When the crash finally came, it came with a kind of surrealistic slowness--so gradually that, on the one hand, it was possible to live through a good part of it without realizing that it was happening, and, on the other hand, it was possible to believe that one had experienced and survived it when in fact it had no more than just begun.

The market did not all crash at once. Large segments of it had been depressed for a year or more. The 1929 boom was, in fact, quite a narrow selective one. lt was a boom of the handful of stocks that figured in the daily calculation of the Dow-Jones and New York Times indexes, and~ that was why those well publicized indexes were at record highs. lt was also a boom of the most actively traded stocks bearing the names of the most celebrated companies, the stocks mentioned daily by the newspapers and millions of times daily by the board-room habitues--and that was why it was constantly talked about. But it was emphatically not a boom of dozens of secondary stocks in which perhaps as many investors were interested.

As a matter of fact, a good part of the stock market had been more or less depressed all through 1929.

The soaring of the averages made a rousing spectacle. Yet the highest September, price 1929 been 118. The September high af Cluett, Peabody was 46; its high in 1928 had been 110. The September high of Consolidated Cigar was 62; its high in 1928 had been 100. The September high of Freeport Sulphur was 43, its 1928 high, 105. The September high of New York Shipbuilding was 27; its 1925 high, 88. The September high of Pepsi-Cola was 10; its I928 high, 19. The September high of Philip Morris was 12; its 1927 high, 41. The list, even if confined to well-known stocks, could be extended to astonishing length. The motor stocks, in particular, were in a virtual industry-wide depression. Studebaker, Hudson, Hupp, and Graham-Paige, at that peak of the most celebrated stock boom in history, were down from their previous highs by 22, 25, 43, and 55 percent, respectively. And even General Motors, the very bellwether of the boom all through the decade, was down over 10 percent. The persistence of the idea that all stocks were going through the roof in the autumn of 1929 is a monument to the power of popular myth.

But if a sort of slow, partial crash, invisible except to its victims, had been occurring over a period of at least three years, Tuesday, September 3, 1929--the day the market averages reached the all time highs that were to endure for a quarter of a century--was not a day when the public at large gave its attention to such a matter. It was the first day after the Labor Day recess, and thus by traditional stock-market reckoning the start of the active season, almost the start of a new year. The fact that it was a record-setting scorcher in New York, with a maximum temperature of ninety-four degrees and brutal humidity, did not deter the mobs from thronging back to the downtown customers' rooms and trading in such volume as to set a September record. Thus unaware of its achievement, in the atmosphere of a steam bath, the market of the twenties achieved its Everest.

Next day there was a general, if unsensational, decline. The daily column of market comment in the Times--unsigned, but presided over and often written in those days by the paper's justly celebrated financial editor, the learned Alexander Dana Noyes-- contained the sober remark, "The pace of advancing prices during the past week has been so rapid, and so regardless of the money market position, as to inspire a growing sense of caution even among convinced speculators for the rise."

The following day, September 5, there occurred the curious phenomenon ever afterward called the Babson Break. A not especially well-known, and hitherto even less influential, financial adviser operating far from Wall Street--a frail, goateed, pixyish-looking man in WeIlesley, Massachusetts, named Roger Babson--said to an audience at a routine New England financial luncheon, "I repeat what I said at this time last year and the year before, that sooner or later a crash is coming." As Babson implied, his earlier warnings had been roundly ignored. He was, in fact, widely thought of as something af a nut. Evidently it was a slow day for financial news, because at 2 p.m. Babson's words were quoted on the Dow-Jones financial news ticker and thus read in brokerage houses across the country. Without the slightest hesitation the market went into a nosedive that carried Steel down 9 points, Westinghouse down 7, and Telephone down 6 in a frantic last hour of trading during which two million shares were traded. The tiny cause and the huge effect, by any llogical standard, were simply far out of proportion.