1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation - 1

Many people know 1929 as the year of the stock market crash—the event that triggered the Great Depression and scarred a generation.

But what led to it, and what followed, is a far more intricate, complex drama—one that is misunderstood or unknown. At its core, it is a deeply human story.

After writing Too Big to Fail , about the financial crisis of 2008, I wanted to explore the most infamous crash in history with the same level of depth, granular detail, and human emotion—not just to tell the story but to better understand what we might learn from it.

The narrative that follows is the product of more than eight years of reporting and thousands of hours of research: an account built on private letters, diaries, memos, notes, oral histories, court records, board transcripts, depositions, and lawsuits—some of which had never been published or closely examined.

In one instance, I was granted access, for the very first time, to the confidential board minutes of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York during the most pivotal months of 1929. In another, I was able to secure a revealing, unpublished memoir of a Wall Street insider who lived through it all.

Each scene in this book was assembled from fragments: an offhand remark in a four-hundred-page transcript, a forgotten oral history, a clipped line in a newspaper, a floor plan showing how far someone had to walk to deliver a message. Detail by detail, layer by layer, the picture came into focus.

By understanding the motivations and disparate stories of the central actors, we can begin to understand how this calamity happened. Which is why this is not a story about those who endured the fallout—it’s about those who helped set it in motion, because that’s where the responsibility lies, and where the lessons remain.

What emerged from this work changed how I understood this period in history. Much of what I uncovered challenged my assumptions—and may challenge yours. And if the characters, issues, and policy choices from that time appear to echo our present moment a little too clearly, that’s because they do.

The arc of the story of 1929 may feel like the response to Ernest Hemingway’s famous line: “ How did you go bankrupt?”

“Two ways,” Hemingway’s character replies. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

That’s how confidence—the lifeblood of our economy—disappears: gradually, and then suddenly.

While I was fortunate to uncover previously unseen documents during my research, this book would not exist without the enduring scholarship of others. Because this is written as a narrative, most citations appear in the endnotes, along with commentary that expands or contextualizes particular details.

I’m indebted to the many researchers, archivists, economists, and historians who devoted their lives to studying this period; to the journalists who wrote contemporaneously in the newspapers and magazines of the time; and to authors like John Kenneth Galbraith, whose The Great Crash 1929 remains canonical; John Brooks, whose Once in Golconda is a classic; and Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts, who wrote the riveting The Day the Bubble Burst . There are many more who are credited at the end of this volume.

In 1920, H. G. Wells, the futurist, already anxious about the direction of the modern world, wrote: “ Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”

I didn’t write this narrative to declare a winner in that race. But I hope that by piecing together the story of 1929, I’ve made the path a little clearer—and the stakes a little harder to ignore.