1 - The Discovery of Poverty and the Return of Commitment

Summary

When the Crash of October 1929 ended the biggest speculative binge in the nation’s history, it brought the Roaring Twenties to a close. Scary economic indicators had been gathering for years. Farm income and industrial wages remained low throughout the twenties, and by 1929, with 35 percent of all personal income going into the pockets of 5 percent of the population, even the middle class was showing signs of stress. Residential construction, consumer spending, industrial production, commodity prices, and employment were going down while business inventories were going up. Looking back on the late twenties from the vantage point of the early thirties, F. Scott Fitzgerald located signs of anxiety in everything from the “nervous beating of feet” and the sudden “popularity of cross-word puzzles” to the remembered faces of Princeton classmates who had disappeared “into the dark maw of violence” before the Crash, including one who had jumped from a skyscraper and another who had “crawled home” to die at the high-toned Princeton Club after being beaten in a Manhattan speakeasy. But it took a crash to counter what Zelda Fitzgerald called “the infinite promises of American advertising.” Borrow to spend was one message, borrow to invest, another. Bankers, brokers, and political leaders directed the campaign; newspapers, magazines, and radios reinforced it. McNeel’s of Boston was one of countless “financial service” operations that specialized in persuading people they could get rich on borrowed money – a message many politicians in Washington endorsed. On December 4, 1928, in his last address to Congress, President Coolidge assured the nation that it could “regard the present with satisfaction and anticipate the future with optimism.”