We all know the stock market crashed in 1929, plunging the world into the Great Depression. But what we don’t know is the gripping, human drama of the flawed men whose arrogance, optimism, and personal gambles made it inevitable.
Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 1929 masterfully argues that the greatest financial disaster in modern history was not a faceless economic event, but a preventable tragedy orchestrated by a small group of powerful, overconfident, and deeply interconnected individuals on Wall Street and in Washington.
Sorkin builds his case on eight years of research, drawing from previously unseen confidential board minutes of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, unpublished memoirs, private letters, diaries, and court records to reconstruct the day-by-day decisions that led to the cliff’s edge.
This book is perfect for readers of narrative non-fiction like The Big Short or Lords of Finance, history buffs seeking a character-driven account, and anyone in finance or economics who wants to understand the human psychology behind market cycles. It is not for those seeking a dry, purely econometric analysis of the Depression.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History–and How It Shattered a Nation is the highly anticipated work by Andrew Ross Sorkin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author of “Too Big to Fail.” Published by Viking, this book represents the culmination of over eight years of intensive investigative reporting.
Sorkin is a founding writer of the New York Times‘ DealBook and a leading voice on financial markets, bringing a modern sensibility and a deep understanding of Wall Street’s machinations to this historical subject.
Context and Purpose: Moving beyond the standard economic textbooks that reduce the crash to graphs of the Dow Jones, Sorkin plunges us into the smoke-filled rooms and opulent mansions where the fate of the global economy was decided. The book’s central thesis, drawn from the author’s own note, is that this story is “deeply human.”
It is not about the masses who endured the fallout, but about “those who helped set it in motion, because that’s where the responsibility lies, and where the lessons remain” (Page 11). Sorkin’s purpose is to dismantle the myth of the crash as an inevitable act of God and rebuild it as a story of specific, consequential choices made by a cast of brilliant, flawed, and overconfident men.
2. Background
To understand the fall, one must first understand the dizzying height of the boom. Sorkin paints the 1920s as the birth of modern consumerism, a period where Americans, migrating to cities, voraciously bought cars, radios, and appliances.
The engine of this new economy was credit. “Buy now, pay later. It was a kind of magic” (Page 28). General Motors and Sears led the way with installment plans, and Wall Street followed suit, offering stock “on margin.” Middle-class Americans poured into the market, putting down just 10-20% of a stock’s price and borrowing the rest. When prices rose, the returns were astronomical, creating a sensation of “free money” (Page 29).
This credit-fueled euphoria created a new American aristocracy: the celebrity businessman. For the first time, financiers and industrialists like Charles Mitchell of National City Bank and John Raskob of General Motors became household names, their pronouncements treated “like scripture” (Page 29).
They built temples to their wealth on Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue, creating a stark divide from the struggling rural populace. As Sorkin notes, this created “a massive bifurcation of American society… a widening gulf between the urban haves and the rural have-nots” (Page 29). The stage was set for a dramatic collision.
3. 1929 Summary
Sorkin structures his book as a ticking clock, using a day-by-day, character-driven narrative from February 1929 through the crash and its immediate aftermath. This method is incredibly effective, building a palpable sense of dread as the players, blinded by their own success, march toward the abyss. The provided PDF covers the first half of 1929, a critical period where the crisis became unavoidable.
The Central Conflict: Wall Street vs. The Fed
The core drama of the book’s first half is the escalating war between the titans of finance and the Federal Reserve. The Fed, fearing a dangerous speculative bubble, attempted to use “moral suasion” to discourage banks from lending to stock speculators (Page 55). This directly threatened the engine of the boom: margin loans.
Leading the charge for Wall Street was Charles E. “Sunshine Charlie” Mitchell, the charismatic and ruthlessly ambitious chairman of National City Bank (the forerunner to Citigroup).
Mitchell had built his empire by democratizing speculation, telling his salesmen to look at the millions on the streets of New York “just waiting for someone to come to tell them what to do with their savings” (Page 57). To him, the Fed’s policies were an ignorant assault on American prosperity.
