LITTLE ROCK — I barely arrived in time for the Great Depression. I saw Hoovervilles on a train trip to Washington in 1940 and consumed too much ginger ale at a lease-breaking party. Most of what I think I know, though, I learned from the story we tell ourselves.
The story is about a kinder, gentler America in which people looked out for each other. “We were poor,” my generation-kids then-is fond of saying, “but we didn’t know it because the neighbors were poor, too.” A gentleman of the road could expect a sandwich and a glass of milk if he knocked on countless doors, as we think we remember it. If true, that gave the 1930s the best-fed generation of homeless people ever.
I’ve been looking for such signs of a more caring society again. The unemployment rate is 9.7 percent, or 15 million people. The rate is 16.6 percent counting part-time workers who need fulltime jobs and those who stopped looking. And 6.8 million have been out of work longer than six months. “My guess is we’ll have continued recovery,” Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said last week, “but it won’t feel terrific.”
Mr. Bernanke is a macro guy, so he can see a recovery with millions out of work and no idea of where their next job will come from. Two days later, as if changing the subject, he said that the federal debt is on an “unsustainable path.” I’d guess so, after all the money he gave AIG.
But Mr. Bernanke is an optimist. Someone sent me market shouter Jim Cramer’s prediction in March that health care reform would bring on a double-dip recession. If health care doesn’t do it, the evaporation of the euro can.
The euro is the better bet for a culprit. Investor pressure on it is forcing European governments to tighten up, cutting wages and pensions while consumer spending remains precarious. If the Great Depression was, in fact, a doubledipper, premature budget tightening was why.Consumers can’t spend what they can’t get. Our thoroughly spooked Congress of today shows signs of joining in the tightening. History repeats.
Demons are less demanding of human sacrifices than a market economy that has been abused. The unemployed are its victims. As sacrifices, they can be said to suffer for all. You might think they’d get some sympathy back. But no. They are viewed as deadfall blocking the way back to a sustainable path for the budget. Helping them, it is said, takes money away from people who earn it to give to people who don’t.
On the other hand, one could ponder the decades of popularly supported presidents and congressmen who dug this budget hole. It is easy to blame them, but not us, and punish the first people to fall into the hole.
Maybe that is not so different from the 1930s. Maybe we shouldn’t expect it to be. If you can get your hands on a copy, read Studs Terkel’s oral history Hard Times, published in 1970. Frightened people can be nasty.
In the Depression, people who should have known better joined the Communist Party. Brownshirts drilled in preparation for the triumph of the Third Reich. Forty million people tuned in to the Rev. Charles Coughlin’s broadcasts, and a lot of them believed every slur. Labor strikes began violently and were ended violently. Organized crime flourished.
When people are afraid of what might happen to them, they may project their fears onto others who are superficially different. Whether they call them bosses, hoodlums or international bankers, the others serve the same purpose. All the names are synonyms for scapegoats. Juxtaposed with concern for each other, many Americans spent the Depression intensely disliking other Americans.
Tom Blackburn is a former member of the Palm Beach Post’s editorial board.
Editorial, Pages 10 on 06/21/2010