Pearson and Walter Weldon, who worked on this at the University College London. In his lecture "Darwinism, Medical Progress and Eugenics", Pearson claimed that everything concerning eugenics fell into the field of medicine.

Eugenic policies have been conceptually divided into two categories. Positive eugenics is aimed at encouraging reproduction among the genetically advantaged; for example, the reproduction of the intelligent, the healthy, and the successful. Possible approaches include financial and political stimuli, targeted demographic analyses, in vitro fertilization, egg transplants, and cloning. Negative eugenics aimed to eliminate, through sterilization or segregation, those deemed physically, mentally, or morally "undesirable". This includes abortions, sterilization, and other methods of family planning. Both positive and negative eugenics can be coercive; in Nazi Germany, for example, abortion was illegal for women deemed by the state to be fit.

The heterozygote test is used for the early detection of recessive hereditary diseases, allowing for couples to determine if they are at risk of passing genetic defects to a future child. The goal of the test is to estimate the likelihood of passing the hereditary disease to future descendants.

There are examples of eugenic acts that managed to lower the prevalence of recessive diseases, although not influencing the prevalence of heterozygote carriers of those diseases. The elevated prevalence of certain genetically transmitted diseases among the Ashkenazi Jewish population ( Tay-Sachs, cystic fibrosis, Canavan's disease, and Gaucher's disease), has been decreased in current populations by the application of genetic screening.

The first major challenge to conventional eugenics based on genetic inheritance was made in 1915 by Thomas Hunt Morgan. He demonstrated the event of genetic mutation occurring outside of inheritance involving the discovery of the hatching of a fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) with white eyes from a family with red eyes, demonstrating that major genetic changes occurred outside of inheritance. Additionally, Morgan criticized the view that certain traits, such as intelligence and criminality, were hereditary because these traits were subjective. Despite Morgan's public rejection of eugenics, much of his genetic research was adopted by proponents of eugenics.

Pleiotropy occurs when one gene influences multiple, seemingly unrelated phenotypic traits, an example being phenylketonuria, which is a human disease that affects multiple systems but is caused by one gene defect. Andrzej Pękalski, from the University of Wroclaw, argues that eugenics can cause harmful loss of genetic diversity if a eugenics program selects a pleiotropic gene that could possibly be associated with a positive trait. Pękalski uses the example of a coercive government eugenics program that prohibits people with myopia from breeding but has the unintended consequence of also selecting against high intelligence since the two go together. Further, a culturally-accepted "improvement" of the gene pool may result in extinction, due to increased vulnerability to disease, reduced ability to adapt to environmental change, and other factors that may not be anticipated in advance. This has been evidenced in numerous instances, in inbred isolated island populations. A long-term, species-wide eugenics plan might lead to such a scenario because the elimination of traits deemed undesirable would reduce genetic diversity by definition.

While the science of genetics has increasingly provided means by which certain characteristics and conditions can be identified and understood, given the complexity of human genetics, culture, and psychology, at this point there is no agreed objective means of determining which traits might be ultimately desirable or undesirable. Some conditions such as sickle-cell disease and cystic fibrosis respectively confer immunity to malaria and resistance to cholera when a single copy of the recessive allele is contained within the genotype of the individual, so eliminating these genes is undesirable in places where such diseases are common.

Societal and political consequences of eugenics call for a place in the discussion on the ethics behind the eugenics movement. Many of the ethical concerns regarding eugenics arise from its controversial past, prompting a discussion on what place, if any, it should have in the future. Advances in science have changed eugenics. In the past, eugenics had more to do with sterilization and enforced reproduction laws. Now, in the age of a progressively mapped genome, embryos can be tested for susceptibility to disease, sex, and genetic defects, and alternative methods of reproduction such as in vitro fertilization are becoming more common. Therefore, eugenics is no longer ex post facto regulation of the living but instead preemptive action on the unborn.

With this change, however, there are ethical concerns which some groups feel warrant more attention before this practice is commonly rolled out. Sterilized individuals, for example, could volunteer for the procedure, albeit under incentive or duress, or at least voice their opinion. The unborn fetus on which these new eugenic procedures are performed cannot speak out, as the fetus lacks the voice to consent or to express their opinion. Philosophers disagree about the proper framework for reasoning about such actions, which change the very identity and existence of future persons.

Opposition

In the decades after World War II, the term "eugenics" had taken on a negative connotation and as a result, the use of it became increasingly unpopular within the scientific community. Many organizations and journals that had their origins in the eugenics movement began to distance themselves from the philosophy which spawned it, as when Eugenics Quarterly was renamed Social Biology in 1969.

Edwin Black has described potential "eugenics wars" as the worst-case outcome of eugenics. In his view, this scenario would mean the return of coercive state-sponsored genetic discrimination and human rights violations such as the compulsory sterilization of persons with genetic defects, the killing of the institutionalized and, specifically, the segregation and genocide of races which are considered inferior. Law professors George Annas and Lori Andrews have argued that the use of these technologies could lead to such human- posthuman caste warfare.

Environmental ethicist Bill McKibben argued against germinal choice technology and other advanced biotechnological strategies for human enhancement. He writes that it would be morally wrong for humans to tamper with fundamental aspects of themselves (or their children) in an attempt to overcome universal human limitations, such as vulnerability to aging, maximum life span and biological constraints on physical and cognitive ability. Attempts to "improve" themselves through such manipulation would remove limitations that provide a necessary context for the experience of meaningful human choice. He claims that human lives would no longer seem meaningful in a world where such limitations could be overcome with technology. Even the goal of using germinal choice technology for clearly therapeutic purposes should be relinquished, he argues, since it would inevitably produce temptations to tamper with such things as cognitive capacities. He argues that it is possible for societies to benefit from renouncing particular technologies, using Ming China, Tokugawa Japan and the contemporary Amish as examples.

Amanda Caleb, Professor of Medical Humanities at Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine, says "Eugenic laws and policies are now understood as part of a specious devotion to a pseudoscience that actively dehumanizes to support political agendas and not true science or medicine."

Endorsement

Some, for example Nathaniel C. Comfort from Johns Hopkins University, claim that the change from state-led reproductive-genetic decision-making to individual choice has moderated the worst abuses of eugenics by transferring the decision-making process from the state to patients and their families. Comfort suggests that "the eugenic impulse drives us to eliminate disease, live longer and healthier, with greater intelligence, and a better adjustment to the conditions of society; and the health benefits, the intellectual thrill and the profits of genetic bio-medicine are too great for us to do otherwise." Others, such as bioethicist Stephen Wilkinson of Keele University and Honorary Research Fellow Eve Garrard at the University of Manchester, claim that some aspects of modern genetics can be classified as eugenics, but that this classification does not inherently make modern genetics immoral.

In their book published in 2000, From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice, bioethicists Allen Buchanan, Dan Brock, Norman Daniels and Daniel Wikler argued that liberal societies have an obligation to encourage as wide an adoption of eugenic enhancement technologies as possible (so long as such policies do not infringe on individuals' reproductive rights or exert undue pressures on prospective parents to use these technologies) in order to maximize public health and minimize the inequalities that may result from both natural genetic endowments and unequal access to genetic enhancements.

In his book A Theory of Justice (1971), American philosopher John Rawls argued that "Over time a society is to take steps to preserve the general level of natural abilities and to prevent the diffusion of serious defects". The original position, a hypothetical situation developed by Rawls, has been used as an argument for negative eugenics.

The novel Brave New World (1931) is a dystopian social science fiction novel by the English author Aldous Huxley, set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy.

The film (1997) provides a fictional example of a dystopian society that uses eugenics to decide what people are capable of and their place in the world. Though Gattaca was not a box office success, it was critically acclaimed and is said to have crystallized the debate over the controversial topic of human genetic engineering. The film's dystopian depiction of " genoism" has been cited by many bioethicists and laypeople in support of their hesitancy about, or opposition to, eugenics and the societal acceptance of the genetic-determinist ideology that may frame it. In a 1997 review of the film for the journal Nature Genetics, molecular biologist Lee M. Silver stated that " Gattaca is a film that all geneticists should see if for no other reason than to understand the perception of our trade held by so many of the public-at-large". In his 2018 book , behavioural geneticist Robert Plomin writes that while Gattaca warned of the dangers of genetic information being used by a totalitarian state, genetic testing could also favour better meritocracy in democratic societies which already administer psychological tests to select people for education and employment. Plomin suggests that polygenic scores might supplement testing in a manner that is free of biases.

Various works by author Robert A. Heinlein mention the Howard Foundation, a group aimed at improving human longevity through selective breeding.

Eugenics is commonly seen in popular media, as highlighted by series like Resident Evil.

Agar, Nicholas (2004). Liberal Eugenics: In Defense of Human Enhancement. Wiley-Blackwell.

Agar, Nicholas (2019). "Why we Should Defend Gene Editing as Eugenics". Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. 34 (1): 9-19. doi:10.1017/S0963180118000336. PMID 30570459. S2CID 58195676.

Black, Edwin (2003). War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race. Four Walls Eight Windows. ISBN 9781568582580.

Cavaliere, Giulia (2018). "Looking into the Shadow: Eugenics arguments in debates about reproductive technologies". Monash Bioethics Review. 36 (1-4): 1-22. doi:10.1007/s40592-018-0086-x. PMC . PMID 30535862.

Daar, J. (2017). The New Eugenics: Selective Breeding in an Era of Reproductive Technologies. Yale University Press.

Savulescu, Julian; Kahane, Guy (2009). The Moral Obligation to Have Children with the Best Chance of the Best Life (PDF). Bioethics. Archived from the original (PDF) on 25 February 2021.

Sparrow, Robert (2014). "In Vitro Eugenics". Journal of Medical Ethics. 40 (11): 725-731. doi:10.1136/medethics-2012-101200. PMID 23557913. S2CID 959092.

Veit, Walter; Anomaly, Jonathan; Agar, Nicholas; Singer, Peter; Fleischman, Diana; Minerva, Francesca (2021). "Can 'eugenics' be defended?". Monash Bioethics Review. 39 (1): 60-67. doi:10.1007/s40592-021-00129-1. PMC . PMID 34033008.

Histories of eugenics (academic accounts)

Chesterton, G. K. (1922). Eugenics and Other Evils. Cassell and Company.

Blom, Philipp (2008). The Vertigo Years: Change and Culture in the West, 1900-1914. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. pp. 335-336. ISBN 9780771016301.

Joseph, Jay (2004). The Gene Illusion: Genetic Research in Psychiatry and Psychology Under the Microscope. New York: Algora. ISBN 9780875863436. Archived from the original on 12 May 2009.

Joseph, Jay (June 2005). "The 1942 'euthanasia' debate in the American Journal of Psychiatry" (PDF). History of Psychiatry. 16 (62 Pt. 2): 171-179. doi:10.1177/0957154x05047004. PMID 16013119. S2CID 35728753.

Joseph, Jay (2006). The Missing Gene: Psychiatry, Heredity, and the Fruitless Search for Genes. New York: Algora. ISBN 9780875864105. Archived from the original on 17 April 2009.

Shakespeare, Tom (1995). "Back to the Future? New Genetics and Disabled People". Critical Social Policy. 46 (44-45): 22-35. doi:10.1177/026101839501504402. S2CID 145688957.

Wahlsten, D. (1997). "Leilani Muir versus the philosopher king: Eugenics on trial in Alberta" (PDF). Genetica. 99 (2-3): 185-198. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.476.9688. doi:10.1007/BF02259522. PMID 9463073. S2CID 45536970.

Wilson, Robert A. (2019). "Eugenics undefended". Monash Bioethics Review. 37 (1): 68-75. doi:10.1007/s40592-019-00094-w. PMID 31325149. S2CID 198131924.

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Eugenics ( yoo-JEN-iks ; from Ancient Greek εύ̃ (eû) 'good, well', and -γενής (genḗs) 'come into being, growing') is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have attempted to alter human gene pools by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or promoting those judged to be superior.

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The Scopes Trial, formally known as The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes and commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial, was an American legal case in July 1925 in which a substitute high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which had made it unlawful to teach evolution.

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Natural History Magazine | Natural Selections

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But that's just one way of looking at it. The rabbit works well enough to have survived, after all, so it must be a successful design-no matter what we might think about the "intelligence" of a design that requires an animal to eat its own excreta.

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Prohibition in the United States was a nationwide constitutional ban on the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages from 1920 to 1933.

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police-emptying-beer-barrels-during-prohibition - Al Capone and Prohibition Pictures - Prohibition - HISTORY.com

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The Eighteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution effectively established the prohibition of alcoholic beverages in the United States by declaring the production, transport, and sale of alcohol illegal.

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The 18th Amendment Explained: The Constitution for Dummies Series

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The National Prohibition Act, known informally as the Volstead Act, was enacted to carry out the intent of the 18th Amendment, which established prohibition in the United States.

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A student presentation that was background before an alcohol simulation with "Fatal Visions" glasses.

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Prohibition in the United States was a nationwide constitutional ban on the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages from 1920 to 1933.

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A speakeasy, also called a blind pig or blind tiger, is an illicit establishment that sells alcoholic beverages. Such establishments came into prominence in the United States during the Prohibition era.

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Prohibition, otherwise known as the Volstead Act or the Eighteenth Amendment, barred the manufacture, transportation, and sale of all alcoholic beverages in America from 1919 to 1933 - but for some people, the appeal of the "forbidden" remains today. Despite the illegality of drinking establishments during prohibition, hidden bars could be found in just about every major American city if you knew where to look. Today, speakeasies are making a comeback in a very big way.

Blind Barber - NYC, Brooklyn & Los Angeles

The name of this establishment may sound like a cruel joke or even an anti-advertisement, but it's all part of a brand that has come to represent a simpler time. Past generations have enjoyed gathering and socializing in barber shops, and even today customers trade gossip as they get a haircut and enjoy a glass of wine in upscale salons.

This type of community gathering place is recreated in Blind Barber. An old-timey barber shop up front provides a bright and friendly place to sit and shoot the breeze as you enjoy a shave or a trim. Take a little walk through the secret door in the back and you'll enter an a very different type of space.

The bar is outfitted in rich wood, low lighting, and period-appropriate black and white tiles on the floor. The owners wanted to create not only an enjoyable drinking establishment, but a place where people could get together to socialize, relax, and maybe pretend for a bit that they are part of a small crowd of those who are "in the know" about a secret club.

Flask and The Press - Shanghai

It might be surprising to learn that there is an American-style speakeasy in China (although if you've been there you will have seen quite a few), but it's even more surprising to witness someone actually entering the bar. The building's front contains a bright, cheery sandwich shop with a classic Coca-Cola machine on the back wall.

Pulling a lever on the soda machine reveals a "secret" passage that leads to Flask, an intimate and delightfully mysterious bar designed by Alberto Caiola. An eclectic mix of furniture calls to mind the furtive nature of assembling these establishments during prohibition.

A floor-to-ceiling display of 25 liter jugs filled with whiskey is a visually stunning detail which may or may not be historically accurate - speakeasies were generally designed to be easy to disassemble if the cops came sniffing around, after all. Regardless, it is still a charming deviation from the loud, crowded urban bar.

Williams & Graham - Denver

The first thing that will strike you as unusual when you walk into the small Denver "bookstore" called simply Williams and Graham is that it's only open from 5 pm to 1 am. Good news for insomniac bibliophiles, perhaps...or maybe there's a little more to this story.

At the back of the shop, a heavy curtain swings open to reveal a very cozy little space with scarce seating, low lighting, and vintage furnishings. One can imagine the hoodlums and society folks alike lining up in the 1920s for a tasty libation while always keeping a wary eye trained on the door.

The bar serves cocktails straight out of the prohibition era - though admittedly, not with liquor made in clandestine basements distilleries or delivered only under the cover of night. The establishment emphasizes its mission to replicate the speakeasy with its fancy drinks, relative exclusivity (reservations are recommended), and general air of mystery.

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Secret Speakeasies: 6 Bars & Clubs Hidden in Plain Sight

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Prohibition, otherwise known as the Volstead Act or the Eighteenth Amendment, barred the manufacture, transportation, and sale of all alcoholic beverages in America from 1919 to 1933 - but for some people, the appeal of the "forbidden" remains today.

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Rum-running, or bootlegging, is the illegal business of transporting (smuggling) alcoholic beverages where such transportation is forbidden by law. Smuggling is usually done to circumvent taxation or prohibition laws within a particular jurisdiction.

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(redirected from Bootleggers)
Also found in: Thesaurus, Legal, Encyclopedia.

boot·leg
(bo͞ot′lĕg′)

v. boot·legged, boot·leg·ging, boot·legs

v. tr.

1. To make, sell, or transport (alcoholic liquor) for sale illegally.

2. To produce, distribute, or sell without permission or illegally: a clandestine outfit that bootlegs compact discs and tapes.

v. intr.

1. To engage in the bootlegging of alcoholic liquor or another product.

2. To attach a transmitter to a dish antenna, creating an uplink via which a signal is sent to a satellite without the knowledge of the satellite's owner.

3. Football To fake a hand-off, conceal the ball on the hip, and roll out in order to pass or especially to rush around the end. Used of a quarterback.

n.

1. A product, especially alcoholic liquor, that is illicitly produced, distributed, or sold.

2. The part of a boot above the instep.

3. Football A play in which the quarterback bootlegs.

adj.

Produced, sold, or transported illegally: bootleg gin; bootleg tapes.

[ From a smuggler's practice of carrying liquor in the legs of boots.]

bootleg
(ˈbuːtˌlɛɡ)

vb, -legs, -legging or -legged

to make, carry, or sell (illicit goods, esp alcohol)

n

1. something made or sold illicitly, such as alcohol during Prohibition in the US

2. an illegally made copy of a CD, tape, etc

adj

produced, distributed, or sold illicitly: bootleg whisky; bootleg tapes.

[C17: see boot ¹, leg; from the practice of smugglers of carrying bottles of liquor concealed in their boots]

boot*leg
(ˈbutˌlɛg)

n., v. -legged, -leg*ging,
adj. n.

1. alcoholic liquor unlawfully made, sold, or transported.

2. something made, reproduced, or sold unlawfully.

v.t.

3. to deal in (liquor or other goods) unlawfully.

v.i.

4. to make, transport, or sell something, esp. liquor, unlawfully or without registration or payment of taxes.

adj.

5. made, sold, or transported unlawfully.

6. unlawful or clandestine.

[1885-95, Amer.; so called from the practice of hiding a liquor bottle in the leg of one's boot]

bootleg

Past participle: bootlegged
Gerund: bootlegging

Thesaurus Antonyms Related Words Synonyms Legend:

Noun 1.
bootleg - whiskey illegally distilled from a corn mash

2.
bootleg - the part of a boot above the instep

boot - footwear that covers the whole foot and lower leg

covering - an artifact that covers something else (usually to protect or shelter or conceal it)

Verb 1.
bootleg - sell illicit products such as drugs or alcohol; "They were bootlegging whiskey"

sell - exchange or deliver for money or its equivalent; "He sold his house in January"; "She sells her body to survive and support her drug habit"

2.
bootleg - produce or distribute illegally; "bootleg tapes of the diva's singing"

produce, create, make - create or manufacture a man-made product; "We produce more cars than we can sell"; "The company has been making toys for two centuries"

Adj. 1.
bootleg - distributed or sold illicitly; "the black economy pays no taxes"

illegal - prohibited by law or by official or accepted rules; "an illegal chess move"

bootleg

adjective illicit, illegal, outlawed, pirate, official, legal, licensed, authorized, on the level (informal), licit unofficial, black-market, unlicensed, under-the-table, unauthorized, contraband, hooky (slang), under-the-counter bootleg liquor
illicit

bootleg
verb

To import or export secretly and illegally:

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References in periodicals archive?

Clemson University economist Bruce Yandle (now also affiliated with George Mason University's Mercatus Center) first introduced the metaphor of bootleggers and Baptists in these pages ("Bootleggers and Baptists: The Education of a Regulatory Economist," May/June 1983).

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(redirected from Bootleggers) Also found in: Thesaurus, Legal, Encyclopedia. (bo͞ot′lĕg′) v. boot·legged, boot·leg·ging, boot·legs v. tr. 1. To make, sell, or transport (alcoholic liquor) for sale illegally. 2. To produce, distribute, or sell without permission or illegally: a clandestine outfit that bootlegs compact discs and tapes. v. intr. 1.

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Alphonse Gabriel Capone, sometimes known by the nickname "Scarface", was an American mobster, crime boss, and businessman who attained notoriety during the Prohibition era as the co-founder and boss of the Chicago Outfit

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In the "roaring twenties," Al Capone ruled an empire of crime in the Windy City: gambling, prostitution, bootlegging, bribery, narcotics trafficking, robbery, "protection" rackets, and murder. And it seemed that law enforcement couldn't touch him.

The early Bureau would have been happy to join the fight to take Capone down. But we needed a federal crime to hang our case on-and the evidence to back it up. Eventually, that day would come.

Early Years

Born of an immigrant family in Brooklyn, New York in January 1899, Al Capone quit school after the sixth grade and associated with a notorious street gang, becoming accepted as a member. Johnny Torrio was the street gang leader and among the other members was Lucky Luciano, who would later attain his own notoriety.

About 1920, at Torrio's invitation, Capone joined Torrio in Chicago where he had become an influential lieutenant in the Colosimo mob. The rackets spawned by enactment of the Prohibition Amendment, illegal brewing, distilling and distribution of beer and liquor, were viewed as "growth industries." Torrio, abetted by Al Capone, intended to take full advantage of opportunities. The mob also developed interests in legitimate businesses in the cleaning and dyeing field and cultivated influence with receptive public officials, labor unions, and employees' associations.

Torrio soon succeeded to full leadership of the gang with the violent demise of Big Jim Colosimo, and Capone gained experience and expertise as his strong right arm.

In 1925, Capone became boss when Torrio, seriously wounded in an assassination attempt, surrendered control and retired to Brooklyn. Capone had built a fearsome reputation in the ruthless gang rivalries of the period, struggling to acquire and retain "racketeering rights" to several areas of Chicago. That reputation grew as rival gangs were eliminated or nullified, and the suburb of Cicero became, in effect, a fiefdom of the Capone mob.

The St. Valentine's Day Massacre on February 14, 1929, might be regarded as the culminating violence of the Chicago gang era, as seven members or associates of the "Bugs" Moran mob were machine-gunned against a garage wall by rivals posing as police. The massacre was generally ascribed to the Capone mob, although Al himself was in Florida.

The Bureau Gets Involved

The investigative jurisdiction of the Bureau of Investigation during the 1920s and early 1930s was more limited than it is now, and the gang warfare and depredations of the period were not within the Bureau's investigative authority.

The Bureau's investigation of Al Capone arose from his reluctance to appear before a federal grand jury on March 12, 1929 in response to a subpoena. On March 11, his lawyers formally filed for postponement of his appearance, submitting a physician's affidavit dated March 5, which attested that Capone had been suffering from bronchial pneumonia in Miami, had been confined to bed from January 13 to February 23, and that it would be dangerous to Capone's health to travel to Chicago. His appearance date before the grand jury was re-set for March 20.

On request of the U.S. Attorney's Office, Bureau of Investigation agents obtained statements to the effect that Capone had attended race tracks in the Miami area, that he had made a plane trip to Bimini and a cruise to Nassau, that he had been interviewed at the office of the Dade County Solicitor, and that he had appeared in good health on each of those occasions.

Arrest and Convictions

Capone appeared before the federal grand jury in Chicago on March 20, 1929 and completed his testimony on March 27. As he left the courtroom, he was arrested by agents for contempt of court, an offense for which the penalty could be one year in prison and a $1,000 fine. He posted $5,000 bond and was released.

On May 17, 1929, Al Capone and his bodyguard were arrested in Philadelphia for carrying concealed deadly weapons. Within 16 hours they had been sentenced to terms of one year each. Capone served his time and was released in nine months for good behavior on March 17, 1930.

On February 28, 1931, Capone was found guilty in federal court on the contempt of court charge and was sentenced to six months in Cook County Jail. His appeal on that charge was subsequently dismissed.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Treasury Department had been developing evidence on tax evasion charges-in addition to Al Capone, his brother Ralph "Bottles" Capone, Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik, Frank Nitti, and other mobsters were subjects of tax evasion charges.

On June 16, 1931, Al Capone pled guilty to tax evasion and prohibition charges. He then boasted to the press that he had struck a deal for a two-and-a-half year sentence, but the presiding judge informed him he, the judge, was not bound by any deal. Capone then changed his plea to not guilty.

On October 18, 1931, Capone was convicted after trial and on November 24, was sentenced to eleven years in federal prison, fined $50,000 and charged $7,692 for court costs, in addition to $215,000 plus interest due on back taxes. The six-month contempt of court sentence was to be served concurrently.

While awaiting the results of appeals, Capone was confined to the Cook County Jail. Upon denial of appeals, he entered the U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta, serving his sentence there and at Alcatraz.

Release From Prison

On November 16, 1939, Al Capone was released after having served seven years, six months and fifteen days, and having paid all fines and back taxes.

Suffering from paresis derived from syphilis, he had deteriorated greatly during his confinement. Immediately on release he entered a Baltimore hospital for brain treatment and then went on to his Florida home, an estate on Palm Island in Biscayne Bay near Miami, which he had purchased in 1928.

Following his release, he never publicly returned to Chicago. He had become mentally incapable of returning to gangland politics. In 1946, his physician and a Baltimore psychiatrist, after examination, both concluded Capone then had the mentality of a 12-year-old child. Capone resided on Palm Island with his wife and immediate family, in a secluded atmosphere, until his death due to a stroke and pneumonia on January 25, 1947.

Bibliography on Al Capone

1. "Farewell, Mr. Gangster!" Herbert Corey, D. Appleton-Century Company, Inc., New York, New York, 1936
2. "The FBI Story," Don Whitehead, Random House, New York, New York, 1956
3. "Organized Crime In America," Gus Tyler, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1962
4. "The Dillinger Days," John Toland, Random House, New York, New York, 1963
5. "The Devil's Emissaries," Myron J. Quimby, A. S. Barnes and Company, New York, New York, 1969
6. "Capone," John Kobler, G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, New York, 1971
7. "Mafia, USA," Nicholas Gage, Dell Publishing Company, Inc., New York, New York, 1972
8. "The Mobs And The Mafia," Hank Messick and Burt Goldblatt, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York, New York, 1972
9. "Bloodletters and Badmen," Jay Robert Nash, M. Evans and Company, Inc., New York, New York, 1973
10. "G-Men: Hoover's FBI in American Popular Culture," Richard Gid Powers, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, Illinois, 1983

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Al Capone | Federal Bureau of Investigation

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Alphonse Gabriel "Al" Capone rose to infamy as a gangster in Chicago during the 1920s and early 1930s.

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Organized crime is a category of transnational, national, or local groupings of highly centralized enterprises run by criminals who intend to engage in illegal activity, most commonly for money and profit.

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Organized Crime research papers look into the highly cenralized and hierarchical structures employed by criminals in order to conduct illegal activity. New research that has been written on organized crime by our writers tells of an evolution of organized crime from family run operations, like those found in the 1920's crime families, to highly sophisticated groups that span entire nations today.

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The Twenty-first Amendment (Amendment XXI) to the United States Constitution repealed the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which had mandated nationwide Prohibition on alcohol on January 16, 1919. TheTwenty-first Amendment was ratified on December 5, 1933.

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The 21 amendment The Twenty-first Amendment ( Amendment XXI ) to the United States Constitution repealed the...

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The Jazz Age was a post-World War I movement in the 1920s from which jazz music and dance emerged. Although the era ended with the outset of the Great Depression in 1929, jazz has lived on in American popular culture.

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is the purchase of an asset by paying the margin and borrowing the balance from a bank or broker. Buying on margin refers to the initial or down payment made to the broker for the asset being purchased; the collateral for the borrowed funds is the marginable securities in the investor's account.

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Day trading is the activity of buying and selling financial instruments (stocks, bonds, options, futures or commodities) with the intent of profiting from price movements in the underlying security within a single trading day. While positions may be held for seconds to hours during the day, they are always closed out prior to the market close to avoid overnight exposure risk. Entering a position (also known as opening a position) and then exiting the same position (also known as closing the position) is defined as a round trip. For example, buying 100 shares of XYZ stock at $26 and selling 100 shares of XYZ stock $26.30 approximately 20 minutes later. Day trading is a series of speculative round trips executed inside of market hours. Swing trading allows for holding positions overnight to several days.

Pattern Day Trading (PDT) Rule for Stocks and Options

FINRA implemented the Pattern Day Trader (PDT) Rule 4210, which defines day trading as executing four or more round trip trades within any rolling five business day period for accounts with less than $25,000 in equity. This basically means accounts under $25,000 are restricted to three round trips within a five-day period. Violation of this rule can result in a 90-day account freeze. This rule applies to stocks and options. The bottom line is a minimum of $25,000 is required to day trade. Realistically, $30,000 should be considered a starting point to avoid PDT Rule restrictions.

Day trading typically utilizes margin for leverage during the trading day. Margin rates and requirements vary depending on the

financial instrument and the broker. For stocks and options, day trading buying power has a leverage ratio of 4 to 1 or four times the maintenance margin excess in the account. In simpler terms, it means you can purchase stocks and options at only 25% of the price (4 to 1) with the excess cash in the account. Margin excess is the account equity minus margin requirement. Overnight margin is 2 to 1 or 50% of the value of position(s).

Day traders can fall into traps when they don't realize that margin is completely at the discretion of the broker. For extremely volatile stocks, brokers may cut the margin leverage ratio down to 2 to 1, requiring 50% instead of 25% excess equity. This becomes a major factor if an intra-day margin call gets triggered. The broker has the right to unwind a position, often at the worst prices, when a margin call needs to be satisfied.

Short Squeeze Margin Calls

In this case, a day trader may be shorting a stock as it rises higher. The day trader assumes he has 4 to 1 leverage but in reality, the broker set the margin leverage down to a 2 to 1 ratio due to excess volatility. As the stock continues to squeeze higher, the day trader notices that he no longer has margin available to add to his short position. Even worse, the rising stock price triggers an intra-day margin call triggering a forced liquidation as the broker automatically buy-covers pieces of his short position at the highs of the day. The damage result is two-fold. The buying frenzy from margin calls fuels the price surges higher, which means larger losses for the trader and continued margin call liquidation. This is how short-squeezes are formed, usually triggering from margin calls and abrupt unavailability of short shares.

The Day Trading and Technology Bubble of 2000

The term day trading conjures up painful memories of the technology bubble bear market at the start of the new millennium. Day trading became a cultural phemon during 1997-2001 as the Nasdaq Composite index climbed from under 1,000 to over 5,000 spurred by the momentum from technology and Internet stocks. Stories of day traders earning $5-$10,000 a day caught the media and stoked a whole generation of retail investors to partake in day trading. Initial public offerings (IPOs) common soared triple digits on the open minting overnight millionaires by the barrel. This all came to a bust when the bear market of 2000-2002 hit. The technology bubble burst triggered a massive market sell-off as the S&P 500 index collapsed 58%. Even worse, the technology heavy Nasdaq Composite index collapsed a whopping 78%, from a high of 5,048 on March 10, 2000, to a low of 1,114 on October 9, 2002! The numerous margin call liquidations and horror stories of life savings lost spurred regulatory involvement, like the PDT Rule 4210.

The Evolution of Day Trading

Since the technology bubble, the markets have become more efficient with computerization, as auction pits have been replaced with computer screens. Retail broker platforms and tools have advanced to allow day traders to analyze technical and fundamental information with a few keystrokes. While fraction-based price spreads have been replaced with decimal-based penny increments, the commission structure has also been improved. Access to news and information combined with instant fills and order modifications have produced more sophisticated day traders. Algorithm and high frequency trading programs control up to 70% of the market movements. This has provided opportunities for day traders that can take advantage of the price action.

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What is Day Trading - Definition and Explanation

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Day trading is the activity of buying and selling financial instruments (stocks, bonds, options, futures or commodities) with the intent of profiting from price movements in the underlying security within a single trading day. While positions may be held for seconds to hours during the day, they are always closed out prior to the market close to avoid overnight exposure risk.

