The Century: America's Time - 1920-1929: Boom To Bust

(dramatic music)

- [Man] The Japanese have
attacked Pearl Harbor--

- [Crowd] Sieg Heil!

Sieg Heil!

- [Kennedy] Ask not what
your country can do for you--

- [Reporter] President
Kennedy has been shot.

- [Armstrong] One small step for man--

- We hold these truths to be self-evident,

that all men are created equal.

- [Reagan] Mr. Gorbachev,
tear down this wall.

(dramatic music)

- [Peter] New York City's
Great White Way, Broadway.

(upbeat music)

Throughout the 1920s, the
nightlife here glittered.

Bands played and liquor flowed,

and everyone who was drinking
it was breaking the law.

In the first month of the new decade,

the 18th Amendment became
the law of the land,

and the sale and consumption
of alcohol was now illegal.

(upbeat music)

- There was Prohibition, but oddly enough,

nobody paid any attention to it.

- We went to people's homes.

They served dreadful things
called orange blossoms,

which was gin and orange juice.

Revolting.

And bad gin at that.

- [Peter] Liquor was now
sold behind closed doors

in places called speakeasies.

Proprietors took the risks
and reaped the profits.

- There's good money in them.

I was 15 years old.

I was riding around
with a Nash convertible.

We had four speakeasies,

one by the Daily News,
one by the Daily Mirror.

You had people, you let them in, okay.

A guy would explain who he was

and he'd show you ID or
something and you let him in.

You got to know, it was
like family after a while.

- Every corner had a saloon on it.

Of course, you know, they
were never raided by,

the cops were a big part
of the business too.

People wanted to drink.

It was a great game.

- [Peter] It became a dangerous game

for the high stakes players.

Battles between rival gangs

for control of illegal liquor territories

riddled American cities with
mushrooming murder rates.

Prohibition's aim was to sweep
liquor off the city streets.

Now, they were flooded
with gangsters and guns.

- I used to carry two Persuaders myself.

You had to have him (chuckles) or else.

- Prohibition and the general disregard

which followed it was the
perfect symbol for the '20s,

a decade which was
about crossing the line,

smashing tradition, breaking boundaries.

As modern America came
of age in the 1920s,

boundaries of all sorts,

technological, geographical,
and social, were shattered.

The roar in the roaring '20s

was the birth scream of the modern.

America was now about to leave behind

the formative experience of its rural past

and embrace the promise
of an urban future.

But progress would have its price,

a sudden wrenching departure

from the certainties of the
traditional and the familiar

spread by an emerging mass
media, movies and the radio.

Things that seem old and familiar mow

were just beginning to
take shape in the 1920s.

(soft music)

At the dawn of the 1920s,

America was clearly entering a new era,

an era defined by a vast and
complicated urban culture

that would dominate the
rest of the 20th century.

After World War I,

there was an eagerness to embrace the new.

And it was in America's cities,

most dramatically in
its biggest, New York,

where the modern age was born.

The very architecture of the city

spoke of America's new
ascendancy and her aspirations.

- The skyscraper was an
example of the new form

achieving a kind of
thrilling scale and nobility.

More people worked there

than lived in the average
small town in America.

- [Peter] A movement to the cities

that had started during
World War I accelerated.

In 1920, for the first time,

more Americans lived in urban centers

than in country towns and villages.

- The pace was being set in the cities.

The city is irresistibly attractive.

It's really at a kind of
high tide in this decade.

It's a force, a magnet.

- [Peter] The very names
of New York streets

would become synonymous with
progress and innovation.

Broadway would represent

the best and latest in
American entertainment.

Madison Avenue would come to stand

for the bustling new
business of advertising,

which was uniting the nation

in a set of shared fantasies and desires.

And Wall Street came to represent

the decade's expanding
economic opportunities.

(frantic music)
(men shouting)

Wall Street was where the action was.

People came from
everywhere to get in on it.

- The reason I come to New
York was there was nobody there

after they closed the mines
in 1926 in Pennsylvania.

There was no money coming there.

This fella, Jerry, got me the first job.

And he said, "C'mon down to Wall Street.

"The streets are paved with gold."

- [Peter] It seemed that way too

on Park and Fifth Avenues,
where the tycoons lived.

The number of millionaires in the 1920s

jumped 400% over the previous decade.

The '20s feeling of limitless horizons

was fueled by their lavish lifestyle.

