The Power of Wall Street
The history of New York City began
with the formation of the consolidated city of the five boroughs in 1898. New transportation links,
most notably the New
York City Subway, first opened 1904, helped bind the new city together. The municipal consolidation would also precipitate
greater physical connections between the boroughs. The building of the New York City Subway, as the
separate Inter-borough Rapid Transit Company and Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation systems, and the later Independent Subway System, and
the opening of the first
IRT line in 1905 marked the
beginning of what became a force for further population
spread and development. The
Williamsburg Bridge, built in 1903,
and the Manhattan Bridge,
built in 1909 further connected Manhattan to the rapidly expanding bedroom community in Brooklyn. The world-famous Grand Central Terminal opened as the world's largest train station on February 1, 1913, replacing an
earlier terminal on the site. It was preceded by Pennsylvania Station, several
blocks to the west.
Increased European
immigration was thought to have brought social upheaval. Later, in the 1920s,
the city saw the influx of African Americans as part of the Great
Migration from the American
South, and the Harlem Renaissance.
The Roaring Twenties were years of glamour and wealth,
highlighted by a construction boom
with skyscrapers dueling in the skyline. New York's financial sector came to
dominate the national, and indeed the world economy.
On September 16, 1920, radicals in the city
perpetrated the Wall Street bombing, a terrorist attack
outside the headquarters of the House
of Morgan, killing dozens of people and injuring hundreds. The bombing, timed
for the busy lunch hour, was unusual for targeting larger numbers of ordinary
people. It was the most deadly act of politically motivated terror on American
soil until the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, and took place in the
context of the 1919 discovery of two
series of deadly mail-bombs.
Officials blamed anarchist and communist elements,
fueling the ongoing Palmer raids. Shortly before the bomb
went off, a warning note was placed in a mailbox at the corner of Cedar Street
and Broadway. The warning read "Remember we will not tolerate any
longer. Free the political prisoners or it will be sure death for all of you.
American Anarchists Fighters." After twenty years investigating the
matter the FBI rendered the file inactive in 1940 without ever finding the
perpetrators.
Wall
in the 1920’s New York City was basically dominated by just a small group of
wealthy men. Men like William C Durant, a titan of industry, who established GM
in the 1920s. Industry and modernization for the masses had taken hold.
Electricity and Consumer credit had been established by 1929. Buy now pay later became a regular practice
throughout.
In Chicago, Al Capone
eliminated his competition in the bootleg liquor business on Valentine’s Day in
1929.
Prior to March 4th
1929 (Hoover’s Inauguration Day) Calvin Coolidge had run his administration on
the belief that business was the basis of America’s prosperity that government
should not hinder. Hoover said “Given the chance to go forward with the
policies of the last 8 years, we will soon, with the help of god, be in site of
the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.”
Charles Mitchell,
President of National City Bank, Virtually invented the idea of mass marketing
stocks and bonds to the general public.
Gradually the general
public became aware of those striking it rich in the stock market. These sudden
riches, reminiscent of the Western Gold Rush, attracted the masses. Wealthy
investors came to be viewed and treated as celebrities. Jessie Livermore, whose
fortune was estimated at over $100 million, lived solely by playing the stock
market in a time when stoplights were hand operated by policemen in boxes or
booths. These officers would make sure that all of the lights were green when
they knew it was time for him to head in to work. Talk about celebrity.
Watching the ticker
tape became a national pastime. This was how investors would keep track of
their stocks. Even comic characters were investing in a make believe world. The
entire country seemed to be under the spell of the stock market. Evangeline
Lilly, a psychic, began making predictions regarding gains in stocks.
The Market had entered
popular culture. The media saw this new craze beginning to take hold, as
everyone wanted to acquire the success of the wealthy men of Wall street, which
so many idolized and, like a parasitic machine, began the promotion of books
that claimed to have the answers on how to make a fortune on the Stock Market.
This marketing strategy produced large sums of money for publishing houses.
In these times the
Market was not controlled. Buying on margin became common practice. You only
needed ten percent down.
MJ Meehan, a formed a pool and developed a plan which drove
the price of RCA stock up almost 50%, making what today would be the equivalent
of $100 million in just over a week’s work.
Practically all of the
financial journals were on the take. Highly regarded papers like The New York
Times would accept bribes to create fantastic press on a particular stock.
These stock titans would invest on the ground floor raising the price of the
stock and when others saw this (The little guy) they were eager to jump on the
bandwagon, trusting the choices of these men with celebrity status. Once the
stock price was driven high enough, these men would pull out with a huge profit
and the stock would collapse, leaving the average guy at a loss.
