NOTES

ABBREVIATIONS

Full Citations are noted once below. All instances in the Notes themselves are the short form:

Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present: Millennial Edition, edited by Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Short form: Historical Statistics

U. S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis, National Income and Product Accounts.
Short form: NIPA

St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, Federal Reserve Economic Data

Short form: FRED

Federal Trade Commission, “Utility Corporations: Report of the Federal Trade Commission to the Senate of the United States, Pursuant to Senate Resolution No. 83, 70th Congress, 1st Session, on Economic, Financial, and Corporate Phases of Holding and Operating Companies of Electric and Gas Utilities,” multiple volumes.
Short form: Utility Corporations

Stock Exchange Practices: Hearings Before the Committee on Banking and Currency, Pursuant to Senate Resolutions, No. 84 and 248, United States Senate (1932–1934)
Short form: Pecora Commission

Report of House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Pursuant to H. Res. No. 59, 72d Cong. 1st Sess. (1932) and H. J. REs. No. 572, 72d Cong. 2d Sess. (1933), Report on the Relation of Holding Companies in Power and Gas Affecting Control.
Short form: Public Utility Holding Companies

PRELUDE

1. For the politics of the war, I used primarily Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), esp. 488–554; and Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (New York: Random House, 2013), esp. 575–631. For the events of the war, I used primarily John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Random House, 1998); and Peter Hart, The Great War: A Combat History of the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). The kaiser’s scene is from Keegan, First World War, 123.

2. L. C. F. Turner, “The Significance of the Schlieffen Plan,” in Paul M. Kennedy, ed., The War Plans of the Great Powers (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979), 191–221; Churchill quote at 205.

3. Ibid.

4. Keegan, First World War, 31–39.

5. Turner, “Significance,” 210, 212, 204.

6. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & Howe, 1920), 10–12.

7. Norman Angell, The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National Advantage, 4th American ed. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913), 17–19.

8. Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War: Explaining World War I (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 100, 33.

9. Ibid., 92–93, 137; and Wayne Dowler, Russia in 1913 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010), 18–50.

10. Ferguson, Pity of War, 89, 91.

11. Paul M. Kennedy, “The First World War and the International Power System,” International Security 9, no. 1 (Summer 1981): 18–19.

12. Ferguson, Pity of War, 293–296.

13. The narrative follows Keegan, First World War, and Hart, The Great War.

14. Battle casualties from “Top 10 Deadliest Battles of World War I,” TopTenz, accessed August 1, 2016, www.toptenz.net/top-10-bloodiest-battles-of-world-war-i.php.

15. Ferguson, Pity of War, 295.

16. Sally Marks, “Mistakes and Myths: The Allies, Germany and the Versailles Treaty, 1918–1921,” Journal of Modern History 85, no. 3 (September 2013): 632–659, 635; and Edward M. Lamont, The Ambassador from Wall Street: The Story of Thomas W. Lamont, J.P. Morgan’s Chief Executive (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1994), 124.

17. Sally Marks, “Mistakes and Myths,” Ebert quote on 634.

18. Etienne Mantoux, The Carthaginian Peace, or the Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952), 90–91; and “Viewpoint: 10 Big Myths about WWI Debunked,” BBC News Magazine, February 25, 2014, www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25776836.

19. Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York; Random House, 2001); the Fourteen Points are on 495–496. And Arthur Ray Leonard, ed., The War Addresses of Woodrow Wilson (Boston, MA: Ginn & Company, 1918); the “no annexations” quote is in a speech Wilson delivered, “The Four Principles of Peace,” Address to the Congress, February 11, 1918, 102.

20. MacMillan, Paris 1919, 463–478.

PART ONE: AMERICA DISCOVERS THE MODERN

1. For the Fitzgeralds and their coterie, the novels may be the best sources. This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned, The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, and the fragment, The Love of the Last Tycoon, are all available in multiple editions, as are various collections of Scott’s short stories. Zelda’s novel, available in reprint, is Save Me the Waltz (New York: Scribner, 1938). The quote from The Beautiful and the Damned is from the “Collector’s Edition” (New York: Collectors Library, reprint 2013), x. It has the original cover depicting the actual Scott and Zelda. In addition to the Fitzgeralds’ own writing, the portrait here draws on Nancy Milford, Zelda, A Biography (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992); Judith Mackrell, Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013); Amanda Vaill, Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy, A Lost Generation Love Story (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1998); and Lucy Moore, Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties (New York: Overlook Press, 2010).

2. Milford, Zelda, 66.

3. Moore, Anything Goes, 64.

4. Sarah Laskow, “Will the Real Great Gatsby Please Stand Up?” Smithsonian.com, May 6, 2013, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?next=/arts-culture/will-the-real-great-gatsby-please-stand-up-53360554/; and Catherine Bailey, The Secret Rooms: A True Story of a Haunted Castle, a Plotting Duchess, and Family Secrets (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 419–420.

5. For the narrative of electricity’s development, I mostly follow Jill Jonnes, Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla and Westinghouse and the Race to Electrify the World (New York: Random House, 2003). For technical developments, Louis C. Hunter and Lynwood Bryant, A History of Industrial Power in the United States, 1780–1930, Vol. 3, The Transmission of Power (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991); and Harold C. Passer, The Electrical Manufacturers, 1875–1900: A Study in Competition, Entrepreneurship, Technical Change, and Economic Growth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953). The details on the Niagara power complex are from Edward Dean Adams, Niagara Power: History of the Niagara Falls Power Company, 1886–1913 (Niagara Falls, NY: Priv. printed for the Niagara Falls Power Company, 1927), 2 vols. The quote is from the preface to Adams, Niagara, I: ix.

6. Adams, Niagara, II, 85.

7. Jonnes, Empires of Light, 110.

8. My major sources for this section are Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, Ford: The Times, The Man, The Company (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1954), the first volume in their three-volume biography; Steven Watts, The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005); and Ford’s autobiography, Henry Ford with Samuel Crowther, My Life and Work (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publications, 2010) originally published in 1922. On Ford’s manufacturing from the Model T onward, the best source is David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production: 1800–1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press), 217–261, for the period covered here. For machine wonks, the locus classicus on Ford’s shop methods during its growth period is Horace Lucien Arnold and Fay Leone Faurote, Ford Methods and the Ford Shops (New York: The Engineering Magazine Company, 1915). There is also an excellent eleven-part series on Ford machining practice by Roger H. Colvin, in American Machinist, 39 (1913). Both the Arnold-Faurote and Colvin treatments are in the public domain and pdf copies may be downloaded from Google Books. The Ford quote is from Watts, People’s Tycoon, 119.

9. Watts, People’s Tycoon, 42.

10. Nevins and Hill, Ford: The Times, 248n.

11. Nevins and Hill, Ford: The Times, Appendices, 644–649.

12. Ibid., 324.

13. Arnold and Faurote, Ford Methods, 77–83, 122, 327–329, 113–116, 138–139.

14. Hounshell, From the American System, 259.

15. See the discussion in “The Five-Dollar Day” in Nevins and Hill, Ford: The Times. On p. 530, they detail some of the shop management problems, but suggest that they had been mostly resolved before the $5 per day decision. The evidence they cite, however, comes from 1916, a full two years after the announcement of the new pay plan. A more convincing account is Daniel M. G. Raff and Lawrence H. Summers, “Did Henry Ford Pay Efficiency Wages?,” NBER Working Paper no. w2101 (December 1986), 8–10; available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=344867

16. Nevins, 644–649, 488.

17. The details in this section are drawn, in addition to those cited below, from: Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties (New York: Harper & Row, 1986) a reprint of the original 1940 edition; Donald L. Miller, Supreme City: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014); Bill Bryson, One Summer: America, 1927 (New York: Doubleday, 2013); Edward White, The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014); and David E. Kyvig, Daily Life in the United States, 1920–1940: How American Lived Through the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 2004); and Judith S. Baughman, ed., American Decades: 1920–1929, “History of American Journalism, the 1920s,” at http://history.journalism.ku.edu/1920/1920.shtml.

