American History Tellers - Roaring Twenties | Anxious Decade | 5

Episode Date: October 27, 2021

The Roaring 20s are often described as a time of optimism and decadence, teeming with flappers, jazz and bootlegged liquor. It was the decade that birthed modern America. But with that birth came growing tensions over civil rights, the urban-rural divide and other culture wars.Historian Michael E. Parrish captured the period in his book Anxious Decades: America in Prosperity and Depression, 1920 -1941. In this episode, Parrish joins host Lindsay Graham to discuss Ponzi schemes, the birth of celebrity culture, and how the lessons learned from the ‘20s still resonate today.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's August 1920 in Boston. You've clawed your way to the front of a crowd of hundreds of people clamoring to get inside the offices of the securities exchange company. You put all your savings from your meager grocer's salary into this company, which is run by an investment wizard named Charles Ponzi. But today, you're trying to redeem your investment voucher early,

after you read an article in the Boston Post that cast suspicion on Ponzi's operation. Hey, everyone, just please, we're doing the best we can. Okay, you sir, you're next. A clerk ushers you inside and quickly closes the door behind you. Once inside Ponzi's offices, it's eerily quiet. The place seems almost deserted. The clerk leads you into a small office littered with boxes and piles of paper and offers you a seat. I'm sorry about the wait. Business is booming. Can I get you some coffee? Coffee? No, I don't need any coffee. I need... What I want is to cash out my investment. Why would you want to do that? You haven't hit the 90-day mark on your deposit, have you? No, no, it's only been a month or so, but I'm ready to cash out. My wife told me

from the start that this whole thing was too good to be true, and I've decided I should listen to her. The clerk pours himself a cup of coffee and sits down behind a desk. His smile is pleasant enough, but his eyes are dull and vacant. He looks like he hasn't slept in days. Well, how about I make you a special offer? We'll return your investment with the same 50% interest we promised, but in 45 days rather than 90. No, you're not listening to me. I don't want to wait one more day, let alone 45. I want my money now. Well, if you could just be patient, like a couple of weeks. Well, what's the problem? Ponzi seems to have plenty of money. I know about the 12-room mansion in Lexington, custom limousine,

his wife's diamonds. Yes, Mr. Ponzi's done very well. And you can too, if you just hold out a little longer. You know, maybe the Post is onto something. They say he's insolvent. He's robbing Peter to pay Paul. I assure you, those allegations are complete lies. Yeah, well, I'm starting to think this company was built on lies, too. When I first bought in, I thought somehow Charles Ponzi knew the secret to getting rich. But he and you, you're just all slick crooks. All you have is a convincing sales pitch. Do you people really think you're going to get away with this? I'll tell you, you're not. You stand up and march out of the office

and into the crowd of desperate investors. You had thought Ponzi's investment scheme was just what you needed to pay off some debts and achieve a better life. Instead, you're realizing, just like all these other suckers, you might lose everything. From Wondery comes a new series about a lawyer who broke all the rules. Need to launder some money? Broker a deal with a drug cartel? Take out a witness?

Paul can do it. I'm your host, Brandon Jinks Jenkins. Follow Criminal Attorney on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Kill List is a true story of how I ended up in a race against time to warn those whose lives were in danger. Follow Kill List wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Kill List and more Exhibit C True Crime shows like Morbid early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story. Early in the year 1920, a dapper, smooth-talking Italian immigrant named Charles

Ponzi promised investors a 50% return in the market for international mail coupons. These coupons could be exchanged for U.S. postage stamps, sometimes, Ponzi claimed, for just pennies to the dollar. But his business was a scam. In reality, he was using the funds from new investors to pay back old investors while skimming money off the top for himself. Thousands of hungry investors from all walks of life were lured by Ponzi's promise of low risk and high rewards. By July of 1920, Ponzi was raking in a staggering $1 million every week. But when journalists and the local U.S. District Attorney's Office

began investigating Ponzi's booming business, the house of cards came tumbling down. It wasn't the first investment scheme of its type, but it was one of the largest, and soon would become synonymous with its infamous perpetrator, Ponzi. Charles Ponzi would be sentenced to three and a half years in prison and was later deported back to Italy. But in many ways, his scheme became symbolic of the 1920s. It was an era of boundless optimism, soaring stock prices, and risky investments promising quick returns. By the end of the decade, this frenzy of financial speculation would prove catastrophic. With me today to discuss that decade and the great crash that ended it is author and historian

