Description

The Great Crash of 1929 violently disrupted the United States confident march toward becoming the world s superpower. The suddenness of the cataclysm and the long duration of the collapse scarred generations of Americans. A Rabble of Dead Money is a lucid and fast-paced account that pulls together the intricate threads of policy, ideology, international hatreds, and sheer cantankerousness that finally pushed the world economy over the brink.

Award-winning writer Charles R. Morris anchors his narrative in America while fully sketching the poisonous political atmosphere of postwar Europe. 1920s America was the embodiment of the modern age-cars, electricity, credit, radio, movies. Breakneck growth presaged a serious recession by the decade s end, but not a depression. It took heroic financial mismanagement, a glut-induced global collapse in agricultural prices, and a self-inflicted crash in world trade to produce the Great Depression.

Vividly told and deeply researched, A Rabble of Dead Money anatomizes history s greatest economic catastrophe-and draws its lessons for the present.