When we think of the Great Depression, we tend to think of the lost and bewildered: the stoic but dazed “Migrant Mother” in Dorothea Lange’s famous photograph; the Muncie businessman who took books out of the library, sat up nights reading them so that he might understand “the big things [that] were happening,” but who soon gave up after realizing “they’re too big for us anyway”; or Sewell Avery, the Chicago businessman who, at the beginning of the Great Depression, led the turnaround of the Montgomery Ward department store, nevertheless confessing that “To describe the causes of this situation is rather beyond my capacity. I am unfortunate in having no friends that seem able to explain it clearly to me.”1 Perhaps the title of Sherwood Anderson’s 1935 travelogue summarizes this sense of bewilderedness best: Puzzled America.
Doremus Jessup, the aged, flinty New England newspaper editor and main character of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935), would certainly consider himself a citizen of that country. Early in Lewis’s novel, Doremus considers how life has changed since the onset of the Great Depression. He laments the impossibility of planning for the future, regretting his share in “the insecurity, the confusion, the sense of futility in trying to do anything more permanent than shaving or eating breakfast, that was general to the country.”2 In addition to robbing him of the capacity to act, the Great Depression has robbed him of the capacity to know. He complains, “And for a newspaper editor—for one who must know, at least as well as the Encyclopaedia, everything about local and foreign history, geography, economics, politics, literature, methods of playing football—it was maddening that it seemed impossible now to know anything surely.” A couple of paragraphs below this one, he extends the circle of his ignorance:
The coming and the going of the N.R.A., the F.E.R.A., the P.W.A., and all the rest, had convinced Doremus that there were four sets of people who did not clearly understand anything whatever about how the government must be conducted: all the authorities in Washington; all of the citizenry who talked or wrote profusely about politics; the bewildered untouchables who said nothing; and Doremus Jessup.3
According to Doremus, the Great Depression has uncovered the abyss of ignorance that lies below the thin surface of knowledge in the United States. The Depression, Doremus concludes, has revealed that no one knows anything, including those whose job it is to know something. At best, Doremus believes, those living through the Great Depression could say “I know that I know nothing,” as Socrates put it. Except for them, ignorance, instead of the starting place for inquiry, as it was for Socrates, becomes the finish line of existence.
Lewis, through Doremus, articulates the anxieties of many thoughtful Americans during the Great Depression. Yet not everyone, and certainly not “all of the citizenry who talked or wrote profusely about politics,” shared Doremus’s sense “that it seemed impossible now to know anything.” For some, just the opposite occurred. The Depression reinforced their understanding of how the world worked and confirmed their most sacred beliefs. This emotional response to the Great Depression looks very different from the bewildered emotional response of liberals like Doremus Jessup, migrant mothers, Indiana businessmen, and Chicago millionaires. It looks like nothing so much as righteousness—an imperfect term that nonetheless captures the sense of confidence and comfort that comes from being on the right side of a question, on the side of truth.
If the psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s thesis in The Righteous Mind is correct, righteousness is one of the most common—and most troublesome—emotions in contemporary life. Curiously, however, even after the emotional and affective turn in literary studies and critical theory in the last two decades, few critics or theorists have explored righteousness. Perhaps that is because of its association with religion, which in the main critics and theorists neglect, but for whatever reason this particular ugly feeling has received little attention.4
When it comes to the Great Depression, however, that will not do, for at times during those years, righteousness functioned as something like the national emotion.
In Miami, Florida, on February 15, 1933, a thirty-three-year-old naturalized immigrant, Joe Zangara, read in the morning paper that the newly elected president, Franklin Roosevelt, would give a speech that evening at Bayfront Park. Zangara arrived early so he could sit close to Roosevelt, and as the president finished his speech, Zangara stood on his chair and fired five shots at the president. He missed Roosevelt but injured five others, including the mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak. Immediately arrested, Zangara, an anarchist of sorts, but also clearly deranged, later told reporters, “I don’t know whether or not I shot Mr. Roosevelt, but I want to make it clear I do not hate Mr. Roosevelt personally. I hate all presidents, no matter from what country they come, and I hate all officials and everybody who is rich.”5 At his sentencing hearing, his defense attorney asked him if he wasn’t sorry he tried to kill Mr. Roosevelt. “No, no, no—I am only sorry because I did not kill,” Zangara responded. “I am sorry about nothing. Put me in the electric chair.”
Zangara did not get his wish; instead, he was sentenced to eighty years in prison.6 A few weeks later, however, after Cermak died of his wounds, Zangara was retried for murder. He remained defiant—and in absolutely no doubt about the righteousness of his cause, either his hatred for the rich and powerful or his urge to act on it. “I feel I have a right to kill him,” Zangara said, meaning Roosevelt. “I feel that many years. It was right. I know they give me electric chair, but I don’t care—I’m right.”7 Less than two weeks later, when the state of Florida did execute him, his last act as a free man was to stride across the room and hand his manifesto, in which, the papers reported, “he had set forth his philosophy on capitalism,” to the prison superintendent.8
Although of an altogether less violent and crazed sort, righteousness occasionally consumed the man whom Zangara sought to kill, too. Two weeks prior to the election of 1936, employers in Detroit tried to scare workers against voting for Franklin Roosevelt by raising alarms about the recently passed Social Security Act of 1935. The employers slipped a note into pay envelopes warning that “Effective January, 1937, we are compelled by a Roosevelt ‘New Deal’ law to make a 1 percent deduction from your wages and turn it over to the government. Finally, this may go as high as 4 percent.” Workers, the note claimed, had no guarantee they would ever see the money again.9
In a speech at Madison Square Garden on the eve of the 1936 election, Roosevelt pounced. In an oddly vague use of the word, Roosevelt boasted that his administration had restored “peace” to the American people, by which he seems to have meant economic security, functioning local government, a promise to stay out of war, and a grab bag of other benefits like “protection of their currency, the ending of long hours of toil, the abolition of child labor, the elimination of wild-cat speculation, [and] the safety of their children from kidnappers.” Peace, however, Roosevelt declared, did not come easy. “We had to struggle,” he said, “with the enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.” He added, explicitly associating the perpetrators of “the current pay-envelope campaign” with these enemies of peace:
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.
