"It Was a Period of High Hope"
-- Robert Sobel, historian

"What will they think of next!" was a 1920s saying, because new things were continually coming out. And there were new things which you could enjoy, not just for the few. So it was a period of high hope. That's why the depression was so severe -- because we started so high, we fell so low...

[In the 1920s] every part of the economy did well, except for coal mining and certain parts of agriculture. But this was a period in which the American household gets the washing machine, gets a refrigerator, goes off gas light and gets electricity in some cities, in which the family buys a car and goes on a long vacation. This didn't occur before the 1920s.

In 1920, for the first time, the census showed that a majority of Americans lived in cities. We were becoming an urbanized society. And if you lived in a city in 1925, '26 or thereabouts, you had all these things going for you. In addition, you were getting your first vacation. People didn't get vacations before the 1920s. You learned how to buy goods on time, so you didn't defer your expectations. You were working a five-and-a-half day week, not a six-day week... So things looked pretty good.

"Oh, They Lived. They Really Lived."
-- Patricia Livermore, daughter-in-law of Jesse Livermore

[The Livermores] lived in utter splendor, typical of the twenties when... society was showy and wealth was displayed. They had a beautiful place on 76th Street in Manhattan on the West Side, off Central Park. They had a floor at 813 Fifth Avenue because Dorothea did not like to go to the West Side to change her clothes. They had a house in Great Neck. They had a summer house in Lake Placid. They had a house in Palm Beach. They had a private railroad car, two yachts. The only yacht that was bigger was J. P. Morgan's. And they used one of them, the big one, very frequently when they went to Europe. They lived very comfortably...

Jesse Livermore had a ticker tape in every home that he owned, on his railway cars, on his yachts... They had several Rolls Royces, lots of chauffeurs. They had a staff of about 20 or 25 and in each place, in each house, see, and with the exception of Dorothea's personal maid, they did not take their staffs with them. They simply kept them year-round in all their establishments...

Oh, they lived. They really lived... Mrs. Livermore was a spender. And, of course, she loved to buy. She spent her days buying and buying and buying...

One day Dorothea Livermore decided that her sons should grow up speaking French. So, let's say, between probably nine or ten o'clock in the morning and four o'clock or four-thirty, whenever Mr. Livermore was due back, she fired her entire staff and replaced them with all French-speaking servants. So that when he came home he wasn't even able to change his clothes because his new valet didn't speak English and Mr. Livermore did not speak French. So they finally reached a compromise by the next day that he could keep his valet, but his valet could not talk to the children because the children from that point on were to speak nothing but French. And, of course, she didn't speak French, so there was very little communication in the family and within a week the old staff was returned and a French governess was retained and that was the end of that little fiasco.

"They'd Be Drinking the Gin... We'd Be... Doing the Bookkeeping"
-- Tom McCormick, stock sales clerk, 1929

Trinity and Greenwich, between them on James Street, they had these little red-brick buildings, old buildings... There was a speakeasy in there. You'd walk in. It was up one flight. And he had a couple of desks, one desk... the dust was that thick on them. And in the back he made his gin. You know, bathtub gin. I was only a kid at the time and I was working on doing bookkeeping with these two older fellows, bookkeepers. So every night they'd send me over there with a dollar, to get a fifth of gin. I'd go over, walk in. "What do you want?" "Fifth of gin." "What do you want, Gilbeys or some..." Didn't matter what. Just put any label, any label you ask, it was the same gin. This I'd bring back. These two fellows I worked with. One of them was a graduate of Rutgers and the other one was a graduate of Fordham. And they had been football players, they were big, heavy.... they'd be sitting in the front office with their feet up and they'd be drinking the gin. And the other kid and I, we'd be out there doing the bookkeeping. Writing up the books...

These blotters that they used to send down to the clearinghouse, night clearing. If the handwriting wasn't very legible, real good -- in fact, they took the best hand writer to write them up -- they'd turn around and send it back to you. And they'd fine you. They would fine you for writing it wrong. If you'd have made a mistake, one of the figures, five dollar fine. You got your sheet and you had to balance your sheet at the end of the day and send it down to them and they'd take all these sheets from all the houses, put them together and they'd pair off all the trades. So in other words, if you sold 500 shares of Telephone and you bought 400, you know, on the buy side, you would be delivering 100, they paired them all off, four against the five. So you were selling one. That was ... how could I put it? That was like the computer we have today. Cutting down on the work.

"Everybody Commuted by Yacht"
-- Craig Mitchell, son of Charles E. Mitchell

There's a telescope on the front porch of the National Golf Links of America in Southampton that people very often nowadays say -- what is that telescope for? Well the telescope was for identifying the various members' yachts. Everybody commuted by yacht over the weekend and we had a little yacht club at the foot of the National. And the head steward, as a new yacht would approach and drop anchor, would come out and read the name of the yacht and then go to the yacht club register and find out which member it belonged to and then he would call and alert the chauffeur at the house to come down and pick up the owner. Of course nowadays, there's nothing in that yacht basin, totally deserted. In the old days it would be crowded with yachts... That's just one tiny little example of how things differ today than they were in the old days.

