Benjamin Schwarz: What the histories of the Depression era tell us about middle-class families in crisis, both then and now
[Benjamin Schwarz is The Atlantic’s literary editor and national editor.]
NOT TO BE faux-populist about it, but although such matters as the electoral turmoil in Iran, the Bernanke/Lewis he said/he said, and the bloating of the list of Oscar finalists (to take the week of June 21) constitute what Charlie Rose and his knowing ilk like to think of as the national discussion, I suspect that an altogether different set of concerns haunts the commuter driving home, is fumbled over on the AYSO sidelines, and is the chief subject across kitchen tables after the kids are put to bed. As Americans confront what has been dubbed the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression, they may be forgiven for failing to linger over soon-to-be-old current events, because they recognize that for the first time in their lives they’re in the grip of history. They’re anxious, even terrified, about what that may mean for their daily lives and dreams and—really the same question—for their children’s lives and dreams.
Because this pervasive trepidation is unprecedented in their lifetime, most Americans have reflexively invoked the Depression in their efforts to comprehend their experience. Facile comparisons are offered up and then shot down, and for good reason. Yes, by nearly all measures the Great Depression—Herbert Hoover chose Depression because it didn’t have the same ominous connotations as the terms for previous severe downturns, the now quaint-sounding panic and crisis—was incomparably worse than today’s Great Recession, even if pessimists remind us that in the year following the 1929 crash, Wall Street enjoyed its own bear-market rally and, like President Obama today, Hoover and Roosevelt kept seeing green shoots when the rest of the country correctly saw bare ground.
But in some respects the mythology of the Depression is bleaker than the reality. For all the terrible unemployment figures and searing WPA images of Dustbowl migrants, the typical worker remained on the job, though he had most likely been forced to take a pay cut. In fact, despite the breadlines and the soup kitchens and the Bonus Army, the population emerged from the Depression healthier than ever, thanks largely to government aid and advances in the then-new science of nutrition; the recruits of the Second World War were in every way more fit than the recruits of the First. Any broad historical analogies Americans reach for to make sense of the social, emotional, and quotidian experience of this current crisis will founder on the rocks of historical specificity. How, after all, can an economic crisis that was broadly defined by a tremendous number of unemployed industrial workers illuminate the social ramifications of our post-post-industrial crash, when the population is overwhelmingly middle-class and white-collar? For instance, the precipitous declines in home values and investment portfolios—realities that no doubt weigh heavily on readers of this magazine—feature calamitously in both eras, but in the 1930s a far smaller portion of the population owned houses or equities than does now.
The experience of that small group, however, may prove to be similar to that of today’s vast lower-upper-middle class and upper-middle class, to borrow Orwell’s nicely granulated categories, and a clutch of books probes the Depression experience from that group’s point of view. Most of these books purport to examine a wide range of the population, but because the haute bourgeoisie—a set defined as much by sensibility and educational attainment as by wealth and income—produced testimony that is unusually extensive, compelling, self-aware, and articulate, and because the writers doing the examining no doubt come from the same class, the books end up focusing overwhelmingly on it....
Read entire article at Atlantic
NOT TO BE faux-populist about it, but although such matters as the electoral turmoil in Iran, the Bernanke/Lewis he said/he said, and the bloating of the list of Oscar finalists (to take the week of June 21) constitute what Charlie Rose and his knowing ilk like to think of as the national discussion, I suspect that an altogether different set of concerns haunts the commuter driving home, is fumbled over on the AYSO sidelines, and is the chief subject across kitchen tables after the kids are put to bed. As Americans confront what has been dubbed the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression, they may be forgiven for failing to linger over soon-to-be-old current events, because they recognize that for the first time in their lives they’re in the grip of history. They’re anxious, even terrified, about what that may mean for their daily lives and dreams and—really the same question—for their children’s lives and dreams.
Because this pervasive trepidation is unprecedented in their lifetime, most Americans have reflexively invoked the Depression in their efforts to comprehend their experience. Facile comparisons are offered up and then shot down, and for good reason. Yes, by nearly all measures the Great Depression—Herbert Hoover chose Depression because it didn’t have the same ominous connotations as the terms for previous severe downturns, the now quaint-sounding panic and crisis—was incomparably worse than today’s Great Recession, even if pessimists remind us that in the year following the 1929 crash, Wall Street enjoyed its own bear-market rally and, like President Obama today, Hoover and Roosevelt kept seeing green shoots when the rest of the country correctly saw bare ground.
But in some respects the mythology of the Depression is bleaker than the reality. For all the terrible unemployment figures and searing WPA images of Dustbowl migrants, the typical worker remained on the job, though he had most likely been forced to take a pay cut. In fact, despite the breadlines and the soup kitchens and the Bonus Army, the population emerged from the Depression healthier than ever, thanks largely to government aid and advances in the then-new science of nutrition; the recruits of the Second World War were in every way more fit than the recruits of the First. Any broad historical analogies Americans reach for to make sense of the social, emotional, and quotidian experience of this current crisis will founder on the rocks of historical specificity. How, after all, can an economic crisis that was broadly defined by a tremendous number of unemployed industrial workers illuminate the social ramifications of our post-post-industrial crash, when the population is overwhelmingly middle-class and white-collar? For instance, the precipitous declines in home values and investment portfolios—realities that no doubt weigh heavily on readers of this magazine—feature calamitously in both eras, but in the 1930s a far smaller portion of the population owned houses or equities than does now.
The experience of that small group, however, may prove to be similar to that of today’s vast lower-upper-middle class and upper-middle class, to borrow Orwell’s nicely granulated categories, and a clutch of books probes the Depression experience from that group’s point of view. Most of these books purport to examine a wide range of the population, but because the haute bourgeoisie—a set defined as much by sensibility and educational attainment as by wealth and income—produced testimony that is unusually extensive, compelling, self-aware, and articulate, and because the writers doing the examining no doubt come from the same class, the books end up focusing overwhelmingly on it....