Free The Family by Kitty Kelley

late 1920s as the country started its slide into the Great Depression. Flappers, gangsters, and bootleggers also marked the decade, along with lynching parties and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. With the war over, America had been celebrating, but after the crash millions had fallen into unemployment. Firms making consumer goods were forced to cut back on production because consumers stopped buying. Children danced the Charleston for pennies in front of theaters at intermission; and coal miners formed unions and went on strike. Those with industrial jobs, particularly railroad employees and clothing workers, experienced drastic wage cuts. The popularity of catalog shopping and paying on layaway had pushed the economy to its limit. So had margin buying in the stock market. During the heyday of the Jazz Age, better known as the Roaring Twenties, stock-trading records skyrocketed as Americans of modest means began speculating and buying stocks. But instead of buying with actual money, they purchased stocks with a little cash down (10 percent) and a lot of credit (90 percent). They then used the stock they’d bought as collateral for loans to buy even more stock. Bewitched by the fantasy of becoming millionaires, they gambled dangerously under the delusion that they were investing. The speculation bubble finally burst on Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929, when the stock market crashed.
    During the decade preceding the crash, Prescott Bush was not much more than a traveling salesman who clung to various jobs. These jobs moved him and his young wife from St. Louis to Kingsport, Tennessee, back to St. Louis, and then to Columbus, Ohio, to work for his father for several months. Summers were spent in Kennebunkport, where Prescott and Dotty’s first child, Prescott Sheldon Bush Jr., was born in 1922. When the venture with his father failed, Prescott took a job with Stedman Products near Milton, Massachusetts, where his second son, George Herbert Walker Bush, was born in 1924.
    Now that Bert Walker, or “Pop,” as Dorothy called her father, had a grandson named in his honor—he was immediately tagged “Little Pop” or “Poppy”—things started looking up for the Bushes, either by coincidence or by design. Prescott landed a job “to promote sales” with the U.S. Rubber Company in New York City, and in 1925 the family moved to the wealthy little town of Greenwich, Connecticut (population thirty thousand), where they bought their first home at 11 Stanwich Road. Whether the $14,000 ($148,560 in 2004) house was purchased by Dorothy or merely put in her name is unknown, but Prescott was not making much money at the time.
    Dorothy was pregnant with their third child, Nancy, who was born in 1926. Bert built his daughter a one-story house on his property at Kennebunkport so that she and the children could spend every summer in Maine while Prescott was working in the city. Bert also paid for a live-in couple to cook and garden, a nurse to take care of the children and give Dotty massages, and an Irish maid named Lizzie Larkin to do the cleaning.
    While much of the country was financially wobbly, Bert Walker was flying high. He cabled his partner, Averell Harriman, who was in London playing polo with the Prince of Wales:
    We closed for the horses, and payment was made last Wednesday in the sum of $225,000 [$2,092,378.65 in 2004]. At the last moment the Belmonts stated that the stable was not included and that they had a chance to sell it elsewhere; but I insisted that it was your understanding and mine that it was in, and they finally ceded the point.
    Although he had inherited $9,842.59 ($92,000 in 2004) from his mother’s estate, Prescott would recall the same period as being financially taxing for himself and his young wife. “I know what it is to tramp the streets all day and return to a strange hotel room in a strange city tired and discouraged,” he said years later. “Mrs. Bush and I know what it is to be deeply in debt and to