chapter 1
3. Hickok,
One Third of a Nation, 14.
10. Schlesinger,
The Coming of the New Deal, 43.
11. “Farm War On; Milk to Go Up,”
Chicago Tribune, Sep. 14, 1933.
12. “Nebraska Joins North Dakota in Fight on NRA,”
Chicago Tribune, October 20, 1933.
16. Hickok,
One Third of a Nation, 55–7.
18. Ibid., 60–1. The relief investigator whom Hickok had accompanied to the house asked the mother about her bedding: “She hesitated for a moment and then led us upstairs. One bed. A filthy, ragged mattress. Some dirty pillows. She said the last of her sheets gave out two years ago. On the bed two worn and dirty flannel blankets, just rags. That was all. ‘Do you and your husband and the
children all sleep together?’ the investigator asked. ‘We have to,’ she replied simply, ‘to keep warm.’”
21. Andrew M. Colman, “Emotional Intelligence,” in
A Dictionary of Psychology, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
22. Hickok,
One Third of a Nation, 93.
24. Others at the time offered the same comparison. In the “Persons and Places” section at the beginning of
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee lists himself as “a spy, traveling as a journalist” and Walker Evans as a “counter-spy, traveling as a photographer.”
28. Hopkins,
Spending to Save, 111.
30. Hickok,
One Third of a Nation, 91.
36. Ahamed,
Lords of Finance, 6.
41. The sentence invokes the title of another famous book about the decade, this one by the economist Peter Temin. See
Lessons from the Great Depression (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).
42. This sentence invokes the title of an earlier book by Eichengreen. See
Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
49. Of recent books published on the Great Depression, the closest to what I offer here is probably
Morris Dickstein’s Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (New York: Norton, 2009). I share Dickstein’s obvious love for the decade, and his effort to understand it by examining what people read, listened to, and watched. But in this book I choose a wider lens than Dickstein does, both in the range of emotions I explore and the objects I use to document those emotions. Unlike Dickstein, that is, I do not focus exclusively on Depression culture and its major players—important as those are—but instead include lesser known but, I would argue, no less important events and players. Nowhere, for example, does Dickstein—or, in his defense, anyone else really—mention polio or infectious diseases, surely one of the most important everyday fears in the Great Depression. And in
Dancing in the Dark, Superman gets only a passing reference. So too Dale Carnegie’s best-selling
How to Win Friends and Influence People. To my mind, these experiences and texts belong to our history of the Great Depression at least as much as
Citizen Kane. I do not mean to single out Dickstein’s book. No writer can do everything. But I believe that when it comes to the Great Depression, at this point the challenge is to make it new, and one way to do that is to take a new approach to it—say, the emotions—and to examine experiences and sources that have thus far gone understudied. In other words, I hope that the people, events, and texts at the heart of my study do not just add detail to a familiar story but, rather, bring a familiar story to life.
50. Those in the grip of righteousness do not consider it a negative emotion, but I consider it one of the worst. Beginning the book with righteousness offers the advantage, too, of not starting with panic, which, given the stock market crash that supposedly set it off, is how one might be tempted to begin a history of the Great Depression. In the hope of offering a slightly different perspective on the period, I begin with righteousness.
51. For relatively recent and relevant but nonetheless differing approaches to the literature of the Great Depression, see
Michael Szalay’s New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000),
Mark W. Van Wienen’s American Socialist Triptych: The Literary-Political Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair, and W.E.B. Du Bois (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), and
Joseph B. Entin’s Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). Entin, in particular, has indirectly taken up the question of emotion (especially astonishment) in the modernist-inflected literature and photography of the Great Depression.
53. Allen selects this date.
55. See
Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987);
Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), and
Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1994). In this book I also follow the by now standard distinction between affect and emotion. “Feelings are
personal and
biographical, emotions are
social, and affect is
prepersonal,” Eric Shouse writes in “Feeling, Emotion, Affect,” which is a good start at definitions, if by prepersonal—as Shouse does—one means preconscious. The classic theoretical work on affect remains
Brian Massumi’s, Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), especially the first chapter. On the political stakes of recent work in affect and the emotions, I recommend
Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37 (2011): 434–72. Eric Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect,”
M/C Journal 8.6 (2005), accessed March 14, 2018,
http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php.
57. A third possibility, of course, is that writers neither exclusively perceive nor project but also persuade. That is, readers may come to feel, if they did not
before, the emotions that writers describe or, as I argue of the Kalar poem, to have their existing, muddled feelings clarified for them.
60. Hickok,
One Third of a Nation, 137.
61. Golay,
America 1933, 254.
62. Hickok,
One Third of a Nation, 216.
Chapter 2
4. My allusion notwithstanding, righteousness differs from the set of ugly feelings described by Sianne Ngai in her book of the same name. In that book, Ngai emphasizes that ugly feelings like envy or irritation “evoke pain or displeasure” and, thus, few enjoy experiencing them. By contrast, righteousness evokes, if not always pleasure, then at least contentment. In any case, few would wish it away. That said, like the other ugly feelings Ngai examines, righteousness in the context of the Great Depression also raises the question of action or inaction. Although not an ugly feeling per se, when it comes to economic
policy, righteousness, as I show, can generate a harmful sort of inaction. As to why affect theorists—and, more specifically, scholars of the emotions—have neglected righteousness in particular and religion, especially Christianity, in general, perhaps affect theorists tend to worry most about political life under late capital, and religion may not seem relevant—or congenial—to the arguments they wish to make. Less charitably, perhaps affect theorists tend to write about subjects that preoccupy them, and in the largely secular world of the humanities, religion does not. To her credit, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick briefly considers Buddhism in the closing pages of
Touching Feeling.
