On what became known as Black Thursday, the New York Stock Exchange saw nearly 13 million shares traded amid frantic selling, nearly three times the normal volume. Leading bankers pooled funds to prop up prices that afternoon, temporarily calming markets, but the reprieve proved brief. Within days, Black Monday and Black Tuesday would follow, cascading into the worst economic collapse in modern American history.
Ticker tapes couldn't keep pace with the chaos. By 11 a.m. the floor of the Exchange had descended into what one observer called a 'weird, inhuman shrieking,' as brokers screamed sell orders on stocks that had no buyers at any price. Crowds gathered outside on Wall Street itself, drawn by rumors of suicides that were mostly untrue but spoke to the mood of dread settling over the country.
A consortium of bankers led by Thomas Lamont of J.P. Morgan & Co. met at lunchtime and pooled roughly $240 million to buy stocks and stabilize prices, a tactic that had worked during the Panic of 1907. Richard Whitney, acting as their agent, marched onto the floor and ostentatiously placed a buy order for U.S. Steel above the current price. The market rallied that afternoon, and papers the next morning declared the crisis over.
It wasn't. The market's underlying weakness, built on margin debt and speculative excess through the Roaring Twenties, reasserted itself the following Monday and Tuesday with even steeper losses. Over the next three years, the Dow Jones Industrial Average would shed nearly 90 percent of its value, and unemployment in the United States would climb toward 25 percent, ushering in the Great Depression that reshaped global politics for a decade.