On October 29, 1929, the stock market in New York tumbled 12 percent, the third consecutive day of massive losses on Wall Street. The magnitude of the sudden downturn was unprecedented. The crash of 1929 abruptly ended a decade of economic prosperity and caused millions of Americans to lose their savings in the ensuing Great Depression.
Politically, the main casualty of the crash was Herbert Hoover (1874–1964), the Republican president who was quickly overwhelmed by the crisis and drubbed by Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) in the 1932 election.
Prior to the Depression, Hoover enjoyed a reputation as a capable administrator, and even a national hero for his efforts to provide food relief to starving Europeans during World War I (1914–1918). He was nicknamed the “Great Humanitarian” for organizing the wartime United States Food Administration. Prior to his wartime service, he was a successful mining engineer.
Hoover entered politics in the 1920s, serving in the cabinets of both Warren G. Harding (1865–1923) and Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) as secretary of commerce. With the economy roaring, Hoover was the natural choice for the 1928 Republican presidential nomination.
Initially, Hoover hoped the 1929 crash would be a short-term downturn. He authorized a few relief programs and urged state governors to start public works projects to give unemployed workers jobs. But his response to the Depression was far too restrained and did little to solve the massive economic problems afflicting Americans. Soon, bitter critics began referring to slums filled with people who had lost their homes as Hoovervilles, a cruel gibe indeed for the Great Humanitarian.
In the election of 1932, Hoover lost in a landslide, even in his home state of California, and carried only a few states in New England, then a Republican bastion.
After the presidency, though, Hoover did not retreat from public life, instead becoming an elder statesman of the Republican Party. He reprised his role as a food relief organizer after World War II (1939–1945), touring Europe on behalf of President Harry Truman (1884–1972) and suggesting ways to improve the American relief effort.
1. Both Herbert Hoover and his wife, Lou Henry Hoover (1874–1944), spoke Mandarin, a language they learned while Hoover was working as a mining engineer in China in the late 1890s.
2. Hoover was the first president born west of the Mississippi. He was born in West Branch, Iowa.
3. Hoover was a graduate of the first class of Stanford University.
One of the fiercest battles of World War II (1939–1945) took place in 1945 on the tiny island of Iwo Jima, a barren speck of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that housed a strategically important Japanese military base. Combined American and Japanese deaths in the monthlong battle, waged at times in hand-to-hand combat, rose to almost 30,000 troops—6,821 Americans and about 21,000 Japanese—before the Americans finally emerged victorious.
The American amphibious assault on Iwo Jima began February 19, 1945. At that point, the war in Europe was nearly over, as American and Soviet forces poured across the German border and rushed toward Berlin. In the Pacific theater, however, there appeared to be no end in sight.
American military commanders wanted to capture Iwo Jima to knock out a radar installation on the island, which had no civilian residents at the time of the battle, that was helping the Japanese detect American bombers before they reached mainland Japan. As an added benefit, Allied commanders thought, capturing Iwo Jima would give American warplanes an emergency landing strip in case of trouble on their missions.
The Japanese military leaders understood the strategic importance of the island and instructed the Japanese commander on the island, Tadamichi Kuribayashi (1891–1945), to hold the outpost at all costs. His 21,000 men burrowed a maze of caves in the side of the island’s dormant volcano, Mount Suribachi, and waited for the American onslaught they knew was coming. True to their orders, by the end of the battle nearly all of Kuribayashi’s soldiers were dead.
Although the commanders and soldiers at Iwo Jima had no way of knowing it, the American victory there would be one of the last Allied victories of the war. In the summer of 1945, President Harry Truman authorized the use of the atomic bomb against Japan, in part because he feared that an invasion of the Japanese home islands would amount to a thousand Iwo Jimas. The Japanese surrendered on August 14, 1945, and the cinder-strewn island of Iwo Jima remained an American military outpost until it reverted to Japanese control in 1968.
1. Iwo Jima means sulfur island in Japanese.
2. The famous Pulitzer Prize–winning picture of US Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima was taken by Joe Rosenthal, a photographer for the Associated Press.
3. The 2006 movie Letters from Iwo Jima, directed by Clint Eastwood (1930–), was based on letters sent home by Japanese soldiers preparing for the battle.
One of the leading black nationalists in the United States of the twentieth century, Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) rallied thousands of African-Americans behind his plans to launch a mass migration back to Africa. Between 1916, when he first arrived in the United States, and 1927, when he was deported back to Jamaica, the charismatic Garvey created a black pride movement that claimed up to six million followers. Although his plans fizzled, Garvey’s emphasis on racial pride, unity, and self-reliance had a major influence on later black nationalists, including Malcolm X (1925–1965).
Garvey’s political agenda, which he expounded to rapt audiences at Madison Square Garden and Carnegie Hall in the early 1920s, was twofold. In the long term, he hoped to lead an exodus back to Africa, and he opened serious negotiations with the West African nation of Liberia to create a Garveyite colony on the continent. In the short term, Garvey wanted to create strong black-owned businesses in the United States. He founded the United Negro Improvement Association, which was an international self-help organization. His followers financed efforts to create black steamship lines, restaurants, factories, publishers, and grocery stores.
