The Great Depression: A Diary

by Benjamin Roth

The notion that anyone with just fifteen dollars a week could become a millionaire by “playing the market on margin” pervaded American culture during the boom of the 1920s.

Historian Arnold J. Toynbee, who would go on to write a twelve-volume history of how civilizations rise and fall, wrote at the time, “In 1931, men and women all over the world were seriously contemplating and frankly discussing the possibility that the Western system of Society might break down and cease to work.”