Wall Street Suicides

On the day after Black Thursday, the New York Times reported that many "wild and false" rumors were spreading throughout the country, including claims that 11 speculators had committed suicide and that a crowd had gathered around a Wall Street building because they thought a workman was a speculator preparing to jump. That same day, Will Rogers quipped that "you had to stand in line to get a window to jump out of"; and soon Eddie Cantor was joking that hotel clerks were asking guests if they wanted rooms "for sleeping or jumping." By mid-November, New York's chief medical examiner tried to put the kibosh on the rumor by publicly announcing that there had been fewer suicides between Oct. 15 and Nov. 13 than there had been in the same period the year before. (Winston Churchill—himself a major stock-market investor—may have added to the rumor mill: He was in New York during the crash and, in a December 1929 Daily Telegraph article, recalled how, under his own hotel window, "a gentleman cast himself down fifteen storey and was dashed to pieces.")

The two Wall Street leaps that did take place, however, were dramatic enough to sustain the myth. On Nov. 5, Hulda Borowski, a clerk who'd been working at a Wall Street stock brokerage house for 28 years, leapt off a 40-story building. On Nov. 16, three days after the market had taken another dive, G.E. Cutler, the head of a produce firm, climbed onto the ledge of his lawyer's office. The New York Times reported that an attorney struggled to pull the frantic Cutler inside, to no avail:

The week following the 1987 stock-market crash, at least two suicides in the United States were linked to the crisis, but none involved a window plunge. (One of the incidents was a murder-suicide in which a distraught investor in Miami killed a Merrill Lynch executive and then himself.) There were also rumors that the Pacific Stock Exchange had asked Golden Gate Bridge officials to be on alert for jumpers, but the stock exchange denied the claim.

- Slate

Thanks to Vineyard Views for the great picture, though the sign should replace the s with a $.