5. “Gunman Lays Act to Body ‘Torment,’”
New York Times, February 16, 1933.
6. “Zangara Receives 80-Year Sentence,”
New York Times, February 21, 1933.
7. “Zangara Defiant in Plea of Guilty,”
New York Times, March 10, 1933.
8. “Zangara Executed for Killing Cermak,”
New York Times, March 21, 1933.
23. Dwight Morrow, the New Jersey candidate for the senate in 1930, expressed a similar sentiment. As Edmund Wilson quoted him, “There is something about
too much prosperity that ruins the fiber of the people. The men and women who built this country, that founded it, were people who were reared in adversity.” “In the cold weather,” Wilson ironically remarked of Morrow’s speech, “it is reassuring to remind oneself that the men in the breadlines, the men and women beggars in the streets, and the children dependent on them, are all having their fiber hardened.” As Wilson also reminded his readers, fewer Americans suffered from prosperity than either Mellon or Morrow seemed to think. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, Wilson tells us, at the height of the pre-Crash peak, “perhaps two thirds of the families in America were very badly off indeed.” Wilson,
The American Earthquake, 170–1.
24. Hoover,
The Memoirs, 31.
25. On the moral economy of Schumpeter in particular and the liquidationist school in general, see J. Bradford DeLong “ ‘Liquidation’ Cycles: Old-Fashioned Real Business Cycle Theory and the Great Depression,”
National Bureau of Economic Research, accessed December 11, 2015,
http://www.nber.org/papers/w3546.
26. Douglas Vincent Brown, preface to Joseph Schumpeter, Economics of the Recovery Program (New York: Whittlesey, 1934), vii.
27. Schumpeter, “Depressions,” in
Economics of the Recovery Program, 13–14.
31. Hoover,
The Memoirs, 31.
32. Schumpeter,
Economics of the Recovery Program, 20.
33. DeLong, “Liquidation Cycles,” 33.
36. Quoted in Carpenter,
Revive Us Again, 94.
38. Quoted in Carpenter,
Revive Us Again, 106.
39. Quoted in Carpenter,
Revive Us Again, 65.
40. The Carter Family,
The Best of the Carter Family: 20th Century Masters The Millennium Collection, MCA Nashville, track 5, compact disc, 2005.
42. Quoted in Sutton, “Was FDR the Antichrist?”, 1062.
57. Two of the main characters from both
Be Thou Prepared and
They That Remain are small businessmen (grocers), and both are squeezed by the rise of chain stores and government pricing schemes, until the day of the rapture when, since both have been born again, they are released from such cares. In
Be Thou Prepared, the narrator explains, shortly after the rapture, that “All of those who had believed in Christ were now released from other worries, poverty, sickness, disease and all other irritating thorns, which included mortgages, taxation and loss of material possessions.” Oiler,
Be Thou Prepared, 97.
58. Numerous scholars have explored Fitzgerald’s arguably best and, in any case, frequently anthologized short story. John Higgins, John Kuehl, and Bryant Mangum discuss the story in their book-length studies of Fitzgerald’s short fiction, as does Ruth Prigozy, who places it in the context of the Great Depression. More recently, Terrell L. Tebbetts has argued that Charlie fails to get what he wants—Honoria most of all—because he conceives of his past, his character, and his daughter in coldly economic terms.
68. “The Dole Evil,”
Saturday Evening Post, February 21, 1931, 20.
69. In one his first reflections following the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, George Horace Lorimer, editor of the
Saturday Evening Post, wrote that “We have had our period of living by bread alone and we need much more than that—less sectionalism, more neighborliness; less greed, more friendly competition;
less intolerance and more understanding.” No doubt America then and now could use more of such virtues and less of such vices, but in appealing to them Lorimer suggests that virtues and vices—and not, say, levels of investment and debt—led the country into depression and could lead it out again.
74. Again, consider Rick Santelli, whose nationally broadcast rant from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade in 2009 is credited with starting the Tea Party movement. Commenting on a federal program to help homeowners avoid foreclosure, Santelli proclaimed “This is America!” and asked traders, “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise their hands.” The traders boo.
75. For a contemporary—and admittedly more sophisticated—argument that it does and will, see David A. Stockman’s recent book The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America (New York: Public Affairs, 2013).
Chapter 3
2. H.G. Welles, “War of the Worlds,” in Cantril,
The Invasion from Mars, 6. Cantril reproduces the text of Welles’s radio play.
4. Cantril,
The Invasion from Mars, 168.
9. Ibid., 169. By turning off the radio, Robbins missed the Martians’ merciless attack on New York City, and the additional Martian cylinders that fell all over the country: Buffalo, Chicago, St. Louis.
11. “Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact,”
New York Times, October 31, 1938.