I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.10
Although I admire Roosevelt as much as anyone, here as elsewhere he could sometimes fall under the spell of righteousness, which tends to simplify the world and populate it with comic book villains and heroes rather than real people. As Kim Phillips-Fein makes clear in her history of business-led opposition to the New Deal, those who opposed Roosevelt, including the Detroit industrialists who conducted the pay envelope scheme, were not “the enemies of peace”; they were simply enemies of the New Deal.11 More generously, they considered themselves friends of the Constitution, which, they thought, Roosevelt and his administration violated at every turn. Their pay envelope tactics may have crossed a line, but they acted out of principle—that government is best which governs least—and not, as Roosevelt had it, a cartoonish “selfishness and lust for power.”
Or consider Action Comics No. 3, from August 1938, which carried the third installment of Jerome Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Superman. In “The Blakely Mine Disaster,” reporter Clark Kent, Superman’s alter ego, learns that a miner has been trapped in a cave-in. Superman saves him, but he learns that the cave-in occurred because “the owner disregarded the mine’s dangerous conditions.”12 Clark Kent interviews the mine owner, Thornton Blakely, who expresses neither sympathy nor regret for endangering his workers. “There are no safety hazards in my mine,” he tells Kent. “But if there were—what of it? I’m a businessman, not a humanitarian.”13 Superman, fired by his own righteousness, sets out to teach Blakely a lesson.
That night, dressed as a miner, Superman crashes a party at the Blakely estate. Blakely, thinking the miner has come to see how the other half lives, decides to entertain his bored guests by showing them how miners live. “We’ll make merry in the bowels of the earth,” he declares, moving the party to the mine.14 Once there, Superman engineers a cave-in. When Blakely tries to sound the alarm, he discovers that it, like the other safety devices in the mine, has rusted. The partygoers, including Blakely, must dig themselves out. They quickly tire. “Think of the miners,” one says, “They have to do this 14 long hours each day.”15 Soon enough, the partygoers give up and settle in to die. “Oh,” Blakely despairs, “if only I had this all to do over again!—I never knew—really knew—what the men down here have to face!” “That’s all I’ve been waiting to hear!” Superman says, and allows the partygoers to be saved.16 Several days later, Blakely tells Clark Kent, “You can announce that henceforth my mine will be the safest in the country, and my workers the best treated.”17
Superman and the president notwithstanding, perhaps the most notorious group to feel deeply their own righteousness during the Great Depression was communists. The communist of the 1930s, however, is a familiar, possibly overfamiliar figure of Great Depression righteousness. Fortunately, as Joe Zangara, Superman, and the president show, communists did not have a monopoly on righteousness during the Great Depression. Other groups—in this chapter, I explore classical economists, religious fundamentalists, and repentant Lost Generation exiles—also felt the righteousness of their beliefs, and none hesitated to judge those who had fallen from the truth. That last part is crucial. The righteous know themselves by their opposite, those who behave in sinful or iniquitous ways. Righteousness, then, is at times indivisible from shame. For the righteous, those who have fallen from the truth, will, like contemptuous mine owners, eventually see the light, regret their misbehavior, and feel deeply shameful about it—and if they don’t, they should. Righteousness therefore also implies the need for atonement, and what connects classical economists, religious fundamentalists, and Lost Generation exiles, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, who imaginatively described the emotional lives of those exiles under the pressure of the Great Depression, is their view of the Great Depression as punishment for past excesses, punishments that must be endured, even embraced, for a good life to resume. A sense of righteousness, that is, would invite many people to read what happened to the economy in the 1930s as a morality tale, with clear lessons about right and wrong, good and bad. And because it tends to rationalize the suffering of others, this righteous view of the economy would have—and to no small extent continues to have—disastrous consequences for ordinary Americans. Indeed, as I show in the first section, out of a sense of righteousness, policymakers during the early years of the Great Depression convinced themselves that by doing nothing about the failing economy, they did everything they could and should do about it lest they reward sinners and punish saints. Their decision changed history.
For many people, one of the enduring mysteries of the Great Depression is why the federal government did not do more to try to rescue the economy when it began to crash. In his popular work of populist history, A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn offers one answer when he writes that “Clearly, those responsible for organizing the economy did not know what had happened, were baffled by it, refused to recognize it, and found reasons other than the failure of the system.”18 In this version of history, Herbert Hoover fares especially poorly. When he is not ordering out the cavalry to evict an encampment of impoverished World War One veterans (known as the Bonus Army) from Washington, D.C., he is leading—if that is the right word—“the inaction of the government in helping.”19 A 1933 cartoon by the great Daniel Fitzpatrick captures the populist belief in Hoover and his administration’s indifference to economic suffering and obtuseness to economic reality.20 In the cartoon, two tramps sit outside a Hooverville reading a newspaper with the headline “Hoover Speech.” “It seems there wasn’t any depression at all,” one says to the other. As the example of Zinn suggests, Hoover’s reputation has not improved much since.
Although not necessarily inaccurate, this story of the ignorant, baffled, and indifferent federal response to the Great Depression leaves out much. At least initially, Hoover broke with his advisors who urged inaction, though his efforts ultimately accomplished little. Moreover, such an account obscures how even those who did counsel doing nothing—most famously, Andrew Mellon—thought they were very much doing something by doing nothing. In short, few were ignorant, baffled, or indifferent. In retrospect, that may have been the problem.
Foremost among those who preached doing something about the Great Depression by doing nothing were classical economists. Although not trained as an economist, Andrew Mellon, the banker, industrialist, and secretary of the treasury during the first years of the Great Depression, very much spoke their language. It was Mellon who contributed one of the most famous quotations to emerge from the period. In his memoir of those years, Hoover reported that in response to the catastrophic slump, Mellon had only one formula: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.”21 On its face, Mellon’s prescription looks bad enough. He treats human beings—laborers, farmers—as objects to be liquidated, belonging to the same category as stocks and real estate. Nor is liquidate a verb most people will have heard all that often, or, if they have, they will have heard it used in the sense of “to dispose of or get rid of, as by killing.” Obviously Mellon did not want to kill farmers and laborers. So what did he mean?
