Bernard Baruch, who made a fortune through stockmarket speculation and who became famous during World War I as chairman of the War Industries Board, was an adviser to Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover during the 1920s.

Former newspaperman Stuart Chase, a widely quoted "economist," told the press in the fall of 1929, "We have probably three more years of prosperity ahead of us before we enter the tail-spin which has occurred in the eleventh year of the four great periods of commercial prosperity."

Charles G. Dawes, financier, banker, and vice president of the United States (1925-1929) under Calvin Coolidge, was noted for his quips about the uselessness of the office, but his most famous statement was that what the country needed was a good five-cent cigar.

In 1926 Harvey S. Firestone leased a one-million-acre rubber plantation in Liberia to provide his Firestone Tire and...