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Period that follows recovery phase in a standard economic cycle. A boom is characterized by an economy working at full or near-full capacity, strong consumer demand, low rate of unemployment, and a rising stockmarket, usually accompanied by rapidly increasing consumer prices (inflation).

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Gene Smiley, Marquette University

Introduction

The interwar period in the United States, and in the rest of the world, is a most interesting era. The decade of the 1930s marks the most severe depression in our history and ushered in sweeping changes in the role of government. Economists and historians have rightly given much attention to that decade. However, with all of this concern about the growing and developing role of government in economic activity in the 1930s, the decade of the 1920s often tends to get overlooked. This is unfortunate because the 1920s are a period of vigorous, vital economic growth. It marks the first truly modern decade and dramatic economic developments are found in those years. There is a rapid adoption of the automobile to the detriment of passenger rail travel. Though suburbs had been growing since the late nineteenth century their growth had been tied to rail or trolley access and this was limited to the largest cities. The flexibility of car access changed this and the growth of suburbs began to accelerate. The demands of trucks and cars led to a rapid growth in the construction of all-weather surfaced roads to facilitate their movement. The rapidly expanding electric utility networks led to new consumer appliances and new types of lighting and heating for homes and businesses. The introduction of the radio, radio stations, and commercial radio networks began to break up rural isolation, as did the expansion of local and long-distance telephone communications. Recreational activities such as traveling, going to movies, and professional sports became major businesses. The period saw major innovations in business organization and manufacturing technology. The Federal Reserve System first tested its powers and the United States moved to a dominant position in international trade and global business. These things make the 1920s a period of considerable importance independent of what happened in the 1930s.

National Product and Income and Prices

We begin the survey of the 1920s with an examination of the overall production in the economy, GNP, the most comprehensive measure of aggregate economic activity. Real GNP growth during the 1920s was relatively rapid, 4.2 percent a year from 1920 to 1929 according to the most widely used estimates. (Historical Statistics of the United States, or HSUS, 1976) Real GNP per capita grew 2.7 percent per year between 1920 and 1929. By both nineteenth and twentieth century standards these were relatively rapid rates of real economic growth and they would be considered rapid even today.

There were several interruptions to this growth. In mid-1920 the American economy began to contract and the 1920-1921 depression lasted about a year, but a rapid recovery reestablished full-employment by 1923. As will be discussed below, the Federal Reserve System's monetary policy was a major factor in initiating the 1920-1921 depression. From 1923 through 1929 growth was much smoother. There was a very mild recession in 1924 and another mild recession in 1927 both of which may be related to oil price shocks (McMillin and Parker, 1994). The 1927 recession was also associated with Henry Ford's shut-down of all his factories for six months in order to changeover from the Model T to the new Model A automobile. Though the Model T's market share was declining after 1924, in 1926 Ford's Model T still made up nearly 40 percent of all the new cars produced and sold in the United States. The Great Depression began in the summer of 1929, possibly as early as June. The initial downturn was relatively mild but the contraction accelerated after the crash of the stock market at the end of October. Real total GNP fell 10.2 percent from 1929 to 1930 while real GNP per capita fell 11.5 percent from 1929 to 1930.

Price changes during the 1920s are shown in Figure 2. The Consumer Price Index, CPI, is a better measure of changes in the prices of commodities and services that a typical consumer would purchase, while the Wholesale Price Index, WPI, is a better measure in the changes in the cost of inputs for businesses. As the figure shows the 1920-1921 depression was marked by extraordinarily large price decreases. Consumer prices fell 11.3 percent from 1920 to 1921 and fell another 6.6 percent from 1921 to 1922. After that consumer prices were relatively constant and actually fell slightly from 1926 to 1927 and from 1927 to 1928. Wholesale prices show greater variation. The 1920-1921 depression hit farmers very hard. Prices had been bid up with the increasing foreign demand during the First World War. As European production began to recover after the war prices began to fall. Though the prices of agricultural products fell from 1919 to 1920, the depression brought on dramatic declines in the prices of raw agricultural produce as well as many other inputs that firms employ. In the scramble to beat price increases during 1919 firms had built up large inventories of raw materials and purchased inputs and this temporary increase in demand led to even larger price increases. With the depression firms began to draw down those inventories. The result was that the prices of raw materials and manufactured inputs fell rapidly along with the prices of agricultural produce-the WPI dropped 45.9 percent between 1920 and 1921. The price changes probably tend to overstate the severity of the 1920-1921 depression. Romer's recent work (1988) suggests that prices changed much more easily in that depression reducing the drop in production and employment. Wholesale prices in the rest of the 1920s were relatively stable though they were more likely to fall than to rise.

Economic Growth in the 1920s

Despite the 1920-1921 depression and the minor interruptions in 1924 and 1927, the American economy exhibited impressive economic growth during the 1920s. Though some commentators in later years thought that the existence of some slow growing or declining sectors in the twenties suggested weaknesses that might have helped bring on the Great Depression, few now argue this. Economic growth never occurs in all sectors at the same time and at the same rate. Growth reallocates resources from declining or slower growing sectors to the more rapidly expanding sectors in accordance with new technologies, new products and services, and changing consumer tastes.

Economic growth in the 1920s was impressive. Ownership of cars, new household appliances, and housing was spread widely through the population. New products and processes of producing those products drove this growth. The combination of the widening use of electricity in production and the growing adoption of the moving assembly line in manufacturing combined to bring on a continuing rise in the productivity of labor and capital. Though the average workweek in most manufacturing remained essentially constant throughout the 1920s, in a few industries, such as railroads and coal production, it declined. (Whaples 2001) New products and services created new markets such as the markets for radios, electric iceboxes, electric irons, fans, electric lighting, vacuum cleaners, and other laborsaving household appliances. This electricity was distributed by the growing electric utilities. The stocks of those companies helped create the stock market boom of the late twenties. RCA, one of the glamour stocks of the era, paid no dividends but its value appreciated because of expectations for the new company. Like the Internet boom of the late 1990s, the electricity boom of the 1920s fed a rapid expansion in the stock market.

Fed by continuing productivity advances and new products and services and facilitated by an environment of stable prices that encouraged production and risk taking, the American economy embarked on a sustained expansion in the 1920s.

Population and Labor in the 1920s

At the same time that overall production was growing, population growth was declining. As can be seen in Figure 3, from an annual rate of increase of 1.85 and 1.93 percent in 1920 and 1921, respectively, population growth rates fell to 1.23 percent in 1928 and 1.04 percent in 1929.

These changes in the overall growth rate were linked to the birth and death rates of the resident population and a decrease in foreign immigration. Though the crude death rate changed little during the period, the crude birth rate fell sharply into the early 1930s. (Figure 4) There are several explanations for the decline in the birth rate during this period. First, there was an accelerated rural-to-urban migration. Urban families have tended to have fewer children than rural families because urban children do not augment family incomes through their work as unpaid workers as rural children do. Second, the period also saw continued improvement in women's job opportunities and a rise in their labor force participation rates.

Immigration also fell sharply. In 1917 the federal government began to limit immigration and in 1921 an immigration act limited the number of prospective citizens of any nationality entering the United States each year to no more than 3 percent of that nationality's resident population as of the 1910 census. A new act in 1924 lowered this to 2 percent of the resident population at the 1890 census and more firmly blocked entry for people from central, southern, and eastern European nations. The limits were relaxed slightly in 1929.

The American population also continued to move during the interwar period. Two regions experienced the largest losses in population shares, New England and the Plains. For New England this was a continuation of a long-term trend. The population share for the Plains region had been rising through the nineteenth century. In the interwar period its agricultural base, combined with the continuing shift from agriculture to industry, led to a sharp decline in its share. The regions gaining population were the Southwest and, particularly, the far West.- California began its rapid growth at this time.

During the 1920s the labor force grew at a more rapid rate than population. This somewhat more rapid growth came from the declining share of the population less than 14 years old and therefore not in the labor force. In contrast, the labor force participation rates, or fraction of the population aged 14 and over that was in the labor force, declined during the twenties from 57.7 percent to 56.3 percent. This was entirely due to a fall in the male labor force participation rate from 89.6 percent to 86.8 percent as the female labor force participation rate rose from 24.3 percent to 25.1 percent. The primary source of the fall in male labor force participation rates was a rising retirement rate. Employment rates for males who were 65 or older fell from 60.1 percent in 1920 to 58.0 percent in 1930.

With the depression of 1920-1921 the unemployment rate rose rapidly from 5.2 to 8.7 percent. The recovery reduced unemployment to an average rate of 4.8 percent in 1923. The unemployment rate rose to 5.8 percent in the recession of 1924 and to 5.0 percent with the slowdown in 1927. Otherwise unemployment remained relatively low. The onset of the Great Depression from the summer of 1929 on brought the unemployment rate from 4.6 percent in 1929 to 8.9 percent in 1930. (Figure 5)

Earnings for laborers varied during the twenties. Table 1 presents average weekly earnings for 25 manufacturing industries. For these industries male skilled and semi-skilled laborers generally commanded a premium of 35 percent over the earnings of unskilled male laborers in the twenties. Unskilled males received on average 35 percent more than females during the twenties. Real average weekly earnings for these 25 manufacturing industries rose somewhat during the 1920s. For skilled and semi-skilled male workers real average weekly earnings rose 5.3 percent between 1923 and 1929, while real average weekly earnings for unskilled males rose 8.7 percent between 1923 and 1929. Real average weekly earnings for females rose on 1.7 percent between 1923 and 1929. Real weekly earnings for bituminous and lignite coal miners fell as the coal industry encountered difficult times in the late twenties and the real daily wage rate for farmworkers in the twenties, reflecting the ongoing difficulties in agriculture, fell after the recovery from the 1920-1921 depression.

The 1920s were not kind to labor unions even though the First World War had solidified the dominance of the American Federation of Labor among labor unions in the United States. The rapid growth in union membership fostered by federal government policies during the war ended in 1919. A committee of AFL craft unions undertook a successful membership drive in the steel industry in that year. When U.S. Steel refused to bargain, the committee called a strike, the failure of which was a sharp blow to the unionization drive. (Brody, 1965) In the same year, the United Mine Workers undertook a large strike and also lost. These two lost strikes and the 1920-21 depression took the impetus out of the union movement and led to severe membership losses that continued through the twenties. (Figure 6)

Under Samuel Gompers's leadership, the AFL's "business unionism" had attempted to promote the union and collective bargaining as the primary answer to the workers' concerns with wages, hours, and working conditions. The AFL officially opposed any government actions that would have diminished worker attachment to unions by providing competing benefits, such as government sponsored unemployment insurance, minimum wage proposals, maximum hours proposals and social security programs. As Lloyd Ulman (1961) points out, the AFL, under Gompers' direction, differentiated on the basis of whether the statute would or would not aid collective bargaining. After Gompers' death, William Green led the AFL in a policy change as the AFL promoted the idea of union-management cooperation to improve output and promote greater employer acceptance of unions. But Irving Bernstein (1965) concludes that, on the whole, union-management cooperation in the twenties was a failure.

To combat the appeal of unions in the twenties, firms used the "yellow-dog" contract requiring employees to swear they were not union members and would not join one; the "American Plan" promoting the open shop and contending that the closed shop was un-American; and welfare capitalism. The most common aspects of welfare capitalism included personnel management to handle employment issues and problems, the doctrine of "high wages," company group life insurance, old-age pension plans, stock-purchase plans, and more. Some firms formed company unions to thwart independent unionization and the number of company-controlled unions grew from 145 to 432 between 1919 and 1926.

Until the late thirties the AFL was a voluntary association of independent national craft unions. Craft unions relied upon the particular skills the workers had acquired (their craft) to distinguish the workers and provide barriers to the entry of other workers. Most craft unions required a period of apprenticeship before a worker was fully accepted as a journeyman worker. The skills, and often lengthy apprenticeship, constituted the entry barrier that gave the union its bargaining power. There were only a few unions that were closer to today's industrial unions where the required skills were much less (or nonexistent) making the entry of new workers much easier. The most important of these industrial unions was the United Mine Workers, UMW.

The AFL had been created on two principles: the autonomy of the national unions and the exclusive jurisdiction of the national union.-Individual union members were not, in fact, members of the AFL; rather, they were members of the local and national union, and the national was a member of the AFL. Representation in the AFL gave dominance to the national unions, and, as a result, the AFL had little effective power over them. The craft lines, however, had never been distinct and increasingly became blurred. The AFL was constantly mediating jurisdictional disputes between member national unions. Because the AFL and its individual unions were not set up to appeal to and work for the relatively less skilled industrial workers, union organizing and growth lagged in the twenties.

Agriculture

The onset of the First World War in Europe brought unprecedented prosperity to American farmers. As agricultural production in Europe declined, the demand for American agricultural exports rose, leading to rising farm product prices and incomes. In response to this, American farmers expanded production by moving onto marginal farmland, such as Wisconsin cutover property on the edge of the woods and hilly terrain in the Ozark and Appalachian regions. They also increased output by purchasing more machinery, such as tractors, plows, mowers, and threshers. The price of farmland, particularly marginal farmland, rose in response to the increased demand, and the debt of American farmers increased substantially.

This expansion of American agriculture continued past the end of the First World War as farm exports to Europe and farm prices initially remained high. However, agricultural production in Europe recovered much faster than most observers had anticipated. Even before the onset of the short depression in 1920, farm exports and farm product prices had begun to fall. During the depression, farm prices virtually collapsed. From 1920 to 1921, the consumer price index fell 11.3 percent, the wholesale price index fell 45.9 percent, and the farm products price index fell 53.3 percent. (HSUS, Series E40, E42, and E135)

Real average net income per farm fell over 72.6 percent between 1920 and 1921 and, though rising in the twenties, never recovered the relative levels of 1918 and 1919. (Figure 7) Farm mortgage foreclosures rose and stayed at historically high levels for the entire decade of the 1920s. (Figure 8) The value of farmland and buildings fell throughout the twenties and, for the first time in American history, the number of cultivated acres actually declined as farmers pulled back from the marginal farmland brought into production during the war. Rather than indicators of a general depression in agriculture in the twenties, these were the results of the financial commitments made by overoptimistic American farmers during and directly after the war. The foreclosures were generally on second mortgages rather than on first mortgages as they were in the early 1930s. (Johnson, 1973; Alston, 1983)

A Declining Sector

A major difficulty in analyzing the interwar agricultural sector lies in separating the effects of the 1920-21 and 1929-33 depressions from those that arose because agriculture was declining relative to the other sectors. A relatively very slow growing demand for basic agricultural products and significant increases in the productivity of labor, land, and machinery in agricultural production combined with a much more rapid extensive economic growth in the nonagricultural sectors of the economy required a shift of resources, particularly labor, out of agriculture. (Figure 9) The market induces labor to voluntarily move from one sector to another through income differentials, suggesting that even in the absence of the effects of the depressions, farm incomes would have been lower than nonfarm incomes so as to bring about this migration.

The continuous substitution of tractor power for horse and mule power released hay and oats acreage to grow crops for human consumption. Though cotton and tobacco continued as the primary crops in the south, the relative production of cotton continued to shift to the west as production in Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California increased. As quotas reduced immigration and incomes rose, the demand for cereal grains grew slowly-more slowly than the supply-and the demand for fruits, vegetables, and dairy products grew. Refrigeration and faster freight shipments expanded the milk sheds further from metropolitan areas. Wisconsin and other North Central states began to ship cream and cheeses to the Atlantic Coast. Due to transportation improvements, specialized truck farms and the citrus industry became more important in California and Florida. (Parker, 1972; Soule, 1947)

The relative decline of the agricultural sector in this period was closely related to the highly inelastic income elasticity of demand for many farm products, particularly cereal grains, pork, and cotton. As incomes grew, the demand for these staples grew much more slowly. At the same time, rising land and labor productivity were increasing the supplies of staples, causing real prices to fall.

Table 3 presents selected agricultural productivity statistics for these years. Those data indicate that there were greater gains in labor productivity than in land productivity (or per acre yields). Per acre yields in wheat and hay actually decreased between 1915-19 and 1935-39. These productivity increases, which released resources from the agricultural sector, were the result of technological improvements in agriculture.

Technological Improvements In Agricultural Production

In many ways the adoption of the tractor in the interwar period symbolizes the technological changes that occurred in the agricultural sector. This changeover in the power source that farmers used had far-reaching consequences and altered the organization of the farm and the farmers' lifestyle. The adoption of the tractor was land saving (by releasing acreage previously used to produce crops for workstock) and labor saving. At the same time it increased the risks of farming because farmers were now much more exposed to the marketplace. They could not produce their own fuel for tractors as they had for the workstock. Rather, this had to be purchased from other suppliers. Repair and replacement parts also had to be purchased, and sometimes the repairs had to be undertaken by specialized mechanics. The purchase of a tractor also commonly required the purchase of new complementary machines; therefore, the decision to purchase a tractor was not an isolated one. (White, 2001; Ankli, 1980; Ankli and Olmstead, 1981; Musoke, 1981; Whatley, 1987). These changes resulted in more and more farmers purchasing and using tractors, but the rate of adoption varied sharply across the United States.

Technological innovations in plants and animals also raised productivity. Hybrid seed corn increased yields from an average of 40 bushels per acre to 100 to 120 bushels per acre. New varieties of wheat were developed from the hardy Russian and Turkish wheat varieties which had been imported. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Experiment Stations took the lead in developing wheat varieties for different regions. For example, in the Columbia River Basin new varieties raised yields from an average of 19.1 bushels per acre in 1913-22 to 23.1 bushels per acre in 1933-42. (Shepherd, 1980) New hog breeds produced more meat and new methods of swine sanitation sharply increased the survival rate of piglets. An effective serum for hog cholera was developed, and the federal government led the way in the testing and eradication of bovine tuberculosis and brucellosis. Prior to the Second World War, a number of pesticides to control animal disease were developed, including cattle dips and disinfectants. By the mid-1920s a vaccine for "blackleg," an infectious, usually fatal disease that particularly struck young cattle, was completed. The cattle tick, which carried Texas Fever, was largely controlled through inspections. (Schlebecker, 1975; Bogue, 1983; Wood, 1980)

Federal Agricultural Programs in the 1920s

Though there was substantial agricultural discontent in the period from the Civil War to late 1890s, the period from then to the onset of the First World War was relatively free from overt farmers' complaints. In later years farmers dubbed the 1910-14 period as agriculture's "golden years" and used the prices of farm crops and farm inputs in that period as a standard by which to judge crop and input prices in later years. The problems that arose in the agricultural sector during the twenties once again led to insistent demands by farmers for government to alleviate their distress.

Though there were increasing calls for direct federal government intervention to limit production and raise farm prices, this was not used until Roosevelt took office. Rather, there was a reliance upon the traditional method to aid injured groups-tariffs, and upon the "sanctioning and promotion of cooperative marketing associations." In 1921 Congress attempted to control the grain exchanges and compel merchants and stockyards to charge "reasonable rates," with the Packers and Stockyards Act and the Grain Futures Act. In 1922 Congress passed the Capper-Volstead Act to promote agricultural cooperatives and the Fordney-McCumber Tariff to impose high duties on most agricultural imports.-The Cooperative Marketing Act of 1924 did not bolster failing cooperatives as it was supposed to do. (Hoffman and Liebcap, 1991)

Twice between 1924 and 1928 Congress passed "McNary-Haugan" bills, but President Calvin Coolidge vetoed both. The McNary-Haugan bills proposed to establish "fair" exchange values (based on the 1910-14 period) for each product and to maintain them through tariffs and a private corporation that would be chartered by the government and could buy enough of each commodity to keep its price up to the computed fair level. The revenues were to come from taxes imposed on farmers. The Hoover administration passed the Hawley-Smoot tariff in 1930 and an Agricultural Marketing Act in 1929. This act committed the federal government to a policy of stabilizing farm prices through several nongovernment institutions but these failed during the depression. Federal intervention in the agricultural sector really came of age during the New Deal era of the 1930s.

Manufacturing

Agriculture was not the only sector experiencing difficulties in the twenties. Other industries, such as textiles, boots and shoes, and coal mining, also experienced trying times. However, at the same time that these industries were declining, other industries, such as electrical appliances, automobiles, and construction, were growing rapidly. The simultaneous existence of growing and declining industries has been common to all eras because economic growth and technological progress never affect all sectors in the same way. In general, in manufacturing there was a rapid rate of growth of productivity during the twenties. The rise of real wages due to immigration restrictions and the slower growth of the resident population spurred this. Transportation improvements and communications advances were also responsible. These developments brought about differential growth in the various manufacturing sectors in the United States in the 1920s.

Because of the historic pattern of economic development in the United States, the northeast was the first area to really develop a manufacturing base. By the mid-nineteenth century the East North Central region was creating a manufacturing base and the other regions began to create manufacturing bases in the last half of the nineteenth century resulting in a relative westward and southern shift of manufacturing activity. This trend continued in the 1920s as the New England and Middle Atlantic regions' shares of manufacturing employment fell while all of the other regions-excluding the West North Central region-gained. There was considerable variation in the growth of the industries and shifts in their ranking during the decade. The largest broadly defined industries were, not surprisingly, food and kindred products; textile mill products; those producing and fabricating primary metals; machinery production; and chemicals. When industries are more narrowly defined, the automobile industry, which ranked third in manufacturing value added in 1919, ranked first by the mid-1920s.

Productivity Developments

Gavin Wright (1990) has argued that one of the underappreciated characteristics of American industrial history has been its reliance on mineral resources. Wright argues that the growing American strength in industrial exports and industrialization in general relied on an increasing intensity in nonreproducible natural resources. The large American market was knit together as one large market without internal barriers through the development of widespread low-cost transportation. Many distinctively American developments, such as continuous-process, mass-production methods were associated with the "high throughput" of fuel and raw materials relative to labor and capital inputs. As a result the United States became the dominant industrial force in the world 1920s and 1930s. According to Wright, after World War II "the process by which the United States became a unified 'economy' in the nineteenth century has been extended to the world as a whole. To a degree, natural resources have become commodities rather than part of the 'factor endowment' of individual countries." (Wright, 1990)

In addition to this growing intensity in the use of nonreproducible natural resources as a source of productivity gains in American manufacturing, other technological changes during the twenties and thirties tended to raise the productivity of the existing capital through the replacement of critical types of capital equipment with superior equipment and through changes in management methods. (Soule, 1947; Lorant, 1967; Devine, 1983; Oshima, 1984) Some changes, such as the standardization of parts and processes and the reduction of the number of styles and designs, raised the productivity of both capital and labor. Modern management techniques, first introduced by Frederick W. Taylor, were introduced on a wider scale.

One of the important forces contributing to mass production and increased productivity was the transfer to electric power. (Devine, 1983) By 1929 about 70 percent of manufacturing activity relied on electricity, compared to roughly 30 percent in 1914. Steam provided 80 percent of the mechanical drive capacity in manufacturing in 1900, but electricity provided over 50 percent by 1920 and 78 percent by 1929. An increasing number of factories were buying their power from electric utilities. In 1909, 64 percent of the electric motor capacity in manufacturing establishments used electricity generated on the factory site; by 1919, 57 percent of the electricity used in manufacturing was purchased from independent electric utilities.

The shift from coal to oil and natural gas and from raw unprocessed energy in the forms of coal and waterpower to processed energy in the form of internal combustion fuel and electricity increased thermal efficiency. After the First World War energy consumption relative to GNP fell, there was a sharp increase in the growth rate of output per labor-hour, and the output per unit of capital input once again began rising. These trends can be seen in the data in Table 3. Labor productivity grew much more rapidly during the 1920s than in the previous or following decade. Capital productivity had declined in the decade previous to the 1920s while it also increased sharply during the twenties and continued to rise in the following decade. Alexander Field (2003) has argued that the 1930s were the most technologically progressive decade of the twentieth century basing his argument on the growth of multi-factor productivity as well as the impressive array of technological developments during the thirties. However, the twenties also saw impressive increases in labor and capital productivity as, particularly, developments in energy and transportation accelerated.

Warren Devine, Jr. (1983) reports that in the twenties the most important result of the adoption of electricity was that it would be an indirect "lever to increase production." There were a number of ways in which this occurred. Electricity brought about an increased flow of production by allowing new flexibility in the design of buildings and the arrangement of machines. In this way it maximized throughput. Electric cranes were an "inestimable boon" to production because with adequate headroom they could operate anywhere in a plant, something that mechanical power transmission to overhead cranes did not allow. Electricity made possible the use of portable power tools that could be taken anywhere in the factory. Electricity brought about improved illumination, ventilation, and cleanliness in the plants, dramatically improving working conditions. It improved the control of machines since there was no longer belt slippage with overhead line shafts and belt transmission, and there were less limitations on the operating speeds of machines. Finally, it made plant expansion much easier than when overhead shafts and belts had been relied upon for operating power.

The mechanization of American manufacturing accelerated in the 1920s, and this led to a much more rapid growth of productivity in manufacturing compared to earlier decades and to other sectors at that time. There were several forces that promoted mechanization. One was the rapidly expanding aggregate demand during the prosperous twenties. Another was the technological developments in new machines and processes, of which electrification played an important part. Finally, Harry Jerome (1934) and, later, Harry Oshima (1984) both suggest that the price of unskilled labor began to rise as immigration sharply declined with new immigration laws and falling population growth. This accelerated the mechanization of the nation's factories.

Technological changes during this period can be documented for a number of individual industries. In bituminous coal mining, labor productivity rose when mechanical loading devices reduced the labor required from 24 to 50 percent. The burst of paved road construction in the twenties led to the development of a finishing machine to smooth the surface of cement highways, and this reduced the labor requirement from 40 to 60 percent. Mechanical pavers that spread centrally mixed materials further increased productivity in road construction. These replaced the roadside dump and wheelbarrow methods of spreading the cement. Jerome (1934) reports that the glass in electric light bulbs was made by new machines that cut the number of labor-hours required for their manufacture by nearly half. New machines to produce cigarettes and cigars, for warp-tying in textile production, and for pressing clothes in clothing shops also cut labor-hours. The Banbury mixer reduced the labor input in the production of automobile tires by half, and output per worker of inner tubes increased about four times with a new production method. However, as Daniel Nelson (1987) points out, the continuing advances were the "cumulative process resulting from a vast number of successive small changes." Because of these continuing advances in the quality of the tires and in the manufacturing of tires, between 1910 and 1930 "tire costs per thousand miles of driving fell from $9.39 to $0.65."

John Lorant (1967) has documented other technological advances that occurred in American manufacturing during the twenties. For example, the organic chemical industry developed rapidly due to the introduction of the Weizman fermentation process. In a similar fashion, nearly half of the productivity advances in the paper industry were due to the "increasingly sophisticated applications of electric power and paper manufacturing processes," especially the fourdrinier paper-making machines. As Avi Cohen (1984) has shown, the continuing advances in these machines were the result of evolutionary changes to the basic machine. Mechanization in many types of mass-production industries raised the productivity of labor and capital. In the glass industry, automatic feeding and other types of fully automatic production raised the efficiency of the production of glass containers, window glass, and pressed glass. Giedion (1948) reported that the production of bread was "automatized" in all stages during the 1920s.

Though not directly bringing about productivity increases in manufacturing processes, developments in the management of manufacturing firms, particularly the largest ones, also significantly affected their structure and operation. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. (1962) has argued that the structure of a firm must follow its strategy. Until the First World War most industrial firms were centralized, single-division firms even when becoming vertically integrated. When this began to change the management of the large industrial firms had to change accordingly.

Because of these changes in the size and structure of the firm during the First World War, E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company was led to adopt a strategy of diversifying into the production of largely unrelated product lines. The firm found that the centralized, divisional structure that had served it so well was not suited to this strategy, and its poor business performance led its executives to develop between 1919 and 1921 a decentralized, multidivisional structure that boosted it to the first rank among American industrial firms.

General Motors had a somewhat different problem. By 1920 it was already decentralized into separate divisions. In fact, there was so much decentralization that those divisions essentially remained separate companies and there was little coordination between the operating divisions. A financial crisis at the end of 1920 ousted W. C. Durant and brought in the du Ponts and Alfred Sloan. Sloan, who had seen the problems at GM but had been unable to convince Durant to make changes, began reorganizing the management of the company. Over the next several years Sloan and other GM executives developed the general office for a decentralized, multidivisional firm.

Though facing related problems at nearly the same time, GM and du Pont developed their decentralized, multidivisional organizations separately. As other manufacturing firms began to diversify, GM and du Pont became the models for reorganizing the management of the firms. In many industrial firms these reorganizations were not completed until well after the Second World War.

Competition, Monopoly, and the Government

The rise of big businesses, which accelerated in the postbellum period and particularly during the first great turn-of-the-century merger wave, continued in the interwar period. Between 1925 and 1939 the share of manufacturing assets held by the 100 largest corporations rose from 34.5 to 41.9 percent. (Niemi, 1980) As a public policy, the concern with monopolies diminished in the 1920s even though firms were growing larger. But the growing size of businesses was one of the convenient scapegoats upon which to blame the Great Depression.

However, the rise of large manufacturing firms in the interwar period is not so easily interpreted as an attempt to monopolize their industries. Some of the growth came about through vertical integration by the more successful manufacturing firms. Backward integration was generally an attempt to ensure a smooth supply of raw materials where that supply was not plentiful and was dispersed and firms "feared that raw materials might become controlled by competitors or independent suppliers." (Livesay and Porter, 1969) Forward integration was an offensive tactic employed when manufacturers found that the existing distribution network proved inadequate. Livesay and Porter suggested a number of reasons why firms chose to integrate forward. In some cases they had to provide the mass distribution facilities to handle their much larger outputs; especially when the product was a new one. The complexity of some new products required technical expertise that the existing distribution system could not provide. In other cases "the high unit costs of products required consumer credit which exceeded financial capabilities of independent distributors." Forward integration into wholesaling was more common than forward integration into retailing. The producers of automobiles, petroleum, typewriters, sewing machines, and harvesters were typical of those manufacturers that integrated all the way into retailing.

In some cases, increases in industry concentration arose as a natural process of industrial maturation. In the automobile industry, Henry Ford's invention in 1913 of the moving assembly line-a technological innovation that changed most manufacturing-lent itself to larger factories and firms. Of the several thousand companies that had produced cars prior to 1920, 120 were still doing so then, but Ford and General Motors were the clear leaders, together producing nearly 70 percent of the cars. During the twenties, several other companies, such as Durant, Willys, and Studebaker, missed their opportunity to become more important producers, and Chrysler, formed in early 1925, became the third most important producer by 1930. Many went out of business and by 1929 only 44 companies were still producing cars. The Great Depression decimated the industry. Dozens of minor firms went out of business. Ford struggled through by relying on its huge stockpile of cash accumulated prior to the mid-1920s, while Chrysler actually grew. By 1940, only eight companies still produced cars-GM, Ford, and Chrysler had about 85 percent of the market, while Willys, Studebaker, Nash, Hudson, and Packard shared the remainder. The rising concentration in this industry was not due to attempts to monopolize. As the industry matured, growing economies of scale in factory production and vertical integration, as well as the advantages of a widespread dealer network, led to a dramatic decrease in the number of viable firms. (Chandler, 1962 and 1964; Rae, 1984; Bernstein, 1987)

It was a similar story in the tire industry. The increasing concentration and growth of firms was driven by scale economies in production and retailing and by the devastating effects of the depression in the thirties. Although there were 190 firms in 1919, 5 firms dominated the industry-Goodyear, B. F. Goodrich, Firestone, U.S. Rubber, and Fisk, followed by Miller Rubber, General Tire and Rubber, and Kelly-Springfield. During the twenties, 166 firms left the industry while 66 entered. The share of the 5 largest firms rose from 50 percent in 1921 to 75 percent in 1937. During the depressed thirties, there was fierce price competition, and many firms exited the industry. By 1937 there were 30 firms, but the average employment per factory was 4.41 times as large as in 1921, and the average factory produced 6.87 times as many tires as in 1921. (French, 1986 and 1991; Nelson, 1987; Fricke, 1982)

The steel industry was already highly concentrated by 1920 as U.S. Steel had around 50 percent of the market. But U. S. Steel's market share declined through the twenties and thirties as several smaller firms competed and grew to become known as Little Steel, the next six largest integrated producers after U. S. Steel. Jonathan Baker (1989) has argued that the evidence is consistent with "the assumption that competition was a dominant strategy for steel manufacturers" until the depression. However, the initiation of the National Recovery Administration (NRA) codes in 1933 required the firms to cooperate rather than compete, and Baker argues that this constituted a training period leading firms to cooperate in price and output policies after 1935. (McCraw and Reinhardt, 1989; Weiss, 1980; Adams, 1977)

Mergers

A number of the larger firms grew by merger during this period, and the second great merger wave in American industry occurred during the last half of the 1920s. Figure 10 shows two series on mergers during the interwar period. The FTC series included many of the smaller mergers. The series constructed by Carl Eis (1969) only includes the larger mergers and ends in 1930.

