Wall Street Bond Rally

Douglas Fairbanks lifts Charlie Chaplin as the crowd roared during a Wall Street rally on April 8, 1918.

As the war news from Europe grew more ominous, the stars came out to sell Uncle Sam’s Liberty Loans. The Times reported these A-list actors had “tied up traffic in the financial district in a knot that the police reserves could not begin to undo.” No doubt the ticker-watchers who jammed the street hoped for a glimpse of “America’s Sweetheart,” Mary Pickford, who, as we would learn a few years later, also happened to be Fairbanks’s sweetheart. The two would marry only a few years later.