Great Depression: The way we lived

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.tdtnews.com/story/2009/03/29/56786/

by Patricia Benoit
Published: March 29, 2009

Clarence Elmo “C.E.” Baggett of Temple, 98, recalls the days when he was grateful for $1 and board.

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the beginning of an epic economic disaster in U.S. history. Oct. 29, 1929, is called “Black Tuesday” for good reason. The buoyant optimism of the 1920s thudded as 16 million stock shares changed hands and the New York Times industrial average plunged nearly 40 points, triggering a $26 billion loss over the next weeks.

Despite its stable, diversified economy, Bell County was not immune to the crash. Complicating the difficult circumstances were bad weather, depressed cotton prices, layoffs and reduced railway commerce. In the opening months of 1930, despite optimistic rhetoric from businesses, bankers and journalists, the county was mired in deep trouble.

Baggett knows those days well. Born on a farm west of Moody, by the time the Great Depression bore down on Central Texas, he was in his early 20s, married, living in Temple and needing a job.

The Great Depression, as it is called, was actually two economic crises, according to Robert Ozment, who studied the effects of those times in his master’s thesis, “Temple, Texas, and the Great Depression” written while he was a student at the University of Texas at Austin.

The first was triggered by the October 1929 crash. The second, lesser economic depression came in 1937, when the federal government cut back on work programs. Not until the advent of World War II was the depression declared officially over.

FULL story at link.

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

1. The institutional/personal memory is just about gone.

What other lessons have we lost?

[Fovea]

2. Read 'Hard Times'

By Studs Terkel.

Not just institutional memory, but cultural wisdom.

[ixion]

3. Ironweed, Grapes of Wrath, In Dubious Battle

are three good books (or movies) with strong perspective on the times.

[Warpy]

4. What people don't seem to get about the 1937 recession

is that it was caused by chickenshit conservatives in Congress who refused to let the jobs programs continue until they were no longer needed.

Likely the Depression would have been over without a world war had cowardly Congressmen not voted to extend it.