The Jazz Age & Black Tuesday

On the 'Black Tuesday' of October 29, 1929, the stock market crashed. The economic declines preceding the crash, which the middle and upper classes ignored during the roaring twenties, no longer were lower class problems and simply 'out of sight, out of mind'. Thousands of Banks closed, along with tons of businesses, and those still alive had large lay offs of their own. People who invested in the stock market before the crash, even if they had money left, were certainly not going to spend it. The economy would be in a quagmire. People were shell-shocked, but not so-much because of the sudden stock market crash as it was the 'chickens coming home to roost'. The signs that something was wrong and turning worse in America during the late 1920s were maybe not as clear as Baby Face Nelson's fate hours after The Battle of Barrington on November 27, 1934 but none-the-less the same; terminal.

In Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" he points to John Galbraith's "The Great Crash" for examples of pre-crash problems:
"...'the economy was fundamentally unsound.'"..."very unhealthy corporate and banking structures, an unsound foreign trade, much economic misinformation, and the 'bad distribution of income'(the highest 5% of the population received about 1/3 of all personal income)."

During the Jazz Age and roaring twenties middle and upper class America were partying as people were becoming consumers, buying various new appliances as farms were generally doing well and unemployment was improving. Air travel arrived, along with newer Cars accessible to the middle class. Appliances like the refrigerator and radios became as desirable as TVs and Laptops today (if you had the money the you had to buy it). And of course the Thompson Machine Gun aka "Tommy Gun" was becoming commercially available to those who 'needed' it.

After the crash, farmers lost their land, the crops wouldn't sell, and they couldn't even legally have a drink to ease their pains. They had a radio in the living room, a car in the barn, and a nice refrigerator to keep their meat cold, but they no longer owned their land. The bank did and I can imagine the farmer and his family were none-too-pleased with the corporate structure snatching their lives (as I'm sure employees weren't pleased to lose their jobs, and therefore their livelihoods at the hands of a crumbling Business). Why not rob a bank? They robbed us. But the big heists would come later, it was a different criminal act that would show the full power of the Tommy Gun and the dark realities of Al Capone's empire.