Although many of these businesses were successful, the steamship line, Black Star, failed, and after a subsequent federal investigation, Garvey was imprisoned for mail fraud in 1925. He was deported to Jamaica two years later and never returned to the United States.
With his riveting speeches, Garvey tapped a growing sense of disillusionment among African-Americans in the early twentieth century. After the Civil War (1861–1865), many civil rights advocates had optimistically predicted a quick end to racism. But fifty years later, hatred and discrimination against blacks were as deeply entrenched as ever. To Garvey and his followers, the time for waiting was over—a message that would continue to resonate among black nationalists long after Garvey’s death.
1. Both of Malcolm X’s parents were members of Garvey’s movement, and Garvey’s writings had a deep influence on the Black Muslim leader.
2. Garvey was nearly barred by the FBI from reentering the United States in 1921, but one of his followers bribed a corrupt Harding administration official to give Garvey a visa.
3. Garvey survived an assassination attempt in October 1919 when his secretary—later his wife, Amy Ashwood (1897–1969)—fought off the attacker.
The biggest automaker of the early twentieth century, Henry Ford (1863–1947) made his fortune on the success of the Model T, which first went on sale in 1908.
Ford’s Model T was a milestone of both automotive design and efficient factory organization. The car was built on a moving assembly line, which enabled mass production and greatly increased the output of Ford’s plants. It was sold at modest prices that were affordable to most middle-class Americans. Ford was born in Dearborn, Michigan, and worked as a mechanic before starting the Ford Motor Company with several partners in 1903. Most of his initial factories were located in or near Dearborn, making Michigan the center of the American automotive industry.
In addition to Ford’s use of the assembly line, he was also noted for offering his factory workers a forty-hour workweek, shorter than the norm at that time, and a then-unprecedented daily wage of $5. Paying his workers well, Ford believed, would attract the best mechanics, encourage productivity, and give his employees enough cash to buy a Ford automobile themselves. Admirers dubbed his business philosophy Fordism, and it was influential among industrialists worldwide.
One of the most famous American entrepreneurs of the twentieth century, Ford is also among the most controversial. Despite his professed concern for his workers, Ford steadfastly resisted unions and was the last major Detroit automaker to sign a union contract. Moreover, beginning in World War I (1914–1918), Ford took a series of increasingly bizarre political stances. He said he believed the war had been caused by a sinister coterie of Jewish bankers, and he opposed American involvement. After the war, he became an outspoken anti-Semite and published an American edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. His anti-Semitic writings were admired by Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), whose Nazi government awarded the automaker one of its highest honors. Ford initially opposed World War II (1939–1945), again blaming the conflict on a cabal of Jewish bankers, but later backed the war effort and happily sold military vehicles to the US Army.
1. The Model T was not discontinued until 1927 and during its heyday was the most popular model of car in the United States.
2. Ford was so rabid in his anti-Jewish beliefs that he had 500,000 copies of an anti-Semitic pamphlet printed and sent to Ford dealerships for free distribution to customers.
3. Ford is one of the villains in the 1932 novel Brave New World, by British author Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), which envisions a dystopian future in which Fordism has replaced religion and Ford himself is regarded as a messiah.
An international architectural icon, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco was the longest and tallest suspension bridge in the world when it opened in 1937. The bridge was the first suspension bridge to cross a stretch of ocean, rather than a river or lake; cold, fog, high winds, and rapid ocean currents made construction of the span especially vexing for the bridge’s ambitious engineers. The graceful, orange span is considered both an engineering and aesthetic wonder, and it is often said to be the most recognizable and most photographed bridge in the world.
Golden Gate is the name for the relatively narrow strait that connects the Pacific Ocean with San Francisco Bay. Massive amounts of seawater surge through the choppy narrows, a body of water that could be crossed only by ferry for most of San Francisco’s history. The width of the turbulent strait and the difficult geography on both sides made conventional bridges impossible.
Plans to span the Golden Gate had been discussed since the 1860s but dismissed as impractical. Joseph Baermann Strauss (1870–1938), an Ohio-born engineer and amateur poet with a penchant for grand, sweeping projects, first presented his design to the city in 1921. The initial presentation began a sixteen-year odyssey to finance and build the structure, which was opposed by a wide variety of environmental groups and San Francisco citizens worried about its steep cost and impact on ocean vistas.
Mindful of the safety hazards of building in San Francisco’s windy climate, Strauss was determined to make the Golden Gate Bridge the safest in history, requiring his workers to wear hard hats and erecting a safety net. Ten workers died during construction, which was considered a relatively light toll by the standards of the 1930s. The bridge opened in 1937—in true San Francisco fashion, the festivities began with the sounding of a foghorn—but Strauss, exhausted by the effort, died of a stroke within a year of the bridge’s completion.
1. The Golden Gate Bridge is considered one of the seven engineering wonders of the modern world by the American Society of Civil Engineers; it is one of only two American structures on the list. The other is the Empire State Building in New York City.
