The 1929 Suicide Narrative
The October 28–29, 1929, crash was another flashbulb memory event, one that
may have been stronger than the 1987 event. The 1929 flashbulb memory is
magnified partly by the stories of death associated with the crash. That is, stories
abounded of businesspeople committing suicide.
There is some question whether the crash really led to these suicides or
whether writers learned that blaming business conditions for suicides just got a
greater reaction from readers. In his best-selling 1955 book The Great Crash,
1929, John Kenneth Galbraith argued that there really weren’t many more
suicides after the crash.7 But there really were many narratives about such
suicides, with twenty-eight such stories in ProQuest News & Newspapers in
November 1929 alone. The principle of psychology called the affect heuristic,
discussed in chapter 6, predicts that such narratives make people temporarily
more fearful about everything.8
The narrative of death at the time of the 1929 crash was reinforced by many
stories of people who were financially “ruined” by the crash and therefore had
no reason to continue living. Two months after the crash, a newspaper article in
the Louisville Courier-Journal implored:
Don’t Shoot Yourself!
With amazement I read of men who kill themselves at 50. The stock-market
crash has ruined them—but only financially.
Have they not the same brains that made the money for them?9
In 1970, Studs Terkel published Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great
Depression, which was based on Terkel’s interviews with people who were of
retirement age when Terkel was researching the book. The interviews reveal how
the 1929 narrative had evolved in the interviewees’ memories after forty years.
Suicide and 1929 came up frequently, along with embellishments and obvious
exaggerations. One interviewee, Arthur A. Robertson, the chairman of the board
of a substantial company when Terkel interviewed him, was thirty-one years old
in 1929. Robertson said:
October 29, 1929, yeah. A frenzy. I must have gotten calls from a dozen and a
half friends who were desperate. In each case, there was no sense in loaning

them the money that they would give the broker. Tomorrow they’d be worse
off than yesterday. Suicides, left and right, made a terrific impression on me,
of course. People I knew. It was heartbreaking. One day you saw the prices at
a hundred, the next day at $20, at $15. On Wall Street, the people walked like
zombies.10
Knud Andersen, a painter and sculptor, recalled:
When the shock of losing what you had worked for comes, I found refuge in
my art. To stew in a deplorable situation … where people were affected …
some to suicide … I lost myself in my art. The pain that came with economic
loss, I felt would pass. These things, like the eclipse of the sun.… People first
observed it and committed suicide … not realizing that this would pass.11
Julia Walther, the wife of a businessman in 1929, said:
When the Crash came, the banks withdrew their support, stock held on
margin was called in. Fred, unable to meet this in the falling market, lost
everything he had. He was completely wiped out. Fred always laughingly
said, “The only million dollars in my life I ever saw were those I lost.”
I felt the fever period was unreal. And the Depression was so real that it
became unreal. There was a horror about it, with people jumping out of
windows.12
The 1987 epidemic in Figure 16.1 looks far stronger than the 1929 epidemic.
The 1987 epidemic draws much of its strength from memories of 1929. Suicides
were attributed to the 1987 crash too, but these stories do not seem to have
formed long-term memories, for a strong narrative did not develop and there was
no reinforcing story of depression after 1987. A 50% margin requirement in
force in 1987, but not in 1929, meant that in the United States many fewer
people were “wiped out” or “ruined” by the 1987 crash than by the 1929 crash.

Moral Narratives about 1929
How did the 1929 crash narrative achieve such strength? Ideas about morality
may have played a role. The 1920s had been a time not only of economic
superabundance but also of chicanery, selfishness, and sexual liberation. Some
critics viewed these aspects of the culture negatively, but they were unable to
make a case against this putative immorality until the stock market crashed.
Sermons preached on the Sunday after the crash, November 3, 1929, talked
about the crash, attributing it to moral and spiritual transgressions. The sermons
helped frame day-of-judgment narratives about the Roaring Twenties. Google
Ngrams shows that the term Roaring Twenties was rarely used in the 1920s. Use
of the term, which sounds a bit judgmental, did not become common until the
1930s, when the broad moral story line in the Great Depression gradually
morphed into a national revulsion against the excesses and pathological
confidence of the 1920s. Purveyors of morality likened the one-day event on
October 28, 1929, to a lightning bolt from heaven.
Murray Kempton describes a narrative that began on the day of the 1929
crash, referring to the “myth” of the 1920s and the “myth” of the 1930s:
The myth of the twenties had involved the search for individual expression,
whether in beauty, laughter, or defiance of convention; all this was judged by
the myth of the thirties as selfish and footling and egocentric. It did not seem
proper at the time to say that the twenties were not quite so simple, and their
values were mixed, some good and some bad.13
Thus the stock market crash was viewed as a dividing line between the self-
centered, self-deceiving 1920s and the intellectually and morally superior, albeit
depressed, 1930s. Even today, the narrative notion that a stock market crash is a
kind of divine punishment remains with us.