Everybody Ought To Be Rich was the title of an article in the Ladies Home Journal. It was written in the summer of 1929, a few months before the Great Depression began.

1929. What was going on in America and the world pre-October 29, 1929?

Lots of people were reading the new bestseller – All Quiet on the Western Front. Babe Ruth was getting
older but he was still belting the ball out of the parks. Tunney had beaten Dempsey and was heavy weight champion. Charles Lindberg married Anne Morrow, daughter of one of the bankers of the House of Morgan.

Middletown, a revealing sociological study about the way of life dominating most of America had just been published. A bunch of gangsters had been massacred in Chicago on St. Valentine's Day. Wm. Faulkner published The Sound and the Fury. Admiral Richard Byrd was preparing to fly an airplane over the South Pole. The immigration quotas had been stiffened to keep out undesirables – all those funny people with brown or yellow skin, or those Eastern Europeans who practiced heathen religions and couldn't speak English. And Jews! If there was one thing this country didn't need any more of, it was Jews. Rudy Vallee crooned his songs over the radio and everybody split their sides laughing over Amos 'n Andy, boy, weren't those dumb darkies funny! There was Bill Tilden in tennis and Bobby Jones in golf. And all sports were being lionized in magazines and newspapers as “noble” and “princely” and “the building blocks of character”.

W.E.B. Du Bois was working and writing to win better living conditions for his people; but a southern editor settled the matter in most people's minds when he said Du Bois, holder of an A.B., an M.A. & a Ph.D. from Harvard was “an ignorant, illiterate ni**er to ought to be shipped back to Africa in chains.

There was news from other parts of the world.

That fellow Mussolini was making those trains run on time in Italy. The rulers of the Soviet Union kicked one of their founding fathers, Leon Trotsky, out of the country. He ran a radical newspaper in the Bronx. An ascetic-looking chap named Gandhi was organizing yet another campaign of civil disobedience to convince the British they weren't wanted in India. The British, naturally, paid tribute to Gandhi's policy of nonviolence by throwing him in jail. Americans yawned. Somebody named Chiang Kaishek was heard to be the new boss of China and the new emperor in Japan was Hirohito, who it was said spent the entire year working on a five line poem which he delivered to an audience, and no one laughed.

And then of course there was that funny little fellow with the mustache in Germany, Adolph Hitler, who was going around making speeches and raising hell about everything. Wasn't he the ex-wallpaper hanger? the people asked and then promptly forgot about him because Germany was so far away and the Great War was over and anyway, who wanted to be reminded of unpleasant times? Another war? Naw.

The truth was, none of it mattered. The stock market was the ticket. But there were warning signs. That no one paid attention to.

The first problem was the maldistribution of income. A second factor was international trade balance. The Great War had changed the US from a debtor to a creditor nation; vast sums were owed by foreign nations. Some foreign countries had already defaulted on their loans, and it looked like the beginning of a trend. If it continued, the lending American banks would be in trouble. Thirdly, there was a lack of structure in the American banking system itself. If one bank got into serious trouble and defaulted, there was no arrangement by which other banks would come to its aid. The fourth disturbing factor were the corporations of America. They issued stock with glowing promises, but many of them were underfinanced and poorly managed.

But such quietly, soberly stated cautions had hardly been sufficient to counteract the shrill chantings of the boosters who claimed everyone was going to get rich.

And so it was on October 29, 1929: When the final tally was made, it showed the staggering number of shares that had been dumped on the market – 16,410,030. The NY Times estimated that eight billion dollars had disappeared from the face of the earth. Across America, people began to realize they had been
wiped out. Families that had bought big houses and fancy cars found they owned nothing. All they had was a big mortgage and other debts. Prosperity had not only been a material condition, sadly it was also a state of mind.

Wall Street had created not a sandy beach along Paradise's lagoon, but a bed of quicksand into which men and women disappeared, never to be seen again.

Coolidge prosperity – that incredible, wonderful naïve dream of the '20's, had proved to be a bubble. A bubble that burst.

An era had ended.

_________________________

Enter 1981. Prosperity. For all. On credit.

And so it goes.

Last year I read a fabulous historical fiction story about the City of New York, from its beginning with the
Dutch settlers, up to the Great Depression. The story encompassed 5 books, written by Bruce Nicolaysen. What I typed above was from his last book of the series - "Gracie Square".

And what I learned about New York City, and hence America, is that we are always at our best when we build. When we create something. Together. It's who we are.

Not everybody has to be rich. It's enough that we leave a better world than the one we were born into.
And that means building. Building not for just the rich. But for everyone.

And taking care of our Nation and our Earth.

It's enough. Really it is. For most of us.

Scott Brown and politicians like him are a dime a dozen. Not bright. And more than willing to be bought. We can't afford that kind of politician any longer.

None of us can. We need to get people back to work. Building and creating and teaching.

It's who we are. It's who our very own grandparents and great grandparents and great great great grandparents were.

They left us a wonderful legacy. Let's not destroy it. Let us embrace it and continue their work. Congress can help. If they so choose.

Pat, outstanding historical post. You are a treasure to 1st Read. I always look forward to your posts.

Excellent post, Pat!

Kudos for The League of Conservation...It's about time that someone actually put the money with the words. We are 7 billion humans in the planet competing for resources. If some of us don't stand to defend the few places left for animals and forests, this planet is going to be a vast desert land. Filled with humans and their waste.

Let's remember that all these people that get killed by sharks and wild animals are just some examples of our human stupidity. 7 Billion of us are way too many to keep taking ALWAYS the selfish side of those humans determined to destroy the environment.

[What can Brown do FOR you???]

More like "What can Brown do TO you".

How about giving the money to help pay those student loans ?