October 30 - Wall Street Lays an Egg

Labor History in 2:00 · Oct 30, 2026 · 1m

On this day in Labor History the year was 1929.

On that Wednesday morning, people across the United States woke up to newspaper headlines informing them that something had gone horribly wrong on Wall Street the day before.

Black Tuesday, as the day came to be known had capped off a devastating drop in the market that had begun with the Great Crash the prior Thursday.

Twenty-five billion dollars was lost in the crash, which would be about three hundred billion in today’s money.

The crash helped spark the Great Depression that saw unemployment soared to twenty-five percent and nearly half of…