This second great merger wave coincided with the stock market boom of the twenties and has been called "merger for oligopoly" rather than merger for monopoly. (Stigler, 1950) This merger wave created many larger firms that ranked below the industry leaders. Much of the activity in occurred in the banking and public utilities industries. (Markham, 1955) In manufacturing and mining, the effects on industrial structure were less striking. Eis (1969) found that while mergers took place in almost all industries, they were concentrated in a smaller number of them, particularly petroleum, primary metals, and food products.

The federal government's antitrust policies toward business varied sharply during the interwar period. In the 1920s there was relatively little activity by the Justice Department, but after the Great Depression the New Dealers tried to take advantage of big business to make business exempt from the antitrust laws and cartelize industries under government supervision.

With the passage of the FTC and Clayton Acts in 1914 to supplement the 1890 Sherman Act, the cornerstones of American antitrust law were complete. Though minor amendments were later enacted, the primary changes after that came in the enforcement of the laws and in swings in judicial decisions. Their two primary areas of application were in the areas of overt behavior, such as horizontal and vertical price-fixing, and in market structure, such as mergers and dominant firms. Horizontal price-fixing involves firms that would normally be competitors getting together to agree on stable and higher prices for their products. As long as most of the important competitors agree on the new, higher prices, substitution between products is eliminated and the demand becomes much less elastic. Thus, increasing the price increases the revenues and the profits of the firms who are fixing prices. Vertical price-fixing involves firms setting the prices of intermediate products purchased at different stages of production. It also tends to eliminate substitutes and makes the demand less elastic.

Price-fixing continued to be considered illegal throughout the period, but there was no major judicial activity regarding it in the 1920s other than the Trenton Potteries decision in 1927. In that decision 20 individuals and 23 corporations were found guilty of conspiring to fix the prices of bathroom bowls. The evidence in the case suggested that the firms were not very successful at doing so, but the court found that they were guilty nevertheless; their success, or lack thereof, was not held to be a factor in the decision. (Scherer and Ross, 1990) Though criticized by some, the decision was precedent setting in that it prohibited explicit pricing conspiracies per se.

The Justice Department had achieved success in dismantling Standard Oil and American Tobacco in 1911 through decisions that the firms had unreasonably restrained trade. These were essentially the same points used in court decisions against the Powder Trust in 1911, the thread trust in 1913, Eastman Kodak in 1915, the glucose and cornstarch trust in 1916, and the anthracite railroads in 1920. The criterion of an unreasonable restraint of trade was used in the 1916 and 1918 decisions that found the American Can Company and the United Shoe Machinery Company innocent of violating the Sherman Act; it was also clearly enunciated in the 1920 U. S. Steel decision. This became known as the rule of reason standard in antitrust policy.

Merger policy had been defined in the 1914 Clayton Act to prohibit only the acquisition of one corporation's stock by another corporation. Firms then shifted to the outright purchase of a competitor's assets. A series of court decisions in the twenties and thirties further reduced the possibilities of Justice Department actions against mergers. "Only fifteen mergers were ordered dissolved through antitrust actions between 1914 and 1950, and ten of the orders were accomplished under the Sherman Act rather than Clayton Act proceedings."
Energy
The search for energy and new ways to translate it into heat, light, and motion has been one of the unending themes in history. From whale oil to coal oil to kerosene to electricity, the search for better and less costly ways to light our lives, heat our homes, and move our machines has consumed much time and effort. The energy industries responded to those demands and the consumption of energy materials (coal, oil, gas, and fuel wood) as a percent of GNP rose from about 2 percent in the latter part of the nineteenth century to about 3 percent in the twentieth.

Changes in the energy markets that had begun in the nineteenth century continued. Processed energy in the forms of petroleum derivatives and electricity continued to become more important than "raw" energy, such as that available from coal and water. The evolution of energy sources for lighting continued; at the end of the nineteenth century, natural gas and electricity, rather than liquid fuels began to provide more lighting for streets, businesses, and homes.

In the twentieth century the continuing shift to electricity and internal combustion fuels increased the efficiency with which the American economy used energy. These processed forms of energy resulted in a more rapid increase in the productivity of labor and capital in American manufacturing. From 1899 to 1919, output per labor-hour increased at an average annual rate of 1.2 percent, whereas from 1919 to 1937 the increase was 3.5 percent per year. The productivity of capital had fallen at an average annual rate of 1.8 percent per year in the 20 years prior to 1919, but it rose 3.1 percent a year in the 18 years after 1919. As discussed above, the adoption of electricity in American manufacturing initiated a rapid evolution in the organization of plants and rapid increases in productivity in all types of manufacturing.

The change in transportation was even more remarkable. Internal combustion engines running on gasoline or diesel fuel revolutionized transportation. Cars quickly grabbed the lion's share of local and regional travel and began to eat into long distance passenger travel, just as the railroads had done to passenger traffic by water in the 1830s. Even before the First World War cities had begun passing laws to regulate and limit "jitney" services and to protect the investments in urban rail mass transit. Trucking began eating into the freight carried by the railroads.

These developments brought about changes in the energy industries. Coal mining became a declining industry. As Figure 11 shows, in 1925 the share of petroleum in the value of coal, gas, and petroleum output exceeded bituminous coal, and it continued to rise. Anthracite coal's share was much smaller and it declined while natural gas and LP (or liquefied petroleum) gas were relatively unimportant. These changes, especially the declining coal industry, were the source of considerable worry in the twenties.

Coal

One of the industries considered to be "sick" in the twenties was coal, particularly bituminous, or soft, coal. Income in the industry declined, and bankruptcies were frequent. Strikes frequently interrupted production. The majority of the miners "lived in squalid and unsanitary houses, and the incidence of accidents and diseases was high." (Soule, 1947) The number of operating bituminous coal mines declined sharply from 1923 through 1932. Anthracite (or hard) coal output was much smaller during the twenties. Real coal prices rose from 1919 to 1922, and bituminous coal prices fell sharply from then to 1925. (Figure 12) Coal mining employment plummeted during the twenties. Annual earnings, especially in bituminous coal mining, also fell because of dwindling hourly earnings and, from 1929 on, a shrinking workweek. (Figure 13)

The sources of these changes are to be found in the increasing supply due to productivity advances in coal production and in the decreasing demand for coal. The demand fell as industries began turning from coal to electricity and because of productivity advances in the use of coal to create energy in steel, railroads, and electric utilities. (Keller, 1973) In the generation of electricity, larger steam plants employing higher temperatures and steam pressures continued to reduce coal consumption per kilowatt hour. Similar reductions were found in the production of coke from coal for iron and steel production and in the use of coal by the steam railroad engines. (Rezneck, 1951) All of these factors reduced the demand for coal.

Productivity advances in coal mining tended to be labor saving. Mechanical cutting accounted for 60.7 percent of the coal mined in 1920 and 78.4 percent in 1929. By the middle of the twenties, the mechanical loading of coal began to be introduced. Between 1929 and 1939, output per labor-hour rose nearly one third in bituminous coal mining and nearly four fifths in anthracite as more mines adopted machine mining and mechanical loading and strip mining expanded.

The increasing supply and falling demand for coal led to the closure of mines that were too costly to operate. A mine could simply cease operations, let the equipment stand idle, and lay off employees. When bankruptcies occurred, the mines generally just turned up under new ownership with lower capital charges. When demand increased or strikes reduced the supply of coal, idle mines simply resumed production. As a result, the easily expanded supply largely eliminated economic profits.

The average daily employment in coal mining dropped by over 208,000 from its peak in 1923, but the sharply falling real wages suggests that the supply of labor did not fall as rapidly as the demand for labor. Soule (1947) notes that when employment fell in coal mining, it meant fewer days of work for the same number of men. Social and cultural characteristics tended to tie many to their home region. The local alternatives were few, and ignorance of alternatives outside the Appalachian rural areas, where most bituminous coal was mined, made it very costly to transfer out.

Petroleum

In contrast to the coal industry, the petroleum industry was growing throughout the interwar period. By the thirties, crude petroleum dominated the real value of the production of energy materials. As Figure 14 shows, the production of crude petroleum increased sharply between 1920 and 1930, while real petroleum prices, though highly variable, tended to decline.

The growing demand for petroleum was driven by the growth in demand for gasoline as America became a motorized society. The production of gasoline surpassed kerosene production in 1915. Kerosene's market continued to contract as electric lighting replaced kerosene lighting. The development of oil burners in the twenties began a switch from coal toward fuel oil for home heating, and this further increased the growing demand for petroleum. The growth in the demand for fuel oil and diesel fuel for ship engines also increased petroleum demand. But it was the growth in the demand for gasoline that drove the petroleum market.

The decline in real prices in the latter part of the twenties shows that supply was growing even faster than demand. The discovery of new fields in the early twenties increased the supply of petroleum and led to falling prices as production capacity grew. The Santa Fe Springs, California strike in 1919 initiated a supply shock as did the discovery of the Long Beach, California field in 1921. New discoveries in Powell, Texas and Smackover Arkansas further increased the supply of petroleum in 1921. New supply increases occurred in 1926 to 1928 with petroleum strikes in Seminole, Oklahoma and Hendricks, Texas. The supply of oil increased sharply in 1930 to 1931 with new discoveries in Oklahoma City and East Texas. Each new discovery pushed down real oil prices, and the prices of petroleum derivatives, and the growing production capacity led to a general declining trend in petroleum prices. McMillin and Parker (1994) argue that supply shocks generated by these new discoveries were a factor in the business cycles during the 1920s.

The supply of gasoline increased more than the supply of crude petroleum. In 1913 a chemist at Standard Oil of Indiana introduced the cracking process to refine crude petroleum; until that time it had been refined by distillation or unpressurized heating. In the heating process, various refined products such as kerosene, gasoline, naphtha, and lubricating oils were produced at different temperatures. It was difficult to vary the amount of the different refined products produced from a barrel of crude. The cracking process used pressurized heating to break heavier components down into lighter crude derivatives; with cracking, it was possible to increase the amount of gasoline obtained from a barrel of crude from 15 to 45 percent. In the early twenties, chemists at Standard Oil of New Jersey improved the cracking process, and by 1927 it was possible to obtain twice as much gasoline from a barrel of crude petroleum as in 1917.

The petroleum companies also developed new ways to distribute gasoline to motorists that made it more convenient to purchase gasoline. Prior to the First World War, gasoline was commonly purchased in one- or five-gallon cans and the purchaser used a funnel to pour the gasoline from the can into the car. Then "filling stations" appeared, which specialized in filling cars' tanks with gasoline. These spread rapidly, and by 1919 gasoline companies were beginning to introduce their own filling stations or contract with independent stations to exclusively distribute their gasoline. Increasing competition and falling profits led filling station operators to expand into other activities such as oil changes and other mechanical repairs. The general name attached to such stations gradually changed to "service stations" to reflect these new functions.

Though the petroleum firms tended to be large, they were highly competitive, trying to pump as much petroleum as possible to increase their share of the fields. This, combined with the development of new fields, led to an industry with highly volatile prices and output. Firms desperately wanted to stabilize and reduce the production of crude petroleum so as to stabilize and raise the prices of crude petroleum and refined products. Unable to obtain voluntary agreement on output limitations by the firms and producers, governments began stepping in. Led by Texas, which created the Texas Railroad Commission in 1891, oil-producing states began to intervene to regulate production. Such laws were usually termed prorationing laws and were quotas designed to limit each well's output to some fraction of its potential. The purpose was as much to stabilize and reduce production and raise prices as anything else, although generally such laws were passed under the guise of conservation. Although the federal government supported such attempts, not until the New Deal were federal laws passed to assist this.

Electricity

By the mid 1890s the debate over the method by which electricity was to be transmitted had been won by those who advocated alternating current. The reduced power losses and greater distance over which electricity could be transmitted more than offset the necessity for transforming the current back to direct current for general use. Widespread adoption of machines and appliances by industry and consumers then rested on an increase in the array of products using electricity as the source of power, heat, or light and the development of an efficient, lower cost method of generating electricity.

General Electric, Westinghouse, and other firms began producing the electrical appliances for homes and an increasing number of machines based on electricity began to appear in industry. The problem of lower cost production was solved by the introduction of centralized generating facilities that distributed the electric power through lines to many consumers and business firms.

Though initially several firms competed in generating and selling electricity to consumers and firms in a city or area, by the First World War many states and communities were awarding exclusive franchises to one firm to generate and distribute electricity to the customers in the franchise area. (Bright, 1947; Passer, 1953) The electric utility industry became an important growth industry and, as Figure 15 shows, electricity production and use grew rapidly.

The electric utilities increasingly were regulated by state commissions that were charged with setting rates so that the utilities could receive a "fair return" on their investments. Disagreements over what constituted a "fair return" and the calculation of the rate base led to a steady stream of cases before the commissions and a continuing series of court appeals. Generally these court decisions favored the reproduction cost basis. Because of the difficulty and cost in making these calculations, rates tended to be in the hands of the electric utilities that, it has been suggested, did not lower rates adequately to reflect the rising productivity and lowered costs of production. The utilities argued that a more rapid lowering of rates would have jeopardized their profits. Whether or not this increased their monopoly power is still an open question, but it should be noted, that electric utilities were hardly price-taking industries prior to regulation. (Mercer, 1973) In fact, as Figure 16 shows, the electric utilities began to systematically practice market segmentation charging users with less elastic demands, higher prices per kilowatt-hour.

Energy in the American Economy of the 1920s

The changes in the energy industries had far-reaching consequences. The coal industry faced a continuing decline in demand. Even in the growing petroleum industry, the periodic surges in the supply of petroleum caused great instability. In manufacturing, as described above, electrification contributed to a remarkable rise in productivity. The transportation revolution brought about by the rise of gasoline-powered trucks and cars changed the way businesses received their supplies and distributed their production as well as where they were located. The suburbanization of America and the beginnings of urban sprawl were largely brought about by the introduction of low-priced gasoline for cars.
Transportation
The American economy was forever altered by the dramatic changes in transportation after 1900. Following Henry Ford's introduction of the moving assembly production line in 1914, automobile prices plummeted, and by the end of the 1920s about 60 percent of American families owned an automobile. The advent of low-cost personal transportation led to an accelerating movement of population out of the crowded cities to more spacious homes in the suburbs and the automobile set off a decline in intracity public passenger transportation that has yet to end. Massive road-building programs facilitated the intercity movement of people and goods. Trucks increasingly took over the movement of freight in competition with the railroads. New industries, such as gasoline service stations, motor hotels, and the rubber tire industry, arose to service the automobile and truck traffic. These developments were complicated by the turmoil caused by changes in the federal government's policies toward transportation in the United States.

With the end of the First World War, a debate began as to whether the railroads, which had been taken over by the government, should be returned to private ownership or nationalized. The voices calling for a return to private ownership were much stronger, but doing so fomented great controversy. Many in Congress believed that careful planning and consolidation could restore the railroads and make them more efficient. There was continued concern about the near monopoly that the railroads had on the nation's intercity freight and passenger transportation. The result of these deliberations was the Transportation Act of 1920, which was premised on the continued domination of the nation's transportation by the railroads-an erroneous presumption.

The Transportation Act of 1920 presented a marked change in the Interstate Commerce Commission's ability to control railroads. The ICC was allowed to prescribe exact rates that were to be set so as to allow the railroads to earn a fair return, defined as 5.5 percent, on the fair value of their property. The ICC was authorized to make an accounting of the fair value of each regulated railroad's property; however, this was not completed until well into the 1930s, by which time the accounting and rate rules were out of date. To maintain fair competition between railroads in a region, all roads were to have the same rates for the same goods over the same distance. With the same rates, low-cost roads should have been able to earn higher rates of return than high-cost roads. To handle this, a recapture clause was inserted: any railroad earning a return of more than 6 percent on the fair value of its property was to turn the excess over to the ICC, which would place half of the money in a contingency fund for the railroad when it encountered financial problems and the other half in a contingency fund to provide loans to other railroads in need of assistance.

In order to address the problem of weak and strong railroads and to bring better coordination to the movement of rail traffic in the United States, the act was directed to encourage railroad consolidation, but little came of this in the 1920s. In order to facilitate its control of the railroads, the ICC was given two additional powers. The first was the control over the issuance or purchase of securities by railroads, and the second was the power to control changes in railroad service through the control of car supply and the extension and abandonment of track. The control of the supply of rail cars was turned over to the Association of American Railroads. Few extensions of track were proposed, but as time passed, abandonment requests grew. The ICC, however, trying to mediate between the conflicting demands of shippers, communities and railroads, generally refused to grant abandonments, and this became an extremely sensitive issue in the 1930s.

As indicated above, the premises of the Transportation Act of 1920 were wrong. Railroads experienced increasing competition during the 1920s, and both freight and passenger traffic were drawn off to competing transport forms. Passenger traffic exited from the railroads much more quickly. As the network of all weather surfaced roads increased, people quickly turned from the train to the car. Harmed even more by the move to automobile traffic were the electric interurban railways that had grown rapidly just prior to the First World War. (Hilton-Due, 1960) Not surprisingly, during the 1920s few railroads earned profits in excess of the fair rate of return.

The use of trucks to deliver freight began shortly after the turn of the century. Before the outbreak of war in Europe, White and Mack were producing trucks with as much as 7.5 tons of carrying capacity. Most of the truck freight was carried on a local basis, and it largely supplemented the longer distance freight transportation provided by the railroads. However, truck size was growing. In 1915 Trailmobile introduced the first four-wheel trailer designed to be pulled by a truck tractor unit. During the First World War, thousands of trucks were constructed for military purposes, and truck convoys showed that long distance truck travel was feasible and economical. The use of trucks to haul freight had been growing by over 18 percent per year since 1925, so that by 1929 intercity trucking accounted for more than one percent of the ton-miles of freight hauled.

The railroads argued that the trucks and buses provided "unfair" competition and believed that if they were also regulated, then the regulation could equalize the conditions under which they competed. As early as 1925, the National Association of Railroad and Utilities Commissioners issued a call for the regulation of motor carriers in general. In 1928 the ICC called for federal regulation of buses and in 1932 extended this call to federal regulation of trucks.

Most states had began regulating buses at the beginning of the 1920s in an attempt to reduce the diversion of urban passenger traffic from the electric trolley and railway systems. However, most of the regulation did not aim to control intercity passenger traffic by buses. As the network of surfaced roads expanded during the twenties, so did the routes of the intercity buses. In 1929 a number of smaller bus companies were incorporated in the Greyhound Buslines, the carrier that has since dominated intercity bus transportation. (Walsh, 2000)

A complaint of the railroads was that interstate trucking competition was unfair because it was subsidized while railroads were not. All railroad property was privately owned and subject to property taxes, whereas truckers used the existing road system and therefore neither had to bear the costs of creating the road system nor pay taxes upon it. Beginning with the Federal Road-Aid Act of 1916, small amounts of money were provided as an incentive for states to construct rural post roads. (Dearing-Owen, 1949) However, through the First World War most of the funds for highway construction came from a combination of levies on the adjacent property owners and county and state taxes. The monies raised by the counties were commonly 60 percent of the total funds allocated, and these primarily came from property taxes. In 1919 Oregon pioneered the state gasoline tax, which then began to be adopted by more and more states. A highway system financed by property taxes and other levies can be construed as a subsidization of motor vehicles, and one study for the period up to 1920 found evidence of substantial subsidization of trucking. (Herbst-Wu, 1973) However, the use of gasoline taxes moved closer to the goal of users paying the costs of the highways. Neither did the trucks have to pay for all of the highway construction because automobiles jointly used the highways. Highways had to be constructed in more costly ways in order to accommodate the larger and heavier trucks. Ideally the gasoline taxes collected from trucks should have covered the extra (or marginal) costs of highway construction incurred because of the truck traffic. Gasoline taxes tended to do this.

The American economy occupies a vast geographic region. Because economic activity occurs over most of the country, falling transportation costs have been crucial to knitting American firms and consumers into a unified market. Throughout the nineteenth century the railroads played this crucial role. Because of the size of the railroad companies and their importance in the economic life of Americans, the federal government began to regulate them. But, by 1917 it appeared that the railroad system had achieved some stability, and it was generally assumed that the post-First World War era would be an extension of the era from 1900 to 1917. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Spurred by public investments in highways, cars and trucks voraciously ate into the railroad's market, and, though the regulators failed to understand this at the time, the railroad's monopoly on transportation quickly disappeared.

Communications

Communications had joined with transportation developments in the nineteenth century to tie the American economy together more completely. The telegraph had benefited by using the railroads' right-of-ways, and the railroads used the telegraph to coordinate and organize their far-flung activities. As the cost of communications fell and information transfers sped, the development of firms with multiple plants at distant locations was facilitated. The interwar era saw a continuation of these developments as the telephone continued to supplant the telegraph and the new medium of radio arose to transmit news and provide a new entertainment source.

Telegraph domination of business and personal communications had given way to the telephone as long distance telephone calls between the east and west coasts with the new electronic amplifiers became possible in 1915. The number of telegraph messages handled grew 60.4 percent in the twenties. The number of local telephone conversations grew 46.8 percent between 1920 and 1930, while the number of long distance conversations grew 71.8 percent over the same period. There were 5 times as many long distance telephone calls as telegraph messages handled in 1920, and 5.7 times as many in 1930.

The twenties were a prosperous period for AT&T and its 18 major operating companies. (Brooks, 1975; Temin, 1987; Garnet, 1985; Lipartito, 1989) Telephone usage rose and, as Figure 19 shows, the share of all households with a telephone rose from 35 percent to nearly 42 percent. In cities across the nation, AT&T consolidated its system, gained control of many operating companies, and virtually eliminated its competitors. It was able to do this because in 1921 Congress passed the Graham Act exempting AT&T from the Sherman Act in consolidating competing telephone companies. By 1940, the non-Bell operating companies were all small relative to the Bell operating companies.

Surprisingly there was a decline in telephone use on the farms during the twenties. (Hadwiger-Cochran, 1984; Fischer 1987) Rising telephone rates explain part of the decline in rural use. The imposition of connection fees during the First World War made it more costly for new farmers to hook up. As AT&T gained control of more and more operating systems, telephone rates were increased. AT&T also began requiring, as a condition of interconnection, that independent companies upgrade their systems to meet AT&T standards. Most of the small mutual companies that had provided service to farmers had operated on a shoestring-wires were often strung along fenceposts, and phones were inexpensive "whoop and holler" magneto units. Upgrading to AT&T's standards raised costs, forcing these companies to raise rates.

However, it also seems likely that during the 1920s there was a general decline in the rural demand for telephone services. One important factor in this was the dramatic decline in farm incomes in the early twenties. The second reason was a change in the farmers' environment. Prior to the First World War, the telephone eased farm isolation and provided news and weather information that was otherwise hard to obtain. After 1920 automobiles, surfaced roads, movies, and the radio loosened the isolation and the telephone was no longer as crucial.

Othmar Merganthaler's development of the linotype machine in the late nineteenth century had irrevocably altered printing and publishing. This machine, which quickly created a line of soft, lead-based metal type that could be printed, melted down and then recast as a new line of type, dramatically lowered the costs of printing. Previously, all type had to be painstakingly set by hand, with individual cast letter matrices picked out from compartments in drawers to construct words, lines, and paragraphs. After printing, each line of type on the page had to be broken down and each individual letter matrix placed back into its compartment in its drawer for use in the next printing job. Newspapers often were not published every day and did not contain many pages, resulting in many newspapers in most cities. In contrast to this laborious process, the linotype used a keyboard upon which the operator typed the words in one of the lines in a news column. Matrices for each letter dropped down from a magazine of matrices as the operator typed each letter and were assembled into a line of type with automatic spacers to justify the line (fill out the column width). When the line was completed the machine mechanically cast the line of matrices into a line of lead type. The line of lead type was ejected into a tray and the letter matrices mechanically returned to the magazine while the operator continued typing the next line in the news story. The first Merganthaler linotype machine was installed in the New York Tribune in 1886. The linotype machine dramatically lowered the costs of printing newspapers (as well as books and magazines). Prior to the linotype a typical newspaper averaged no more than 11 pages and many were published only a few times a week. The linotype machine allowed newspapers to grow in size and they began to be published more regularly. A process of consolidation of daily and Sunday newspapers began that continues to this day. Many have termed the Merganthaler linotype machine the most significant printing invention since the introduction of movable type 400 years earlier.

For city families as well as farm families, radio became the new source of news and entertainment. (Barnouw, 1966; Rosen, 1980 and 1987; Chester-Garrison, 1950) It soon took over as the prime advertising medium and in the process revolutionized advertising. By 1930 more homes had radio sets than had telephones. The radio networks sent news and entertainment broadcasts all over the country. The isolation of rural life, particularly in many areas of the plains, was forever broken by the intrusion of the "black box," as radio receivers were often called. The radio began a process of breaking down regionalism and creating a common culture in the United States.

The potential demand for radio became clear with the first regular broadcast of Westinghouse's KDKA in Pittsburgh in the fall of 1920. Because the Department of Commerce could not deny a license application there was an explosion of stations all broadcasting at the same frequency and signal jamming and interference became a serious problem. By 1923 the Department of Commerce had gained control of radio from the Post Office and the Navy and began to arbitrarily disperse stations on the radio dial and deny licenses creating the first market in commercial broadcast licenses. In 1926 a U.S. District Court decided that under the Radio Law of 1912 Herbert Hoover, the secretary of commerce, did not have this power. New stations appeared and the logjam and interference of signals worsened. A Radio Act was passed in January of 1927 creating the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) as a temporary licensing authority. Licenses were to be issued in the public interest, convenience, and necessity. A number of broadcasting licenses were revoked; stations were assigned frequencies, dial locations, and power levels. The FRC created 24 clear-channel stations with as much as 50,000 watts of broadcasting power, of which 21 ended up being affiliated with the new national radio networks. The Communications Act of 1934 essentially repeated the 1927 act except that it created a permanent, seven-person Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Local stations initially created and broadcast the radio programs. The expenses were modest, and stores and companies operating radio stations wrote this off as indirect, goodwill advertising. Several forces changed all this. In 1922, AT&T opened up a radio station in New York City, WEAF (later to become WNBC). AT&T envisioned this station as the center of a radio toll system where individuals could purchase time to broadcast a message transmitted to other stations in the toll network using AT&T's long distance lines and an August 1922 broadcast by a Long Island realty company became the first conscious use of direct advertising.

Though advertising continued to be condemned, the fiscal pressures on radio stations to accept advertising began rising. In 1923 the American Society of Composers and Publishers (ASCAP), began demanding a performance fee anytime ASCAP-copyrighted music was performed on the radio, either live or on record. By 1924 the issue was settled, and most stations began paying performance fees to ASCAP. AT&T decided that all stations broadcasting with non AT&T transmitters were violating their patent rights and began asking for annual fees from such stations based on the station's power. By the end of 1924, most stations were paying the fees. All of this drained the coffers of the radio stations, and more and more of them began discreetly accepting advertising.

RCA became upset at AT&T's creation of a chain of radio stations and set up its own toll network using the inferior lines of Western Union and Postal Telegraph, because AT&T, not surprisingly, did not allow any toll (or network) broadcasting on its lines except by its own stations. AT&T began to worry that its actions might threaten its federal monopoly in long distance telephone communications. In 1926 a new firm was created, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), which took over all broadcasting activities from AT&T and RCA as AT&T left broadcasting. When NBC debuted in November of 1926, it had two networks: the Red, which was the old AT&T network, and the Blue, which was the old RCA network. Radio networks allowed advertisers to direct advertising at a national audience at a lower cost. Network programs allowed local stations to broadcast superior programs that captured a larger listening audience and in return received a share of the fees the national advertiser paid to the network. In 1927 a new network, the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) financed by the Paley family began operation and other new networks entered or tried to enter the industry in the 1930s.

Communications developments in the interwar era present something of a mixed picture. By 1920 long distance telephone service was in place, but rising rates slowed the rate of adoption in the period, and telephone use in rural areas declined sharply. Though direct dialing was first tried in the twenties, its general implementation would not come until the postwar era, when other changes, such as microwave transmission of signals and touch-tone dialing, would also appear. Though the number of newspapers declined, newspaper circulation generally held up. The number of competing newspapers in larger cities began declining, a trend that also would accelerate in the postwar American economy.
Banking and Securities Markets
In the twenties commercial banks became "department stores of finance."- Banks opened up installment (or personal) loan departments, expanded their mortgage lending, opened up trust departments, undertook securities underwriting activities, and offered safe deposit boxes. These changes were a response to growing competition from other financial intermediaries. Businesses, stung by bankers' control and reduced lending during the 1920-21 depression, began relying more on retained earnings and stock and bond issues to raise investment and, sometimes, working capital. This reduced loan demand. The thrift institutions also experienced good growth in the twenties as they helped fuel the housing construction boom of the decade. The securities markets boomed in the twenties only to see a dramatic crash of the stock market in late 1929.

There were two broad classes of commercial banks; those that were nationally chartered and those that were chartered by the states. Only the national banks were required to be members of the Federal Reserve System. (Figure 21) Most banks were unit banks because national regulators and most state regulators prohibited branching. However, in the twenties a few states began to permit limited branching; California even allowed statewide branching.-The Federal Reserve member banks held the bulk of the assets of all commercial banks, even though most banks were not members. A high bank failure rate in the 1920s has usually been explained by "overbanking" or too many banks located in an area, but H. Thomas Johnson (1973-74) makes a strong argument against this. (Figure 22)- If there were overbanking, on average each bank would have been underutilized resulting in intense competition for deposits and higher costs and lower earnings. One common reason would have been the free entry of banks as long as they achieved the minimum requirements then in force. However, the twenties saw changes that led to the demise of many smaller rural banks that would likely have been profitable if these - changes had not occurred. Improved transportation led to a movement of business activities, including banking, into the larger towns and cities. Rural banks that relied on loans to farmers suffered just as farmers did during the twenties, especially in the first half of the twenties. The number of bank suspensions and the suspension rate fell after 1926. The sharp rise in bank suspensions in 1930 occurred because of the first banking crisis during the Great Depression.

Prior to the twenties, the main assets of commercial banks were short-term business loans, made by creating a demand deposit or increasing an existing one for a borrowing firm. As business lending declined in the 1920s commercial banks vigorously moved into new types of financial activities. As banks purchased more securities for their earning asset portfolios and gained expertise in the securities markets, larger ones established investment departments and by the late twenties were an important force in the underwriting of new securities issued by nonfinancial corporations.

The securities market exhibited perhaps the most dramatic growth of the noncommercial bank financial intermediaries during the twenties, but others also grew rapidly. (Figure 23) The assets of life insurance companies increased by 10 percent a year from 1921 to 1929; by the late twenties they were a very important source of funds for construction investment. Mutual savings banks and savings and loan associations (thrifts) operated in essentially the same types of markets. The Mutual savings banks were concentrated in the northeastern United States. As incomes rose, personal savings increased, and housing construction expanded in the twenties, there was an increasing demand for the thrifts' interest earning time deposits and mortgage lending.

