The Great Depression Was A Long, Long, Long Time Ago
It has come to my attention that The Great Depression was a long time ago. A long, long, long time ago and I don't mean it has been a lot of years since it started, or ended.
How long ago was it? Women has been voting for less than ten years when it started. There were only 120 million Americans when it started and 24% of African Americans, as well as 6% of all Americans, couldn't read the newspapers with the latest news because they were illiterate.
When The Great Depression started, the telegraph was the fastest way to get information from point A to point B, telephone service was still relatively rare and very expensive. There was no television, movies were silent, and radio was the top of the entertainment charts. Most major cities had three, four or five newspapers and they were printed every morning, and every afternoon as well.
When The Great Depression heated up, homes were not air-conditioned. Outhouses outnumbered inhouses. Electricity was still rare, especially in Hawaii and Alaska for a lot of reasons, like they weren't states yet.
Major league sports were in their infancy, the NHL was less than a decade old and was just the original six. Boston had two major league baseball teams and the Braves were better though Babe Ruth had just pitched the Red Sox to the World Series a few years before.
When The Great Depression started, Kings still ruled Europe and Emperors were man-gods in Asia. Commercial aviation really wasn't even starting yet, and trains were how you got coast to coast, eventually.
No one had heard of Adolf Hitler, or Stalin and John F Kennedy was a young boy in Brookline, Mass.
For the obvious, there are no cell phones, faxes, computers, internet, blackberries, ipods, hybrid cars, but then again, there weren't any of those save computers twenty years ago.
When The Great Depression started, America was a relatively poor, agrarian country. People were hard-working true, we had helped win World War I, but it wasn't the country, the culture or the land we know today.
I just point this out because economists, a breed who love numbers, but are less willing or less able perhaps, to understand people, are looking back at something that happened a long time ago in a place very different from today, for clues about what to do now, with economy and stimulus plans and government intervention.
Is it possible that what was the path then, is the path now? Something tells me no. Something tells me that the world is so different, history is valuable but not as a guide. Something tells me that this is not more of the same but is something very different.
It's a new world. We need new thinking. Dusting off the playbook from The Great Depression is like building a modern ship with the plans of the Titanic, which had sunk just a few years before everything went south by the way.
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While the neo-cons falsely claim that FDR's New Deal didn't end the depression, BHO couldn't use FDR's old plans to rebuild America. The America is vastly different than the America of 1933-42. America is an urbanized, post industrial, importer of clothes, autos & industrial goods, a nation deeply in debt to Asian countries in 2007. America's farming is based on agri-business, not the family farm. Few can make a living farming on less than 500 acres now. The jobs which may be saved require a post-high school level of training & new jobs...
Obama's programs won't be or resemble the New Deal.
Sorry, not EVERYone is dead who was alive during the Depression. Some of us are alive, voting, kicking, thinking, reading, writing, active human beings. Yes, technology has changed immeasurably.
But human intelligence, human psychology have not.
Remember when it was a catchword to say "Don't trust anyone over thirty," until, of course one crossed that bridge.
The truism about what happens when we don't learn from history is alive and well.
Just when you think that all truths have been learned in the 21st. Century, you should reread your Shakespeare, and come away shaking your head in disbelief and muttering, "How the heck did he know that about people?"
It is intelligence, balance, and wisdom that is important. Not the calendar.
A few more fact corrections. The illiteracy rate was not 6%, it was 4.8%. Telephone was much faster than telegraph and 40% of American homes had telephone service. Almost 70% had electricity. Hawaii was an early adopter of electricity even back when it was an independent kingdom: "On November 16, 1886 -- Kalakaua's birthday --Iolani Palace became the world's first royal residence to be lit by electricity." 51% of American homes had flush toilets. In baseball the National League was a 53 year old infant and the American League was 28. The National Hockey League, founded on November 22, 1917, with four teams, was more than a decade old and had ten teams (five in Canada, five in the USA) not six. John F. Kennedy was living in Bronxville, New York.
Leaving aside the merits of his argument, Mr. Boyce has his facts mostly wrong. Most people date the Great Depression from the crash of 1929. At that time Stalin had been the Soviet dictator for over seven years. Hitler was well known, at least in Germany, having published Mein Kampf in 1925. There were more monarchies in Europe than today, but they were all constitutional monarchies where the monarch reigned but did not rule. (The Soviets eliminated monarchy in Eastern Europe at the end of World War II. Of the eleven Western European monarchies in 1929, only Italy is now a republic.) There was only one man-god emperor left in Asia, in Japan, where a "heaven ruler" (a translation of the Japanese title) still reigns today and is still considered a god by most Shinto believers.
All movies being released were available with sound, although many theaters could not yet play them. Babe Ruth had finished his tenth season as a Yankee. Both the '29 Red Sox (58 wins) and Braves (56 wins) stunk, but the Red Sox were better. The Titanic sank 17 years before. (Mr. Boyce is not too good with recent history either, cell phones and the Internet were introduced in 1983, faxes were widely used in the 1970s.)
Most importantly America was not "a relatively poor, agrarian country". It was the richest, and most heavily industrialized nation in the world. The 1930 census showed 56.1% of Americans lived in urban locations.
You are an encyclopedia, sir!
You're right. But there are lessons to be learned from history, no matter how long ago it was. I think a very important lesson was the 'upgrade' of our infrastructure to the most modern of the time worked well. In fact, it worked so well that we could primarily ignore it, and putting any money into modernization, for seventy years. Now, we can either do that, or fall farther and farther behind in application of technology. One of the things I see as outdated is the idea is power must be generated by monumental construction. Why? I'd like a loan for a windmill, to be paid off with what I add to the power grid. I've got room and wind enough to power a home through a Minnesota winter, too. So do all the neighbors. I'd be delighted to put people to work building wind and solar power units and installing and servicing them. That's creating twenty-first century 'blue collar' jobs.
I truly believe there is so much focus on the Great Depression and the New Deal because we obviously DID NOT learn our lessons from the past, because it is happening again!! GET IT? It is vitally important to analyze what happened then to make sense of it all.
While many young people may hold these views, they could not be further from the truth. In every great challenge and crisis in history it is CRITICALLY necessary to look backward before moving forward with bold plans!! The mistake of not figuring out the mistakes of the PAST would most definitely be catastrophic for the present and the future. While NOTHING in history or life or world affairs is ever perfect, there are great ideas and ideologies hidden in and among each period of history and it is VITALLY IMPORTANT to learn from the past and "Take what you need from it and leave the rest!!!!" Please consider and think about this.
Culture has not kept pace with the rapid technological and societal changes. It lags far behind, and we are suffering for it. We are like a baby with a pistol.
Sadly, you are right. The America of the Great Depression went the way of the generation(s) who experienced it. They're all dead now. I'm afraid the America of today is a pale shadow of what once made us great.
On Saturday I was a guest at a Bar Mitzvah in Manhattan. There were seven people at our table, THREE of whom were born before 1926, each of whom remembered The Great Depression.
There are more people then you think who are over 80.
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