Prohibition
We always had our normal share of pickpockets, forgers, bank robbers, wife beaters and assorted petty criminals.
But why steal an old lady's purse or the pennies out of a blind man's tin cup when you could make millions manufacturing fake booze?
Despite the Eighteenth Amendment and the gradual disappearance of real whisky, people were still thirsty and still desired a shot now and then.
But the government, with its habitual wisdom, instead of allowing its citizens to drink moderately like ladies and gentlemen, now fixed it so that the bonded whisky we drank was sometimes aged in tire wood for as much as two whole weeks.
Millions of people, teetotalers all their lives, who had never been in a saloon or a night club and were indifferent to the joys of a highball or a martini, suddenly developed a yen for hooch.
I was one of those millions.
I never had a drink before January 18, 1920.
It wasn't that I disapproved of it, morally, but I just didn't like the taste of the stuff.
As a matter of fact, I still don't.
I drink it now and then at parties to avoid being caught sober.
But with the advent of prohibition, I came to the conclusion that if it was illegal there must be something to it that I had never discovered.
Groucho MARX, Groucho and me
Hoover’s speech
We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poorhouse is vanishing from among us. We have not yet reached the goal, but given a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, and [sic] we shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this Nation.
Herbert HOOVER, Speech accepting the Republican Party Presidential nomination (1928).
How I Starred in the Follies of 1929
Soon a much hotter business than show business attracted my attention, and the attention of the country.
It was a little thing called the stock market.
I first became acquainted with it around 1926.
It was a pleasant surprise to discover that I was a pretty talented trader.
Or at least so it seemed, for everything I bought went up.
I had no financial adviser. Who needed one?
You could close your eyes, stick your finger any place on the big board and the stock you had just bought would start rising.
I never took profits. It seemed absurd to sell a stock at thirty when you knew it would double or triple within a year.
The most astonishing thing about the '29 market was that no one ever sold a stock.
The public just kept buying.
One day I rather timidly asked my broker about this speculative phenomenon.
"I don't know much about Wall Street," I began apologetically, "but what makes these stocks continue to go up?
Shouldn't there be some relation between a company's earnings, its dividends and the stock's selling price?"
He looked over my head at a new victim who had just entered the office, and said, "Mr. Marx, you've got a lot to learn about the stock market. What you don't know about securities would fill a book."
One special day, the market began wavering.
Some of the people I knew lost millions.
I was luckier.
All I lost was two hundred and forty thousand dollars. (Or one hundred and twenty weeks of work at two thousand per.)
I would have lost more but that was all the money I had.
The day of the final, convulsive crash, my friend, sometime financial adviser and talented trader, Max Gordon, phoned me from New York. In five words, he issued a statement that I think will, in time, compare favorably with any of the more memorable quotations in American history.
I'm referring to such imperishable lines as "Don't give up the ship," "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes,"
"Give me liberty or give me death!" and "I have but one life to give to my country."
These words sink into comparative insignificance alongside Max's notable quote. Never the frilly type of conversationalist, this time he even ignored the traditional "Hello." All he said was, "Marx, the jig is up!" Before I could answer, the phone was dead.
Groucho MARX, Groucho and me
FDR's First Inaugural Address
This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933)
Lebensraum
The National Socialist Movement, on the contrary, will always let its foreign policy be determined by the necessity to secure the space necessary to the life of our Folk.
Adolf HITLER, Mein Kampf
We are an anti-parlianmentarian party
We are an anti-parliamentarian party that for good reasons rejects the Weimar constitution and its republican institutions. We oppose a fake democracy that treats the intelligent and the foolish, the industrious and the lazy, in the same way. We see in the present system of majorities and organized irresponsibility the main cause of our steadily increasing miseries. So why do we want to be in the Reichstag?
We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with democracy’s weapons. If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem. It does not concern us. Any way of bringing about the revolution is fine by us… Mussolini entered parliament. Shortly afterward, he marched on Rome with his Black Shirts.
Joseph GOEBBELS, Der Angriff (1928)
They came for...
First they came for the Communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Social Democrats,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Social Democrat.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholic,
and I didn't speak out because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.
Martin NIEMÖLLER
Propaganda
If you tell the same lie enough times, people will believe it; and the bigger the lie, the better.
Joseph GOEBBELS
German autarky
When I realise that a particular raw material is indispensable for the war, I shrink from no effort to make us independent in this field. We must be able to dispose freely of iron, coal, petroleum, grain, livestock and timber.
Hitler’s Table Talk
CIENCIAS SOCIALES
