Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

by Frederick Lewis Allen

business men were turning in desperation to Al Capone for protection;

summer and autumn of 1925. The whole city had become one frenzied real-estate exchange. There were said to be 2,000 real-estate offices and 25,000 agents marketing house-lots or acreage.

In 1920 its population had been only 30,000. According to the state census of 1925 it had jumped to 75,000—

a retired Congregational minister named Merrick had bought cheap land outside Miami, built a many-gabled house out of coral rock, and called it “Coral Gables.”

Now his son, George Edgar Merrick, had added to this parcel of land and was building what the advertisements called “America’s Most Beautiful Suburb.” The plan was enticing, for Merrick had had sense enough to insist upon a uniform type of architecture—what he called a “modified Mediterranean” style. By 1926 his development, which had incorporated itself as the City of Coral Gables, contained more than two thousand houses built or building,

In 1928 there were thirty-one bank failures in Florida; in 1929 there were fifty-seven; in both of these years the liabilities of the failed banks reached greater totals than were recorded for any other state in the Union.

right.

How many Americans actually held stock on margin during the fabulous summer of 1929 there seems to be no way of computing, but it is probably safe to put the figure at more than a million.

There was a new interest in the Russian experiment, not unmixed with sober fear. Maurice Hindus’s Humanity Uprooted, which had come out during the month of the panic and had sold very slowly at first, became a best seller during the gloomy autumn of 1930. In the summer of 1929 Russia had seemed as remote as China; in 1931, with bread-lines on the streets, the Russian Five-Year Plan became a topic of anxious American interest. The longer the paralysis of industry lasted—and how it lasted!—the more urgent became the demand for some measure of American economic planning which might prevent such disasters from recurring, without handing over undue power to an incompetent or venal bureaucracy.