In January 1921, the five-masted schooner Carroll A. Deering was spotted off North Carolina's Cape Hatteras with its sails set but no crew. When the Coast Guard boarded it after it ran aground on the Diamond Shoals, food had been prepared and was untouched, and the lifeboats were gone. The twelve men aboard had been heading from Barbados to Norfolk, Virginia. Theories ranged from mutiny to pirates and Bolshevik plots, but a Coast Guard captain argued the crew most likely took the lifeboats to try to reach shore in 90 mph winds and huge waves, and that no lifeboat could survive those seas. The mystery was partly fuelled by a message in a bottle that was later shown to be a hoax by the man who claimed to have found it.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.