Mellon had made his millions as a banker. For him, to liquidate meant to convert assets into cash and, relatedly, to settle the accounts of a bankrupted business by apportioning those liquidated assets to its creditors. In other words, Mellon was calling for Hoover to let bankrupt businesses go bankrupt, and for them to get what they can for their assets, until the market bottoms out. For that to happen, Mellon believed, the slump must proceed unmolested by government intervention. Hoover reports that Mellon “felt that the government must keep its hands off and let the slump liquidate itself.” Hence Hoover’s reference to Mellon as belonging to the “leave-it-alone-liquidationists.” Mellon, Hoover writes,
insisted that, when the people get an inflation brainstorm, the only way to get it out of their blood is to let it collapse. He held that even a panic was not altogether a bad thing. He said: “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.” He often used the expression, “There is a mighty lot of real estate lying around the United States which does not know who owns it,” referring to excessive mortgages.22
By “inflation brainstorm,” Mellon means something like what Alan Greenspan later famously dubbed “irrational exuberance”: when optimism about the future of the economy leads people to bid up assets beyond a reasonable value. The market inevitably corrects such exuberance, and when it does, prices fall, sometimes disastrously. As Mellon states, however, a market correction “was not altogether a bad thing.” “Values,” Mellon declares, “will be adjusted.” As prices fall back to their pre-inflated level, enterprising people can gather up the pieces and make something new. For Mellon, one man’s panic and crash is another man’s opportunity.
But when Mellon insists “values will be adjusted,” he means moral values in addition to economic ones. And his language suggests that he conflates the two; in fact, that they are negatively correlated. In the boom, prices go up and morals deteriorate. In the crash, prices come down and morals return. Hence Mellon’s association of “high costs of living” and “high living.” Both rose together, and both must simultaneously return to earth. And when they do, Mellon believes, people “will work harder, live a more moral life.” In general, Mellon suggests, prosperity has coddled and corrupted people; the slump will reform them.23 It will restore order, morality, and prosperity. Thus a panic, the precursor to a slump, “was not altogether a bad thing,” as Mellon has it.
Despite taking such a hard line, Mellon, as Hoover recognized, “was not hard-hearted. In fact he was generous and sympathetic with all suffering.” His formula for responding to the crashing economy—leave-it-alone—arose not from indifference to suffering but from sympathy for it. “He felt,” Hoover reports, “that there would be less suffering if his course were pursued,” and in this feeling he reflected perfectly the economic orthodoxy of the day.24 Regardless of their effect on morals, slumps had critical, ultimately beneficial work to do. They must be left alone to do it.
Or so some of the leading economists of the day argued with more or less one voice; and while they might not have conflated economic and moral values as explicitly as Mellon did, they nevertheless spoke of the Great Depression as a timely corrective for past misdeeds.25 In 1934, for example, the economic faculty of Harvard University published The Economics of the Recovery Program, a collection of essays that promised to “analyze, in the light of economic experience and principle, the present economic policy of this country with reference to the goal of recovery.”26 The lead essay of the collection, written by Joseph Schumpeter—one of the most important economists of the twentieth century—questioned the wisdom of any efforts on the part of the federal government to intervene in the economy. Indeed, when people are most tempted to fiddle with the economy—during slumps—that is precisely when, Schumpeter argued, they should most keep their hands off of it.
For Schumpeter, slumps occur because of overinvestment in certain sectors of the economy or because of an overly bubbly enthusiasm for future prosperity. During a boom, Schumpeter observes, “an increasing volume of business is being done on the assumption that things will continue to boom. A superstructure of such transactions rises above what is substantially sound and comes down with a crash.”27 Because crashes are inevitable and corrective, Schumpeter tends not to speak of depressions or slumps but of “readjustments” and “adjustments,” and they are not to be avoided but endured, even welcomed. (Fittingly, Schumpeter is best remembered today for his phrase “creative destruction.”) Speaking of “the recurrent troubles of capitalist societies,” Schumpeter asserts, “They are but temporary. They are the means to reconstruct each time the economic system on a more efficient plan.”28 “[D]epressions are not simply evils,” Schumpeter continues, “but—perhaps undesirable—forms of something which has to be done, namely, adjustments to previous economic change.”29 As a result, recovery must “come of itself” and not from what Schumpeter calls “artificial stimulus,” that is, government intervention. He explains, “For any revival which is merely due to artificial stimulation leaves part of the work of depressions undone and adds, to an undigested remnant of maladjustment, new maladjustment of its own which has to be liquidated in turn, thus threatening business with another crisis ahead.”30 Schumpeter mixes all sorts of metaphors here—artificial stimulation, undigested remnant, maladjustment, liquidation—but his meaning is plain. In Mellon’s terms, slumps are not the rottenness; they purge the rottenness from the system.
Schumpeter and Mellon spoke with such certainty because their account made good economic sense but, even more so, because they believed they had history on their side. For evidence, both referred to the Panic of 1873, which was, until the Great Depression of the 1930s, known as the Great Depression. Like its later version, it left widespread bankruptcy, unemployment, and deflation in its wake. The economy shrank for over five consecutive years, but then, just as suddenly, it bounced back, and prosperity returned. Soon enough, Mellon reminded Hoover, “the whole system was working at full speed.”31 Schumpeter drew a similar moral. In the section of his essay titled “The Upshot,” he declared: “There is no reason to despair—this is the first lesson to be derived from our story. Fundamentally the same thing has happened in the past, and it has—in the only two cases which are comparable with the present one—lasted just as long.” “In all cases,” he added, “recovery came of itself.” Indeed, “recovery is sound only if it does come of itself.”32
Unfortunately, while “Always historicize” is usually good advice, in the case of the Great Depression, it was not. The Great Depression was not a “readjustment.” By 1934, when Schumpeter and his colleagues published The Economics of the Recovery Program, the Depression had wiped out nearly all of the gains the economy had made since the end of the last recession in 1923. It could not, therefore, simply be an ordinary correction. Still, as one contemporary economist observes, “The advocates of the ‘liquidationist’ point of view during the Great Depression were mistaken, but not crazy.”33 Prior to the Great Depression, a liquidationist view did seem to explain the ups and downs of the business cycle. In the case of the Great Depression, however, this time really was different.
