The Backstory: 1929 Market Crash: Did Panicked Investors Really Jump from Windows?

It’s the 96th anniversary of Black Thursday . . the day the stock market crashed, kicking off the Great Depression. There were stories in the immediate aftermath of dozens of investors jumping from buildings on Wall Street. But what inspired those stories and what really happened?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Well, Halloween is days away and there are plenty of
stories to scare us to pieces. But aside from the
regular stuff like paranormal activities and deranged killers, a lot
of us are equally spooked by what is or isn't
inside our bank account. Well, it could be worse. Today
is the ninety sixth anniversary of the stock market crash

(00:23):
on Wall Street. There was talk of mass suicide as
Black Thursday began the decade long Great Depression. I'm Patty Steele.
What really happened and what world famous politician contributed to
the mass suicide story? That's next on the backstory. The

(00:45):
backstory is back. Got to send a big thank you
to backstory listener Chuck Bell for suggesting this episode. Thank you, Chuck.
It is late October nineteen twenty nine. There have been
rumblings of financial trouble for the best year or so.
Prices are down steadily, and since so many people make
their livings off of farming in those days, they have

(01:06):
no money to spend, so consumer prices and production is
also falling. Problem is all the masters of the universe
on Wall Street see this as an opportunity to buy low,
and eventually they think sell high, so they keep buying
stocks which are now artificially inflated, until Black Thursday, that

(01:27):
is October twenty fourth, nineteen twenty nine. More experienced investors
had already begun to sell, but now all investors begin
to panic as they see stocks being sold off, so
they all start selling and the market goes into free fall.
There's a run on the banks, which of course increases
the panic. With the New York Stock Exchange crashing, a

(01:50):
jittery crowd literally descends on Wall Street because getting real
time access to news any other way but in person,
just wasn't very easy in those days. They'd heard that
eleven investors had already committed suicide that afternoon. It sounds crazy,
but imagine you've been living not just a comfortable life,

(02:10):
but an exciting life during the go go Roaring twenties.
You have the fancy house or city apartment, gorgeous cars,
chic flapper era clothes, and for the summer you head
for the beaches of Long Island, maybe the Adirondecks, or
if you're really loaded, Newport, Rhode Island. But then on
bloody Black Thursday, it all disappears. The flood of money

(02:35):
you've gotten used to to fund that lifestyle trickles to
nothing overnight. The masters of the universe who thought the
good times would never end are no longer masters of
their universe, and that means working class people are equally
as deprived because industry and thus the job market is collapsing.

(02:56):
So as folks cluster on Wall Street, they're sure they're
going to see more bodies drop as they look up
at the Wall Street high rises searching, Wait, look up,
is that someone leaning out of the window or over
the rooftop? Are they getting ready to jump? On Black Thursday,
false reports are everywhere around Wall Street that panic bankers

(03:18):
and investors are leaping out of high rise windows and plummeting,
much like the stock market itself. The next day, the
New York Deli News says if half the suicides which
were reported yesterday were true, Wall Street would be a
deserted village this morning. Historians say there actually was no
epidemic of suicides in the immediate wake of the crash,

(03:42):
although by nineteen thirty two, three years later, suicides in
the US were up by almost twenty five percent. The
rate by that year was the highest on record, far
higher than the rate today. The thing is, it took
a while for the impact of the crash to sink in.
A lot of investors thought at first it would come

(04:03):
around quickly, the stock market would be back, but it wasn't. So.
Window jumping and other methods of suicide became ingrained in
the public consciousness for several reasons. In one case, a
British newspaper reporter who lost a ton of money in
the crash himself, was in New York City that day
and said he'd watched the crash from the Stock Exchange

(04:25):
visitor gallery. He wrote that on that same day he
looked out of the window of his hotel room at
the Savoy and watched a body fall not far from him.
The reporter was Winston Churchill, future British Prime Minister. He wrote,
under my very window, a gentleman cast himself down fifteen

(04:45):
stories and was dashed to pieces, causing a wild commotion
and the arrival of the fire brigade. As it turns out,
the jumper was actually a German chemist also visiting New
York City, who had either jumped, fallen accidentally, or been pushed.
But it happened before the actual Wall Street crash. So

(05:06):
not related. But as the days wore on, there were
suicides that made the news. The head of a wholesale
produce company lost off fortune, and he jumped from the
seventh floored ledge outside his lawyer's office and landed on
a car parked on Wall Street. A man with a
seat on the New York Stock Exchange drank poison in Chicago.

(05:28):
A real estate investor turned on the gas in his
kitchen and put his head in the oven. In Scranton, Pennsylvania,
a civil engineer doused himself with gasoline and lit himself
on fire. His wife also died from burns she suffered
while trying to save her husband. And a twenty six
year old in Milwaukee, Wisconsin left a suicide note in

(05:50):
his hotel room with some gallows humor, saying my body
should go to science, my soul to Secretary of Treasury
Andrew W. Mellon, and my sympathy to my creditors. On
top of that, there was plenty of public dark humor
in the aftermath. Will Rogers was a vaudeville superstar and

(06:11):
newspaper humorist. The day after Black Thursday, in his newspaper column,
he said, when Wall Street took that tailspan you had
to stand in line to get a window to jump
out of. Speculators were selling spaces for bodies in the
East River Yikes, maybe a little too soon, right and
Vaudeville comedian, singer and movie producer Eddie Canter lost most

(06:34):
of his money in the crash thanks to his business
sense in his resilience. He did make most of his
fortune back by investing in publishing, radio and movies, but
at the time of the crash, humor was all he had.
He joked that when he asked for a nineteenth floor
room at a New York City hotel, the clerk asked him,

(06:55):
what will this be for sleeping or jumping? Can you imagine? Again?
Big thanks to backstory listener Chuck Bell for turning me
on to this story. Hope you like the backstory with
Patty Steele. Please leave a review. I'd love it if
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(07:18):
like Chuck, you have a story you'd like me to cover.
On Facebook, It's Patty Steele and on Instagram Real Patty Steele.
I'm Patty Steele. The Backstories a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks,
the Elvis Durand Group, and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer

(07:39):
is Doug Fraser. Our writer Jake Kushner. We have new
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Thanks for listening to the Backstory with Patty Steele, the
pieces of history you didn't know you needed to know.