I had been at the firm for two years when the market broke. I was twenty-four years old, a junior in the order room, which meant I processed buy and sell orders for the partners and the senior men — translated their instructions into the paper tickets that went to the floor. It was not a prestigious position. It was a position that put me in the center of things on the days when the center of things was where you least wanted to be.
The week before the crash, everyone knew something was wrong. The market had been falling since September — not straight down but in the lurching, recovering, lurching-again way of a thing that has not yet decided whether to fall completely. The partners spoke in lower voices. The phones rang more. But the market had lurched before and recovered, and the recovery was always, to date, true, and so the belief that it would recover again was reasonable, based on evidence, and wrong.
The Morning of October 29th
The opening bell brought a wave of sell orders unlike anything I had processed before. I am speaking of volume: the sheer physical quantity of paper tickets that needed to be written, checked, and carried to the floor. My handwriting, which was neat in ordinary conditions, became functional and then rapid and then something that preserved legibility at the expense of everything else by nine-thirty in the morning.
The ticker fell behind almost immediately. This is the detail that I have tried to explain to people who were not there: the ticker was a mechanical device that printed prices as they occurred, and it had a maximum speed, and the volume of trading exceeded that speed, so the prices you could read on the tape were not the current prices — they were the prices from one hour ago, then two hours ago, then more. You were watching history being printed in real time while the present moved too fast to record.
Men in the order room were executing sell orders at prices they could not verify. The client would call: sell a hundred shares of U.S. Steel. At what price? At market. And "market" was an unknown — a thing you would learn eventually, when the tape caught up, when you could total the damage.
The Crowd Outside
Word had gotten to the street by mid-morning. A crowd gathered on Broad Street and on Wall Street and along the approaches to the Exchange — not a violent crowd, not a shouting crowd, but a crowd of the particular quality of people who do not know what is happening and are trying to be physically near to the place where it is happening as a substitute for knowing. Policemen stood on the steps of the Sub-Treasury Building. I watched the crowd from the windows twice, briefly, between processing orders.
A man I recognized — a client, a man who had come to the office every week for two years to review his portfolio, who had seemed to me an example of someone who had made sensible decisions about money — was standing on the street corner below looking up at the Exchange building. I do not know what he was looking for. The building told him nothing. The building was just a building.
The End of the Day
The closing bell at three o'clock produced a silence in the order room that lasted perhaps ten seconds — the particular silence of people who have been moving very fast and have suddenly stopped. Then the adding up began: tallying the trades, calculating the losses, learning what "at market" had meant for each of the orders we had executed blind.
The numbers I saw that afternoon belonged to a different world than the one I had woken up in. The mathematics of the decline — expressed in the losses of individual accounts, some of them belonging to people I knew by name — was arithmetic that the arithmetic did not seem adequate for.
I walked home along the East River. The city was ordinary: the trucks, the food carts, the people going wherever they were going. None of it knew yet, or was behaving as if it knew, what had been decided in the order rooms and on the exchange floor over the past eight hours. That knowledge would take time to move from the financial district into the rest of the city, into the country, into the decade.
It took three years. By the end of those three years, a quarter of the country was out of work, and the world that had existed before October 29, 1929 was as gone as if it had been a different world entirely. Which, in most of the ways that mattered, it had been.
Narrator's note: Arthur Fenwick is a fictional figure. The ticker delay, trading volume, margin mechanics, and the street crowds are documented in contemporaneous accounts in the New York Times (October 29–30, 1929), Robert Sobel's The Great Bull Market (1968), and John Kenneth Galbraith's The Great Crash 1929 (1954).