2010s Depression versus the Great Depression

Great Debates
1

I’ve been reading “The Hungry Years” by T.H. Watkins and “Hard Times” by Studs Terkel–the former being a historical review of the Great Depression (with heavy emphasis on the New Deal programs and labor unionism), the latter being a collection of personal accounts from people who lived during that time, or their children. I’ve learned a lot. I knew times were really bad during that time, but some of the stories are just so heart-wrenching I cannot imagine Americans today withstanding them.

-Thousands of families living in shantytowns off the side of highways.
-Thousands of young men and some women riding the rails, living as tramps and hobos in search of any kind of work.
-Housewives or their help leaving food and clothing on their back porches for beggers.
-People coming together to form unemployment associations, creating quasi-self sustaining communities.
-Mile-long lines at soup kitchens and places advertising a couple of job openings.

Even more hard to imagine happening today…

-The government being allowed to create hundreds of thousands of jobs for almost every type of kind of work–from sewing, public works, and arts and music. If one reads about the Civilian Conservation Corps, you can’t blame them for thinking it was something out of different kind of society, a different world–a kind of hard-core Boy Scouts, complete with bugle reverie, barracks, and self-improvement classes.

-Riots and violence being mainstays at strikes and union activities…and it being sanctioned or even implemented by local governments.

-And of course, all the blatant racism and classicism.

Even the dust storms seemed out of this world.

I know society has changed in lots of ways since the 1930s. So I’m wondering how a modern-day depression would compare to the Great Depression? Would the suffering be greater? Would the tolerance for poor people be similar, greater, or lesser? Would our collective anxiety over socialism block governmental intervention and prolong or speed up recovery? Would we see mobilized unemployed masses–SUVs and mini-vans packed up to the rafters with furniture and people–traveling in search of work? Or would people be stationary, waiting fruitlessly for miraculous assistance to hit their suburbs? Would unions be dismantled in desperation or bolstered in the face of exploitation?

What would be the tipping point before our society would stop resembling what we have now? When I step out of my front door, I still see people driving around in big ole cars, gnoshing at Starbucks, dressed very nicely, everyone happy-smiley. I still see college kids absorbed in iPads, iPhones, Androids, Blackberries, and all sorts of digital wonderments… I have noticed an increase in panhandlers…more white and female faces walking the medians with cardboard “Need Work” signs than I’ve ever seen. But if there are huge masses of angry and suffering unemployed people, I have not seen them yet. I’m wondering if things get that bad, where poor people are everywhere, just how things will pan out for them and society as a whole.

Anyone have any ideas? Have we learned anything from the past (doesn’t seem like it), or will history repeat itself?

I know one thing. If I lost my job right now, the first thing that would come to mind would be, “Oh shit. What am I going to do about my meds!” So many of us are on some type of pill, whether it be birth control or anti-psychotic. Some of these are physiologically addictive…if you go cold-turkey, you can die (I think about the precariousness of my own situation on a regular basis). There’s no way I could just hop on the rails and take off for Californy (or wherever). Not without at least two months of meds stocked up. That’s really screwed up, but it’s true. I’m not as strong as my 1930s counterpart. I might be smarter, but despite the relatively more comfortable life I’ve lived, I’m physically and emotionally weaker. I think I would be blown away like a speck of dust if anything like the Great Depression hit us.

2

I don’t think there is any real comparison, to be honest. The Great Depression was harder on everyone because, as a society we were less wealthy. Unemployment levels were higher for much of the GD as well, and there wasn’t anything close to the social safety net we have today. Also, the GD affected a broad spectrum of workers from all sorts of different sectors, while a large percentage of those unemployed by the current recession are from building trade, general construction and related industries (not to say that folks haven’t been laid off in a lot of other sectors).

I think the problem is that as a society we are softer today and more used to prosperity than the folks during the GD. We EXPECT prosperity, and when things turn down it hits us harder today. I don’t know that even if something like the WPA could be pushed through today, if most people would even take those jobs. Can you see the majority of those currently unemployed digging ditches or building dams (even if you could do those things without years of environmental impact studies and protests in the case of the dams)? I can’t see that as something most people would jump at today.

My grandparents on both sides lived through the GD, and listening to their stories…well, you find out what REAL hard times are like. Not to denigrate what people are going through today, but I don’t think we come anywhere close to what those folks suffered through.

