1929: America Before the Crash

by Warren Sloat

More than a mere overview of what may well be the most crucial year in American history, and not at all a nostalgia trifle, 1929 is a dramatic tale of a nation leading the rest of the world into the twentieth century―brilliantly aware of the surge of energy that has made it the leading world power, and yet blind to the destiny that waits in the caverns of Wall Street.

1929 reveals how important figures in the nation and the world―Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Herbert Hoover, H. L. Menken, and many others―redirected the twentieth century in America's last period of enterprise and energy before the Depression.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

384 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1979

Reviews

[Billhotto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Description of American business culture following WW I. The narrative is woven around a banquet that Henry Ford held to honor his good friend Thomas Edison, on the fiftieth anniversary of Edison's successful development of the electric light bulb. President Hoover, Marie Curie and many of the country's top business leaders were attendees. Ironically the affair took place on October 23, 1929,even as American Capitalism was being celebrated, the Stock Market was crashing and the Great Depression was underway.
Edison and Ford were self made men who helped develop electric power and the automobile, two technologies that along with radio utterly changed America and the world. These represented the American ideal of practical application of technology rather than the theoretical. Sloat describes the development of advertising and public relations that sold the public on the glories of American capitalism and free enterprise. His description of things in 1929- the panacea of unregulated business, the deification of success and celebrity culture, the power of the financial sector, the emphasis on financial return over real growth, America's withdrawal from the world, anti-immigration1 and nativist movements, rural versus urban, the influence of lobbyists and the weakness of labor unions are prominent today. If Stoat had written this book recently, you might say he was deliberately drawing parallels. However, 1929 was published in 1977. The more things change...

[Melissa Salsgiver · Rating 3 out of 5]

Events, people and circumstances of the 1920's were clarified and distinctive. I better understand the nation at that time and the reason the crash occurred. I learned from this book things never taught in school. Interesting yet not a spell binding read.