12. “Fake Radio ‘War’ Stirs Terror Through U.S.,”
New York Daily News, October 31, 1938.
15. North Carolina
News and Observer.
18. Michael J. Socolow, “The Hyped Panic over ‘War of the Worlds,’”
Chronicle Review, October 24, 2008, 16.
21. Cantril,
The Invasion from Mars, 117.
23. Pooley and Socolow, “Checking Up on
The Invasion from Mars,” 1935.
24. Cantril,
The Invasion from Mars, 202.
26. Specifically, at 1:30 p.m., Richard Whitney, then vice-president of the New York Stock Exchange and a trader for the powerful J.P. Morgan bank, appeared on the scene. Acting on the bankers’ behalf, and with their money, he strode onto the floor of the stock exchange and bid 205 for 10,000 shares of U.S. Steel, several points higher than current bids. He made his way around the exchange offering similarly confident bids for other blue-chip stocks. Whitney, and the bankers who backed him, are often credited with ending the panic, albeit temporarily.
27. Quoted in Galbraith,
The Great Crash 1929, 106.
28. In September 1929, after the investor Roger Babson told the
New York Times that “sooner or later a crash is coming,” Fisher insisted in an article printed beneath Babson’s prediction that “stock prices are not too high and Wall Street will not experience anything in the nature of a crash.” “Babson Predicts ‘Crash’ in Stocks,”
New York Times, September 6, 1929.
29. “Time will tell,” he added, “whether the increase [in earnings] will continue sufficiently to justify the present high level. I expect that it will.” In the question and answer session that followed his speech, Fisher abandoned his usual qualifications. He said that he expected “to see the stock market a good deal higher than it is today, within a few months.” A week later, on October 22, 1929, after the market had already begun to wane, Fisher reiterated his optimistic outlook, this time in front of a meeting of the New York Credit Men’s Association. The headline in the
New York Times read: “Fisher Says Prices of Stocks Are Low”; the subheadline read “Quotations Have Not Caught Up with Real Values Yet, He Declares.”
“Fisher Sees Stocks Permanently High,”
New York Times, October 16, 1929 and “Fisher Says Prices of Stocks Are Low,”
New York Times, October 22, 1929.
30. “Says Stock Slump Is Only Temporary,”
New York Times, October 24, 1929.
32. Quoted in Galbraith,
The Great Crash 1929, 146.
37. Fisher,
The Stock Market Crash—and After, 269.
38. One way to answer the question of whether a stock is cheap or expensive is the price-earnings (P/E) ratio, which is the price of a company’s stock divided by that company’s earnings. After all, a share of a company’s stock simply represents a claim on the total value of that company, which its earnings more or less approximate. So, for example, if a stock trades at $50 per share, and over the last ten years it has averaged $2 in earnings per share, then its P/E ratio would be 25 (50 divided by 2). The same calculation can be performed for the market as a whole, where the numerator is the average price of shares and the denominator is the average combined earnings per share. From 1871 to today, the P/E ratio for stocks in Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 largest companies has averaged 16 or 17. In December 1921, during the nadir of the post-war recession, the P/E ratio for the S&P 500 stood at 5. Assuming future earnings matched or exceeded past earnings, stocks were very cheap indeed; the cheapest, in fact, they had ever been. And so they proved. Over the next eight years, the stock market boomed. The Dow Jones Industrial Average went from 67 on September 1, 1921 to, as I have said, 381 on September 3, 1929. More importantly, over the same period the P/E ratio for the S&P 500 went from 5 in 1921 to 33 in 1929. Its previous high had been 25, achieved in 1901, after which it fell and fell until it bottomed out in 1921. After 1929, the P/E ratio would not return to 33 until 1997, from which it would rise to 44, until it all came crashing down when the dot.com bubble burst in 2000.
The P/E ratio is not a crystal ball. It can only indicate very generally the price of stocks relative to earnings relative to other moments in economic history. But then or now, a P/E ratio of 33, where it was in 1929, is high. Alarm bells high. In their revered 1934 book of investment theory, Security Analysis, Benjamin Graham and David L. Dodd suggested that “about sixteen times average earnings is as high a price as can be paid in an investment purchase of a common stock.” They added a corollary: “people who habitually purchase common stocks at more than about sixteen times their average earnings are likely to lose considerable money in the long run.” When, as was the case in 1929, the P/E ratio for the S&P 500 was twice what Graham and Dodd describe as “the upper limit” of this multiplier, stocks were almost certainly overpriced. Fisher, of course, disagreed. He thought the promise of higher earnings justified higher P/E ratios. See Benjamin Graham and David L. Dodd, Security Analysis (New York: Whittlesey House, 1934), 453, emphasis in original. For historical P/E ratios, see “Shiller P/E Ratio,” accessed March 12, 2018, http://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe/.
39. Fisher,
The Stock Market Crash—and After, 95.
42. Less the interest my broker or lender charges me, of course.
44. Quoted in Fisher,
The Stock Market Crash—and After, 44. In other words, as James K. Galbraith glossed this passage in
The Great Crash 1929, the mob “didn’t sell. It got sold out,” 146.
45. Fisher,
The Stock Market Crash—and After, 44.
46. Irving Fisher, “The Stock Market Panic,”
Journal of the American Statistical Association, 25 (1930): 94.