-XT

3

The current unemployment rate is 9.1%. The US passed that point in 1931, hit a peak of perhaps 21% in 1933, then hovered around 15% for the rest of the decade. So yes, things were pretty bad. File:US Unemployment 1890-2009.gif - Wikipedia
The Recovery from the Great Depression of the 1930s

That said, this Lesser Depression is the worst since WWII. The contraction in employment has been deep and long:
http://cr4re.com/charts/charts.html?Employment#category=Employment

The stimulus package of 2009 was large, except if you factor in the contraction in state and local spending. Combined, the change is less perceptible.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2011/02/the_stimulus_was_small.html Oddly enough, I’ve read similar stories about the Great Depression.

4

One of my friends said that they were so poor they stopped having biscuits for breakfast and had cornbread instead. Cornmeal was cheaper than flour. Imagine an entire country living like that.

My dad said that it cost a dime to go to a movie but most folks didn’t have a dime to spare.

When people get that hungry and that broke, they will start taking those jobs – especially if they have children.

Over my desk are reproductions of five woodcuts by a WPA artist. Sadly, I can’t imagine our current government paying people to use their creative talents. Art classes, especially, are usually among the first things cut in education budgets. The attitude is just different.

I do remember from my childhood in the 1940s that there were still shacks on the country road to my grandmother’s house. The houses looked like they were about to collapse. The front porch would be sagging. The lumber would have turned gray and begun to rot. The children in the yard would be wearing clothes made from flower sacks. (These dresses were common in my elementary school.) The irony is today that these old flower sack fabrics are in great demand. the poor would not be able to afford them.

Anyway, my memories were after the depression was supposed to be over.

So far we have not experienced a “depression.” The pictures and stories that I’ve heard of the past make current hardships for most people pale. That’s the big difference. It hasn’t spread to most of us yet. But I noticed in my AARP magazine that canning fresh foods is on the rise. Belt tightening.

I’m uncertain how we would treat each other in another Great Depression. I think that as a whole people still feel compassion when someone is down. But I think there is an element that is more prone to violence than before. And guns are so readily available.

And these days a lot of people think nothing of stealing from their own kin – and elderly kin at that. Is that widespread or do I just have a run of bad luck with greedy family members?

5

I think the 2010 version can win. It’s got helicopters and tanks and jets and stuff.

6

For those who might be wondering…I don’t think we have hit “depression” yet. I’m just thinking how we would respond to a depression. If 9.2% unemployment is making us scream bloody murder now, then what will we do when that number is 15%? 20% When it’s not just the poor schmoe across the street who’s been unemployed for two years, but us too. And almost everyone we know.

I’m wondering what would be the on-the-ground sign that things getting be really Fucked Up. Every day I pass by one of those labor pool/day laborer places. It’s always the same down-on their-luck fellas (and an occasional woman) standing in those long lines. When I start seeing a lot of people dressed in suits and ties standing in those lines, then I’ll begin to wonder if we’re approaching the bottom.

Another thing I just considered. Back in the 1930s, families were still close geographically. So if Ma and Pa and the older kids were out of work, there was still a working uncle or some cousins around to share living space and/or food so that no one really had to move. Currently, families are sprawled all over the place. My sister lives two hours away from me, and we live hundreds of miles away from our folks and other siblings. And my folks live hundreds of miles away from their people. If something serious hit the fan and my parents lost their home and pension, and my brother and brother-in-law lost their jobs, then I know someone would be coming up here to live with me and my sister (assuming we weren’t screwed ourselves). Maybe my nieces…maybe my parents. Maybe my siblings too. I would take them; I could make room for them in my living room and spare bedroom and someone could sleep in my bed with me (well, I guess my parents should have the bed. Dang), and another person could make a pallet on the floor. But it would be a very difficult adjustment for all of us to live off of one income in a two-bedroom apartment. We’d be eating biscuits and gravy every night. Koolaid spiked with Remy Red would be our only luxury. :slight_smile: (One that I would not be able to partake in, being unable to drink alcohol. But I would still chip in!)

Maybe the sprawled-out family would be an advantage this time. No need to wander aimlessly across the country. Just have an extended stay with different family members and hope that they live in places where job prospects are better than from whence you came.