2. The bridge figured prominently in the James Bond movie A View to a Kill (1985), in which Roger Moore (1927–) and Christopher Walken (1943–) were seen fighting atop the span, with a combustible zeppelin hovering nearby.
3. The cables used for the Golden Gate Bridge were built by the firm of John Roebling and Sons, whose namesake had designed the Brooklyn Bridge about fifty years earlier.
Biologist Alfred Charles Kinsey (1894–1956) provoked a firestorm of controversy in the United States following World War II (1939–1945) after publishing two groundbreaking studies of human sexual behavior known collectively as the Kinsey Reports. The books, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), were the first scientific investigations of human sexuality, and they confronted many intimate subjects formerly considered taboo. Based on his confidential interviews with tens of thousands of Americans, Kinsey concluded that adultery, masturbation, and homosexuality were far more prevalent in American society than had been believed.
Kinsey was born in New Jersey and attended Bowdoin College in Maine, where he studied biology. After finishing his doctorate at Harvard, Kinsey published books on insects and plants, but became interested in the largely unexplored field of human sexuality in the 1930s. He was named director of the Institute for Sexual Research at Indiana University, where he began conducting and compiling thousands of interviews for his two famous reports.
When they were first released, Kinsey’s findings created an enormous uproar, and Kinsey was viciously attacked by conservatives upset by his reports. Among his other conclusions, Kinsey reported that 26 percent of married women had extramarital affairs by their fortieth birthday and that 50 percent of husbands cheated on their wives at some point in their life. He also found that homosexuality was far more widespread than most Americans wanted to believe—about 10 percent of men were categorized as homosexuals in Kinsey’s surveys and fully 37 percent of all male respondents reported at least one homosexual experience in their lifetime.
Despite the backlash against Kinsey, his reports were widely read by an inquisitive public and became cultural landmarks. The first book sold 200,000 copies within two months; the second landed Kinsey on the cover of Time magazine. By forcing Americans to confront the surprising realities of human sexuality, Kinsey is widely credited—or blamed—for helping to liberalize American attitudes toward sex.
Kinsey died several years later at age sixty-two after a bout of pneumonia. Although conservative groups continue to gripe about Kinsey’s findings, his reports have had a deep impact on changing American attitudes toward sex.
1. Each interviewee in Kinsey’s research was asked 300 to 500 questions about his or her sex life.
2. Kinsey joined the Boy Scouts in 1911 and only two years later achieved the top rank of Eagle Scout.
3. Liam Neeson (1952–) starred in a 2004 movie about Kinsey’s life titled Kinsey.
Beginning with his brilliant performance as the angry husband Stanley Kowalski in the 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire, Marlon Brando (1924–2004) electrified Hollywood in a series of trailblazing roles. Although his eccentric personal life and legendary moodiness hampered Brando’s career, he is almost universally regarded as one of the greatest male movie actors ever.
The son of an insecticide salesman and an alcoholic mother, Brando was born in Nebraska and suffered through an unhappy childhood. He was sent to military school, where he first began acting, but was expelled before graduation. He moved to New York City in 1943, where he worked at a number of menial jobs to pay for his acting classes.
In New York, Brando learned an unconventional acting technique known as method acting, which requires the actor to connect his or her role with personal life experiences. Drawing on his own painful past, Brando became a master of this technique.
Brando’s first big break came when director Elia Kazan (1909–2003) picked him for the male lead in the stage version of Streetcar, a play written by Tennessee Williams (1911–1983). He won a Best Actor Academy Award nomination for the film but lost the Oscar to Humphrey Bogart (1899–1957) for his role in The African Queen.
Suddenly famous, Brando acted in an astonishing range of roles in the 1950s. He played Marc Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in 1953. The same year, he played the rebellious leader of a biker gang in The Wild One. (In one scene, asked what he was rebelling against, Brando’s character famously replied, “What’ve you got?”) He won an Oscar in 1954 for his sensitive portrayal in On the Waterfront of Terry Malloy, a dimwitted ex-boxer who famously insisted he “coulda been a contender.”
Brando’s career began to teeter in the 1960s, when his unusual personal habits began taking a toll on his work. He refused to memorize lines, demanded exorbitant paychecks, and lost his sex-symbol image when his weight ballooned to 300 pounds.
His career revived, however, in 1972 when he played Vito Corleone in The Godfather. His last great role, as a psychotic army officer in Vietnam, came in the classic 1979 film Apocalypse Now, which reunited him with director Francis Ford Coppola (1939–), who also directed The Godfather.
1. Brando demanded—and received—top billing and $3.7 million to portray Jor-El, Superman’s father, in the 1978 Superman movie, although he was on-screen for only a few minutes.
2. At the 1973 Oscar ceremony, he refused his Academy Award for Best Actor in The Godfather to protest Hollywood’s unflattering depiction of Native Americans in films.
3. Brando parodied himself in the 1990 Mafia movie The Freshman, which also starred Matthew Broderick (1962–).