Celebrities and the Shoeshine Boy Narrative
One example of celebrity attachment to the 1929 crash narrative is the shoeshine
boy narrative of the late 1920s. In this narrative, a great man, either John D.
Rockefeller or Bernard Baruch or Joseph Kennedy (all of them still celebrities
today, Kennedy only because he was the father of John F. Kennedy, who later
became president of the United States), decided to sell stocks before the peak in
1929 after a shoeshine boy offered him advice on investing in the stock market.
Jody Chudley provided a version of this story in Business Insider in 2017:
In 1929, JFK’s father Joseph Kennedy Sr. picked up on one of those subtle
signs and didn’t just get out at the top, he scored a massive windfall on the
way down as well.
Like for virtually anyone invested in the stock market, the 1920s were
good to Joseph Kennedy Sr. How could they not be, all you had to do was
buy all the stock you could and watch it go up.
After having made a bundle owning stocks in the roaring bull market of
the 1920’s, Joe Kennedy Sr. found himself needing to get his shoes polished
up.
While sitting in the shoeshine chair, Kennedy Sr. was alarmed to have the
shoeshine boy gift him with several tips on which stocks he should own—yes,
a shoeshine boy playing the stock market.
This unsolicited advice resulted in a life-changing moment for Kennedy
Sr. who promptly went back to his office and started unloading his stock
portfolio.
In fact, he didn’t just get out of the market, he aggressively shorted it—and
got filthy rich because of it during the epic crash that soon followed.
They don’t ring bells at the top, but apparently when shoeshine boys start
giving stock advice it is time to head for the exits.14
I could not, however, find evidence of this story in the ProQuest News &
Newspapers database for the 1920s and 1930s. The earliest mention I found of a
shoeshine boy giving stock tips to a rich and important man was in Bernard
Baruch’s 1957 memoirs,15 but even there the story is not exactly that of an
epiphany at the moment the shoeshine boy spoke.
The shoeshine boy story also has variants that mention bootblacks, barbers, or

policemen as the stock tipper. For example, a 1915 article in the Minneapolis
Morning Tribune argued that the advancing market was not about to turn down
because:
We do not hear of the chamber maids and bootblacks who have cleaned up
fortunes by lucky plays in the street. These romances usually mark the
approach of the culmination of the advance.16
This 1915 narrative does not seem to have the moral force of the shoeshine boy
narrative, for it is not connected to any catastrophic Armageddon event, it does
not moralize as effectively, and it does not effectively tie the story to a celebrity.

Relevance of the Stock Market Crash Narrative Today
Though much time has passed since the 1929 crash, and much of the zeitgeist of
the 1930s is lost to us now, the feeling lingers that the United States might
experience another stock market crash. This continuing economic narrative is a
lasting legacy of 1929, and it probably serves to amplify end-of-boom drops in
the stock market and drops in confidence. Moreover, any awareness that some
people frame their thinking in terms of such a narrative might lead to
expectations that others will also display such amplifying reactions. As of this
writing, in 2019, the stock market crash story is not contagious, but it remains a
part of public thinking and might return with a mutation or change in the
economic environment.
Policymakers might take a lesson from both the real estate bubble narratives
and the stock market crash narratives: during economic inflections, there is real
analytical value to looking beyond the headlines and statistics. We should also
consider that certain stories that recur with mutations play a significant role in
our lives. Stories and legends from the past are scripts for the next boom or
crash.
The next two chapters describe economic narratives that differ from those we
have covered so far in that they engender moral outrage and an impulse to fight
back. In both chapters, we examine a dominant emotion of anger—against
business in chapter 17, and against labor in chapter 18. This anger takes a form
that may cause significant changes in economic behavior.

Chapter 17
Boycotts, Profiteers, and Evil Business
Anger at business varies through time. People may start thinking business is evil
when prices of consumer goods increase substantially. Narratives blame business
aggressiveness for rising prices, and public anger may continue after the
inflation stops, if the public believes that prices are still too high. Anger can also
become inflamed when businesses cut wages. Such anger may induce organized
boycotts or disorganized decisions to postpone spending until prices are lower.
In such cases, people view their buying decisions in moral terms, not just as
satisfying their wants. Anger narratives may also interact with self-interested
thoughts of postponing expenditures until prices come down. We see the effects
of such angry narratives clearly in major economic events, including the
depression of the 1890s, the 1920–21 depression, the Great Depression, and the
1974–75 recession. We see glimpses of such anger today, and we may see it
strongly again in the future.