18. Allen, Only Yesterday, 164–167.

19. Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Random House, 2010), 161–163.

20. Ibid., 163–164.

21. Ibid, 271–273.

22. Ibid., 276–277.

23. The discussion of Prohibition is drawn from Mark Edward Lender and James Kirby Master, Drinking in America: A History (New York: The Free Press, 1982), 124–167.

24. Alcohol consumption data were compiled by the Rutgers Institute for Alcohol Studies and are reprinted in the Appendix of Lender and Master, Drinking in America. For a fuller discussion, see, John C. Burnham, “New Perspectives on the Prohibition ‘Experiment’ of the 1920s,” Journal of Social Studies II 2, no. 1 (Fall, 1968): 51–68; Jeffrey A. Miron and Jeffrey Zweibel, “Alcohol Consumption During Prohibition,” The American Economic Review 81, no. 2 (May 1991): 242–247; Jack S. Blocker Jr., “Did Prohibition Really Work? Alcohol Prohibition as a Public Health Innovation,” American Journal of Public Health 96, no. 2 (February 2006): 233–243.

25. Kyvig, Daily Life in the United States, 97.

26. Catherine Keyser, Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 61.

27. Lewis Mumford, “Magnified Impotence,” The New Republic, December 22, 1926; James H. Collins, “Panic!” Scientific American, September 1925—both collected in “The Twenties in Contemporary Commentary,” in Becoming Modern: America in the 1920s—Primary Source Collection, National Humanities Center—America in Class, 2012, available online at http://americainclass.org/sources/becomingmodern/.

28. Robert S. Lynd and Helen M. Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1929).

29. Ibid., 75.

30. Ibid., 33–34.

31. Ibid., 34.

32. Ibid., 162–163.

33. Christopher Brown, “Consumer Credit and the Propensity to Consume: Evidence from 1930,” Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics 19, no. 4 (Summer, 1997): 617–638, 620–621.

34. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 256, 255–256, 257.

35. Ibid., 266–267, 258, 145.

36. The Scopes trial is covered in nearly all histories of the period. Most earlier histories followed the account in Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday, which was drawn primarily from newspaper accounts and is wrong in many details. The account here is based primarily on the trial transcripts, “The Scopes Trial Transcripts” 8 vols., The Clarence Darrow Digital Collection, Law Library, University of Minnesota, http://darrow.law.umn.edu/trials.php?tid=7. Michael Hannon, “The Scopes Trial (1925)” (May 2010) is a comprehensive, thesis-length synthesis based on the most recent sources. I also used Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1997); and Louis W. Koenig, Bryan: A Political Biography of William Jennings Bryan (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971). Quote “big sensation” is from Koenig, Bryan: A Political Biography, 60.

37. Koenig, Bryan: A Political Biography, 605, 645; Hannon, “The Scopes Trial,” 30. For the footnote on Fundamentalism, Larson, Summer for the Gods, 20ff.

38. Larson, Summer for the Gods, 93.

39. “The Scopes Trial Transcripts,” Vol. IV, 141.

40. Ibid., Vol. V, 176.

41. Ibid.; and Koenig, Bryan: A Political Biography, 645.

42. Koenig, Bryan: A Political Biography, 656.

43. Larson, Summer for the Gods, 200.

44. Koenig, Bryan: A Political Biography, 656.

45. Allen, Only Yesterday, 205, 206; and Larson, Summer for the Gods, 235–237.

46. Karl Pearson, The Grammar of Science, 3rd ed. (London: Black, 1911), 15.

47. James T. Kloppenberg, “Democracy and Disestablishment: From Weber and Dewey to Habermas and Rorty,” in Dorothy Ross, ed., Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, 1870–1930 (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 68–90, at 84.

48. Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 238.

49. Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper: A Study and a Confession (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1929), 200, 39, 166–167, 170.

50. Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1931), 22, 24, 27, 326.

PART TWO: “ONE HECKUVA BOOM”

1. Theodore Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 248–250. For the sharecroppers’ union, see Michael Kief, “The Alabama Sharecroppers Union,” Encyclopedia of Alabama, http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-2477.

2. Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers, 256.

3. The White House, Office of Management and Budget, Historical Statistics, Table 1; see http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals; and Historical Statistics, Tables Ca213 and 214, inflation calculation by the author.

4. Statistics here and below from Hugh Rockoff, “Until It’s Over, Over There: The U.S. Economy in World War I,” NBER Working Paper 10580 (June 2004).

5. Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1915–1933 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955) 65–67.

6. Rockoff, “Until It’s Over.”

7. Leonard P. Ayres, The War with Germany: A Statistical Summary (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1919), 134.

8. Allan H. Meltzer, A History of the Federal Reserve, Vol. I, 1913–1951 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 87–91; Historical Statistics, op. cit.

9. James Grant, The Forgotten Depression: 1921, the Crash That Cured Itself (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014) is a lively, if tendentious, account of the period. Inflation and growth data are from Historical Statistics.

10. Meltzer, A History of the Federal Reserve, 97.

11. Moody’s Industrial Manual (New York: John Moody and Co.): 1920 and 1921 for the respective companies.

12. US Department of Commerce, Survey of Current Business, no. 17, January 1923, 2–4.

13. Historical Statistics, op. cit, calculation by the author.

14. The account here, except as noted below, is drawn primarily from Forrest McDonald, Insull (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962) and Harold L. Platt, The Electric City, Energy and the Growth of the Chicago Area, 1880–1930, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

15. McDonald, Insull, 88–90.

16. Ibid., 108–113.

17. John C. Zink, “Steam Turbines Power an Industry,” Power Engineering, August 1, 1996, http://www.power-eng.com/articles/print/volume-100/issue-8/features/steam-turbines-power-an-industry.html.

18. Platt, The Electric City, 108–114. For an excellent description of Insull’s methods of rationalizing power supply, with exhibits, see Samuel Insull, “Public Utilities in Modern Life, Selected Speeches, 1914–1923,” William Eugene Keily, ed., “Production and Distribution of Electric Energy in the Central Portion of the Mississippi Valley,” 263–303.

19. Platt, The Electric City, 109–124.

20. Platt, The Electric City, shows the Barton ad between 110–111.

21. McDonald, Insull, 204–205.

22. Lawrence R. Gustin, David Buick’s Marvelous Motor Car: The Men and the Automobile That Launched General Motors (Detroit, MI: Buick Gallery and Research Center, Alfred P. Sloan Museum, 2006), 17–40, 55–57. The development of the “valve-in-head” engine is a serpentine tale, with many participants; for a full account, see ibid., 67–72.

23. Lawrence R. Gustin, Billy Durant: Creator of General Motors (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 42–88, on Buick, 149–152, 206–208.

24. Ibid., 72.

25. Ibid., 85.

26. Ibid., 92–96.

27. Ibid., 112–113.

28. Ibid., 134–141; David Farber, Everybody Ought to Be Rich: The Life and Times of John J. Raskob, Capitalist, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 103–106.

29. Gustin, Billy Durant, 147–163.

30. Farber, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, 103–108; for a recent journalistic version, Andrew Engel, “The Original GM Bailout” BloombergViews, March 6, 2012.

31. Gustin, Billy Durant, 179–193.

32. Gustin, Billy Durant, 204–215; Farber, 172–183.

33. Sloan, My Years with General Motors (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), 154; the Durant and immediate post-Durant years occupy most of Part One of his book. See also David Farber, Sloan’s Rules: Alfred P. Sloan and the Triumph of General Motors (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 51–105; Allyn Freeman, The Leadership Genius of Alfred P. Sloan: Invaluable Lessons on Management, and Leadership for Today’s Managers (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005), 11–48; and Daniel G. Raff, “Making Cars and Making Money in the Interwar Automobile Industry: Economies of Scale and Scope and the Manufacturing Behind the Marketing,” Business History Review, 65, no. 4 (Winter 1991), 721–753, 741–742, 752.

