A Portal into the Past

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These days, millions of people think they know what Americans experienced during the Great Depression three–quarters of a century ago.

It is understandable that they should feel that way. This recession has been persistent, stubborn, cruel, painful — choose the adjective you think is most appropriate. Housing foreclosures have been rampant. Job losses have been across the board. They haven't been confined to specific industries. Few have been spared the misery that has been wrought.

But the vast majority of the people who are living today were not living in the days of the Depression, and their only sources for comparison are books, journals, films, perhaps the recollections of older family members (most of whom likely are not living anymore). Even most of the living people who can remember that time in American history were mere children. They didn't have to look for work when the unemployment rate was 25%.

Dorothea Lange did live in those days. Is the name unfamiliar to you? Perhaps the name is unfamiliar, but the work she did during her life shouldn't be.

For it was through her photographer's eyes — and camera lens — that those living in the 21st century can get an idea what life was like for so many Americans in the 1930s.

For example, her 1936 photograph of Florence Owens Thompson — titled simply "Migrant Mother" — captured for many the sense of helplessness and shame that many people experienced during the Depression.

"I did not ask her name or her history," Lange said. "She told me her age, that she was 32. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food."

Lange wasn't a trained reporter, and Thompson later acknowledged that she got some of the details of her story wrong.

"There's no way we sold our tires, because we didn't have any to sell," she said. "The only ones we had were on the Hudson, and we drove off in them. I don't believe Dorothea Lange was lying, I just think she had one story mixed up with another. Or she was borrowing to fill in what she didn't have."

If Thompson harbored any resentment, it was that she was never compensated for her image.

Well, Lange wasn't a businesswoman, nor was she writer. She was a photographer, and her photography told stories the way words couldn't.

What is more, her pictures didn't just tell the stories of people who were victims of the economy. She also took pictures that told the story of discrimination in America.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, more than 100,000 Japanese people living in the United States (more than three–fifths of whom were American citizens) were forced to relocate in internment camps. Shortly before that happened, Lange snapped the picture at the right that shows Japanese children pledging allegiance to the American flag.

She was a pioneer, a woman excelling in what had been largely a man's world. But that wasn't her only handicap. Like so many others of her generation — including the man who was president during the Depression — Lange suffered from polio. She survived, but the disease left her with a permanent limp of which she, apparently, always was conscious.

"It formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me," she said. "I've never gotten over it, and I am aware of the force and power of it."

I don't know how pronounced that limp was. I knew a man who had polio when he was young and walked with a noticeable limp until his death (in his 80s) a few years ago. I never saw Lange walk so I don't know if, perhaps, it was as severe as that.

I've known people, for example, who, for one reason or another, suffered from speech impediments. Some were quite severe, while others were so modest that no one except the people who were afflicted really seemed to be aware of it.

If Lange's handicap was modest, perhaps it served its purpose by helping her to be more empathetic with the suffering she must have seen all around her in the mid–1930s — and then, of course, after Pearl Harbor.

Lange died of cancer at the age of 70 in 1965. Today would have been her 115th birthday.

What Would FDR Do?

There are a couple of things that stand out in my memory of last Thanksgiving:

• The terrorist attacks on Mumbai.


• The anticipation of the Barack Obama administration (accompanied by speculation that Obama's former rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, might be his secretary of state).

Here we are, a year later, and I'm seeing articles about a president who has been dead for more than half a century, Franklin D. Roosevelt. What gives?

Well, I guess it's only natural for thoughts to turn to FDR. He was elected to deal with the Great Depression, and Obama was elected to deal with the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression.

For Democrats, there is no president who can match FDR's achievements. He rescued the nation from an economic calamity, and he led the nation to a victory in World War II that he missed seeing by a matter of weeks.

Yesterday, I wrote about an article that found fault with Obama's Thanksgiving proclamation when compared to Roosevelt's.

Today, Stephen Herzenberg writes, in the Pittsburgh Post–Gazette, about the steps FDR might have taken to breathe new life into the economy.