Michael E. Parrish. He's professor emeritus at the University of California at San Diego and author of the book Anxious Decades, America in Prosperity and Depression, 1920 through 1941. Here's our conversation. Professor Parrish, thanks so much for speaking with me on American History Tellers. Well, I'm very pleased to be here this morning. When we think of the Roaring Twenties, we think of a time of decadence and optimism and jazz and flappers and bootleg liquor. But by the title of your book, you characterize it as one of the anxious decades. What did you mean by that, anxious? Well, I meant that because people were experiencing this burst of what you might call modernism in terms of American culture and politics,

entering this era did generate a great deal of anxiety and frustration among a great number of people. It wasn't only, say, in the rural areas where people were having a sense that they were being left behind in the sense of that the country was becoming more urban. It was becoming more centered of the cities of the United States were beginning to exercise a great deal of cultural and political influence. So that in the rural areas, there was a great deal of anxiety about losing their sense of superiority, their sense of hegemony over American life. So I think that is one source of anxiety, the sense of losing one's control over the nation's culture and politics. Well, I'm interested in the anxious part because, as you said, in many ways, the 20s were the birth of the modern era. What do you think it means for the

beginning of our familiar way of life to be rooted in anxiety? Well, I think then one has to find an outlet or one ways to express this kind of anxiety. And certainly in the 1920s, you did have that in terms of the various culture wars that spread across the country. Wars over, for example, prohibition over whether the country should continue to allow alcohol to be consumed or whether you should attempt to stop the consumption of alcohol. The whole question of the teaching of evolution, of course, the teaching of Charles Darwin. So there was a great deal of anxiety about the way in which America was moving in terms of the division between the countryside and the metropolitan urban areas.

You mentioned the culture wars of urban versus rural, prohibition, and the discussions of evolution. But part of this anxiety surely must also be the evolving roles and perceptions of race and gender in society. What was it about the 20s, do you think, that caused a new and louder conversation about women and people of color? Certainly, there was a sense among American women, which was expressed most profoundly by the effort to adopt the Equal Rights Amendment in the middle of the 1920s to put into the Constitution a prohibition on gender discrimination.

And there was also, of course, a very broad-based movement among American women to promote birth control and to gain some degree of control over their reproductive lives. So there was a great deal of anxiety about these issues, about whether or not women could achieve legal as well as political equality. I mean, women had actually achieved the vote by 19-20-21, but there was a great deal left in terms of the way in which American legal structures continued to discriminate against women in terms of employment, in terms of property rights, in terms of divorce. And so there was this effort, of course, to achieve a greater equality through a constitutional amendment. That was not unusual in the 1920s. There were people who wanted to write their values into the Constitution. And those who were supporting prohibition, of course, were able to achieve that goal by writing into the Constitution the prohibitions with regard to the consumption of alcohol.

Well, American women, of course, were interested in doing that, too, to write their values into the Constitution with regard to the Equal Rights Amendment. They were not as successful since that movement was not achieved during the 1920s. Thinking about women in particular, do you think that the 1920s was just the decade in which the march of progress for women just happened to coalesce? Or was there something special about this moment, maybe technologically or socially? Well, there was certainly the changes with regard to the availability of birth control or birth control techniques. So to that extent, science, the science of biology had made those advances. But we should recall that American women had played some considerable roles during the earlier period, the so-called progressive era, under Teddy Roosevelt, under Woodrow Wilson, even under William Howard Taft.

There was a way in which, you know, American women had come to the fore in terms of various reform movements involving, you know, education, involving urban political reforms. Women, in many ways, were an important backbone to the progressive movement between 1900 and 1920. And certainly they played a very important role during the First World War in terms of mobilizing the American economy for the war against Germany in 1917 to 1919. This period also, especially World War I, was probably a sea change for African Americans. Many African Americans served overseas and then came back to the 20s to find an America that had both changed and not changed enough. When you think about their experience in the 20s, again, I guess it's the same question. Was this decade something

special or in that a culmination of moments and ingredients or just the moment for them interested in tearing down all of the discriminatory laws with respect to voting, with respect to housing and employment, who wanted to basically pursue this vision of a non-segregated society. On the other hand, you had large numbers of African-Americans who were drawn to Black nationalism, to Marcus Garvey, and to not only the idea that somehow you could encourage this kind of Afro-centered culture, but that even returning to Africa might not be a bad idea. To a large extent, the Garvey movement was a kind of a reflection of this who in a sense shared this kind of racial nationalism with the most reactionary parts of the Ku Klux Klan. So we have a moment in which quite a few forces are coming to the fore. They want their voice to be heard.

