Originally posted December 12, 2025.
Don’t waste your money (like Your Survival Guy did) on the book 1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin. It’s revisionist history, if I’ve ever seen it, of what really happened and who is to blame for the difficulties of the Great Depression that followed. In three letters: FDR.
Instead, take the advice of my favored author on that era, Amity Shlaes, who provides the truth in her tireless accounts of what really happened. For her full review of 1929, go here.
Shlaes begins:
Back in 1999, William F. Buckley Jr. interviewed the economist John Kenneth Galbraith on Firing Line. The gents’ topic was historic figures. Around twenty-four minutes in, Buckley got to President Franklin Roosevelt. Galbraith, then ninety, turned nostalgic.
“Of my generation, there was no figure like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And I still wake up in the morning and say, ‘Well, Galbraith, you’re still a New Dealer.’ ”
Certainly. But do the rest of us have to be?
Apparently, yes. For “We are all New Dealers now” is likewise a conclusion of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 1929, an artful reprise of Galbraith’s book on the same topic, The Great Crash, 1929.
In that 1955 book, Galbraith argued that unregulated speculation, exacerbated by lazy statesmen and the greed of the rich, caused the Great Crash. Galbraith’s choice of a narrow time frame—one short year, 1929—helped him to capture the drama of the crash.
According to Galbraith, quoted approvingly as “seminal” by Sorkin, the worst day of the Great Crash—Tuesday, October 29—was “the most devastating day in the history of the New York stock market,” and “may have been the most devastating day in the history of markets.”
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