- Our family had a house
at 934 Fifth Avenue

when I was growing up.

We had a place in Tuxedo
Park and a house in New York,

and then we used to come to
South Hampton in the summer.

Everybody seemed to be having a good time.

- In those days, you got lots of help.

You had a cook, you had a kitchen maid,

and you had a laundress.

And then you had a parlor maid,

a chambermaid,

and mother's maid.

How many does that make?

Six, or I think there
were eight, actually.

Terribly nice people.

- Almost everybody had a boat.

I recall in the '20s,

you would see a harbor filled with yachts.

I mean, really filled,
almost gunnel to gunnel.

And we didn't refer to yachts as such

unless they were 100 feet or over.

There was a great deal of entertaining,

and it was all done in people's houses.

You see the dinner parties
with 50, 60 people.

Always, after dinner,

there would be entertainment by guests.

George Gershwin was there with
his orchestrator, Bill Daly.

They got up and played on two pianos.

Mother always had two grand pianos

in the big room downstairs.

(upbeat jazz music)

- [Peter] Gershwin, who
wrote Rhapsody in Blue

and other anthems of the decades,

was profoundly influenced by the new music

he had heard called jazz.

The capital of jazz in the 1920s

was just a subway ride uptown, in Harlem.

It was in Harlem clubs that
one could see the artists

at the forefront of this fresh
and uniquely American music,

performers such as Louis Armstrong,

Bessie Smith,

and a dapper young man named
Edward Kennedy Ellington.

His friends simply called him Duke.

- Duke was the essence of What
black music was all about.

Everybody else was
heading in that direction,

but Duke was there.

- The first time that I
was seized by the music

was the first time I heard Duke Ellington

broadcast from the Cotton Club,

where Broadway, Hollywood,
and Paris rubbed elbows.

People came from all
over the United States

to experience what was going
on in Harlem in the '20s.

- I was young then and out,

and we went up to Harlem at
night to dance and everything.

We all saved up for months

to get the money to go out to a nightclub.

And of course, the music was wonderful.

- [Peter] Harlem was
contributing more than music

to America's new urban culture.

The world above New York's 125th Street

was, in the 1920s, a hotbed

of political, social,
and cultural activity.

It was later called
the Harlem Renaissance.

- The Harlem Renaissance
was one of those fancy terms

that white folks invent
when they wanna take

a particular look at some
aspect of black folks.

I don't think black
folks run around saying

that we're gonna have us a renaissance

or something like that, but it
was a holiday of the spirit.

- In Harlem was born this
idea of the new Negro,

someone who stood up for the Negro,

who advertised his and her contributions

to American culture, who
was proud to be black.

- Harlem was the end of the
line, the promised land,

the place where all our
fantasies came true.

If I had to choose between
heavens and Harlem (chuckles),

Harlem, of course, would win every time.

(soft music)

- [Peter] While Harlem
seemed a promised land

for black Americans, New
York's Lower East Side

was, for European immigrants,

their gateway to the American dream.

- We were blessed because
we were in America.

My father came from the Ukraine.

He went to work in New York
city and worked in a factory

where they blocked hats, men's hats.

And he was making, you know,
like nine or $10 a week,

working a six-day week.

And he would tell me

how he was able to buy lunch
every day for 12 cents.

And the lunch consisted of

a herring, a big Schmaltz
herring out of the barrel,

and my mouth waters now to think of it,

and a big roll with poppy
seeds, and an onion.

And life was beautiful.

- This was perhaps the most mixed city,

racially, ethnically, in the country.

But cities all around the
country had become more important

because change was centered in the cities,

business, industry, culture.

- Nothing was like rain in New York.

It's the magic of everything,

the world full of things to be explored.

That time was one of the
feeling of adventure,

and your life is having a shape to it,

sort of a thread, like
a narrative, or a story,

a feeling that anything may unfold.

- [Peter] The decade's startling changes

would soon spread from America's cities

to envelop the entire nation.

(soft music)

Far from the speakeasies
and the dance halls

and the nightclubs, there was
another America in the 1920s.

Here, people still lived

as their parents and grandparents had,

and they liked it that way.

- In the early 1920s, this
was a quiet, easy life.

Neighbors would come over,

what we call the front porch visits.

And that's where there
would be discussion,

maybe a little gossip.

- [Peter] Throughout the 1920s,

new technologies would
transform daily life.

