Lorena Hickok reports on the Great Depression

I've noticed quite a few DUers' commenting that we should let the market fail - let it all fail - it'll serve those bastards right, etc, etc. Then it will all be hunky-dory once we get the Dems back in charge. While I'm very concerned about what I'm reading of this 'bailout,' I am convinced that doing nothing is not the answer. As to what, I don't know . . . I have enough trouble trying to understand what all this means.

I'm an historian. That doesn't make me an expert on very much, I grant - it just means I read a lot of history and I understand that nothing - nothing - happens in isolation. History doesn't repeat itself, circumstances are never quite the same, but it can certainly do a pretty good impersonation of itself every once in awhile.

In 1933, Harry Hopkins, who headed up FDR's Federal Emergency Relief Administration, hired Lorena Hickok to tour the country and get a "sense" of the lay of the land - the toll that the Depression was taking on the nation. Lorena's reports are not as well known as the photos that accompanied it, taken by Dorothea Lange - but her report stripped away any blinders that remained among the Washington elites. Today, using excerpts from her report brings the Great Depression home to my students far better than the lecture on the 1st and 2nd New Deal, Hoover's politics, or even the darkly amusing alphabet soup of programs that FDR created.

If you're interested in reading Hickok's report, it has been edited in One Third of a Nation. http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/93xss8gf9780252010965.html

Here are a few of the points I use in my lecture, along with Hickok's findings. I'm not trying to be a pedant - I just think that there are a few folks here who should think a little harder about whether or not they want even a dim repeat of the 1930s.

Unemployment
1931 - 100,000 people/fired per week
1932 - 13 million unemployed (25% of workforce)
Black unemployment, 35%
Regional unemployment: Chicago, 40%; Toledo, OH 80%
Attempts to find work
Selling apples, 5 cents each
Shoeshine stands
The city of Birmingham wanted 800 workers and offered jobs: 11 hour day for $2. They had 12,000 applicants
Pay cuts
1929 to 1933, average weekly earning of manufacturing workers fell from $25 to less than $17


Farmers
By 1933, some farmers burning corn for fuel
Wholesale price of cotton down to 5 cents/pound
25% of farmers pushed off the land by 1933


Movies were the only depression proof industry
85 million went to the movies each week. They were cheap, compared to everything else: 25 cents, 10 cents for children
Hollywood responded with escapist themes
Shirley Temple
Costume dramas, especially Biblical
Musicals

Some people were not affected; the wealthy who didn’t have all of their money in the Stock Market and the very poor, who didn’t see a difference. But the lives of the majority of Americans are dramatically changed. The Depression not only challenged Americans economically, but also philosophically.

Birth rates drop
1921, more than 3 million
1932, 2.4 million

Families move in together to save money (Waltons). In the Pennsylvania coal fields, three or four families crowded together in one-room shacks and lived on wild weeds. In Arkansas, families were found inhabiting caves. In Oakland, California, whole families lived in sewer pipes.

Men often had to face the idea of failing to support their families.
Some committed suicide to provide life insurance. Many did not take this loss of power as the primary decision maker and breadwinner very well. Many stopped looking for work, paralyzed by their bleak chances and lack of self-respect.
Others left to try and find work. Some, unable to face their families, just left. A 1940 survey found that 1.5 million women had been abandoned by their husbands.

Women moved beyond the flapper. Politically they were very visible on a national level: Eleanor Roosevelt, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, special advisor Mary McLeod Bethune. Because women traditionally made less money, they often found it easier to get and maintain employment—clerical workers, maids, other service jobs. However, most Americans disapproved of a married woman, whose husband was employed, holding a job. The role of women within the family remained very traditional, and many worked hard to stretch the limited family income—vegetable gardens, canning, sewing.

During the depression many children took on greater responsibilities at an earlier age than later generations would. Some teenagers found jobs when their parents could not, reversing the normal roles of provider and dependent. Sometimes children had to comfort their despairing parents.

