Of all the influences that operated upon American culture in the 1920s and the 1930s, none perhaps acted with more dramatic effect than economic forces. The very names by which the two decades have gone down in popular memory testifies to the immense force of economics. The Roaring Twenties may have roared in many ways: the roaring engines of jalopies, rumrunners' boats, and the Spirit of St. Louis, and the roar of gangsters' Tommy guns are the images we preserve in our cultural newsreel of the age. But above all, it roared with economic energy--the roar of factories running at full tilt and the roar of crowds gathered around the stock-market tickers as they proclaimed ever-new highs.
The crowds watching the tickers also provided the final roar of the Twenties. On Thursday, October 24, 1929,
Outside the Exchange in Broad Street a weird roar
could be heard. A crowd gathered. Police Commissioner
Grover Whalen became aware that something was happening
and dispatched a special police detail to Wall Street
to insure the peace. More people came and waited,
though apparently no one knew for what. A workman
appeared atop one of the high buildings to accomplish
some repairs, and the multitude assumed he was a
would-be suicide and waited impatiently for him to
Black Thursday, as it came to be called, was followed by a series of other "black" days in the weeks that followed, but the stock market slide that began that day would not end for another three and a half years, until the spring of 1933, the same spring in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated President and launched the first "Hundred Days" of the New Deal. The decade of the 1930s, of the New Deal, is remembered in the popular culture simply as "the Great Depression." It needs no other name, and the name has indeed effaced the memory of every panic and depression that came previously, all of which are essentially forgotte...