The plummet of the stock market in October 1929 created panic and scandal. Harder days were yet to come.
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.
Continue reading the entire piece on The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
______________________
Judge Glock is the director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal.
Photo by alexsl/Getty Images