On this day...

American Minute for October 29th:

OCTOBER 29, 1929, the New York Stock Exchange crashed.

Panic ensued as Wall Street sold 16,410,030 shares in a single day.

Billions of dollars were lost and America plunged into the Great Depression.

In a drive to aid private relief agencies, October 18, 1931, President Herbert Hoover stated:

Time and again the American people have demonstrated a spiritual quality of generosity...

This is the occasion when we must arouse that idealism, that spirit, from which there can be no failure in this primary obligation of every man to his neighbor.

Herbert Hoover continued:

Our country and the world are today involved in more than a financial crisis.

We are faced with the primary question of human relations, which reaches to the very depths of organized society and to the very depths of human conscience...

This great complex, which we call American life, is builded and can alone survive upon the translation into individual action of that fundamental philosophy announced by the Savior nineteen centuries ago.

Hoover concluded:

Part of our national suffering today is from failure to observe these primary yet inexorable laws of human relationship...

Modern society can not survive with the defense of Cain, 'Am I my brother's keeper?'

Hoover, Herbert Clark. Oct. 18, 1931, address for national drive to aid private relief agencies during Great Depression. Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover-The Great Depression 1929-1941 (NY: MacMillan, 1952), p. 151.

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