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By Root 766 0

of the million-dollar gate, the seventy-thousand-dollar horse-race, the hundred-thousand-dollar football game, the millionaire prize-fighter, and the fifty-thousand-dollar golfer. I have witnessed an era of spending in sport such as has never been seen before and which may not be matched again, when the box-office prize for a single ringside seat for a heavyweight championship prize-fight was fifty dollars, and fetched as high as two hundred and fifty dollars a pair from speculators,” wrote Gallico. “And I have seen the bubble collapse as sharply and completely as did the great stock boom, and watched prize-fighting go downhill from a million-dollar industry back to the small-time money from which it came.”

The Chrysler Building’s architect, William Van Alen, dressed as his creation, with his wife at the Society of Beaux Arts Arthitects ball, 1931.

14

CRASH

JACK DEMPSEY WAS JUST ONE OF MANY AMERICANS COASTING to easy wealth on the boom years of the 1920s. While salaries and prices remained largely static, production increased J steadily, costs fell and corporate profits rose by 62 percent, feeding a national sense of optimism. Certain niche groups like farmers and textile workers excepted, most people had more money to spend and, as vacations became more common and working weeks shorter, more time to spend it on each new product the advertisers told them they couldn’t live without: wrist-watches, Reader’s Digest subscriptions, nylon stockings, cigarette lighters, ice-cream bars, movie tickets and crossword puzzle books.

“Society obeyed the impersonal law of progress,” wrote Malcolm Cowley. “Cities expanded relentlessly year by year; fortunes grew larger; more and more automobiles appeared in the streets; people were wiser and better read than their ancestors—eventually, by automatic stages, we should reach an intolerable utopia of dull citizens, without crime or suffering or drama.”

In January 1929 Ladies’ Home Journal published an article entitled, “Everybody Ought to be Rich” by John Jakob Raskob, self-made financier and former vice president of General Motors, reportedly worth $100 million in 1928, who listed his occupation in Who’s Who in America as “capitalist.” He advised readers to save $15 a month, invest it in the stock market—and find $80,000 in their bank accounts in twenty years’ time. Anything felt possible; everything fed the mood of buoyancy. Even Lindbergh’s successful landing in Paris prompted the stock market to shoot up another few notches.

Herbert Hoover, campaigning for president in the summer of 1928, declared that America was closer “to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land” and that soon poverty would be “banished from this nation.” His message was so popular that 58 percent of the electorate voted for him. But perhaps Hoover had not seen the figures showing nearly three-quarters of the population living at or below the official minimum standard for a working-class family, $2,500 per year. Despite the illusory grandeur of Hoover’s ambitions and the general sense of prosperity and advancement throughout the country, inequalities in wealth were vast and increasing. America’s thirty-six-thousand richest families collectively received as much per annum as the twelve million families (or nearly half the population) who scraped by on less than $1,500.

Not everyone was as bullish on America—to quote one of the phrases Frederick Allen said characterized the boom philosophy—as Raskob and Hoover. The problem was that as the economy continued its apparently inexorable rise the doom-sayers and disbelievers seemed so patently mistaken. “I wish to record my utter inability to understand why a lot of folks don’t go broke,” said the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, as early as 1926. “These consolidations and security flotations plus the building boom, beat my comprehension—unless there is a breakdown within a year.” But despite Brandeis’s legal eminence, his prediction of a financial collapse was (to say the least) premature, and no one heeded his warning.