34. All financial data from Moody’s Industrial Manuals for the various years.

35. Sloan, My Years, 162.

36. Nevins and Hill, Ford: 1915–1933, 407–408, 416–417.

37. Data on market size and production for GM and Ford from Sloan, My Years, 151n, and Appendix: “General Motors Corporation, Unit Sales of Total Cars and Trucks by Division;” and Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, Ford: Decline and Rebirth, 1933–1962, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963), Appendix 1: “Ford Motor Company Production Report, 1903 Thru 1955.”

38. For the main story of the model change, see Nevins and Hill, Ford: 1915–1933, 429–431, 437–458, 466.

39. Ibid., 454.

40. Ibid., 459–460.

41. Ibid., 457.

42. Charles R. Morris, The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution (New York: PublicAffairs, 2012), 252–258, (for Colt); Warren D. Devine, “From Shafts to Wires: Historical Perspective on Electrification,” The Journal of Economic History, 43, no.2 (June 1983): 347–372.

43. Harold F. Williamson, Ralph L. Adreano, Arnold R. Daum, and Gilbert C. Close, The American Petroleum Industry: The Age of Energy, 1899–1950 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1963) 329–330.

44. Moody’s Industrial Manuals, 1923 and 1930.

45. Thomas J. Misa, A Nation of Steel: The Making of Modern America, 1865–1925 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 213–222, 242–247, quote at 170. Also see Kenneth Warren, Big Steel: The First Century of the United States Steel Company, 1901–2001 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001) 123–132.

46. Moody’s Industrial Manuals, 1929.

47. Giovanni Federico, “Not Guilty? Agriculture in the 1920s and the Great Depression,” The Journal of Economic History, 65, no. 4 (December 2005), 949–976; Survey of Current Business, March 1930, 3 “Crops”; Harvester profits from Moody’s Industrial Manuals, 1922, 1928, 1929.

48. FRED, “Index of Farm Prices of Crops for the United States” and “Index of Prices for Meat Animals in the United States”; and Harold Barger and Hans H. Landsberg, “Agricultural Productivity,” in American Agriculture, 1899–1933: A Study of Output, Employment, and Productivity (Cambridge, MA: NBER, 1942), Table 38, 247–288.

49. Paul S. George, “Brokers, Binders, and Builders: Greater Miami’s Boom of the Mid-1920s,” The Florida Historical Quarterly, 65, no. 1 (July, 1986): 27–51, at 27–29.

50. Ibid., 27, 29.

51. Ibid., 35–36.

52. Ibid., 37, 38–39.

53. Ibid., 48–49, 40–42, 45–47.

54. Alexander J. Field “Uncontrolled Land Development and the Duration of the Depression in the United States,” The Journal of Economic History, 52, no. 4 (December, 1992): 785–805. For the “short block” in the footnote, ibid., 798.

55. Ibid., 790, 791–792.

56. Ibid., 791–792.

57. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash, 1929 (Boston, MA: Harcourt Houghton Mifflin, 2009), 70, 169.

58. Barrie A. Wigmore, The Crash and Its Aftermath: A History of Security Markets in the United States, 1929–1933 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 4.

59. Ibid., 26–27..

60. Federal Reserve Board, “Banking and Monetary Statistics of the United States, 1914–1941,” Table 48, p. 142; Table 137, p. 489; Table 139, p. 494.

61. Galbraith, The Great Crash, 79; Vincent Carosso, Investment Banking in America: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 346.

62. J. Bradford De Long and Andrei Shelfer, “The Stock Market Bubble of 1929: Evidence from Closed-end Mutual Funds,” Journal of Economic History, 51, no. 3 (September, 1991): 675–700; Peter Rappoport and Eugene N. White, “Was There a Bubble in the 1929 Stock Market?” Journal of Economic History, 53, no. 3 (September, 1993). The two authors extended their model in Peter Rappoport and Eugene N. White, “Was the Crash of 1929 Expected?” American Economic Review, 84, no. 1 (January 1994): 271–281. But see Tung Liu, Gary J. Santoni, and Courtenay C. Stone, “In Search of Stock Market Bubbles: A Comment on Rappoport and White,” Journal of Economic History, 55, no. 3 (September 1995): 647–654, who argue that in 1919–1920 similar call loan spreads had no such effect; that an econometric analysis suggests that there was no radical break in the interest rate profiles, and that the timing of the call loan spikes does not correlate with the events of the crash. Gerald Sirkin, “The Stock Market of 1929 Revisited: A Note,” Business History Review, XLIX, no. 2 (Summer 1975): 223–231; but see Ali Kabiri, “‘Theory Anchors’ Explain the 1929 NYSE Bubble,” Special Paper 218, LSE Financial Markets Group Paper Series (January 2013). Kabiri points to specific erroneous theories for evaluating shares in the late 1920s that produced a substantial overvaluation of shares.

63. Meltzer, A History of the Federal Reserve, Chart 4.4, 253.

64. Survey of Current Business, July 1929, 12, 16.

65. Ibid., August 1929.

66. Ibid., September 1929; Wigmore, The Crash and Its Aftermath, 12.

67. FRED, “Industrial Production Data Series, 1919–2015;” Stephen G. Cecchetti, “The Stock Market Crash of 1929,” January 1992, manuscript submitted for entry in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance, access online at www.people.brandeis.edu/~cecchett/Polpdf/Polp05.pdf.

68. Wigmore, The Crash and Its Aftermath, 4–5.

69. Galbraith, The Great Crash, 171.

PART THREE: THE CRASH IN THE UNITED STATES

1. “Bankers v. Panic,” Time, November 4, 1929.

2. Barrie Wigmore, The Crash and Its Aftermath: A History of Securities Markets in the United States, 1929–1933 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 6–12.

3. Federal Reserve Board, “Banking and Monetary Statistics of the United States: 1914–1943,” Washington, DC, Table 141, 497–498.

4. Spectator, 27, September 1929, p. 2.

5. Wigmore, The Crash and its Aftermath, 10–11.

6. Ibid.; and Michael Beschloss, “From White Knight to Thief,” New York Times, September 13, 2014.

7. Wigmore, The Crash and its Aftermath, 25.

8. Ibid., 25, 31–32.

9. Ibid., 129–131, Appendix Tables A-19.

10. Ibid., Appendix Tables A-20.

11. Except as indicated, the narrative of Hoover’s early career follows William E. Leuchtenburg, Herbert Hoover (New York: Times Books, 2009), 2–79.

12. Ibid., 26.

13. Ibid., 44, 47.

14. John Maynard Keynes, A Treatise on Money, 2 vols. (Mansfield Center, CT: Martino Publishing, 2011—reprint of Harcourt Brace 1930 edition), Vol. 2, 353–355.

15. Leuchtenburg, Herbert Hoover, 64.

16. Wesley C. Mitchell, Recent Social Trends in the United States: Report of the President’s Research Committee on Social Trends, 2 vols. (New York: McGraw-Hill, Vol. I, 1933, and Vol. II, 1934). I have read them through, and there is a great deal of interesting information, often along the lines of the materials by the Lynds in Muncie, who also contributed to these volumes. Hoover had already lost his presidency by the time it was published.

17. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash, 1929 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009 reprint edition), 70.

18. Irving Fisher, Booms and Depressions: Some First Principles (New York: Adelphi Company, 1932), 27.

19. Ibid., 104–105.

20. Ibid., 122–125, Table 13, 192.

21. Ibid., 129–129, 132.

22. Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 50–53 (for footnote), 392, 308–309, 411–414.

23. Lester V. Chandler, American Monetary Policy, 1928–1941 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 144.

24. Oliver M. W. Sprague, “Problems of Recovery,” New York Times, no. 1, November 29, 1933, and no. 8, December 22, 1933.

