Sunday Forum: Great Depression I
I was there; let me tell you what it was like, says GENE JANNUZISunday, March 08, 2009
Stacy Innerst/Post-Gazette
The media's running refrain these days is: This recession is the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. But they usually don't tell you what the Great Depression was like. Because most of them don't know -- they weren't there. I was.
I don't pretend that my vintage, at age 93, gives me special knowledge for remedying the 2008-2009 recession. Monetary policy, fiscal policy -- for that you can resurrect John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman. Or you can get the scoop from the new magi from the east, such as Paul Krugman, Thomas L. Friedman, George Will, David Brooks or Rush Limbaugh. But it still might be worthwhile to retro to the Great Depression.
In 1933, a pall hung over the land. It stalled the economy, battered the mind, clutched at the heart. The unemployment rate reached 25 percent, which meant 15 million Americans were without jobs. There was no Social Security, no unemployment compensation, no Medicare, no Medicaid, no food stamps. Public assistance was starting, but slowly.
People queued along city streets in bread lines, snaking their way patiently to a handout of food by some charity. Some with an entrepreneurial bent sold apples, pencils or shoe laces on the sidewalks.Settlements of makeshift huts, built of cardboard and orange crates, speckled the outskirts of towns. They were called "Hoovervilles," monuments to President Herbert L. Hoover's economic policies.
Hobos hopped freight trains, hoping to find something -- anything -- somewhere.
Nature and man conspired. Dust storms devastated the prairie states. Smog smothered the industrial regions. Here in the Pittsburgh tri-state area, thick black smoke hung low, spewed by the steel mills, by the coal-burning railroad locomotives and river boats, by the chimneys of thousands of homes heated by inefficient coal furnaces.
In Downtown Pittsburgh, street lights and headlights often burned at midday. Snow was blackened within hours. By noon the smoke had soiled a man's shirt collar or a woman's hose. Your curtains had to be laundered weekly and dried on a frame called a curtain stretcher. A smudge circled your nostrils; tissues were not yet available. Your lungs got black.
At a night football game at Geneva College's Reeves Field a high punt might disappear at the top of its arc in dust from the nearby Armstrong Cork Works.
You could get a haircut for 35 cents. Or go to the movies needing a haircut. If you had 35 cents.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his first inaugural address on March 4, 1933, tried to rally the country with the ringing declaration, "Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is ... fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning fear." Then he closed the banks for a few days to prevent a run on their deposits.
FDR launched a "New Deal" for the American people, which consisted of an alphabet soup of agencies and measures designed to restart the economy. There were the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).
The union movement, gaining speed, used up more letters, with the SWOC (Steelworkers Organizing Committee), the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations), the AFL (American Federation of Labor) and the UAW (United Auto Workers).
Television was years away; radio was a godsend. FDR used it to boost morale with speeches and "fireside chats." Each evening Lowell Thomas gave 15 minutes of news and Amos 'n' Andy gave 15 minutes of fun. Bing Crosby and Russ Columbo were the romantic balladeers.
On a Sunday evening, families gathered around their radio sets, often large chunks of furniture three or four feet high. They sat looking at the radio, using their imaginations to picture the performers who tried to cheer them up. They listened to Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Eddie Cantor, Will Rogers and Joe Penner.
The movies provided a bit of hope. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced. Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Robert Montgomery, Claudette Colbert and Irene Dunne planted the possibility of romance.
The literature of the time was uniformly somber. Among the best known were John Steinbeck's novels "The Grapes of Wrath," "Cannery Row" and "Of Mice and Men;" Maxwell Anderson's "Winterset;" Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," and William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" and "Absalom, Absalom." There was not a laugh in the lot. Labor strife compounded the general gloom.
In those days "the mall" was Main Street. On Saturday nights all the stores were open, but shopping was a charade. People looked wistfully at the window displays.
My Beaver Falls High School's midyear 1933 graduating class numbered 56. The commencement speaker, Dr. John Coleman, a political science professor at Geneva College, began with this lead-weighted sinker: "Tomorrow there will be 56 more unemployed on the streets of Beaver Falls."
I fooled him. With the help of my older siblings I scraped together the enormous sum of $100, a semester's tuition at Geneva College. I went up the street to the college and enrolled. That left only 55 more unemployed on the streets of Beaver Falls.
On St. Patrick's Day, March 17, 1936, Pittsburgh's three rivers administered a coup de grace. Ice gorges dammed the rivers to flood stage of 25 feet. By the next day they reached 46 feet. On Penn Avenue Downtown, the water was deep enough to cover a trolley car. Water and sludge surged into cities and towns down the Ohio River valley.
Roosevelt's New Deal was only moderately successful. The Supreme Court declared NIRA unconstitutional. FDR tried to pack the court to gain a favorable majority but was unsuccessful. By 1938 unemployment still was near 20 percent. This continued until the United States entered World War II in 1941, when the draft and enlistments drew 16 million men and women into the armed forces. Our industrial might became The Arsenal of Democracy.
There you have it, a snapshot of the Great Depression of the 1930s -- a time of misery, hopelessness and despair uncushioned, a decade of tears. We aren't even close to that yet, here in 2009.
Take the word of a survivor.
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