Another thing: I can’t see the government being able to do much more than it already has. Roosevelt, in a way, had it easy. He was able to take a do-nothing, hands-off government and transform it from the ground floor up. A New Depression president can’t go much further now without bankrupting the federal government. He can’t borrow any money because other countries are in just as bad of shape, if not worse, than we are. And short of giving corporations money for hiring people, I do not see how it can create jobs. A bill authorizing something like the WPA or CCC wouldn’t even make it in the house. But I do think people would work those jobs if it was the difference between watching their kids starve or keeping them healthy. Shit, if I lost my job, I’d work for the CCC if they would take women in their 30s and I don’t even have kids. I think a lot of people, especially the young, would because the alternative would be worse.

Sadly, I think violence would be the only way to get anyone’s attention. And I don’t mean isolated flash mobs. I mean on-going, media-grabbing, organized anti-establishment violence. Otherwise, people will just be sitting at home depressed, crying woe is me and blaming themselves about their eviction and foreclosure notices and starving children. Anger is much more therapeutic.

7

I don’t think we’re in another Great Depression, but I do think we may be in an analogue of the earlier (20 year!) Long Depression.

8

We don’t need armies of men pushing shovels - it makes no sense to build things that way anymore when machinery can do it much quicker and more efficiently. So not much help in that direction.

9

Think of all this in terms of your individual everyday lives…then think about what the average American in the late 20’s or early 30’s would think about the contrast. Consider something as prosaic as just going to McDonald’s, or going to see a movie at the local theater…or even switching on the TV and watching it. People who are unemployed today think of cutting back on some or even all of those things. Possibly getting rid of their high speed internet account, cutting down on how many or even if they have a cell phone, or how often or even if they go out to dinner and a movie, or take the kiddies to McDonald’s. Yeah, that’s hard, and people are having to make some fairly hard decisions when they are losing their jobs or taking jobs that pay a lot less. But consider the difference between the life and living standard of the average American before and during the GD and the average living standard before and during this recession. The average American’s living standard DURING this recession is immeasurably better than the average American’s living standard BEFORE the GD, in so many ways it would be almost impossible to list them. Hell, in my lifetime I’ve seen stuff that was a rare treat become an every day thing that is taken for granted (when I was a kid getting a Coke was a treat…today, it’s just something you get at the local convenience store, or buy a case of at Walmart on the way home because you drank them all this weekend watching the big game)…and I grew up in the 60’s, not the 30’s.

It’s hard to even explain the difference to people today from the way things were when I grew up…and the difference between that and the way it was when my folks were kids (growing up in the late 30’s and early 40’s) and their folks who were born at the turn of the century. Even my generation takes so much of this stuff for granted that we don’t even notice it unless we really sit down and think of it.

-XT

10

My dad served in the CCC. It apparently was run in a military fashion. I remember him telling me that at one point he had stopped writing home because he didn’t have any stamps and his checks were being sent to his family. So my grandma wrote the sgt. and Dad got a chewing out for not writing home, a stamp, and some help making sure that he had some money to spend on necessary things like stamps.

11

Apparently they wore army shirts, because the government had a big quantity of them left over from the World War.
Some of that CCC park furniture is still in use in the National Parks today, it lasted a long time and they had decades-worth of it in store.

12

Another thing that is different, during the great depression the factories were still there but idle. Now with industry outsourced there is no factory for the jobless to return.

13

These are at least somewhat related. In many places there are still some low-paying jobs available. I have friends who are out of work and have trouble finding a job. Not trouble finding any job, but trouble finding a job that will pay enough to be worth giving up unemployment benefits and finding childcare.

I’m fairly certain that if it came to not having enough food to feed their kids, they’d be out digging ditches or anything else they had to do. They’re not lazy or coddled; they’re just practical.

That’s not an argument against the safety nets we have now. It’s a reason why you’re unlikely to see the sort of suffering or the willingness to do hard work at low pay that we saw during the Great Depression.

14

During the GD, folks like you would be digging in the ditch alongside you. Ya’ll may have looked your noses down on such work a few years earlier, but if everyone’s doing it, then there isn’t such a stigma anymore.

