1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History – And How it Shattered a Nation
Published by EH.Net (December 2025).
Andrew Ross Sorkin. 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History – And How it Shattered a Nation. New York: Viking, 2025. xxi + 567 pp. $35 (hardcover), ISBN 978-0593296967.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Sebastián Royo, Clark University.
The stock market crash of 1929 is considered a defining event in modern world history, heralding the beginning of the Great Depression. The questions of 1929 have echoed loudly in recent times. Indeed, the Great Recession of 2007-09, triggered by a subprime mortgage crisis and the US housing market’s collapse, brought back the significance of the 1929 crash. It is therefore fitting that Andrew Ross Sorkin, a New York Times journalist and author of the best-selling book Too Big to Fail, which sought to explain the 2007-09 crisis, has now focused on 1929.
Over 400 pages Sorkin, inspired by Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember, the definite account of the sinking of the Titanic, seeks to reanimate the leading characters, the decisions they made, and the events at the heart of the crash. The book is informed by many new sources, including the private papers of Wall Street leaders who played a central role in the crash (such as Thomas Lamont’s papers at Harvard University’s Baker Library), an unpublished memoir from Richard Lambeer, archival material (e.g., Carter Glass’s archives), and newly disclosed deliberations from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The book reads like a true-crime documentary. Sorkin is at his best describing the main players, their backgrounds, accomplishments, dreams, and ambitions, as well as their greed and corruption. The book is filled with examples of the latter: Richard Whitney, president of the New York Stock Exchange, took securities from the Exchange Gratuity Fund, which paid life insurance to families of its members, and pledged those securities as collateral to himself and his company. Leaders of prestigious Wall Street firms regularly offered stocks to politicians at below-market rates to cultivate their favor, and they often conspired to hype a stock to increase its price and then proceeded to sell it (often to one another and/or members of their families) at inflated values, profiting handsomely. John Raskob, a prominent American financier, businessman and Democratic Party politician, orchestrated a scheme with his close friend Pierre du Pont whereby they would sell each other big blocks of stock at a price below what they had paid, and then buy them back the following year, thus creating enormous write-offs. Albert Wiggin, President of Chase National Bank, began selling short his personal shares in the bank in September 1929, using a Canadian Shell company to buy the stocks, making his earnings tax-free, while at the same time committing his bank’s money to buying. He shorted over 42,000 shares, earning him over $4 million. Among this “collection of scoundrels” a central character is the financier Charles Mitchell, president of National City Company, who played a key role in pumping up the stock market and fostering the speculation that contributed to the crash and went as far as floating a $25 million advance to traders while the New York Federal Reserve Bank was attempting to curb speculation earlier in 1929.
As the stock market reached new heights, amid growing concerns about an unsustainable bubble, the US government was largely a bystander. President Hoover, despite knowing that the stock market was running too high and trying to make that case to Wall Street, otherwise did little to address it. President Roosevelt’s New Deal regulations, notably the Securities Act of 1933 and 1934 and the Glass-Steagall Act’s separation of investment and commercial banking, would attempt to remedy these problems.
Overall, Sorkin does an outstanding job describing the role that Mitchell and his peers on Wall Street played in causing the 1929 crash. He comes short, however, in heeding the lessons from that experience. The book took eight years to write, and in that time Sorkin seems to have become enthused and overly sympathetic with many of his book’s characters. He spends far more time justifying them and their actions than holding them accountable. For instance, Sorkin mentions a report that made the case that Mitchell provided relief to the stock market to stop the credit market from completely freezing up and avert a disaster. And after hundreds of pages in which he shows how Wall Street propped up speculation and engaged in disreputable (and sometimes criminal) behavior, he goes as far as claiming, “However contemptible, their behavior… did not cause the crash on its own” (p. 441). His defense of the bankers, however, is an indictment of the system: unabashedly fueling speculation, fighting any attempt to cool down or regulate the markets, pushing the goal of expanding access to markets at all costs, and disregarding any safeguard were direct causes of the crash rather than merely things that helped “magnify the damage when the collapse finally came,” as he claims (p. 441).
Moreover, what stands out is the impunity of most of these Wall Street rogues who rarely faced any consequences from their corruption and reckless actions, while millions of people lost everything during the Great Depression. There seems to be a lot more sympathy in this book towards the crooks than towards the victims of their actions, who are largely invisible. Indeed, Sorkin seems oblivious not just to the devastating economic consequences of these actions (which he admits buts to glosses over), but also to their political and social consequences. We ignore them at our own peril. Indeed, we have not heeded that lesson and we made the same mistake following the 2007-09 crisis. A decade and a half later, the world is still suffering the long-term consequences of the Great Recession, which led to rises in income inequality and had a disproportionate impact on younger generations who face lower wages and fewer job opportunities, and help account for the erosion of liberal democracy and the sustained increase in populist parties and movements.
Sorkin asks the question of “who can be trusted”? He certainly provides ample evidence that Wall Street should not be trusted. Yet, despite hundreds of pages describing the immoral, unethical, and often criminal behavior of many of the Wall Street key players, Sorkin still claims that “other than the disgraced Richard Whitney and Albert Wiggin, it is hard to make the case that any of the era’s other major financial figures did anything appreciable worse than most individuals would have done in their position and circumstances” (p. 441). As Sorkin states, “Markets are not contests of virtue and honor,” and in the long run he may be correct that “in the aggregate the system works” because “by pitting the greed of their participants against one another, [markets] wend their messy way toward fair and reasonable prices” (p. 441). Yet in the short term the severe damage to millions of people from a financial crash cannot be dismissed as casually as Sorkin seems to do.
In the end, this is a book about greed and arrogance, and Sorkin rightly concludes with an appeal to “human nature” and a call for “humility.” Still, if there is a lesson from 1929 it is that greed does not always lead to progress. Now that a coalition of right-wing populists and a finance and tech oligarchy are shattering the pro-regulation consensus, it is important to remember that unleashing capitalism risks repeating the disasters of the past. On the contrary, history has shown that speculation is so intoxicating and dangerous that the system only works when it has appropriate and sufficient guardrails. As Sorkin notes, arrogance and temptation have driven human folly for centuries and every cycle we are seduced into believing that we have learned from history, that “this time is different” and that we cannot be fooled. Then a crisis happens again. Indeed, booms may not be fully averted, and we must recognize the limits of individual and collective foresight while resisting the temptation to believe that market cycles can be perfectly predicted or controlled. Sorkin is correct that “humility” is the answer, but the best way to foster it is by curtailing irrational exuberance and protecting people from their own worst impulses through measures like prudent regulation and financial literacy.
Sebastián Royo is Professor of Political Science at Clark University. His publications include Bank Failure and Resolution in the EU: Lessons for the Crisis Management and Deposit Insurance Framework, co-edited with Giovanni Ferri and Ewa Miklaszewska (Routledge, forthcoming, 2026) and Why Banks Fail: The Political Roots of Banking Crises in Spain (Palgrave, 2020).
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