96 Years ago, the Stock Market Crashed. It Broke the Nation
By Bruce Ramsey
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The task of financial history is to tell the story without being dry. A few have done it well: Liaquat Ahamed in Lords of Finance (2009) is one. Andrew Ross Sorkin’s new book, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History and How It Shattered a Nation, (567 pages, Viking), tells a human story around the stock crash of October 1929, which began the Great Depression.
At 449 pages of text, 1929 is an easy read. It is not about finance really. It’s about the financiers, speculators, regulators, and politicians. “This is not a story about those who endured the fallout,” the author writes. “It’s about those who helped set it in motion, because that’s where the responsibility lies, and where the lessons remain.”
“Responsibility, Lessons”: I suspect Sorkin’s editor put that in there. Sorkin, a financial columnist for The New York Times, did not write the book in search of lessons. He’s not arguing for an economic theory, and he is no muckraker out to scarify the “robber barons.” He wants to tell a story, a narrative, through the eyes of his characters. “Who were the people caught up in it, [and] what did their lives look and feel like?” he writes. And he finds — no surprise — that his players “are often no different than anyone else — flawed, self-interested, complicated.”
Sorkin began his research in the collected papers of Thomas Lamont, a key partner in the private bank of J.P. Morgan. The letters and diaries allow him to climb into the mind of a man long dead, so he can describe meetings and scenes in fine detail. Starting in early 1929, the reader is led through the lives of with investment banker Lamont, short-seller Jesse Livermore, Democratic money man John Raskob, gold-standard Senator Carter Glass, and the intelligent but aloof President Herbert Hoover. It is all quite a tale, particularly the first half of the book, when all these players are rushing toward a cliff that a few can sense but no one can see.
https://www.postalley.org/2025/11/07/96-years-ago-the-stock-market-crashed-it-broke-the-nation/