47. Fisher,
Booms and Depressions, 90.
48. Fisher,
The Stock Market Crash—and After, 264.
52. That is not to say, however, that emotions, including panic, never influence the stock market. As Robert J. Shiller showed in his definitive study of the 1987 stock market crash, they almost certainly do. Markets are efficient, except when they are not. See Schiller, “Investor Behavior in the October 1987 Stock Market Crash: Survey Evidence,” NBER Working Papers (1987),
http://www.nber.org/papers/w2446.pdf.
53. No one could not sweet talk capitalists out of their pessimism, but the federal government could prime the economy and, acting as the investor of last resort, compel capitalists to invest in the economy lest they leave money on the table, which they are loathe to do.
65. Roth,
The Great Depression, 32.
74. “Will Rogers Claps Hands for the President’s Speech,”
New York Times, March 14, 1933.
78. Roosevelt, “Fireside Chat on Banking.”
80. Roosevelt, “Fireside Chat on Banking.”
109. In that famous scene, West writes:
There was another wild surge forward that ended in another dead spot. [Tod] now faced a young girl who was sobbing steadily. Her silk print dress had been torn down the front and her tiny brassiere hung from one strap. He tried by pressing back to give her room, but she moved with him every time he moved. Now and then, she would jerk violently and he wondered if she was going to have a fit. One of her thighs was between his legs. He struggled to get free of her, but she clung to him, moving with him and pressing against him.
She turned her head and said, “Stop, stop,” to someone behind her.
He saw what the trouble was. An old man, wearing a Panama hat and horn-rimmed glasses, was hugging her. He had one of his hands inside her dress and was biting her neck.
Tod fights off her attacker, but it is not long before he too succumbs to the social contagion of the crowd. A policeman rescues him from the riot, but on the drive home Tod seems to lose whatever of his individual consciousness remains. In the closing lines of the novel, he gleefully imitates the police siren. Nathanael West, Day of the Locust (1939; repr. New York: New Directions, 2009), 173.
110. Wright,
Native Son, 303–4.
112. Wright, “How Bigger Was Born,” 455.
113. In
Native Son, Wright has a journalist write of Bigger, “All in all, he seems a beast utterly untouched by the softening influences of modern civilization.” In reality, in 1938 a journalist had written of Robert Nixon in
The Chicago Tribune: “civilization has left Nixon practically untouched” and “his physical characteristics suggest an earlier link in the species.” Wright,
Native Son, 280
and Charles Leavelle, “Brick Slayer Is Likened to Jungle Beast,”
Chicago Tribune, June 5, 1938.
114. Wright,
Native Son, 388.
Chapter 4
2. Quoted in Badal,
In the Wake of the Butcher, 92.
4. William Miller, “Fear Hangs over Kingsbury Run Where Butcher Leaves His Dead,”
Cleveland Press, September 11, 1934.
7. “Girl, 14, Dies of Poliomyelitis,”
New York Times, March 30, 1931.
8. “City’s Health Good, Dr. Wynne Reports,”
New York Times, January 1, 1931.
9. “Give Paralyzed Child Oxygen for 24 Hours,”
New York Times, June 19, 1931.
10. “Child Dies in Respirator after 60 Hours,”
New York Times, June 21, 1931.
11. “Stricken Boy Saved by ‘Mechanical Lung,’”
New York Times, June 17, 1931.
12. “Connecticut Cities Combat Paralysis,”
New York Times, July 19, 1931.
13. “Fight Infantile Paralysis,”
New York Times, July 18, 1931.
14. “Warns on Infant Paralysis,”
New York Times, July 25, 1931.
16. “Disease Baffles Scientists,”
New York Times, August 12, 1931.
17. Robert Kingman, “Infantile Paralysis a Medical Mystery,”
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 11, 1931. The
Brooklyn Daily Eagle covered the polio outbreak as well, though not in as much depth as the
Times.
18. “Open Fight to Stop Paralysis,”
New York Times, July 28, 1931.
19. “53 New Cases Here of Paralysis in Day,”
New York Times, September 3, 1931.
20. “Wynne Offers Aid on Child Paralysis,”
New York Times, August 2, 1931.
21. “Family’s Distress Grows,”
New York Times, August 8, 1931.
22. “Doctors Map Fight as Paralysis Gains,”
New York Times, August 6, 1931.
23. “Paralysis in City Again Shows Rise,”
New York Times, August 14, 1931.
24. “87 Paralysis Cases in Week-End Here,”
New York Times, August 18, 1931.
25. “Peak of Paralysis Past, Says Wynne,”
New York Times, August 19, 1931.
26. “City Schools Delay Opening until Sept. 22 as Dr. Wynne Acts to Curb Infantile Paralysis,”
New York Times, September 1, 1931.
27. “53 New Cases Here of Paralysis In Day,”
New York Times, September 3, 1931.
28. “Paralysis Recedes with Cool Weather,”
New York Times, September 22, 1931.
29. “Infant Death Toll at New Low Here,”
New York Times, January 2, 1932.
30. “Paralysis Deaths Far Below 1916 Rate,”
New York Times, July 30, 1931.
31. “Slight Drop Seen in Paralysis Here,”
New York Times, August 7, 1931.