And in one way in which their voice can be heard right at this moment is that the 1920s gave us the first nationwide radio broadcast, the next great step forward in mass media. How do you think radio changed the way Americans engaged in culture and political discussions in the 20s? Well, to some extent, it was very similar to the impact that, say, the internet and the World Wide Web has had in more contemporary American life, in the sense that it exposed many people to lifestyles and to other individuals who in the past they would never have encountered or would never have come into contact with. So there was a way in which not only did it bring people together, but in which people began to recognize differences with other people.

And so to some extent, while radio was homogenizing American culture and American consumer habits with regard to music, with regard to sporting events. At the same time, radio was driving people apart, much like the internet has driven people apart. Because over radio, you experienced people whose values you did not share. And so therefore, the radio was also a source of increasing division within American society, much as the internet has driven these very similar kinds of divisions over race and over lifestyles in the contemporary period. So radio was both a source of binding Americans together in certain ways, but also it was a device for driving Americans apart with regard to issues of race and culture. Thinking about your analogy with the internet, one thing

that the internet is maligned for is its echo chamber effect. Do you think radio had the same sort of power over people to balkanize them? Well, I think that the balkanization was certainly there, but the difference, of course, is that in the 19th century, Americans lived in what we can call these island communities in which there was not a great deal of interaction, in which people did not really experience cultural styles or political life much beyond their local society. It's not that the United States, you know, was completely a society of these island communities, but there was much less kind of cultural and political interaction, say, in the 1880s than there would be in the 1920s. So that people were coming into contact more

frequently over the radio and over the motion picture screen. They were coming into contact through popular culture with people who they had never encountered in the past. Taking the analogy even further, who were the YouTube stars of 1920s radio? Who was demanding attention? Well, I mean, there were certainly radio stars like Eddie Kander, for example. I think even Jack Benny got his start in that particular period. So there were these popular artists with regard to popular songs, music, jazz, for example. And they were, in a sense, the first kind of icons of that period. But it wasn't just music.

Certainly, there's a lot of what we would call talk radio, too, especially religious radio. Who were the, I guess, the celebrities of that era? Well, yes. I mean, you had sort of the evangelical activities on radio in places like California and Los Angeles. You had people like Amy Semple McPherson, who was a very widely listened to radio evangelist. And there were others, of course, like her in other cities across the country, Chicago, San Francisco, and New York. And of course, rural networks in parts of the South and the Midwest. So in a sense, you had the early examples of what would become the widespread evangelism that would become popular

on television in the 1950s with the Billy Graham crusades. And certainly Amy Simple McPherson was probably the most widely emulated evangelist of that period of the 1920s. Of course, radio wasn't the only media in the era. At the same time, the motion picture industry and the development of professional sports were also creating their own celebrities. But all of this seems to indicate that there is a blossoming celebrity culture in America. How do you think this might have changed the national conversation? Well, you certainly had sports figures who emerged during the period. Even you can see the beginnings of the big-time college athletics in the sense of the way in which

Red Grange became a very celebrated college football player and, in a sense, formed also the basis of the liaison between big- time college football and the professional football leagues that would follow in the 1930s and the 1940s. This was also true of prize fighting, of boxing, of course. These celebrated bouts between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney. People, you know, looked to these boxers as symbolic of the kind of divisions in American life. I mean, Gene Tunney was kind of the cultured, the more what sophisticated cosmopolitan figure. Jack Dempsey was sort of the roughneck. He was sort of the figure of the slums. So indeed, you had sports figures who became these icons of other aspects of the popular culture that was very pervasive during the decade.

