The panic of 1929 began as a crisis of the stock market and therefore of an elite Wall Street world, but in a short time the psychological, emotional, and financial effects rippled out from Wall Street to touch Americans across geographic regions and down the economic scale. "Big industry" had rushed America forward with "a narrowly conceived drive for efficiency" and had created, "tragic wastefulness of want amid plenty" (Cooney). Big business in many ways had caused the economy to fail and industry might have remained a problematic entity in the public eye. That there was no dramatic upheaval or large-scale social unrest has puzzled scholars for decades. We observe, however, that the nation followed two trajectories, only one of which had real support. The political left reacted to the economic crisis by trying to dramatically reorder values and society while the majority of Americans -- the center and the right -- held to traditional values, for a variety of reasons that this work will explore later. Despite the failures of traditional structures, such as government, economy, religion and democratic ideology (see Henry Purcell or Walter Lippman's writings), these Americans continued to believe that the American Dream was viable. Ultimately, Americans looked to industry and technology for their country's repair, believing in the ability of technology as a rehabilitative driving force.Fortune displayed the details and structures of industry to a society that enforced "contemporary emphasis on large-scale undertakings in engineering and technology" (Cooney).