32. Gareth Williams, Paralysed with Fear: The Story of Polio (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), xv. Exhibit A in this indictment is
In Daily Battle, a short film financed by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis that “invaded” American cinemas in 1947. In the film, weird, ominous music plays as clouds darken the sun. A colossal shadow bearing a crutch steals across the landscape and soon engulfs a group of boys swimming in a lake. A sinister voice straight from the horror movies then intones, “My name is Virus Poliomyelitis. I specialize in grotesques, twisting and deforming human bodies. That’s why I’m called ‘the crippler.’ ” After this introduction, the shadow overtakes a farm boy, who falls desperately to the ground. “That is what I’ve been looking for,” the crippler exults. Next, three African-American children appear playing outside a tenement. “As you probably know,” the voice of the shadow whispers, “I am very fond of children, especially little children.” In subsequent scenes, the crippler attacks a man with a briefcase and a schoolgirl walking down her front steps. In theaters across the country, the film would be shown before the feature and volunteers from the March of Dimes would then circulate through the house collecting donations.
33. “Children under 6 Lead in Paralysis,”
New York Times, September 4, 1931.
36. Ehrenreich,
Fear of Falling, 15.
38. For those unfamiliar with the literature, I would recommend two works: Edmund Wilson’s “A Bad Day in Brooklyn,” which appeared in the April 22, 1931 issue of the
New Republic and in his collection of Depression-era journalism,
The American Earthquake; and Tom Kromer’s
Waiting for Nothing, which I discuss, briefly, in
Chapter 5.
49. Wight Bakke,
The Unemployed Worker, 114.
57. Hickok,
One Third of a Nation, 143.
66. Creeps by Night: Chills and Thrills, ed. Dashiell Hammett (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1944) and
Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, eds. Phyllis Cerf Wagner and Herbert Wise (1944; reprint, New York: Random House, 1994).
67. Edmund Wilson, “A Treatise on Tales of Horror,”
New Yorker, May 27, 1944, 72.
69. “The true weird tale,” he wrote, “has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.” For
Weird Tales, see Ed Hulse’s chapter on “Horror and Fantasy” in
The Blood and Thunder Guide to Pulp Fiction (Morris Plains: Murania Press, 2013), 192–225 and relevant entries in
Lee Server, Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers (New York: Facts on File/Checkmark Books, 2002).
70. Wilson, “A Treatise on Tales of Horror,” 72.
72. Edmund Wilson, “Tales of the Marvellous and Ridiculous,”
New Yorker, November 24, 1945, 100.
76. The story, written in 1931 but not published until 1936, features Lovecraft’s stock narrator, an antiquarian with an interest in the occult, who visits Innsmouth, a decaying town on the coast of Massachusetts, and discovers its horrible secret. In the eighteenth century, a sea captain from the town, Obed Marsh, makes a bargain with an underwater race of creatures called the Deep Ones—part fish, frog, and man—in which the creatures will provide him with fish and jewels and Marsh will provide them with human sacrifices. Eventually, the Deep Ones demand more. They wish to mate with humans and in time force the residents of Innsmouth to comply. Hence the “Innsmouth type”: human enough, but with disturbing suggestions of fish and frog, including “a perpetual odour of fish” and, as with the young woman Edward Derby marries, Asenath Waite, “overprotuberant eyes.” That is the downside. The upside is that offspring of the interspecies coupling eventually transform more fully into Deep Ones and take to the sea, where they enjoy a kind of underwater immortality.
H.P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” in The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, 866–923.
77. Lovecraft, “The Thing on the Doorstep,” 997.
90. Michel Houellebecq,
H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, against Life, trans. Dorna Khazeni (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), 32.
91. H.P. Lovecraft, “The Music of Erich Zann,” in
The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, 153.
93. Lovecraft, “The Thing on the Doorstep,” 1002.
97. The weird fiction of the 1930s often generates fear by depicting similar assaults upon the body and human autonomy. Of only the most frequently anthologized, Henry S. Whitehead’s “Passing of a God,” which appeared in
Weird Tales in 1931, tells the story of an expatriate in Haiti whose “malignant bodily growth” on his abdomen turns out to house a nascent, malevolent god, which, when removed by a surgeon, opens its eyes. In Robert Bloch’s “The Cloak,” published in the rival weird fiction pulp
Unknown in 1939, a mere article of clothing can turn one into a vampire. And in John Collier’s “Evening Primrose,” from 1941, refugees from the Great Depression and previous economic catastrophes take shelter in a Macy’s-like department store, where those who threaten to reveal their presence are turned into mannequins by a group of Dark Men who have themselves taken refuge in funeral homes. Perhaps the best example, though, is Fritz Leiber’s 1941 classic “Smoke Ghost,” published just months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in which a composite of all the horrors of the times coalesce into a single grimy figure that menaces the narrator, a Chicago advertising executive. On the less literary end, in pulp stories no one has bothered to collect, things turn even more grotesque, especially as the decade proceeded, and more and more plots—and cover art—featured sadomasochistic villains torturing women.
102. Robert Anton Wilson,
Cosmic Trigger, Vol. 1, Final Secret of the Illuminati (San Francisco: And/Or Press, 1977; repr. Las Vegas: New Falcon Publications, 1991), 3.
