Word: 1920s
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...industrial depression was, the crisis on the land was even worse; the farmers, one-quarter of the population, had been in serious trouble even during the 1920s. A bushel of wheat that sold in Chicago for $2.94 in 1920 dropped to $1 by 1929 and 30? by 1932. Such prices provoked desperation. In LeMars, Iowa, where Judge Charles Bradley was foreclosing a series of mortgages, a crowd of farmers kidnaped him from his courtroom, drove him into the countryside and strung him up until he nearly lost consciousness. Then they revived him, crowned him with a truck hubcap and forced...
...income taxes at all. National City Bank President Charles Mitchell admitted that the top officials of his bank had given themselves $2.4 million in interest-free loans to protect their margin accounts in National City's stocks. Of the $50 billion in new stocks issued during the 1920s, another congressional committee said, "fully half have proved to be worthless . . . fraudulent." And when Utilities King Samuel Insull carried thousands of investors into bankruptcy, he protested at the prospect of indictment: "What have I done that every banker and business magnate has not done in the course of business...
Economists debate to this day about what caused the Great Depression. A prevailing view, persuasively argued by John Kenneth Galbraith, is that the technological increases in productivity throughout the 1920s (up 43% per factory man-hour) were not matched by increases in wages and thus in the public's capacity to consume (factory pay rose less than 20%). The collapse of the overinflated stock market therefore started a downward spiral in both demand and the ability to pay. Conservative economists like Milton Friedman, on the other hand, blame the Federal Reserve System for failing to expand the money supply...
...controversial recalculation represents only the latest adjustment of a cosmological value known as the Hubble constant, after the noted astronomer Edwin Hubble. In the late 1920s, using the 100-in. Mount Wilson telescope, then the world's largest, Hubble discovered that everywhere he looked in the heavens, the galaxies seemed to be moving away from each other, like flecks on the surface of an expanding balloon, their speed increasing in direct proportion to their distance. By assuming the universe was expanding, astronomers used that ratio to reckon the universe's age and size. Trouble was that the Hubble...
...future looters. The field at Patrick's Point, though it now belongs to the state, is part of an ancient burial ground that was long a favorite target for hunters of Indian relics. Says Yurok Tribal Chairman Joy Sundberg, 49: "White people came through this area in the 1920s and '30s and took everything Indian they could get their hands on. Every college, every souvenir hunter wanted Indian artifacts. Back then there was no way to stop them. Now we can at least try to protect our ancestors...