Chapter 31 Vocabulary Flashcards
Racketeer
A person who obtains money illegally by fraud, bootlegging, gambling, or threats of violence. Racketeers invaded the ranks of labor during the 1920s, a decade when gambling and gangsterism were prevalent in American life.
Underworld
Those who live outside society’s laws, by vice or crime; organized crime.
Credit
In business, the arrangement of purchasing goods or services immediately but making the payment at a later date; a consumer loan.
Repression
In psychology; the forcing of instincts or ideas painful to the conscious mind into the unconscious, where they continue to exercise influence.
Surtax
A special tax, usually involving a raised rate on an already existing tax.
A. Mitchell Palmer
An Attorney General of the United States from 1919 to 1921. He is best known for overseeing the “Palmer Raids” during the Red Scare of 1919–20.
John T. Scopes
John Thomas Scopes was a teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, who was charged on May 5, 1925 for violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution in Tennessee schools.
Henry Ford
An American industrialist, the founder of the Ford Motor Company, and the sponsor of the development of the assembly line technique of mass production.
Nicola Sacco/Bartolomeo Vanzetti
Italian-born US anarchists who were convicted of murdering a guard and a paymaster during the armed robbery of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company on April 15, 1920, in South Braintree, Massachusetts, United States, and were executed by the electric chair seven years later at Charlestown State Prison. Both adhered to an anarchist movement that advocated relentless warfare against a violent and oppressive government.
Sigmund Freud
An Austrian neurologist and the father of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst.
Al Capone
An American gangster who attained fame during the Prohibition era as the co-founder and boss of the Chicago Outfit. His seven-year reign as crime boss ended when he was 33 years old.
Bible Belt
The region of the American South, extending roughly from North Carolina west to Oklahoma and Texas, where Protestant Fundamentalism and believe in literal interpretation of the Bible were traditionally strongest.