The city suffered
during the Great
Depression, which saw the election and repeated reelection of reformer Fiorello La Guardia,
who ended the long dominance of Tammany
Hall. La Guardia's success in getting new deal relief funds helped
convert the city to a stronghold of the New
Deal Coalition.
The Great Depression, which was to
affect the rest of the world, began with the Stock Market Crash of 1929.
The Depression was both a time of unemployment and poverty, and a period of
increased government involvement in the economy.
When
FDR was elected, the Hooverville shacks named after his predecessor
dotted city parks, but the city would benefit from the New
Deal and the Works Progress Administration,
which among other things financed much public art locally. The recently
completed Empire State Building would
be known as the "Empty State Building" for many years because it
could not attract sufficient tenants in the bleak business climate.
In
1933, Republican reformer Fiorello
La Guardia was elected
mayor. La Guardia, sometimes considered New York's greatest mayor, was of both
Italian and Jewish descent and acted as an exuberant populist with a multi-ethnic
sensibility. La Guardia's term also saw the rise of the long-careered planner Robert
Moses, bridges, parks and parkways coordinator, and great proponent of
automobile-centered modernism, whose legacy of massive construction projects is
controversial today. The last large expansion of the subway system and municipal ownership of the
previously privately owned subway companies gave the system its final shape.
New York, long a great American city with many
immigrants, became a culturally international city with the brain drain of
intellectual, musical and artistic European refugees that started in the late
1930s.
The 1939 New York World's Fair, marking the 150th
anniversary of George Washington's inauguration in Federal Hall,
was a high point of technological optimism, meant to mark the end of the
Depression. After the start of World War II, though, the theme was changed from
"Building the World of Tomorrow" to "For Peace and
Freedom", and a shadow affected the proceedings.
The economy of New York City was affected
by the military conflict; shipping was hurt by the U-boats, many
windows were blacked out for fear of German bombing that never materialized due
to failure of the Amerika
Bomber project, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard again increased its
production of warships.
World War II, also called Second World War, conflict that involved virtually every part of the
world during the years 1939–45. The principal belligerents were the Axis
powers—Germany, Italy,
and Japan, and the Allies,France, Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union,
and, to a lesser extent, China.
The war was in many respects a
continuation, after an uneasy 20-year hiatus, of the disputes left unsettled by World War I.
The 40,000,000–50,000,000 deaths incurred in World War II make it the bloodiest
conflict, as well as the largest war, in history.
War produced an outpouring of propaganda from public service
announcements to comic books, to cartoons and movies like Casablanca. Superman
cartoons like Japoteurs were produced by Famous Studios and released by Paramount Pictures during
the early 1940s. Public service announcements were meant to instill fear,
patriotism and to inspire a better America.
For the duration of the war, the Port of New York handled
25% of the nation's trade. Much of this passed through the Brooklyn Army
Terminal and the Brooklyn Navy Yard. By the war's end, the Navy Yard was
the world's largest shipyard with 75,000 workers. At the end of the war, the
city was pre-eminent in the world, the only major world city unscathed by the
war.
The
road to war between Japan and the United States began in the 1930s when
differences over China drove the two nations apart. In 1931 Japan conquered
Manchuria, which until then had been part of China. In 1937 Japan began a long
and ultimately unsuccessful campaign to conquer the rest of China. In 1940, the
Japanese government allied their country with Nazi Germany in the Axis
Alliance, and, in the following year, occupied all of Indochina.
The
United States, which had important political and economic interests in East
Asia, was alarmed by these Japanese moves. The U.S. increased military and
financial aid to China, embarked on a program of strengthening its military
power in the Pacific, and cut off the shipment of oil and other raw materials
to Japan. Because Japan was poor in natural resources, its government viewed
these steps, especially the embargo on oil as a threat to the nation's
survival. Japan's leaders responded by resolving to seize the resource-rich
territories of Southeast Asia, even though that move would certainly result in
war with the United States.
The
problem with the plan was the danger posed by the U.S. Pacific Fleet based at
Pearl Harbor. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Japanese fleet,
devised a plan to immobilize the U.S. fleet at the outset of the war with a
surprise attack.
The
key elements in Yamamoto's plans were meticulous preparation, the achievement
of surprise, and the use of aircraft carriers and naval aviation on an
unprecedented scale. In the spring of 1941, Japanese carrier pilots began
training in the special tactics called for by the Pearl Harbor attack plan.
At
6:00 a.m. on 7 December, the six Japanese carriers launched a first wave of 181
planes composed of torpedo bombers, dive bombers, horizontal bombers and
fighters. Even as they winged south, some elements of U.S. forces on Oahu
realized there was something different about this Sunday morning.