Thinking about this, it's probably, for our listeners, celebrity culture is probably very familiar. Our popular culture is steeped, if not defined, by celebrities. If whatever, it was certainly the case that clergymen, whether you were a Protestant or whether you were Jewish or whether you were a Catholic, that your religious leadership, your priest, your rabbi, your rector, these people had a great deal of cultural and political sway in American life. Also politicians. I mean, there were political figures. One thinks of Lincoln. One thinks of President Grant. There were political figures who had a great deal of cultural power in the 19th century. And certainly businessmen, entrepreneurs, scientists, one thinks of,

Thomas Edison, or one thinks of other important entrepreneurial figures, Rockefeller, etc. Carnegie, there was a way in which opinion leaders came, different social groups, from religion, from politics. And of course, all of those experienced something of a decline in the 1920s. Even though religion was certainly considerably important with regard to the evolution debate, certainly religious leaders, I think, lost influence in popular culture, and so did politicians, not only because of the scandals of the 1920s, but there was a way in which also business leaders would experience a sharp decline in their prestige and influence by the end of the 1920s because of the economic and the political scandals of the time. So there's a way in which the old groups

that influenced American life, clergymen, businessmen, politicians, they went into something of an eclipse in the 1920s, and they were replaced by motion picture stars, by those in the music world, by those in literature, for example. Writers like Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald. There was a way in which serious literary and serious cultural figures emerged as more important than the more traditional 19th century figures. I'm Tristan Redman, and as a journalist, I've never believed in ghosts. But when I discovered that my wife's great-grandmother was murdered in the house next door to where I grew up, I started wondering about the inexplicable things that happened in my childhood bedroom. When I tried to find out more, I discovered that someone who slept in my room after me, someone I'd never met, was visited by the ghost of a faceless woman. So I started

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Blood and garlic, bats and crucifixes. Even if you haven't read the book, you think you know the story. One of the incredible things about Dracula is that not only is it this wonderful snapshot of the 19th century, but it also has so much resonance today. The vampire doesn't cast a reflection in a mirror. So when we look in the mirror, the only thing we see is our own monstrous abilities. From the host and producer of American History Tellers and History Daily comes the new podcast, The Real History of Dracula. We'll reveal how author Bram Stoker raided ancient folklore, exploited Victorian fears around sex, science, and religion, and how even today we remain enthralled to his strange creatures of the night. You can binge all episodes of The Real History of Dracula exclusively with Wondery+.

Join Wondery Plus and the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. We open this episode with a small look at Charles Ponzi, the namesake, of course, of the Ponzi scheme. His racket might have been perhaps the personification, the pinnacle of the get-rich-quick attitude of the 1920s that probably led to the great crash of 1929. How did that attitude shape the decade? Well, ironically, it's during that war period from 1917 to 1919 that the government made an effort, of course, to encourage Americans to invest in the war effort by buying, of course,

war bonds. It's that experience in that brief period of the war and of the bond efforts by the government of the United States that first accustomed the American people to not simply putting their savings into a savings bank, et cetera, or whatever, but to investing, and investing in this case in the war effort. And that directly, I think, influenced the kind of interest in the stock market in the 1920s, and also in real estate investment that became very important in places like California and Florida between 1920 and 1930. I mean, the first great crashes occurred not on Wall Street, but in the real estate markets in places like Florida and California. I think, though, it's probably a far cry from the meager returns on a war bond

to an expectation that there's free money on Wall Street or in real estate. Who do you think led the charge in convincing America that good times could never end? Well, I mean, it was a pretty easy thing to sell Americans on the idea, look, if you buy a new Oldsmobile or a new Chevrolet or a new Ford and you put down $100 or $150, the minute you drive that automobile off the lot, it's going to depreciate in value. You've already bought something that is not going to increase in value. Whereas if you put $100 down and you buy, say, 50 shares of RCA stock or White Owl cigar. And if that stock goes up 50% or 100% in, say, a month or in six months, you have bought an asset that is going to keep rising in value. It's unlike buying a refrigerator or a new sofa or a new car. All of those things are going to depreciate in value. But basically,

people entice people into the market with the idea that if you invested in the stock market, the value of your assets were going to continue to go up. And that indeed was the experience between 1924 and 1927. In other words, it made far more sense to a lot of Americans to put their money into RCA stock or White Owl Cigar or Rexall Drug than it did, say, to buy a new refrigerator or a new automobile. Just thinking through some anecdotes that you might have, certainly there are some shenanigans around investment schemes. What do you think, other than Ponzi, might be some of the examples of the most egregious? Well, some of the most egregious are that you could, of course, get a pool organized on Wall Street where a group of very shrewd investors,

