04:22

[Music – These Foolish Things by Benny Carter, Album Perfect Blues]

04:26

Section 2 – History & Historiography

04:32

[Music fades out]

We think we know their stories.  We know a lot about them, especially about their fortunes.  But do we really know their actual stories?  Plenty has been written about them individually but rarely together as an interconnected group.  We know all about their deaths, certain events, what happened to their fortunes, and yet do we really know the why’s or the truths behind what was mostly rumor and scandal.

04:58
They were the young future heirs of the essential American dream – massive unlimited wealth spanning generations.  They were part of dynasties meant to rule economically and socially for centuries, and their influence would be felt around the world.  Soon their time would come when they would get their substantial inheritances.  Until then, they must learn the rules of Society, with a capital S, in order enjoy all the privileges and luxuries that came in that world.  But they would forever want the things money couldn’t buy – love and acceptance, true belonging, and friendship.

05:35

Then the unimaginable happened, and the world turned upside down.

Tuesday, October 29, 1929 is one day in history that suddenly and irreversibly changed the world.  That was the day of the infamous Wall Street Stock Market Crash, when stocks plummeted to record lows.  Instantly, fortunes vanished over night and the ripple effects would last for several years known as the Great Depression.

06:04

We know what preceded that event was World War 1, the Roaring Twenties, Prohibition, and gangsters.  We know the aftermath – the unrest in Germany, the rise of Nazism, and World War II.  How wartime austerity led to another period of postwar prosperity, the Cold War, and an eventually a robust booming economy.

We know the details of Wall Street, how far the Dow dropped (230.7 or 24.3% within 2 days  – and 30% from its record peak high 381.6 just weeks earlier on September 3rd).  The Stockmarket Crash was a result of the overconfidence in an unsustainable asset bubble.  Within a week before the Crash news headlines alerted to the activities of shortsellers, margin sellers, and foreign investors exiting the market.

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This led to panic. 

The result would have an international impact that would lead to years of financial instability until 1933.

07:02

We know the effects on the millions of unemployed and homelessness, the waves of migrations across the United States, the breadlines, the rise in suicides, women selling furs in hotel lobbies…  The development of Social Security, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Hoovervilles, the end of Prohibition, the Jazz Age, and an era giving rise to Bonnie & Clyde style of desperation leading to flamboyant bank robberies.

07:26

But there are many things we don’t really know nor remember.  Like that fact about the rise in suicides – that didn’t happen immediately in that first month.  The myth of people jumping out of buildings was started by none other than Winston Churchill in an offhanded remark that was given way more prominence than the truth behind it.  Suicides did rise but was spread out over the next 2 years as people realized they weren’t going to rebound or recover to the pre-Crash highs.  In fact for the year 1929, the peak in suicides was the summer before the Crash.

08:00

And that is where our story begins, the summer just before the Crash.  A last look at a golden era that is coming to a harsh and swift end.  There were plenty of things happening before the Crash that now are obvious signs of the pending disaster. 

But back then they had no idea the red flags all around them.  It was a bull market with stocks at an all time high, and the Gatsby-era style of partying and overly conspicuous consumption of the Roaring Twenties lingers on in full swing.  Though the cracks already surfacing, most are oblivious as plenty of things can be hidden when so much money seems to be in abundance.  Still not everyone is as well as off as they seem.

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Immediately after the Crash, many believed life would return back to normal.  Those who had losses would pretend they were okay.  It would take nearly a year for people to realize there would be no sudden good reversal in fortune.  And methods to hide become harder.  That peak of that now mythical like summer of 1929 forever taunting them. 

09:06

We are going to follow the lives behind some of the greatest American fortunes.  Why should we follow the wealthy?  Because they too were not immune to the Crash, and their overexposed and documented lives gives us a unique perspective into the choices and problems one could face in any situation, and how the seemingly simple solution of more money might help or hurt the situation.  Money does solve the problems over certain survival basics like food and shelter, but it can actually increase other dangers like kidnapping and murder.  And worse, these aren’t problems only faced on the outside, but the inside from those most closest to you – possibly even your own mother. 

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Furthermore they are the first true media celebrities in an era pre-Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and all other things internet.  This was the beginning of celebrity for celebrity’s sake without the need of achievement.  Just prior to the Crash, newspapers and journals switched the policy of using pseudonyms and started using people’s actual names and even more – their images.  Other new developments in photography and newsreels meant that not only their names but their faces were exposed for all the world to see.  Anonymity would no longer be possible.  One young heiress could never stay incognito for longer than a week.

