20-30 Flashcards
Racketeer
Someone who commits crime for profit, especially in fraud cases.
Racketeering- the exploitation of pressured sales with the intent to engage in criminal activity that is structured in a delegated hierarchy from a dominant figure. Many mobster actions are called racketeering, but some businesses that ‘launder money’ also engage in it.
Underworld
Those who live outside society’s laws, by vice or crime
Credit
The ability to make purchases with the promise that the money will be repaid later, your reputation for financial responsibility, which entitles you to be trusted when buying and borrowing, also the time allowed for payment of something, a source of revenue for financial institutions, credit is not more money; it is tomorrow’s money
Repression
Involuntary pushing of unpleasant feelings out of conscious thought
Surtax
A special tax, usually involving a raised rate on an already existing tax
A. Mitchell Palmer
Palmer Attorney General in 1920s; earned the title of the “fighting Quaker” by his excess of zeal in rounding up suspects of Red Scare; ultimately totaled about six thousand; This drive to root out radicals was redoubled in June 1919, when a bomb shattered his home
John T. Scopes
high school biology teacher who was indicted for teaching evolution in the “Monkey Trial” of 1925; defended by nationally known attorneys; clash between theology and biology proved inconclusive; found guilty and fined $100; Tennessee supreme court set fine aside on a technicality
Henry Ford
the mass-produced Model-T car, which sold at an affordable price. It pioneered the use of the assembly line. Also greatly increased his workers wages and instituted many modern concepts of regular work hours and job benefi
Nicola Sacco/Bartolomeo Vanzetti
anti-redism and antiforeignism were reflected in a notorious case regarded by liberals as “judicial lynching”. Sacco, a shoe-factory worker, and Vanzetti, a fish peddler, were convicted in 1921 of the murder of a Massachusetts paymaster and his guard; jury and judge prejudiced against defendants because they were Italians, atheists, anarchists, and draft dodgers; case dragged on for six years until 1927, when the men were electrocuted; became martyrs in the “class struggle” for communists and other radicals; liberals upset and ashamed; evidence not enough for death sentence
Sigmund Freud
Viennese physician; justified the new sexual frankness in his writings; appeared to argue that sexual repression was responsible for a variety of nervous and emotional ills; thus not pleasure alone but also health demanded sexual gratification and liberation
Al Capone
Grasping and murderous booze distributor; known as “Scarface”; from Chicago; in 1925, he began six years of gang warfare that netted him millions of blood-splattered dollars; branded “Public Enemy Number One”; could not be convicted of the cold-blooded massacre, on St. Valentine’s Day in 1929, of seven disarmed members of a rival gang; after serving most of an eleven year sentence in a federal penitentiary for income-tax evasion, he was released as a syphilitic wreck
Bible Belt
The region of the American South, extending roughly from North Carolina west to Oklahoma and Texas, where Protestant Fundamentalism and belief in literal interpretation of the Bible have been the strongest.
