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 4^th 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.

            With the economic decline, criticism of Mayor Walker grew, from Cardinal Patrick Joseph Hayes and then from New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, who broke with Walker and Tammany. Mayor Walker came under increasing pressure in the midst of FDR's 1932 Presidential campaign, and resigned to relocate to Europe fleeing potential criminal charges.

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-

http://www.pbs.org/childofcamp/history/index.html?PHPSESSID=032e01e0d9275e2e1d447e604074cc9c

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0806.html

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_samuels

http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/his1005spring2011/2011/03/13/bread-lines-during-the-great-depression/

http://www.pbs.org/superheroes

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal_Coalition

www.pbs.org