The Great Depression
Copyright © 2005-6, Henry J. Sage
Imagine the scene: A school classroom, perhaps fourth or fifth grade, with a teacher looking down at a slender little girl in clean but ragged clothes. The teacher says, “you look pale, dear. You should go home and get something to eat.”
The little girl answers, “I can't, Miss Jones. It's my sister's turn to eat today.”Another scene in a rundown village in Appalachia. Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of President Franklin Roosevelt, is watching a sad looking little boy who is holding and stroking a pet rabbit. A little girl, the boy's sister, looks up at Mrs. Roosevelt and says, “He thinks we're not going to eat it, but we are.”
A police officer in Chicago is walking his beat on a cold morning when he spies a ragged, skinny old man sleeping in a doorway. He prods the man gently with his nightstick and says, “Come on, Buddy, time to move along.” Nothing. He pokes the man again, not quite so gently, and then looks closer. The man is dead. It's the fifth one he has found this week.
Scenes like the ones above were common during the Great Depression, a time that is difficult for those of us alive and well in the 21st century to imagine existing in America. Suicides became so common that people made bad jokes about it. thousands of people lived in cardboard shacks, drain pipes, and tent cities on the fringes of America's most affluent cities. Once prosperous men in three-piece suits stood in line for a piece of bread or a cup of soup. People stopped looking for jobs when it was apparent that there were no jobs to be had.
There were parts of the country were people were less affected than in others. People still went to the movies, listened to the radio, played golf and tennis, took vacations, and went about their lives as though nothing was wrong, trying to ignore the desperate looks of people they often passed on the streets, sitting on benches, too proud to beg, but still hoping for a handout of a dime or a quarter that might buy a sandwich and a cup of coffee.
In the Roaring 20s nobody thought an economic disaster of such proportion could ever touch the United States. In the aftermath of the Great War, while Europe was still cleaning up the mess, caring for the wounded and mourning the dead, Americans felt a sense of disdain for the rest of the world, a European-centered world that could not manage its affairs any better than it had done in the past. America had problems of its own to be sure: racism, religious differences, adjustments to the post-industrial age. But the mood of the 1920s was upbeat and positive, and as President Coolidge said, the business of America was business.
Then it hit in October 1929. The Depression was caused by many factors, but it was triggered by the stock market crash. The sudden loss of wealth had a snowball effect. Banks found themselves short of funds as margin buying had eaten up credit, and now those margins could not be met because the value of stocks had plunged so rapidly. As people stop buying, merchants found they could not sell their wares, so orders to factories dried up, and people were laid off. Income continued to fall, and the cycle repeated over and over in a downward spiral. The country produced 8 million cars in 1928 and 2 million in 1932. Unemployment percentages varied from 15% to 25% and even higher in some areas. In hard hit regions, entire towns seemed hopelessly stuck in poverty.
Aside from war, the United States government had never faced a crisis of such magnitude. And because government's traditional relationship with business had been one of laissez-faire, tempered by relatively mild regulation that began in the Progressive Era, many people could not envision the government providing solutions for problems which government had not apparently caused. Furthermore, Communism had engulfed Russia, and Socialist parties were strong all across Europe, but America had been through a red scare, and labor agitation and hints of “socialistic solutions” were seen by many as un-American, unnecessary, even dangerous. The income tax was relatively new, and government revenues were ample for most needs. But the burden of caring for the unemployed and unemployable soon became so large that local, state and national government, let alone charitable organizations, lacked funds to deal forcefully with the problem. And as wages and incomes fell, raising taxes hardly seemed the solution.
To make things worse, the middle of the United States went through an era known as the dust bowl, as farmlands dried up primitive irrigation projects were unable to keep the growing. Farmers discovered that with the falling prices they could not earn enough from the sale of their produce to cover the costs of getting it to market, so farmers burned their corn to keep warm, slaughtered their livestock for their own food and dumped milk in the streets.
President Hoover, a man who had been responsible for the food production program during the Great War, and whose activities in saving the Belgians from starvation had been recognized far and wide, ironically found himself in a position which seemed hopeless, and which in which the government itself seemed helpless. President Hoover did not do nothing, however. The actions he took were unprecedented, far more than government had ever taken before in interfering with the affairs of private business. But it was far too little to stem the tide of depression that was sweeping across the country.
In 1928, the year in which President Hoover had been elected by a huge landslide, Franklin Roosevelt, whose political career had apparently been ended by infantile paralysis in 1921, was elected governor of New York, one of the few bright spots for Democrats during that year. Having learned progressive politics under President Wilson, Roosevelt began to address problems of depression aggressively from the governor's mansion in Albany. By 1932 his willingness to experiment seemed appealing to Democrats, who nominated him for president in that year.
Franklin Roosevelt was not capable of ending the depression by himself. But he was willing to try almost anything, and try he did. What he brought to Washington, and what he gave to the American people, was a sense of hope, even as those on the left accused him of being a closet capitalist, and those on the right accused him of being a betrayer of his patrician class, if not an outright socialist. Roosevelt took it all in stride, commenting that since he was being attacked from both sides of the political spectrum, then he must be doing something right.
What FDR tried to do was called the New Deal, and although it did not in it of itself end the Depression, it changed the relationship between the government and the American people forever, and its legacy is still with us. Memories of the Great Depression have all but disappeared except among the very old, but the effects of the Depression have never completely gone away.
A Personal Story about the Depression
History 122 Part 3 | Assignments