The Chronicle: 9/28/2001: A Second Black Tuesday

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From the issue dated September 28, 2001

A Second Black Tuesday

By ROBERT S. McELVAINE

In the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, The Chronicle asked scholars in a variety of disciplines to reflect on those events. Their comments were submitted in writing or transcribed from interviews.

For more than seven decades, "Black Tuesday" has been a term denoting the Great Crash that happened in lower Manhattan on October 29, 1929. What occurred in the same area on September 11, 2001, might be called a second Black Tuesday. This one, however, was so much worse: a real crash; a literal collapse.

I always point out to my classes on the Great Depression that it is a myth that during the 1929 Crash the streets of the financial district were filled with the bodies of people leaping from the windows of tall buildings. It is a measure of how much worse were the events of this modern Tuesday than those of that infamous day in 1929 that the horrifying pictures of human beings jumping from windows last week were an unspeakable reality.

One of the most important aspects of the Great Depression was that it interrupted the modern historical movement toward ever more consumption and self-centeredness, which was apparent in the 1920s and which would return so powerfully after World War II. I suspect that the scope of the horror we have just witnessed may have a similar effect, although only for a time. People cannot help but see in the consequences of the terrorist attacks a clear reminder that money and possessions are not the most important aspects of life.

Robert S. McElvaine is a professor of history at Millsaps College.

http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Page: B16

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Azizah al-Hibri: Can We Restore America's Historical Role?

Bernard Wasserstein: Anti-Semitism and Anti-Americanism

Thomas E. Gouttierre: An Abandoned Afghanistan

Joanne B. Freeman: The American Republic, Past and Present

Stanley Hauerwas: A Complex God

Terry L. Deibel: Finding a Middle Road

Stanley I. Kutler: Fanatics at Home and Abroad

Howard Zinn: Compassion, Not Vengeance

Robert Jay Lifton: Giving Meaning to Survival

Alan M. Dershowitz: Preserving Civil Liberties

Richard Perle: Needed: a Sustained Campaign

Mark Crispin Miller: Danger in the New Solemnity

David P. Barash: Our Biological Nature

John O. Voll: Understanding Terrorism

R. Scott Appleby: Building Peace to Combat Religious Terror

Richard Slotkin: Our Myths of Choice

Christopher Phelps: Why We Shouldn't Call It War

Homi Bhabha: A Narrative of Divided Civilizations

Amitai Etzioni: Balancing Rights and Public Safety

Michael Ledeen: Steps to a Safer World

Leonard Cassuto: The Power of Words

Catherine Lutz: Our Legacy of War

Paul Levinson: Images of Unmediated Ugliness

Thomas S. Hibbs: What Kind of Evil?

David Sterritt and Mikita Brottman: Hollywood's Metaphors

Robert S. McElvaine: A Second Black Tuesday

Jeane Kirkpatrick: The Case for Force

Robert Coles: In the Words of Children

R. Stephen Humphreys: Muslims Must Look Within

Richard Mouw: A Time for Self-Examination

Point of View
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