10: Interwar period (1929)

Overflowing, forbidden champagne. Exquisite cars. The finest suits a man has seen. A booming wave of wealth and prosperity swept across the United States of America during what we now call the "Roaring Twenties". The stock market was full of ambitious and progressive people trying to realize the American Dream and making themselves increasingly richer every day. The money poured out into an excessive consumption of the worlds finest luxury. While we danced our troubles away in jazz, we were in fact living in a blinding bubble. A bubble that was waiting to consume us all in an economic crisis the likes of which we have never seen before.

T'was a Tuesday. Tuesday the 24th of October. That morning, as every morning, I was in my brand new Mercedes with a smile on my face heading further into the prosperous streets of Manhattan - centre of the city that never sleeps. However, something seemed different this morning. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but a fellow stockbroker later described it as 'the feeling Ramses 2's people must have had before God washed over them with the seven plagues'. The seven plagues were nothing compared to this. After a ravishing party the night before, I was running a bit late and wasn't among the earliest birds to Wall Street that morning. As my Mercedes rolled further towards Manhattans most ambitious workspace, the mood around me started to change. Many New Yorkers seemed to be struck of some kind of discomfort and confusion that morning, and as I got to Wall Street, I could finally get my eyes on the chaos that ravished between the stockbrokers. Just outside the building one could hear the growing desperation, and once inside it struck you that something catastrophic was about to strike the home of the brave and the land of the free. As usual, every stockbroker was clambering on to their phones and shouting, but today it was as if they clambered onto their lives and each shout was a call of desperation. My assistant came running over, screaming to me. It took a couple seconds before it sank in. Wall Street has crashed. We are all doomed. 

The stock market crash struck the global economy with a fierce wave of destruction, and the world turned dark. Millions lost their jobs, their houses, their quality of living - and for some, the darkness is just to hard to handle. It is just to hard to accept that one minute you are floating through life on a river champagne, comfortably floating lifeboat made out of luxurious cars and suits - and the next you're sitting on the streets of Manhattan with a paper cup next to thousands of others and no help to be found. That is why I am standing here on this rooftop. I just want it all to go away. As I leap towards my death, the last thing to flash before my eyes are images of the best days this great nation has experienced - the Jazz age of the Roaring Twenties.