“1929
By Andrew Ross Sorkin
Viking, 592 pages, $35
Of all the improbable coincidences of the 20th century, the fact that Winston Churchill happened to be in the New York Stock Exchange gallery in October 1929, watching one of the worst market meltdowns ever, has to rank as one of the oddest. Churchill also watched as, he later said, "under my very window a gentleman cast himself down fifteen storeys and was dashed to pieces, causing a wild commotion and the arrival of the fire brigade."
The 1929 stock-market crash is one of those pivot points historians use to neatly divide history. Before, there was the roaring '20s; after, the hungry '30s. Some have drawn a straight line from the collapse that day to the global Depression, the rise of the Nazis and the outbreak of World War II, in which Churchill would again make an appearance.
In "1929" Andrew Ross Sorkin brings the drama of the crash to a high pitch. He has consulted weather reports, diaries, architectural records and every newspaper imaginable to create a vivid and historically accurate account of the boom, crash and aftermath. Although Mr. Sorkin offers hints that the crash looms larger in our memory than it did in the moment, his focus is on portraying the lives of the people who lived through it. It is one of the best narrative histories I've read.
The book is crowded with characters, but "Sunshine Charlie" Mitchell, the head of National City Bank of New York, provides a sort of leitmotif. When Mitchell started his career at the bank's stock-and-bond subsidiary, National City was already the largest bank in the country. As he rose through the ranks, he brought the trader ethos to the rest of the institution, creating a "bank for all" that offered every kind of financial service available to the market. Mitchell's bank helped customers delve into stocks at a moment when the rising market nearly quadrupled, in little more than a year, the bank's own stock price.
When the Federal Reserve tried to squelch the rise of the stock market in early 1929, Mitchell announced that National City would instead lend money to support the market. Sen. Carter Glass of Virginia called Mitchell's action a "mutiny" that thwarted the government's efforts to halt speculation. When the stock market finally crashed in October, Glass said it was because the market had confused traditional banking and stock trading. He called it Mitchellism.
After the first big crash, on Oct. 24 (later known as Black Thursday), the market suffered both a Black Monday and a Black Tuesday. It was clear that this was more than a passing panic. At a dinner on Fifth Avenue where Churchill was the guest of honor, Mitchell, trying to maintain his usual bonhomie, stood up and offered a toast: "To my fellow former millionaires." Churchill entertained the guests with his description of the trading floor during the crash, which he later described as looking like a "disturbed ant heap."
The once-sunny Charlie Mitchell was soon dragged before congressional committees to answer for questionable stock-selling practices and stratospheric bonuses. He was arrested for tax evasion. Glass and Henry Steagall, his sometime rival in the House, passed their eponymous bill, which broke up National City and other banks that had stock-trading operations.
The boom was over, the supposed malefactors had been brought to justice and reform had come. To many it seemed, as President Franklin Roosevelt said in 1933 during his first inaugural address, that "the money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization." People knew to whom Roosevelt was referring. Two days later, Time magazine headlined an article "Damnation of Mitchell." In private Roosevelt was more explicit. "My gosh," he said, "I feel Charlie took my money."
There is a tendency to make economic tales resemble morality plays, where excess and pride lead ineluctably to poverty and humiliation. Mr. Sorkin resists that temptation. Here Sunshine Charlie appears more unlucky than oppressive. It later came out that National City's efforts to lend money on stocks had the Federal Reserve's internal approbation, not its opposition. Mitchell lost much of his personal fortune defending National City stock, even though colleagues told him he had no duty to do so. He won an acquittal in his tax case. Later research has shown that banks with investment arms, such as National City, were if anything more stable than traditional banks.
But there is a larger problem with the common story of the crash, and it's a problem that Mr. Sorkin at times recognizes. The year 1929 was, obviously, not a good one for stocks. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 17% for the year. But 1929 wasn't even the worst year for stocks in that decade. In 1920 the Dow cratered 33%, yet what followed was not a Great Depression but an unparalleled boom.
The truth is that the stock-market crash did not inaugurate the Great Depression, nor did people at the time believe that it did. As Mr. Sorkin notes, the New York Times's top story of 1929 was not the crash but Richard Byrd's flight to the South Pole. In 1955 John Kenneth Galbraith punctured one of the strangely enduring myths about the aftermath: that there was a wave of suicides. In fact, the suicide rate declined that fall. The death Churchill witnessed likely happened on the morning of Black Thursday, before the crash, and might have been accidental.
After October the stock market started to recover and by the spring of 1930 it was up almost 50%. The real crash happened that year, after the Smoot-Hawley tariffs and a series of bank failures, abetted by bad Federal Reserve policy, sent the economy and the market into a tailspin. The worst year for stocks in American history was 1931, when the Dow dropped by more than 50%. It was only later that the 1929 crash came to be seen as a turning point in public memory.
Although Mr. Sorkin briefly makes the case that the crash had a psychological effect that eventually led to the Depression, the reasons for, or the economic consequences of, the crash are not the focus of his book.
In his afterword, Mr. Sorkin says his model was Walter Lord's "A Night to Remember" (1955), about another crash, that of the Titanic. Mr. Sorkin says he, too, wants "to restore the texture and detail of the human lives" that lived through tragedy. He has succeeded.
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Mr. Glock is the director of research at the Manhattan Institute and the author of "The Dead Pledge: The Origins of the Mortgage Market and Federal Bailouts, 1913-1939."” [1]
1. Fall Books: The Year the Roaring Stopped. Glock, Judge. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 11 Oct 2025: R4.
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