Neither of the authors of this book is an economist or a business writer by profession. The style of the book is quite different from most financial histories in that it spends more of the text on recording the thoughts and feelings of the characters. In fact, it is more like the style one expects to find in a novel. The attribution of thoughts or feelings to the main characters would make a reader suspicious of the validity of the accounts except for two things: the book was written forty years ago when many of the principals or their families were still alive and available for interview and the authors cite numerous journals, diaries, and interviews among their sources.
The book covers the last months of the Great Bull Market from New Year's Eve 1928 to October 1929. It is not restricted to the usual players in the Street, but takes individuals at several levels of society and at venues outside New York. These individual stories reinforce the narrative by adding a poignancy to human plans overwhelmed by the event. There are several projects or goals set by the participants for the last week in October that the reader knows will never come to fruition. The stories include the standard players such as Michael Meehan, the pool operator; Thomas Lamont and George Whitney, partners at Morgan; Richard Whitney, George's brother, embezzling from his customers for one bad investment after another while president of the NYSE; Jesse Livermore, who often blamed for the Crash because he often sold short; Charles Mitchell, famous for placing bids on behalf of the bankers' group to try to stabilize the market, but who also was selling short the stock of his own bank; and Professor Irving Fisher, the economist whose serious work on the money illusion has been swept aside by his Panglossian pronouncements.
The authors go further and include other characters to give a broader sense of the easy riches mania that seemed to carry away the country. There are also Henry Ford, eccentric and living in an America that is fading into the past; Joseph Kennedy, snubbed in his visit to the House of Morgan, but having a better sense of the market than his "betters"; John J. Raskob, focused on his plans to build the Empire State Building; A. P. Giannini, laboring against the fear that his Transamerica Corporation might become a tool for speculators and also seen as an upstart by the J. P. Morgan firm; the "league of gentlemen," fifteen clerks and officers of Union Industrial Bank of Flint, Michigan, each of whom was embezzling from the bank to invest in the stock market; and the Vargo family, immigrants in Flint and bootleggers who trusted their savings to the Union Industrial Bank.
By following each of these stories, the reader is reminded that the Crash did not happen on just one day; the market's collapse took place over several days. At the end of each of those days, there was a hope that the rally might undo the damage. The reader will likely feel a pang of sympathy for the characters because we know the end of the story. That is something too often missing from economic history: the sense that no one at the time knew how the story would end. We can empathize with their frail hopes.
This book is recommended for a sense of the mania for easy money that swept through society during this period.
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