Patricia Yarberry Allen, M.D. is a Gynecologist, Director of the New York Menopause Center, Clinical Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Weill Cornell Medical College, and Assistant Attending Obstetrician and Gynecologist at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. She is a board certified fellow of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Dr. Allen is also a member of the Faculty Advisory Board and the Women’s Health Director of The Weill Cornell Community Clinic (WCCC). Dr. Allen was the recipient of the 2014 American Medical Women’s Association Presidential Award.

by Patricia Yarberry Allen

Americans are drowning in a sea of information about the financial calamities that roil our society.  We seem to be incapable of understanding that our Titanic, a ship of a country so large and so prosperous, could ever go down.  One of the reasons these events seem so incomprehensible to us is that many of us have no memory of   the U.S. stock market boom of the 1920’s.  I believe that  we can gain a better understanding of our own financial
boom and bust if we immerse ourselves in a small library of essential
reading now.  My basic recommendations are below; I would love to hear from readers with suggestions.

This was a time when people felt and acted just the way we did for the last 25 years. Rising stock prices on Wall Street enticed millions to invest and to borrow money to do so.  The automobile industry and industrial output in general were fueled by easy credit.  Businesses were assuming that they could sell more goods and services every year and were increasing their expenses.  Farmers were not part of this party but tried to survive by mortgaging the farm.  Interest rates were kept low by the government; thus credit was easy and business could grow.  It was all about more, more, more.

There were intelligent people then who warned that no system could grow quickly year after year after year without substantial adjustment.  “Too good to be true…you can’t get something for nothing,” then-New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote in the late 1920’s.  But no one wanted to hear. Then on October 29, 1929 the stock market crashed, followed by a “run on banks.”

So many people wanted their money out of those banks that crowds clustered outside closed bank buildings.  The banks couldn’t give it to them — they had loaned out too much of the money, and could not cover mass redemptions.  The Great Depression began and lasted for much of the next decade.  The political inertia of the president at the start of the economic collapse, Herbert Hoover, did much to worsen the new downturn’s severity.

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected as the next President after Hoover, he immediately got to work. He began to rebuild the economy and banking structure,  and put into place programs which are the still a part of the framework of the current government. The programs he created helped employ millions of Americans and built much of the country’s infrastructure.

The words above don’t really convey the complex madness of the “ Roaring Twenties” and the gritty texture of The Great Depression. Thankfully, there are several classic novels and histories that have become the standards by which those years are understood.

The Great Gatsby was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1925.  This novel describes the boom at its pinnacle, wild parties, wild spending, and speculation run rampant.  The narrator, Nick Carraway, is a young man from the Midwest who has come to Wall Street to make his fortune in stocks and bonds. The character of Jay Gatsby  is a poor man from the Middle West (born James Gatz) who becomes a rich racketeer, obsessed with making more and more money — all in order to impress Daisy, the love of his life, never accessible and now married.  It takes place in summer, whose heat is Fitzgerald’s motif for the over inflated economy and out of control spending.

We’ll end with a glimpse from Cummings of the fall of 1929, but please do send your own suggestions.

what if a much of a which of a wind
gives the truth to summer’s lie;
bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun
and yanks immortal stars awry?
Blow king to beggar and queen to seem
(blow friend to fiend: blow space to time)
-when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,
the single secret will still be man

what if a keen of a lean wind flays
screaming hills with sleet and snow:
strangles valleys by ropes of thing
and stifles forests in white ago?
Blow hope to terror; blow seeing to blind
(blow pity to envy and soul to mind)
-whose hearts are mountains, roots are trees,
it’s they shall cry hello to the spring
what if a dawn of a doom of a dream
bites this universe in two,
peels forever out of his grave
and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?
Blow soon to never and never to twice
(blow life to isn’t:blow death to was)
-all nothing’s only our hugest home;
the most who die, the more we live