Chapter 5
1. Henry Norris Russell, “Space as Yet Unfathomed,”
Scientific American, December 1, 1939, 374.
2. “Limits of Creation, in Light Years, Estimated at 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,”
New York Times, December 15, 1930.
3. Sir James Jeans, “Watching the Creation of the Stars,”
Scientific American, June 1, 1932, 345.
4. “Hubble Shows Scientists How the Universe Evolved,”
New York Times, May 8, 1939.
5. Henry Norris Russell, “Is Space Expanding?”
Scientific American, January 1, 1932, 15.
6. “Eddington Pictures Expanding Universe,”
New York Times, September 8, 1932.
7. George Lemaître, “The Beginning of the World from the Point of View of Quantum Theory,”
Nature, October 24, 1931, 324.
8. “Le Maitre Suggests One, Single, Great Atom, Embracing All Energy, Started the Universe,”
New York Times, May 19, 1931.
11. “A Prize for Lemaître,”
Literary Digest, March 31, 1934, 16.
12. Schopenhauer,
The World as Will and Representation, 205.
13. Witness the landscape photography of Ansel Adams, who had his most innovative and productive years during the 1930s; the continued popularity, despite the Depression, of tourist destinations like the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls; or, less agreeable, the wind storms and erosion that left dust piled as high as rooftops in the Plains states.
19. “Big Sunday Crowd Sees Empire Tower,”
New York Times, May 4, 1931.
20. Keltner and Haidt, “Approaching Awe,” 304.
22. Schopenhauer,
The World as Will and Representation, 205.
24. Curiously, the person who figures so prominently in Fitzgerald’s romance with the city when he first arrives, Edmund Wilson, also left an account of his visit to the observation deck of the Empire State Building when it opened in 1931. By then, Wilson was not a model bohemian intellectual but, as Fitzgerald ruefully observes in the closing lines of his essay, had “gone over to Communism.” That may explain why Wilson, unlike Fitzgerald, from atop the building does not see the limits of the city and the limits of his previous understanding of the city but rather a vista of poverty and human suffering. See Edmund Wilson, “May First: The Empire State Building: Life on the Passaic River,” in
The American Earthquake (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979), 292–303.
25. Keltner and Haidt, “Approaching Awe,” 306.
26. The playwright Edward Albee picked up on this phenomenon when he put a photograph of Roosevelt—next to Mahatma Gandhi—on the bookshelf of those marital cutthroats but political liberals George and Martha in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
27. Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man, ed. Robert McElvaine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 224.
30. “Personal Glimpses,”
Literary Digest, May 1931, 30.
31. C.G. Poore, “The Riveter’s Panorama of New York,”
New York Times, January 5, 1930.
36. Robert Doran, The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 254. For Kant, it should be added, strength, courage, and resistance do more than simply characterize the sublime. Truly exceptional displays of strength, courage, and resistance—which can terrify us in their sublimity—can inspire feelings of the sublime in us, assuming, that is, that we do not submit to those displays but overcome them ourselves.
40. Keltner and Haidt, “Approaching Awe,” 310.
41. The Grapes of Wrath, directed by John Ford (1940; Twentieth Century Fox).
42. Margaret Walker, “Lineage,” in For My People (1942; reprint New York: Arno Press, 1968), 7. Walker published
For My People in 1942, which falls outside the dates (1929–41) I use to bound the Great Depression. Poems from the collection, however, including the title poem, “The Struggle Staggers Us,” and “We Have Been Believers,” appeared in
Poetry in 1937, 1938, and 1939, respectively. I assume “Lineage” belongs to that group.
44. United States,
Farm Tenancy: Report of the President’s Committee (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1937), 25.
45. Ibid., iv. Except for migratory laborers like the Joads, those who worked for brief periods harvesting crops before moving on to the next harvest or the next crop, and who could be found everywhere but especially in the western states, the authors of
Farm Tenancy acknowledged that landlessness and the resulting insecurity—read poverty—mostly occurred in the South, where two out of every three tenant farmers in the country lived. Moreover, although the Midwest and West had its share of tenants, only in the South did the percentage of farmers
who did not own their land exceed those who did. Of the 3.422 million farmers in the South, over 1.831 million of them were tenants. In the Cotton Belt states of Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi, the rate of tenancy exceeded 60 percent and, in Mississippi, rose as high as 70 percent.
47. The authors of
Farm Tenancy reasoned that if the problem was farmers who did not own land, the solution lay in helping farmers acquire land, which the federal government would accomplish through a series of reforms: low-interest loans to those capable of owning a farm now; aid to tenants who, with guidance and education from federal extension agents, could after a year or several years responsibly own a farm; and the resettlement of tenants currently on depleted land to more promising homesteads, where they, too, might eventually own a farm. Whereas now comparatively few landlords owned a majority of the land on which a majority of farmers scratched out an insufficient living, eventually, or so the authors of
Farm Tenancy hoped, a majority of farmers would own their own farm, on which they would raise crops to eat and cash crops to sell. In short, the Jeffersonian ideal of prosperous, independent yeoman farmers would return. It did not work out that way.
