Teaching American history, I must discuss the Great Depression. Best to get many points of view.

J K Galbraith’s The Great Crash 1929 (1954) is a lively account of greed and folly, dishonesty and ignorance. (These aren’t extinct human traits: The Great Crash is reprinted every time the economy tanks.) Convinced that stocks would rise forever, investors borrowed to buy. Brokers, capitalists, and politicians assured them that the economy was sound. When the crunch came, the wealthy typically defended themselves where possible at the expense of the vast majority.

Arthur Schlesinger’s 600 pages on two years of politics and government make The Coming of the New Deal (1959) a thorough and detailed account. And he’s interested in people: lovely biographical vignettes. Schlesinger and my other authors sympathize with Roosevelt and the New Deal. They are read because the New Deal saved people. Their opponents’ writings are lost to the public because they were wrong: business wasn’t destroyed, nor was the Bill of Rights.

Dickson and Allen’s The Bonus Army (2004) depicts Depression era events. Promised a bonus for their services in World War I, but told they could not collect it until 1945, distressed veterans marched on Washington. President Hoover sent the army against them, perhaps ensuring Roosevelt’s election. The authors argue that the Bonus Army permanently raised awareness of veterans’ needs, leading to the GI Bill that made World War II’s soldiers the first well-assisted veterans.

Studs Terkel wrote a different sort of history. Hard Times (1970) records the words of all sorts of people who experienced the Depression: evicted farmers, unemployed factory workers, horrified or surprisingly complacent businessmen, officials and politicians, children who remembered their puzzlement and their parents’ distress. There are even those who, ignoring the course of events, remain convinced that the New Deal was a communist plot.

Histories are revealing; novels like Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) dig deeper. The scene of farmers watching their crops wither and their land literally blow away in the “Dust Bowl” is unforgettable. Transients return to homes and families no longer there; masses of Americans were on the roads, but individual stories speak loudest.

All this for 10 minutes lecturing and an hour’s discussion!

If pressed, David R. Jones will admit that he enjoys his work.

Comments are not available on this story.