1929: The Great Crash (25 of 30)

1929: The Great Crash

There were mass bankruptcies there was a liquidity crisis of exactly the same kind we have today, that is to say all kinds of businesses could no longer get loans to keep themselves afloat even if those businesses were entirely solvent, they couldn't get the kind of short term commercial credit to pay their workers, to buy new inventory, to pay their suppliers.
And so they began going bankrupt and as they went bankrupt they laid people off and as they laid people off demand fell.
And this is what does traumatic damage to the whole society, so traumatic that it's second only to the Civil War in American memory as a tragic moment in American history.

My father had a modest-sized insurance brokerage agency.
One night at dinner, my father said that he had to fire an employee and I very cavalierly said, "Well, he'll be able to get a job, won't he?" And my father said, "No, he's an older man who isn't very capable and I don't think he can."
And at that point, my father burst into tears.
It was the first time I had ever seen my father cry.
There was such a change in our lives and all the people around me after the Crash.
Many of my girlfriends' fathers lost their jobs and they couldn't pay the rent, they were evicted.
The poverty was really all around us.
Men had no clothing.
They were in rags, really rags.
They used to wrap their feet up in newspaper and put them in cardboard, makeshift shoes to walk around the street.
And then if you took a walk over to Central Park you saw this big area, a deserted reservoir that had been drained and they made little huts of cardboard boxes, and they would sleep there overnight.
And they called it Hooverville, because that was the name of our President at the time and, of course, all this...