The decade of the 1920's unleashed a gold rush in the Dutch East Indies.These were the proverbial fat years, and in the imagination of shortsighted Western residents, this era of prosperity would last forever.Rather than preparing for the lean years that might follow, Europeans and Americans dreamed they could defy the Old Testament's warning.Almost all Westerners in Sumatra who worked on rubber or tobacco plantations or in the expanding oil industry had grown accustomed to a life of hard work and generous financial rewards.They approached their ample incomes and their equally lavish spending habits with an attitude of “easy come, easy go,”as Madelon Székely-Lulofs wrote in her controversial novel, Rubber.When rubber prices started to drop ominously after 1925, she suggested that many heedless Europeans and Americans were “devoured by an unbridled passion for speculation.”

The story from the Hebrew Bible,however,would soon prove to be prophetic. The years of astronomical profits were followed by a decade of scarcity and suffering. In the wake of the stock market crash on Wall Street during the autumn of 1929, the Great Depression gradually attained worldwide proportions. Initially, the collapse of the stock market seemed to touch only the wealthiest speculators in the United States,whose handsome profits,in many instances,were reduced to a pittance. In the daily lives of ordinary people across the vast North American continent, though, trains continued to run on schedule and the shelves of grocery stores were as well-stocked as before Wall Street's financial collapse.American farmers, whether on the Great Plains of the Midwest and in the Western or Southern regions of country, did not immediately worry about losing their cattle ranches or their corn, wheat, and cotton fields, nor did the average American worker harbor a sudden anxiety about the security of his or her employment. Banks opened on time and small-time depositors remained confident that their life savings were safe in local banks. As with previous financial panics that had shaken the capitalist system, the initial expectation was that the American economy would regain its balance and profitability once the super-rich investors in the stock market had absorbed their losses.

However, the stock market crash of 1929 turned out to be much more than a temporary financial slump.