Content area
Full Text
The stock market crash of 1929, a major trauma that still haunts the national memory, has received surprisingly little attention from scholars in seventy years and has produced even less agreement as to its causes and consequences. This review of the literature suggests that the disagreements and debates over the crash reveal as much about what can and cannot be known for certain about the event as they do about potential answers to the mysteries of the crash.
Few historical problems continue to perplex scholars more than the Great Crash of 1929. More than seventy years later, the story of the crash remains well known but continues to defy clear or convincing explanation. Three questions in particular remain as vivid and elusive today as they did then: What caused the crash? What was the relation of the crash to the long depression that ensued? Could such a crash and depression happen again? In our own era, when an aged but seemingly indomitable bull market seems at last to have floundered, the last question has taken on an urgency that transcends mere scholarship. In reviewing the literature on this subject, this article explores not only the range of positions taken on these questions but also the broader issue of why so little agreement has been reached. It suggests as well some ways in which the crash illustrates certain limitations in the approaches used by scholars to tackle such historical questions.
Unlike most market disasters, the Great Crash was not the event of one day but a series of events stretched initially across the week from Wednesday, October 23, through Thursday, October 31. During these eight frantic sessions, a total of nearly 70.8 million shares were traded-more than had changed hands in any month prior to March 1928. The Dow Jones average dropped 53 points, from 326.51 to 273.51 and the New York Times combined average, 50.21 points: from 280.21 to 230.1 In broader terms, the crash extended until November 13, by which time the Dow had fallen another 74.82 to 198.69 and the Times average, another 63.8-to 166.15. Altogether the Dow lost 39 percent and the Times average, 41 percent. Of the seven abbreviated trading sessions during those bleak November days, only one registered a...