My eyes were drawn to an observation that, because Congress is under pressure with unemployment continuing to rise, "momentum is building for a federal tax credit that would give companies an incentive to hire new employees."

I found this interesting because it is something Obama proposed during the presidential campaign last year — but, as PolitiFact.com points out, it was not included in the stimulus package.

So, what seemed (to me) like a logical and potentially beneficial approach to the problem has never been tried. It remains where it has been since Obama first mentioned it on the campaign trail — on the drawing board, an untried theory.

From what I have been able to gather, the proposal was nixed by Democrats in Congress. But it was Obama's promise so PolitiFact.com regards it as a broken promise. If the tax credit proposal had been part of the stimulus package, would it have made a difference? Herzenberg writes that Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff says "the real appeal of a job–creation tax credit may be that it 'beats doing nothing.' "

The psychological impact of a tax credit notwithstanding, though, Herzenberg writes that, when compared to the things FDR did to combat joblessness in the 1930s, the proposal "looks like, well, nothing." It didn't look like nothing on the campaign trail, but, admittedly, that was a year ago. Millions of jobs have been lost since then.

The question that can't be answered, though, is whether as many jobs would have been lost if the administration and the Democrats in Congress had been more proactive about unemployment.

As far as the jobless are concerned, Democratic efforts to stem the tide now — whether in the guise of a much–ballyhooed jobs summit or any legislative measure — amount to little more than last–minute scrambling designed to save their jobs. But they may be able to do better than that by learning from what FDR did.

In the 1930s, Herzenberg writes, Roosevelt "championed the 'Big Four' social policies:

• "a minimum wage to lift purchasing power at the bottom;


• "a law strengthening workers' rights to unionize, laying the basis for the emergence of America's middle class through manufacturing unions;


• "unemployment insurance, which enabled jobless workers to feed their families; and


• "Social Security, which enabled the elderly poor to avoid destitution and increase their consumption."

"So far, what is Washington offering as the Great Recession's Big Four?" Herzenberg asks. "The Big Zero."

Herzenberg tries to be fair, pointing out that the Democrats have been devoting a lot of time and energy to health care reform, and he concedes that the reform plan will yield benefits to the economy in the decades ahead. But the issue now is reinvigorating the middle class, which has been brutalized by the recession.

"There are some ideas kicking around the margins that can help shape what today's Big Four might look like," he writes, adding that some "would update elements of the New Deal."

The problem, writes Jeanne Sahadi for CNN.com, is that all the strategies that are being considered for encouraging job creation have downsides.

But that may be the inevitable result of the dithering Congress and the administration have done on this subject all year. They've squandered precious time, but time is running out for the Democrats, who have operated on the false assumption that their triumphs in the 2006 and 2008 elections entitled them to congressional majorities indefinitely. No one knows what will happen in the 2010 midterm elections, but poll numbers suggest Democrats are losing the support of independent voters who were so crucial to their successes in the last two elections.

They may be able to regain the support of some of those independents if they pass health care reform, but as long as unemployment continues to go up, any such gains will be temporary. And the electorate is likely to be in a sour mood by November 2010.

Learning From History

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"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

George Santayana (1863–1952)
The Life of Reason
Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense

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As I write this, it has been exactly one week since the funeral mass for Ted Kennedy.

During Kennedy's funeral last Saturday, his oldest son, Teddy Jr., gave the speech that was considered by many to be the most moving tribute of all the eulogies that were given in his father's memory.

That assessment probably was based on Teddy Jr.'s recollection of his struggle with bone cancer, which cost him one of his legs, and his personal comments about his relationship with his father. Those words certainly were touching.

Equally significant, though, were his memories of how Kennedy used to take him and his siblings and his cousins to Civil War battlefields. He recalled how his father and historian Shelby Foote would visit battlefields on the anniversaries of the battles in order to gain a greater appreciation for what the soldiers experienced.

"He believed that, in order to know what to do in the future, you had to understand the past," Teddy Jr. told those who were assembled in Boston.