"You Couldn't Hardly Believe It Fell"
-- Reuben L. Cain, stock salesman, 1929

I really went to look for a job on Wall Street hoping that I could make money... You'd heard so much about the bull market and the way everything was going up... and read about such people as Charlie Mitchell, the president of National City Bank, and a lot of others -- the J. P. Morgan group -- and they seemed to be so strong and so powerful and knew so much about the market that, as they kept saying "This is going to correct itself," you tended to believe them. And then when it did fall, you still couldn't hardly believe it fell.

There were all sorts of rumors and you'd see people going down the street looking up to see if they could catch somebody jumping out the window. Now it turned out there weren't as many people jumped out the window as they reported, but some did. And others committed suicide other ways.

"A Fistful of Red Orders"
-- Horace Silverstone, New York Stock Exchange telephone clerk, 1929

In October of 1929 I was just being broken in on the phones on the floor of the Stock Exchange, cold. The wires from the order room and from any special customer or any registered rep that had a direct wire to me, would put an order in and I had to take the order -- buy a thousand shares of Auburn Motors or whatever. Give it to a broker. But at that time I was just a clerk. I was brought down two months before that crash took place to learn the wires. So when the crash took place, I didn't know enough about what was going on. And it was just like a nightmare. I couldn't believe what was going on. In those days, every buy order was on a black pad. And every sell order was on a red pad. And all I saw was members running around with a fistful of red orders. I couldn't find any bids. I'd come back to the phone and say, "there's no bid for New York Central, it's down ... it's selling down 15 points." The tape ran ... in those days the market was open from 10 until 3. That's during the five day week and on Saturday, from 10 to 12 on Saturday, we had a short weekend. Anyhow, the tape ran two and a half hours late in a five-hour session and didn't stop running until 8:30 at night the day of the crash.

"Everything Was Worth Practically Nothing"
-- Arthur Marx, son of Groucho Marx

Everyone was in [the market] in those days, in the Roaring Twenties. It seemed like an easy way to make money... "The market'll just keep up and up and up." And, of course, the market, when it had its big crash, everything was worth practically nothing, including all of my father's money, which was about $250,000, which was a lot of money in those days...

[My father] told me... that he took a tip from a bellhop in a hotel, the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Boston, and the guy said, "Buy this stock. It's going to go up. It's down two points. Buy it. It's a good buy." So he went out and bought $50,000 worth of something and, of course, it went down again to nothing... He said that everybody was giving tips, the doorman and the caddies on the golf course and everybody was in the market. And they all learned the hard way.

"A New World Is Coming"
-- Craig Mitchell, son of Charles E. Mitchell

Looking back it seems like a complete dichotomy between the days up until the great crash of '29 and the subsequent depression and everything that has obtained since then... I think one example is the experience of a great friend of my father, Reggie Waterbury, who was almost a member of the family. Reggie was a bon vivant and great fun and he was sort of the number one extra man at every party. And a great, great friend of my sister and mine...

When the Depression came, after the crash and when we got into 1930, Father received a letter from him saying... "Dear Charlie, I will always revere our friendship and remember the great times we've had together, but I know that a new world is coming and I'm not prepared to live in it and I'm dropping out. Please don't have me followed, you will never see me again. I send you all my dearest affection, Reggie." And indeed, he would go from town to town one step ahead of the detectives my father would send to try and find him. And he was never again located and he was never able to make that transition.

Of course a lot of other people jumped out the window. By noon on Black Thursday there had been eleven suicides of fairly prominent investors. A lot of people either drank themselves to death, committed suicide, or just disappeared. Reggie was one of them. And I will say, looking back on it... the world in those days, prior to the Great Depression was a totally, totally different thing with almost nothing in common to what we live in today.

"Carried Away By the Illusion of Ever-Increasing Wealth"
-- John Kenneth Galbraith, economist

One of the things you must understand about 1929 and the antecedent years, as about any speculative episode, is the danger... in attributing intelligence to the simple fact that people are associated with large sums of money or large financial operations. We don't ask whether they're intelligent. We say, they're associated with all this money, so they must be intelligent. We attribute intelligence to association with financial operations. And only afterwards do we discover that error and that the people involved can be extremely successful in gulling themselves. That they can be in effect, and I use the word advisedly, marvelously stupid.

I used to be quite an optimist... I thought that by keeping the memory of the 1929 crash alive we would have a warning against the kind of feckless, fatuous optimism which caused people to get in and shove up the markets and shove it up more and get carried away by the illusion of ever-increasing wealth. I've given up on that hope because we've had it happen too often again since.