For Schumpeter, there may not have been any reason to despair, but there was reason to atone. Although they felt no personal shame for their conduct during the Great Depression, economists like Schumpeter and liquidationists like Mellon nevertheless believed that the Great Depression arose because of the excesses of the 1920s. (Somewhat more generously, Schumpeter refers to these excesses not as “high living” but as “error and misbehavior.”) For both Mellon and Schumpeter, hard times had, by necessity, to follow good times, which were made good in part by people not behaving—or investing—well enough. Fittingly, a later economist, Walter S. Salant, would refer to the liquidationist school of economics as the “crime and punishment” theory of business cycles.34 Slumps, including the Great Depression, were punishments for past economic and moral looseness.
To put it plainly, then, according to the liquidationists, the economy had to atone for its misdeeds. So too did the American people, even though they may not have erred or misbehaved or even shared in the wealth of the boom. They still had a price to pay.
Economists like Schumpeter and would-be economists like Mellon reveal a number of things about how righteousness works. First, righteousness emerges not from the self alone but the self in tune with some higher power, someone or something that guarantees the truth and lies beyond appeal; usually, as with the religious, that higher power is God, but it does not have to be. For Schumpeter and Mellon, their authority was classical economics, the irresistible force of business cycles, supply and demand. Second, righteousness usually requires concrete evidence that irrefutably reveals the authority of a higher power in action. For Schumpeter and Mellon, evidence for the authority and truth of classical economics came from history itself. Untouched, the Depression of 1873 eventually broke, and prosperity followed. Third, righteousness often requires sacrifice on the part of the righteous. That is, the righteous witness others succumbing to temptation, from which they hold themselves back. For Schumpeter and Mellon, that temptation was, on the way up, high living and mortgaged real estate, and, on the way down, compassion—the impulse to intervene in the economy and relieve suffering before the work of slumps or adjustments (or what have you) could finish. Schumpeter and Mellon resisted those temptations and derived sober authority from it. All of these elements combine to warrant the final and most important characteristic of righteousness, which is a willingness—at times an eagerness—to judge others who disobey the dictates of a higher power or, what amounts to the same thing, succumb to temptation. If someone is right, and thus righteous, someone else must be wrong. In other words, the righteous know themselves through the wicked; in this case, those who sought to get rich quick during the boom and those, the misguided bleeding hearts of the New Deal, whose sympathy and economic policies would only prolong suffering by delaying true prosperity. One struggles to imagine an emotion more perfectly suited to rationalize the suffering of the Great Depression. To a certain extent, Hoover resisted its pull. He would do something instead of nothing. But primed to do nothing, he exaggerated the momentousness of what he did do.
Some economists may have responded righteously to the Great Depression, but they had nothing on evangelical Christians, whose faith, far from wavering during the onslaught of the Depression, only grew stronger. During the 1930s, Christian fundamentalists believed that mankind was living through its last days. They did not mean this metaphorically. As they saw it, God had lost patience with a sinful mankind, and the signs of the times, including the Great Depression itself, all pointed to an imminent Apocalypse.
Many fundamentalist Christians viewed with horror America’s slide into modernity and immorality in the 1920s. For them, too many people, especially young people, lived “fast” lives—smoking, drinking, dancing, and going to movies. Worse, in high schools and universities, the young studied Darwin, and their faith suffered accordingly. Worse still, instead of condemning such trends, fundamentalists charged, the modern Church sought to get in step with them. Apostasy, in other words, ruled the day, just as the Bible said it would, and widespread apostasy, as the Bible also said, inevitably preceded the Apocalypse.
Moreover, the political developments of the 1930s—Benito Mussolini’s rise to power, Adolf Hitler’s driving Jews back to Palestine, the consolidation of godless communism in the Soviet Union and its spread across the globe, the increasing prospect of world war, the droughts and plagues of grasshoppers in the American dust bowl, and the alleged drift of the United States toward dictatorship—also seemed to fulfill what the New Testament prophets had predicted millennia ago. To fundamentalists, even the blue eagle of the National Recovery Administration, which was supposed to signal that businesses had complied with federal economic recovery policies, instead invoked the mark of the beast that the author of the Book of Revelations warned of, and thus confirmed mankind’s drift into the end days.35 No less a figure than H.L. Mencken, no friend to organized religion or fundamentalism, eventually came to think that the fundamentalists might have been onto something. The New Testament, Mencken wrote in 1932, “offers precise and elaborate specifications of the events preceding the inevitable end of the world,” and he observed “that a fair reading of them must lead any rational man to conclude that those events are now upon us. If the Bible really is the Word of God … then it is plain as day that the human race is on its last legs.”36
And then there was the Great Depression itself. “You must know this,” the apostle Paul wrote, “that in the last days distressing times shall come,” and distressing times—in the form of an unprecedented and inexplicable economic collapse—had indeed come.37 In the grip of the Depression, evangelicals did not hesitate to draw apocalyptic conclusions. The United States, the editor of the Sunday School Times told his readers in 1933, was being judged for its sins, and the trial of the Great Depression proved it.38 Similarly, E.W. Crowell, a Baptist pastor from Jackson, Michigan, began his 1938 sermon, titled “Why God Is Judging America,” with the following passage from the prophet Hosea: “The Lord hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land. By swearing, and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery, they break out, and blood toucheth blood. Therefore shall the land mourn.”39 In short, America had sinned and, as the Great Depression showed, the day of reckoning had come.
For premillennial fundamentalists, then, the Apocalypse was nigh. The end days, however, had a silver lining; two in fact. The first was the rapture. During the rapture, which would precede the Apocalypse proper, all true Christians would ascend to heaven, leaving behind an impious remnant to suffer through seven years of tribulation (pestilence, war, famine, and death) and rule by the Antichrist. The second was the second coming of Christ, who, after the rapture and the tribulation, would return to Earth and usher in a millennium of peace and prosperity, at least for those who had not succumbed to the lures of the Antichrist during the years of tribulation.