25. All the data in this paragraph are from the Survey of Current Business (various issues).

26. Charles Rappleye, Herbert Hoover in the White House: The Ordeal of the Presidency (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 196–197.

27. Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920–1933 (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Press, 2010 reprint edition), 317, 300; Lizbeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 2008) Table 14, Loc. 5020; and Robert A. Margo, “Employment and Unemployment in the 1930s,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 7, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 41–59, 42.

28. Bernstein, The Lean Years, 301–304; Fortune quote on 302.

29. Cohen, Making a New Deal, 5063–5064.

30. “Doleful Detroit,” Time, July 20, 1931.

31. “Labor: Below Animal Standards,” Time, August 3, 1931.

32. Bernstein, The Lean Years, 292–295.

33. Ibid., 296–298; and Cohen, Making a New Deal, 4790.

34. Bernstein, The Lean Years, 300, 289.

35. Leuchtenburg, Herbert Hoover, 83; and Glen Jeansonne, The Life of Herbert Hoover: Fighting Quaker, 1928–1933 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 57–61. For note on Dust Bowl, see Jason Long and Henry E. Sun, “Refugees from Dust and Shrinking Land: Tracking the Dust Bowl Migrants, NBER Working Paper w22108 (March 2016).

36. “Husbandry: Cotton Crisis,” Time, August 24, 1931.

37. “Husbandry: Again Bumper,” Time, May 18, 1931.

38. “Husbandry: Simply Got Hungry,” Time, January 12, 1931.

39. Frederick C. Mills, Economic Tendencies in the United States: Aspects of Pre-War and Post-War Changes (Cambridge, MA: NBER, 1932), 336, 340, calculations by the author; and Prices in Recession and Recovery (Cambridge, MA: NBER, 1936), 296.

40. The data are from Douglas Irwin, “The Smoot-Hawley Tariff: A Quantitative Assessment,” The Review of Economics and Statistics 80, no. 2 (May 1998): 326–334. Mario J. Crucini, “Sources of Variation in Real Tariff Rates: the United States, 1900–1940,” The American Economic Review 84, no. 3 (June 1994): 732–743 was the first to draw attention to the impact of deflation in increasing the weight of fixed-dollar tariffs. Barry Eichengreen, “The Political Economy of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff,” NBER Working Paper No. 2001 (August 1986) makes a case that, while the effect of Smoot-Hawley was small, it was likely to have been expansionary. The “incredible folly” quote is here. The best-known argument for a substantial negative effect from the tariff is Allan H. Meltzer, “Monetary and Other Explanations for the Start of the Great Depression,” Journal of Monetary Economics 2 (1976): 455–472. Meltzer argues that the tariff interfered with the price-specie flow mechanism, thus interrupting international price adjustments.

41. Leuchtenberg, Herbert Hoover, 132, 133.

42. The short summary of Hoover’s presidential demise follows Leuchtenberg, Herbert Hoover, 124–146, quotes at 132, 133, and 138; and Rappleye, Herbert Hoover in the White House, 346–351, 367–381, quotes at 374, 379.

43. Friedman and Schwartz, A Monetary History, 308–352.

44. Peter Temin, Lessons from the Great Depression (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 47–52; Elmus Wicker, The Banking Panics of the Great Depression (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 32–38; and Charles Calomiris and Joseph R. Mason, “Causes of U.S. Bank Distress During the Depression,” NBER Working Paper No. 7919 (September 2000), an econometric analysis that confirms Wicker.

45. Charles W. Calomiris, “Bank Failures in Theory and History: The Great Depression and Other ‘Contagious’ Events,” NBER Working Paper 13597 (November 2007), 3–7.

46. Ibid., 11–15.

47. Charles Calomiris and Berry Wilson, “Bank Capital and Portfolio Management: The 1930s ‘Capital Crunch’ and the Scramble to Shed Risk,” The Journal of Business, 77:3 (July 2004) 421–455.

48. Forrest McDonald, Insull (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 274–275; and Thomas P. Hughes, “The Electrification of America: The System Builders,” Technology and Culture 20, no. 1 (January 1979): 124–161, at 139–153.

49. Hughes, “The Electrification of America,” 153–161.

50. Utilities Corporations, No. 72A, 619, 155; the MWU overhead charges were computed by the author from the income statements in Utilities Corporations, No. 38, Exhibit No. 5, 606–607.

51. McDonald, Insull, 274–276.

52. Utilities Corporations, No. 72A, 571, 555–556.

53. Utilities Corporations, No. 72A, 580–583.

54. Samuel Insull, The Memoirs of Samuel Insull: An Autobiography, edited by Larry Plachno (Polo, IL: Transportation Trails, 1992), 188–189, 192; and Marcus Gleisser, The World of Cyrus Eaton (Kent OH: Kent State University Press, 2005), loc. 471–473.

55. Public Utility Holding Companies, 1–2, and Insull, The Memoirs, 189, 191–192.

56. McDonald, Insull, 281–283.

57. Gleisser, The World of Cyrus Eaton, loc. 479–566; and McDonald, Insull, 289.

58. Insull, The Memoirs, 192–194; McDonald, Insull, 287; and Gleisser, The World of Cyrus Eaton, loc. 529.

59. Insull, The Memoirs, 195–197.

60. Ibid.

61. Ibid., 196.

62. Ibid., 196–198.

63. Ibid., 198–199.

64. Financial data for MWU, IUI, and CSC from the respective reports of the receivers: Utility Corporations, No. 50, 846–847; 757; and 1112–1114. For CSC detail and Eaton transaction, see Public Utility Holding Companies, 483–505.

65. Arthur R. Taylor, “Losses to the Public in the Insull Collapse,” The Business History Review 36, no. 2 (Summer, 1962): 188–204.

66. The account here is drawn from Insull, The Memoirs, 232–269; and McDonald, Insull, 305–339.

67. Pecora Commission, Final Report.

68. Gleisser, The World of Cyrus Eaton, Loc. 772–808.

69. Pecora Commission, “A.B. Kreuger & Toll Group of Companies—Final Report Dated November 28, 1932—Price, Waterhouse & Co., Stockholm,” 1260–1265. Kroner converted to dollars by author, at 26.8 cents/$1.

70. Ibid.

71. Ibid., Testimony of George O. May, 1268.

72. Ibid., 1261, 1263.

73. Except as indicated, the portrait of Kreuger follows Frank Partnoy, The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, the Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009).

74. Ibid., 31–32.

75. Ibid., 33–35.

76. Ibid., 37–41.

77. Ibid., 43–45, 50–54.

78. Ibid., 54–55.

79. Ibid., 70–74.

80. Ibid., 79–83

81. Ibid., 59–69, 103.

82. Ibid., 116.

83. Ibid., 103–111.

84. Ibid., 136–140.

85. Ibid., 140–143.

86. “Business: Monopolist,” Time, October 28, 1929.

87. Partnoy, The Match King, 143–144.

88. Ibid., 144, 163.

89. Ibid., 154–155.

90. Ibid., 156–157.

91. Ibid.; and “Sweden: Glorified I.O.U.s,” Time, April 28, 1930.

92. Hyman Minsky, “The Financial Instability Hypothesis,” Working Paper No. 74, The Jerome Levy Economics Institute of Bard College (May 1992), 8.

93. Partnoy, The Match King, 164–165.

94. Ibid., 160, 164.

95. Ibid., 190–191.

PART FOUR: BLOOD, GOLD, AND UNPAID DEBTS

1. John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System, 1830–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 117–120, 144–145.

2. Walter Bagehot, Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (London: Dodo Press, undated), 23; and Allan H. Meltzer, A History of the Federal Reserve: Vol. I, 1913–1951 (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 48–51.

3. Barry Eichengreen, Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 46–49; and Darwin, The Empire Project, 114–122.