At the beginning of the decade,

most Americans lived without electricity.

When night fell,

only candles and lamps
held off the darkness.

(pensive music)

America was electrified in the '20s.

Electric lights extended the day,

opened up new possibilities
for work and play.

That surge of new power
came first to the cities.

And by the decade's end,

the majority of American
homes had electricity.

- You can't understand this century

without understanding the effect,

the impact of science and technology.

- My father's generation

is the one that really
saw amazing changes,

but he was born in 1900
in a world where the horse

was still the main means of getting about.

The car seemed to me more
revolutionary in a way

than anything that's happened since.

It totally changed the kind
of space we live in, really.

- [Peter] The car would give Americans

a sense of autonomy and freedom,

the freedom to escape their city or town,

to go away on a vacation,
or simply on a day's outing.

By mid-decade, the government was spending

more than $1 billion

on the construction of
highways, bridges, and tunnels,

the beginnings of a
national infrastructure

which knit the country together.

- My father took my
mother and me in the car

for the first ride through
the Holland Tunnel.

This was opening night.

All the cars were lined up
to go through the tunnel.

I was petrified.

I cringed.

Suppose the water leaks in.

How did they build the
tunnel under the water?

Where's the water?

And I imagined, as we were
riding through the tunnel,

that I heard the waves overhead.

Out on the so-called
highways of those days,

outside of New York,
we saw the billboards.

- [Peter] Roadways were soon dotted

with a new phenomenon,
roadside advertising.

- They were big and colorful

and beautiful, I thought.

- [Peter] Advertising helped transform

not just the physical
landscape, but the cultural one.

Along with advertising came the expansion

of a brand new consumer concept, credit.

The inhibition against
debt came tumbling down

as everything from cars to
clothes could be bought on time.

Buy now, pay later became
the order of the day.

By 1927, 75% of all household
goods were bought on credit.

And in the last years of the decade,

the item desired most was the radio.

- [Radio Announcer] In just a moment.

But first, we'd love to
ask you to let us know

if this broadcast is reaching you.

- [Peter] From its
scratchy beginnings in 1920

as a mere hobby, radio would
become a nationwide phenomenon

as important as the car.

Young radio enthusiast,
Albert Sindlinger was there

at the birth of modern radio.

In 1920, the night station, KDKA,

broadcasting from a factory
rooftop in Pittsburgh,

transmitted the results of
the presidential election.

- [Radio Announcer] The Republican ticket

of Harding and Coolidge
is running well ahead--

- One of the gentlemen was
reading the election returns.

He got sick.

So for about 45, 35 or 45
minutes, I read election returns.

Nobody had any comprehension
of the significance

of what was going on.

But don't forget,

there were only a couple
of hundred listeners.

Within six months, every store in America,

even grocery stores
were selling radio sets.

- Suddenly, all Americans were
listening to the same things

and laughing at the same jokes.

There was a kind of
communal exercise here,

and very much a
strengthening of your notion

of what it was to be an American.

- Along with and sometimes propelled

by the great technological
leap in the 1920s,

social patterns in place for
decades also began to shift.

Nowhere was this more obvious

than with the changes
for the American women.

An expanding job market

had given more and more women careers

and the disposable income
to do with what they wished.

Throughout the 1920s, women would assert

a newfound freedom and independence,

and nothing symbolized it
more than the 19th Amendment.

In 1920, after 81 years of agitation,

women won the right to vote.

(upbeat music)

- A woman's lot had changed
in almost every way.

She thought that she had the
right to live for herself

rather than for her family, for others,

as women were always supposed to.

She went to bars.

She went to after-hours clubs.

She went to wild parties.

She had much shorter hair.

She wore much more makeup.

You go from having young women

whose dresses reached to their ankles

to flesh flashed everywhere.

And a lot of '20s culture

is about the fun of smashing prohibitions.

- [Peter] The more daring women of the day

were known as flappers and vamps.

- Sure I remember flappers.

They were all over the place.

They were older than me,
but you know, you look at,

when you look at the flappers

through the eyes of a
young guy, wow, whoa.

- I think a flapper was
the type of young woman

who just wanted to see
how far she could go

and then would stop because
she'd be afraid to go too far.

And a vamp didn't care how far she went.

- [Peter] The shattering
ways of 1920s city life

were spread by the media to rural America,

places where the changes

were not always so easy to get used to.