Nothing captures this premillennial worldview quite so well as the Carter Family’s “No Depression (in Heaven),” one of the most moving or, depending on your perspective, disturbing songs of the decade. The Carter Family—A.P. Carter, his wife Sara Carter, and his sister-in-law Maybelle Carter—recorded the song in New York City in June 1936. (Sara Carter sings.) The first verse associates the arrival of the Great Depression with the end times as predicted in the Bible. The second verse imagines the glories that await Christians in heaven, and the third verse describes the apocalypse itself, which will send millions of the damned to hell.40 Neither the plucky guitar melody, nor the unperturbed monotone in which Sara Carter dispatches the unregenerate to their fate—it sounds like she is reading the shipping forecast—seem at all appropriate to the horror of the last verse. But the millions of the damned deserved their fate. As did the saved. Indeed, to focus on the violence and suffering of the final verse misses the point of the song. For the Carter Family, and for those who listened to the song, the Depression meant hunger and death. But for the Carter Family, and many of their listeners, the Great Depression also promised salvation. Hence the title of the song (“No Depression (in Heaven)” ) and the chorus, when the rest of the Carters join Sara to describe how they will leave this world for their final one in heaven.41 In short, the destruction of one world would lead to the birth of a new and better one. God promised.
This premillennial way of viewing the world hanged on a sort of delayed gratification. For the small band of believers whom Christ would take up to heaven during the rapture, things—manners, mores, and in general life on earth—had to get worse before they would get better. In fact, things getting worse were signs that they would henceforth get very much better. In addition, by denying themselves pleasures here on earth, believers laid them up—tenfold—in heaven. The same delayed gratification applied for the apostates who would witness the rapture, dramatically confront the errors of their ways, and then give themselves to Christ. True, they would have to live through the seven indescribably awful years of the tribulation, during which time the Antichrist and his legions would persecute those who committed themselves to Christ, but soon enough Christ would return to defeat the Antichrist and establish His kingdom of peace and prosperity on earth. Whether saints or converts, pre- or post-Apocalypse, one must suffer now to thrive later.
Fundamentalists half-heartedly fought the satanic forces that drove the earth toward its last days; they also thrilled at the prospect of the rapture and the second coming. In 1932, the founder of the Dallas Theological Seminary wrote of Franklin Roosevelt’s victory in the presidential election, which supposedly brought mankind that much closer to the Apocalypse, “As these dark days grow darker, we are feeling the certainty of His soon return.”42 The pastor of the Hollywood Presbyterian Church offered a similar interpretation of the election returns. “The results of the past election in our country,” he told readers of the King’s Business, one of the more influential fundamentalist magazines in the country, “must confirm the conviction that we are living in the end days of human government in the earth … Surely the Lord must be at hand!”43
Almost by definition, religious fundamentalists exuded righteousness, and as with classical economists, that righteousness entailed doling out judgment on (at best) the mistaken and (at worst) the wicked. That formula drives the premillennial fiction written and published during the Great Depression. These novels confirm the righteousness of the saved even as they underscore the disgracefulness of the profane. By dramatizing the rewards the righteous will receive and the shame and regret that unbelievers will feel after Christ returns, these novels also help readers imagine such powerful emotions in the here and now, while they still have a chance to do something about them.
Take Forrest Loman Oiler’s 1937 novel Be Thou Prepared for Jesus Is Coming. (My first edition of the book is inscribed “To Merle/from/Thelma/Merry Christmas/1938.”) The novel concerns the Kolzon family: John, Miriam, and their three children, Frank, Jane, and Ann. John, Miriam, and their youngest daughter, Ann, all fervently believe in Christ; their older children, Frank and Jane, do not. After graduating from high school, Frank and Jane leave their parents’ homestead for the city, where they work at banks and live fast lives, “going to dances, playing cards, smoking and tearing around and becoming more worldly, daily,” their mother laments. In time, Frank embezzles money from his bank and is imprisoned, while Jane, we are told, “stayed in the city and went from bad to worse.”44
Years pass, and a literally wandering Jew, Joel Levi, joins the family. One day, with a neighbor named Acy, Joel and Miriam drive to town “to take some produce to the village and some provisions to the Agnes Mission, to help feed the hungry and needy.”45 During the services, Miriam persuades Acy, usually indifferent to Christ, “to confess and accept the Lord Jesus as your Savior.”46 She has no such luck with Joel, much to his immediate dismay, because at the moment Acy converts, there is, as the novel describes it: “(AN INSTANEOUS OCCURRENCE!)” In other words, “a transition of the saints”—that is, the rapture.
With the main characters from the first third of the book—Ann, John, and Miriam—ushered off the earth, the book switches perspectives to Frank, Jane, and Joel, especially their newfound regret at having ignored Miriam’s counsels. On his drive home from the village, for example, Joel “could not keep from thinking of Miriam’s last words: ‘Don’t miss this chance’ and of what an idiot he had been in his indifference and stubbornness.”47 “Joel Levi and millions of others in the world,” the narrator explains, “had missed their chance of becoming a part of the Bride. They had failed to accept the Lord Jesus Christ as the Son of God and to live in readiness, as a bride would, in expectation of her lover’s coming.”48 Jane, in a chapter titled “The Prodigal Daughter,” is also “completely awakened to what had transpired. She became fully resigned to the situation, remembering the warning she had heard from her mother, time and time again, and like millions of others had heedlessly disregarded.”49
The remainder of the novel plays out the end days according to the Biblical prophecies: the rise of the Antichrist; his torture of the Jews and those, like the newly converted Jane, who refuse to take the mark of the beast; the battle at Armageddon between the armies of the Antichrist and Christ himself; Christ’s victory and the establishment of His kingdom on earth; and finally His judgment of the dead.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, but nevertheless compellingly, the novel is suffused with shame and regret, but mostly—and finally—righteousness. Midway through the novel, Jane is captured by the Antichrist and confined to a small prison on top of a skyscraper “for the rest of her natural life.”50 There she is visited by a demon that tempts her to commit suicide. She resists and is visited by an angel, who leads her on a guided tour through the Jerusalem of the New Testament (where she witnesses the crucifixion of Christ), then hell, and finally heaven. In hell, the angel shows her the daily arrival of the 30,000 unsaved and recently dead who “had refused their chance for eternal happiness” and now despair at their eternal fate. Among them is Herman Zolk, a wealthy oilman whom Miriam had earlier tried to save at one of his grand parties but who rebuffs her and dies before he can “think of such serious matters.”51 Seeing Herman in hell, Jane observes that in his life Herman had “gave thousands of dollars to the poor and to the missionaries.” Surely, then, “there is some hope for him,” she thinks. None, the angel replies. “Herman missed the one and only really important requisite. He rejected the Lord Jesus Christ as his Savior.”52 Like others in hell, Herman must live with the consequences of his rejection.
