Quote of the Day (Thomas Wolfe, on Americans’ ‘Almost Quenchless Hope,’ Even Amid the Great Depression)

“It is also true—and this is a curious paradox about America—that these same men who stand upon the corner and wait around on Sunday afternoons for nothing are filled at the same time with an almost quenchless hope, an almost boundless optimism, an almost indestructible belief that something is bound to turn up, something is sure to happen. This is a peculiar quality of the American soul, and it contributes largely to the strange enigma of our life, which is so incredibly mixed of harshness and of tenderness, of innocence and of crime, of loneliness and of good fellowship, of desolation and of exultant hope, of terror and of courage, of nameless fear and of soaring conviction, of brutal, empty, naked, bleak, corrosive ugliness, and of beauty so lovely and so overwhelming that the tongue is stopped by it, and the language for it has not yet been uttered.”—American novelist Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), You Can’t Go Home Again (1940)

Quote of the Day (Carlos Fuentes, on FDR and the ‘True Greatness’ of America)

“[T]he United States in the thirties went far beyond my personal experience. The nation that [Alexis de] Tocqueville had destined to share dominance over half the world realized that, in effect, only a continental state could be a modern state; in the thirties, the U.S.A. had to decide what to do with its new worldwide power, and Franklin Roosevelt taught us to believe that the first thing was for the United States to show that it was capable of living up to its ideals. I learned then — my first political lesson — that this is your true greatness, not, as was to be the norm in my lifetime, material wealth, not arrogant power misused against weaker peoples, not ignorant ethnocentrism burning itself out in contempt for others.

“As a young Mexican growing up in the U.S., I had a primary impression of a nation of boundless energy, imagination, and the will to confront and solve the great social issues of the times without blinking or looking for scapegoats. It was the impression of a country identified with its own highest principles: political democracy, economic well-being, and faith in its human resources, especially in that most precious of all capital, the renewable wealth of education and research.

“Franklin Roosevelt, then, restored America’s self-respect in this essential way, not by macho posturing.”—Mexican novelist-essayist Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012), “How I Started to Write,” in Myself With Others: Selected Essays (1988)

Song Lyric of the Day (George and Ira Gershwin, on Dating and "The Economic Situation")

“I’m tired of keeping up with the economic trends

And the universal problems that perplex;

Oh, tell me where I can find a man who condescends

To show an int’rest in sex.”—"The Economic Situation," music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, in Ira Gershwin: Selected Lyrics, edited by Robert Kimball (2009)

For The Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, George Gershwin (1998-1937) and brother Ira (1896-1983) had “Miss Gherkin” (a young Eve Arden) and a group of chorus girls lament the terrible impact of hard times on their love lives. It’s not so much that anxiety and overwork lacerate the male libido, but rather that politically active intellectuals now show no interest in them whatsoever. 

I really had to chuckle, though, when I came across this couplet: 

“You’re looking your best, but he hasn’t noticed

For you’re up to your neck in the Taxpayers’ Protest.”

How did the Gershwins anticipate the Tea Party movement of the last decade?

Leave it to the wise, witty and brilliant brothers to make the nation chuckle even during the Great Depression.

Quote of the Day (Edmund Wilson, on Chicago in the Depth of the Great Depression)

“Unemployed. In schools, factories, warehouses, old jails—whitewashed furniture—factory walls, yellow school walls soiled, blackboards punched through, thin blankets and a sheet, men in holey socks and slit union suits, tattooed with fancy designs and with the emblems of services they no longer served, with fallen arches taken out of their flattened shoes and done up with bandages of adhesive tape, or lying wrapped up in their blankets on their backs, their skin stretched tight over their cheekbones and jawbones almost like the faces of the dead—the smell, peppery-sweetish stink: sulphur fumigations, cooking food, sweat, creosote disinfecting, urinals, one element or the other figuring more prominently from time to time but in the same inescapable fumes of humanity not living and functioning naturally but dying on its feet and being preserved as best one could, venereal disease, Negroes with t.b., lonely as a pet coon, men poisoned with wood alcohol—fifteen cents a pint—two sick and one to the psych hospital—benzine, kerosene, and milk—I say, which will you have, your bottle or a bed?—and they won’t give up the bottle—I wouldn’t be surprised if a hearse drove up and a dead man got up and walked out and asked for a flop—a cripple drunk again—one man so lousy no one would go nearum and they puttum in the stable with the horse and the horse tried to get away and then the next morning they gaveum a shower and scrubbedum with a long-handled brush.—They fumigate the clothes and if they’re moist it ruins them. Chicago is probably doing as good a job as anybody.”—American writer, critic and social commentator Edmund Wilson (1895-1972), The Thirties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period, edited by Leon Edel (1980)

This entry from the diaries of Wilson dates from the fourth quarter of 1932, the long, dispiriting interregnum between the November 1932 election and FDR’s inauguration the following March, when Herbert Hoover flailed about miserably trying to contain the growing damage of the Depression. 

Wilson offers an unforgettable contemporary picture of the era. How will future historians remember our time? Indeed, have we seen the worst of it yet?

This Day in Economic History (‘Black Tuesday’ Kicks Off Great Depression)

Oct. 29, 1929—Only five days after Wall Street trembled before righting itself, the New York Stock Exchange collapsed. The 16 million shares sold at declining prices not only made this “Black Tuesday” but also, for all intents and purposes, the start of the Great Depression. 

