(2 of 4)
"Promptly at 10 a.m. on Thursday, Oct. 24, sounded the gong of the New York Stock Exchange and 6,000 shares of Montgomery Ward changed hands at 83 -- its 1929 high having been 156," reported a six-year-old newsmagazine named TIME. "For so many months so many people had saved money and borrowed money and borrowed on their borrowings to possess themselves of the little pieces of paper by virtue of which they became partners in U.S. industry. Now they were trying to get rid of them even more frantically than they had tried to get them. Stocks bought without reference to their earnings were being sold without reference to their dividends. At around noon there came the no-bid menace. Even in a panic market, someone must buy the 'dumped' shares, but stocks were dropping from 2 to 10 points . . . before a buyer could be found for them."
Outside in the streets, people began drifting toward the pillared exchange building and assembling there as though it were some royal palace where a king lay dying. One observer recalled later that the people in the crowd showed "not so much suffering as a sort of horrified incredulity." In Once in Golconda, John Brooks' lively history of Wall Street, another witness observed that the crowd gave off a sound that "was subdued, a kind of murmur, hardly more than a whisper, broken occasionally by the distinct, surrealistic cackle of an isolated hysterical laugh." Of that crowd in the surviving photographs, Brooks added, "They stare in the way a caught fish stares as it lies on the beach."
A few minutes after noon, someone spotted Mitchell slipping into the offices of J.P. Morgan & Co. It was J.P. Morgan, according to Wall Street legend, who had stopped the Panic of 1907 virtually single-handed by pumping money into a threatened company. The elder Morgan was dead now, and his son was in Europe, but the firm's senior partner, Thomas W. Lamont, had summoned Mitchell and the heads of Chase National, Guaranty Trust, Bankers Trust and First National to the House of Morgan at 23 Wall Street. The bankers created a pool (estimates of its size range from $20 million to $240 million) to support the market. "There has been a little distress selling," Lamont told reporters, but he added that it was just a "technical condition" and "there are no houses in difficulty."
At 1:30 p.m., the bankers' pool went into action. The stock exchange's acting president, Richard Whitney, strode jauntily across the floor of the market to Post No. 2, where stocks in U.S. Steel were traded. Though U.S. Steel had already slid from 205 to 190, Whitney boldly offered to buy 10,000 shares at 205. His gesture had a spectacular effect. In record trading that finally totaled 12.9 million shares, the panicky market rallied. At the closing, the Times industrials were only 12 points below the previous day's level.
"Roaring was the business done by downtown speakeasies," TIME reported on the moderately happy ending to what soon came to be known as Black Thursday. "Wild were the rumors of ruin and suicide." It has always remained part of American legend that Black Thursday featured stockbrokers leaping from skyscraper windows, but specific instances are hard to find. The nearest to such a case was the president of Union Cigar, who was appalled when his company's shares fell from 113 to 4. He jumped or fell from a ledge of a New York hotel.