THE GREAT DEPRESSION

Recent rumblings about a Recession and the housing crisis have raised a lot of fear in people that we may soon experience a new fall. The sub-prime loan crisis has contributed to that too. Loan institutions have been too free with money and many people have been purchasing homes that can not support the mortgage payments. I found myself drifting back to the times of " Hey Mister Can You Spare Me a Dime?' Then when I was watching “The War” by Ken Burns I could see just how the war effort employed nearly every American in order to counter the Axis threat. It was quite clear to me how the US was able to pull out of the Depression, with everyone working people had money to put back into the economy. This in turn created more businesses and jobs and before you knew it we were really percolating. When I was a kid I often suspected that the Vietnam War was fueled by a need to keep the armaments industry prospering. I believe this even stronger today. Yet as I experienced some of this news I have felt a burning need to rewind the tape and take a look at the Depression Years and also look at the Great Crash of 1929, maybe out of a desire to prevent history from repeating itself. When I was a kid I withered from focusing on this period, rather favoring the optimism of the New Frontier. In the literature there are conflicting opinions about just how effective the New Deal really was. Some have even suggested that the work programs even worsened things. I am not in this camp of thought, but I will have to review many documents before I can get a handle on how Roosevelt was able to get us out of these troubling times. Some may argue that he never actually accomplished this, but simply by the resolve and character, and sheer will power of the American people we were able to pull ourselves out of these pernicious pits of collective disaster. The fact that it may have been simply WWII that did it has always been a thorn in the side for me. We may never truly know if the experiments in social engineering were intrinsically valuable.

Of the millions of books one can read on this subject, I now have three to start me off. I am about half way through “The Worst Hard Time” by Timothy Egan, and I can tell you it is a good one. It just looks at the Dust Bowl and the area of the Panhandle, Oklahoma, Kansas, and parts of Colorado. I will include the map so that you can see the area clearly. You may recall that the Jodes were fleeing from Oklahoma and on their way to California in “The Grapes of Wrath”. I have been almost prone to not believe this phenomenon of clouds of dust blowing across the prairie, if I had not seen some of these photographs. Egan gets some first hand accounts of this Midwest crisis and much of it centers around the city of Dalhart and Boise. How anyone could have survived through those years, especially 1933-1936, is the gist of these accounts. To say that poverty, ignorance, and prejudice existed within that society is an understatement. Yet, much courage and Christian generosity prevailed also. Another monograph that I picked up at the new Borders at the Domain is “The Defining Moment” by Jonathan Alter. This is about the first 100 days in office of FDR, a time when some of the major reforms of the New Deal were put in place. I am on page 103, but am getting into it-Roosevelt`s struggle with polio, his growth of character, and the ways he began to tackle the monumental problems of the American People are touched on in these early pages of the book. I just found the speeches of FDR, and you can even listen to them here. The first inaugural address reveals in the black and white the despair of the country, March 4, 1933. All the lines address the urgency of the crisis, and a rough sketch of the New Deals reforms are also suggested. The most famous line is: “ So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself-nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror that paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Also, “Our greatest primary task is to put people to work.” That is to the point. The fear thing is really that the American people would need change their collective psychology to being hard and tough, in order to fight unemployment and starvation. Do not succumb to fear and paranoia, laugh in the face of the perils. This is still good lesson today. Much ink has been spilled on Roosevelt, so if anyone would like to recommend some possible better treatises, let me know. I am inclined to want to look at some of the titles of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. first, such as “The Coming of the New Deal”. General works on The Great Depression are a rarity, it would seem to me. If you know of a best one, let me know! I picked up a general reader by Robert S. McElvaine, but it is a little patchy in the writing, but not too bad for the most part.

The wiki entry is very good, as usual, but should just be used as jumping off point for more specific investigations. I want to look at Prohibition and the movies from that era, or the role that entertainment played in lives of everyday Americans, say during the 1930s. Also, I want to look at the thousands of bank crashes and the ways the New Dealers restored the banking system. Naturally, I want to look at the work programs and how they put millions of people to work and restored their self-esteem, and possibly made them feel like they were not just getting a hand out. This will entail a look at the many programs that were put in place then, such as the Works Progress Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corp., and the Tennessee Valley Authority. The History Channel has a good special on the TVA that shows you how strong men built The Hoover Dam. Another thing is to see how the Social Security system was first formed and why that was and still is so important today. And being a stock market buff I want to better understand the the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, which put the SEC in place. Yes, there is much to know, but through gradual study and attrition it will start to sink in. Actually studying economics will be one greatest goal. It has been in the news that the American people have been spending money that they do not have, and running up credit card debt astronomically. The federal deficit too is getting out of control. The excesses of the 1920s have often been given as the cause of The Great Depression. Those fears surface again as we escalate into out-of-control debt. The irony is that if we stop spending we will sink into a recession. Yet, once credit cards are maxed out we will have to stop spending! Some unwinding is inevitable!

“Every picture tells a story, story.” The best place to start our journey is to look at as many photographs as possible. I urge you to look at each one of these shots several times, and you will begin to understand the American landscape of the early 1930s-the hopelessness, the bread lines, people looking for work, and down and outs leaning on a street corner with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Please review this page many times, then pick up some books to study this period. The real test of the New Deal was how far it went to help the poor. In Roosevelt`s second Inaugural Address he said, “It is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” True government grew much at that time, and that is part of the legacy of Roosevelt. But during Republican presidencies, such as Reagan and George W. Bush, I do not see that the role of the federal government has shrank any. I don`t think anyone else could have helped the American people other than the government. Yes, the New Deal was brilliant in the way it addressed the major problem of unemployment. If everyone would simply go to work, then people would have money to buy goods and services. Businesses would flourish, farmers could buy supplies, parks and public facilities would look nice, people would go to more movies and concerts etc…! Yet, it was not quite that simple. In fact, we slipped into another recession in 1937. Sadly, it was the invasion of Poland by the Nazis (just an approximate guess of when real recovery may have begun) that truly began to propel our economy.