I imagine the same thing would happen today. People who are unemployed are still trying to keep up appearances and run with the Jones’s because the ranks of the unemployed haven’t reached critical mass. Poverty is still something that’s attributed to the failure of the individual rather than to a broken system. But there would be a breaking point when people would eventually give up the act…and that would be when the Jones’s are out on the street begging. If the Jones’s are out picking fruit or digging ditches or cleaning toilets, then the shame in this work would disappear. If everyone’s at the bottom, then there’s no shame anymore.

The on-going theme that I keep picking up from my reading is this feeling of “togetherness” and “solidarity” during the GD. We think we’re kinda-sorta unified right now, but I don’t think we are. We’re all islands. I see it as I walk every day. All these grand Victorian houses…and no one sitting on their front porches. People drive by in their humongo cars with tinted windows rolled up and DVDs playing for the backseat. Even joggers deafen themselves with iPods. I pass by the same dog-walkers everyday and we smile at each other, but they don’t know me and I don’t know them. I’ve been walking the same route for almost four years, and only one person has stopped me and introduced themselves, offered me a ride. No one is mean or evil. It’s just we’re all in our own worlds…only concerned about our own preservation and comfort. Everyone else is stranger danger. A mugger, rapist, serial killer, a scam-artist. Or crazy.

During the GD, unions went all balls-out. If the light-bulb makers wanted to strike, well, everyone–from the seamstresses to the autoworkers–would join them, by golly! If the hot shots wanted a fight, they’d get one! I just can’t see that happening today. Hell, if someone got fired on my floor, no one would do a thing. We’d gossip all week about it and shake our heads like we really felt something, but we wouldn’t get angry. We wouldn’t fight for that person, even if it meant an increased workload for us. Because we’d be afraid that we’d be next if we said something, and we have too much to lose. Folks of the GD…they didn’t have that much to lose.

Look at how people view the Verizon strikers. People are saying how dare they strike…they should be glad they’ve got ANY job in this horrible economy. But if labor had that mentality during the GD, we’d still be working sixty-hour weeks for pennies. We are afraid of giving up all the trappings we’ve become accustomed to. So if a depression hits us, we’d fall hard, much harder than they did during the GD.

We’d be a hot mess for a while, but I think we’d wise up pretty soon.

15

On thing that was better during the Great Depression was that Franklin Roosevelt was a popular and effective leader. I voted for Barack Obama last time. I will next time, but I am disappointed in him. I want some one who can out think and out maneuver the Republicans.

16

I dug ditches during my tenure with Americorps NCCC (sort of a modern-day spinoff of the CCC). I was not too good to get out there and go it. Digging a ditch, about 50 feet long, alongside 9 other people, in 100 degree Baton Rouge, LA heat, is still the single most physically difficult thing I have ever done. I have all respect for ditch-diggers.

I’m 26 years old.

17

When you are 45, were making $50k/year in the building trades and have a family of 4 come back and talk about doing that kind of work for minimum wage in some sort of WPA type program. Yeah…when I was in my teens and 20’s I did hard physical labor as well. Bit harder to get folks to do that sort of stuff these days when they are older, and are used to making a lot more.

Unless you were planning to pay these folks a lot more than minimum wage? Which would mean…yeah, that it would be another instance of a large difference between today and what things were like during the GD.

There simply is no comparison between the way things were before, during or immediately after the GD and the way things are today. We are a much more wealthy society today than we were then. The attitudes have shifted and changed. And the GD was a hell of a lot harder than what we are going through today, despite what people want to think.

-XT

18

But folks who were making good money during the 1920s were made low enough during the GD to do exactly that. And to stand in bread lines and sign up for relief. If people did it then, people will do it today. They may complain more or drag their feet, but like I said, if the differences is between “sit there on the side of the road and starve” or “work like a slave but at least have a decent meal every day”, then people will do it. We just haven’t been brought low enough yet (and I’m glad for this).

Well, society would have to dramatically shift, I think, if there was another depression. Wages and prices would have to see eye-to-eye. Otherwise, the unemployment rate would just skyrocket. There WOULD be exploitation of the laborer during these times, so unless governments want to deal with hungry mobs rioting on a daily basis, they would have to do something. Set up affordable housing, ensure a supply of cheap food, and keep people from being worked to death, at a minimum. You take away any of these elements, and you’ve got a problem on your hands. A hungry mob is an angry mob (yay, a Bob Marley reference!)