4. Eichengreen, Golden Fetters, 50.

5. H. Clark Johnson, Gold, France, and the Great Depression, 1919–1932 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 50.

6. Charles O. Hardy, Is There Enough Gold? (Washington, DC, The Brookings Institution, 1936), 92–93.

7. Stephen V. O. Clarke, Central Bank Cooperation, 1924–1931, (New York: Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 1967), 85–90, 124–134.

8. Johnson, Gold, France, 45–58, quote at 58.

9. Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (New York: Random House, 2013), xvii–xviv; Niall Ferguson, The House of Rothschild: the World’s Banker, 1828–1999 (New York: Penguin, 1998), see 204–219; MacMillan. Paris 1919, 161.

10. Sally Marks, “Reparations Reconsidered: A Reminder,” Central European History 2, no. 4 (December, 1969): 356–365. The Poincaré quote is on 361.

11. Sally Marks, “The Myths of Reparations,” Central European History 11, no. 3 (September, 1978): 238, 238n26, 240n34, and 241n38. The details of the borrowing are in David Felix, Walter Rathenau and the Weimar Republic: The Politics of Reparations (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), 83–84.

12. D. G. Williamson, “Great Britain and the Ruhr Crisis, 1923–1924, British Journal of International Studies 3, no. 1 (April, 1977): 70–91, on the animosity between the British and the French; Conan Fischer, The Ruhr Crisis, 1923–1924 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003): 139–147, quote on 144, for French abuses; and Marks, “The Myths,” 250.

13. Carl Ludwig Holtfrerich, The German Inflation, 1914–1923: Causes and Effects in International Perspective (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1986), 231–243, 76–79.

14. Ibid., 164–172.

15. Johnson, Gold, France, 87–88; Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (New York: The Penguin Press, 2009), 120–124; Felix, Walter Rathenau, 28, 168–169, 173–174; and William C. McNeill, American Money and the Weimar Republic: Economics and Politics on the Eve of the Great Depression (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 23, 47.

16. Ahamed, Lords of Finance, 120–124. The figure is adapted from Eric E. Crowley, Hyperinflation in Germany: Perceptions of a Process (Aldershot, Hants, England: Scolar Press, 1994), 73–74.

17. Ahamed, Lords of Finance, 127–129, 181–187.

18. Ibid., 187–190.

19. Ibid.

20. MacMillan, Paris 1919, 488–492.

21. Meltzer, A History, 84; and Historical Statistics, Table Ca214. American wartime and immediate postwar lending to its allies was $9.7 billion compared to a 1913 GNP of $36.25 billion. By 1918, nominal American GDP had roughly doubled, while the index of real growth had moved from 100 to 157. From Hugh Rockoff, “Until It’s Over, Over There: The U.S. Economy in World War I,” NBER Working Paper no. 10580 (June 2004), Table 4.

22. Ahamed, Lords of Finance, 142; Lester V. Chandler, Benjamin Strong, Central Banker (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1958), 276. Alleged Mellon comment is in Herbert Hoover, Memoirs Volume 3, 30–31.

23. Ahamed, Lords of Finance, 197–215; and Josephine Young Case and Everett Needham Case, Owen D. Young and American Enterprise (Boston, MA: David R. Godine, 1982), 274–287.

24. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & Howe, 1920), 135. Keynes calculated that a maximum reparation that Germany could be responsible for was somewhere between $8–$15 billion; Johnson, Gold, France, 74–75; Ahamed, Lords of Finance, 214; and Stephen A. Schuker, The End of French Dominance in Europe: The Financial Crisis of 1924 and the Adoption of the Dawes Plan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976) is a day-by-day account, predominately from the French point of view.

25. Schuker, End of French, 294; Case and Case, Owen D. Young, 274–287.

26. Case and Case, Owen D. Young, 286; and “The Ruhr: March 17, 1923,” Time, March 17, 1923.

27. Strong quote in Chandler, Benjamin Strong, 271; Keynes in Case and Case, Owen D. Young, 290–291.

28. The Report of the First Committee of Experts to the Reparations Commission, April 9, 1924, reprinted in Federal Reserve Bulletin, May 1924, 351–417, quote at 355. The full report is available at fraser.stlouisfed.org/scribd/?toc_id=64276&filepath=/docs/publications/FRB/1920s/frb_051924.pdf&start_page=31#scribd-open.

29. Ibid., 359–366.

30. Ibid., 365 (converted to $).

31. Ibid., 366.

32. Schuker, End of French, offers the most detailed account, 289–359.

33. Case and Case, Owen D. Young, 308.

34. Robert L. Hetzl, “German Monetary History in the First Half of the Twentieth Century,” Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Economic Quarterly 88 no. 1 (Winter 2002): 1–35, 19 Table 1; and Jon Jacobson, Locarno Diplomacy: Germany and the West, 1925–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972): 3–44.

35. Felix, Walter Rathenau, 9.

36. George F. Kennan, Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin (Boston MA: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1960–1961), 208–223; Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 427–435; MacMillan, Paris 1919, 481; and Felix, Walter Rathenau, 11, 135–136.

37. Schuker, End of French, 249–250, 253–254.

38. Ibid., 265–266, 318; and Stephen A. Schuker, American “Reparations” to Germany, 1919–1933: Implications for the Third World Debt Crisis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 46.

39. Schuker, American “Reparations,” 106–109; Niall Ferguson, The House of Rothschild: The World’s Banker, 1849–1999 (New York: Viking Penguin, 1998), 204–217; and Michael Gavin, “Intertemporal Dimensions of International Economic Adjustment: Evidence from the Franco-Prussian War Indemnity,” The American Economic Review 82, no. 2 (May 1992), 174–179.

40. Paul Bairoch, “International Industrialization Levels from 1750 to 1980,” Journal of European Economic History 11, no. 2 (Fall, 1982): 269–333, and Stephen N. Broadberry and Douglas Irwin, “Labor Productivity in the United States and the United Kingdom during the Nineteenth Century,” NBER Working Paper no. 10364 (March 2004). The 1870–1913 growth rate calculations are from W. Arthur Lewis, Growth and Fluctuation, 1870–1913 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978), 17–18. S. B. Saul, The Myth of the Great Depression, 1873–1896 (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1985), also includes a great deal of comparative data, generally consistent with Bairoch, but with a variety of additional nuances.

41. For a general history, see D. L. Burn, The Economic History of Steelmaking, 1867–1939: A Study in Competition (Cambridge, England: University Press, 1940).

42. D. E. Moggridge, British Monetary Policy: The Norman Conquest of $4.86 (Cambridge, England: University Press, 1972), 30–36.

43. Ibid., 17–21.

44. Ibid., 24–26.

45. Clarke, Central Bank Cooperation, 74–75 (Strong quotes); and Chandler, Benjamin Strong, 291–331, and see 281–285 for a lucid Strong memo on the practical issues of establishing the exchange rate of disparate currencies.

46. Moggridge, British Monetary Policy, 28–29; and see Peter Termin, Lessons from the Great Depression (Cambridge MAS: MIT Press, 1989), 12–16.

47. Moggridge, British Monetary Policy, 37–51.

48. P. J. Grigg, Prejudice and Judgement (London: Jonathan Cape, 1948), 180–186; and detailed questions, Moggridge, British Monetary Policy, 65–66, with full text of questions on 260–262.

49. Moggridge, British Monetary Policy, 67.

50. Ibid., 75–77.

51. Clarke, Central Bank Cooperation, 85–88.

52. Ibid., 88–90.

53. Ibid., 93–96; Chandler, Benjamin Strong, 308–321. Neither line was drawn upon.

54. Grigg, Prejudice and Judgement, 184, 182.

55. Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 400–401.

56. Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Savior, 1920–1937, Vol. 2 (London: MacMillan, 1992), 200.