The conflict came to a head on March 26, 1929, when a Fed-induced credit crunch caused a massive sell-off. With the market in freefall, Mitchell made a fateful decision.
He publicly declared that National City Bank would step in and lend freely to speculators, stating, “we feel that we have an obligation which is paramount to any Federal Reserve warning” (Page 93). This single act of defiance, hailed on Wall Street, made him a hero but also a prime target. Sorkin frames this as the pivotal moment where private power openly challenged public regulatory authority.
The Cast of Characters and Their Fatal Flaws
Sorkin’s narrative power lies in his character portraits:
- Thomas Lamont of J.P. Morgan & Co.: The de facto leader of the most powerful bank in the world, Lamont is the polished, diplomatic heir to the Morgan legacy. While in Paris negotiating the Young Plan for German war reparations—a storyline showcasing the immense political power of bankers—he is simultaneously orchestrating audacious, risky mergers and participating in the very speculative investment trusts that would have horrified the bank’s founder (Page 45-48). He embodies the era’s contradiction: a man of immense responsibility engaged in profound recklessness.
- William Crapo Durant: The founder of General Motors turned legendary speculator, Durant was a “financial Pied Piper” (Page 69) who organized massive stock pools to manipulate prices. He was so concerned about the Fed’s policies that he secretly went to the White House to plead with President Herbert Hoover, warning him that the Fed was “killing the goose which laid the golden egg” (Page 70). His desperate, failed lobbying shows how deeply the speculators believed their own rhetoric.
- Jesse Livermore: The “Boy Plunger,” was a legendary bear raider who made fortunes by shorting the market. Yet, even he was eventually seduced by the bull market, flipping to bet on rising prices in the summer of 1929 (Page 143). His internal conflict between his bearish instincts and the market’s relentless rise illustrates the overpowering force of the mania.
- John Raskob: The Democratic National Committee chairman and financial genius behind GM, Raskob was the ultimate evangelist of the era. He famously proclaimed in Ladies’ Home Journal that “Everybody Ought to Be Rich” and devised a plan to help the average wage earner buy stocks on installment debt (Page 125-127). Yet, privately, he was hedging his own bets, worried the market was overvalued. His public optimism masked private doubt, a hypocrisy that defined the era’s top.
- Senator Carter Glass: The fiery, segregationist Democrat from Virginia was the architect of the Federal Reserve System and Wall Street’s most formidable foe. He viewed speculation as a “tax on American prosperity” and considered Mitchell’s actions “mutiny” (Page 104). His relentless crusade to punish Mitchell and tax speculators represents the growing political backlash that would define the post-crash era.
The Mechanics of Manipulation
Sorkin brilliantly exposes the legalized corruption that fueled the bubble. He details the operation of “stock pools,” where insiders like Durant, Raskob, and Walter Chrysler would pool their resources to artificially inflate a stock’s price.
Using Michael Meehan, the RCA “specialist” on the exchange floor, they would “paint the tape” with fake trades, lure in gullible investors, and then “pull the plug,” dumping their shares for massive profits (Page 99-100). In one week, Meehan’s RCA pool netted nearly $5 million.
This was all done “in accordance with and subject to the rules and regulations of the New York Stock Exchange” (Page 100), a chilling detail that underscores the complete lack of effective oversight.
4. 1929 Analysis
Sorkin’s methodology is the book’s greatest strength. He employs the same immersive, cinematic technique he used in “Too Big to Fail” for the 2008 crisis, treating 1929 not as ancient history but as a breaking news story.
By grounding his narrative in primary sources—diary entries, telegrams, board minutes—he achieves a level of intimacy and immediacy that is rare in historical writing. We are not just learning about a meeting at the New York Fed; we are in the room, feeling Mitchell’s frustration and watching the clock tick toward adjournment.
The book effectively supports its argument by demonstrating, through accumulated detail, that the crash was not a single event on Black Tuesday but a slow-motion unraveling that began months earlier. The structural weaknesses are laid bare: the rampant manipulation, the dangerous leverage in investment trusts (“leverage amplified,” as on Page 46), the conflict of interest at banks like National City, and the paralyzing political and philosophical war between Washington and New York.