Those who are condemned to hell must live with the consequences, but Jane learns that some of those in heaven do too, for not all experience heaven equally. While showing Jane around heaven, the angel points out a group of “ministers, settlement workers, Sunday school teachers, and missionaries” who “seemed to be wishing that they had labored more earnestly and with perpetual zeal in their tedious tasks of feeding God’s Word to souls in need of divine food.”53 If the soldiers in God’s army regret their wasted lives on earth, think how the insurance men, bankers, unemployed, and retired, who similarly neglected their opportunities to save others, must feel. In heaven, some of these last are even denied crowns and reduced to “merely looking-on,” while those who saved other souls are granted crowns and a closer seat to and a better view of Christ. “If you had your life to live over,” the angel asks one of these mere onlookers in the cheap seats, “would you do it differently?” “Yes, indeed,” he responds. “I had no idea of these wonderful things in store for the saints.”54 He, of course, is not among them.
As if to drive home the point still further, Be Thou Prepared for Jesus Is Coming does not end, like the other major work of premillennial fiction published during the Great Depression, Dayton A. Manker’s They That Remain (1941), with a vision of Christ’s peaceful and prosperous kingdom come but with a vision of Christ the righteous judge mercilessly dispatching souls to hell. At the end of the novel, Herman Zolk returns, standing before Christ’s throne awaiting His judgment, pleading for forgiveness. Zolk claims he “was a wealthy oil man, generous—.” “Yes, Herman Zolk,” Christ replies, “I know all about it. You, like millions of others here, had good intentions. You didn’t appreciate God’s goodness to you.” Christ explains that Zolk was too busy with a big gathering to hear the messenger—Miriam Kolzon—whom God had sent to offer him salvation. When Zolk asks why God could not have sent a messenger before, when he was less engaged, Christ loses patience. “You are one of those who expected God to suit your convenience,” he tells Zolk. “What a mistake! Then, too, you were money-mad and would never have listened to my messengers.” Christ asks, “How could you refuse your God?” Zolk says he is sorry. Christ says, “Not as much as I.” At which point, Zolk is sent to hell for all eternity.55
Frank Kolzon, bank embezzler, fares even worse. He stands before Christ’s throne awaiting His judgment:
“Mighty God,” he admits, “I robbed my bank but—”
“Yes, Frank Kolzon, I know all of the circumstances. Like millions of others in this throng, there is absolutely no use for you being lost but you wouldn’t listen to your saintly parents or even to your sister Jane. With every privilege, there was added responsibility, and because of that intimate knowledge and lack of interest you will receive more severe punishment than if you had never heard the message of salvation.”
“Oh God, have mercy, I’m sorry—”
“Your excuses are lame. You are a thief and a robber and tried to enter some other way. Depart!”56
In his judgment of Frank, Christ sounds like the Christ of the parable of the faithful servant. To whom much is given—in this case, opportunities to hear the gospel—of him much will be required. And much greater will be the judgment against him if he does not seize his opportunity. As for Frank, Be Thou Prepared insists, so for all those who, despite the manifest signs of Christ’s return during the Great Depression, persisted in lives of sin and sacrilege.
Fundamentalists seem to have always dreamed—and continue to dream, to judge from the success of the Left Behind series of novels—of the rapture and the second coming. Still, the chaos and fear of the Great Depression intensified the emotions surrounding this dream. Prophecies about the second coming of Christ not only made sense out of the chaos of the Great Depression; they also promised an escape from it.57 (Recall “No Depression in Heaven.”) The imminent arrival of Christ also ensured that those who behaved shamefully would receive their punishment, and forever after regret it, while those who gave themselves to Christ would receive their eternal reward. To many who lived through it, that is, the Depression could seem strikingly unjust, with its capricious ruining of good men and women and occasional rewarding of bad. In fact, or so fundamentalists could hope, it began the process of separating the sheep from the goats, the blessed from the damned.
Although in some, perhaps most respects they could not have less in common, when it comes to righteousness fundamentalists and classical economists spoke a similar language. Both resisted temptation, both delayed gratification, and both judged those who did not behave as virtuously as they did. Although the economists might not have used just that word, both evangelicals and economists believed that Americans had sinned and would have to pay for those sins. For the economists, the sin consisted in high costs of living and high living, as Mellon put it. For the fundamentalists, the sin was high—read ungodly—living, plain and simple. Most importantly, both groups believed the Depression was punishment for those sins. Finally, economists and fundamentalists may have had different gods and different notions of virtue. The economists worshipped prosperity and the market, while the fundamentalists stuck to God and godliness proper. But both groups believed that, ultimately, virtue would be rewarded and sins punished. As a result, both groups viewed the Depression as something necessary, even, in the end, something beneficial. So long as Americans took what they had coming, the Depression would lead to something better, whether renewed prosperity or the second coming. You might call this the righteous view of the Great Depression; you might also call it the punitive—or redemptive—view of the Great Depression. By that view, the road to redemption, economic and spiritual, ran through suffering.
The punitive view of the Great Depression must have had a powerful emotional pull on the American people, because it shows up in the unlikeliest of places, including in what would become one of the canonical short stories of the 1930s, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Babylon, Revisited.”58 In Fitzgerald’s story, which originally appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in February, 1931, Charlie Wales returns to Paris to reclaim his nine-year-old daughter, the significantly named Honoria, from his sister-in-law, Marion. Honoria is placed with Marion after Helen, Honoria’s mother and Charlie’s wife, dies as a result of drunkenly wandering around in a Paris snowstorm after being locked out of their apartment by an angry and equally drunken Charlie. After her death, Charlie enters a sanitarium and sobers up, but Marion still holds him responsible for her sister’s death and is therefore reluctant to return Honoria to him.