But the dramatic expansion in the financial sector came in new corporate securities issues in the twenties-especially common and preferred stock-and in the trading of existing shares of those securities. (Figure 24) The late twenties boom in the American economy was rapid, highly visible, and dramatic. Skyscrapers were being erected in most major cities, the automobile manufacturers produced over four and a half million new cars in 1929; and the stock market, like a barometer of this prosperity, was on a dizzying ride to higher and higher prices. "Playing the market" seemed to become a national pastime.

The Dow-Jones index hit its peak of 381 on September 3 and then slid to 320 on October 21. In the following week the stock market "crashed," with a record number of shares being traded on several days. At the end of Tuesday, October, 29th, the index stood at 230, 96 points less than one week before. On November 13, 1929, the Dow-Jones index reached its lowest point for the year at 198-183 points less than the September 3 peak.

The path of the stock market boom of the twenties can be seen in Figure 25. Sharp price breaks occurred several times during the boom, and each of these gave rise to dark predictions of the end of the bull market and speculation. Until late October of 1929, these predictions turned out to be wrong. Between those price breaks and prior to the October crash, stock prices continued to surge upward. In March of 1928, 3,875,910 shares were traded in one day, establishing a record. By late 1928, five million shares being traded in a day was a common occurrence.

New securities, from rising merger activity and the formation of holding companies, were issued to take advantage of the rising stock prices.-Stock pools, which were not illegal until the 1934 Securities and Exchange Act, took advantage of the boom to temporarily drive up the price of selected stocks and reap large gains for the members of the pool. In stock pools a group of speculators would pool large amounts of their funds and then begin purchasing large amounts of shares of a stock. This increased demand led to rising prices for that stock. Frequently pool insiders would "churn" the stock by repeatedly buying and selling the same shares among themselves, but at rising prices. Outsiders, seeing the price rising, would decide to purchase the stock whose price was rising. At a predetermined higher price the pool members would, within a short period, sell their shares and pull out of the market for that stock. Without the additional demand from the pool, the stock's price usually fell quickly bringing large losses for the unsuspecting outside investors while reaping large gains for the pool insiders.

Another factor commonly used to explain both the speculative boom and the October crash was the purchase of stocks on small margins. However, contrary to popular perception, margin requirements through most of the twenties were essentially the same as in previous decades. Brokers, recognizing the problems with margin lending in the rapidly changing market, began raising margin requirements in late 1928, and by the fall of 1929, margin requirements were the highest in the history of the New York Stock Exchange. In the 1920s, as was the case for decades prior to that, the usual margin requirements were 10 to 15 percent of the purchase price, and, apparently, more often around 10 percent. There were increases in this percentage by 1928 and by the fall of 1928, well before the crash and at the urging of a special New York Clearinghouse committee, margin requirements had been raised to some of the highest levels in New York Stock Exchange history. One brokerage house required the following of its clients. Securities with a selling price below $10 could only be purchased for cash. Securities with a selling price of $10 to $20 had to have a 50 percent margin; for securities of $20 to $30 a margin requirement of 40 percent; and, for securities with a price above $30 the margin was 30 percent of the purchase price. In the first half of 1929 margin requirements on customers' accounts averaged a 40 percent margin, and some houses raised their margins to 50 percent a few months before the crash. These were, historically, very high margin requirements. (Smiley and Keehn, 1988)-Even so, during the crash when additional margin calls were issued, those investors who could not provide additional margin saw the brokers' sell their stock at whatever the market price was at the time and these forced sales helped drive prices even lower.

The crash began on Monday, October 21, as the index of stock prices fell 3 points on the third-largest volume in the history of the New York Stock Exchange. After a slight rally on Tuesday, prices began declining on Wednesday and fell 21 points by the end of the day bringing on the third call for more margin in that week. On Black Thursday, October 24, prices initially fell sharply, but rallied somewhat in the afternoon so that the net loss was only 7 points, but the volume of thirteen million shares set a NYSE record. Friday brought a small gain that was wiped out on Saturday. On Monday, October 28, the Dow Jones index fell 38 points on a volume of nine million shares-three million in the final hour of trading. Black Tuesday, October 29, brought declines in virtually every stock price. Manufacturing firms, which had been lending large sums to brokers for margin loans, had been calling in these loans and this accelerated on Monday and Tuesday. The big Wall Street banks increased their lending on call loans to offset some of this loss of loanable funds. The Dow Jones Index fell 30 points on a record volume of nearly sixteen and a half million shares exchanged. Black Thursday and Black Tuesday wiped out entire fortunes.

Though the worst was over, prices continued to decline until November 13, 1929, as brokers cleaned up their accounts and sold off the stocks of clients who could not supply additional margin. After that, prices began to slowly rise and by April of 1930 had increased 96 points from the low of November 13,- "only" 87 points less than the peak of September 3, 1929. From that point, stock prices resumed their depressing decline until the low point was reached in the summer of 1932.

-There is a long tradition that insists that the Great Bull Market of the late twenties was an orgy of speculation that bid the prices of stocks far above any sustainable or economically justifiable level creating a bubble in the stock market. John Kenneth Galbraith (1954) observed, "The collapse in the stock market in the autumn of 1929 was implicit in the speculation that went before."-But not everyone has agreed with this.

In 1930 Irving Fisher argued that the stock prices of 1928 and 1929 were based on fundamental expectations that future corporate earnings would be high.- More recently, Murray Rothbard (1963), Gerald Gunderson (1976), and Jude Wanniski (1978) have argued that stock prices were not too high prior to the crash.-Gunderson suggested that prior to 1929, stock prices were where they should have been and that when corporate profits in the summer and fall of 1929 failed to meet expectations, stock prices were written down.- Wanniski argued that political events brought on the crash. The market broke each time news arrived of advances in congressional consideration of the Hawley-Smoot tariff. However, the virtually perfect foresight that Wanniski's explanation requires is unrealistic.- Charles Kindleberger (1973) and Peter Temin (1976) examined common stock yields and price-earnings ratios and found that the relative constancy did not suggest that stock prices were bid up unrealistically high in the late twenties.-Gary Santoni and Gerald Dwyer (1990) also failed to find evidence of a bubble in stock prices in 1928 and 1929.-Gerald Sirkin (1975) found that the implied growth rates of dividends required to justify stock prices in 1928 and 1929 were quite conservative and lower than post-Second World War dividend growth rates.

However, examination of after-the-fact common stock yields and price-earning ratios can do no more than provide some ex post justification for suggesting that there was not excessive speculation during the Great Bull Market.- Each individual investor was motivated by that person's subjective expectations of each firm's future earnings and dividends and the future prices of shares of each firm's stock. Because of this element of subjectivity, not only can we never accurately know those values, but also we can never know how they varied among individuals. The market price we observe will be the end result of all of the actions of the market participants, and the observed price may be different from the price almost all of the participants expected.

In fact, there are some indications that there were differences in 1928 and 1929. Yields on common stocks were somewhat lower in 1928 and 1929. In October of 1928, brokers generally began raising margin requirements, and by the beginning of the fall of 1929, margin requirements were, on average, the highest in the history of the New York Stock Exchange. Though the discount and commercial paper rates had moved closely with the call and time rates on brokers' loans through 1927, the rates on brokers' loans increased much more sharply in 1928 and 1929.- This pulled in funds from corporations, private investors, and foreign banks as New York City banks sharply reduced their lending. These facts suggest that brokers and New York City bankers may have come to believe that stock prices had been bid above a sustainable level by late 1928 and early 1929. White (1990) created a quarterly index of dividends for firms in the Dow-Jones index and related this to the DJI. Through 1927 the two track closely, but in 1928 and 1929 the index of stock prices grows much more rapidly than the index of dividends.

The qualitative evidence for a bubble in the stock market in 1928 and 1929 that White assembled was strengthened by the findings of J. Bradford De Long and Andre Shleifer (1991). They examined closed-end mutual funds, a type of fund where investors wishing to liquidate must sell their shares to other individual investors allowing its fundamental value to be exactly measurable.- Using evidence from these funds, De Long and Shleifer estimated that in the summer of 1929, the Standard and Poor's composite stock price index was overvalued about 30 percent due to excessive investor optimism. Rappoport and White (1993 and 1994) found other evidence that supported a bubble in the stock market in 1928 and 1929. There was a sharp divergence between the growth of stock prices and dividends; there were increasing premiums on call and time brokers' loans in 1928 and 1929; margin requirements rose; and stock market volatility rose in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash.

There are several reasons for the creation of such a bubble. First, the fundamental values of earnings and dividends become difficult to assess when there are major industrial changes, such as the rapid changes in the automobile industry, the new electric utilities, and the new radio industry.- Eugene White (1990) suggests that "While investors had every reason to expect earnings to grow, they lacked the means to evaluate easily the future path of dividends." As a result investors bid up prices as they were swept up in the ongoing stock market boom. Second, participation in the stock market widened noticeably in the twenties. The new investors were relatively unsophisticated, and they were more likely to be caught up in the euphoria of the boom and bid prices upward.- New, inexperienced commission sales personnel were hired to sell stocks and they promised glowing returns on stocks they knew little about.

These observations were strengthened by the experimental work of economist Vernon Smith. (Bishop, 1987) In a number of experiments over a three-year period using students and Tucson businessmen and businesswomen, bubbles developed as inexperienced investors valued stocks differently and engaged in price speculation. As these investors in the experiments began to realize that speculative profits were unsustainable and uncertain, their dividend expectations changed, the market crashed, and ultimately stocks began trading at their fundamental dividend values. These bubbles and crashes occurred repeatedly, leading Smith to conjecture that there are few regulatory steps that can be taken to prevent a crash.

Though the bubble of 1928 and 1929 made some downward adjustment in stock prices inevitable, as Barsky and De Long have shown, changes in fundamentals govern the overall movements. And the end of the long bull market was almost certainly governed by this. In late 1928 and early 1929 there was a striking rise in economic activity, but a decline began somewhere between May and July of that year and was clearly evident by August of 1929. By the middle of August, the rise in stock prices had slowed down as better information on the contraction was received. There were repeated statements by leading figures that stocks were "overpriced" and the Federal Reserve System sharply increased the discount rate in August 1929 was well as continuing its call for banks to reduce their margin lending. As this information was assessed, the number of speculators selling stocks increased, and the number buying decreased. With the decreased demand, stock prices began to fall, and as more accurate information on the nature and extent of the decline was received, stock prices fell more. The late October crash made the decline occur much more rapidly, and the margin purchases and consequent forced selling of many of those stocks contributed to a more severe price fall. The recovery of stock prices from November 13 into April of 1930 suggests that stock prices may have been driven somewhat too low during the crash.

There is now widespread agreement that the 1929 stock market crash did not cause the Great Depression. Instead, the initial downturn in economic activity was a primary determinant of the ending of the 1928-29 stock market bubble. The stock market crash did make the downturn become more severe beginning in November 1929. It reduced discretionary consumption spending (Romer, 1990) and created greater income uncertainty helping to bring on the contraction (Flacco and Parker, 1992). Though stock market prices reached a bottom and began to recover following November 13, 1929, the continuing decline in economic activity took its toll and by May 1930 stock prices resumed their decline and continued to fall through the summer of 1932.
Domestic Trade
In the nineteenth century, a complex array of wholesalers, jobbers, and retailers had developed, but changes in the postbellum period reduced the role of the wholesalers and jobbers and strengthened the importance of the retailers in domestic trade. (Cochran, 1977; Chandler, 1977; Marburg, 1951; Clewett, 1951) The appearance of the department store in the major cities and the rise of mail order firms in the postbellum period changed the retailing market.

Department Stores

A department store is a combination of specialty stores organized as departments within one general store. A. T. Stewart's huge 1846 dry goods store in New York City is often referred to as the first department store. (Resseguie, 1965; Sobel-Sicilia, 1986) R. H. Macy started his dry goods store in 1858 and Wanamaker's in Philadelphia opened in 1876. By the end of the nineteenth century, every city of any size had at least one major department store. (Appel, 1930; Benson, 1986; Hendrickson, 1979; Hower, 1946; Sobel, 1974) Until the late twenties, the department store field was dominated by independent stores, though some department stores in the largest cities had opened a few suburban branches and stores in other cities. In the interwar period department stores accounted for about 8 percent of retail sales.

The department stores relied on a "one-price" policy, which Stewart is credited with beginning. In the antebellum period and into the postbellum period, it was common not to post a specific price on an item; rather, each purchaser haggled with a sales clerk over what the price would be. Stewart posted fixed prices on the various dry goods sold, and the customer could either decide to buy or not buy at the fixed price. The policy dramatically lowered transactions costs for both the retailer and the purchaser. Prices were reduced with a smaller markup over the wholesale price, and a large sales volume and a quicker turnover of the store's inventory generated profits.

Mail Order Firms

What changed the department store field in the twenties was the entrance of Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, the two dominant mail order firms in the United States. (Emmet-Jeuck, 1950; Chandler, 1962, 1977) Both firms had begun in the late nineteenth century and by 1914 the younger Sears Roebuck had surpassed Montgomery Ward. Both located in Chicago due to its central location in the nation's rail network and both had benefited from the advent of Rural Free Delivery in 1896 and low cost Parcel Post Service in 1912.

In 1924 Sears hired Robert C. Wood, who was able to convince Sears Roebuck to open retail stores. Wood believed that the declining rural population and the growing urban population forecast the gradual demise of the mail order business; survival of the mail order firms required a move into retail sales. By 1925 Sears Roebuck had opened 8 retail stores, and by 1929 it had 324 stores. Montgomery Ward quickly followed suit. Rather than locating these in the central business district (CBD), Wood located many on major streets closer to the residential areas. These moves of Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward expanded department store retailing and provided a new type of chain store.

Chain Stores

Though chain stores grew rapidly in the first two decades of the twentieth century, they date back to the 1860s when George F. Gilman and George Huntington Hartford opened a string of New York City A&P (Atlantic and Pacific) stores exclusively to sell tea. (Beckman-Nolen, 1938; Lebhar, 1963; Bullock, 1933) Stores were opened in other regions and in 1912 their first "cash-and-carry" full-range grocery was opened. Soon they were opening 50 of these stores each week and by the 1920s A&P had 14,000 stores. They then phased out the small stores to reduce the chain to 4,000 full-range, supermarket-type stores. A&P's success led to new grocery store chains such as Kroger, Jewel Tea, and Safeway.

Prior to A&P's cash-and-carry policy, it was common for grocery stores, produce (or green) grocers, and meat markets to provide home delivery and credit, both of which were costly. As a result, retail prices were generally marked up well above the wholesale prices. In cash-and-carry stores, items were sold only for cash; no credit was extended, and no expensive home deliveries were provided. Markups on prices could be much lower because other costs were much lower. Consumers liked the lower prices and were willing to pay cash and carry their groceries, and the policy became common by the twenties.

Chains also developed in other retail product lines. In 1879 Frank W. Woolworth developed a "5 and 10 Cent Store," or dime store, and there were over 1,000 F. W. Woolworth stores by the mid-1920s. (Winkler, 1940) Other firms such as Kresge, Kress, and McCrory successfully imitated Woolworth's dime store chain. J.C. Penney's dry goods chain store began in 1901 (Beasley, 1948), Walgreen's drug store chain began in 1909, and shoes, jewelry, cigars, and other lines of merchandise also began to be sold through chain stores.

Self-Service Policies

In 1916 Clarence Saunders, a grocer in Memphis, Tennessee, built upon the one-price policy and began offering self-service at his Piggly Wiggly store. Previously, customers handed a clerk a list or asked for the items desired, which the clerk then collected and the customer paid for. With self-service, items for sale were placed on open shelves among which the customers could walk, carrying a shopping bag or pushing a shopping cart. Each customer could then browse as he or she pleased, picking out whatever was desired. Saunders and other retailers who adopted the self-service method of retail selling found that customers often purchased more because of exposure to the array of products on the shelves; as well, self-service lowered the labor required for retail sales and therefore lowered costs.

Shopping Centers

Shopping Centers, another innovation in retailing that began in the twenties, was not destined to become a major force in retail development until after the Second World War. The ultimate cause of this innovation was the widening ownership and use of the automobile. By the 1920s, as the ownership and use of the car began expanding, population began to move out of the crowded central cities toward the more open suburbs. When General Robert Wood set Sears off on its development of urban stores, he located these not in the central business district, CBD, but as free-standing stores on major arteries away from the CBD with sufficient space for parking.

At about the same time, a few entrepreneurs began to develop shopping centers. Yehoshua Cohen (1972) says, "The owner of such a center was responsible for maintenance of the center, its parking lot, as well as other services to consumers and retailers in the center." Perhaps the earliest such shopping center was the Country Club Plaza built in 1922 by the J. C. Nichols Company in Kansas City, Missouri. Other early shopping centers appeared in Baltimore and Dallas. By the mid-1930s the concept of a planned shopping center was well known and was expected to be the means to capture the trade of the growing number of suburban consumers.

International Trade and Finance

In the twenties a gold exchange standard was developed to replace the gold standard of the prewar world. Under a gold standard, each country's currency carried a fixed exchange rate with gold, and the currency had to be backed up by gold. As a result, all countries on the gold standard had fixed exchange rates with all other countries. Adjustments to balance international trade flows were made by gold flows. If a country had a deficit in its trade balance, gold would leave the country, forcing the money stock to decline and prices to fall. Falling prices made the deficit countries' exports more attractive and imports more costly, reducing the deficit. Countries with a surplus imported gold, which increased the money stock and caused prices to rise. This made the surplus countries' exports less attractive and imports more attractive, decreasing the surplus. Most economists who have studied the prewar gold standard contend that it did not work as the conventional textbook model says, because capital flows frequently reduced or eliminated the need for gold flows for long periods of time. However, there is no consensus on whether fortuitous circumstances, rather than the gold standard, saved the international economy from periodic convulsions or whether the gold standard as it did work was sufficient to promote stability and growth in international transactions.

After the First World War it was argued that there was a "shortage" of fluid monetary gold to use for the gold standard, so some method of "economizing" on gold had to be found. To do this, two basic changes were made. First, most nations, other than the United States, stopped domestic circulation of gold. Second, the "gold exchange" system was created. Most countries held their international reserves in the form of U.S. dollars or British pounds and international transactions used dollars or pounds, as long as the United States and Great Britain stood ready to exchange their currencies for gold at fixed exchange rates. However, the overvaluation of the pound and the undervaluation of the franc threatened these arrangements. The British trade deficit led to a capital outflow, higher interest rates, and a weak economy. In the late twenties, the French trade surplus led to the importation of gold that they did not allow to expand the money supply.

Economizing on gold by no longer allowing its domestic circulation and by using key currencies as international monetary reserves was really an attempt to place the domestic economies under the control of the nations' politicians and make them independent of international events. Unfortunately, in doing this politicians eliminated the equilibrating mechanism of the gold standard but had nothing with which to replace it. The new international monetary arrangements of the twenties were potentially destabilizing because they were not allowed to operate as a price mechanism promoting equilibrating adjustments.

There were other problems with international economic activity in the twenties. Because of the war, the United States was abruptly transformed from a debtor to a creditor on international accounts. Though the United States did not want reparations payments from Germany, it did insist that Allied governments repay American loans. The Allied governments then insisted on war reparations from Germany. These initial reparations assessments were quite large. The Allied Reparations Commission collected the charges by supervising Germany's foreign trade and by internal controls on the German economy, and it was authorized to increase the reparations if it was felt that Germany could pay more. The treaty allowed France to occupy the Ruhr after Germany defaulted in 1923.

Ultimately, this tangled web of debts and reparations, which was a major factor in the course of international trade, depended upon two principal actions. First, the United States had to run an import surplus or, on net, export capital out of the United States to provide a pool of dollars overseas. Germany then had either to have an export surplus or else import American capital so as to build up dollar reserves-that is, the dollars the United States was exporting. In effect, these dollars were paid by Germany to Great Britain, France, and other countries that then shipped them back to the United States as payment on their U.S. debts. If these conditions did not occur, (and note that the "new" gold standard of the twenties had lost its flexibility because the price adjustment mechanism had been eliminated) disruption in international activity could easily occur and be transmitted to the domestic economies.

In the wake of the 1920-21 depression Congress passed the Emergency Tariff Act, which raised tariffs, particularly on manufactured goods. (Figures 26 and 27) The Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922 continued the Emergency Tariff of 1921, and its protection on many items was extremely high, ranging from 60 to 100 percent ad valorem (or as a percent of the price of the item). The increases in the Fordney-McCumber tariff were as large and sometimes larger than the more famous (or "infamous") Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930. As farm product prices fell at the end of the decade presidential candidate Herbert Hoover proposed, as part of his platform, tariff increases and other changes to aid the farmers. In January 1929, after Hoover's election, but before he took office, a tariff bill was introduced into Congress. Special interests succeeded in gaining additional (or new) protection for most domestically produced commodities and the goal of greater protection for the farmers tended to get lost in the increased protection for multitudes of American manufactured products. In spite of widespread condemnation by economists, President Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff in June 1930 and rates rose sharply.

Following the First World War, the U.S. government actively promoted American exports, and in each of the postwar years through 1929, the United States recorded a surplus in its balance of trade. (Figure 28) However, the surplus declined in the 1930s as both exports and imports fell sharply after 1929. From the mid-1920s on finished manufactures were the most important exports, while agricultural products dominated American imports.

The majority of the funds that allowed Germany to make its reparations payments to France and Great Britain and hence allowed those countries to pay their debts to the United States came from the net flow of capital out of the United States in the form of direct investment in real assets and investments in long- and short-term foreign financial assets. After the devastating German hyperinflation of 1922 and 1923, the Dawes Plan reformed the German economy and currency and accelerated the U.S. capital outflow. American investors began to actively and aggressively pursue foreign investments, particularly loans (Lewis, 1938) and in the late twenties there was a marked deterioration in the quality of foreign bonds sold in the United States. (Mintz, 1951)

The system, then, worked well as long as there was a net outflow of American capital, but this did not continue. In the middle of 1928, the flow of short-term capital began to decline. In 1928 the flow of "other long-term" capital out of the United States was 752 million dollars, but in 1929 it was only 34 million dollars. Though arguments now exist as to whether the booming stock market in the United States was to blame for this, it had far-reaching effects on the international economic system and the various domestic economies.

The Start of the Depression

The United States had the majority of the world's monetary gold, about 40 percent, by 1920. In the latter part of the twenties, France also began accumulating gold as its share of the world's monetary gold rose from 9 percent in 1927 to 17 percent in 1929 and 22 percent by 1931. In 1927 the Federal Reserve System had reduced discount rates (the interest rate at which they lent reserves to member commercial banks) and engaged in open market purchases (purchasing U.S. government securities on the open market to increase the reserves of the banking system) to push down interest rates and assist Great Britain in staying on the gold standard. By early 1928 the Federal Reserve System was worried about its loss of gold due to this policy as well as the ongoing boom in the stock market. It began to raise the discount rate to stop these outflows. Gold was also entering the United States so that foreigners could obtain dollars to invest in stocks and bonds. As the United States and France accumulated more and more of the world's monetary gold, other countries' central banks took contractionary steps to stem the loss of gold. In country after country these deflationary strategies began contracting economic activity and by 1928 some countries in Europe, Asia, and South America had entered into a depression. More countries' economies began to decline in 1929, including the United States, and by 1930 a depression was in force for almost all of the world's market economies. (Temin, 1989; Eichengreen, 1992)
Monetary and Fiscal Policies in the 1920s Fiscal Policies
As a tool to promote stability in aggregate economic activity, fiscal policy is largely a post-Second World War phenomenon. Prior to 1930 the federal government's spending and taxing decisions were largely, but not completely, based on the perceived "need" for government-provided public goods and services.

Though the fiscal policy concept had not been developed, this does not mean that during the twenties no concept of the government's role in stimulating economic activity existed. Herbert Stein (1990) points out that in the twenties Herbert Hoover and some of his contemporaries shared two ideas about the proper role of the federal government. The first was that federal spending on public works could be an important force in reducin investment. Both concepts fit the ideas held by Hoover and others of his persuasion that the U.S. economy of the twenties was not the result of laissez-faire workings but of "deliberate social engineering."

The federal personal income tax was enacted in 1913. Though mildly progressive, its rates were low and topped out at 7 percent on taxable income in excess of $750,000. (Table 4) As the United States prepared for war in 1916, rates were increased and reached a maximum marginal rate of 12 percent. With the onset of the First World War, the rates were dramatically increased. To obtain additional revenue in 1918, marginal rates were again increased. The share of federal revenue generated by income taxes rose from 11 percent in 1914 to 69 percent in 1920. The tax rates had been extended downward so that more than 30 percent of the nation's income recipients were subject to income taxes by 1918. However, through the purchase of tax exempt state and local securities and through steps taken by corporations to avoid the cash distribution of profits, the number of high income taxpayers and their share of total taxes paid declined as Congress kept increasing the tax rates. The normal (or base) tax rate was reduced slightly for 1919 but the surtax rates, which made the income tax highly progressive, were retained. (Smiley-Keehn, 1995)

President Harding's new Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, proposed cutting the tax rates, arguing that the rates in the higher brackets had "passed the point of productivity" and rates in excess of 70 percent simply could not be collected. Though most agreed that the rates were too high, there was sharp disagreement on how the rates should be cut. Democrats and Progressive Republicans argued for rate cuts targeted for the lower income taxpayers while maintaining most of the steep progressivity of the tax rates. They believed that remedies could be found to change the tax laws to stop the legal avoidance of federal income taxes. Republicans argued for sharper cuts that reduced the progressivity of the rates. Mellon proposed a maximum rate of 25 percent.

Though the federal income tax rates were reduced and made less progressive, it took three tax rate cuts in 1921, 1924, and 1925 before Mellon's goal was finally achieved. The highest marginal tax rate was reduced from 73 percent to 58 percent to 46 percent and finally to 25 percent for the 1925 tax year. All of the other rates were also reduced and exemptions increased. By 1926, only about the top 10 percent of income recipients were subject to federal income taxes. As tax rates were reduced, the number of high income tax returns increased and the share of total federal personal income taxes paid rose. (Tables 5 and 6) Even with the dramatic income tax rate cuts and reductions in the number of low income taxpayers, federal personal income tax revenue continued to rise during the 1920s. Though early estimates of the distribution of personal income showed sharp increases in income inequality during the 1920s (Kuznets, 1953; Holt, 1977), more recent estimates have found that the increases in inequality were considerably less and these appear largely to be related to the sharp rise in capital gains due to the booming stock market in the late twenties. (Smiley, 1998 and 2000)

Each year in the twenties the federal government generated a surplus, in some years as much as 1 percent of GNP. The surpluses were used to reduce the federal deficit and it declined by 25 percent between 1920 and 1930. Contrary to simple macroeconomic models that argue a federal government budget surplus must be contractionary and tend to stop an economy from reaching full employment, the American economy operated at full-employment or close to it throughout the twenties and saw significant economic growth. In this case, the surpluses were not contractionary because the dollars were circulated back into the economy through the purchase of outstanding federal debt rather than pulled out as currency and held in a vault somewhere.
Monetary Policies
In 1913 fear of the "money trust" and their monopoly power led Congress to create 12 central banks when they created the Federal Reserve System. The new central banks were to control money and credit and act as lenders of last resort to end banking panics. The role of the Federal Reserve Board, located in Washington, D.C., was to coordinate the policies of the 12 district banks; it was composed of five presidential appointees and the current secretary of the treasury and comptroller of the currency. All national banks had to become members of the Federal Reserve System, the Fed, and any state bank meeting the qualifications could elect to do so.

The act specified fixed reserve requirements on demand and time deposits, all of which had to be on deposit in the district bank. Commercial banks were allowed to rediscount commercial paper and given Federal Reserve currency. Initially, each district bank set its own rediscount rate. To provide additional income when there was little rediscounting, the district banks were allowed to engage in open market operations that involved the purchasing and selling of federal government securities, short-term securities of state and local governments issued in anticipation of taxes, foreign exchange, and domestic bills of exchange. The district banks were also designated to act as fiscal agents for the federal government. Finally, the Federal Reserve System provided a central check clearinghouse for the entire banking system.

When the Federal Reserve System was originally set up, it was believed that its primary role was to be a lender of last resort to prevent banking panics and become a check-clearing mechanism for the nation's banks. Both the Federal Reserve Board and the Governors of the District Banks were bodies established to jointly exercise these activities. The division of functions was not clear, and a struggle for power ensued, mainly between the New York Federal Reserve Bank, which was led by J. P. Morgan's protege, Benjamin Strong, through 1928, and the Federal Reserve Board. By the thirties the Federal Reserve Board had achieved dominance.

There were really two conflicting criteria upon which monetary actions were ostensibly based: the Gold Standard and the Real Bills Doctrine. The Gold Standard was supposed to be quasi-automatic, with an effective limit to the quantity of money. However, the Real Bills Doctrine (which required that all loans be made on short-term, self-liquidating commercial paper) had no effective limit on the quantity of money. The rediscounting of eligible commercial paper was supposed to lead to the required "elasticity" of the stock of money to "accommodate" the needs of industry and business. Actually the rediscounting of commercial paper, open market purchases, and gold inflows all had the same effects on the money stock.

The 1920-21 Depression

During the First World War, the Fed kept discount rates low and granted discounts on banks' customer loans used to purchase V-bonds in order to help finance the war. The final Victory Loan had not been floated when the Armistice was signed in November of 1918: in fact, it took until October of 1919 for the government to fully sell this last loan issue. The Treasury, with the secretary of the treasury sitting on the Federal Reserve Board, persuaded the Federal Reserve System to maintain low interest rates and discount the Victory bonds necessary to keep bond prices high until this last issue had been floated. As a result, during this period the money supply grew rapidly and prices rose sharply.

A shift from a federal deficit to a surplus and supply disruptions due to steel and coal strikes in 1919 and a railroad strike in early 1920 contributed to the end of the boom. But the most-common view is that the Fed's monetary policy was the main determinant of the end of the expansion and inflation and the beginning of the subsequent contraction and severe deflation. When the Fed was released from its informal agreement with the Treasury in November of 1919, it raised the discount rate from 4 to 4.75 percent. Benjamin Strong (the governor of the New York bank) was beginning to believe that the time for strong action was past and that the Federal Reserve System's actions should be moderate. However, with Strong out of the country, the Federal Reserve Board increased the discount rate from 4.75 to 6 percent in late January of 1920 and to 7 percent on June 1, 1920. By the middle of 1920, economic activity and employment were rapidly falling, and prices had begun their downward spiral in one of the sharpest price declines in American history. The Federal Reserve System kept the discount rate at 7 percent until May 5, 1921, when it was lowered to 6.5 percent. By June of 1922, the rate had been lowered yet again to 4 percent. (Friedman and Schwartz, 1963)

The Federal Reserve System authorities received considerable criticism then and later for their actions. Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz (1963) contend that the discount rate was raised too much too late and then kept too high for too long, causing the decline to be more severe and the price deflation to be greater. In their opinion the Fed acted in this manner due to the necessity of meeting the legal reserve requirement with a safe margin of gold reserves. Elmus Wicker (1966), however, argues that the gold reserve ratio was not the main factor determining the Federal Reserve policy in the episode. Rather, the Fed knowingly pursued a deflationary policy because it felt that the money supply was simply too large and prices too high. To return to the prewar parity for gold required lowering the price level, and there was an excessive stock of money because the additional money had been used to finance the war, not to produce consumer goods. Finally, the outstanding indebtedness was too large due to the creation of Fed credit.

Whether statutory gold reserve requirements to maintain the gold standard or domestic credit conditions were the most important determinant of Fed policy is still an open question, though both certainly had some influence. Regardless of the answer to that question, the Federal Reserve System's first major undertaking in the years immediately following the First World War demonstrated poor policy formulation.

Federal Reserve Policies from 1922 to 1930

By 1921 the district banks began to recognize that their open market purchases had effects on interest rates, the money stock, and economic activity. For the next several years, economists in the Federal Reserve System discussed how this worked and how it could be related to discounting by member banks. A committee was created to coordinate the open market purchases of the district banks.