speculators, many of them were insider traders, were able to buy stock and to encourage buying by basically buying it back and forth and to raise artificially, to raise the value and to lure outside investors into the market. And also, of course, there was the whole business of short selling, basically borrowing securities that you did not own. And then, of course, hoping that the market would decline. And oftentimes those short sellers were caught on the wrong side of the market between 1924 and 1927. So there were many ways in which you could manipulate the market, especially if you were an insider, if you were a floor trader in New York or in Chicago. And of course, you only had to put down a very minimal amount of money.

You could put down basically 5% or 10% of the value of the stock. You could borrow the rest from your stockbroker. And if, of course, the value of that stock rose, you could easily pay back your broker and you could still come away with a tidy profit. The problem with the whole thing is that the market depended on there always being more buyers than there were sellers. And there were simply not enough buyers. There were simply not enough people in the stock market by 1928 or 29 to continue the boom. In other words, as soon as you had more sellers than buyers, the market was going to collapse. And compared to today, the market was simply not deep enough in terms of the number of people who were actually willing to risk their

money in equities or in bonds. Well, that's exactly the mechanism of a Ponzi scheme, isn't it? And if these traders were so aware of their self-dealing and the artificial inflation of the market, I'm wondering if there shouldn't have been some obvious signs that the crash in 1929 was on the horizon. Well, of course, there were economists who pointed out to all of the structural weaknesses that were visible by certainly 1926, 27. I mean, American agriculture was in a period of great economic distress. This was certainly true of staple crops like cotton, corn, wheat, soybeans, even tobacco, that, you know, the American farmers had to face basically an international market in which, you know, the price of their wheat or the cotton was not set

in the United States, it was set in the world markets. And really, American farmers were in a state of depression, probably from 1922 throughout the rest of the decade. The fact that they would suffer even worse during the 1930s. But the evidence was very palpable by 1926-27 that American agriculture was extremely sick. This was also true of industries like coal mining. It was true of most of the extractive areas of the economy were suffering hard times long before the stock market crashed, long before the Great Depression. And of course, you could see also the downturn in the housing market by 1928. You could see the downturn in terms of new car purchases. I mean, there are only so many new cars or even

used cars that could be purchased given the very bad distribution of income by 1927-28. You mentioned the international nature of markets. We tend to think of the crash as an American event, but it certainly had global ramifications. Did the crash change the way the rest of the world perceived America or even how America perceived the rest of the world? Well, I think during a good part of the 1920s, there was a belief that America could somehow remain isolated from the events of the rest of the world, not only economic, but also political. There was a reluctance to see how interdependent the world economy and the world political situation had become as a result of the war

and certainly a result of the collapse of the old European empires, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I mean, there had been a complete reshuffling of the political deck as a result of the First World War. And there was a reluctance to come to terms with that so that the United States tried in many ways to isolate itself from what it believed to be the contamination of the political chaos that had been generated by the First World War and also by the economic fallout. So that we paid very scant attention to the way in which foreign economic and political matters were going to impact the United States. We didn't join the League of Nations. We didn't join the World Court. We didn't show much concern about the failure of the League of Nations to do anything about the growing

political instability in Europe and in East Asia. To what extent did we export the contagion then of the depression, even though we might have been trying to isolate from global elements of infecting us? Well, for example, we did some very stupid things during the 1920s under the fiscal and monetary policies of the Republican regimes, starting with Harding and Coolidge and then with Herbert Hoover. America had become basically the lender of last resort. We could have played the role that Great Britain played in the world economy in the 19th century by engaging in free trade to allow other nations to trade with us in order to earn American dollars. This would have been very important for many of the countries in Europe to be able to earn American dollars in order, for example, to pay off their war debts, in order to stimulate their own economies. Unfortunately, we tended to raise American tariffs. We tended to become very protectionist between 1921 and 1928, even 1932.