57. Ibid., 182. In a long passage discussing tenant houses, for example, Agee observes that tenant houses do not differ all that much from southern company houses in mill towns. That fact alone, he writes, should warn us against focusing too much on tenantry as the problem. To do so anyway, he thinks, would be “dishonest or ridiculous, or in any case deceptive and dangerous.” “Dangerous” because “by wrong assignment of causes it persuades that the ‘cure’ is possible through means which in fact would have little effect save to delude the saviors into the comfortable idea that nothing more needed doing, or even looking-to.” And “deceptive because … these homes have more than less in common with the homes of the whole poorest class of
owning cotton farmers.” The “economic source,” he adds, “is nothing so limited as the tenant system but is the whole world-system of which tenantry is one modification; and there are in the people themselves, and in the land and climate, other sources quite as
powerful but less easy to define, far less to go about curing; and they are, to suggest them too bluntly, psychological, semantic, traditional, perhaps glandular.” In other words, as part of the whole world-system, tenantry may change, or we may succeed in changing tenantry, but the abuses associated with it will not change save the changing of the whole world-system. To be sure, well-thought-out liberal efforts of the sort suggested by the authors of
Farm Tenancy—having the government furnish sharecroppers at no interest or helping tenants acquire land—will help at the margins, but they will not fundamentally alter the conditions that inspired our sympathy in the first place. (Unless, that is, out of our desire to be done with the “unpleasant situation down South,” we deceive ourselves that, as Agee puts it, “nothing more needed doing.”) That is, if you think tenantry is the problem, Agee suggests, look at the lives of those who own their own farms rather than rent them, or those who live in company housing in nearby Southern mill towns, and say whether you would trade places with them. The problem, to put it another way, goes beyond sharecroppers, yet sympathy for sharecroppers may prevent us from seeing that.
58. In the Notes and Appendices section of the book, for example, Agee reprints a fluff article about Margaret Bourke-White that appeared in the
New York Post following the publication of
You Have Seen Their Faces. Discussing Erskine Caldwell’s new play,
Journeyman, which takes place in a church for poor whites in the South, Bourke-White observes:
The Negro churches are not, somehow, so shocking, because you think of Negroes as being actors and emotional, but with the white people the whole business is so sordid and desperate and out of place. It isn’t as though the church played any role, as we know religion. It’s just a place where people go to shout and scream and roll on the floor. They are so beaten down and their lives are so drab and barren and lonely that they have nothing. This terrible thing Sunday is their only release.
Many people who write about Let Us Now Praise Famous Men follow Agee in making Caldwell and, especially, Bourke-White, into villains, and I do not want to pile on, especially since, as I have written elsewhere, their approach has merit. Still, Bourke-White, who had a chance to view poverty not just at a distance but up close—or through a camera lens, anyway—should know better than to assert that their religion has nothing to do with hers or that the poor “have nothing.” No one doubts Bourke-White’s sympathy for sharecroppers, or her desire to do something for them, but her sympathy for them—as may sympathy in general—reduces them to their suffering and leads her into fatuous beliefs like the ones above.
70. Chadwick’s discovery laid the groundwork for the Manhattan Project, begun in 1939, which produced the first atom bomb, and which, in its capacity to literally reduce individuals and whole cities to nothing, proved to be perhaps the most terrifying instance of a midcentury sublime.
Chapter 6
1. “Queen Leaves Buckingham to Obey Tradition,”
Chicago Tribune, October 1, 1936.
2. “Mrs. Simpson, Friend of King, Seeks Divorce,”
Chicago Tribune, October 14, 1936. The article revealed that while Wallis might have cited adultery as the grounds of the divorce, the divide between her and Ernest came down to lifestyle. “It has long been known,” the Associated Press reported, “that the couple were at odds, chiefly because the sparkling mooded American girl preferred royal companionship to life with a workaday shipping broker husband.” Ernest, for his part, “dislikes the gay set in which his monarch travels and into which his lovely and lively American wife first won an introduction and then undisputed place as Edward’s closest woman friend and companion.”
3. “King To Marry Wally in Spring, Gossip in London,”
Chicago Tribune, October 25, 1936.
6. “Ex-Ruler Sails into Exile,”
Chicago Tribune, December 12, 1936.
7. Readers of the
Chicago Tribune need not have made the latter connection for themselves. On December 6, the
Tribune London correspondent published an article titled “Story of Modern Cinderella and Prince Charming.”
8. See Williams,
The People’s King, 1–14.
9. Gallup Organization, “Would You Like to Have King Edward Marry Mrs. Simpson?” Gallup Poll, November 1936, Cornell University, Ithaca: Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, iPOLL, accessed March 1, 2017. Many had apparently heard enough. Fifty-six percent also wanted newspapers to print less news about King Edward and Wallis Simpson: Gallup Organization, “Should Newspapers Print More or Less News about King Edward and Mrs. Simpson?” Gallup Poll, November 1936, Cornell University, Ithaca: Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, iPOLL, accessed March 1, 2017.
10. “Let King Marry Wally! Chicagoans Say 3 to 1 in Poll,”
Chicago Tribune, December 8, 1936.
11. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Marriages, Divorces, and Rates: United States, 1867–1967,” 100 Years of Marriage and Divorce Statistics, 1867–1967, table 1, page 22, accessed February 28, 2017,
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_21/sr21_024.pdf.