If, before he died, Kennedy didn't impart that lesson directly to his countrymen, I hope they got it last weekend. But, with the endless fighting over health care reform and the latest firestorm over Barack Obama's intention to speak to America's schoolchildren next week, I have my doubts.

Obama fancies himself a student of history, but he often seems to lack an awareness of the lessons of history.

Well, if the president needs a little help in that regard, Matthew Rothschild can give him some historical perspective with an article he has written for The Progressive.

"It's Labor Day and the American worker doesn't have a lot to celebrate," Rothschild writes. "Unemployment stands at 9.7 percent — that's 15 million people out of work, officially, and millions more unofficially."

Rothschild goes on to observe that "the richest Americans have seen their wealth skyrocket, so much so that now we have widest gap between the rich and the poor since 1929."

Ah, yes, 1929. There are many years that would have little meaning for non–historians, even though those years brought significant developments, but it seems to me that just about anyone who ever studied American history, especially 20th century American history, would be able to tell you that 1929 was the year of the Stock Market Crash that helped to usher in the Great Depression.

Well, the prevailing belief is that the Depression began with the Stock Market Crash — but, in truth, real estate values had been declining for awhile, and the long–term influence of the crash was not clear to many Americans when it happened. Neither of my parents had been born when the stock market crashed, but my studies of that period indicate that reality didn't settle in until later on, when banks began to fail and an economic domino effect was under way.

But some people understood immediately what the crash meant. There are many stories of folks who did not wish to face what was to come and chose to end it all. Some put bullets through their heads. Others hanged themselves or jumped from tall buildings.

There are some differences between the current recession and 1929. Today, most people believe this will not turn into another Depression. They disagree over whether the actions of the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress are responsible, but most believe an economic catastrophe like the one in the 1930s has been avoided.

And, while historians disagree over exactly when the Depression really began, economists tend to agree that this recession began in December 2007, but things didn't get noticeably bad for most until the economic meltdown late last year.

People were losing their jobs before then, of course, just as there were signs before the Stock Market Crash that the economy was dangerously unstable. And, in the year since the meltdown, the economy has been losing hundreds of thousands of jobs each month. Some of the folks who lost their jobs before the meltdown may well have found new employment, but it isn't much of a reach to say that most of the people who were unemployed last Labor Day are still unemployed.

Consequently, this is the second straight Labor Day that many people have been out of work. The Calculated Risk blog provides ample data showing that long–term unemployment is higher than it has been since the Depression.

And economist/columnist Paul Krugman observes in his New York Times blog, The Conscience of a Liberal, that long–term unemployment is "the most destructive in human terms."

How will the destructive nature of unemployment in the early 21st century differ from the 20th century? Well, I suppose the answer to that really lies in the demographic breakdown of the out–of–work labor force. And, when I say "demographic," that isn't a reference to gender or race or anything like that. It has more to do with the fact that technological advancements not only change the way we all live but also have the power to make certain job functions obsolete.

Certainly, the nature of the economy is changing, No industry of which I am aware has been immune to the poor economy, and a key to each industry's recovery will be which jobs have been permanently lost and what that means in human terms.

That's why I have been saying all along that Obama and the Democrats needed to focus their efforts on job creation. They haven't. They have permitted 7½ months to go by, and unemployment is teetering on double–digit territory.

It may not be too late to encourage job creation, although time has run out for some of the unemployed. But, while they still have huge majorities in Congress and occupy the White House, Democrats must act and act quickly. Unfortunately, they chose now to wage this fight on health care reform. After enacting a pork–laden stimulus package, this isn't the best time to be pushing for tax incentives to encourage employers to hire people — as any student of history would be sure to tell you, the last thing you want to do is wage a two–front war. Ted Kennedy was devoted to the cause of health care reform, but he knew enough about history to know that you must pick the right time to wage certain battles.

Health care is important, but first you've gotta eat and you've got to have a roof over your head and you've got to have clothes to wear.

"Obama and the Democrats have a chance to improve the lives of working people," Rothschild writes. "But if they cave on the necessary policy changes, next Labor Day may be even grimmer than this one."

Well, for those who decide to stick around.