- Smoking,

or drinking, being loose
with talk, using profanity,

this sifted down from the cities,
from New York and Chicago.

And this finally had a unwanted place

in our rural community.

Here was a girl who'd come home from,

she'd been working in Chicago.

She comes home with short dresses on.

Well, they were not wearing short dresses.

They were going to church with hats on

and with white gloves on.

They were decidedly concerned

about what the future
generation is gonna bring.

- This company was founded
on a respect for God

and a sense of righteousness

and keeping with the Sabbath day.

And people brought their children up

on the discipline and on
reading the scripture.

And all of those things
were part of the things

that bound us together in America.

- The people were solid,

with church going and very
little crime and so on.

- [Peter] As the cities
grew in size and influence,

many people in small town
America found them threatening,

a breeding ground for new
and often alien ideas.

In one small American town,

the forces of traditional
religion and modern science

would clash in a battle
heard around the world.

Here in Dayton, Tennessee,

in the summer of 1925,
one of the century's

most famous courtroom
battles would take place.

John T. Scopes stood accused

of teaching Darwin's theory of evolution,

that man and ape
shared a common ancestor.

That was against the law in Tennessee.

The Scopes trial attracted

the best legal brains of the time.

William Jennings Bryan, three
times presidential candidate

and a Christian fundamentalist
himself, came to prosecute.

Clarence Darrow, the celebrated
Chicago trial lawyer,

came to defend Scopes.

Outside, as the trial progressed

in the scorching summer heat,
Dayton had itself a carnival.

- People would bring
in trained chimpanzees

dressed in suits and ties,

and they'd lead 'em up
and down the streets.

- Read your Bible was everywhere in town,

posted up the street,
across the street, banners.

And you walk maybe 100 yards this way

and you'd have a street preacher.

I didn't know what he was preaching about.

And you never saw the same people twice.

You go to the same place next,

the next day, there'd be some other people

from some other parts of
the United States there.

But it was a lot of hoopla.

I enjoyed it.

- The Scopes trial became emblematic.

Everybody had to make up their mind.

People who've never been to Tennessee,

couldn't even find Tennessee,

had to think about this question,

do I believe in modern science?

- [Peter] At times, it
seemed that the whole world

had converged on Dayton.

- The aisles were filled,

and the walls were lined
with newspaper people

from England, from Spain, from France.

We had so many newspaper people there

that you couldn't stir 'em with a stick.

- When all the hoopla ended,

John T. Scopes was found
guilty and fined $100,

a ruling later overturned
on a technicality.

What Scopes represented in
what the world came to witness

was a colossal clash of ideals.

The cool reason of
science seemed to threaten

the deep and abiding roots of religion.

It was one thing to replace
the family mule with a Model T,

but quite another to trade
Matthew, Mark, and John

for Einstein, Freud, and Darwin.

For many people, these
were confusing times.

And what may have been the most unsettling

about the pace of change in the 1920s

was that people really wanted

both the benefits of the future

and the familiar comforts of the past.

- They want the fruits of modernity.

They want the automobiles,
electricity, radio.

And at the same time, they
want it to remain 1850,

and they know they cannot have both.

And this creates psychological tension

within American society

that is then looking for somewhere to go.

And it goes into hatred
towards immigrants,

hatred towards people
who are simply different.

It goes into intolerance,
and into the Ku Klux Klan.

(ominous music)

- [Peter] Ku Klux Klan membership

soared to four million in the 1920s.

- Almost everybody that was
a good citizen of the South

was a member of the Klan.

I think they were encouraging morality

by turning the light

on immorality and deceit and unfairness.

- It created a great deal of,

I'd say consternation
and debate and so on.

They were not just opposed to the blacks,

but they were opposed to
the Catholics and the Jews

or anybody else who came
from somewhere else.

Going to people's houses,
and calling them out,

and insulting them, and whipping them,

and things of that kind.

This was not just particular
to the South or to the Alabama.

It was nationwide.

- [Peter] The clan was actively recruiting

in many northern states.

- My father was asked

if he would like to join the Ku Klux Klan.

He grabbed the guy by the collar

and threw him down the stairs.

Three nights later, almost
directly across the street,

there was a large cross burning.

I still can see it in my mind.

It was a dreadful, horrifying experience.

My mother said,

"it's just as though they're
guarding the gates of hell."

- And those white people who catered to us

and were in sympathy with
us, they caught hell too.