In
the hours before dawn, U.S. Navy vessels spotted an unidentified submarine
periscope near the entrance to Pearl Harbor. It was attacked and reported sunk
by the destroyer USS Ward (DD-139) and a patrol plane. At 7:00
a.m., an alert operator of an Army radar station at Opana spotted the
approaching first wave of the attack force. The officers to whom those reports
were relayed did not consider them significant enough to take action. The
report of the submarine sinking was handled routinely, and the radar sighting
was passed off as an approaching group of American planes due to arrive that
morning.
The
Japanese aircrews achieved complete surprise when they hit American ships and
military installations on Oahu shortly before 8:00 a.m. They attacked military
airfields at the same time they hit the fleet anchored in Pearl Harbor. The
Navy air bases at Ford Island and Kaneohe Bay, the Marine airfield at Ewa and
the Army Air Corps fields at Bellows, Wheeler and Hickam were all bombed and
strafed as other elements of the attacking force began their assaults on the
ships moored in Pearl Harbor. The purpose of the simultaneous attacks was to
destroy the American planes before they could rise to intercept the Japanese.
When
the attack ended shortly before 10:00 a.m., less than two hours after it began,
the American forces has paid a fearful price. Twenty-one ships of the U.S.
Pacific Fleet were sunk or damaged. Aircraft losses were 188 destroyed and 159
damaged, the majority hit before they had a chance to take off. American dead
numbered 2,403. That figure included 68 civilians, most of them killed by
improperly fused anti-aircraft shells landing in Honolulu. There were 1,178
military and civilian wounded.
Following
the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an
executive order which permitted the military to circumvent the constitutional
safeguards of American citizens in the name of national defense. The order set
into motion the exclusion from certain areas, and the evacuation and mass
incarceration of 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry living on the west coast,
many of whom were U.S. citizens or legal permanent resident aliens.
These
Japanese Americans, half of whom were children, were incarcerated for up to
four years, without due process of law, in bleak remote camps surrounded by
barbed wire and armed guards. Families were sometimes split up within the ten
facilities which President Roosevelt himself referred to as “concentration
camps.”
Following a firebombing campaign that destroyed many Japanese cities the Allies prepared for a costly invasion of Japan.
The war in Europe ended when Nazi Germany signed its instrument of surrender on May 8, 1945, but the Pacific War continued. Together with the United
Kingdom and China,
the United States called for the unconditional surrender of the Japanese armed
forces in the Potsdam Declaration on July 26, 1945, threatening
"prompt and utter destruction".
By August 1945, the
Allied Manhattan Project had
successfully tested
an atomic device and had
produced weapons based on two alternate designs. The 509th Composite Group of the U.S. Army Air Forces was equipped with Silverplate Boeing B-29 Super-fortress that could deliver them from Tinian in the Mariana Islands.
A uranium gun-type atomic bomb (Little Boy) was
dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, followed by a
plutonium implosion-type bomb (Fat Man) on the
city of Nagasaki on August 9. Within the first two
to four months of the bombings, the acute effects killed 90,000–166,000 people
in Hiroshima and 60,000–80,000 in Nagasaki; roughly half of the deaths in each
city occurred on the first day. During the following months, large numbers died
from the effect of burns, radiation
sickness, and other injuries, compounded by illness. In both cities,
most of the dead were civilians, although Hiroshima had a sizeable garrison.
A gigantic mushroom cloud rises above Hiroshima, Japan, on
Aug. 6, 1945, after a U.S. aircraft dropped an atomic bomb on the city,
immediately killing more than 70,000 people. (U.S. Air Force
photograph)
The atomic bombings of the cities of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki in Japan
were conducted by the United States during the final stages of World War II in August 1945. The two bombings were
the first and remain the only use of nuclear
weapons in wartime.
On
August 15, just days after the bombing of Nagasaki and the Soviet Union's declaration
of war, Japan announced its
surrender to the Allies.
On September 2, it signed the instrument
of surrender, ending World War II. The bombings' role in Japan's
surrender and their ethical justification are still
debated.
Resources-
James
Bronson Reynolds, ed. (1911), Civic Bibliography for Greater New York,
New York: Russell Sage Foundation
"New
York". Collier's Encyclopedia 6. New York: P.F.
Collier & Son. 1921.
Burrows,
Edwin G., and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City
to 1898, Oxford University Press, 1998
Jackson,
Kenneth and Sam Roberts, eds. The Almanac of New York City (2008)
World War
II Internment Camps from the Handbook of
Texas Online
"Campaign
For Justice: Redress Now For Japanese American Internees!". A website with
information about the lesser known internment of Japanese Latin Americans
A
More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans and the U.S. Constitution Online exhibition from the National Museum of American
History, Smithsonian Institution
National
Park Service; Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese
American Relocation Sites.