If the guiding metaphor of Mellon and Schumpeter was liquidation, turning assets into more liquid cash, the guiding metaphor of Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited” is dissipation, turning all-too-liquid cash—and existence—into nothing. Wandering around Montmartre, the setting for his previously dissolute Paris life, Charlie reflects, “All the catering to vice and waste was on an utterly childish scale, and he suddenly realized the meaning of the word ‘dissipate’—to dissipate into thin air; to make nothing out of something.”59 Indeed, the story repeatedly hints of Charlie’s dissolute, shameful past, beyond his indirect responsibility for Helen’s death. In the opening scene, he returns to the Ritz bar, where he meets Alix, a bartender whom he knows from the old days. Charlie stops at one drink (“I’m going slow these days”), and Alix congratulates him. “You were going pretty strong a couple of years ago,” Alix says, and then asks him about conditions in America.60 “I haven’t been to America in months,” Charlie says. “I’m in business in Prague, representing a couple of concerns there. They don’t know about me down there,” he adds. The implication is that if the concerns in Prague knew about Charlie’s behavior in Paris, they would not trust him with their business.
But Charlie reveals the most about himself—his past and his present—when he contrasts himself with others. Still in the bar, Charlie watches “a group of strident queens installing themselves in a corner,” and his response is telling: “‘Nothing affects them,’ he thought. ‘Stocks rise and fall, people loaf or work, but they go on forever.’”61 Unlike the strident queens, that is, Charlie has been deeply affected by the crash. Unlike the strident queens, too, who are “installing” themselves in a corner of the bar, Charlie has renounced living his life in bars. (He takes just one drink every afternoon, he insists, “so the idea won’t get too big in [his] imagination.”)62 The scene closes with Alix asking Charlie if he is in Paris for long. When Charlie responds that he is “here for four or five days to see my little girl,” Alix exclaims, “Oh-h! You have a little girl.” The exchange illustrates how much Charlie has changed, and how anxiously he needs to assert that change. In all of the years of Alix serving him drinks, his daughter apparently never came up. Now, though, his daughter further distinguishes him from the strident queens. He is heterosexual, and in a reversal of his dissipated years, when he made nothing out of something, he has instead made something, a daughter, out of nothing. As Andrew Mellon predicted, the Depression did purge the rottenness out of the system—or out of Charlie, anyway, since the strident queens appear not to have gotten the message. After the crash, Charlie does indeed “work harder” and “live a more moral life.”
At bottom, “Babylon Revisited” is about the past, whether it can be outlived or made amends for. The answer is no. Charlie takes Honoria to Le Grand Vatel, “the only restaurant he could think of not reminiscent of champagne dinners and long luncheons that began at two and ended in a blurred and vague twilight.”63 Even there, though, he runs into “sudden ghosts out of the past: Duncan Shaeffer, a friend from college. Lorraine Quarrles, a lovely pale blonde of thirty; one of a crowd who had helped them make months into days in the lavish times of three years ago.”64 Charlie puts these ghosts off, which prompts Lorraine to write him later at his hotel, hoping to rekindle their relationship and reminding him of events he would prefer to forget. “We did have good times that crazy spring,” she writes, “like the night you and I stole the butcher’s tricycle, and the time we tried to call on the president and you had the old derby rim and the wire cane.” “His first feeling,” Charlie thinks upon receiving the letter, “was one of awe that he had actually, in his mature years, stolen a tricycle and pedaled Lorraine all over the Étoile between the small hours and dawn. In retrospect it was a nightmare … How many weeks or months of dissipation to arrive at that condition of utter irresponsibility?”65 In other words, Charlie is ashamed of his past, and ashamed of his association with the people of his past. Children ride tricycles and play dress-up, not adults.
But Lorraine (and Duncan) will return to do more damage than just remind Charlie of his shamefully childish Paris years. In order to regain custody of Honoria, Charlie must convince his righteous sister, Marion, that he has changed and can now care for his daughter. In doing so, Fitzgerald not so subtly nudges readers, Charlie will reclaim his Honor(ia). Marion, however, remains bitter about Charlie’s role in her sister’s death and skeptical that he has genuinely forsaken his drunken past. In a discussion with Marion and her husband Lincoln regarding his paternal fitness, Charlie reflects: “He knew that now he would have to take a beating. It would last an hour or two hours, and it would be difficult, but if he modulated his inevitable resentment to the chastened attitude of the reformed sinner, he might win his point in the end.” And he does win the point in the end, persuading Marion to release Honoria to him.
When he returns to the apartment the next day to arrange the details, however, his ghosts return. Seated with Marion in the living room, having just agreed on the day he will come back to take Honoria, Duncan Shaeffer and Lorraine Quarrles arrive, obviously drunk, bearing a dinner invitation for Charlie. Their arrival frightens the children and shocks Marion, who associates Charlie with their loutishness and instantly reverses her decision to trust Charlie with his daughter.
After the incident, Charlie retreats to the Ritz bar, where he runs into Paul, the owner. Their exchange provides the final, revealing gloss on the story:
“It’s a great change,” [Paul] said sadly. “We do about half the business we did. So many fellows I hear about back in the States lost everything, maybe not in the first crash, but then in the second. Your friend George Hardt lost every cent I hear. Are you back in the States?”
“No, I’m in business in Prague.”
“I heard that you lost a lot in the crash.”
“I did,” and he [Charlie] added grimly, “but I lost everything I wanted in the boom.”
“Selling short?”
“Something like that.” 66
Short selling is an investing strategy that profits from a drop in the price of a stock. For example, say a stock is trading at $10 per share. A short seller will borrow 100 shares of that stock from a broker, agree to pay the shares back to the broker in, say, a month, then immediately sell the shares for $1,000. In a month, if the price of the stock has dropped to $8, the short seller buys 100 shares for $800, returns the shares to the broker, and has pocketed $200. If, however, the price of the stock rises to $11, the speaker must buy 100 shares for $1,100, and he is out $100. In a booming market, when most or all stocks rise, it is a losing strategy.
Charlie does lose everything selling short, but not quite in the sense that Paul means. He has a different kind of asset in mind than stocks. Charlie lost a lot of money in the crash, but he lost everything he wanted—his wife and, especially, his daughter—in the boom. In the delirium of the boom, that is, Charlie thought the value of his wife and daughter would drop or, at least, not rise. They did not matter to him then, and he could not ever imagine them mattering to him. When he chose, when he was done with his life of dissipation and irresponsibility, he could buy them back and still come out ahead—that is, he could short sell them. But their price did not drop. It rose. So much so that now he cannot reacquire them for love or money. His wife is dead, and he has given up custody of his daughter with no prospect of reclaiming her.
