The 1920s: Business and the Economy: People in the News

THE 1920s: BUSINESS AND THE ECONOMY: PEOPLE IN THE NEWS

Bernard Baruch, who made a fortune through stock-market speculation and who became famous during World War I as chairman of the War Industries Board, was an adviser to Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover during the 1920s.

Former newspaperman Stuart Chase, a widely quoted "economist," told the press in the fall of 1929, "We have probably three more years of prosperity ahead of us before we enter the tail-spin which has occurred in the eleventh year of the four great periods of commercial prosperity."

Charles G. Dawes, financier, banker, and vice president of the United States (1925-1929) under Calvin Coolidge, was noted for his quips about the uselessness of the office, but his most famous statement was that what the country needed was a good five-cent cigar.

In 1926 Harvey S. Firestone leased a one-million-acre rubber plantation in Liberia to provide his Firestone Tire and Rubber Company factories with raw rubber. He hoped to break the British monopoly on imported rubber.

Like many of his colleagues in academic economics, Irving Fisher of Yale made optimistic comments on the bull market only months before the October 1929 crash. However, his standing as a professional economist remained intact.

In 1922 Edsel B. Ford, president of Ford Motor Company and son of company founder Henry Ford, purchased the Lincoln Motor Car Company and took a keen interest in the development of the Lincoln luxury car.

Immediately after the October 1929 crash, hotel manager Conrad Hilton announced to the press that Hilton Hotels would initiate an economy plan to save on operating costs: stationery would be issued one sheet at a time.

During the 1920s Samuel Insull became active in electrical holding companies in the Midwest and, after their collapse in the 1929 crash, fled to Europe in 1932, was captured in 1934, and was tried for and acquitted of fraud later in the 1930s.

Throughout the 1920s Joseph P. Kennedy was widely quoted in the financial press regarding the several monetary coups he pulled off during the decade.

In 1921 William S. Knudsen resigned as production manager at Ford Motor Company to head the Chevrolet Division of General Motors Corporation (GM). (He rose to the presidency of GM in 1937.)

Thomas W. Lamont appeared almost daily in the news during the 1929 market crash. As senior partner in the Morgan bank, he served as the bankers' spokesman during the crisis.

Jesse L. Livermore, known to the press as the "Great Bear" operator or the "great plunger," survived the 1929 crash a wealthy man but continued to speculate until he finally went bankrupt.

In the days just before and after the October 1929 crash, Charles E. Mitchell, president of the National City Bank, was widely quoted; but when, following the crash, it became clear that his conduct had been less than completely honest, he faded from the scene.

Charles S. Mott became one of the General Motors millionaires after he merged his wheel-and-axle plant into GM in 1908. During the crash of 1929 he was serving as chairman of GM.

In 1927 Charles W. Nash, pioneer automaker and founder of the Nash Motor Company, introduced his Nash, an upper-medium-priced car.

John J. Raskob, for years an executive with the Du Pont Company and a leader at General Motors, was the author of the notorious "everyone should be rich" Statement on the eve of the crash. He was one of the sponsors of the Empire State Building, begun in 1929.

On 8 November 1929 James Riordan, a widely admired self-made businessman and Wall Street speculator, committed suicide by shooting himself after he lost his fortune in the stock-market crash.

In 1921 Charles E. Sorensen, production guru of Ford

Motor Company since the heyday of the Model T, became extremely influential after many of Henry Ford's lieutenants left the company.

In 1923 Nathan Straus, owner of Macy's department store, was voted the individual who had done the most for the welfare of New York City during the past twenty-five years.

In 1922 businessman Gerard Swope, who built International General Electric into a major General Electric (G.E.) subsidiary, was named president of G.E.

In early 1929 Walter Teagle, president of the Standard Oil Company, declared, "There has been no fundamental change in the petroleum industry."

Samuel Vaculain, chairman of the Baldwin Locomotive Company, used railroad terms to reassure the country after the 1929 crash: "The country is on the right track and steaming along."

In 1924 company president Thomas John Watson oversaw the renaming of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company to International Business Machines (IBM); he served as IBM president until 1949.

In 1928 Robert Elkington Wood —who had only joined the company in 1924—became president of Sears, Roebuck and Company; under Wood's leadership Sears, Roebuck expanded to a $3-billion-a-year enterprise.

Owen D. Young became chairman of General Electric Corporation in 1922. In 1929 he worked with Charles G. Dawes on the German reparations problem, for which he developed the Young Plan.