The recovery from the 1920-1921 depression had proceeded smoothly with moderate price increases. In early 1923 the Fed sold some securities and increased the discount rate from 4 percent as they believed the recovery was too rapid. However, by the fall of 1923 there were some signs of a business slump. McMillin and Parker (1994) argue that this contraction, as well as the 1927 contraction, were related to oil price shocks. By October of 1923 Benjamin Strong was advocating securities purchases to counter this. Between then and September 1924 the Federal Reserve System increased its securities holdings by over $500 million. Between April and August of 1924 the Fed reduced the discount rate to 3 percent in a series of three separate steps. In addition to moderating the mild business slump, the expansionary policy was also intended to reduce American interest rates relative to British interest rates. This reversed the gold flow back toward Great Britain allowing Britain to return to the gold standard in 1925. At the time it appeared that the Fed's monetary policy had successfully accomplished its goals.

By the summer of 1924 the business slump was over and the economy again began to grow rapidly. By the mid-1920s real estate speculation had arisen in many urban areas in the United States and especially in Southeastern Florida. Land prices were rising sharply. Stock market prices had also begun rising more rapidly. The Fed expressed some worry about these developments and in 1926 sold some securities to gently slow the real estate and stock market boom. Amid hurricanes and supply bottlenecks the Florida real estate boom collapsed but the stock market boom continued.

The American economy entered into another mild business recession in the fall of 1926 that lasted until the fall of 1927. One of the factors in this was Henry's Ford's shut down of all of his factories to changeover from the Model T to the Model A. His employees were left without a job and without income for over six months. International concerns also reappeared. France, which was preparing to return to the gold standard, had begun accumulating gold and gold continued to flow into the United States. Some of this gold came from Great Britain making it difficult for the British to remain on the gold standard. This occasioned a new experiment in central bank cooperation. In July 1927 Benjamin Strong arranged a conference with Governor Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, Governor Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank, and Deputy Governor Charles Ritt of the Bank of France in an attempt to promote cooperation among the world's central bankers. By the time the conference began the Fed had already taken steps to counteract the business slump and reduce the gold inflow. In early 1927 the Fed reduced discount rates and made large securities purchases. One result of this was that the gold stock fell from $4.3 billion in mid-1927 to $3.8 billion in mid-1928. Some of the gold exports went to France and France returned to the gold standard with its undervalued currency. The loss of gold from Britain eased allowing it to maintain the gold standard.

By early 1928 the Fed was again becoming worried. Stock market prices were rising even faster and the apparent speculative bubble in the stock market was of some concern to Fed authorities. The Fed was also concerned about the loss of gold and wanted to bring that to an end. To do this they sold securities and, in three steps, raised the discount rate to 5 percent by July 1928. To this point the Federal Reserve Board had largely agreed with district Bank policy changes. However, problems began to develop.

During the stock market boom of the late 1920s the Federal Reserve Board preferred to use "moral suasion" rather than increases in discount rates to lessen member bank borrowing. The New York City bank insisted that moral suasion would not work unless backed up by literal credit rationing on a bank by bank basis which they, and the other district banks, were unwilling to do. They insisted that discount rates had to be increased. The Federal Reserve Board countered that this general policy change would slow down economic activity in general rather than be specifically targeted to stock market speculation. The result was that little was done for a year. Rates were not raised but no open market purchases were undertaken. Rates were finally raised to 6 percent in August of 1929. By that time the contraction had already begun. In late October the stock market crashed, and America slid into the Great Depression.

In November, following the stock market crash the Fed reduced discount rates to 4.5 percent. In January they again decreased discount rates and began a series of discount rate decreases until the rate reached 2.5 percent at the end of 1930. No further open market operations were undertaken for the next six months. As banks reduced their discounting in 1930, the stock of money declined. There was a banking crisis in the southeast in November and December of 1930, and in its wake the public's holding of currency relative to deposits and banks' reserve ratios began to rise and continued to do so through the end of the Great Depression.

Conclusion

Though some disagree, there is growing evidence that the behavior of the American economy in the 1920s did not cause the Great Depression. The depressed 1930s were not "retribution" for the exuberant growth of the 1920s. The weakness of a few economic sectors in the 1920s did not forecast the contraction from 1929 to 1933. Rather it was the depression of the 1930s and the Second World War that interrupted the economic growth begun in the 1920s and resumed after the Second World War. Just as the construction of skyscrapers that began in the 1920s resumed in the 1950s, so did real economic growth and progress resume. In retrospect we can see that the introduction and expansion of new technologies and industries in the 1920s, such as autos, household electric appliances, radio, and electric utilities, are echoed in the 1990s in the effects of the expanding use and development of the personal computer and the rise of the internet. The 1920s have much to teach us about the growth and development of the American economy.

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Ulman, Lloyd. "The Development of Trades and Labor Unions," In American Economic History, edited by Seymour E. Harris, chapter 14. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1961.

Ulman Lloyd. The Rise of the National Trade Union. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955.

U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, 2 volumes. Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 1976.

Walsh, Margaret. Making Connections: The Long Distance Bus Industry in the U.S.A. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000.

Wanniski, Jude. The Way the World Works. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978.

Weiss, Leonard W. Cast Studies in American Industry, 3d ed. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1980.

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Wheelock, David C. and Subal C. Kumbhakar. "The Slack Banker Dances: Deposit Insurance and Risk-Taking in the Banking Collapse of the 1920s." Explorations in Economic History 31 (1994): 357-375.

White, Eugene N. "The Stock Market Boom and Crash of 1929 Revisited." The Journal of Economic Perspectives. 4 (Spring 1990): 67-83.

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The interwar period in the United States, and in the rest of the world, is a most interesting era. The decade of the 1930s marks the most severe depression in our history and ushered in sweeping changes in the role of government. Economists and historians have rightly given much attention to that decade.

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To purchase something with the promise that you will pay in the future. When buying something on credit, you acquire the item immediately, but you pay for it at a later date.

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Credit card, small plastic card containing a means of identification, such as a signature or picture, that authorizes the person named on it to charge goods or services to an account, for which the cardholder is billed periodically.

credit card Comstock/Thinkstock

The use of credit cards originated in the United States during the 1920s, when individual firms, such as oil companies and hotel chains, began issuing them to customers for purchases made at company outlets. The first universal credit card, which could be used at a variety of establishments, was introduced by the Diners' Club, Inc., in 1950. Another major card of this type, known as a travel and entertainment card, was established by the American Express Company in 1958. Under this system, the credit card company charges its cardholders an annual fee and bills them on a periodic basis-usually monthly. Cooperating merchants throughout the world pay a service charge to the credit card issuer in the range of 4-7 percent of total billings.

A later innovation was the bank credit card system, in which the bank credits the account of the merchant as sales slips are received and assembles the charges to be billed at the end of the period to the cardholder, who pays the bank either in toto or in monthly installments with interest or "carrying charges" added. The first national plan was BankAmericard, begun on a statewide basis by the Bank of America in California in 1958, licensed in other states beginning in 1966, and renamed VISA in 1976-77. Many banks that began credit card plans on a citywide or regional basis eventually affiliated with major national bank plans as the range of included services (meals and lodging as well as store purchases) expanded. This development changed the nature of personal credit, which was no longer limited by location. The growing reach of credit networks allowed a person to make credit card purchases on a national and, eventually, international scale. The system has spread to all parts of the world. Other major bank cards include MasterCard (formerly known as Master Charge in the United States), JCB (in Japan), Discover (formerly partnering with Novus and primarily issued in the United States), and Barclaycard (in the United Kingdom, Europe, and the Caribbean).

In bank credit card systems, the cardholder may choose to pay on an installment basis, in which case the bank earns interest on the outstanding balance. The interest income permits banks to refrain from charging cardholders an annual fee and to charge participating merchants a lower service charge. An additional advantage of the system is that merchants receive their payments promptly by depositing their bills of sale with the bank. ( See also revolving credit.)

Store cards are a third form of credit card. They lack the wide acceptance of bank cards or travel and entertainment cards because they are accepted only by the retailer that issues them.

In the late 20th century, credit card use began to increase dramatically, with many customers soon outspending their earnings. Users who were unable to make the monthly payments on outstanding balances accrued on high-interest cards were subsequently hit with hefty penalty fees and quickly fell into default. The recession and rising unemployment that accompanied the global financial crisis of 2008-09 led to a rise in defaults as consumers were increasingly forced to rely on credit. In April 2009 the U.S. House of Representatives approved the Credit Card Holders' Bill of Rights, which would provide additional consumer protections and restrict or eliminate credit card industry practices deemed unfair or abusive. Credit card debt is typically higher in industrialized countries such as the United States-the world's most indebted country-the United Kingdom, and Australia. Nonindustrialized countries and countries with strict bankruptcy laws such as Germany, however, tend to have relatively low credit card debt.

Debit cards are in some ways similar to credit cards-for example, in terms of appearance and functionality. However, unlike credit cards, when a debit card transaction occurs, the amount is immediately deducted from the bank account.

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Credit card, small plastic card containing a means of identification, such as a signature or picture, that authorizes the person named on it to charge goods or services to an account, for which the cardholder is billed periodically. The use of credit cards originated in the United States during the

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The U.S. government's system of checks and balances applies not only to its distribution of power but also to its economic viability. The Securities and Exchange Commission regulates the investment industry, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau safeguards the interests of consumers and a banking supervisory system regulates U.S. monetary policy. That's where the Federal Reserve Board comes in.

For example, the Federal Reserve is expected to step in if the newly passed tax reform legislation does what Congress projects it will do - spur a jump in economic growth. If growth is considered excessive, it frequently leads to higher levels of employment, increased wages and higher prices. When that happens, it's up to the Federal Reserve's Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to regulate interest rates to help tamp down the negative impacts of high inflation - such as another recession. ¹

The Fed has a dual mandate to maximize employment while maintaining a stable price growth rate. To do this, the Fed targets a 2 percent inflation rate. If inflation rises above that threshold, the Fed is likely to increase the benchmark federal funds rate. This is the interest rate that banks charge one another for overnight lending. The trickle-down effect of this action is to dampen economic growth by raising the cost of credit to consumers. ²

These government actions are interwoven so that no one agency can drastically impact the U.S. economy without some form of checks and balances. And this is a good thing. It's like managing a household budget. If you spend too much in one area, you won't be able to save enough. If you need helping keeping your own personal budget in check, we're happy to look over your spending to establish a financial strategy designed to meet your retirement goals. Please contact us to schedule a consultation.

Over the past six months, there's been a fair amount of disruption among the Fed's board members. William Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, announced that he will retire in mid-2018, several months before the end of his term in January 2019. Jeffery Lacker, president of the Richmond Fed, resigned unexpectedly in April 2017, and his post remains vacant. President Trump recently nominated another sitting Fed governor, Jerome Powell, to succeed Janet Yellen as Fed chair when her leadership term expires on Feb. 3, 2018. Although her term as a governor doesn't expire until 2024, Yellen announced she would resign from all Fed posts as soon as Powell was confirmed and sworn in as Fed chairman. ³

On a final note, the FOMC made its final interest rate increase for 2017 in December and projected three increases in 2018. Yellen told reporters, "This change highlights that the committee expects the labor market to remain strong, with sustained job creation, ample opportunities for workers and rising wages." ⁴
Content prepared by Kara Stefan Communications.
¹ Arthur Delaney and Daniel Marans. Huffington Post. Nov. 30, 2017. "How the Federal Reserve Could Rain on Trump's Tax Cut Parade." https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-federal-reserve-offset-tax-cuts_us_5a2076cae4b03350e0b55f99. Accessed Dec. 4, 2017.

³ Michael Ng and David Wessel. Brookings. Nov. 27, 2017. "Janet Yellen and Bill Dudley are leaving the Fed. Who'll be next to go?" https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/whats-next-for-central-bank-turnover-after-jay-powells-nomination-bill-dudleys-retirement/. Accessed Dec. 4, 2017.

⁴ Christopher Condon and Craig Torres. Bloomberg Markets. Dec.13, 2017. "Fed Raises Rates, Eyes Three 2017 Hikes as Yellen Era Nears End." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-13/fed-raises-rates-while-sticking-to-three-hike-outlook-for-2018. Accessed Dec. 18, 2017.
We are an independent firm helping individuals create retirement strategies using a variety of insurance and investment products to custom suit their needs and objectives. This material is intended to provide general information to help you understand basic financial planning strategies and should not be construed as financial advice. All investments are subject to risk including the potential loss of principal. No investment strategy can guarantee a profit or protect against loss in periods of declining values. The information contained in this material is believed to be reliable, but accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed; it is not intended to be used as the sole basis for financial decisions. If you are unable to access any of the news articles and sources through the links provided in this text, please contact us to request a copy of the desired reference.
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The Federal Reserve's Role in the Economy - Heise Advisory Group

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The U.S. government's system of checks and balances applies not only to its distribution of power but also to its economic viability. The Securities and Exchange Commission regulates the investment industry, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau safeguards the interests of consumers and a banking supervisory system regulates U.S. monetary policy.

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Media are the collective communication outlets or tools used to store and deliver information or data.

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The 1940s and 1950s saw the beginnings of increased research into the functions of mass communications. Post the Second World War, there was widespread interest in trying to understand the impact of mass media messages on society.

Stuart Miles/dollar photo club
Functionalism
The focus on understanding the effects of mass communications, especially its social consequences and its impact on maintenance of social order gave rise to a theoretical framework called functionalism. Functionalism focusses on explaining slow, evolutionary change and not sudden changes. The limited capacity of functionalism to be used only in policy research, evaluation and planning has been criticized by many theorists. The focus of functionalism is on how mass communication serves society and fails to account for how humans interact with mass communication and construct meanings from messages. The focus on maintaining the existing social order and not allowing for any meaningful change has also being criticized.
Merton's Contribution
According to Merton, the functions of mass communication can either be manifest or latent. Manifest functions are the readily observed and intended consequences of the media. Latent functions on the other hand refer to the impacts that are not as easy to be observed or those which are unintended.
Lasswell and Wright's Functions of Mass Communication
1) Surveillance of the Environment: An important function of the media is to keep up a surveillance of all the happenings in the world and provide information to the human society. The media has the responsibility of providing news and cover a wide variety of issues that is of some service to the society. Media help maintain social order by providing instructions on what has to be done in times of crisis, thereby reducing confusion among the masses.

Example: In times of natural disasters, war, health scares, etc., it is the role of the media to create awareness by providing information on what is happening and of ways in which the disaster can be faced.

2) Correlation of parts of Society: This function relates to how the media's selection of certain news and its interpretation affects how society understands and responds to it. People's attitudes towards political issues, events, public policy, etc. are influenced to an extent by how the media frames and presents the issue in their discussions and presentations.

Example: The media's reporting on the war in Vietnam played a role in changing the mindsets of Americans who started opposing sending soldiers to fight a losing war. Hitler used the media in his propaganda war against the Jews.

3) Cultural Transmission: This refers to the ability of the media to teach the various norms, rules and values that exist in a society and ensure its transfer from one generation to the next. Television programmes by and large reflects the society in which they are broadcast and promote the understanding of a society's cultural heritage. Children's television programmes are designed to showcase good behaviors and moral standards which children can learn by watching.

Example: Shows like Lassie, Full House, Seventh Heaven and the Brady Bunch promoted family values.

4) Entertainment: This popular function of the mass media refers to the ability of the media to help relax people and create a means of escape from the stress of everyday life. The entertainment function of mass media has both positive and negative effects. The low quality of content is often criticized but the other benefits like helping people experience new events, stimulating emotions and helping people pass their leisure time show how important this function is.

Example: Television offers opportunities for people to view events that they would otherwise not be able to participate in like the Oscars, Independence Day Rallies, the Olympics, etc.

Tagged as: Communication / General, effects of mass communications, entertainment function of mass media, functionalism, functions of mass communication, impact of mass media messages on society, media

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The 1940s and 1950s saw the beginnings of increased research into the functions of mass communications. Post the Second World War, there was widespread interest in trying to understand the impact of mass media messages on society. Stuart Miles/dollar photo club Functionalism The focus on understanding the effects of

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Talkies and talking pictures are informal terms for films incorporating synchronized audible dialogue rather than readable text plates. The terms were widely used in the late 1920s and early 1930s to distinguish sound films from silent films.

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From Silents to Talkies; a short silent film.

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The Lost Generation was the generation that came of age during World War I. Demographers William Strauss and Neil Howe outlined their Strauss–Howe generational theory using 1883–1900 as birth years for this generation

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To paraphrase something Oscar Wilde said about parents, to lose a generation is a tragedy; to lose two looks like carelessness.

Two compelling articles in the Wednesday Tribune had the bad luck to run a couple of pages from each other. The first, by Michelle Manchir, introduced us to Syrian university students who have come to America to study in peace. The story ended dramatically. Zeina Abdul-Samad, now at IIT, mourned the students she'd left behind. "When I think about what these students could achieve here, I feel very bad because we're losing a generation," she said. "An educated generation."

After reading that, I turned the page to Michael Hawthorne's report (which began on page one and jumped inside) on the health hazards posed by Chicago's ancient lead pipes and water mains. The story ended dramatically. A lead expert who'd studied the problem for the EPA said it's so huge, not just here but in cities across America, that utilities and state governments hate to acknowledge it. "But if we don't start to do something, we're sacrificing another generation of children to the hazards of lead."

I'd accepted the claim made by Abdul-Samad as figuratively and perhaps even literally true. The warning of the EPA guy felt like a stretch. And reading them together, I wondered if it was time to issue an alert to copy desks everywhere. So I searched the Internet.

From globalpost.com: "A new report by UK charity Oxfam says that austerity in Europe may be creating a 'lost generation' through lack of economic opportunity."

From the sports blog WaitingForNextYear: "MLB is losing a generation of fans by being stubborn for no apparent reason."

From Inside Higher Education: "'I fear that we're going to be losing a generation of bright young scientists who might take their talents in other directions,' he said. 'I'm seeing it already in the choices that people make as they complete their clinical training now, but it'll trickle down to people in graduate school and undergraduates.'"

From WalesOnline: "'Unemployment in Wales is consistently higher than in England, especially amongst our young people. There's been a 35% increase in the number of apprenticeships offered in England since 2010. In Wales, that number has fallen by a third and communities risk losing a generation of talented young people.'"

From , a daily in Melbourne, Australia: "Premier Denis Napthine has urged Tony Abbott to promote more women from Victoria into the federal ministry, as the new prime minister seeks to address a gender gap within his senior ranks . . . . Speaking on this issue last year, deputy Liberal leader Louise Asher warned that the party was in danger of 'losing a generation' unless more women were preselected to run for Parliament."

From London's Telegraph: "Army chiefs are particularly concerned they are losing a generation of officers who have gained invaluable experience from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan."

From The Australian: "Tony Abbott recognised this vital link when we were in northeast Arnhem Land recently. 'We will know reconciliation has been achieved when Aboriginal people have the same educational attainments, the same life expectancy and the same employment prospects as everyone else,' he said. Historically there has been a plethora of placebo policies, ineffectual treatment intended to deceive the recipient. Sometimes patients given placebos have a perceived improvement in their condition, but here we aren't talking about a perception, we are talking about losing a generation of Australian children, and the nightmare isn't imagined, it is real."

From the weekly message of the president of the Florida Education Association: "There's no question that Florida faces stiff challenges economically. I'll admit that a tax increase doesn't sound very appealing in difficult times. But we're just beginning to feel the impacts of the budget cuts that have already been passed. The next round of budget cuts will cause even greater damage. We're sacrificing this generation of students on an altar of supposed fiscal responsibility. That's a recipe for longer-term disaster."

WCHS News, quoting the president of the Kanawha County Commission in West Virginia: "We're losing a generation of young children to meth. We need to do something, instead of saying, 'Well, we really tried.'"

These are all recent postings. From earlier this year I spotted these headlines:

Reuters: "Banks saved, but Europe risks 'losing a generation'"

Dailykos.com: "Democrats Risk Losing a Generation to Cynical Libertarianism"

In every case I'm sure the author was certain the language he or she had chosen couldn't possibly be more compelling.

But things wear out.

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There's just one Lost Generation, but several others are being misplaced

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To paraphrase something Oscar Wilde said about parents, to lose a generation is a tragedy; to lose two looks like carelessness. Two compelling articles in the Wednesday Tribune had the bad luck to run a couple of pages from each other.

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Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. His economical and understated style—which he termed the Iceberg Theory—had a strong influence on 20th-century .

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Ernest Miller Hemingway (; July 21, 1899 - July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. His economical and understated style-which included his iceberg theory-had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his adventurous lifestyle and public image brought him admiration from later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and he was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature. He published seven novels, six short-story collections, and two nonfiction works. Three of his novels, four short-story collections, and three nonfiction works were published posthumously. Many of his works are considered classics of American literature.

Hemingway was raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After high school, he was a reporter for a few months for The Kansas City Star before leaving for the Italian Front to enlist as an ambulance driver in World War I. In 1918, he was seriously wounded and returned home. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms (1929).

In 1921, he married Hadley Richardson, the first of four wives. They moved to Paris, where he worked as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star and fell under the influence of the modernist writers and artists of the 1920s' " Lost Generation" expatriate community. Hemingway's debut novel The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926. He divorced Richardson in 1927, and married Pauline Pfeiffer. They divorced after he returned from the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), which he covered as a journalist and which was the basis for his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Martha Gellhorn became his third wife in 1940. He and Gellhorn separated after he met Mary Welsh in London during World War II. Hemingway was present with Allied troops as a journalist at the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris.

He maintained permanent residences in Key West, Florida in the 1930s and in Cuba in the 1940s and 1950s. On a 1954 trip to Africa, he was seriously injured in two plane accidents on successive days, leaving him in pain and ill health for much of the rest of his life. In 1959, he bought a house in Ketchum, Idaho, where, in mid-1961, he died by suicide.

Life and career

Hemingway was the second child and first son born to Clarence and Grace.

The Hemingway family in 1905 (from the left to right): Marcelline, Sunny, Clarence, Grace, Ursula, and Ernest

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, an affluent suburb just west of Chicago, to Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a physician, and Grace Hall Hemingway, a musician. His parents were well-educated and well-respected in Oak Park, a conservative community about which resident Frank Lloyd Wright said, "So many churches for so many good people to go to." When Clarence and Grace Hemingway married in 1896, they lived with Grace's father, Ernest Miller Hall, after whom they named their first son, the second of their six children. His sister Marcelline preceded him in 1898, followed by Ursula in 1902, Madelaine in 1904, Carol in 1911, and Leicester in 1915. Grace followed the Victorian convention of not differentiating children's clothing by gender. With only a year separating the two, Ernest and Marcelline resembled one-another strongly. Grace wanted them to appear as twins, so in Ernest's first three years she kept his hair long and dressed both children in similarly frilly feminine clothing.

Hemingway's mother, a well-known musician in the village, taught her son to play the cello despite his refusal to learn; though later in life he admitted the music lessons contributed to his writing style, evidenced for example in the " contrapuntal structure" of For Whom the Bell Tolls. As an adult Hemingway professed to hate his mother, although biographer Michael S. Reynolds points out that he shared similar energies and enthusiasms. Each summer the family traveled to Windemere on Walloon Lake, near Petoskey, Michigan. There young Ernest joined his father and learned to hunt, fish, and camp in the woods and lakes of Northern Michigan, early experiences that instilled a life-long passion for outdoor adventure and living in remote or isolated areas.

Hemingway attended Oak Park and River Forest High School in Oak Park from 1913 until 1917. He was an accomplished athlete involved with a number of sports, including boxing, track and field, water polo, and football. He performed in the school orchestra for two years with his sister Marcelline, and received good grades in English classes. During his last two years at high school he edited the Trapeze and Tabula (the school's newspaper and yearbook), where he imitated the language of sportswriters and used the pen name Ring Lardner Jr.-a nod to Ring Lardner of the Chicago Tribune whose byline was "Line O'Type". Like Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway was a journalist before becoming a novelist. After leaving high school he went to work for The Kansas City Star as a cub reporter. Although he stayed there for only six months, he relied on the Star's style guide as a foundation for his writing, such as "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative."

Hemingway in uniform in Milan in 1918, where he drove ambulances for two months until he was wounded.

Hemingway in Red Cross Hospital in July 1918

In December 1917, after being rejected by the U.S. Army for poor eyesight, Hemingway responded to an International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement recruitment effort and signed on to be an ambulance driver in Italy. In May 1918, he sailed from New York, and arrived in Paris as the city was under bombardment from German artillery. That June he arrived at the Italian Front. On his first day in Milan, he was sent to the scene of a munitions factory explosion to join rescuers retrieving the shredded remains of female workers. He described the incident in his 1932 non-fiction book Death in the Afternoon: "I remember that after we searched quite thoroughly for the complete dead we collected fragments." A few days later, he was stationed at Fossalta di Piave.

On July 8, he was seriously wounded by mortar fire, having just returned from the canteen bringing chocolate and cigarettes for the men at the front line. Despite his wounds, Hemingway assisted Italian soldiers to safety, for which he was decorated with the Italian War Merit Cross, the Croce al Merito di Guerra. He was still only 18 at the time. Hemingway later said of the incident: "When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you ... Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you." He sustained severe shrapnel wounds to both legs, underwent an immediate operation at a distribution center, and spent five days at a field hospital before he was transferred for recuperation to the Red Cross hospital in Milan. He spent six months at the hospital, where he met and formed a strong friendship with "Chink" Dorman-Smith that lasted for decades and shared a room with future American foreign service officer, ambassador, and author Henry Serrano Villard.

While recuperating he fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky, a Red Cross nurse seven years his senior. When Hemingway returned to the United States in January 1919, he believed Agnes would join him within months and the two would marry. Instead, he received a letter in March with her announcement that she was engaged to an Italian officer. Biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes Agnes's rejection devastated and scarred the young man; in future relationships, Hemingway followed a pattern of abandoning a wife before she abandoned him.

Hemingway returned home early in 1919 to a time of readjustment. Before the age of 20, he had gained from the war a maturity that was at odds with living at home without a job and with the need for recuperation. As Reynolds explains, "Hemingway could not really tell his parents what he thought when he saw his bloody knee." He was not able to tell them how scared he had been "in another country with surgeons who could not tell him in English if his leg was coming off or not."

In September, he took a fishing and camping trip with high school friends to the back-country of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The trip became the inspiration for his short story " Big Two-Hearted River", in which the semi-autobiographical character Nick Adams takes to the country to find solitude after returning from war. A family friend offered him a job in Toronto, and with nothing else to do, he accepted. Late that year he began as a freelancer and staff writer for the Toronto Star Weekly. He returned to Michigan the following June and then moved to Chicago in September 1920 to live with friends, while still filing stories for the Toronto Star. In Chicago, he worked as an associate editor of the monthly journal Cooperative Commonwealth, where he met novelist Sherwood Anderson.

When St. Louis native Hadley Richardson came to Chicago to visit the sister of Hemingway's roommate, Hemingway became infatuated. He later claimed, "I knew she was the girl I was going to marry." Hadley, red-haired, with a "nurturing instinct", was eight years older than Hemingway. Despite the age difference, Hadley, who had grown up with an overprotective mother, seemed less mature than usual for a young woman her age. Bernice Kert, author of The Hemingway Women, claims Hadley was "evocative" of Agnes, but that Hadley had a childishness that Agnes lacked. The two corresponded for a few months and then decided to marry and travel to Europe. They wanted to visit Rome, but Sherwood Anderson convinced them to visit Paris instead, writing letters of introduction for the young couple. They were married on September 3, 1921; two months later Hemingway was hired as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, and the couple left for Paris. Of Hemingway's marriage to Hadley, Meyers claims: "With Hadley, Hemingway achieved everything he had hoped for with Agnes: the love of a beautiful woman, a comfortable income, a life in Europe."

Hemingway's 1923 passport photo; at this time, he lived in Paris with his wife Hadley and worked as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star Weekly.

Ernest and Pauline Hemingway in Paris in 1927

Carlos Baker, Hemingway's first biographer, believes that while Anderson suggested Paris because "the monetary exchange rate" made it an inexpensive place to live, more importantly it was where "the most interesting people in the world" lived. In Paris, Hemingway met American writer and art collector Gertrude Stein, Irish novelist James Joyce, American poet Ezra Pound (who "could help a young writer up the rungs of a career") and other writers.

The Hemingway of the early Paris years was a "tall, handsome, muscular, broad-shouldered, brown-eyed, rosy-cheeked, square-jawed, soft-voiced young man." He and Hadley lived in a small walk-up at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine in the Latin Quarter, and he worked in a rented room in a nearby building. Stein, who was the bastion of modernism in Paris, became Hemingway's mentor and godmother to his son Jack; she introduced him to the expatriate artists and writers of the Montparnasse Quarter, whom she referred to as the " Lost Generation"-a term Hemingway popularized with the publication of The Sun Also Rises. A regular at Stein's salon, Hemingway met influential painters such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Juan Gris. He eventually withdrew from Stein's influence, and their relationship deteriorated into a literary quarrel that spanned decades. While living in Paris in 1922, Hemingway befriended artist Henry Strater who painted two portraits of him.

Ezra Pound met Hemingway by chance at Sylvia Beach's bookshop Shakespeare and Company in 1922. The two toured Italy in 1923 and lived on the same street in 1924. They forged a strong friendship, and in Hemingway, Pound recognized and fostered a young talent. Pound introduced Hemingway to James Joyce, with whom Hemingway frequently embarked on "alcoholic sprees".

During his first 20 months in Paris, Hemingway filed 88 stories for the Toronto Star newspaper. He covered the Greco-Turkish War, where he witnessed the burning of Smyrna, and wrote travel pieces such as "Tuna Fishing in Spain" and "Trout Fishing All Across Europe: Spain Has the Best, Then Germany".

Hemingway was devastated on learning that Hadley had lost a suitcase filled with his manuscripts at the Gare de Lyon as she was traveling to Geneva to meet him in December 1922. In the following September the couple returned to Toronto, where their son John Hadley Nicanor was born on October 10, 1923. During their absence, Hemingway's first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was published. Two of the stories it contained were all that remained after the loss of the suitcase, and the third had been written early the previous year in Italy. Within months a second volume, in our time (without capitals), was published. The small volume included six vignettes and a dozen stories Hemingway had written the previous summer during his first visit to Spain, where he discovered the thrill of the . He missed Paris, considered Toronto boring, and wanted to return to the life of a writer, rather than live the life of a journalist.

Hemingway, Hadley and their son (nicknamed Bumby) returned to Paris in January 1924 and moved into a new apartment on the rue Notre-Dame des Champs. Hemingway helped Ford Madox Ford edit The Transatlantic Review, which published works by Pound, John Dos Passos, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and Stein, as well as some of Hemingway's own early stories such as " Indian Camp". When was published in 1925, the dust jacket bore comments from Ford. "Indian Camp" received considerable praise; Ford saw it as an important early story by a young writer, and critics in the United States praised Hemingway for reinvigorating the short story genre with his crisp style and use of declarative sentences. Six months earlier, Hemingway had met F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the pair formed a friendship of "admiration and hostility". Fitzgerald had published The Great Gatsby the same year: Hemingway read it, liked it, and decided his next work had to be a novel.

With his wife Hadley, Hemingway first visited the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona, Spain, in 1923, where he became fascinated by bullfighting. It is at this time that he began to be referred to as "Papa", even by much older friends. Hadley would much later recall that Hemingway had his own nicknames for everyone and that he often did things for his friends; she suggested that he liked to be looked up to. She did not remember precisely how the nickname came into being; however, it certainly stuck. The Hemingways returned to Pamplona in 1924 and a third time in June 1925; that year they brought with them a group of American and British expatriates: Hemingway's Michigan boyhood friend Bill Smith, Donald Ogden Stewart, Lady Duff Twysden (recently divorced), her lover Pat Guthrie, and Harold Loeb. A few days after the fiesta ended, on his birthday (July 21), he began to write the draft of what would become The Sun Also Rises, finishing eight weeks later. A few months later, in December 1925, the Hemingways left to spend the winter in Schruns, Austria, where Hemingway began revising the manuscript extensively. Pauline Pfeiffer joined them in January and against Hadley's advice, urged Hemingway to sign a contract with Scribner's. He left Austria for a quick trip to New York to meet with the publishers, and on his return, during a stop in Paris, began an affair with Pfeiffer, before returning to Schruns to finish the revisions in March. The manuscript arrived in New York in April; he corrected the final proof in Paris in August 1926, and Scribner's published the novel in October.