In contrast to prior economic contractions, which lasted only a year or two, the Great Depression was far more protracted—not really ending until the arms ramp-up just before Pearl Harbor—and far more devastating, putting one-quarter of the American workforce on the unemployment line simultaneously. 

It is well-known that, in effect, it thrust the federal government into a more interventionist position in relation to the economy. But not as many Americans realize that the Depression opened the country up to dangerous forces in a way never seen before. More Americans than ever before were willing to at least flirt with the idea of Communism, and in Louisiana, Huey Long made the entire state dance to his will.

Perhaps somewhat less surprising, my predominantly U.S. readership may not realize the impact of the Depression on other nations, starting with north of the border in Canada, a downturn chronicled by historian Pierre Berton in The Great Depression: 1929-1939. New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom also felt the blow. Worst of all was Germany, where voters in the already weak Weimar Republic looked increasingly toward, then embraced, the Nazi Party.

Critic Edmund Wilson called his account of the early stage of the downtown The American Earthquake. But if the noun in that title applies domestically, the case of Germany suggests that yet a stronger term might be required to depict the political damage in that country, where people sought simplistic solutions, then moved to wipe out the most vulnerable in their society. 

I will not rehash what happened on Black Tuesday. If you want a vivid narrative of what happened that fateful day, you can turn to economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Great Crash: 1929.  What I really want to do is consider: could it happen again?

In one sense, it already has—in the 2007-2009 Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Much ink has been spilled about how Fed Chair Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, mindful of what happened in 1929, prevented a complete economic meltdown.

But what happened was bad enough. Consider some of the consequences of the crisis in the decade since, here and abroad:

*largely anemic economic growth;

*a whole cadre of the unemployed who, toward the start of the recession, became jobless for so long that they ended up out of the workforce for good;

*the hollowing out of the middle class; 

*a resentment of government bank bailouts that, in part, sparked the Tea Party movement;

*scapegoating of immigrants.

In the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs, Gillian Tett, an editor at The Financial Times, laid out the results of the “Faith-Based Finance” of a dozen years ago—how a mystical conviction about new technology, for instance, not only led to a round of Wall Street delusion, but could be repeaed:

“It would be foolish to imagine that the lessons of the crisis have been fully learned. Today, as before, there is still a tendency for investors to place too much faith in practices they do not understand. The only solution is to constantly question the basis of the credit that underpins credit markets. Just as there was in 2007, there is still a temptation to assume that culture does not matter in the era of sophisticated, digitally enabled finance.”

In a sense, Galbraith had anticipated this in 1954, when his highly acclaimed history of the Great Crash appeared. Although much of the book brimmed with ironic reflections on the comeuppance of Wall Street a quarter-century before, he became considerably more sober in the introduction to his 1961 edition:

"Someday, no one can tell when, there will be another speculative climax and crash. There is no chance that, as the market moves to the brink, those involved will see the nature of their illusion and so protect themselves. The mad can communicate their madness; they cannot perceive it and resolve to be sane. There is some protection so long as there are people who know, when they hear it said that history is being made in this market or that a new era has been opened, that the same history has been made and the same new eras have been opened many, many times before. This acts to arrest the spread of illusion. A better sense of history is what protects Europeans if not perfectly at least more adequately from speculative excrescence."

Quote of the Day (Alan Brinkley, on Historians’ Treatment of Conservatism)

“While historians have displayed impressive powers of imagination in creating empathetic accounts of the past, they have seldom done so in considering the character of conservative lives and ideas.” —Columbia University professor of history Alan Brinkley (1949-2019), “The Problem of American Conservatism,” American Historical Review, April 1994

The history department at Columbia University was one of the principal factors attracting me to the school in the late 1970s. Looking back on my four years being taught by its excellent faculty, I have no regrets whatsoever.

Well, okay, maybe one. Because he didn’t arrive at Morningside Heights until nearly a decade after my graduation, I never had a chance to take a course with or even attend a lecture by Alan Brinkley.

Brinkley—who died on Monday at age 70—quickly became one of the university’s most acclaimed teachers, and even, despite his professed distaste for academic administration, even provost of the school for a couple of years.

His influence on a generation at the university, then, was considerable. But so was his impact on how historians came to view liberalism, conservatism, and the catastrophe that redefined these movements for nearly the next century: the Great Depression.

Brinkley’s article for American Historical Review might not have significantly kick-started the intensive study of conservatism that has occurred in the last two decades (surely, the electoral success of Ronald Reagan might have had something to do with that). 

But it instilled a sense in academe that conservatism should be examined in all its varieties, with at least something approaching the same rigor and seriousness accorded liberalism.

But Brinkley had already exerted influence early in his career through his first book, Voices of Protest (1982), an outgrowth of his doctoral thesis that ended up winning him the National Book Award for history. 

Though conceived as an analysis of two populist movements of the past—Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth Society and Fr. Charles Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice—it should be read now as a warning of the discontents with the latent potential to disrupt the American political landscape that was finally realized in the last Presidential race:

“This casual mingling of themes commonly associated with opposite political poles did not originate with the Long and Coughlin movements; nor did it end with them. The populists, from whom both men derived so much ideological strength, had exhibited similar contradictions; so did later political phenomena: the George Wallace movement of the 1960s and the New Right of the 1980s, which combined populist rhetoric with cultural conservatism. Underlying all such movements in varying degrees has been a common impulse: the fear of concentrated power, the traditional American resistance to being governed—whether by private interests or by public institutions.”

And this sentence seems especially ominous: 

“Were these many protest movements to unite into a single force, they might be capable of toppling the entire structure of traditional party politics."