Calling all fans of the Great Depression

[vintage68]

Okay, I have a secret to share with my peoples. I've always had a guilty pleasure: I have a lot of nostalgia for the Great Depression. Period movies, novels, works of non-fiction, I just can't get enough.

I'm flying my freak flag high in the hopes of attracting others to my banner, particularly now with so much talk of our country potentially facing another economic calamity. Do you believe another depression is possible? Why is this era so compelling? What are you're favorite movies, books, etc?

Some of the movies that are currently getting a lot of spin in my home are Cinderella Man and Miller's Crossing, and the HBO series Carnivale. I also just bought The Forgotten Man, a non-fiction book about the Great Depression.

Anyone?

 

[Paisley]

I was just thinking today how much fun (in some ways, and if you had a good job) it would have been to live back then: to have seen Benny Goodman and the other giants of swing, the awesome Latin bands, to have danced with Frankie Manning as a young man...:arated:

Without going into politics, no, I don't think there will be another depression on the scale of the 1930s. I've read that the crash of '87 was as severe as that of '29, but due to better policies, it didn't lead to 25% unemployment and bread lines. We know more about economics today than we did in the 1930s.

 

[ScionPI2005]

I'm trying not to dwell on the possibility of another Depression. However, I have a mental race going on to finish my degree as quickly as possible (which really can't be much of a race as I'm scheduled to graduate this December and 16-week classes obviously have to take 16 weeks). I really want to put my hard work, education, and experience to the test and get into a comfortable entry-level or slightly above entry level position with health insurance before the economy crashes (if it does). I'm not expecting the criminal justice field to suffer too much if the economy goes down. More than likely there will be many more crimes and possibly new enforcement agencies created to deal with things. I shouldn't have trouble getting a job, as sad as that is in a way.

The one thing I'm really hoping will change is the sense of community. Our society is way too independent these days to the point we don't seem to care about our fellow neighbor--let alone know them. During the Great Depression, there was a much stronger sense of community, as people needed to rally together to get by. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned (like a lot of folks here), but I want to see stronger cohesion between people again.

 

[Fletch]

I was just thinking today how much fun (in some ways, and if you had a good job) it would have been to live back then: to have seen Benny Goodman and the other giants of swing, the awesome Latin bands, to have danced with Frankie Manning as a young man...:arated:

Just don't confuse the '30s with the Depression. The nostalgia people have is for the '30s, a vibrant and exciting time that transcended the realities of the economy and the social system.

 

[Undertow]

Without going into politics, no, I don't think there will be another depression on the scale of the 1930s. I've read that the crash of '87 was as severe as that of '29, but due to better policies, it didn't lead to 25% unemployment and bread lines. We know more about economics today than we did in the 1930s.

I agree here. Unless there is a fundamental shift, or a real disaster, we won't see anything like the Great Depression.

Our society has changed so greatly, that it would really require a dramatic 180 to bring us back to the same class, style and poverty, of the Great Depression era.

And as far as I'm concerned, we may need to hit some tough times to get us back into the mindset I believe this country needs. We've been in a glut for far too long, IMHO.

 

[Forgotten Man]

Here's a fan of the Great Depression

lol

Seriously, I'm much like your self... I adore the early 30s... and learning how people coped and survived the Depression.

Movies, books, photos and art of the era really help paint the story but, next time you meet someone who lived it, the stories are the true gold! You see it in their eyes... If they had a hard time during those years, you can sense it in the way they talk about it.

I have a friend, who's up there in the years... I asked him if he'd go back in time... he said soon as I have built a time machine, he'd love to go back to the late 20s! I asked him about living through the Depression again... he said he'd do it! So, for some it wasn't so bad I guess.

However, I wouldn't want a Depression to hit now, there's no steam trains with long consists of boxcars to ride on, no rail bulls to fight, no coal to take from tenders and such... if a depression hit now, it would be a lot harder then it was back in those days! Even though money was scarce, a dollar still meant something! Today, the standard of living is higher then most standard incomes... if you lived in 1930, had a minimum paying job, you could still afford a little flat, pay some bills, and buy food... and if you save, maybe a radio. Today, there's no way a minimum paying job could even get you that. The gold standard was backing the US dollar and today, it's not. Money is nearly worthless today.

 

[Paisley]

Just don't confuse the '30s with the Depression. The nostalgia people have is for the '30s, a vibrant and exciting time that transcended the realities of the economy and the social system.

Good point. But who would long for a depression of any era? Yes, people were probably more generous and caring than they are today, but I don't wish for the tragedies that made their noble sacrifices necessary.

 

[Fletch]

One thing you will find if you read people's reminiscences of that time is that that kind of caring and generosity was mostly limited to people of "your own kind." Ties of neighborhood, church and ancestry were very strong - maybe too strong. (Look at the way Catholic congregations were manipulated into a bloc calling for movie censorship.) People who were different were usually not your problem, in fact, often got blamed for the problems of one's own group. "Cosmopolitan" was a code word then, because very few people were.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Not so different from today, really. Only today it's subcultures that band together against "them".