- [Peter] James Cameron
was living in Indiana

when he and two childhood friends

were seized by a Klan-inspired mob,

enraged by reports of the rape
and murder of a white couple.

- The men there out in the crowd

had their robes and hood on too.

And then the leaders said,

"Take all these niggers out and hang 'em."

- [Peter] His two friends were lynched.

James Cameron barely
escaped with his life.

- They put a rope around my neck

and they throw the
other end over the tree.

And I kept crying and hollering,
"I haven't done anything."

But before they could hang me up,

a voice said, "Take this boy back.

"He had nothing to do with
any killing or raping."

I looked up to heaven and
I said, "Lord, have mercy."

- [Peter] Throughout the decade,

an estimated 200 people
were lynched by the Klan.

This organization claiming to uphold

the values and virtues of the past

became so powerful in the 1920s

that it seized political
control in seven states.

And in 1927, Klansmen
marched 50,000 strong

down the streets of the nation's capital.

Clearly, the forces of '20s modernity

had stirred a bitter resistance.

- [Announcer] Then the
Manassa Mauler lashed out

in his old ferocious style,
every punch deadly cunning.

- [Peter] In a decade
fraught with so many changes,

people in the 1920 seemed
hungry for old-fashioned heroes,

and an explosion in spectator
sports provided them.

Sports giants became household names,

their every move followed by radio

and an eager tabloid press.

One name was known in more
households than any other.

- In our family, we were
never baseball oriented,

but I would have had to be deaf

not to have heard about Babe Ruth.

(crowd cheers)

- George Herman Ruth, the Babe,
reshaped America's pastime.

In an era of big events,

he excelled at the game's
biggest excitement, the home run.

He hit 60 of them in a
single season in 1927,

a record that would
stand for four decades.

Fans drove from miles around to see him.

- We used to get in a truck, seven of us,

put hay in the truck and just sit on it.

And in three and a half hours,

we head from Scranton
to the Yankee Stadium.

It was 35 cents to see
the Babe, Lou Gehrig,

all the Yankee players.

- Babe Ruth was a hero.

Lou Gehrig was always my hero.

It seems like everybody
back then was a hero.

We'd write to get autographs.

They graciously sent us pictures,

three-cent postage stamp
to get your picture back.

A really nice time to live.

It felt good to be an American.

(engine whirs)

- [Peter] The public's fascination

with flying in the 1920 seemed fitting

for a time when even gravity
couldn't hold down progress

and when every boundary seemed
just waiting to be broken.

- Once I got up about a thousand feet,

it was like I was home.

And that's the only way
I can describe it to you.

I was home.

I never wanted to be any place else.

- [Peter] In 1927, one pilot
would put aviation and himself

on every front page in the world.

On a misty may morning
outside New York City,

a plane called the Spirit of St. Louis

was ready to take off for Paris.

No one had ever flown solo
across the Atlantic before.

Six others had tried, failed, and died.

Ready to take the chance this
time was Charles Lindbergh,

the six-foot-two son of a former
congressman from Minnesota.

Thousands of people came
to watch him take off.

Once he was out of sight,

it seemed as if all
America held its breath.

- In Yankee Stadium, they had
framed minutes of silence,

praying for him.

Everybody in the company
was praying for him.

- [Peter] Flying the
fuel-heavy single-engine plane

was a battle against
weather, hunger, and fatigue.

For the entire 33-and-a-half-hour flight,

the Western world wondered

about the fate of that tiny plane

somewhere over the vast Atlantic.

- It was a Saturday night.

They hadn't heard from
him for a long time.

And I was walking up 125th
Street and someone shouted,

"They found him.

"He was flying over Ireland."

And within an hour or
so, he landed in Paris.

- [Peter] 100,000 Parisians were there

to welcome the shy young pilot.

Lucky Lindy emerged from his plane

carrying only a razor and a passport.

His flight had represented
the best of an era,

a mastery of modern technology

joined with old-fashioned
values of courage,

individualism, and hard-won achievement.

- When Lindbergh came back,

it was as though he walked on the water.

The public couldn't get enough of him.

He was the star.

There wasn't a woman in America
that wasn't crazy about him.

- He was a hero.

He was a nice guy.

He was new.

He was young.

He was kind of gawky, but
that was what they wanted.

- [Peter] The parade for
Lindbergh down Broadway

was the biggest national celebration

since the end of World War I.