57. John Maynard Keynes, “The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill,” reprinted in Essays in Persuasion (Classic House Books, 2009), 132–147, at 138.

58. Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 200–203, quote at 193.

59. Ibid., 200–201.

60. Jenkins, Churchill, 405; and “History: General Strike of 1926,” BBC, bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/history/mwh/britain/generalstrikerev4.shtml.

61. Jenkins, Churchill, 408–412.

62. Johnson, Gold, France, 33; FRED, “Index of Wholesale Prices (France).”

63. Johnson, Gold, France, 74–75.

64. Eichengreen, Golden Fetters, 172–175; Schuker, End of French, 95–100.

65. Eichengreen, Golden Fetters, 173–178.

66. Johnson, Gold, France, 81–82.

67. Ibid., 122–28; and Eichengreen, Golden Fetters, 182.

68. Eichengreen, Golden Fetters, 182–183.

69. Ahamed, Lords of Finance, 261–269.

70. Ibid., 259–261.

71. Ibid., 295–299.

72. Clarke, Central Bank Cooperation, 124.

73. See ibid., 124–125; Eichengreen, Golden Fetters, 213–214; and Meltzer, A History, 256–257 for the evidence against the likelihood that the 1927 easing policy was destabilizing, and Ahamed, Lords of Finance, 298–300 for the argument that it was destabilizing. The attack on Strong is the less credible because it was mounted originally by Adolph Miller, the chairman of the Washington Board, who had been mounting a guerilla campaign to undercut Strong’s position and move international policy to the Washington board. Miller is widely viewed as among the weakest of Federal Reserve chairmen.

74. David Cannadine, Mellon: An American Life (New York: Knopf, 2008), 290–291; Schuker, American “Reparations,” 91.

75. Jon Jacobson, Locarno Diplomacy, 68–76.

76. Ibid., 104–110.

77. McNeil, American Money, 100–103.

78. Ibid, 122–123.

79. Theo Balderston, “The Beginning of the Depression in Germany, 1927–1930: Investment and the Capital Market,” The Economic History Review, New Series 36, no. 3 (August, 1983), 395–415, 406–410.

80. Schuker, American “Reparations,” 60. For note, see S. Parker Gilbert, Report of the Agent General for Reparation Payments, IV. The German Budget, June 10, 1927; net.lib.byu.edu/~rdh7/wwi/1918p/rep27/repartc.htm.

81. Jacobson, Locarno Diplomacy, 250–276; Case and Case, Owen D. Young, 430; and for the text of the Young plan, see www.pca-cpa.org/hague19300cfe.pdf?fil_id=388i.

82. Theo Balderston, “German Banking Between the Wars: the Crisis of the Credit Banks,” The Business History Review, 65:3 (Autumn 1991), 554–605, 564.

83. “Report of the Agent General for Reparations, May 21, 1930,” Federal Reserve Bulletin, November 1930, 694–737, quote, 697.

84. Theo Balderston, “The Origins of Economic Instability in Germany, 1924–1930: Market Forces versus Economic Policy,” VSWG: Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial-und Wirtschaftgeschichte, 69:4, 488–514, 490.

85. Johnson, Gold, France, 135–136.

86. Ibid., 131.

87. Ibid., 142–144.

88. Ibid., 147.

89. Eichengreen, Golden Fetters, 267–269; and Ahamed, Lords of Finance, 404–406.

90. Eichengreen, Golden Fetters, 264–267; Ahmed, 406.

91. Ibid., 269–270.

92. Harold James, “The Causes of the German Banking Crisis of 1931,” The Economic History Review, 37:1 (February, 1984), 68–87, 76–78.

93. Ahamed, Lords of Finance, 408–410.

94. Charles Rappleye, Herbert Hoover in the White House: The Ordeal of the Presidency (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 261.

95. Clarke, Central Bank Cooperation, 193–194; and Ahamed, Lords of Finance, 414–418.

96. Clarke, Central Bank Cooperation, 201–202; and Eichengreen, Golden Fetters, 280.

97. Clarke, Central Bank Cooperation, 204–209.

98. Ibid., 208–213.

99. Ibid.

100. “Disorders in British Navy Follow Economy Pay Cut; Manoeuvres Are Cancelled,” New York Times, September 26, 1931; and Clarke, Central Bank Cooperation, 214.

101. Clarke, Central Bank Cooperation, 215–216.

102. Ibid., 218–219.

103. Kim Quaile Hill, Democracies in Crisis: Public Policy Responses to the Great Depression (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988), 37, Figure 3.3.

104. Peter Temin, “Socialism and Wages in the Recovery from the Great Depression in the United States and Germany,” The Journal of Economic History, 50:2 (June, 1990), 297–307.

PART FIVE: ROOSEVELT, REFLATION, AND RECOVERY

1. International: “The World Confers,” Time, June 19, 1933.

2. Eric Rauchway, The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 71–91.

3. Quotes from Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny (Boston, MA: Little Brown & Co., 1990), 68; and Eric Larrabee, Commander-in-Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants, and Their War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 644.

4. Rauchway, Money Makers, 34–35.

5. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Coming of the New Deal, V. 3 of The Age of Roosevelt (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959), 203–212.

6. Lester V. Chandler, America’s Greatest Depression, 1929–1941 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 53–66, is a compact and data-rich summary; the study on farmer incomes is cited in Bernard F. Stanton, George F. Warren, Farm Economist (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2007), 296.

7. Chandler, America’s Greatest Depression, 56.

8. Chandler, America’s Greatest Depression, 54; and Lloyd D. Teigen, Agricultural Parity: Historical Review and Alternative Calculations (Washington, DC: US Department of Agriculture, Economic Agriculture Report No. 571, 1987).

9. FRED, Index of Prices Received by Farmers, All Groups for the United States 1900–1914 = 100, Monthly, Not Seasonally Adjusted; and Chandler, America’s Greatest Depression, 57–59.

10. Domenico Delli Gatti et al., “Sectoral Balances and Long Run Crises,” paper presented to the International Economic Association, Beijing, July 8, 2011, 14–16.

11. Public Law 73–10, H.R. 3835.

12. Ibid.

13. Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal, 195–203.

14. Barry Eichengreen, Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 332.

15. Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal, 213–218; Eichengreen, Golden Fetters, 333.

16. Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal, 218.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid., 219–224.

19. Sebastian Edwards, “Academics as Economic Advisers: Gold, the ‘Brains Trust,’ and FDR,” NBER Working Paper 21380 (July 2015), 35; Stanton, George F. Warren, 353–358.

20. Elmus Wicker, “Roosevelt’s 1933 Monetary Experiment,” Journal of American History 57, no. 4 (March 1971): 864–879, at 876; and Charles P. Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929–1939, 40th anniversary ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 228, 230.

21. Wicker, “Roosevelt’s 1933,” 877–878. For Warren’s prominent role—he was on the cover of TIME magazine—see Stanton, George F. Warren, 404–440.

22. Rauchway, Money Makers, 83–84.

23. Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal, 241–242.

24. Rauchway, Money Makers, 89–90.

25. Eichengreen, Golden Fetters, 345–347.

26. Barry Eichengreen and Jeffrey Sachs, “Exchange Rates and Economic Recovery in the 1930s,” Journal of Economic History 45, no. 4 (December, 1985): 925–946; and “Competitive Devaluation and the Great Depression: A Theoretical Assessment,” Economics Letters 22 (1986): 67–71. Quote is from Eichengreen and Sachs, “Exchange Rates,” 925.

27. Eichengreen, Golden Fetters, 345–347.

28. Ibid.

29. Eichengreen and Sachs, “Exchange Rates,” 927n8.

30. “Address at Oglethorpe University, May 22, 1932,” in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Vol. 1, 1928–32 (New York: Random House, 1938), 639.

31. Alan Brinkley, Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression (New York: Vintage Edition, 1983), 111–127.

