Gold Diggers of 1929: Canada and the Great Stock Market Crash (Paperback)

Peter Newman

Even 75 years later, the Crash of 1929 throws a shadow over the financial world whenever stock markets take a tumble. Yet much of what we believe we know about it is mistaken. Brokers didn’t jump out of windows—and Bay Street wasn’t in lock–step with Wall Street. The truth is that Canada’s crash and subsequent Depression were worse than the American ones, striking at a vulnerable time, when society was in transition between agricultural and industrial economics and between the British and American styles of power.

But though the period was different here than across the border, it was no less thickly populated with outrageous scoundrels, speculators, suckers, soothsayers—and victims. Many people burned by the collapse of prices in Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg or Vancouver were still alive to tell their stories when Gold Diggers of 1929 was first published a quarter century ago. The book records their voices as it looks at politics and institutions blown apart by events set in motion in that long–ago October.

In this classic account rich in anecdote and alive with the heady flavour of the times, George Fetherling looks back at the brokers and bankers, the shrewd millionaires and blue–collar wildcatters—all of them caught up in the rush to cash in. Who were the heroes? Who were the villains? Who went to jail, who went broke, who carried on business as usual?