It was not an easy flight. Because of air turbulence, there was no beverage-cart service, and it turned out that Lindbergh had already seen the movie (The Poseidon Adventure.). Nevertheless he persevered, and thirty-three hours later, on the afternoon of October 8, he arrived at an airfield near Paris, where, to the joy of a watching world, he Plowed into a crowd of French persons at over 140 miles per hour. An instant hero, he returned in triumph for a motorcade ride in New York City, where millions welcomed him, in typical “Big Apple” style, by covering the streets with litter, much of which can still be seen today. But little did the cheering crowds realize, as streams of ticker tape fluttered down from office windows, that within just two years, the falling paper would be replaced by falling stockbrokers. If the crowds had realized this, of course, they would have stayed to watch.

1. What do coal companies do with the coal, anyway? You never see it for sale.

2. Is “Big Apple” a stupid nickname, or what?

The day the stock market crashed—October 8, 1929—will forever be etched on the Etch a Sketch of the American consciousness as “the day the stock market crashed,” or Sometimes “Black Tuesday.” For on that fateful day, the nation’s seemingly prosperous economy Was revealed to be merely a paper tiger with feet of clay living in a straw house of cards that had cried “wolf” once too often. Although this would not become clear for some time.

Oh, there had been warning signs. Just a few weeks before Black Tuesday, there had been Mauve Wednesday, which was followed, only two days later, by Dark Navy Blue with Thin Diagonal Yellow Stripes Friday. But most Americans paid little heed (“Little Heed” would be a good name for a rock band. Also “Short Shrift.”) to these events, choosing instead to believe the comforting words of President Herbert Hoover Dam, who, in a reassuring nationwide radio broadcast, said: “Everybody STAY CALM, because there is NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT! Do you HEAR ME?? NOTHING!! HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA [click].”

What were the underlying causes of the Crash? To truly understand the answer to this question, we must examine:

The stock market of the 1920s was very different from the stock market of today. Back then, the market was infested by greed-crazed slimeballs, get-rich-quick speculators with the ethical standards of tapeworms, who shrieked “buy” and “sell” orders into the telephone with no concern whatsoever for the nation’s long-term financial well-being. Whereas today they use computers.

Another big flaw in the stock market of 1929 was the practice of “buying on margin.” To illustrate how this worked, let’s take a hypothetical example. Let’s say Investor A had x amount of dollars that he wished to invest in the stock market. He would pick up telephone B, dial 1234567, and tell stockbroker C he wanted to buy stock “on margin” in Company D. And the stockbroker would sell it to him, even though Company D did not really exist (Although as of yesterday it was up two points in active trading.). We just made it up, for this hypothetical example.

Clearly, this kind of thing Could not go on forever, and on Black Tuesday, it did not. As stock prices plummeted, panic selling spread. A number of speculators, realizing that their dreams of wealth had turned to ashes and seeing no hope of repaying their debts, hurled themselves from their office windows. Even this failed to brighten the national mood. Because it was becoming increasingly apparent that the Roaring Twenties were over and that a new era had arrived: an era of unemPlOYment, poverty, social turmoil, despair, and—worst of all—Shirley Temple movies. And thus began what became known, following a highly successful “Name That Era” contest sponsored by the New York World Herald Journal Telegram Bugle and Harmonica, as:

The Great Depression was horrible. Ask the people who lived through it. Or, don’t even bother to ask. Just stand next to them for more than two minutes, and they’ll tell you about it. “It was hard, during the Great Depression,” they’ll say. “We had nothing to eat except floor sweepings and we walked eighteen miles to school. Even if the school was only two miles away, we’d have to walk back and forth nine times, because times were bad, and you had no choice, so you worked hard for every nickel, which in those days would buy you two tickets to a movie plus four boxes of popcorn plus a used Buick sedan, but of course we couldn’t afford it because Dad only made two dollars and fifty-seven cents per year and our shoes were made out of grapefruit rinds, but we never complained, no, we were happy, because we had values in those days, and if you had values you didn’t need a lot of money or food or toilet paper, which was a luxury in those days to the point where we’d get through a whole year—this was a family of eleven—on just six squares of toilet paper, because we had this system where if you had to ... HEY! Come back here!”

As the federal government began to recognize the seriousness of the situation, it swung into action with the historic enactment, in 1930, of ...

Quite frankly we have no idea what this is, but we think it has a wonderful ring to it, and we just like to see it in large bold letters:

THE HAWLEY-SMOOT TARIFF

And yet, as the weeks dragged into months and the economy continued to founder, it soon became clear that some economic “medicine” even more potent than ...

THE HAWLEY-SMOOT TARIFF

would be needed to get the nation “back on its feet.” This paved the way for the historic election of 1932. The Republicans, showing the kind of sensitivity they are famous for, renominated President Hoover Dam, who pledged that, if elected, he would flee to the Bahamas. The Democrats countered by nominating Franklin Delanor Roosevelt—or, as he was affectionately known, “J.F.K.”—who ran under the slogan “Let’s Elect Another President Named “Roosevelt” and Confuse the Hell out of Future Generations of Students.” The voters responded overwhelmingly, and Roosevelt was elected in a mammoth landslide that unfortunately left him confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

Nevertheless he began immediately to Combat the Depression, implementing a series of bold and sweeping new programs that came to be known, collectively, as:

THE HAWLEY-SMOOT TARIFF

No! Sorry! We can’t control ourselves. The programs implemented by Roosevelt were of course called the “New Deal,” which consisted of the following:

1. Bank Protection—A major problem during the Depression was that people kept trying to get their money out of banks. To put a stop to this kind of thing, the government instituted modern banking regulations, under which:

The banks are never open when it might be convenient. The customer is never sure what his bank’s name is, since they keep changing it, usually from something like “The First Formal Federal National State Bank of Savings Loans and Of Course Trust” to something like

“InterContiBankAmeriTransWestSouthNorthCorp.” There are always stupid people in line ahead of you trying to cash checks from the Bank of Ye men and using underwear labels for identification.

2. Job Creation—The government instituted a massive program of public works, under which tens of thousands of men and women were put to work strewing barricades and traffic cones on all the major roads in America, then using red flags to give halfhearted and confusing signals to motorists and sometimes waving them directly into the path of oncoming traffic. These projects are still fully operational today.