The Crash: Once Upon A Time in October . . .

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Whether the crash caused the Depression or merely presaged it is still a $ topic of debate. Nobody can say with certainty what caused those twin catastrophes or who is to blame, and so theoreticians have accused greedy speculators, Wall Street manipulators, gold merchants and a carnival of other scapegoats. Those experts who contend that the crash did bring on the Depression blame the Federal Reserve for reacting to the collapse by allowing the money supply to diminish, thereby stifling consumption and investment. Others argue that the stock tumble was essentially a market correction and simply signaled the start of a recession.

One New Yorker came up with another kind of answer, or perhaps just an epitaph. It was a bedraggled parrot that a policeman found in Manhattan in November of 1929. "More margin!" the bird squawked, in echo of some desperate stockbroker's greedy injunction to the bird's vanished master in that already vanished era. "More margin!"