Document 5a
I. W. Burnham was a Wall Street stockbroker.
…People were making a lot of money in the stock market—you could sort of feel it when you
visited customers or made deliveries. Everybody was really, really busy and they were feeling
pretty good about themselves. It was around this time that the public got more interested in the
market than they had been. Stock prices had been going up pretty steadily, and even though it
was still mainly rich people investing, the average guy was starting to hear about friends making
$20,000 or $30,000 overnight. There was rampant [widespread] speculation, and if you wanted
to take part all you had to do was put up 10 percent of the money and a broker would cover the
rest.…
Source: I. W. Burnham, interviewed in Jennings and Brewster, The Century, Doubleday, 1998 (adapted)
According to I. W. Burnham, what was one reason the public became more interested in the stock market
in the 192os?