In the 1930s, and Today

Here's a couple interesting quotations from The Great Depression: America in the 1930s, by T.H. Watkins (Back Bay Books, 1993).  I started reading this a few days ago, but got sidetracked into an Agatha Christie murder mystery.  Now I'm back to Watkins' book.  Obviously, this was written long before the Great Recession, but it might have been plucked from yesterday's New York Times op-ed pages.

"Fear was the great leveler of the Great Depression.  It haunted the dreams of the African-American sharecropper in the South who held a fistful of barren dust in his hand and wondered what the system would do now to cheat him and his family of life.  It stalked the middle-class white merchant in Idaho who had seen decades of work destroyed when his once-friendly banker coldly forced him into bankruptcy.  It whispered terror into the ear of the Mexican-American foundry worker in Detroit who had put his future in the hands of the coyote who brought him north from Mexico into this strange cold place and who now found his job vanished.  

"Fear shattered all the fine Anglo-Saxon certitudes of the Great Plains farm wife who watched black clouds of dust roll up on the edge of the horizon and knew that her dreams would soon be sucked up into that boiling mass.  Fear even tweaked the nerves of those too rich to be harmed by economic hardship iself, as they looked around at the financial ruin and entertained dark fantasies of revolutionary hordes boiling up to seize control of their world.  Banker J.P. Morgan, for one, decided to put his yacht in mothballs for a while.  'It seems very unwise to let the "Corsair" come out this summer,' he wrote a friend in October, 1931.  'There are so many suffering from lack of work, and even from actual hunger, that it is both wiser and kinder not to flaunt such luxuriant amusement in the face of the public.'

"Most middle-class Americans — and those who aspired to the middle class — would not have been overwhelmed by Morgan's sensitivity.  Bankers, once considered the pillars of whatever community in which one happened to live (though not always in the usually overmortgaged Midwest), were more often seen now as being among the principal villains of the national disaster.  


"Because of the stock market crash of 1929 and the thousands of bank failures that brought so many of them to ruin, Americans would learn to nurture a permanent distrust of the "financial community" — banks, trust companies, and, above all, brokers of speculation.  Workers, farmers, and other identifiable groups had risen up to shout against heartless bankers and rapacious speculators before, but this time faith in the very virtues of thrift and responsibility to which white, middle-class America had given its heart was shattered.  The world of money had not merely failed, it had betrayed an implicit trust." (pp. 13-14)

"The ideal of individualism had marked the world of the twenties; it was the individualistic genius of men like Thomas Alva Edison or Henry Ford that had made them cultural icons, after all, and it was the very singleness of his exploit that had made airman Charles Lindbergh the definitive popular hero of the age when he crossed the Atlantic all by himself in 1927.  But individualism, it now appeared to millions, had brought disaster upon the nation by encouraging the wildcatters of speculation and endorsing the socially irresponsible actions of self-centered industrialists who cared for nothing but the dimensions of their profit margins — and the people be damned... In everything from federal land-management agencies to labor unions, from ethnic self-help groups to Communist cells, individualism would be stifled by the collectivist urge to join together in common cause for the common good." (pp. 16-17)


(Above: President Coolidge presents Lindbergh the National Geographic Society's Hubbard Medal following his solo flight across the Atlantic.  Wikimedia Photo.) •••