Not for nothing, then, does Charlie fantasize about a return to “character.” Early in the story, at dinner with Honoria, he feels a “great wave of protectiveness” go over him. “He thought he knew what to do for her. He believed in character; he wanted to jump back a whole generation and trust in character again as the eternally valuable element. Everything else wore out.”67 According to Charlie’s logic, the problem with his generation is its lack of character, its penchant for stealing tricycles or getting in drunken fights that result in accidental deaths. That may be true, but it subtly implies that the ills of an entire generation—including the Great Depression—result from a lack of character. Conversely, it suggests that those same ills might be solved through a reassertion of character. Just as the United States was debating ending the real gold standard, Charlie believes it would—or should—adopt another: “the eternally valuable element” of character. Such moralizing recalls Andrew Mellon’s inference that the Depression was brought on in part by “high living,” or E.W. Crowell’s assertion that God is judging America for its sins.
Whether and to what extent Fitzgerald shares Charlie’s belief in character as an explanation of the ills of the present does not matter all that much—though it would be in keeping with Fitzgerald’s self-assessment of himself as a “moralist.” At the least, Fitzgerald must have known it would appeal to the readers of the Saturday Evening Post. In the same issue that “Babylon Revisited” appeared, the editors published an unsigned editorial (“The Dole Evil”) arguing against the federal government providing relief for the needy because doing so would undermine “responsibility,” both of the poor who receive relief funds and of the wealthy who would feel relieved of their responsibility to take care of the poor.68
In “Babylon Revisited,” responsibility is synonymous with character, and an appeal to virtues like responsibility or character during the Great Depression signaled, as the editors of the Saturday Evening Post understood, a certain attitude toward it.69 According to this view, irresponsibility and lack of character caused the Great Depression, and a return to responsibility and character would solve it. To be sure, unlike fundamentalists or the liquidationists, Fitzgerald never explicitly states that the crash and depression were judgments for living “utterly irresponsibly,” as Charlie puts it—but Fitzgerald nevertheless implies as much on every page. He has turned Lost Generation dissipation into an economic morality tale.
Consider his title. In Revelation, that favorite book of the Bible for fundamentalists, Babylon is “the great city which rules over the kings of the earth,” until, that is, God judges and punishes it for its sins.70 “[H]er sins are heaped high as heaven,” the author explains, “and God has remembered her iniquities.”71 Revelation also outlines the retributive justice that fundamentalists and economists alike used to describe the Great Depression: “As she glorified herself and lived luxuriously, so give her a like measure of torment and grief.”72 The same could be said of Charlie. During the boom, he glorified himself and lived luxuriously. After the crash, he must receive equal parts torment and grief. But having so suffered and repented, he can now cast judgment on the wicked whom he has left behind: queens who establish themselves in the corners of bars and exiles who refuse to grow up, all of whom, somehow, have brought the Great Depression upon themselves and others.
To be sure, not everyone in the 1930s viewed the Great Depression as righteous punishment for American sins, whether moral, economic, or both. Christian sermons, the oral histories of ordinary people during the Great Depression, the fireside chats of Franklin Roosevelt, or the proletarian fiction of the day reveal much more sympathy for the victims of the Great Depression than righteous judgment—though the proletarian fiction (and the fireside chats, for that matter) are not without their own kind of righteousness. Even so, the righteous view of the Great Depression had many and various believers. John Maynard Keynes had these believers in mind when, in one of his first written responses to the Great Depression, “An Economic Analysis of Unemployment,” published in 1931, the same year as “Babylon Revisited,” he warned against the tendency to see the Depression as the logical and necessary reaction to the boom. “It seems an extraordinary imbecility,” he wrote,
that this wonderful outburst of productive energy should be the prelude to impoverishment and depression. Some austere and puritanical souls regard it both as an inevitable and a desirable nemesis on so much overexpansion, as they call it; a nemesis on man's speculative spirit. It would, they feel, be a victory for the mammon of unrighteousness if so much prosperity was not subsequently balanced by universal bankruptcy. We need, they say, what they politely call a “prolonged liquidation” to put us right. The liquidation, they tell us, is not yet complete. But in time it will be. And when sufficient time has elapsed for the completion of the liquidation, all will be well with us again.73
For the most part, Keynes won this argument. With the exception of the scarce remaining Marxist economists, today few mainstream economists view “impoverishment and depressions” as inevitable, and fewer still as desirable. Still, as the recent Great Recession shows, with its outbursts against subsidizing “the losers’ mortgages” and its solemn talk of the need for austerity after so much profligacy, the punitive view of depressions and recessions continues to attract converts, perhaps because it appeals to our righteous, if mistaken, belief in a just world, the view that people—and nations—reap what they sow. If something bad happens, like a depression, it must have happened because of something bad we—or, more often, someone else—did.74 In ordinary times, a righteous belief in a just world can be a dangerous illusion. In times of mass suffering, however, it can turn into an economic and moral disaster. At best, it can lead to inaction. At worst, it can lead people to justify others’ suffering.
My point is not that recklessness and misbehavior do not happen or do not have broad economic implications. (The deliberate mislabeling of subprime mortgage-backed collateralized debt obligations that led to the near collapse of the financial sector in 2008 comes to mind.) Nor is it that such behavior should go unpunished. Nor, finally, do I think human beings will rid themselves of the ugly emotion of righteousness any time soon. Even warnings against righteousness like Keynes’s (or this one) smuggle in their own sort of righteousness. Rather, my point is righteousness, by justifying misfortune, risks turning the economy into a morality tale when it is no such thing.
If not a morality tale, then what kind of story does the economy tell? Here too Keynes helps. His great insight is that the economy is more like an occasionally balky machine than a vengeful God. It can be tinkered with, and perhaps even tuned to accord with whatever sense of fairness and justice we can agree to. The economy does not, however, have a moral life of its own. It does not punish sin, decadence, or debased character.75 Then and now, economies crash because opportunities for investment recede, aggregate demand falls, and unemployment rises, which makes everything worse. As everyone, even Doremus Jessup, should now know, economies do not crash because they have punishments to dole out or moral weights to balance.
The Emotional Life of the Great Depression. John Marsh, Oxford University Press (2019).
© John Marsh. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198847731.001.0001