The Sun Also Rises epitomized the post-war expatriate generation, received good reviews and is "recognized as Hemingway's greatest work". Hemingway himself later wrote to his editor Max Perkins that the "point of the book" was not so much about a generation being lost, but that "the earth abideth forever"; he believed the characters in The Sun Also Rises may have been "battered" but were not lost.

Hemingway's marriage to Hadley deteriorated as he was working on The Sun Also Rises. In early 1926, Hadley became aware of his affair with Pfeiffer, who came to Pamplona with them that July. On their return to Paris, Hadley asked for a separation; in November she formally requested a divorce. They split their possessions while Hadley accepted Hemingway's offer of the proceeds from The Sun Also Rises. The couple were divorced in January 1927, and Hemingway married Pfeiffer in May.

Pfeiffer, who was from a wealthy Catholic family in Arkansas, moved to Paris to work for magazine. Before their marriage, Hemingway converted to Catholicism. They honeymooned in Le Grau-du-Roi, where he contracted anthrax, and he planned his next collection of short stories, Men Without Women, which was published in October 1927, and included his boxing story " Fifty Grand". Cosmopolitan magazine editor-in-chief Ray Long praised "Fifty Grand", calling it, "one of the best short stories that ever came to my hands ... the best prize-fight story I ever read ... a remarkable piece of realism."

By the end of the year Pauline, who was pregnant, wanted to move back to America. John Dos Passos recommended Key West, and they left Paris in March 1928. Hemingway suffered a severe injury in their Paris bathroom when he pulled a skylight down on his head thinking he was pulling on a toilet chain. This left him with a prominent forehead scar, which he carried for the rest of his life. When Hemingway was asked about the scar, he was reluctant to answer. After his departure from Paris, Hemingway "never again lived in a big city".

Key West and the Caribbean

The Hemingway House in Key West, Florida, where he lived between 1931 and 1939 and where he wrote To Have and Have Not

Ernest, Pauline, Bumby, Patrick, and Gloria Hemingway pose with marlins after a fishing trip in Bimini in 1935

Hemingway and Pauline traveled to Kansas City, Missouri, where their son Patrick was born on June 28, 1928. Pauline had a difficult delivery; Hemingway fictionalized a version of the event as a part of A Farewell to Arms. After Patrick's birth, Pauline and Hemingway traveled to Wyoming, Massachusetts, and New York. In the winter, he was in New York with Bumby, about to board a train to Florida, when he received a cable telling him that his father had killed himself. Hemingway was devastated, having earlier written to his father telling him not to worry about financial difficulties; the letter arrived minutes after the suicide. He realized how Hadley must have felt after her own father's suicide in 1903, and he commented, "I'll probably go the same way."

Upon his return to Key West in December, Hemingway worked on the draft of A Farewell to Arms before leaving for France in January. He had finished it in August but delayed the revision. The serialization in Scribner's Magazine was scheduled to begin in May, but as late as April, Hemingway was still working on the ending, which he may have rewritten as many as seventeen times. The completed novel was published on September 27. Biographer James Mellow believes A Farewell to Arms established Hemingway's stature as a major American writer and displayed a level of complexity not apparent in The Sun Also Rises. (The story was turned into a play by war veteran Laurence Stallings that was the basis for the film starring Gary Cooper.) In Spain in mid-1929, Hemingway researched his next work, Death in the Afternoon. He wanted to write a comprehensive treatise on bullfighting, explaining the toreros and corridas complete with glossaries and appendices, because he believed bullfighting was "of great tragic interest, being literally of life and death."

During the early 1930s, Hemingway spent his winters in Key West and summers in Wyoming, where he found "the most beautiful country he had seen in the American West" and hunted deer, elk, and grizzly bear. He was joined there by Dos Passos, and in November 1930, after bringing Dos Passos to the train station in Billings, Montana, Hemingway broke his arm in a car accident. The surgeon tended the compound spiral fracture and bound the bone with kangaroo tendon. Hemingway was hospitalized for seven weeks, with Pauline tending to him; the nerves in his writing hand took as long as a year to heal, during which time he suffered intense pain.

His third child, Gloria Hemingway, was born a year later on November 12, 1931, in Kansas City as "Gregory Hancock Hemingway". Pauline's uncle bought the couple a house in Key West with a carriage house, the second floor of which was converted into a writing studio. While in Key West, Hemingway frequented the local bar Sloppy Joe's. He invited friends-including Waldo Peirce, Dos Passos, and Max Perkins-to join him on fishing trips and on an all-male expedition to the Dry Tortugas. Meanwhile, he continued to travel to Europe and to Cuba, and-although in 1933 he wrote of Key West, "We have a fine house here, and kids are all well"-Mellow believes he "was plainly restless".

In 1933, Hemingway and Pauline went on safari to Kenya. The 10-week trip provided material for Green Hills of Africa, as well as for the short stories " The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and " The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber". The couple visited Mombasa, Nairobi, and Machakos in Kenya; then moved on to Tanganyika Territory, where they hunted in the Serengeti, around Lake Manyara, and west and southeast of present-day Tarangire National Park. Their guide was the noted "white hunter" Philip Percival who had guided Theodore Roosevelt on his 1909 safari. During these travels, Hemingway contracted amoebic dysentery that caused a prolapsed intestine, and he was evacuated by plane to Nairobi, an experience reflected in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro". On Hemingway's return to Key West in early 1934, he began work on Green Hills of Africa, which he published in 1935 to mixed reviews.

Hemingway bought a boat in 1934, named it the , and began sailing the Caribbean. In 1935 he first arrived at Bimini, where he spent a considerable amount of time. During this period he also worked on To Have and Have Not, published in 1937 while he was in Spain, the only novel he wrote during the 1930s.

Spanish Civil War

Hemingway (center) with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens and German writer Ludwig Renn serving as an International Brigades officer during the Spanish Civil War in Spain in 1937

In 1937, Hemingway left for Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), despite Pauline's reluctance to have him working in a war zone. He and Dos Passos both signed on to work with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens as screenwriters for The Spanish Earth. Dos Passos left the project after the execution of José Robles, his friend and Spanish translator, which caused a rift between the two writers.

Hemingway was joined in Spain by journalist and writer Martha Gellhorn, whom he had met in Key West a year earlier. Like Hadley, Martha was a St. Louis native, and like Pauline, she had worked for Vogue in Paris. Of Martha, Kert explains, "she never catered to him the way other women did". In July 1937 he attended the Second International Writers' Congress, the purpose of which was to discuss the attitude of intellectuals to the war, held in Valencia, Barcelona and Madrid and attended by many writers including André Malraux, Stephen Spender and Pablo Neruda. Late in 1937, while in Madrid with Martha, Hemingway wrote his only play, The Fifth Column, as the city was being bombarded by Francoist forces. He returned to Key West for a few months, then back to Spain twice in 1938, where he was present at the Battle of the Ebro, the last republican stand, and he was among the British and American journalists who were some of the last to leave the battle as they crossed the river.

In early 1939, Hemingway crossed to Cuba in his boat to live in the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Havana. This was the separation phase of a slow and painful split from Pauline, which began when Hemingway met Martha Gellhorn. Martha soon joined him in Cuba, and they rented " Finca Vigía" ("Lookout Farm"), a 15-acre (61,000 m ²) property 15 miles (24 km) from Havana. Pauline and the children left Hemingway that summer, after the family was reunited during a visit to Wyoming; when his divorce from Pauline was finalized, he and Martha were married on November 20, 1940, in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Hemingway moved his primary summer residence to Ketchum, Idaho, just outside the newly built resort of Sun Valley, and moved his winter residence to Cuba. He had been disgusted when a Parisian friend allowed his cats to eat from the table, but he became enamored of cats in Cuba and kept dozens of them on the property. Descendants of his cats live at his Key West home.

Gellhorn inspired him to write his most famous novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, which he began in March 1939 and finished in July 1940. It was published in October 1940. His pattern was to move around while working on a manuscript, and he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls in Cuba, Wyoming, and Sun Valley. It became a Book-of-the-Month Club choice, sold half a million copies within months, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and, in the words of Meyers, "triumphantly re-established Hemingway's literary reputation".

In January 1941, Martha was sent to China on assignment for magazine. Hemingway went with her, sending in dispatches for the newspaper , but in general he disliked China.

A 2009 book by former KGB officer Alexander Vassiliev suggests during that period he may have been recruited to work for NKVD "on ideological grounds" under the code name "Argo".

They returned to Cuba before the declaration of war by the United States that December, when he convinced the Cuban government to help him refit the Pilar, which he intended to use to ambush German submarines off the coast of Cuba.

World War II

Hemingway with Col. Charles "Buck" Lanham in Germany during the fighting in Hürtgenwald in 1944, after which he became ill with pneumonia

Hemingway was in Europe from May 1944 to March 1945. When he arrived in London, he met magazine correspondent Mary Welsh, with whom he became infatuated. Martha had been forced to cross the Atlantic in a ship filled with explosives because Hemingway refused to help her get a press pass on a plane, and she arrived in London to find him hospitalized with a concussion from a car accident. She was unsympathetic to his plight; she accused him of being a bully and told him that she was "through, absolutely finished". The last time that Hemingway saw Martha was in March 1945 as he was preparing to return to Cuba, and their divorce was finalized later that year. Meanwhile, he had asked Mary Welsh to marry him on their third meeting.

Hemingway accompanied the troops to the Normandy Landings wearing a large head bandage, according to Meyers, but he was considered "precious cargo" and not allowed ashore. The landing craft came within sight of Omaha Beach before coming under enemy fire and turning back. Hemingway later wrote in that he could see "the first, second, third, fourth and fifth waves of [landing troops] lay where they had fallen, looking like so many heavily laden bundles on the flat pebbly stretch between the sea and first cover". Mellow explains that, on that first day, none of the correspondents were allowed to land and Hemingway was returned to the Dorothea Dix.

Late in July, he attached himself to "the 22nd Infantry Regiment commanded by Col. Charles "Buck" Lanham, as it drove toward Paris", and Hemingway became de facto leader to a small band of village militia in Rambouillet outside of Paris. Paul Fussell remarks: "Hemingway got into considerable trouble playing infantry captain to a group of Resistance people that he gathered because a correspondent is not supposed to lead troops, even if he does it well." This was in fact in contravention of the Geneva Convention, and Hemingway was brought up on formal charges; he said that he "beat the rap" by claiming that he only offered advice.

On August 25, he was present at the liberation of Paris as a journalist; contrary to the Hemingway legend, he was not the first into the city, nor did he liberate the Ritz. In Paris, he visited Sylvia Beach and Pablo Picasso with Mary Welsh, who joined him there; in a spirit of happiness, he forgave Gertrude Stein. Later that year, he observed heavy fighting in the Battle of Hürtgen Forest. On December 17, 1944, he had himself driven to Luxembourg in spite of illness to cover The Battle of the Bulge. As soon as he arrived, however, Lanham handed him to the doctors, who hospitalized him with pneumonia; he recovered a week later, but most of the fighting was over.

In 1947, Hemingway was awarded a Bronze Star for his bravery during World War II. He was recognized for having been "under fire in combat areas in order to obtain an accurate picture of conditions", with the commendation that "through his talent of expression, Mr. Hemingway enabled readers to obtain a vivid picture of the difficulties and triumphs of the front-line soldier and his organization in combat".

Cuba and the Nobel Prize

Hemingway and Mary in Africa before the two plane accidents

Hemingway in the cabin of his boat Pilar, off the coast of Cuba, c. 1950

Hemingway said he "was out of business as a writer" from 1942 to 1945 during his residence in Cuba. In 1946 he married Mary, who had an ectopic pregnancy five months later. The Hemingway family suffered a series of accidents and health problems in the years following the war: in a 1945 car accident, he "smashed his knee" and sustained another "deep wound on his forehead"; Mary broke first her right ankle and then her left in successive skiing accidents. A 1947 car accident left Patrick with a head wound and severely ill. Hemingway sank into depression as his literary friends began to die: in 1939 William Butler Yeats and Ford Madox Ford; in 1940 F. Scott Fitzgerald; in 1941 Sherwood Anderson and James Joyce; in 1946 Gertrude Stein; and the following year in 1947, Max Perkins, Hemingway's long-time Scribner's editor, and friend. During this period, he suffered from severe headaches, high blood pressure, weight problems, and eventually diabetes-much of which was the result of previous accidents and many years of heavy drinking. Nonetheless, in January 1946, he began work on The Garden of Eden, finishing 800 pages by June. During the post-war years, he also began work on a trilogy tentatively titled "The Land", "The Sea" and "The Air", which he wanted to combine in one novel titled The Sea Book. However, both projects stalled, and Mellow says that Hemingway's inability to continue was "a symptom of his troubles" during these years.

In 1948, Hemingway and Mary traveled to Europe, staying in Venice for several months. While there, Hemingway fell in love with the then 19-year-old Adriana Ivancich. The platonic love affair inspired the novel Across the River and into the Trees, written in Cuba during a time of strife with Mary, and published in 1950 to negative reviews. The following year, furious at the critical reception of Across the River and Into the Trees, he wrote the draft of The Old Man and the Sea in eight weeks, saying that it was "the best I can write ever for all of my life". The Old Man and the Sea became a book-of-the-month selection, made Hemingway an international celebrity, and won the Pulitzer Prize in May 1953, a month before he left for his second trip to Africa.

In January 1954, while in Africa, Hemingway was almost fatally injured in two successive plane crashes. He chartered a sightseeing flight over the Belgian Congo as a Christmas present to Mary. On their way to photograph Murchison Falls from the air, the plane struck an abandoned utility pole and "crash landed in heavy brush". Hemingway's injuries included a head wound, while Mary broke two ribs. The next day, attempting to reach medical care in Entebbe, they boarded a second plane that exploded at take-off, with Hemingway suffering burns and another concussion, this one serious enough to cause leaking of cerebral fluid. They eventually arrived in Entebbe to find reporters covering the story of Hemingway's death. He briefed the reporters and spent the next few weeks recuperating and reading his erroneous obituaries. Despite his injuries, Hemingway accompanied Patrick and his wife on a planned fishing expedition in February, but pain caused him to be irascible and difficult to get along with. When a bushfire broke out, he was again injured, sustaining second-degree burns on his legs, front torso, lips, left hand and right forearm. Months later in Venice, Mary reported to friends the full extent of Hemingway's injuries: two cracked discs, a kidney and liver rupture, a dislocated shoulder and a broken skull. The accidents may have precipitated the physical deterioration that was to follow. After the plane crashes, Hemingway, who had been "a thinly controlled alcoholic throughout much of his life, drank more heavily than usual to combat the pain of his injuries."

In October 1954, Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He modestly told the press that Carl Sandburg, Isak Dinesen and Bernard Berenson deserved the prize, but he gladly accepted the prize money. Mellow says Hemingway "had coveted the Nobel Prize", but when he won it, months after his plane accidents and the ensuing worldwide press coverage, "there must have been a lingering suspicion in Hemingway's mind that his obituary notices had played a part in the academy's decision." Because he was suffering pain from the African accidents, he decided against traveling to Stockholm. Instead he sent a speech to be read, defining the writer's life:

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

From the end of the year in 1955 to early 1956, Hemingway was bedridden. He was told to stop drinking to mitigate liver damage, advice he initially followed but then disregarded. In October 1956, he returned to Europe and met Basque writer Pio Baroja, who was seriously ill and died weeks later. During the trip, Hemingway became sick again and was treated for "high blood pressure, liver disease, and arteriosclerosis".

In November 1956, while staying in Paris, he was reminded of trunks he had stored in the Ritz Hotel in 1928 and never retrieved. Upon re-claiming and opening the trunks, Hemingway discovered they were filled with notebooks and writing from his Paris years. Excited about the discovery, when he returned to Cuba in early 1957, he began to shape the recovered work into his memoir A Moveable Feast. By 1959 he ended a period of intense activity: he finished A Moveable Feast (scheduled to be released the following year); brought True at First Light to 200,000 words; added chapters to The Garden of Eden; and worked on Islands in the Stream. The last three were stored in a safe deposit box in Havana, as he focused on the finishing touches for A Moveable Feast. Author Michael Reynolds claims it was during this period that Hemingway slid into depression, from which he was unable to recover.

The Finca Vigía became crowded with guests and tourists, as Hemingway, beginning to become unhappy with life there, considered a permanent move to Idaho. In 1959 he bought a home overlooking the Big Wood River, outside Ketchum, and left Cuba-although he apparently remained on easy terms with the Castro government, telling The New York Times he was "delighted" with Castro's overthrow of Batista. He was in Cuba in November 1959, between returning from Pamplona and traveling west to Idaho, and the following year for his 61st birthday; however, that year he and Mary decided to leave after hearing the news that Castro wanted to nationalize property owned by Americans and other foreign nationals. On July 25, 1960, the Hemingways left Cuba for the last time, leaving art and manuscripts in a bank vault in Havana. After the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Finca Vigía was expropriated by the Cuban government, complete with Hemingway's collection of "four to six thousand books". President Kennedy arranged for Mary Hemingway to travel to Cuba where she met Fidel Castro and obtained her husband's papers and painting in return for donating Finca Vigía to Cuba.[clarification needed ]

Idaho and suicide

Hemingway bird-hunting at Silver Creek, near Picabo, Idaho in January 1959; with him are Gary Cooper and Bobbie Peterson

The Hemingway Memorial in Sun Valley, Idaho

Hemingway continued to rework the material that was published as A Moveable Feast through the 1950s. In mid-1959, he visited Spain to research a series of bullfighting articles commissioned by magazine. Life wanted only 10,000 words, but the manuscript grew out of control. He was unable to organize his writing for the first time in his life, so he asked A. E. Hotchner to travel to Cuba to help him. Hotchner helped him trim the Life piece down to 40,000 words, and Scribner's agreed to a full-length book version (The Dangerous Summer) of almost 130,000 words. Hotchner found Hemingway to be "unusually hesitant, disorganized, and confused", and suffering badly from failing eyesight.

Hemingway and Mary left Cuba for the last time on July 25, 1960. He set up a small office in his New York City apartment and attempted to work, but he left soon after. He then traveled alone to Spain to be photographed for the front cover of Life magazine. A few days later, the news reported that he was seriously ill and on the verge of dying, which panicked Mary until she received a cable from him telling her, "Reports false. Enroute Madrid. Love Papa." He was, in fact, seriously ill, and believed himself to be on the verge of a breakdown. Feeling lonely, he took to his bed for days, retreating into silence, despite having the first installments of The Dangerous Summer published in Life in September 1960 to good reviews. In October, he left Spain for New York, where he refused to leave Mary's apartment, presuming that he was being watched. She quickly took him to Idaho, where physician George Saviers met them at the train.

Hemingway was constantly worried about money and his safety. He worried about his taxes and that he would never return to Cuba to retrieve the manuscripts that he had left in a bank vault. He became paranoid, thinking that the FBI was actively monitoring his movements in Ketchum.[clarification needed ] The FBI had opened a file on him during World War II, when he used the to patrol the waters off Cuba, and J. Edgar Hoover had an agent in Havana watch him during the 1950s. Unable to care for her husband, Mary had Saviers fly Hemingway to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota at the end of November for hypertension treatments, as he told his patient. The FBI knew that Hemingway was at the Mayo Clinic, as an agent later documented in a letter written in January 1961.

Hemingway was checked in under Saviers's name to maintain anonymity. Meyers writes that "an aura of secrecy surrounds Hemingway's treatment at the Mayo" but confirms that he was treated with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) as many as 15 times in December 1960 and was "released in ruins" in January 1961. Reynolds gained access to Hemingway's records at the Mayo, which document ten ECT sessions. The doctors in Rochester told Hemingway the depressive state for which he was being treated may have been caused by his long-term use of Reserpine and Ritalin. Of the ECT therapy, Hemingway told Hotchner, "What is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the patient."

Hemingway was back in Ketchum in April 1961, three months after being released from the Mayo Clinic, when Mary "found Hemingway holding a shotgun" in the kitchen one morning. She called Saviers, who sedated him and admitted him to the Sun Valley Hospital and once the weather cleared Saviers flew again to Rochester with his patient. Hemingway underwent three electroshock treatments during that visit. He was released at the end of June and was home in Ketchum on June 30. Two days later he "quite deliberately" shot himself with his favorite shotgun in the early morning hours of July 2, 1961. He had unlocked the basement storeroom where his guns were kept, gone upstairs to the front entrance foyer, and shot himself with the "double-barreled shotgun that he had used so often it might have been a friend", which was purchased from Abercrombie & Fitch.[need quotation to verify ]

Mary was sedated[clarification needed ] and taken to the hospital, returning home the next day where she cleaned the house and saw to the funeral and travel arrangements. Bernice Kert writes that it "did not seem to her a conscious lie" when she told the press that his death had been accidental. In a press interview five years later, Mary confirmed that he had shot himself.

Family and friends flew to Ketchum for the funeral, officiated by the local Catholic priest, who believed that the death had been accidental. An altar boy fainted at the head of the casket during the funeral, and Hemingway's brother Leicester wrote: "It seemed to me Ernest would have approved of it all." He is buried in the Ketchum cemetery.

Hemingway's behavior during his final years had been similar to that of his father before he killed himself; his father may have had hereditary hemochromatosis, whereby the excessive accumulation of iron in tissues culminates in mental and physical deterioration. Medical records made available in 1991 confirmed that Hemingway had been diagnosed with hemochromatosis in early 1961. His sister Ursula and his brother Leicester also killed themselves. Hemingway's health was further complicated by heavy drinking throughout most of his life.

A memorial to Hemingway just north of Sun Valley is inscribed on the base with a eulogy Hemingway had written for a friend several decades earlier:

Best of all he loved the fall

the leaves yellow on cottonwoods

leaves floating on trout streams

and above the hills

the high blue windless skies

...Now he will be a part of them forever.

Writing style

The New York Times wrote in 1926 of Hemingway's first novel, "No amount of analysis can convey the quality of The Sun Also Rises. It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame." The Sun Also Rises is written in the spare, tight prose that made Hemingway famous, and, according to James Nagel, "changed the nature of American writing". In 1954, when Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, it was for "his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style."

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

Henry Louis Gates believes Hemingway's style was fundamentally shaped "in reaction to [his] experience of world war". After World War I, he and other modernists "lost faith in the central institutions of Western civilization" by reacting against the elaborate style of 19th-century writers and by creating a style "in which meaning is established through dialogue, through action, and silences-a fiction in which nothing crucial-or at least very little-is stated explicitly."

Because he began as a writer of short stories, Baker believes Hemingway learned to "get the most from the least, how to prune language, how to multiply intensities and how to tell nothing but the truth in a way that allowed for telling more than the truth." Hemingway called his style the iceberg theory: the facts float above water; the supporting structure and symbolism operate out of sight. The concept of the iceberg theory is sometimes referred to as the "theory of omission". Hemingway believed the writer could describe one thing (such as Nick Adams fishing in "Big Two-Hearted River") though an entirely different thing occurs below the surface (Nick Adams concentrating on fishing to the extent that he does not have to think about anything else). Paul Smith writes that Hemingway's first stories, collected as , showed he was still experimenting with his writing style, and when he wrote about Spain or other countries he incorporated foreign words into the text, which sometimes appears directly in the other language (in italics, as occurs in The Old Man and the Sea) or in English as literal translations. He also often used bilingual puns and crosslingual wordplay as stylistic devices. In general, he avoided complicated syntax. About 70 percent of the sentences are simple sentences without subordination -a simple childlike grammar structure.

Jackson Benson believes Hemingway used autobiographical details as framing devices about life in general-not only about his life. For example, Benson postulates that Hemingway used his experiences and drew them out with "what if" scenarios: "what if I were wounded in such a way that I could not sleep at night? What if I were wounded and made crazy, what would happen if I were sent back to the front?" Writing in "The Art of the Short Story", Hemingway explains: "A few things I have found to be true. If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened. If you leave or skip something because you do not know it, the story will be worthless. The test of any story is how very good the stuff that you, not your editors, omit."

The simplicity of the prose is deceptive. Zoe Trodd believes Hemingway crafted skeletal sentences in response to Henry James's observation that World War I had "used up words". Hemingway offers a "multi-focal" photographic reality. His iceberg theory of omission is the foundation on which he builds. The syntax, which lacks subordinating conjunctions, creates static sentences. The photographic " snapshot" style creates a collage of images. Many types of internal punctuation (colons, semicolons, dashes, parentheses) are omitted in favor of short declarative sentences. The sentences build on each other, as events build to create a sense of the whole. Multiple strands exist in one story; an "embedded text" bridges to a different angle. He also uses other cinematic techniques of "cutting" quickly from one scene to the next; or of "splicing" a scene into another. Intentional omissions allow the reader to fill the gap, as though responding to instructions from the author and create three-dimensional prose.

In the late summer that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the trees.

-Opening passage of A Farewell to Arms showing Hemingway's use of the word and

Hemingway habitually used the word "and" in place of commas. This use of polysyndeton may serve to convey immediacy. Hemingway's polysyndetonic sentence-or in later works his use of subordinate clauses-uses conjunctions to juxtapose startling visions and images. Benson compares them to haikus. Many of Hemingway's followers misinterpreted his lead and frowned upon all expression of emotion; Saul Bellow satirized this style as "Do you have emotions? Strangle them." However, Hemingway's intent was not to eliminate emotion, but to portray it more scientifically. Hemingway thought it would be easy, and pointless, to describe emotions; he sculpted collages of images in order to grasp "the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always". This use of an image as an objective correlative is characteristic of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust. Hemingway's letters refer to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past several times over the years, and indicate he read the book at least twice.

Hemingway's writing includes themes of love, war, travel, wilderness, and loss. Critic Leslie Fiedler sees the theme he defines as "The Sacred Land"-the American West-extended in Hemingway's work to include mountains in Spain, Switzerland and Africa, and to the streams of Michigan. The American West is given a symbolic nod with the naming of the "Hotel Montana" in The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls. According to Stoltzfus and Fiedler, in Hemingway's work, nature is a place for rebirth and rest; and it is where the hunter or fisherman might experience a moment of transcendence at the moment they kill their prey. Nature is where men exist without women: men fish; men hunt; men find redemption in nature. Although Hemingway does write about sports, such as fishing, Carlos Baker notes the emphasis is more on the athlete than the sport. At its core, much of Hemingway's work can be viewed in the light of American naturalism, evident in detailed descriptions such as those in "Big Two-Hearted River".

Hemingway often wrote about Americans abroad. In Hemingway's Expatriate Nationalism, Jeffrey Herlihy describes "Hemingway's Transnational Archetype" as one that involves characters who are "multilingual and bicultural, and have integrated new cultural norms from the host community into their daily lives by the time plots begin." In this way, "foreign scenarios, far from being mere exotic backdrops or cosmopolitan milieus, are motivating factors in-character action." Donald Monk comments that Hemingway's use of "expatriation comes to be not so much a psychological as a metaphysical reality. It guarantees his world-view of his heroes, based on a type of rootless outsider."

Fiedler believes Hemingway inverts the American literary theme of the evil "Dark Woman" versus the good "Light Woman". The dark woman-Brett Ashley of The Sun Also Rises-is a goddess; the light woman-Margot Macomber of " The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"-is a murderess. Robert Scholes says early Hemingway stories, such as " A Very Short Story", present "a male character favorably and a female unfavorably". According to Rena Sanderson, early Hemingway critics lauded his male-centric world of masculine pursuits, and the fiction divided women into "castrators or love-slaves". Feminist critics attacked Hemingway as "public enemy number one", although more recent re-evaluations of his work "have given new visibility to Hemingway's female characters (and their strengths) and have revealed his own sensitivity to gender issues, thus casting doubts on the old assumption that his writings were one-sidedly masculine." Nina Baym believes that Brett Ashley and Margot Macomber "are the two outstanding examples of Hemingway's 'bitch women.'"

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

The theme of women and death is evident in stories as early as " Indian Camp". The theme of death permeates Hemingway's work. Young believes the emphasis in "Indian Camp" was not so much on the woman who gives birth or the father who kills himself, but on Nick Adams who witnesses these events as a child, and becomes a "badly scarred and nervous young man". Hemingway sets the events in "Indian Camp" that shape the Adams persona. Young believes "Indian Camp" holds the "master key" to "what its author was up to for some thirty-five years of his writing career". Stoltzfus considers Hemingway's work to be more complex with a representation of the truth inherent in existentialism: if "nothingness" is embraced, then redemption is achieved at the moment of death. Those who face death with dignity and courage live an authentic life. Francis Macomber dies happy because the last hours of his life are authentic; the bullfighter in the corrida represents the pinnacle of a life lived with authenticity. In his paper The Uses of Authenticity: Hemingway and the Literary Field, Timo Müller writes that Hemingway's fiction is successful because the characters live an "authentic life", and the "soldiers, fishers, boxers and backwoodsmen are among the archetypes of authenticity in modern literature".

The theme of emasculation is prevalent in Hemingway's work, notably in God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen and The Sun Also Rises. Emasculation, according to Fiedler, is a result of a generation of wounded soldiers; and of a generation in which women such as Brett gained emancipation. This also applies to the minor character, Frances Clyne, Cohn's girlfriend in the beginning of The Sun Also Rises. Her character supports the theme not only because the idea was presented early on in the novel but also the impact she had on Cohn in the start of the book while only appearing a small number of times. In God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen, the emasculation is literal, and related to religious guilt. Baker believes Hemingway's work emphasizes the "natural" versus the "unnatural". In " An Alpine Idyll" the "unnaturalness" of skiing in the high country late spring snow is juxtaposed against the "unnaturalness" of the peasant who allowed his wife's dead body to linger too long in the shed during the winter. The skiers and peasant retreat to the valley to the "natural" spring for redemption.

Descriptions of food and drink feature prominently in many of Hemingway's works. In the short story " Big Two-Hearted River" Hemingway describes a hungry Nick Adams cooking a can of pork and beans and a can of spaghetti over a fire in a heavy cast iron pot. The primitive act of preparing the meal in solitude is a restorative act and one of Hemingway's narratives of post-war integration.

Susan Beegel reports that Charles Stetler and Gerald Locklin read Hemingway's The Mother of a Queen as both misogynistic and homophobic, and Ernest Fontana thought that a "horror of homosexuality" drove the short story " A Pursuit Race". Beegel found that "despite the academy's growing interest in multiculturalism ... during the 1980s ... critics interested in multiculturalism tended to ignore the author as 'politically incorrect.'", listing just two "apologetic articles on [his] handling of race". Barry Gross, comparing Jewish characters in literature of the period, commented that "Hemingway never lets the reader forget that Cohn is a Jew, not an unattractive character who happens to be a Jew but a character who is unattractive because he is a Jew."

Influence and legacy

A life-sized statue of Hemingway by José Villa Soberón at El Floridita, a bar in Havana

Hemingway's legacy to American literature is his style: writers who came after him either emulated or avoided it. After his reputation was established with the publication of The Sun Also Rises, he became the spokesperson for the post-World War I generation, having established a style to follow. His books were burned in Berlin in 1933, "as being a monument of modern decadence", and disavowed by his parents as "filth". Reynolds asserts the legacy is that "[Hemingway] left stories and novels so starkly moving that some have become part of our cultural heritage."