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Their whole lives from birth to marriage to death were endlessly documented, speculated, and rumored, even though sometimes wrong.  Elaborations and exaggerations abound as people obsessed over the idea of wealth while they themselves faced starvation.  The case of schaudenfreude (pleasure in other’s misfortune) and its reverse freudenschade (misery in another’s good fortune) will be always be rampant.

Additionally, the demands of their status required many of them to mingle.  Thus several if not all would often be at or nearby the same events.  Therefore they would know of the others’ situations if not as a firsthand eyewitness then a very close secondhand word of mouth.  Any triumph or defeat would have a rippled butterfly effect on the other. 

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This interconnected world allows us to play with the storylines in a Kurosawa style of multiple perspectives and interpretations.  This gives any events and experiences a better context as to what they really meant in that time period.  Was it a mere faux pas, barely a blip on the radar, or something far more fatalistic and damaging?

Trust me if the super rich did anything remotely of note and especially a blunder – it was documented for all the world to see far and wide with the requisite social commentary much like today’s comment sections and trolling.  A trend we are much more familiar today, but nothing they were prepared to handle back then.

11:58

This same sociological perspective would be far more challenging in covering more middle class accounts.  Other players and contemporaries might not be equally documented or recorded in direct relation to each other. 

Our primary characters will start out young, very young – as young 16.  Three were born in the year 1912.  The same fateful year of the Titanic.  One was on board the Titanic and survived only to be marked for his whole life by the tragedy.  His back story was alluded in James Cameron’s disaster film.  And we will visit that backstory and its ramifications over multiple episodes.

The stories we will follow include deaths, wills, debutante balls, exotic travel, sibling conflicts, rivalries, scams including sweetheart and, bad land deals, and a stockmarket Ponzi scheme.

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Thus here is the world of AS THE MONEY BURNS.  A retelling of a time and era and people with a 360 view of what was happening in individual and group’s lives.  While the story will primarily follow events from 1929 to 1936, we will not adhere to a strict chronology.  We will shift and travel forwards and backwards, upwards and downwards, sideways, inside out, outside in, flip flop, and however else we need to relay and comprehend the situations presented.

This not a mere documentation of facts but the exploration into the darker aspects of humanity brought out by greed, lust, pride, and envy.  There will be moments of embellishments and some narrative creative license to illustrate situations and dynamics.

13:32

The series is set up to be both episodic and serial.  Each episode will cover a subject, however there will be a link to the other stories told in the series.

Each episode is comprised into three primary sections.  Section 1 is a narrative story told with some creative license to enhance the emotional and psychological situations.  Section 2 goes into the historical facts behind the scenario with occasional the historiography to analyze sources and any biasness.  Section 3 focuses on contemporary emotional and personal connections that help make the story relevant to the current day.   

14:06

The intention of this podcast is not to glorify nor vilify wealth.  But rather explore emotional situations we all experience and the ways money might help or hurt the problems further.  This is how I always discovered and related to the scenarios that I found as most of the facts were not specifics like a date nor  an event nor concrete like the number of the Dow Jones, but rather the persistent and more common and random anecdotal situations that come up and shape a person.  These are the emotional facts that though are not as concrete somehow often come to dominate a person’s mental state and view of the world.  Luckily, that contextual importance has often been confirmed by other eyewitnesses.  Part of the known stories were rumors and scandals, and whether confirmed or disproved later nonetheless became as important as an actual concrete fact.

14:57

I also want to place the context and subjectivity brought into the storylines.  Partially, this is the nature of my academic training.  Graduate school at the University of Chicago heavily stresses historiography – the method of analyzing a historical source and its biasness as well as the biasness of the historian.  And trust me, I am biased.  It’s the very nature of my own connection to the material and the stories since the moment of discovery and as I continually uncovered more and more events and situations that strangely mirrored my own life experiences. 

15:30

You see this story didn’t just come when I found one article, a mere tip of the iceberg of what I have compiled.  But for me the story begins much more personal back to the summer when I was 17 and spent 2 separate days in Newport, Rhode Island.  The most difficult year of my life had a moment of respite with the perfect summer experience of young love and hope for the future only to end soon afterwards with the greatest loss of my life.

Fast forward many years of heartbreaks, a few successes, life struggles, a major heartbreak, and a different job loss, and I uncovered an article detailing the events of a summer at Newport, Rhode Island in August 1929.  I knew this was only a few months before the 1929 Stockmarket Crash, and thus began a journey into the lives of several wealthy heirs and heiresses, many the same age I had been that, whose lives paralleled my own – all except in dollar signs.