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Boat sales are up, the La Crosse Tribune reported recently. The New York Times reported one of the big hedge funds has grown substantially this year. Some of the troubled banks are regaining their financial footing. We see just glimmers of hope in what has been called the worst economic times since the Great Depression.
We hear comparisons to the Great Depression, the nation’s economic disaster in the 1930s that took Word War II to bring recovery, but most of us probably don’t have a good idea of how tough times were then. Mainly I saw the Depression in the frugality my mother learned then — her penchant for patching anything that could be worn again and other thrifty habits.
So Gretchen and I decided to read Studs Terkel’s “Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression” on our trip west. We took turns driving and reading on the long straight roads we follow from here to southwest Colorado — 65 mph on the little-traveled two-lane roads through South Dakota, Nebraska and the High Plains of Kansas and Colorado — one story after another in the voices of the people from all walks of life who shared their stories with Terkel in the 1960s.
Somewhere in the undulating landscape of Nebraska’s Sand Hills, we took a break in reading to discuss what struck both of us about what we had heard so far in the 500-page book. It was the way people accepted their hardships as being the result of some personal failure.
A psychiatrist who practiced during the Depression, David J. Rossman, put it this way: “In those days everybody accepted his role, responsibility for his own fate. Everybody, more or less, blamed himself for his delinquency or lack of talent or bad luck. There was an acceptance that it was your own fault … You took it and kept quiet.”
Now, of course, we can point to well-publicized failure of government regulators to contain fraud and foolish speculation — a failure not of our own foolishness, but of government to protect us from ourselves, for our failure to recognize that what probably was too good to be true probably was.
This feeling of personal failure apparently accounted for the lack, with a few exceptions, of violent responses to the hard times. Terkel’s storytellers described a zombie-like passivity in the faces of men standing in lines for soup and bread.
Rossman and others in the book posed the question whether another depression would be accepted so passively.
Rossman said no even in the ’60s: “Now people think it’s coming to them. The whole ethos has changed. We have reached unprecedented prosperity. Everybody said: ‘Why not me?’”
And Robin Langston, who said he knew the Depression had really hit when his parents couldn’t afford to pay their electric bill, warned: “It would behoove the Federal government not to let it come (another depression). Because you’re dealing with a different breed of cat now. If they really want anarchy, let a depression come now.”
We resumed our reading, which has left both of us wondering how our countrymen would react now if we slipped into another depression.
The sobering tales from Terkel’s book made the miles go by more quickly. But it has left us hoping fervently that recent glimmers of hope are the signs of a bright economic future for all of us and that Terkel’s collection of memories will remain accounts of a singular time in our history, not a foretelling of an even greater misfortune.
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