Benson believes the details of Hemingway's life have become a "prime vehicle for exploitation", resulting in a Hemingway industry. Hemingway scholar Hallengren believes the "hard-boiled style" and the machismo must be separated from the author himself. Benson agrees, describing him as introverted and private as J. D. Salinger, although Hemingway masked his nature with braggadocio. During World War II, Salinger met and corresponded with Hemingway, whom he acknowledged as an influence. In a letter to Hemingway, Salinger claimed their talks "had given him his only hopeful minutes of the entire war" and jokingly "named himself national chairman of the Hemingway Fan Clubs".

The extent of his influence is seen from the enduring and varied tributes to Hemingway and his works. 3656 Hemingway, a minor planet discovered in 1978 by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Chernykh, was named for Hemingway, and in 2009, a crater on Mercury was also named in his honor. The Kilimanjaro Device by Ray Bradbury featured Hemingway being transported to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, while the 1993 motion picture Wrestling Ernest Hemingway explored the friendship of two retired men, played by Robert Duvall and Richard Harris, in a seaside Florida town. His influence is further evident from the many restaurants bearing his name and the proliferation of bars called "Harry's", a nod to the bar in Across the River and Into the Trees. Hemingway's son Jack (Bumby) promoted a line of furniture honoring his father, Montblanc created a Hemingway fountain pen, and multiple lines of clothing inspired by Hemingway have been produced. In 1977, the International Imitation Hemingway Competition was created to acknowledge his distinct style and the comical efforts of amateur authors to imitate him; entrants are encouraged to submit one "really good page of really bad Hemingway" and the winners are flown to Harry's Bar in Italy.

Mary Hemingway established the Hemingway Foundation in 1965, and in the 1970s she donated her husband's papers to the John F. Kennedy Library. In 1980, a group of Hemingway scholars gathered to assess the donated papers, subsequently forming the Hemingway Society, "committed to supporting and fostering Hemingway scholarship", publishing The Hemingway Review. Numerous awards have been established in Hemingway's honor to recognize significant achievement in the arts and culture, including the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and the Hemingway Award.

In 2012, he was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.

Almost exactly 35 years after Hemingway's death, on July 1, 1996, his granddaughter Margaux Hemingway died in Santa Monica, California. Margaux was a supermodel and actress, co-starring with her younger sister Mariel in the 1976 movie . Her death was later ruled a death by suicide.

Three houses associated with Hemingway are listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places: the Ernest Hemingway Cottage on Walloon Lake, Michigan, designated in 1968; the Ernest Hemingway House in Key West, designated in 1968; and the Ernest and Mary Hemingway House in Ketchum, designated in 2015. Hemingway's childhood home in Oak Park and his Havana residence were also converted into museums.

On April 5, 2021, , a three-episode, six-hour documentary, a recapitulation of Hemingway's life, labors, and loves, debuted on PBS. It was co-produced and directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.

Selected works

The following is the list of books that Ernest Hemingway completed during his lifetime. While much of his work was published posthumously, they were finished without his supervision, unlike the works listed below.

References

1. ^ thestar.com. "The Hemingway Papers / How Hemingway came of age at the Toronto Star". The Hemingway Papers / How Hemingway came of age at the Toronto Star.

2. ^ "Star style and rules for writing". The Kansas City Star. June 26, 1999. Archived from the original on April 8, 2014. Below are excerpts from The Kansas City Star stylebook that Ernest Hemingway once credited with containing "the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing."

3. ^ Voss, Frederick; Reynolds, Michael; Reynolds, Michael S.; Institution), National Portrait Gallery (Smithsonian; D.C.), National portrait gallery (Washington (January 1, 1999). Picturing Hemingway: A Writer in His Time. Yale University Press. pp. 14-15. ISBN 978-0-300-07926-5.

4. ^ Harrington, Mary (December 28, 1946). "They Call Him Papa". New York Post Week-End Magazine. p. 3.

5. ^ Bruccoli, Matthew Joseph, ed. (1986). Conversations with Ernest Hemingway. Literary conversations series. Univ. Press of Mississippi. pp. 42-45. ISBN 978-0-87805-273-8. ISSN 1555-7065.

6. ^ Richardson, Hadley (n.d.). "How Hemingway became Papa" (MP3) (Audio segment (4 m 37s) from interview). Interviewed by Alice Hunt Sokoloff. Archived from the original on April 18, 2016.

7. She would undergo ^ sex reassignment surgery in the mid-1990s and took the name Gloria Hemingway. See "Hemingway legacy feud 'resolved'" Archived May 4, 2012, at the Wayback Machine. BBC News. October 3, 2003. Retrieved April 26, 2011.

8. ^ Thomas, Hugh (2012). The Spanish Civil War (50th Anniversary ed.). London: Penguin Books. p. 678. ISBN 978-0-141-01161-5.

9. ^ "Ernest Hemingway The Nobel Prize in Literature 1954 Banquet Speech". The Nobel Foundation. Archived from the original on August 2, 2018.

10. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Literature 1954". The Nobel Foundation. Archived from the original on December 26, 2018.

11. ^ Monk, Donald (1978). "Hemingway's Territirual Imperative". The Yearbook of English Studies. 8: 125-140 https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3506769.pdf. doi:10.2307/3506769. JSTOR 3506769.

12. ^ Stetler, Charles; Locklin, Gerald (1982). "Beneath the Tip of the Iceberg in Hemingway's 'The Mother of a Queen'". The Hemingway Review. 2.1 (Fall 1982): 68-69.

13. ^ Fontana, Ernest (1984). "Hemingway's 'A Pursuit Race'". Explicator. 42.4 (Summer 1984) (4): 43-45. doi:10.1080/00144940.1984.11483804.

14. Hallengren, Anders. "A Case of Identity: Ernest Hemingway". NobelPrize.org.

15. Schmadel, Lutz D. (2003) ^ Dictionary of Minor Planet Names. New York: Springer Verlag. ISBN 978-3-540-00238-3, 307

16. ^ "Finca Vigía Foundation | Preserving Ernest Hemingway's Legacy in Cuba". Archived from the original on June 12, 2021.

Bibliography

Banks, Russell. (2004). "PEN/Hemingway Prize Speech". The Hemingway Review. Volume 24, issue 1. 53-60

Benson, Jackson. (1989). "Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life". American Literature. Volume 61, issue 3. 354-358

Desnoyers, Megan Floyd. "Ernest Hemingway: A Storyteller's Legacy" Archived August 23, 2016, at the Wayback Machine. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Online Resources. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. Retrieved November 30, 2011.

Gladstein, Mimi. (2006). "Bilingual Wordplay: Variations on a Theme by Hemingway and Steinbeck" The Hemingway Review Volume 26, issue 1. 81-95.

Herlihy-Mera, Jeffrey. (2017). "Cuba in Hemingway" The Hemingway Review Volume 36, Number 2. 8-41.

Long, Ray - editor. (1932). "Why Editors Go Wrong: 'Fifty Grand' by Ernest Hemingway", 20 Best Stories in Ray Long's 20 Years as an Editor. New York: Crown Publishers. 1-3

Meyers, Jeffrey. (1985). Hemingway: A Biography. New York: Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-333-42126-0

Miller, Linda Patterson. (2006). "From the African Book to Under Kilimanjaro". The Hemingway Review, Volume 25, issue 2. 78-81

Müller, Timo. (2010). "The Uses of Authenticity: Hemingway and the Literary Field, 1926-1936". Journal of Modern Literature. Volume 33, issue 1. 28-42

Nagel, James. (1996). "Brett and the Other Women in The Sun Also Rises", in Donaldson, Scott (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-45574-9

Robinson, Daniel. (2005). "My True Occupation is That of a Writer: Hemingway's Passport Correspondence". The Hemingway Review. Volume 24, issue 2. 87-93

Trogdon, Robert W. "Forms of Combat: Hemingway, the Critics and Green Hills of Africa". The Hemingway Review. Volume 15, issue 2. 1-14

Stoltzfus, Ben. (2005). "Sartre, "Nada," and Hemingway's African Stories". Comparative Literature Studies. Volume 42, issue 3. 205-228

Trodd, Zoe. (2007). "Hemingway's Camera Eye: The Problems of Language and an Interwar Politics of Form". The Hemingway Review. Volume 26, issue 2. 7-21

Wells, Elizabeth J. (1975). "A Statistical Analysis of the Prose Style of Ernest Hemingway: Big Two-Hearted River", in Benson, Jackson (ed.), The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Critical Essays. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-0320-6

External links

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Ernest Miller Hemingway (; July 21, 1899 - July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. His economical and understated style-which included his iceberg theory-had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his adventurous lifestyle and public image brought him admiration from later generations.

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Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American writer, whose works illustrate the Jazz Age. While he achieved limited success in his lifetime, he is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century

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F. Scott Fitzgerald - Quotes, Books & Facts

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American short-story writer and novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald is known for his turbulent personal life and his famous novel ‘The Great Gatsby.’

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George Herman "Babe" Ruth Jr. was an American professional baseball player whose career in Major League Baseball spanned 22 seasons, from 1914 through 1935.

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NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Former Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert, longtime umpire Hank O'Day and barehanded catcher Deacon White have been elected to the baseball Hall of Fame for their excellence through the first half of the 20th century.

The trio was picked by the Hall's pre-integration committee. The announcement was made Monday at the winter meetings.

Induction ceremonies will be held July 28.

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Jacob Ruppert, former Yankees owner, elected to baseball Hall of Fame

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NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Former Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert, longtime umpire Hank O'Day and barehanded catcher Deacon White have been elected to the baseball Hall of Fame for their excellence through the first half of the 20th century. The trio was picked by the Hall's pre-integration committee.

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Charles Augustus Lindbergh, nicknamed Lucky Lindy, The Lone Eagle, and Slim, was an American aviator, military officer, author, inventor, explorer, and environmental activist. He was also the first to fly non stop from new york to paris.

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On May 20, 1927, 25-year-old pilot Charles Lindbergh strapped into his famous airplane, "The Spirit of St. Louis," and took off on the first ever non-stop flight from New York to Paris. The 33.5-hour crossing vaulted Lindbergh to international stardom, but he was later visited by tragedy in 1932, when his 20-month-old son was kidnapped and murdered in what was dubbed "the Crime of the Century." Below, learn 10 surprising facts about the heroic and controversial life of the aviator known as "The Lone Eagle."

His father was a U.S. Congressman.

When Lindbergh was four years old, Minnesota's Sixth Congressional District elected his father, Charles August Lindbergh, to the U.S. House of Representatives. The elder Lindbergh would serve five terms in Congress, where he won a reputation for his independent stances and fierce opposition to the Federal Reserve System. Congressman Lindbergh was among the few members of the House to speak out against U.S. involvement in World War I, and was later censored and accused of sedition after writing an anti-war pamphlet called "Why is Your Country at War?"

He worked as a daredevil and stunt pilot.

After learning to fly at the Nebraska Aircraft Corporation in Lincoln, Lindbergh spent two years years as an itinerant stuntman and aerial daredevil. During "barnstorming" excursions through the American heartland, the young aviator wowed audiences with daring displays of wing-walking, parachuting and mid-air plane changes. After purchasing his own plane, he became one of the nation's top stunt pilots, often twisting his machine into complicated loops and spins or killing the engine at 3,000 feet and gliding to ground. Despite the hazardous nature of stunt flying, "Lucky Lindy's" closest brushes with death would come during his time as a U.S. Army flier, test pilot and airmail pilot, when he survived a record four plane crashes by bailing out and parachuting to safety.

He wasn't the first person to make a transatlantic crossing in an airplane.

In the years before Charles Lindbergh's New York to Paris flight, dozens of other pioneering aviators completed airborne crossings of the Atlantic. Most made the journey in multiple stages or used lighter-than-air dirigibles, but in 1919, British pilots John Alcock and Arthur Brown famously flew nonstop from Newfoundland to Ireland in a Vickers Vimy biplane before crash landing in a bog. Lindbergh's major achievement was not that he was the first person to cross the Atlantic by airplane, but rather that he did it alone and between two major international cities.

He experienced hallucinations and saw mirages during his famous flight.

Along with the perils of navigating the foggy Atlantic, Lindbergh's biggest challenge during his transatlantic flight was simply staying awake. Between his pre-flight preparations and the 33.5-hour journey itself, he went some 55 hours without sleep. Lindbergh went so far as to buzz the surface of the ocean in the hope that the chilly sea spray would help keep him awake, but 24 hours into the journey, he became delirious from lack of rest. He later wrote of mirage-like "fog islands" forming in the sea below, and of seeing "vaguely outlined forms, transparent, moving, riding weightless with me in the plane." Lindbergh even claimed the apparitions spoke to him and offered words of wisdom for his journey. The hallucinations eventually faded, and only a few hours later, the exhausted aviator landed in Paris to a crowd of more than 150,000 jubilant spectators.

He achieved several more "firsts" in aviation.

Lindbergh's transcontinental crossing made him one of the most famous men in the world. He received millions of letters from adoring fans, rode in more than a thousand miles of parades and was even given the Medal of Honor. Still, it wasn't long before the "The Lone Eagle" took back to the skies on another ambitious journey. In December 1927, he piloted "The Spirit of St. Louis" on a solo, non-stop flight from Washington D.C. to Mexico City as part of a goodwill tour of Latin America. While in Mexico, Lindbergh met Anne Morrow, the daughter of U.S. Ambassador Dwight Morrow, and the two married only a few months later. Anne later became Lindbergh's trusted copilot and radio operator, and the couple made several groundbreaking flights, including a 1931 trip from the United States to Japan and China.

Gangster Al Capone offered to help find Lindbergh's kidnapped baby.

On March 1, 1932, Lindbergh's 20-month-old son, Charles Lindbergh, Jr., was mysteriously kidnapped from his home in New Jersey. The family received thousands of offers of assistance, including one from none other than "Scarface" himself-Al Capone. While waiting to be transferred to prison on charges of tax evasion, Capone released a statement offering the Lindberghs his condolences, saying, "I know how Mrs. Capone and I would feel if our son were kidnapped." The gangster put up a $10,000 reward for information that would lead to the arrest of the perpetrators, and even proposed to use his criminal connections to help find the kidnappers in exchange for his release from jail. Lindbergh didn't accept the offer, but he did work with other underworld figures who claimed they had information on the crime. The search would ultimately end in tragedy in May 1932, when the body of the murdered Lindbergh baby was found only a few miles from the family home.

He played a role in the advent of the space program.

Lindbergh was a famous proponent of early air travel, but he also helped sow the seeds of the space program through his work with Robert Goddard, the so-called "father of modern rocketry." Lindbergh first learned about Goddard's experiments with liquid-fueled rockets in late-1929, and the two soon struck up a lifelong friendship. Convinced that Goddard's work might one day facilitate a trip to the moon, Lindbergh became the physicist's greatest champion and even persuaded philanthropist Daniel Guggenheim to give him $100,000 in funding. Goddard's breakthroughs would later prove invaluable in the development of early missiles and space travel. When Apollo 8 became the first manned space mission to orbit the moon in 1968, Lindbergh sent the astronauts a message saying, "You have turned into reality the dream of Robert Goddard."

He helped invent an early artificial heart.

Lindbergh was known for his hands-on approach to repairing and prepping his aircraft, and he later turned his mechanical wizardry toward biology. Inspired by his sister-in-law Elisabeth's battle with heart disease, he teamed with Nobel Prize-winning French surgeon Alexis Carrel and spent much of the early 1930s working on a method for keeping organs alive outside the body. By 1935, Lindbergh had developed a perfusion pump made of Pyrex glass that was capable of moving air and life-giving fluids through excised organs to keep them working and infection-free. The pump was hailed as a medical breakthrough, and helped pave the way for the development of the first true artificial organs. Lindbergh and Carrel later collaborated on a 1938 book on the subject called "The Culture of Organs."

He was a major opponent of U.S. involvement in WWII.

In the late-1930s and early 1940s, Lindbergh's ironclad reputation took a serious hit for his opposition to World War II and his apparent fascination with Nazi Germany. The aviator had made several trips to Germany in the 1930s to inspect its air force, and returned home convinced that the Luftwaffe was capable of overpowering the rest of Europe. He became one of the most vocal opponents of American involvement in the conflict, and gave dozens of public speeches and radio addresses criticizing President Franklin Roosevelt and Jewish-run newspapers and arguing in favor of isolationism. As the United States edged closer to war, many began to denounce the former hero as an anti-Semite and a traitor. Lindbergh gave up his crusade and tried to win a commission in the military after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but President Roosevelt-who privately called the aviator a Nazi-barred him from serving. Lindbergh later spent time as a test pilot and aviation advisor before travelling to the war's Pacific Theater as an observer. Though officially a civilian, he eventually flew around 50 combat missions and even shot down a Japanese fighter plane.

He was a staunch conservationist.

Lindbergh traveled widely after World War II, and later claimed that his wanderings had made him acutely aware of the toll modern civilization was taking on animal and plant life. Arguing that he would rather have "birds than airplanes," in the 1960s, Lindbergh threw his support behind the World Wildlife Fund and the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. He used his travels to lobby for environmental causes, and fought against the disappearance of dozens of endangered species including blue and humpback whales, tortoises, tamaraws and eagles. Before his death in 1974, he also lived among indigenous tribes in Africa and the Philippines and helped procure land for the formation of Haleakala National Park in Hawaii.

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10 Fascinating Facts About Charles Lindbergh

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On May 20, 1927, 25-year-old pilot Charles Lindbergh strapped into his famous airplane, "The Spirit of St. Louis," and took off on the first ever non-stop flight from New York to Paris. The 33.5-hour crossing vaulted Lindbergh to international stardom, but he was later visited by tragedy in 1932, when his 20-month-old son was kidnapped and murdered in what was dubbed "the Crime of the Century."

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Henry Ford was an American captain of industry and a business magnate, the founder of the Ford Motor Company, and the sponsor of the development of the assembly line technique of mass production.

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Who Was Henry Ford?

Henry Ford was an American automobile manufacturer who created the Model T in 1908 and went on to develop the assembly line mode of production, which revolutionized the automotive industry.

As a result, Ford sold millions of cars and became a world-famous business leader. The company later lost its market dominance but had a lasting impact on other technological development, on labor issues and on U.S. infrastructure. Today, Ford is credited for helping to build America's economy during the nation's vulnerable early years and is considered one of America's leading businessmen.

Early Life and Education

Ford was born on July 30, 1863, on his family's farm in Wayne County, near Dearborn, Michigan.

When Ford was 13 years old, his father gifted him a pocket watch, which the young boy promptly took apart and reassembled. Friends and neighbors were impressed and requested that he fix their timepieces too.

Unsatisfied with farm work, Ford left home at the age of 16 to take an apprenticeship as a machinist at a shipbuilding firm in Detroit. In the years that followed, he would learn to skillfully operate and service steam engines and would also study bookkeeping.

In 1888, Ford married Clara Ala Bryant. The couple had a son, Edsel, in 1893.

Inventions

In 1890, Ford was hired as an engineer for the Detroit Edison Company. In 1893, his natural talents earned him a promotion to chief engineer.

All the while, Ford developed his plans for a horseless carriage. In 1892, Ford built his first gasoline-powered buggy, which had a two-cylinder, four-horsepower engine. In 1896, he constructed his first model car, the Ford Quadricycle.

In the same year, he attended a meeting with Edison executives and found himself presenting his automobile plans to Thomas Edison. The lighting genius encouraged Ford to build a second, better model.

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Ford Motor Company

By 1898, Ford was awarded with his first patent for a carburetor. In 1899, with money raised from investors following the development of a third model car, Ford left Edison Illuminating Company to pursue his car-making business full-time.

After a few trials building cars and companies, Ford established the Ford Motor Company in 1903.

Model T

Ford introduced the Model T, the first car to be affordable for most Americans, in October 1908 and continued its construction until 1927. Also known as the "Tin Lizzie," the car was known for its durability and versatility, quickly making it a huge commercial success.

For several years, Ford Motor Company posted 100 percent gains. Simple to drive and cheap to repair, especially following Ford's invention of the assembly line, nearly half of all cars in America in 1918 were Model T's.

By 1927, Ford and his son Edsel introduced another successful car, the Model A, and the Ford Motor Company grew into an industrial behemoth.

Henry Ford's Assembly Line

In 1913, Ford launched the first moving assembly line for the mass production of the automobile. This new technique decreased the amount of time it took to build a car from 12 hours to two and a half, which in turn lowered the cost of the Model T from $850 in 1908 to $310 by 1926 for a much-improved model.

In 1914, Ford introduced the $5 wage for an eight-hour workday ($110 in 2011), more than double what workers were previously making on average, as a method of keeping the best workers loyal to his company.

More than for his profits, Ford became renowned for his revolutionary vision: the manufacture of an inexpensive automobile made by skilled workers who earn steady wages and enjoyed a five-day, 40-hour work week.

Philosophy and Philanthropy

Ford was an ardent pacifist and opposed World War I, even funding a peace ship to Europe. Later, in 1936, Ford and his family established the Ford Foundation to provide ongoing grants for research, education and development.

In business, Ford offered profit sharing to select employees who stayed with the company for six months and, most important, who conducted their lives in a respectable manner.

At the same time, the company's "Social Department" looked into an employee's drinking, gambling and otherwise uncouth activities to determine eligibility for participation.

Henry Ford, Anti-Semite

Despite Ford's philanthropic leanings, he was a committed anti-Semite. He even went as far as to support a weekly newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, which furthered such views.

Ford published a number of anti-Semitic pamphlets, including a 1921 pamphlet, "The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem." Ford was awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the most important award Nazis gave to foreigners, by Adolf Hitler in 1938.

In 1998, a lawsuit filed in Newark, New Jersey, accused the Ford Motor Company of profiting from the forced labor of thousands of people at one of its truck factories in Cologne, Germany during World War II. The Ford company, in turn, said the factory was under the control of the Nazis, not the American corporate headquarters.

In 2001, Ford Motor Company released a study which found that the company did not profit from the German subsidiary, at the same time promising to donate $4 million to human rights studies focused on slavery and forced labor.

Death

Ford died on April 7, 1947, of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 83, near his Dearborn estate, Fair Lane.

Henry Ford Museum

Ford was an avid collector of Americana, with a particular interest in technological innovations and the lives of ordinary people: farmers, factory workers, shopkeepers and business people. He decided to create a place where their lives and interests could be celebrated.

Opening in 1933, the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, displays the thousands of objects Ford collected and many more-recent additions, such as clocks and watches, an Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, presidential limousines and other exhibits.

Also on display in the expansive outdoor Greenfield Village are operational railroad roundhouses and engines, the Wright Brothers bicycle shop, a replica of Thomas Edison's Menlo Park laboratory and Ford's relocated birthplace.

Ford's vision for the museum was stated as, "When we are through, we shall have reproduced American life as lived; and that, I think, is the best way of preserving at least a part of our history and tradition."

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Henry Ford was an American automobile manufacturer who created the Model T in 1908 and went on to develop the assembly line mode of production, which revolutionized the automotive industry. As a result, Ford sold millions of cars and became a world-famous business leader.

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an automobile with a 2.9-liter, 4-cylinder engine, produced by the Ford Motor Company from 1909 through 1927, considered to be the first motor vehicle successfully mass-produced on an assembly line.

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1926 Ford Model T for Sale on ClassicCars.com - 16 Available

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There are 16 1926 Ford Model Ts for sale today on ClassicCars.com. More listings are added daily. Email alerts available.

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a manufacturing process in which parts are added as the semi-finished assembly moves from workstation to workstation where the parts are added in sequence until the final assembly is produced.

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The Highland Park assembly line, 1913. All images courtesy Ford Motor Company.

When Ford's Highland Park, Michigan, assembly plant opened in 1910, it was a wonder of the industrial age. Initially covering some 60 acres, the plant gave Ford the room it needed to increase production of the Model T, and in time the Highland Park complex would contain everything from a foundry to administrative offices. On October 7, 1913, Highland Park achieved one additional milestone, when Ford installed the plant's moving automotive assembly line.

Assembly lines and even moving assembly lines were not developed by Henry Ford or his staff. The first automotive assembly line is credited to Ransom E. Olds http://evolutionoftheassemblyline.weebly.com/ransom-e-olds.html, who, according to Helen Jones Earley and James R. Walkinshaw in their book Setting the Pace: Oldsmobile's First 100 Years, implemented a system of wheeled carts, fixed stations and repetitive operations to construct the Curved Dash Oldsmobile as early as 1901. In addition, moving "deassembly lines" had been used in the meat packing industry for years, as far back as the 1860s. By moving pig carcasses via a pulley system past waiting butchers, each tasked with processing a specific part of the animal, the time between slaughter and packaging was greatly reduced. Such efficiency did not go unnoticed by other industries, and in April of 1913 a Ford production engineer set up a new type of assembly process for flywheel magnetos, applying the conveyor-style moving assembly line to automotive production.

Mounting engines, 1913.

As a baseline, the conventional process took a single employee 20 minutes to assemble a complete flywheel magneto. The revised process broke assembly into 29 steps, each tasked to a different line worker, who would push the subassembly to the next worker upon completion of his step. Initially, this new procedure cut assembly time to 13 minutes, but fine-tuning soon reduced this even further, to five minutes. Seeing the potential of this process, Ford soon rolled it out to other component areas as well.

On October 7, 1913, production supervisors Peter Martin and Charles Sorensen built a crude final assembly line in the Highland Park plant. Using a rope and a windlass, it pulled a Model T chassis down a 150-foot line, staffed by 140 workers. Grabbing parts from nearby bins, the workers demonstrated the efficiency of the moving assembly line manufacturing process, and the production time per car soon fell from 12 hours and 30 minutes to five hours and 50 minutes. The line was improved with the addition of a powered "endless belt" conveyor system, and made wide enough so that workers on both sides of the car could be accommodated. As Ford's experience with the moving assembly line grew, it was able to shave even more time off the build process, and by 1914 was turning out a Model T in just 93 minutes.

Final assembly, 1914.

As production efficiency increased, Ford lowered prices accordingly. In 1910, the cheapest Model T was the Runabout, which sold for $900, roughly the annual salary of a school teacher. By 1915, a Model T Runabout could be purchased for just $390, representing a 57 percent reduction in price, and the public responded accordingly. By making the automobile accessible to the common man, Ford helped to create a society that revolves around the automobile instead of mass transit, and one that (for many years, anyway) favored suburban living over dwelling in the city core. On the surface, October 7, 1913, is the birthday of the moving automotive assembly line, but in many ways it's also the birthday of the automotive-themed culture that shaped the American landscape in the 20th century.

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Henry Ford's moving automotive assembly line turns 1 | Hemmings Daily

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The Highland Park assembly line, 1913. All images courtesy Ford Motor Company. When Ford's Highland Park, Michigan, assembly plant opened in 1910, it was a wonder of the industrial age. Initially covering some 60 acres, the plant gave Ford the room it needed to increase production of the Model T, and in time the Highland Park complex would contain everything from a foundry to administrative offices.

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travel some distance between one's home and place of work on a regular basis.

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Traffic is backed up during evening rush hour on the I-405 San Diego Freeway on the city's west side near the I-10 interchange. This section of the 405 has been ranked as one of the busiest freeways in the United States

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Women's suffrage is the right of women to vote in elections; a person who advocates the extension of suffrage, particularly to women, is called a suffragist.

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HONOLULU, Hawaii- When it comes to women's rights, one of the most commonly referred to issues is women's suffrage. Societally, the right to vote has often been equated with definitive freedom. While getting the right to vote is a crucial element in the fight for gender equality, there are other issues that also oppress women, such as rape, domestic violence and reproductive rights. Even still, it is important that women are granted a voice during elections so that they can help decide who will influence laws that may limit or advance their rights.

According to Freedom House, an independent organization that researches the overall level of freedom in countries, many nations fall short in regards to gender equality despite women being able to vote. Freedom House ranks countries as, free, partly free or not free, depending on factors such as rates of nondiscrimination, autonomy, security and freedom of each person, economic rights, political rights and social/cultural rights.

While the thought of women not being allowed to vote may seem archaic, it has taken certain countries an exceedingly long time to grant women's suffrage due to conservative and strict governments. The following is a list of the last five countries to grant women's suffrage, or will be the last, and the level of freedom of that country.

In 1994, all women in South Africa were granted the right to vote. This is a unique case, however, because actually white women were given the vote back in 1930. It took South Africa 64 years to grant black women suffrage. South Africa has seen a lot of turmoil and changes over the years, and according to Freedom House, has evolved into a free country.
4. Bahrain
Women were granted the right to vote in 2002. Even still, this country is not considered to be free according to Freedom House. In regards to the evaluation of autonomy, security and freedom of a person, Bahrain received a 2.6 on a scale of one to five. Women's organizations within the country have been working towards achieving more rights in order for women to infiltrate the public and private sector. More assistance is needed, however, in order for women to have full autonomy over their lives, and for the country to be considered free.
3. Qatar
Women were granted the right to vote in 2003. In regards to the rate of autonomy, security and freedom of a person in Qatar, Freedom House has ranked Qatar at 2.3 on the scale of one to five. This country is considered not free, and recent labor rights' violations support this analysis.
2. Kuwait
Women were finally granted the right to vote in 2005. According to Freedom House, this country is considered partly free. Their ranking in regards to autonomy, security and freedom of a citizen in Kuwait is 2.4 on the scale of one to five. Kuwait has a successful economy due to vast amounts of oil, but the majority of the wealth and power remains in the hands of the nation's leaders.
1. Saudi Arabia
There have been indications that women's suffrage in Saudi Arabia may be on the horizon, however, as of now women cannot vote in any elections. During the elections held in 2011, women attempted to register to vote, but were denied the opportunity. Time will tell as to whether or not they will be permitted to vote in upcoming elections, as recently promised. There are other major limitations placed on women in Saudi Arabia, such as not being able to leave the country without permission and not being allowed to obtain a license to drive as well. The ranking of autonomy, security and freedom of a person in Saudi Arabia is quite low, at 1.3 on the scale of one to five. To no surprise, this country is considered not free.

To be thorough, it is important to note the case of Vatican City. Although it is not a country, it is still a place where women are prohibited from voting. In comparing this circumstance with the countries listed above, of which many are under Sharia or Islamic law, we can see a divergence in theological law. While the only real election in Vatican City is for the Pope, only Cardinals (who are men) may vote. Many have argued that since this is based on theocracy, it is not the same, yet some may view it as biased to support a Christian theology even when it limits women's rights, and then reject Islamic theology when it limits women's rights.

While these countries were late to grant women the right to vote, or still have not granted it, the overall fight for freedom persists in all five nations except for South Africa, according to Freedom House. With more intervention by international organizations, such as the United Nations (UN) and nonprofit organizations, women's rights will advance and these countries will work towards achieving the full status of freedom. Women still face other issues that need addressing, but the fight for women's suffrage is a vital movement that recognizes the notion that gender equality is essential for sustainable human progress.

Sources: All Readable, Freedom House, Freedom House, Inter-Parliamentary Union
Photo: Few And Far

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Last 5 Countries to Grant Women's Suffrage - BORGEN

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HONOLULU, Hawaii- When it comes to women's rights, one of the most commonly referred to issues is women's suffrage. Societally, the right to vote has often been equated with definitive freedom. While getting the right to vote is a crucial element in the fight for gender equality, there are other issues that also oppress women, such as rape, domestic violence and reproductive rights.

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Flappers were a generation of young Western women in the 1920s who wore short skirts, bobbed their hair, listened to jazz, smoked, and flaunted their disdain for what was then considered acceptable behavior.

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-Women of the Roaring 20's - The War on Patriarchy -Women's Success Story

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Several key inventions and advances in technology that occurred in the twenties were very important in the role that women everywhere played in their home lives. Electricity became a hugely important thing, especially when applied to ewer invention such as the washing machine, the refrigerator, and the vacuum cleaner made tending to the home a much easier task and left more time available for other things instead.

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It was the idea that all individuals are entitled to freedom and equality. It affected the people of the 1920s affected gender, race, and sexuality during the 1920s.

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Romantic women writers and the question of economic progress | The Leverhulme Trust

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Over the past twenty years there has been increasing interest in the interdisciplinary study of literature and economics. Literary critics have been alert to the staging of economic ideas in works of literature and to the interplay of the print market and aesthetic developments.