Of course. But people went through a bad recession during the 1920s, even though we tend to think that as the era of flowing milk and honey. There were harbingers of the Depression during that decade. So it’s not like the GD just happened abruptly. Plenty of smart people knew what was about to happen and got while the getting was good. We might be in a short-lived economic failure now, but we may also be at the precipitous of something a lot scarier. Signs are certainly pointing that way. There’s nothing built into our system to protect us against another GD. We do have the FDIC and programs like SS, Medicare/Medicaid, and unemployment insurance. But during desperate times and provided a soulless enough administration, these things aren’t safe. Hoover saw the Hoovervilles. He knew what was going down but thought things would take care of themselves, somehow. I could see that happening today, easily.

I guess I’m just bothered by some things in my reading. I know it’s easy to romanticize a past that you didn’t live in, but it does seem people were more tolerant of poor people and willing to rise up against a failed system than they are now. Even during this lousy economy, conservative-minded folks keep telling the unemployed to go out and create jobs, stop waiting for hand-outs and rescue boats. That’s a line exactly out of Hoover’s book. For all its faults (and I think there were a lot), the New Deal broke down that bullshit philosophy that an individual can change their downtroddenness just by being smarter or working harder or even having good luck. The GD wasn’t the failure of individuals. It was the failure of an entire system. Except for a pampered few, most people back then seemed to get this. I don’t think that’s true today. People are more likely to blame themselves (if only I had a college degree…if only I had majored in this versus that) rather than externalizing the blame and being mad at the same economic diddlers that, like Pennywise the Clown, always keep popping up generation after generation. They don’t ask themselves why the jackasses that got us into the recession are now sitting pretty in top-level administrative positions, running things even more powerfully than they ever have. Because no one knows this. They’re watching “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” instead of “Inside Job”, or they’re too busy texting their buds about some hawt chick instead of sitting around, talking about why their hours of sweat aren’t as valuable as another guy’s. They believe the rhetoric on TV about corporations being people too, that they serve the people by creating jobs for everyone (instead of concentrating wealth for the people at the top). That’s the mentality that is encrusting the American public’s brain.

I really don’t think we fundamentally lack the true grit of our forebearers. We just have been taught different things about society and how people are.

19

We have more wealth, but how long would it last? If the U3 were really 20% and the U6 were 35% or so, then the deficit would likely be closer to 3 trillion a year (as a guess, somewhere around that area).

So there would be massive cuts to social safety net programs, infrastructure, education, etc. So we have more wealth than they did back then and more programs (food stamps, social security, medicare, medicaid, SCHIP, etc). But how long would they last in the face of annual 3 trillion deficits?

So most of those programs probably wouldn’t last. I’m sure that would cause a ton of resentment and pain.

The basics of life are pretty cheap now. You can live in a 4 season tent, eat a diet heavy in basic food staples (rice, bread, pancakes, oatmeal, cornbread, etc) and take the bus or ride a bike. Assuming you can find a place to put your tent up. But other things like education and anything other than basic health care will become totally unobtainable to most people. I think that’ll cause a lot of resentment too since people will have known how much better things could’ve been, have been in the past or are in other countries. Our standards are a lot higher now and a crash would be harder.

So I’d predict a lot more resentment and anger over economic injustice than happened in the first depression. But what happens to those emotions? I don’t know. I’m guessing what is happening now, a polarization of the right and left. We haven’t gotten to the point where it is fascists vs communists and doubt we would, but we are more polarized. Since fascism and communism were both new ideologies back then, and both eventually failed miserably, I don’t think people would throw themselves into them again.

20

One very important point-Obama’s recession/depression is beginning to resemble Roosevelt’s-in that government “pump priming”/stimulus has been completely ineffective.
The OMB estimates that the stimulus created jobs–at a cost of over $500,000 each.
this tells me that Obama’s attempts have actually been prolonging the recession-instead of allowing firms to fail, and wages to fall (especially government jobs), the "stimulus"spending has been propping up an unsustainable economy-with foreign wars and huge levels of military spending.
Sort of like the “New Deal”-we got lots of unskilled, dead-end jobs, but nothing capable of generrating wealth.
It took WWII, with years of spending and forced employment (the military) to end the Roosevelt Depression.