 

[Fletch]

I dunno. If giant radioactive ants emerge again, you'll see a lot more of a unified front.

 

[Paisley]

One thing you will find if you read people's reminiscences of that time is that that kind of caring and generosity was mostly limited to people of "your own kind." Ties of neighborhood, church and ancestry were very strong - maybe too strong. (Look at the way Catholic congregations were manipulated into a bloc calling for movie censorship.) People who were different were usually not your problem, in fact, often got blamed for the problems of one's own group. "Cosmopolitan" was a code word then, because very few people were.

True again. And even among people of your own kind, some of them might have been especially nice to you because they wanted something. The fawning young woman may have been trying to marry well to save her parents from destitution; the solicitous employee knew that jobs were scarce.

 

[Fletch]

You can easily imagine confidence games being pulled on the have-a-littles by the have-nots - and intimate ones, too, involving marriage and worse.

 

[Big Man]

I think the thing to remember is that the reminiscing of "older folks" are, in fact, the reminiscing of children (or at best very, very young adults) during the Great Depression. This is probabally true in just about all cases of "older folks" we talk with today.

The "way things were back then" to someone who was a child at the time is, most assuredly, vastly different from someone who was an adult of 30 or 40 or 50 years of age and had a family to be responsible for.

 

[vintage68]

I was just thinking today how much fun (in some ways, and if you had a good job) it would have been to live back then: to have seen Benny Goodman and the other giants of swing, the awesome Latin bands, to have danced with Frankie Manning as a young man...:arated:

Without going into politics, no, I don't think there will be another depression on the scale of the 1930s. I've read that the crash of '87 was as severe as that of '29, but due to better policies, it didn't lead to 25% unemployment and bread lines. We know more about economics today than we did in the 1930s.

I heard this discussed by a talking head on TV recently, so take it for what it's worth, but the guy said that if we do have a depression it would be worse than the first one. He said that today we as a country don't really produce anything (we have a so called "knowledge economy"), our national debt is huge, and people are in debt up to their eyeballs.

There's also this from the NY Times this morning:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/01/business/economy/01leonhardt.html?ref=business

So I dunno, I think it's at least possible though not exactly likely.

 

[Paisley]

It depends on what the government does. Some say they shouldn't have encouraged lenders to make subprime loans. Sounds reasonable to me.

I'm not sure how we'd be better off if more of us were making circuit boards or cobbling shoes together.

 

[Weston]

As an observer on the sidelines, I'd like to say that this is one of the few threads where the diversions and asides have been hilarious. Great for taking ones mind off the current situation - whatever it will evolve into.

 

[Paisley]

You can easily imagine confidence games being pulled on the have-a-littles by the have-nots - and intimate ones, too, involving marriage and worse.

I'm trying hard to imagine what could be worse than a confidence game involving marriage.

 

[Rachael]

I'm trying hard to imagine what could be worse than a confidence game involving marriage.

I was trying to figure out the difference between the two.

 

[Dixon Cannon]

Well, I'm of the mind that we all will have the opportunity to have a 'Depression' experience of our own to tell our grandchildren - very soon, in fact!

The worst part of a modern Depression will be the devalutation of the dollar - already devalued beyond the imagination of anyone who lived through the '30's.

Picture pre-Nazi Germany with wheel-barrows full of Marks to buy a loaf of bread - the wheel-barrow being worth more than the money it carried! Not just inflation, but hyper-inflation, with a devalued currency that isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

That is the real danger of modern Depression - an unbacked fiat currency that won't buy a prayer.

I'm generally not a pessimist, but the dye is set long ago with the end of Bretton-Woods. Now that's not political; that's historical fact!

-dixon cannon

 

[Miss 1929]

Too much credit.

People in the 30s didn't have the credit system we have now. If you owned your house, you could take out a mortgage on it, but taking out a mortgage to buy a house was very rare. Not to mention credit cards - they weren't invented yet.
You might have credit at a store, but you were expected to pay your bills. What a rational idea!

So now, we have a lot of people living in houses that they think are theirs, but are actually the property of the bank (including me). At this point the banks would rather have our payments than our houses, but that could change.
One of the first banks to fail in this New Depression was the one holding my mortgage - funny, not a peep out of them, the bills come, I pay, no change. it will be interesting to see what happens in the next few months.

Also, it is not really true that you could make a living on a minimum wage job. People were HUNGRY and had to choose between the rent and eating, especially in urban areas. And if you lost your job, there wasn't any safety net. We forget that our unemployment insurance (pathetic as it is, about 1200 a month to try to live on if you were making 4000 a month working), our Social Security (essential for the old and the disabled) and many other programs were born of necessity during the Great Depression.

I hope that what we will see come of this is a new program to create jobs, restore education, and repair our infrastructure here at home, instead of giving away billions and spending all our treasure on wars abroad.

Sort of like the New Deal...but it will not happen without all of us demanding it.