There was, of course, not only an effort to raise American taxes during the onset of the Great Depression, but there was also an effort to raise American tariffs even higher than from the 1920s. All of this prevented other foreign countries from effectively trading with us, earning the dollars that could have cushioned their own economic recovery, their own ability to, for example, pay back the loans they had borrowed from the United States. We didn't do that. So instead, we forced countries to borrow more from us. And so ultimately, you had created this kind of fragile structure of international indebtedness, where more and more people were indebted to us, but they couldn't pay their debts because of our very high tariffs. And that was a major contributing factor to the economic crash and to the economic problems that would bedevil the country after 1929. We are, of course, in our own 20s decade now, so it's easy to look back 100 years and marvel at the many issues that were theirs and are still ours today. Race, gender, morality, economic disparity.

Is that a fair thing to do to compare the 1920s and the 2020s? Well, I think there is. even though supposedly today, if you look at the role of the federal government, if you look at the role of the Federal Reserve, the role of the Treasury, the role of Congress, there's a great deal more economic literacy today than there was, say, in 1928 to 1929. So there are economic, there are fiscal and monetary tools at the command of our leaders today that one would hope prevent a recurrence of what happened in 2008, 2009, and also what happened in the 1920s. You've got the tools. The question is whether there's the willpower, the political willpower to use those tools effectively. I mean, President Biden is, of course, confronting that today. He's got a political party,

half of which is concerned about inflation and the growing federal deficit. The other half, far more concerned about economic inequality and about whether or not the government has done enough to address these economic inequalities. Certainly today, if you look at the distribution of income, it's probably almost as bad as in 1928 and 1929 in terms of the benefits going to the top one or two percent of the population compared to the 95 or the 90 percent within the society. So, I mean, the economic disparities are probably as worse today as they were in 1929. There's another similarity, perhaps not as striking. At the beginning of the 1920s, America was entering an isolationist phase because it was reeling and retreating from the horrors of World War I. Now, we are exiting a much smaller conflict, the war in Afghanistan,

but a longer one, certainly. And after eight years of an America First policy, an isolationist agenda, what similarities are there in America's view of the world in terms of isolationism between the 20s and now? Well, there is this legend of isolationism in the 1920s. I don't mean to diminish the importance of that, because certainly the United States rejected the League of Nations, rejected the World Court. We paid very little attention to events. We behaved very badly in terms of our economic policies with high tariffs, preventing most foreign countries from effectively trading with us during the 1920s.

So, yes, there was indeed this period of so-called isolationism. American popular culture, American consumer goods, American popular music, American motion pictures were beginning to dominate, to dominate the world culture as never before in the 1920s. So on the one hand, while we were politically, or you might say, diplomatically or militarily isolated from the rest of the world, American culture was beginning, of course, to have this enormous impact in Europe, in Asia, in Latin America, that American consumer goods, American popular culture was becoming dominant. And that would continue, of course, up through the 1930s, the 40s. So that by the beginning of the 1950s, I mean, American record companies, you know, were dominating probably 70% of the world market in terms of both long plane and,

you know, 45 RPM records. American automobiles were dominant in terms of probably 70% of the world market in terms of automobiles by 1950. So there was a way in which American consumer goods and American popular culture, at the very same time that you were experiencing this kind of military, political, economic isolationism, there was also this enormous impact of American culture upon the world. And that's what people were attempting to emulate and to follow. So if I can bring it back to a comparison between the two decades, it actually seems like there might be a comparison to be made that our political or international discourse might be retreating and isolationist, but we continue to export quite a great deal of our

culture and business innovations. Well, that's certainly true. If you look at the internet, if you look at our technology side, if you look at the impact of American science, I mean, just consider the way in which the COVID vaccines, of course, in which there's been a great deal of American influence. That's not to say that these are not, you know, international scientific achievements. They certainly are. There's been a huge impact with respect to European science and even Chinese science with regard to the pandemic. But American technology, American science, if you look at the Nobel Prizes, which I think came out this morning,

