In the summer of 1929 the surface of Wall Street was a mixture of placidity and mania – stock averages at record highs and still headed upward, the dissenters momentarily routed … Roger Babson said to an audience at a routine New England financial luncheon, ‘I repeat what I said at this time last year and the year before, that sooner or later a crash is coming.’ As Babson implied, his earlier warnings had been roundly ignored… When the crash finally came, it came with a kind of surrealistic slowness – so gradually that, on the one hand, it was possible to live through a good part of it without realizing it was happening, and, on the other hand, it was possible to believe that one had experienced and survived it when in fact it had no more than just begun.
– John Brooks, Once in Golconda, 1969