Some Hard Truth About Hard Times

I'm not calling anyone a liar, but I've got to explode a popular myth that's been circulating in this country far too long. Here's how it gets passed around: in a casual conversation, someone will mention an elderly friend or relative who has a habit of never throwing anything away.

Almost invariably the person telling the story will explain the hoarding behavior by saying, "It's because he (or she) grew up in the Depression and they remember the hard times, with no money, scrimping and saving day after day. So for the rest of their life, they have trouble getting rid of stuff even when it's worn out."

Many of these anecdotes are undoubtedly true. But scrimping and saving every day is NOT behavior that started during the Great Depression, and it's misleading to portray the hardships caused by that event as remarkable or unprecedented in American life.

Using the Depression as a baseline for all discussions of national prosperity, or lack of it, ignores an important historical truth: for millions of average citizens, money was tight and economic security non-existent in every decade prior to the 1930s.

My father didn't grow up in poverty, but he lived on a strict budget in circumstances that, by today's standards, seem harsh. He was born in Nebraska in 1915, but by 1922 the family had moved to California and settled in Redwood City, about 20 miles south of San Francisco.

His father worked in the nearby Southern Pacific railroad yards and couldn't afford to buy a house. Instead, he purchased a vacant lot and built one, using his own carpentry skills, sawing and hammering on weekends. My dad was impressed by that accomplishment but never talked about it as an amazing, inspirational project. His father wanted a house and constructing it himself was the only option, so that's what he did.

Their neighborhood wasn't the kind of setting that would make a nice Norman Rockwell cover on the Saturday Evening Post. From what my dad told me, lifestyles of the residents varied between frugal and threadbare. There was one guy who wore the same overalls every day. On Saturdays he would sit in the kitchen, wrapped in a blanket, while his wife washed the overalls in a tub of hot soapy water perched on the stove.

Food wasn't abundant. My dad and his brother often had rice for breakfast, cooked mushy like oatmeal. Bread smeared with Crisco was a typical sandwich option. And if there was no real tea in the house they would make 'silver tea.' That's hot water flavored with milk and sugar.

My dad went to college for a year but the cost put too much strain on the family finances. He dropped out, got hired by a local title company, and later served in the Navy during World War Two. Thanks to the G.I. bill he got his college diploma in 1949 and had a successful career in the aerospace industry.

I don't think he felt nostalgic for his childhood and teenage years. The conditions of everyday life he had to deal with didn't encourage average people to dream big or take risks. Getting a job and hanging onto it was the top priority for most of his peers, He once said to me, "If the war hadn't come along I might have stayed with that title company forever."

So yes, the Great Depression was awful, but it wasn't some terrible new malady that no one had ever experienced before. And lately I've noticed a few media pundits floating the idea that many New Deal policies created by the Roosevelt administration were actually bad for America in the long run. This line of thinking claims the US is firmly on the road to becoming a welfare state populated by slackers devoid of personal responsibility.

More insidiously, it suggests that conditions before the Depression were closer to genuine American ideals, two of the most important being greater laissez-faire capitalism and freedom from 'government intrusion' in many areas of our lives.

Federal spending on social programs is a subject that deserves serious, thoughtful debate, and always will. But anyone who thinks America is on the way down because the New Deal wrecked our national character and turned us into softies looking for endless handouts is delusional.

My dad is long gone, but I know he'd be amused and somewhat irked by people nowadays who think of the 1920s as a time when women wore flapper outfits, men called each other "old sport," and every night was party time at the local speakeasy.

If anyone ever builds a time machine and says they're heading back to the festive years of the Jazz Age because America was a better place in that freewheeling era, I'll be happy to send them off with fireworks. I hope they feel liberated and empowered by the total lack of government safety nets such as FDIC protection for bank accounts, social security benefits, or unemployment assistance.

I might even pack a box lunch for them, something appropriate for the journey. I wonder if they'd enjoy two or three Crisco sandwiches and a big Thermos of silver tea?

Comments

[realpolitic]

The FDR policies such as FDIC insurance, social security insurance, and unemployment benefits helped set the stage for our future prosperity. Where would we be if in a relatively prosperous society our elderly people were going hungry without social security benefits? If one looks at the income distributions in the 1920s, many had no money. John Kenneth Galbraith in the Great Crash said:

"In 1229 the rich were indubitably rich. The figures are not entirely satisfactory, but it seems certain that the 5 per cent of the population with the highest incomes in that year received approximately one third of all the personal income. The proportion of personal income received in the form of interest, dividends, and rent - the income, broadly speaking of the well-to-do - was about twice as great as in the years following the Second War World."

"The highly unequal income distribution meant that the economy was dependent on a high level of investment or a high level of luxury spending or both. The rich can not buy great quantities of bread. If they are to dispose of what they receive it must be on luxuries or by way of investment in new plants and new projects. Both investment and luxury spending are subject, inevitably, to more erratic influences and to wider fluctuations than the bread and rent outlays of the $25-a-week workman. This high-bracket spending and investment was especially susceptible to the crushing news from the stock market in 1929."

[jhNY]

Nostalgia is one of the most pernicious forces at work in our (or anybody else's) national politics, in that projection of wishes for a time that never was replaces the actual history of the nation, and nobody is the wiser for it.

[dwatkins9]

Time machine to the twenties? Free enterprise, no FICA tax, and each man responsible for himself?

Where the heck do I sign?

Of course, there is no going back in time, but it might still become politically possible to return to those old-time values of self-reliance. Who knows what global warming and the accompanying political stresses might not bring?

[realpolitic]

What is self-reliance when there are no jobs to hire you? Don't the self-reliant get sick occasionally or get fired? Are not the children of the self-reliant sometimes born with medical conditions that may need expensive care? You can only be so flippant because you have grown up with these protections. Ask those who lived without them and they will tell you they do not want to go back to that era.

[dwatkins9]

Since you don't know my age, how do you know what I have or have not lived through?

The self reliant have savings and investments to fall back on when they get sick, or if they lose their jobs. The truly self-reliant don't have "jobs" - they are professionals (doctors, lawyers) or entrepreneurs, or self-sufficient farmers.The self reliant pay their own medical bills, or buy medical insurance at market rates in the free market. Those who can't afford those things yet should perhaps put off having children until they can.
And let us not forget that death is not unnatural. There is no need to go to extraordinary - and extraordinarily expensive - lengths to keep everyone alive until the absolute last possible minute. What happened to facing death - or the loss of a loved one, for that matter- with a modicum of dignity and courage?

Oh for an era when virtue was not so heavily punished, or vice not so lavishly rewarded, as now. Just thinking about it makes me want to break out in an impromptu Charleston. Mr. Whiteman, if you would be so kind....

[Rule Of Law]

Ah, home. Redwood City--where my buddy's 3 bedroom 1 bath house that he bought for 85k in the 80's is valued at nearly a million today--even with the falling prices. Who'd a thunk it?
Sure would buy a whole lot of crisco sandwiches.

[Samalabear]

That's insanity.

[Rule Of Law]

Yes. Yes it is...but it is an insanity foisted upon us by Bush and the FED under Greenspan who needed this real estate bubble to hide the fact that their tax cuts and wars were bankrupting the country.