American science, American physics, American biology is supreme with regard to international scientific achievements. That's also true in mathematics and technology. And it's also true today in terms of popular culture, in terms of American motion pictures, American music. There is even American literature. I mean, there is a sense of American dominance in terms of popular culture, in terms of its influence around the world. At the same time of today, we have our culture wars. Our culture wars, it's not necessarily over prohibition or over the teaching of evolution,

although that's still with us. But it's still there with regard to issues like abortion, reproductive rights, and those cultural wars have not ended. And if you look at the red state, blue state division that we have today, whether it's in terms of the pandemic or whether it's in terms of political parties, that's very much very similar to the kind of divisions of the 1920s. When you think about the political struggle between, say, Al Smith in 1928 and Herbert Hoover, that was obviously a kind of red state, blue state division, a division between the cities of this country, the metropolitan areas, and the

countryside, the rural areas. So that Herbert Hoover was, you know, enormously popular and strong in the countryside, in the rural areas, much as former President Trump, of course, exploited that as well. And it's the metropolitan areas, the large cities. Al Smith, in 1928, Al Smith carried the 50 largest metropolitan areas. Politically, the Democratic Party carried those metropolitan areas. So that was a foretaste of what would happen under Roosevelt after 1932. In a quiet suburb, a community is shattered by the death of a beloved wife and mother. But this tragic loss of life quickly turns into something even darker. Her husband had tried to hire a hitman on the dark web to kill her.

And she wasn't the only target. Because buried in the depths of the internet is The Kill List, a cache of chilling documents containing names photos addresses and specific instructions for people's murders this podcast is the true story of how i ended up in a race against time to warn those who lives were in danger and it turns out convincing a total stranger someone wants them dead is not easy follow kill list List on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Kill List and more Exhibit C true crime shows like Morbid early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Check out Exhibit C in the Wondery app for all your true crime

listening. In November 1991, media tycoon Robert Maxwell mysteriously vanished from his luxury yacht in the Canary Islands. But it wasn't just his body that would come to the surface in the days that followed. It soon emerged that Robert's business was on the brink of collapse, and behind his facade of wealth and success was a litany of bad investments, mounting debt, and multi-million dollar fraud. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show Business Movers. We tell the true stories of business leaders who risked it all,

the critical moments that define their journey, and the ideas that transform the way we live our lives. In our latest series, a young refugee fleeing the Nazis arrives in Britain determined to make something of his life. Taking the name Robert Maxwell, he builds a publishing and newspaper empire that spans the globe. But ambition eventually curdles into desperation, and Robert's determination to succeed turns into a willingness to do anything to get

ahead. Follow Business Movers wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. Your book, Anxious Decades, was published in 1992, almost 30 years ago. Has your perspective on what that decade, the Roaring Twenties, meant to American history changed in those years since? I don't think so, because I see the 20s through the lens of things like the Scopes trial, the lens of prohibition through those culture wars of that particular period. I see it through the lens of the contradiction of isolationism and yet the fact that American culture was becoming dominant throughout other parts of the world. I see the division between the countryside and the metropolitan areas as continuing today, as it started in the 1920s. So I see not only the similarities between our own time and

that period of the interwar years, but I don't think I would change my perspective a great deal at all, given that we seem to be replaying much of the 1920s, or at least we're experiencing some of the very same issues and the same problems that were encountered in the 1920s. You've got a lot of people in this country today who feel left out, who feel they've been abandoned by the society, either culturally or politically. That's the very same feeling that many Americans had in the 1920s, the sense that they were losing ground, that they were economically losing ground, culturally losing ground in terms of controlling their own lives. I mean, I think that is a prevalent feeling today, and I think it was a prevalent feeling between 1921 and 1929. You mentioned the irresistible and probably correct comparison between that 20s and this 20s, but that 20s ended in the next decade with the Great Depression. So the obvious question is, with the hindsight we have of 100 years of history and the similarities we see, is there anything that we need to take

heed of in those lessons? And how might we apply them to our current moment so that 2030s do not resemble the 1930s? Well, I think today we have enough economic knowledge and we have enough economic tools that we can prevent something as catastrophic as the Great Depression of the 1930s. That's not to say we didn't experience a very rough period after 2008, 2009, but I think that lesson has also been learned. And I do not see a major economic crash similar to the 30s on the horizon. What I do fear is continuing political stalemate, continuing a sense of political hopelessness on the part of large numbers of people in American society that was manifested, I think, in the support for Donald Trump in the last political

election. I think those divisions are still prominent. I don't think that the Democratic Party today has the cohesion or the will to deal much with the economic and the social inequalities that often are driving these divisions, whether they're racial or ethnic or regional within American society. I think it's going to be very hard to overcome these social and political divisions that are present today. In the 1930s, of course, since so many people experienced hard times, there was a way in which the society actually experienced more consensus, more harmony, more unity between 1932 and say 1939 or 1940 than the country experienced in the previous decade. There was, of course, the desire to get back to the kind of consumer society that we had briefly tasted in the 1920s. So much of the New Deal program was the effort to

