Black Thursday
Today marks the anniversary of Black Thursday on October 24, 1929, when the stock market began to crash, concluding five days later on Black Tuesday, the end and biggest day of the fall.
It’s debatable today whether the Wall Street Crash of 1929 kicked off the Great Depression or whether the two things just happened concurrently, but it was definitely one of the most dramatic visuals of the downturn and shook confidence in an already shaken world economy.
Hoover’s quote about being close to eradicating poverty was part of his speech to the Republican National Convention when accepting the nomination for the election of 1928. In hindsight, of course, this line would prove troubling a little more than a year later and it was repeatedly used by Franklin Roosevelt as a line of attack. It proved so effective that FDR kept using it when running for reelection, even when Hoover wasn’t on the ballot.