Some schools closed because there was no money to run them.
Children had no clothes to go to school
Teachers took pay cuts, delays in pay. In Chicago, they weren’t compensated for 10 years

Notes from Lorena Hickok

In W. Virginia, camps set up for 4000 undernourished children. Food cost 30 cents per child per day. The children were so malnourished that the average weight gain was 5 pounds in the first 2 weeks

In New Orleans a government worker was mixing with a crowd of transients when he was accosted by a woman who offered him sex. He said, “I can’t. I haven’t any money.” She said wearily, “Oh, that’s alright. I only costs a dime.”

In Colorado, Hickok spoke with the workers in a sugar beet field. One was a 10 year old girl who had been working in the field for 2 years, from 6AM to 6 or 7 at night.

In South Dakota people were eating boiled thistles. A child fainted in school; the teacher told her to go home and eat. She said she couldn't, "it’s her sister’s turn to eat that day."


ETA: a link to the book

Just like we were supposed to fear al-Qaida scuba divers, Saddam's Winnebagos of Death, and mystery terrorists crossing the border from Mexico. If we are sufficiently fearful, we will go along with whatever solution is placed before us, regardless of whether it actually is a reasonable solution.

The Patriot Act was passed in haste because we were told that the bogeyman was hiding under our bed, waiting to attack us. And America -- including most of Congress -- fell for it.

Now here we are again. A "crisis" has suddenly appeared, and lo and behold, our government just happens to have a "solution" all ready to go. And the threats are only going to intensify next week: Pass this plan exactly as is, or else you're contributing to the death of our financial system.

Without a bailout, are we headed to another Great Depression? Nobody knows, not you, not me, not the Fed. But the question is: Are we willing to put up $700 billion (probably more like $1.5 trillion before it's all over) of our money for a scheme that might prevent a collapse that may or may not happen? And what do we get in return? The only thing we're scheduled to get from all of this is ... nothing. No collapse. But no other benefits. Our "success" is measured only by absence of "disaster."

The more that the talking heads try to spread fear over the next week, the more I will know that this bailout must not happen. If I can be shown a logical, factual analysis of where we are now, and a logical, factual plan for how to get us out of this mess that does not reward those who caused the problem, then I can be swayed.

But for now, I'm against it.

Do what Bush* proposes or do nothing at all.
Either we do this, or we do nothing.
Nothing but rhetoric dealing in extremes.
You are either with us or with the terrorists.
You are either for the bailout or you're promoting a new Great Depression.

I'm getting rather tired of it.
It's like an ostrich with his head in the sand.

Do you honestly believe we only have two extremes to choose from? You don't think that maybe someone could come up with a more responsible plan than Bernake's? Or are you so brainwashed by the last 8 years that you honestly believe there's only binary solutions to everything? 0 or 1. Black or White. Nothing in between. :eyes:

I don't know what you were reading - or if you bothered - but I never said it was either this or the other.

Believe what you will.

After 9/11 millions were thrown at the airlines. Except for enriching the CEOs compensation packages, those millions have NOT helped the airline industry

Companies who were mismanaged should not be bailed out

The assets of those companies that have value will be bought by viable companies who didn't give loans to people who couldn't qualify, and who didn't play games with the derivitives market

I've read at least part of Hickok's report, and Stud Terkel's Hard Times is another good historical look of the Depression, this time as told by the survivors.

A couple of things I'd like to point out, though. There are a lot of people here who think that we can weather this sort of thing, that simply want the rich and powerful to fall. Frankly that won't happen - even during the worst of the Depression the wealthiest 1% of the population went about their business with only a vague awareness that there were problems, and like many in the punditocracy today, were inclined to blame these problems on malcontents and communists.

On the other hand, I have to seriously question whether a late-night bull session by the former head of Goldman Sachs (Hank Paulson) is in fact going to solve anything other than how best to make sure that the life boats are filled with the "right" people. This whole thing smacks way too much of the secret agreements that the oil companies made with Cheney several years ago, with little real congressional oversight and with a president who is more concerned about his legacy and his cronies than with the people he's ostensibly supposed to be governing.

There are a number of things that can be done to keep this economy from teetering into the brink, but they are things that should be done with deliberation rather than panic, with transparency rather than secrecy, and with a goal towards helping the broadest segment of the people rather than the narrowest.