32. Ibid., 22–31, 69.

33. Ibid., 79–80.

34. Ibid., 222–230.

35. “Education and Training: History and Timeline,” US Department of Veterans Affairs, www.benefits.va.gov/gibill/history.asp; and Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 1 (2003): 1–39, Table A3 (tables and figures updated to 2015 in Excel format, June 2016). The calculation in the footnote is the author’s. I removed transfer payments from the GDP personal income figure, and applied the Saez-Piketty percentage to the remainder.

36. Price Fishback and John Joseph Wallis, “What Was New About the New Deal?” in Nicholas Crafts and Peter Fearon (eds.), The Great Depression of the 1930s: Lessons for Today (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 290–327, is a crisp summary.

37. “Not tried” quote in Christina D. Romer, “What Ended the Great Depression,” Journal of Economic History 52, no. 4 (December, 1992): 757–784, 758; and Alexander J. Field, “Economic Growth and Recovery in the United States, 1919–1941,” in Nicholas Crafts and Peter Fearon (eds.), The Great Depression of the 1930s: Lessons for Today (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 358–394, 374.

38. Gauti B. Eggertsson, “Great Expectations and the End of the Depression,” American Economic Review 98, no. 4 (2008): 1476–1516, 1482.

39. Kindleberger, World in Depression, 193.

40. Peter Temin and Barrie A. Wigmore, “The End of One Big Inflation,” Explorations in Economic History 27, no. 4 (1990): 483–502, quote at 483.

41. Eggertsson, “Great Expectations,” 1501; and Christina D. Romer, “What Ended.”

42. Relief: “Rizzo Goes to Work,” Time, April 17, 1933.

43. Schlesinger, 337–340.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid., 266–268, Ron Cynewulf Robbins, “Roosevelt’s Bracken: Harry Hopkins, ‘Lord Root of the Matter,’” Finest Hour, 146 (Spring 2010), www.winstonchurchill/publications/finest-hour/60-finest-hour-146.

46. Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal, 269–271.

47. Ibid.; Fishback and Wallis, “What Was New,” 298. Calculations by the author.

48. Fishback and Wallis, “What Was New,” 308.

49. Ibid., 306.

50. Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt, 150.

51. Public Law No. 67 (H.R. 5755), June 16, 1933, Section 1.

52. Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 219–256. Dewey quote at 252–253.

53. Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914), 44.

54. Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt, 136–138. Schecter quote in note: A.L.A. Schecter Poultry Corp. v. United States 495 (1935). Court Syllabus, Holding (1).

55. Fishback and Wallis, “What Was New,” Table 10.2, summations by author.

56. Ibid., 296–304, 308–313, 316–319.

57. This section relies on Price V. Fishback, Alfonso Flores-Lagunes, William Horrace, Shawn E. Kantor, and Jaret Treber, “The Influence of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation on Housing Markets During the 1930s,” NBER Working Paper No. 15824 (March 2010), quote at 6.

58. Price V. Fishback, William C. Horrace, and Shawn Kantor, “Did New Deal Grant Programs Stimulate Local Economies? A Study of Federal Grants and Retail Sales During the Great Depression,” Journal of Economic History 65, no. 1 (March, 2005): 36–71.

59. Todd C. Neumann, Price V. Fishback, and Shawn Kantor, “The Dynamics of Relief Spending and the Private Urban Labor Market During the New Deal,” Journal of Economic History 70, no. 1 (March 2010): 195–220, quote at 200.

60. Ibid.; and Gavin Wright, “The Political Economy of New Deal Spending: An Econometric Analysis,” Review of Economics and Statistics 56, no. 1 (February 1974): 30–38.

61. Fishback and Wallis, “What Was New,” 304.

62. Eggertsson, “Great Expectations,” 1482; NIPA Table 1.1.6.

63. W. L. Crum, R. A. Gordon, and Dorothy Westcott, “Review of the Year 1937,” The Review of Economics and Statistics 20, no. 1 (February 1938), 43–52, at 43. Kenneth D. Roose, The Economics of Recession and Revival: An Interpretation of 1937–38 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954) is data rich and intelligent, but dated.

64. Francois R. Velde, “The Recession of 1937—A Cautionary Tale,” Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago: Economic Perspectives (4Q 2009), 16–36; industrial production drop calculated by author, from FRED, G-17, “Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization;” drops in employment and stock valuations from Velde, “Recession of 1937,” 17; quarterly GDP data from the interpolated data developed by Robert J. Gordon and Nathan S. Balke, in Robert J. Gordon, ed., The American Business Cycle: Continuity and Change (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986), appendix B, Historical Data, 794–795.

65. Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform (New York: Random House, 1995), 28. Deficits from FRED, FYFSGDDA188s.

66. Business & Finance: “Crash! Crash! Crash!,” Time, September 20, 1937.

67. Velde, “Recession of 1937”; Herbert Stein, The Fiscal Revolution in America (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 1969), 100–107; and Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobsen Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 517–526.

68. Velde, “Recession of 1937,” 19; Friedman and Schwartz, A Monetary History, 544; and Robert Higgs, “America’s Depression Within a Depression, 1937–1939,” Foundation for Economic Education, October 22, 1910. https://fee.org/articles/americas-depression-within-a-depression-193739/.

69. United States Department of Commerce (US DOC), BEA “GDP: One of the Great Inventions of the 20th Century,” Survey of Current Business (January, 2000): 1–9.

70. Brinkley, End of Reform, 29, 30.

71. Douglas A. Irwin, “Gold Sterilization and the Recession of 1937–38,” NBER Working Paper 17595 (November 2011).

72. Brinkley, End of Reform, 82–85, 97–101.

73. Charles W. Calomiris, Joseph Mason, and David Wheelock, “Did Doubling Reserve Requirements Cause the Recession of 1937–38: A Microeconomic Approach,” NBER Working Paper 16688 (January 2011).

74. Charles W. Calomiris and R. Glenn Hubbard, “Internal Finance and Investment: Evidence from the Undistributed Profits Tax of 1936–37,” Journal of Business 68, no. 4 (October, 1995): 443–482; and Field, “Economic Growth,” 358–359, at 374. GDP growth calculations by the author from NIPA 1.1.6 and Historical Statistics, Table Ca213.

75. NIPA Table 1.1.6.

76. Robert A. Margo, “Employment and Unemployment in the 1930s,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 7, no. 2 (Spring, 1993), Table 1. The “Lebergott” column is the official Census Bureau version; for the Darby version, see Michael R. Darby, “Three and a Half Million U.S. Employees Have Been Mislaid: Or, an Explanation of Unemployment, 1934–1941,” Journal of Political Economy 84, no. 1 (February, 1976): 1–16.

77. Ibid., 43–44.

78. Keynes quote in footnote from Donald Moggridge, ed., The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Vol. XX: Activities 1929–1931, Rethinking Employment and Unemployment Policies (London: MacMillan and Cambridge University Press, for the Royal Economic Society, 1981), 130.

79. For the flavor of British labor relations in the interwar period, see Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001), 403–417.

80. Irving Bernstein, The Turbulent Years, A History of the American Worker, 1933–1940 (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Press reprint edition, 2010), 646–671, 569–571, 754–751.

81. Frederick C. Mills, “Changes in Pricing, Manufacturing Costs, and Industrial Productivity, 1929–1934,” NBER Bulletin No. 53, December 22, 1934, 7; and Ada M. Beny, Wages, Hours, and Employment in the United States, 1914–1936 (New York: National Industrial Conference Board, Inc., 1936), Table 2. (Note: I recovered the Mills data from charts in the cited newsletter. Mills did not consistently publish his monthly data, usually citing them only to mark start and end points of price movements. The charts in the cited newsletter were clearly based on monthly data, although they were hard to read and the Xerox pages were distorted. I engaged a computer graphics professional to produce rectified, blown up versions, on graph paper, so I could read off the monthly data.

