The Crash of 1929: American Experience Movie Worksheet
1. What was the “New Era” the people believed in as 1929 dawned? What song epitomized this feeling?
2. What is a stock and what dictates its value? By 1929 how long had stock prices been rising?
3. How did Michael Meehan, Jesse Livermore, and Charles Mitchell amass their fortunes? How did these men live
in the 1920's?
4. What promise did Herbert Hoover make during his election campaign in 1928?
5. What was consumer credit? What was the attitude of the 1920's about prosperity?
6. Who was William C. Durant and how much money did he control?
7. What was important about companies and the stock market to speculator Jesse Livermore?
8. What idea did Charles Mitchell invent in the 1920's? How successful was this?
9. Where did Evangeline Adams get her information on stocks and what did she predict in February of 1929?
10. What was “buying on margin”?
11. What was a “pool” and who used them? Why is this illegal today?
12. How did “pool operators” get “good press” about certain stocks?
13. What was “painting the tape”? Why did pool operators do this?
14. Why did small investors continue to return to the stock market if they knew the system was rigged?
15. What did economist Roger Babson warn the American public about the stock market in 1929 and how did
people react to him?
16. Why did the Federal Reserve Board distrust the stock boom of 1929? Why did they do nothing?
17. What prevented the US Stock Market from crashing in March of 1929?
18. What was happening to the American economy in the late 1920's? (Wages, spending, prices)
19. Where did the brokerage firm of Michael Meehan open offices beginning in August of 1929?
20. What was the state of the Stock Market on September 3 1929? Why was this?
21. What did most of the top investors assure people in the weeks preceding the crash?
22. What is a “panic” and what ends up causing a panic?
23. When was the first “Black Thursday”? What happened?
24. What did Richard Whitney do on October 25th? Why did he do this? What happened the following Monday?
25. When was the real crash? What was it like? What did this crash do to many middle class peoples' retirements?
26. What happened to many of the wealthy men traveling on ocean liners who left England before the crash began?
What did they find out when they reached America?
27. What did William Durant do in 1936? What did he own at that point and what did he do?
28. By the end of 1929, how had the Stock Market crash changed the attitude or spirit of the 1920’s?