Sorkin proves that the system was rotten to its core, and the players at the top were either complicit, in denial, or profiting from the decay.
5. Strengths and Weaknesses
My Pleasant/Positive Experience:
The most compelling aspect of 1929 is its profound humanity. Sorkin refuses to let these figures become mere caricatures of greed. He gives them depth, context, and motivation. We see Charles Mitchell not just as a reckless banker, but as a self-made man terrified of the bank run he witnessed in 1907, now desperately trying to prevent a far larger one, even pledging his personal fortune in a doomed attempt to save his bank (Page 27).
We see the intellectual conflict in Lamont, a man who privately urged his own son to “keep plenty of cash” (Page 137) while publicly championing the new era. This nuance makes their failures all the more tragic and instructive.
Furthermore, the parallels Sorkin draws to the modern era are undeniable and chilling. The debates over the role of a central bank, the political influence of financiers, the culture of celebrity CEOs, the complex financial instruments that few understand, and the seductive belief that “this time is different” are all themes that resonate powerfully today. Reading about Carter Glass’s fury feels like reading a transcript of post-2008 Congressional hearings.
My Unpleasant/Negative Experience
A potential weakness, depending on the reader’s preference, is the book’s intense focus on the elite. The “shattered nation” promised in the subtitle is, in the first half, largely offstage. We get glimpses of the cultural mania—the elevator operators giving stock tips, the astrologist Evangeline Adams advising J.P. Morgan (Page 139)—but the story is firmly anchored in the boardrooms and mansions of the powerful.
Additionally, the sheer number of characters—financiers, industrialists, politicians—can be overwhelming at times. Sorkin provides a helpful “Cast of Characters,” but keeping track of every partner at Morgan and every senator requires diligent attention from the reader.
6. Reception, Criticism, and Influence
While the full book is yet to be released and thus lacks public reception, based on the excerpt and Sorkin’s reputation, it is poised to become a defining work on the subject. It will likely be compared to John Kenneth Galbraith’s seminal The Great Crash, 1929, which Sorkin himself cites as “canonical” (Page 11). However, Sorkin’s approach is fundamentally different; where Galbraith wrote with wry economic analysis, Sorkin delivers a tense, character-driven thriller.
Potential criticism may come from economic historians who prefer more data-driven analysis. Sorkin’s narrative approach, while rigorously sourced, prioritizes story over charts and graphs. His work is about the “why” behind the numbers, not the numbers themselves.
7. Comparison with Similar Works
- 1929 Vs. “The Great Crash, 1929” by John Kenneth Galbraith: Galbraith provides the brilliant, overarching economic framework. Sorkin provides the gripping, human screenplay that fits within that framework. They are essential companions.
- 1929 Vs. “The Lords of Finance” by Liaquat Ahamed: Ahamed’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work focuses on the central bankers of the 1920s. Sorkin’s book is its perfect counterpart, focusing on the commercial bankers, speculators, and politicians they battled. Together, they form a complete picture of the era’s financial landscape.
- 1929 Vs. “The Big Short” by Michael Lewis: Sorkin is applying the “Big Short” formula—using vivid characters to explain complex financial folly—to the original sin of modern finance. Readers who loved Lewis’s book will find Sorkin’s 1929 equally compelling.
8. Conclusion
Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 1929 is a monumental achievement in narrative history. It transforms a well-known historical event into a fresh, urgent, and deeply unsettling story about human nature. By taking us inside the minds of those who built the tower of debt and leverage, he forces us to confront the uncomfortable truth that financial catastrophes are not accidents; they are the products of specific decisions, blinded by optimism and hubris.
This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand not just what happened in 1929, but how it happened. It is a cautionary tale that speaks directly to our own era of meme stocks, cryptocurrency manias, and persistent concerns over wealth inequality.
After reading Sorkin’s masterful account, you will never see a stock ticker or a headline about the Federal Reserve in quite the same way again. The lessons of 1929, as he so vividly demonstrates, are waiting, always, to be relearned.