82. Mills “Changes in Pricing,” 7.

83. Business: “Steel Accedes,” Time, October 31, 1932.

84. Mills, “Changes in Pricing,” 7.

85. The discussion here draws from Lawrence F. Katz and Robert A. Margo, “Technical Change and the Relative Demand for Skilled Labor in Historical Perspective,” NBER Working Paper 18752 (February 2013). I have also written on the early American textile industry and white-collar revolution in Charles R. Morris, The Dawn of Innovation (New York: Public Affairs, 2012), 89–107; and The Tycoons, How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J.P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), 187–215, respectively.

86. Roose, Economics of Recession, 181.

87. Timothy F. Bresnahan and Daniel M. G. Raff, “Intra-Industry Heterogeneity and the Great Depression: The American Automobile Industry, 1929–1935,” Journal of Economic History 51, no. 2 (June 1991): 317–331, Tables 2, 3, and 4. For essential background of the lengthy diffusion of Fordism, see Daniel M. G. Raff, “Making Cars and Making Money in the Interwar Automobile Industry: Economies of Scale and Scope and the Manufacturing Behind the Marketing,” Business History Review 65, no. 4 (Winter 1991), 721–753; and “Representative Firm Analysis and the Character of Competition: Glimpses of the Great Depression,” American Economic Review 88, no. 2 (May 1998), 57–61.

88. Richard J. Jensen, “The Causes and Cures of Unemployment in the Great Depression,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 19, no. 4 (Spring 1989): 553–583; and Daniel M. G. Raff and Lawrence H. Summers, “Did Henry Ford Pay Efficiency Wages?,” NBER Working Paper No. 2101 (December 1986).

89. Jensen, “Causes and Cures,” 555.

90. Ibid., 564–565.

91. Robert A. Margo, “The Microeconomics of Depression Unemployment,” Journal of Economic History 51, no. 2 (June 1991): 333–341, Table 1.

92. Jensen, “Causes and Cures,” 564; and Margo, “Microeconomics of Depression,” Table 1 and 340.

93. Alexander J. Field, A Great Leap Forward: 1930s Depression and US Economic Growth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 1.

94. Ibid., 20.

95. Ibid., 54–56.

96. Ibid., 58–63.

PART SIX: THE GEOLOGY OF THE COLLAPSE

1. William James, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” in Robert McHenry, “William James on Peace and War,” Encyclopedia Britannica Blog, March 22, 2010, http://blogs.britannica.com/2010/03/william-james-on-peace-and-war/.

2. James E. Hollenbeck, “The 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic: A Pale Horse Rides Home from War,” Bios 73, no. 1 (March, 2002): 19–27.

3. Jeffrey N. Dupeé, Traveling Europe Between the Two World Wars (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2013), 21.

4. Ibid., 26–27, 17.

5. Ibid., 20.

6. Ibid., 22.

7. Ibid., 30–31.

8. Nicholas Crafts and Peter Fearon, “Depression and Recovery in the 1930s: An Overview,” in Crafts and Fearon, eds., The Great Depression of the 1930s: Lessons for Today (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1, 3.

9. D. E. Moggridge, The Return to Gold, 1925: The Formulation of Economic Policy and Its Critics (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 24.

10. H. Clark Johnson, Gold, France, and the Depression, 1919–1932 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 133.

11. Allan H. Meltzer, A History of the Federal Reserve, Vol. I, 1913–1951 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 277–279.

12. Charles Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929–1939, 40^th anniversary ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013), 83–107; and Jakob B. Madsen, “Agricultural Crises and the International Transmission of the Great Depression,” The Journal of Economic History 61, no. 2 (June 2001): 327–365.

13. Frederick C. Mills, Prices in Recession and Recovery (Cambridge, MA: NBER, 1936), 98–99.

14. Madsen, “Agricultural Crises,” 328.

15. Giovanni Federico, “Not Guilty? Agriculture in the 1920s and the Great Depression,” The Journal of Economic History 65, no. 4 (December 2005): 949–976.

16. Madsen, “Agricultural Crises,” 331–335.

17. Crafts and Fearon, “Depression and Recovery,” 21.

18. Ibid., 21–24.

19. Jakob B. Madsen, “Trade Barriers and the Collapse of World Trade During the Great Depression,” Southern Economic Journal 67, no. 4 (April 2001): 848–868, 850–851.

20. Douglas A. Irwin, “The Smoot-Hawley Tariff: A Quantitative Assessment,” Review of Economics and Statistics 80, no. 2 (May, 1998): 326–334, 329; Madsen, “Trade Barriers,” 862–863. (I used the rounder numbers in the Abstract, however.)

21. Barry Eichengreen and Douglas Irwin, “The Slide to Protectionism to the Great Depression: Who Succumbed and Why?” The Journal of Economic History 70, no. 4, (December 2010): 871–897.

22. Christina D. Romer, “The Great Crash and the Onset of the Depression,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 105, no. 3 (August 1990): 597–624; Frederic S. Mishkin, “The Household Balance Sheet and the Great Depression,” The Journal of Economic History 38, no. 4 (December 1978): 918–937; Martha L. Olney, “The Role of Credit in the Consumption Collapse of 1930,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 114, no. 1 (February 1999): 319–335; and Christopher Brown, “Consumer Credit and the Propensity to Consume: Evidence from 1930,” Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics 19, no. 4 (1997): 617–638.

23. US DOC, “Indebtedness in the United States, 1929–1941,” Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1942), Table 1 and Table 9; for footnote, Federal Reserve Board, “Financial Accounts of the United States, Z.1,” Table.D3 and NIPA Table 1.1.5.

24. Charles Calomiris, “Financial Factors in the Great Depression,” Journal of Financial Perspectives 7, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 61–85; Ali Anari, James Kolari, and Joseph Mason, “Bank Asset Liquidation and the Propagation of the U.S. Great Depression,” Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking 37, no. 4 (August 2005): 753–773; Alexander J. Field, “A New Interpretation of the Onset of the Great Depression,” The Journal of Economic History 44, no. 2 (1984): 489–498; Ben Bernanke, “Nonmonetary Effects of the Financial Crisis in the Propagation of the Great Depression,” in Bernanke, Essays on the Great Depression (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 41–69, by permission of the American Economic Review 73 (1983).

25. Historical Statistics, Table Ba4361; and Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 1 (2003): 1–39 (tables and figures updated to 2015 in Excel Format), Figure 2.

26. D. E. Moggridge, British Monetary Policy 1924–1931: The Norman Conquest of $4.86 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1972), Table 10, 121.

27. The German narrative below is drawn entirely from Thomas Ferguson and Peter Termin’s splendid, “Made in Germany: The German Currency Crisis of July 1931,” Research in Economic History (2003), 21, 1–53.

28. Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 392–393.

29. Charles Calomiris, “Financial Factors in the Great Depression,” Journal of Financial Perspectives 7, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 61–85, 73, 67.

30. Theo Balderston, Economics and Politics in the Weimar Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 101.

31. Alan Greenspan, testimony before the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services, September 16, 1998.

32. Alan Greenspan, remarks to the Chicago Conference on Banking and Financial Services, May 8, 2003.

APPENDIX: MILKING THE INSULL STRUCTURE

1. The example is adapted from a presentation in US Trade Commission, “Utilities Corporations: Summary Report of the Federal Trade Commission to the Senate of the United States, Pursuant to Senate Resolution No. 83, 70th Congress, 1st Session, on Economic, Financial, and Corporate Phases of Holding and Operating Companies of Electric and Gas Utilities,” No. 72A, filed December 18, 1934, 154–164. More than eight hundred pages long, the report is impressive in its sweep and detail, although occasionally excessively hostile in its interpretations. The report is part of an eighty-four-volume investigative record undertaken by the US Trade Commission under various Senate resolutions.

2. Forrest McDonald, Insull (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 126–127; US Trade Commission, “Utilities Corporations,” 570, 504.