Economic Forces in the 1920s & 1930s

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

. . .
f mass car ownership--as early as 1907, but only in the 1920s did the family car become a normal appurtenance of middle-class American families. Indeed, so widespread were cars by the end of the decade that even the new poor of the 1930s frequently owned them. When the movie version of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was shown to foreign audiences after the Second World War, I have heard it claimed that the audiences frequently burst into laughter. It was incomprehensible to them that the impoverished Joads should have made their trek to California in an automobile. American audiences had no such difficulty of comprehension; they remembered quite well that the automobile had been established as the norm before the Depression. Suburbia had already been established a few decades earlier; it was essentially the child of streetcar technology. But the spread of the automobile in the 1920s allowed suburbia to free itself from linear dependence upon trolley tracks and expand freely in all directions. State and federal highway systems appeared in that decade, and in 1925 the first freeway-style cloverleaf intersection was built in New Jersey, though true freeways did not appear until the late 1930s. Most fundamentally of all
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Approximate Word count = 4862
Approximate Pages = 19 (250 words per page)

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