Rockne and Jones by Thomas Rupp

Author:Thomas Rupp
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Kent State University Press

19

After a Million Dreams

Whenever there’s a big war comin’ on, you should rope off a big field … and sell tickets.

—Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, 1930

As the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1929, the old day ended, just as the final moment of every day had slipped into the next since the beginning of time. The party went on, as it had at the last midnight of 1928 the year before, as it always had at the end of every year. The balloons fell, people hugged and kissed and cheered, and the band played on. The Roaring Twenties were over, yet nothing conspicuous had changed. Not yet, anyway.

Calendars were flipped to 1930, but a different date on the wall gave no indication that something special was fading away. No warning was given. No marker was crossed to clearly divide one era from another. No grand announcement signaled that the days of easy money and fast living were coming to an end. Those are details that historians debate after the fact. At the moment, people simply recognized that 1930 had begun, a year like any other.

The annual dose of irrational optimism arrived that New Year’s Day as it always did, amid the hoopla and exuberance of celebrating unrealistic hopes and earnest but short-lived resolutions. There seemed little cause to worry, and certainly no reason to panic. The worrisome financial dips of 1929 were widely dismissed as no more than temporary downturns. None of the three previous recessions had lasted more than nineteen months, and no one saw any reason why this time should be any different.1 No one recognized anything particularly ominous lurking to signal that the recent downturn would be any worse than previous ones had been. No war loomed on the horizon. No deadly disease was rampaging across the nation, as the flu had done a decade before.

Yet in reality, times were changing. It was just that Americans hadn’t realized how different things were going to be this time around. The new decade would bring disaster, but the depths of the impending economic collapse and the worldwide war that followed it were still years away. Omens of dark times ahead were there if you cared to look, but not even those whose job it was to predict such problems recognized the changes that were under way.

Wall Street was content enough as long as the Federal Reserve kept lending money. Knowing that the government was feeding the money supply calmed financial experts who worried about what might happen if skittish investors hoarded their remaining funds.2 Economists downplayed problems and issued mostly bright forecasts of speedy recovery. Irving Fisher, a leading financial theorist who had been given the first Ph.D. in economics granted by Yale in 1891, retained his rosy outlook despite the market crash.3 Right after the plunge he had stated, “The nation is marching along a permanently high plateau of prosperity.” Even in early 1930 he persisted in his positive predictions, asserting that the future for stocks was “bright.

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