- Everybody became Lindbergh.

They became the person that
he was and represented.

It was great.

He made a big impression on me.

- It was very exciting for all of us

because we realized that a
young man could do great things.

- [Peter] After Lindbergh's triumph,

there remained only one continent

for the airplane to conquer, Antarctica.

The frozen and forbidding landscape

at the bottom of the
world was the boundary

one of the centuries great
explorers, Admiral Richard Byrd,

set out to break.

His goal was to fly over the South Pole.

His expedition was flooded with
young and eager volunteers,

all of them wanting to be heroes.

- Admiral Byrd was gonna select,

I forget how many Boy
Scouts to go to the pole.

Now, I was about 12 at that time,

and I was nominated as
one of the guys to go.

Now, this was a big thing.

It was in all the papers.

When I came home, I says,
"Ma, what do you think?

"I'm gonna go to the North
Pole with Admiral Byrd!"

She says, "You can't go!"

I says, "Why?"

She says, "You'll catch
your death of cold."

I never went.

My cousin went instead.

Imagine that.

There were 120 men connected
with the Byrd expedition.

- [Peter] 20-year-old Harvard
student, Norman Vaughan

dropped out of school trained for a year,

and was finally selected

to go on the adventure of a lifetime.

- We stepped on land

that had never been
seen or touched before,

and that just excited me beyond words.

Absolutely a new frontier.

- [Peter] The expedition's home base

was called Little America.

Its two-year mission was to
conduct geological research

and prepare for Byrd's
record-breaking attempt.

- [Norman] We were
responsible for getting out

onto the interior of
Antarctica, as far as we could,

to be there for Admiral
Byrd's rescue expedition

should he have had a forced landing.

(somber music)

- [Peter] Just after midnight
on November the 29th, 1929,

Admiral Byrd's aircraft flew 500 feet

above the geographic South Pole.

He dropped a stone wrapped
in an American flag.

Americans and their airplane

had reached the ends of the Earth.

By the end of the 1920s,
anything seemed possible.

- The most extraordinary thing
about the decade of the '20s

was a pandemic air of optimism,

a feeling that the future of
the country was unlimited.

One of the great jazz songs
of the day was Blue Skies,

only but blue skies do I see.

- [Peter] The President
promised blue skies

in the country's future.

At his inauguration in 1929,

Herbert Hoover repeated the
common wisdom of the day

that Americans were on
their way to riches.

If proof was needed, all one had to do

was look at the bubbling pool
of wealth, the stock market.

- The butcher, the baker,
the candlestick maker,

everybody, oddly enough,
was in the stock market.

One of our chauffeurs was in the market.

If he can be in the market,
anybody can be in the market.

- There were no
regulations, as we have now.

People got away with murder all the time.

The government didn't bother them.

So they were all making money.

They were doing very well.

- [Peter] A boom in buying
had driven up stock prices.

Suddenly, in October of 1929,

investors started cashing
in their overpriced stock.

A panic of selling started.

- On October 29, 1929,

it was obvious from the opening bell

that things were wildly amiss.

- At 9:30,

there was a rumble on the floor.

One of the pageboys said, "Hey, Mike,

"look at the sell orders
coming out of those phones."

- The wheels really started to come off.

The stock market went into a free fall.

Crowds gathered in the street
outside of the exchange.

- At three o'clock, the
bell rang, and that was it.

(bell rings)

- [Peter] More than $30
billion in paper value

simply vanished that day as
the stock market crashed.

- The famous word, the crash.

Overnight, it was like bombs fell.

- [Peter] The '20s bubble had burst,

and with it, the decade's optimism.

- People lost every penny that they had.

Nobody had any pensions.

There was no Medicare and
Medicaid, social security.

If people lost their money, that was it.

They were down and out.

- People jumped off the
George Washington Bridge,

which had only just then,
not long ago been built,

people we knew!

My father was wiped out!

He never, psychologically,
he never recovered.

- The 29th, I lost $1 million.

What do you do?

It's the same story.

Wash your face and
hands and comb your hair

and start all over again.

- But as people would find
out in the decade to come,

a decade as different from
the '20s as night is from day,

starting over was not gonna be so easy

America, along with much of the world,

faced the Great Depression.

That's on the next episode of
The Century: America's Time.

I'm Peter Jennings.

Thank you for joining us.

(dramatic music)