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The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual, social, and artistic explosion that took place in Harlem, New York, spanning the 1920s. During the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke.

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The Harlem Renaissance was the development of the Harlem neighborhood in New York City as a black cultural mecca in the early 20th Century and the subsequent social and artistic explosion that resulted. Lasting roughly from the 1910s through the mid-1930s, the period is considered a golden age in African American culture, manifesting in literature, music, stage performance and art.

Great Migration

The northern Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem was meant to be an upper-class white neighborhood in the 1880s, but rapid overdevelopment led to empty buildings and desperate landlords seeking to fill them.

In the early 1900s, a few middle-class black families from another neighborhood known as Black Bohemia moved to Harlem, and other black families followed. Some white residents initially fought to keep African Americans out of the area, but failing that many whites eventually fled.

Outside factors led to a population boom: From 1910 to 1920, African American populations migrated in large numbers from the South to the North, with prominent figures like W.E.B. Du Bois leading what became known as the Great Migration.

In 1915 and 1916, natural disasters in the south put black workers and sharecroppers out of work. Additionally, during and after World War I, immigration to the United States fell, and northern recruiters headed south to entice black workers to their companies.

By 1920, some 300,000 African Americans from the South had moved north, and Harlem was one of the most popular destinations for these families.

Langston Hughes

This considerable population shift resulted in a Black Pride movement with leaders like Du Bois working to ensure that black Americans got the credit they deserved for cultural areas of life. Two of the earliest breakthroughs were in poetry, with Claude McKay's collection Harlem Shadows in 1922 and Jean Toomer's Crane in 1923.

Novelist and du Bois protege Jessi Redmond Fauset's 1924 novel There Is Confusion explored the idea of black Americans finding a cultural identity in a white-dominated Manhattan. Fauset was literary editor of the NAACP magazine The Crisis and developed a magazine for black children with Du Bois.

The debut event of Fauset's novel was engineered for a larger purpose by sociologist Charles Spurgeon Johnson, who was integral in shaping the Harlem literary scene. Johnson used the novel's debut party to organize resources to create Opportunity, the National Urban League magazine he founded and edited, a success that bolstered writers like Langston Hughes.

Hughes was at that party along with other promising black writers and editors, as well as powerful white New York publishing figures. Soon many writers found their work appearing in mainstream magazines like Harper's.

Zora Neale Hurston

Anthropologist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston courted controversy through her involvement with a publication called FIRE!!

Helmed by white author and Harlem writers' patron Carl Van Vechten, the magazine exoticized the lives of Harlem residents. Van Vechten's previous fiction stirred up interest among whites to visit Harlem and take advantage of the cultural and night life there.

Though Van Vechten's work was condemned by older luminaries like DuBois, it was embraced by Hurston, Hughes and others.

Louis Armstrong

The music that percolated in and then boomed out of Harlem in the 1920s was jazz, often played at speakeasies offering illegal liquor. Jazz became a great draw for not only Harlem residents, but outside white audiences also.

Some of the most celebrated names in American music regularly performed in Harlem- Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Fats Waller and Cab Calloway, often accompanied by elaborate floor shows. Tap dancers like John Bubbles and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson were also popular.

Cotton Club

With the groundbreaking new music came a vibrant nightlife. The Savoy opened in 1927, an integrated ballroom with two bandstands that featured continuous jazz and dancing well past midnight, sometimes in the form of battling bands helmed by Fletcher Henderson, Jimmie Lunceford and King Oliver.

While it was fashionable to frequent Harlem nightlife, entrepreneurs realized that some white people wanted to experience black culture without having to socialize with African Americans and created clubs to cater to them.

The most successful of these was the Cotton Club, which featured frequent performances by Ellington and Calloway. Some in the community derided the existence of such clubs, while others believed they were a sign that black culture was moving towards greater acceptance.

Paul Robeson

The cultural boom in Harlem gave black actors opportunities for stage work that had previously been withheld. Traditionally, if black actors appeared onstage, it was in a minstrel show musical and rarely in a serious drama with non-stereotypical roles.

At the center of this stage revolution was the versatile Paul Robeson, an actor, singer, writer, activist, and more. Robeson first moved to Harlem in 1919 while studying law at Columbia University and continually maintained a social presence in the area, where he was considered an inspirational but approachable figure.

Robeson believed that arts and culture were the best paths forward for Black Americans to overcome racism and make advances in a white-dominated culture.

Josephine Baker

Black musical revues were staples in Harlem, and by the mid-1920s had moved south to Broadway, expanding into the white world. One of the earliest of these was Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle's Shuffle Along, which launched the career of Josephine Baker.

White patron Van Vechten helped bring more serious black stage work to Broadway, though largely the work of white authors and considered to fall short of the potential. It wasn't until 1929 that a black-authored play about black lives, Wallace Thurman and William Rapp's Harlem, played Broadway.

Playwright Willis Richardson offered more serious opportunities for black actors with a several one-act plays written in the 1920s, as well as articles in Opportunity magazine outlining his goals. Stock companies like the Krigwa Players and the Harlem Experimental Theater also gave black actors serious roles.

Aaron Douglas

The visual arts were never welcoming to black artists, with art schools, galleries and museums shutting them out. Sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller, a protege of Auguste Rodin, explored African American themes in her work and influenced Du Bois to champion black visual artists.

The most celebrated Harlem Renaissance artist is Aaron Douglas, often called as "the Father of Black American Art," who adapted African techniques to realize paintings and murals, as well as book illustration.

Sculptor Augusta Savage's 1923 bust of Du Bois garnered considerable attention. She followed that up with small, clay portraits of everyday African Americans, and would later be pivotal enlisting black artists into the Federal Art Project, a division of the Work Progress Administration (WPA).

James VanDerZee 's photography captured Harlem daily life, as well as by commissioned portraits in his studio that he worked to fill with optimism and separate philosophically from the horrors of the past.

Harlem Renaissance Ends

The end of Harlem's creative boom began with the stock market crash of 1929 and wavered until Prohibition ended in 1933, which meant white patrons no longer sought out the illegal alcohol in uptown clubs.

By 1935 many pivotal Harlem residents had moved on seeking work, replaced by the continuous flow of refugees from the South, many requiring public assistance.

That same year, a riot broke out following the arrest of a young shoplifter, resulting in three dead, hundreds injured, and millions of dollars in property damage, as well as serving as a marker of the end of the Harlem Renaissance.

SOURCES

Harlem Stomp! A Cultural History of the Harlem Renaissance. Laban Carrick Hill.
The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920-1930. Steven Watson.
The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary For The Era. Bruce Kellner, Editor.

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The Harlem Renaissance was the development of the Harlem neighborhood in New York City as a black cultural mecca in the early 20th Century and the subsequent social and artistic explosion that resulted. Lasting roughly from the 1910s through the mid-1930s, the period is considered a golden age in African American culture, manifesting in literature, music, stage performance and art.

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the movement of 6 million African-Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West that occurred between 1916 and 1970. Until 1910, more than 90 percent of the African-American population lived in the American South.

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This past year has found me reading a variety of books about immigrants. The question of immigration has been a highly charged issue in Congress and it is always good to remember that our ancestors were all immigrants to this Country at some time in the past. Even the American Indians came to this continent from a land bridge in the distant past.

Recently I have been reading the book"The Warmth of other Suns" about the migration of the African American population from the South to many northern cities from the early 1900's to the 1970's. This migration was driven by the desire to have more opportunities in the North than in the South with its Jim Crow laws. While the northern states were not completely welcoming to this migrating population the opportunities to advance economically were far greater in the North.

In reading about the struggles of early Pilgrim settlers to this Country it is hard not to be moved by the harsh conditions they faced. Death was a regular occurrence. Most families experienced the death of some of their children. Food sufficiency was not a given. Starvation and disease were not unknown conditions.
So what motivated people to give up their families and move to a new land? The motivations were many but the common thread was the willingness to take a risk that the new land would provide new opportunities for advancement for themselves and their families. The harsh reality they faced showed just how large a gamble they were taking. Too often this gamble on advancement ended in death and not a better life. Only 53 of the original 132 Pilgrims survived the first winter. At Jamestown in the winter of 1609-1610 only 60 of the 500 settlers survived the "winter of starvation."
No matter when our ancestors came to this Country and migrated to uncharted areas of our Country the risks they took to better themselves and their future generations, including all of us today, is what I am thankful for this Thanksgiving. Hopefully this also impacts our views on those still taking risks today to obtain citizenship in our Country.
I came across this description written by a Pilgrim in a letter sent to his family back in England. It came from the website of heNational Center for Public Policy Research:

" This description of the life of the Pilgrims following the landing of the Mayflower was written as a letter by pilgrim Edward Winslow soon after the landing. During the first winter in New England, Winslow's wife died. Two months later, he married Susannah White, who had been widowed during the same period. White was distinguished as the first white woman to give birth in New England, and Winslow and White's wedding was the first in the region. Winslow, who was elected governor of the colony several times, is best known for negotiating a treaty with the Indian Chief Massasoit."

"Although I received no letter from you by this ship, yet for as much as I know you expect the performance of my promise, which was, to write unto you truly and faithfully of all things, I have therefore at this time sent unto you accordingly, referring you for further satisfaction to our more large relations.
You shall understand that in this little time a few of us have been here, we have built seven dwelling-houses and four for the use of the plantation, and have made preparation for divers others. We set last spring some twenty acres of Indian corn, and sowed some six acres of barley and peas; and according to the manner of the Indians, we manured our ground with herrings, or rather shads, which we have in great abundance, and take with great ease at our doors. Our corn did prove well; and, God be praised, we had a good increase of Indian corn, and our barley indifferent good, but our peas not worth the gathering, for we feared they were too late sown. They came up very well, and blossomed; but the sun parched them in the blossom.
Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might, after a special manner, rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, among other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming among us, and among the rest their greatest king, Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted; and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation, and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God we are so far from want, that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.
We have found the Indians very faithful in their covenant of peace with us, very loving, and ready to pleasure us. We often go to them, and they come to us. Some of us have been fifty miles by land in the country with them, the occasions and relations whereof you shall understand by our general and more full declaration of such things as are worth the noting. Yea, it has pleased God so to possess the Indians with a fear of us and love unto us, that not only the greatest king among them, called Massasoit, but also all the princes and peoples round about us, have either made suit unto us, or been glad of any occasion to make peace with us; so that seven of them at once have sent their messengers to us to that end. Yea, an isle at sea, which we never saw, hath also, together with the former, yielded willingly to be under the protection and subject to our sovereign lord King James. So that there is now great peace amongst the Indians themselves, which was not formerly, neither would have been but for us; and we, for our parts, walk as peaceably and safely in the wood as in the highways in England. We entertain them familiarly in our houses, and they as friendly bestowing their venison on us. They are a people without any religion or knowledge of any God, yet very trusty, quick of apprehension, ripe-witted, just.
For the temper of the air here, it agrees well with that in England; and if there be any difference at all, this is somewhat hotter in summer. Some think it to be colder in winter; but I cannot out of experience so say. The air is very clear, and not foggy, as has been reported. I never in my life remember a more seasonable year than we have here enjoyed; and if we have once but kine, horses, and sheep, I make no question but men might live as contented here as in any part of the world. For fish and fowl, we have great abundance. Fresh cod in the summer is but coarse meat with us. Our bay is full of lobsters all the summer, and affords a variety of other fish. In September we can take a hogshead of eels in a night, with small labor, and can dig them out of their beds all the winter. We have muscles and othus [others?] at our doors. Oysters we have none near, but we can have them brought by the Indians when we will. All the spring-time the earth sends forth naturally very good salad herbs. Here are grapes, white and red, and very sweet and strong also; strawberries, gooseberries, raspberries, etc.; plums of three sorts, white, black, and red, being almost as good as a damson; abundance of roses, white, red and damask; single, but very sweet indeed. The country wants only industrious men to employ; for it would grieve your hearts if, as I, you had seen so many miles together by goodly rivers uninhabited; and withal, to consider those parts of the world wherein you live to be even greatly burdened with abundance of people. These things I thought good to let you understand, being the truth of things as near as I could experimentally take knowledge of, and that you might on our behalf give God thanks, who hath dealt so favorably with us.
Our supply of men from you came the 9th of November, 1621, putting in at Cape Cod, some eight or ten leagues from us. The Indians that dwell thereabout were they who were owners of the corn which we found in caves, for which we have given them full content, and are in great league with them. They sent us word there was a ship near unto them, but thought it to be a Frenchman; and indeed for ourselves we expected not a friend so soon. But when we perceived that she made for our bay, the governor commanded a great piece to be shot off, to call home such as were abroad at work. Whereupon every man, yea boy, that could handle a gun, were ready, with full resolution that, if she were an enemy, we would stand in our just defense, not fearing them. But God provided better for us than we supposed. These came all in health, not any being sick by the way, otherwise than by sea-sickness, and so continue at this time, by the blessing of God. . . .
When it pleased God we are settled and fitted for the fishing business and other trading, I doubt not but by the blessing of God the gain will give content to all. In the meantime, that we have gotten we have sent by this ship; and though it be not much, yet it will witness for us that we have not been idle, considering the smallness of our number all this summer. We hope the merchants will accept of it, and be encouraged to furnish us with things needful for further employment, which will also encourage us to put forth ourselves to the uttermost.
Now because I expect your coming unto us, with other of our friends, whose company we much desire, I thought good to advertise you of a few things needful. Be careful to have a very good bread-room to put your biscuits in. Let your cask for beer and water be iron-bound, for the first tire, if not more. Let not your meat be dry-salted; none can better do it than the sailors. Let your meal be so hard trod in your cask that you shall need an adz or hatchet to work it out with. Trust not too much on us for corn at this time, for by reason of this last company that came, depending wholly upon us, we shall have little enough till harvest. Be careful to come by some of your meal to spend by the way; it will much refresh you. Build your cabins as open as you can, and bring good store of clothes and bedding with you. Bring every man a musket or fowling-piece. Let your piece be long in the barrel, and fear not the weight of it, for most of our shooting is from stands. Bring juice of lemons, and take it fasting; it is of good use. For hot waters, aniseed water is the best; but use it sparingly. If you bring anything for comfort in the country, butter or salad oil, or both, is very good. Our Indian corn, even the coarsest, makes as pleasant meat as rice; therefore spare that, unless to spend by the way. Bring paper and linseed oil for your windows, with cotton yarn for your lamps. Let your shot be most for big fowls, and bring store of powder and shot. I forbear further to write for the present, hoping to see you by the next return. So I take my leave, commending you to the Lord for a safe conduct unto us, resting in him,
Your loving friend,
E. W."
P.S.
A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving anyone ?

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What I am thankful for this Thanksgiving

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This past year has found me reading a variety of books about immigrants. The question of immigration has been a highly charged issue in Congress and it is always good to remember that our ancestors were all immigrants to this Country at some time in the past.

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Black nationalism is a type of nationalism which espouses the belief that black people are a nation and seeks to develop and maintain a black identity.

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Integration doesn't guarantee equality or freedom.

Nation of Islam counter-demonstration at NAACP rally in Harlem, 1961 / Photograph: NAACP collection, Library of Congress

In a world where Donald Trump's presidential nomination speech has been endorsed by a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan-yet Black Lives Matter activists are accused of reverse racism for asking to not be murdered by police-what constitutes hate speech has become increasingly convoluted. In the aftermath of police killings in Dallas and Baton Rouge, gunmen Micah Johnson and Gavin Long were immediately linked by media outlets to black nationalist groups such as the Nation of Islam (NOI), New Black Panther Party, Black Riders Liberation Party, and Washitaw Nation, despite their professions to have been acting alone. Not only did these depictions draw misleading lines to organizations that do not prescribe such acts of violence, they also overshadowed both mens' backgrounds in cultures of military violence (Johnson joined the Army Reserves immediately after high school and Long was a former Marine sergeant).

In a desperate attempt to drive home a link to black nationalism and direct attention away from these other troubling vectors, some news outlets began referring to Johnson as "Micah X" (NOI members use "X" to replace their "slave names"). In fact his middle name was simply Xavier. Even progressive groups, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, play a legitimating role by identifying black nationalist groups as "black separatist hate groups," leaving little room for meaningful distinctions between white supremacy and black nationalism. While groups such as the Nation of Islam have historically advocated for the separation of black communities, to assert that this position is simply the obverse of white supremacy-that is, black supremacy-overlooks the nuance of black nationalism. More importantly, it fails to account for the dramatically different relationships to power that black nationalist and white supremacist groups possess. White nationalism reinscribes and exalts the privileges of whiteness. Black nationalists council separation as an anti-racist practice and a method of empowerment in the absence of alternative avenues of power. To many black nationalists, this is the difference between life and death: the black community must either do for itself or perish.

The conflation of black and white nationalism is not new. In 1963 the New York Herald Tribune satirized what it perceived as the ironic similarities between white supremacists and black nationalists in a story entitled "Integrated Segregation." Things "seem a trifle confused on the racial front these days. The segregationists are getting integrated and the integrationists are getting segregated," the Tribune remarked. The article imagined a scene in which staunch segregationist George Wallace was explaining why racial segregation benefitted black Americans when "a Black Muslim popped up from behind, tapped him on the back and agreed with him." Soon, the article predicted, the Congress for Racial Equality would "start picketing the N.A.A.C.P., while the Black Muslims set up an all-Negro chapter of the Ku Klux Klan."

To many black nationalists, separation from whites is the difference between life and death: the black community must either do for itself or perish.

Understanding black nationalism as simply the mirror image of white supremacy, rather than an anti-racist practice, has deep roots in American political discourse. And in our current moment of colorblind "post-racialism," when race-specific remedies such as affirmative action or reparations are derided as reverse racism-and even modest demands from Black Lives Matter for criminal justice reform are decried as anti-white-black nationalism has been once again mischaracterized using a host of long-stale tropes. We would be better served, not by simply dismissing black nationalism as the underbelly of white supremacy, but by understanding it as a tradition that is both liberative and anti-racist; one that does not mirror white supremacy, but repudiates it.
* * *
W. D. Fard, the founder of the Nation of Islam, arrived in Detroit in 1930 and told black Detroiters that they "were not Americans but Asiatics." This was part of a holistic alternative creation story that rejected the racist underpinnings of white American nationalism. Many of Fard's followers were former followers of Marcus Garvey, left without an organization after the decline of his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the late 1920s due to financial mismanagement and government infiltration. Garvey and the UNIA epitomized the goals of black nationalism, launching the most ambitious and successful Pan-Africanist vision in history. At its height, the UNIA had over 700 branches in 38 states, and its newspaper, Negro World, circulated throughout the African diaspora. Millions of black people were moved by Garvey's message of racial pride embodied through the UNIA motto "One God! One Aim! One Destiny!" The NOI borrowed many of its black nationalist tenets from the UNIA, combining them with religious symbols, practices, and theologies drawn from the plethora of new northern, black, urban religious and racial-pride movements spawned by the Great Migration. This blending spoke to the diverse backgrounds of many early NOI members: in 1951 nineteen out of twenty-eight Muslims interviewed reported having previously been members in other movements such as black Masonry, the Israelite Movement, God's Government on the Earth (dedicated to Liberian emigration), the Peace Movement of Ethiopia, Repatriation Movement to Liberia, and the Black Jews.

As historian Robin D. G. Kelley notes, many of these movements were influenced by a Black Zionist tradition that drew upon the narrative of the book of Exodus to imagine liberation and deliverance for black people around the world. These freedom dreams not only provided what he calls a "narrative of slavery, emancipation, and renewal," but also a "language to critique America's racist state since the biblical Israel represented a new beginning." Beyond providing a framework for denouncing American racism, black nationalists addressed the racist power structures that governed their communities by creating jobs, businesses, schools, and places of worship. Racial separation was not simply about black communities' physical relationship to white people; it was about changing the structures of power that governed those relationships through self-determination, community control, and new relationships to self and one another.

By 1959 the Nation of Islam was a burgeoning movement well known within urban black communities in the North but still largely unknown to white America. That summer, as Malcolm X traveled to Africa as a guest of Egypt's president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Mike Wallace (later of 60 Minutes fame) and black journalist Louis Lomax presented the NOI to white audiences for the first time. In their sensationalist documentary, The Hate That Hate Produced, NOI was compared to the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan. Members of the Nation were referred to as "black racists" and "black supremacists." Its cautionary message to a largely white audience was that white racism would inevitably produce its black variant. As Malcolm X later recalled in his Autobiography, the show was meant to shock viewers, like when "Orson Welles frightened America with a radio program describing . . . an invasion by 'men from Mars.'"

The Hate That Hate Produced was critical in launching the Nation of Islam into the public eye. But it also offered white viewers a language for understanding black nationalism that both intensified and allayed their fears. While racism was a plague that undermined American democracy, it was not a distinctly white characteristic. As Charlie Keil, a young white civil rights organizer at Yale during the early 1960s explained to me recently: " The Hate that Hate Produced allowed [whites] to sort of categorize the Muslims-the Nation of Islam-and treat them a certain way. . . . [It was] some way of saying that this was not an autonomous self-starting movement, but a reaction, an overreaction to a history of oppression."

Throughout the 1960s black nationalists were castigated as "supremacists" who promoted the very racism and racial segregation that liberals were fighting against. This was stoked by white nationalists who saw calls for black racial separation as consistent with their belief in the benefits of racial segregation. As George Lincoln Rockwell, head of the American Nazi Party, told Alex Haley in a 1966 interview: "Malcolm X said the same thing I'm saying."

Rockwell was not the only one confused about the difference between racial segregation and racial separation. In a highly-publicized Los Angeles trial in 1962 after police killed an unarmed member of the Los Angeles NOI mosque, the Los Angeles Times reported the "unusual problem in seating of spectators . . . when women members of the sect refused to accept seats alongside white persons." The court eventually overturned this seating arrangement, and the press described this as "desegregation." Los Angeles NAACP president Christopher Taylor joined the chorus of the aggrieved by arguing that he would be against any type of segregation, regardless of who initiated it. This decontextualized, colorblind insistence that any race demanding separation was calling for racial segregation was central to mischaracterizations of black nationalism during this period.

Malcolm X set about clarifying the Nation of Islam's advocacy for racial separatism through dozens of debates with prominent civil rights figures on college campuses across the country in the early 1960s. He debated James Farmer at Cornell, Bayard Rustin at Howard, Louis Lomax at Yale, and the NAACP's Walter Carrington at Harvard. Almost every debate was themed around the question: "Integration or Separation?" As Malcolm explained at Wesleyan University: "We are just as much against segregation as the most staunch integrationist." But he added that black people did not "want to be free any more; they want integration. . . . They have confused their method with their objective." In other words, black nationalists were not opposed to racial integration as an outcome of freedom struggles, or even as an organizing strategy, but they saw it as deeply flawed as the movement's principal objective. More importantly, they pointed out the racist presumption of integration, which took for granted that white society and its values were more desirable. As Malcolm once sardonically asked, Who is the white man to be equal to?

More than simply critiquing integration, the Nation of Islam emphasized the importance of community control, an idea that flourished in upcoming years with the emergence of the Black Power movement. As Malcolm explained: "segregation means to regulate or control. . . . A segregated community is that forced upon inferiors by superiors. A separate community is done voluntarily by two equals." Recognizing the pervasiveness of racial segregation, nationalists sought control over the businesses, healthcare, education, housing, and policing in their communities. Indeed, the Kerner Commission's grim 1968 assessment that the nation was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white-separate and unequal" was something understood within black communities for decades. Amidst this backdrop, nationalists called for greater autonomy. The distinction between segregation and separation was not a semantic pivot. It was a deeper analysis of power, and an assertion of self-determination.

Over sixty years since the Supreme Court struck down the constitutionality of "separate but equal" in Brown v. Board, it would seem that calls for racial separatism are a relic of the past. But that might be too hopeful. A 2014 UCLA study revealed higher levels of school segregation in many regions than in 1968, the year the Supreme Court decreed a more proactive approach to desegregation. Schools with less than 1 percent white students are now being referred to as "apartheid schools." And while the South is no longer governed by Jim Crow laws, cities outside the South such as Chicago and Baltimore continue to be described by demographers as "hypersegregated."

The denial of race is a fixture of racism. Black nationalists have often exposed the "colorblind," coded racism of liberals.

Black critiques of school integration during the 1950s and 1960s were often decried. In the words of scholar Andrew Delbanco, novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston "consigned herself to oblivion" when she responded to the Brown v. Board decision by saying that she could "see no tragedy in being too dark to be invited to a white school affair." After James Meredith enrolled as the first black student in the University of Mississippi's history, Malcolm X told a courtroom that anytime a man "needs [an] escort of 15,000 troops to go to a college where he will be among people whose viciousness toward him is so deadly that he needs the Army there to protect him . . . that Negro is foolish if he thinks that he is going to get an education." Education, not integration, should be the goal, both Hurston and Malcolm agreed. As Malcolm explained, "token integration" was pointless as long as there were "a couple million Negroes in Mississippi who haven't been allowed to go to the Kindergarten in a decent school."

Meanwhile, integration today is often illustrated through the exceptional accomplishments of a handful of black elites, most notably President Barack Obama, rather than evidenced by a substantial redistribution of wealth or educational and housing opportunities. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor demonstrates, the role of "black faces in high places" is often to obscure the common conditions facing many African Americans. Instead, black elected officials serve as interlocutors speaking to-and on behalf of-black communities. Taylor writes poignantly of the 2015 Baltimore uprising after the death of Freddie Gray: "When a Black mayor, governing a largely Black city, aids in the mobilization of a military unit led by a Black woman to suppress a Black rebellion, we are in a new period of the Black freedom struggle." But this new period has unfortunately produced all-too-familiar outcomes for poor and working-class black people.
* * *
The long history of black nationalist leaders having official meetings with white supremacist leaders is another narrative often mobilized as proof of the essential symmetry of the two movements. In 1922 Marcus Garvey met with the Imperial Wizard of the Klan, Edward Clarke, earning him swift denunciation by the NAACP. In 1961 Malcolm X and other NOI officials secretly met with the KKK in Atlanta to negotiate a non-aggression pact surrounding the NOI's purchase of southern farmland. The following year American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell even appeared as an invited guest at the NOI's Saviour's Day convention in Chicago. When police in Monroe, Louisiana, illegally targeted and raided the city's mosque with tear gas, rifles, and riot sticks, the Nation of Islam secured an interracial defense team: local black attorney James Sharpe, Jr., and Imperial Wizard of the National Knights of the Klan, James Venable. As Venable explained when taking the case, "I hate to say it but a colored man doesn't have a chance in a courtroom in the South."

The decision by black nationalists to meet or coordinate with white supremacists was often driven by a combination of pragmatism and a deep cynicism about the authenticity of liberals. In the case of the UNIA, Garvey negotiated an agreement with Clarke to sell stock in black businesses such as newspapers, factories, and his Black Star shipping line, which ambitiously hoped to link a global black economy in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas before failing due to poor business management. And although Malcolm X would later denounce the Nation of Islam's détente with the Klan, the organization's motivation for doing so was plainly and only to secure the right to farm in the South without danger of violent reprisal. And in the case against eight members of the NOI in Monroe, Venable successfully won an appeal for several of those convicted.

Black nationalists were also not uncritical of the white supremacists with whom they interacted, a fact often downplayed or forgotten. After his meeting with the Klan, Garvey told a crowd: "Mr. Clark [sic] did not tell me anything new; he told me what I discovered seven years ago. He told me the thing that caused me to have organized the Universal Negro Improvement Association four and a half years ago." When Rockwell, wearing full Nazi regalia, donated twenty dollars to a collection plate at Saviour's Day, there was a smattering of reluctant applause. Malcolm X belittled him by adding: "You got the biggest hand you ever got." Equally, black nationalists used white supremacists to draw attention to the hypocrisy of liberals. Following his 1922 meeting, Garvey claimed that Klan members were "better friends to my race, for telling us who they are, and what they mean." Malcolm used a similar device in his folk metaphor of the liberal "fox" and the conservative "wolf." When comparing John F. Kennedy to George Wallace, Malcolm said: "Neither one loves you. The only difference is that the fox will eat you with a smile instead of a scowl." He even penned a 1964 editorial entitled "Why I Am for Goldwater" in which he drew upon the same fox/wolf metaphor and cynically suggested that with Goldwater, "black people at least know what they are dealing with."

Critics on the left who see these as misguided political strategies have marginalized black nationalists by painting them as racial conservatives, and thereby emptied black nationalists' critiques of their incisiveness. For example, Paul Gilroy accuses Garvey of "black fascism" and C. L. R. James even compared him to Hitler. Others have taken Malcolm's cynical support for Goldwater at face value, rather than understanding his rhetorical move to draw parallels between openly racist politicians and ostensibly liberal ones whose policies nonetheless gut the black community.

Black nationalist groups such as the UNIA and the NOI have rightly been critiqued for their deep patriarchy, homophobia, and tendency to reproduce the other trappings of empire. As historian Michelle Ann Stephens notes of Garvey, his "vision of the sovereign state figured in the black male sovereign; the desire for home at a more affective level figured in the woman of color." Likewise, anti-Semitic comments by Nation of Islam leaders such as Louis Farrakhan have certainly buttressed comparisons between white and black nationalists. Most recently, Farrakhan stoked this fire by praising Donald Trump's refusal to take money from Jewish donors.

But although charismatic leaders are often the voices we hear most prominently, for many rank-and-file members of the Nation of Islam and other black nationalist groups, the lived experience of racial pride, religious rebirth, and doing for oneself is a redemptive, affirming, and even lifesaving practice. Many members joined the NOI after feeling alienated in integrated, more middle-class organizations such as the NAACP. As Lindsey X told an interviewer, what the NAACP "wanted never seemed real to me. I think Negroes should create jobs for themselves rather than going begging for them." Malcolm X's autobiography is only the best-known narrative of religious and political redemption. In a long-running feature in the NOI's newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, entitled "What Islam Has Done For Me," members offered their conversion narratives and testified to the transformative practice of Islam. Robert 24X of Paterson, New Jersey, contributed: "I was a young drug addict who had spent too much time in the hells of Harlem's East Side . . . [before] everything came into focus for me. . . . I stopped smoking, using profanity, and eating improper foods. And I've passed my biggest acid test-no more needles in the arm."

Instead of positioning black nationalism as a reactionary, conservative ideology that simply apes the violence and hate of white supremacy, we might learn from its lessons today. If asked about the xenophobia and dangerous comments of conservative firebrand Donald Trump in our current election, Malcolm X might well have pivoted us back to Hillary Clinton's questionable record on race, one which Black Lives Matter activists have pointed out includes racist dog whistles such as her comments about "super-predators" lacking empathy, her steadfast support for the devastating 1994 Crime Bill, and campaign money taken from private prison corporations. And beyond the hollow political discourse of election cycles, we must avoid the pitfalls of incessant claims of post-racialism that insist that to see race is to participate in rac ism. As we have witnessed with the familiar "All Lives Matter" rejoinder to "Black Lives Matter," we are living in a time when people's humanity is so denigrated that the mere valuation of life is taken by some whites to be a zero-sum game. The denial of race is a central fixture in the perpetuation of racism, and black nationalists have routinely called attention to the importance of racial pride while exposing the coded racism of liberals. Rather than draw facile lines between black nationalism and white supremacy, we are better served by understanding black nationalism as an anti-racist political tradition seeking to envision black American freedom and citizenship in a nation that has rarely devoted much effort toward either end.

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Integration doesn't guarantee equality or freedom. Nation of Islam counter-demonstration at NAACP rally in Harlem, 1961 / Photograph: NAACP collection, Library of Congress In a world where Donald Trump's presidential nomination speech has been endorsed by a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan-yet Black Lives Matter activists are accused of reverse racism for asking to not be murdered by police-what constitutes hate speech has become increasingly convoluted.

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Festus Claudius "Claude" McKay was a Jamaican writer and poet, who was a seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

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Claude McKay was a Jamaican poet best known for his novels and poems, including 'If We Must Die,' which contributed to the Harlem Renaissance. Learn more about his life and career at Biography.com.