“What we want is confidence,” Clarence Barron wrote in this magazine’s first issue, dated May 9, 1921, near the nadir of the postwar recession. Over the next century, the stock market—represented here by the Dow Jones Industrial Average—would expand by magnitudes as the U.S. became the world’s leading economic power. But it wasn’t a straight line upward. The 1929 Crash gave back all the Roaring ’20s’ gains and plunged the nation into the Great Depression. More crashes and recessions followed.