sort of recapture or to restore this sense that America was still a boundless society of economic opportunity and progress in which everyone could share in this kind of consumer society, which had been tasted, briefly tasted in the 1920s. Although, of course, there were millions of Americans who never tasted that in the 1920s. If you think of all of the agricultural problems, all of the industrial, all of the problems in the American labor movement in the 1920s, there were millions of Americans who were left out of the prosperity of the 1920s. In the 1930s, there was a sense you could recapture some of that sense of people sharing in the bounty of American life. You could restore a kind of consumer society, or at least

there would be a way to get back to the society of the 1920s. As that's probably our final question, I wonder if you could expound a little bit and just summarize bringing it back to today. If the fear was that there was a hope to recapture it, maybe that's the theme that you can bring back to, or that you mentioned that there were millions of people who did not taste the success of the 20s. So anything to close that up and bring it back to today? Well, I think you have the same situation today. I think you have movements of people

in America today who feel they have been left out of the political system, that their influence no longer counts, that the political structure is dominated by big money, that it's dominated by insiders. There's also a sense they've been left behind economically, that those who are in the more technologically sophisticated areas of the economy, those who have done well during the last 20 to 25 years economically, that there has been a way in which the bounty of America has not been shared equally. This is not only a racial issue, it also affects, of course, the white working class as well. So I think that you have much the same kind of anxieties today. You have a sense that many people have given up on American political life. They've given up in terms of the economic system. And unless their faith can be restored, their political faith that the system

does function, and it does function also for them. And the sense that the economy is not only working for, you know, the top five or 10%, but it's working for others as well. Unless you can restore that sense of confidence that the American economy and the American economic system are functioning and functioning for them as well as for those who are more privileged, I think we're in for a rough period of the next decade or so. So, Professor Parrish, thank you so much for talking to me on American History Tellers. Well, it's been a pleasure to be with you today. Unfortunately, we didn't get to some of my more hilarious anecdotes that I might have talked about. There was one with regard to Prohibition that I was just dying to, but I couldn't find a way to fit it in. Of course, during Prohibition,

a number of Americans, you know, would purchase their alcohol or whiskey or their gin from bootleggers. And oftentimes, they were, of course, concerned about the purity of what they had purchased. And I think there's a very funny story about one purchaser who was not confident that the whiskey he had purchased from a bootlegger was absolutely of drinking quality. So he took it to his local druggist for analysis. And the druggist, when he stopped by the next day or so, the druggist said, oh, I'm sorry to tell you, but your horse has diabetes. Oh, so an amber-tinted liquor then.

Yes, apparently so. Well, thank you again. It was a pleasure speaking with you. And may you always watch what you swallow. Thank you. And may you always watch what you swallow. Thank you. That was my conversation with Professor Michael E. Parrish. His courses at UC San Diego centered on 20th century American history and the history of constitutional law. His book, Anxious Decades, explores the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression. From Wondery, this was the fifth and final episode of the Roaring Twenties from American History Tellers. Next, in a new four-part series, we'll explore the lives and motivations of some

of America's most famous traitors, starting with the man whose name is synonymous with treason, Benedict Arnold. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Lindsey Graham for Airship. Audio editing by Molly Bach. Sound design by Derek Behrens.

This episode was produced by Isaiah Murtaugh. Our senior producer is Andy Herman. Our executive producers are Jenny Lauer-Beckman and Marshall Louis for Wondery. In the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Peru and New Zealand, lies a tiny volcanic island. It's a little-known British territory called Pitcairn, and it harboured a deep, dark scandal. There wouldn't be a girl on Pitcairn once they reached the age of 10 that would still a virgin.

It just happens to all of us. I'm journalist Luke Jones and for almost two years I've been investigating a shocking story that has left deep scars on generations of women and girls from Pitcairn. When there's nobody watching, nobody going to report it, people will get away with what they can get away with. In the Pitcairn trials I'll be uncovering a story of abuse and the fight for justice that has brought a unique, lonely Pacific island to the brink of extinction.

Listen to the Pitcairn Trials exclusively on Wondery+. Join Wondery in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.