1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation - 50

This book is the product of hundreds of sources—private letters, transcripts, oral histories, architectural plans, memoirs, newspaper accounts, corporate filings, and other archives—some of which were recorded contemporaneously and others that were made years or even decades after the moment being described.

I traveled across the United States—as well as to Europe—to visit universities, public and private libraries, museums, and homes that housed the papers and documents that are the basis of this narrative.

Writing an account of such a historical spectacle was a test in amassing detail upon detail about every character, their relationships, and their evolving views of a momentous story they were experiencing in real time. Their own views of their roles in these events, as absolute as they often were as the crisis unfolded, sometimes shifted years later when they were challenged by new facts.

To write this book, I found myself constantly returning to both the journalists of the time and the authors who came later—those who wrote biographies of the individuals of that era, who tried to make sense of the chaos, who pulled the threads together. They served as my guides.

The Day the Bubble Burst by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts, Once in Golconda by John Brooks, and John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Great Crash 1929 remain three of the most lucid and essential books about the period. But so, too, is The Hellhound of Wall Street by Michael Perino, which smartly and stylishly reintroduces the Senate investigation that tried—haltingly—to hold Wall Street accountable. Ron Chernow’s The House of Morgan is a towering work that helped frame the contours of financial power. I also relied on Edward Lamont’s The Ambassador from Wall Street for its sharp portrait of Thomas Lamont, and David Farber’s Everybody Ought to Be Rich for the larger-than-life story of John Jakob Raskob. Earl Sparling’s Mystery Men of Wall Street , written in the crash’s immediate aftermath, helped convey how the titans of finance were viewed during their lifetimes.

To understand Herbert Hoover, I drew on Herbert Hoover in the White House by Charles Rappleye, Kenneth Whyte’s elegant and sobering Hoover , and Theodore Joslin’s insider account, Hoover Off the Record , which, while self-protective, is filled with revealing moments of insecurity, anger, and resignation. Eric Rauchway’s Winter War captures the political brinksmanship of the transition from Hoover to Roosevelt with stunning clarity.

Nomi Prins’s All the Presidents’ Bankers traces the intimate entanglements between Washington and Wall Street across a century. It’s a smart, deeply researched book that reminded me how much of financial history is shaped not just by money but by relationships.

For Carter Glass, I relied on Carter Glass by Rixey Smith and Norman Beasley and George Herring’s The Unlikely Reformer , both of which helped explain the contradictions of a man who helped write the rules of modern finance while distrusting almost everything modern.

Understanding William C. Durant required chasing shadows—so much about him was performance. But the most useful window into his mind came from The Dream Maker by Lawrence Gustin. Jesse Livermore proved equally elusive, and I’m grateful to Richard Smitten’s World’s Greatest Stock Trader and Tom Rubython’s Boy Plunger , both of which grappled with the myth and man behind Livermore’s trades.

No book inspired me more in thinking about how to write a story like this—narrative in form, rigorous in research—than Liaquat Ahamed’s Lords of Finance . It frames, with extraordinary clarity, the conversations around reparations, central banks, and the ideological battles of the interwar years—debates that echo into our own time.

Churchill’s time in North America, covered in works like No More Champagne by David Lough and Churchill in North America by Bradley P. Tolppanen, offered insight into the colorful man and how ideas about wealth, debt, and national power were transatlantic in nature.

This book was also shaped by academic work that doesn’t always get the credit it deserves. I’m especially indebted to Alexander Tabarrok’s work on Glass–Steagall and the regulatory landscape, which helped me better understand the complex—and often misunderstood—legacy of financial reform in the wake of the crash. The paper “Charles E. Mitchell: Scapegoat of the Crash,” by Thomas F. Huertas and Joan L. Silverman, added nuance and data to a figure often reduced to caricature.

None of this would have been possible without the extraordinary help of archivists and librarians across the country. I am especially grateful to those at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, the University of Virginia, Stanford, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives—all of whom not only opened doors to physical collections but often helped guide me toward files I didn’t know I needed. In many cases, their deep knowledge of forgotten boxes and uncatalogued folders made all the difference.

The papers of Thomas Lamont are housed at Harvard’s Baker Library. Florence Corliss Lamont’s archive resides at Smith College. The University of Virginia is home to the Carter Glass papers. The John Jakob Raskob papers are held at the University of Notre Dame. I relied on the Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York, for FDR’s early financial thinking. And I’m deeply grateful to the Kettering University Archives in Flint for materials related to Durant and the birth of General Motors. Bernard Baruch’s papers are housed at Princeton University; Russell Cornell Leffingwell’s and Irving Fisher’s papers—both crucial to the story—are at Yale, as is the remarkable Businessweek archive, which offered a unique lens into the financial language of the moment. The Morgan Library—as well as the historical archivists at JPMorganChase and Citigroup (National City)—were very helpful.

I owe a special debt of gratitude to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The minutes from the most critical months of 1929 had never been made public, but I formally requested their release. After providing a set of redacted versions, the Fed—after further prompting—chose to release them in full. These were not transcripts, but they were deeply valuable. They confirmed the internal tempo of the moment, added time stamps to key decisions, and provided a grounding that helped verify or challenge the public record. They became one of the clearest anchors for telling this story.

Equally vital—and astonishing in its availability—was the digital archive maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis through its FRASER project. The site itself is a quiet marvel, preserving thousands of pages of overlooked documents, speeches, memos, and financial records from across the Fed system. Among the most revealing were diary entries from Charles Sumner Hamlin, the first governor of the Federal Reserve and a member of the Fed’s board from 1916 to 1936, which gave rare insight into the private mindset of those shaping—and reacting to—the unfolding crisis. These firsthand notes helped confirm, complicate, and contextualize key decisions. I found myself returning to them again and again.

The Center for Research in Security Prices, an affiliate of the University of Chicago, combed its database to provide some of the historical stock prices that are referenced in this volume.

As exacting as I’ve tried to be, I am sure that I have overlooked or forgotten to credit an article, a document, or someone whose work helped illuminate this story. For that, I offer my sincere apologies in advance.

In the endnotes that follow, I’ve tried to directly cite the original source material that I reviewed wherever possible. When multiple authors have used the same quote or covered the same scene, I’ve cited the version that either influenced me most or that I encountered first—though in truth, there are many cases where multiple attributions could have fairly been made.

Many scenes in this book were constructed using multiple sources—often a combination of transcripts, letters, newspaper clippings, and published works—as reflected in the accompanying endnotes. In instances where a single endnote appears near the beginning of a scene or conversation, the cited work is the source drawn upon for the full passage below it. In some cases, language has also been smoothed or updated—“percent,” for example, rather than “per cent”—for readability.

I’ve also included a bibliography at the end of the book, not just to acknowledge those sources but to offer the reader a kind of treasure map—a guide for anyone who wants to go deeper into this remarkable and turbulent period.