Teachers have long taught that the Stock Market Crash of 1929 resulted in many stock investors jumping out of high rises. Seems logical, right? So many millions lost and fortunes ruined, it seems logical that some riches to rags individuals ended it all. The problem is that this did not happen. The truth is that only two suicides occurred in New York City the week of the crash and it is not clear why they committed suicide. How did this myth begin? You can partly blame it on a British reporter who wrote a column that mentioned: “Under my very window, a gentleman cast himself down 15 stories and was dashed to pieces, causing a wild commotion and the arrival of the fire brigade.” The reporter was Winston Churchill. He apparently was referring to the death of Dr. Otto Matthias. The problem is that the good doctor ended his life the morning of Black Thursday, Oct. 24, but he did it in the morning so it could not be crash related. Soon newspapers were reporting dozens of suicides. And comedians contributed with what were obviously jokes, but they fed the narrative. Will Rogers said “you had to stand in line to get a window to jump out of.” Eddie Cantor said when he went to get a room in a hotel in NYC, the clerk asked him if it was for sleeping or jumping.
The myth was refuted early on. The chief medical examiner in NYC reported that there had been 44 suicides in the weeks after the crash, but there had been 53 over the same period in 1928. John Kenneth Galbraith, in his book “The Great Crash of 1929”, pointed out that the suicide rate had been rising in the years before 1929 and continued to rise in the next few years. In 1929, 17.0 per 100,000 deaths were suicides. In 1932, the rate was 21.3.
This myth needs to be put to rest, but don’t stop teaching that the depression caused severe distress and not just to stock brokers. Only a small minority of people ended their problems by taking their lives (and not usually by jumping). But there were more nervous breakdowns and broken families from 1929-1932. This was before our current system of safety nets like Social Security and welfare. It’s a credit to the spirit of the American public that there wasn’t a large increase in suicides.
https://www.history.com/news/stock-market-crash-suicides-wall-street-1929-great-depression
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