https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-28-2024
"On Monday, October 28, 1929, New York’s Metropolitan Opera Company opened its
forty-fifth season.
Four thousand attendees in their finest clothes strolled to the elegant
building on foot or traveled in one of a thousand limousines to see Puccini’s
Manon Lescaut, the melodramatic story of an innocent French girl seduced by
wealth, whose reluctance to leave her riches for true love leads to her arrest
and tragic death. Photographers captured images of the era’s social celebrities
as they arrived at opening night, their flash bulbs blinding the crowd that had
gathered to see the famous faces and expensive gowns.
No one toasting the beginning of the opera season that night knew they were
marking the end of an era.
At ten o’clock the next morning, when the opening gong sounded in the great
hall of the New York Stock Exchange, men began to unload their stocks. So fast
did trading go that by the end of the day, the ticker recording transactions
ran two and a half hours late. When the final tally could be read, it showed
that an extraordinary 16,410,030 shares had traded hands, and the market had
lost $14 billion. The market had been uneasy for weeks before the twenty-ninth,
but Black Tuesday began a slide that seemingly would not end. By mid-November
the industrial average was half of what it had been in September. The economic
boom that had fueled the Roaring Twenties was over.
Once the bottom fell out of the stock market, the economy ground down.
Manufacturing output dropped to levels lower than those of 1913. The production
of pig iron fell to what it had been in the 1890s. Foreign trade dropped by $7
billion, down to just $3 billion. The price of wheat fell from $1.05 a bushel
to 39 cents; corn dropped from 81 to 33 cents; cotton fell from 17 to 6 cents a
pound. Prices dropped so low that selling crops meant taking a loss, so
struggling farmers simply let them rot in the fields.
By 1932, over one million people in New York City were unemployed. By 1933 the
number of unemployed across the nation rose to 13 million people—one out of
every four American workers. Unable to afford rent or pay mortgages, people
lived in shelters made of packing boxes.
No one knew how to combat the Great Depression, but certain wealthy Americans
were sure they knew what had caused it. The problem, they said, was that poor
Americans refused to work hard enough and were draining the economy. They must
be forced to take less. “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the
farmers, liquidate real estate,” Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon told
President Herbert Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High
costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a
more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up
the wrecks from less competent people.”
Slash government spending, agreed the
Chicago Tribune: lay off teachers and
government workers, and demand that those who remain accept lower wages.
Richard Whitney, a former president of the Stock Exchange, told the Senate that
the only way to restart the economy was to cut government salaries and
veterans’ benefits (although he told them that his own salary—which at sixty
thousand dollars was six times higher than theirs—was “very little” and
couldn’t be reduced)."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