15. If I had more room, I would also include Nathaniel West’s
Miss Lonelyhearts. Although the novel is above all concerned with human suffering, surprisingly, for a work so closely associated with the Great Depression, more often than not the source of that human suffering is not poverty but love, its absence or corruption.
16. See Susan Broomhall, ed.,
Gender and Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Destroying Order, Structuring Disorder (London: Routledge, 2015).
18. In the uncensored version, the cobbler, wielding a copy of Nietzsche’s
Will to Power, does considerably less moralizing, or rather moralizing of a different sort. “[Y]ou must use men—not let them use you,” he tells her in lines cut from the theatrical release. “Exploit yourself!”
19. Just as earlier, in the speakeasy, the camera pans up from the bottom of Lily’s body to the top, showing us what the local politician sees when he looks at Lily, so too do we see what Lily sees when she looks at the bank: an object to be conquered. She has learned her lesson. Men lust after Lily, and Lily lusts after wealth and power, which she will win by exploiting the lust for her. And so she does.
20. Jacobs,
Wages of Sin, 76.
21. “A Woman’s Wiles,”
New York Times, June 24, 1933.
22. Jacobs,
Wages of Sin, 80–1.
23. Vieira,
Sin in Soft Focus, 220.
25. The following account relies on Jonathan Goodman,
The Passing of Starr Faithfull (1990; repr. Kent: Kent State University Press, 1996).
26. Quoted in Ibid., 216.
27. John O’Hara,
BUtterfield 8 (1935; repr. New York: Penguin, 2013), 66.
32. In his review of the novel (see below), Malcolm Cowley makes a similar point.
33. O’Hara,
BUtterfield 8, 181.
37. Although neither of the couples in those novels lives happily ever after, either.
42. Lorin Stein suggests as much in her introduction to the Penguin edition of the novel.
43. O’Hara,
BUtterfield 8, 234.
64. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Marriages, Divorces, and Rates: United States, 1867–1967.”
65. For the statistically minded, the r-squared value is .56731. I use the unemployment rate adjusted for federal work programs, though the unadjusted rates would not have changed the outcome much. See Darby, “Three-and-a-Half Million.”
66. Woodie Guthrie,
This Land Is Your Land: The Asch Recordings, Vol. 1, Smithsonian Folkways, track 3, compact disc, 2007.
73. Lewis,
It Can’t Happen Here, 105.
74. Quoted in Goodman,
The Passing of Starr Faithfull, 216.
77. See Bruce Smith,
The History of Little Orphan Annie (1982; New York: Ballantine Books, 1982).
80. Josiah Flint Willard, “Homosexuality among Tramps,” in Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds,
Sexual Inversion (1897; reprint New York: Arno Press/New York Times, 1975).
81. To clarify, we cannot know whether parents loved their children any less during the Great Depression. As the chapter on fear and polio make clear, it would seem they loved them as much as ever. There were simply fewer children, relatively speaking, around.
82. “To Our Readers,”
Catholic Worker, May 1933.
84. Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More Than One Hundred Men Have Recovered from Alcoholism (1939; Malo: Anonymous Press, 2008), 167.
86. Wild Boys of the Road, directed by William Wellman, in
Forbidden Hollywood Collection, Vol. 3 (1933; Burbank: Warner Home Video, 2009), DVD.
87. Woman Haters, directed by Archie Gottler, in
The Three Stooges Collection, Vol. 1: 1934–1936 (1934; Culver City: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2007), DVD.
90. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Marriages, Divorces, and Rates: United States, 1867–1967.”
94. Allen,
Since Yesterday, 76.
95. Dix,
How to Win and Hold a Husband, 81.
96. Ibid., 82. Moreover, “these girls do not realize that the kind of man who is willing to marry a girl without purity is the sort of man who is not fit for any girl to marry.” Ibid., 83.
100. In addition to Shirley Temple, other child stars had remarkable runs during the 1930s. A short list would include Bobby Breen, Mickey Rooney, Jane Withers, and Freddie Bartholomew.
102. Knight Jessee, “Extra Sheer,”
Love Story, March 10, 1934, 10.
Chapter 7
2. Figures slightly altered from the example given in Ibid., 180.
4. Allen,
Irving Fisher, 206.
6. Fisher,
The Stock Market Crash—and After, 53.
11. “Dow Jones: 100 Year Historical Chart.”
14. For his part, in a late October speech in Madison Square Garden, Hoover accused Roosevelt and the New Deal of inspiring false hope. Attacking Roosevelt and his plan for public works projects to combat unemployment, Hoover singled out the “promise to promote ‘employment for all surplus labor at all times’—by the Government.” “I at first could not believe that anyone would be so cruel as to hold out a hope so absolutely impossible of realization to those 10 million who are unemployed and suffering,” Hoover said. “But the authenticity of that promise has been verified. And I protest against such frivolous promises being held out to a suffering people.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Roosevelt and his vision of hope won out over Hoover and his stingy realism. Hoover, “Address at Madison Square Garden,” speech, New York City, October 31, 1932,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=23317.
15. See Darby, “Three-and-a-Half Million.”
18. Langston Hughes, “Ballad of Roosevelt,”
New Republic, November 14, 1934, 9.
19. Allen,
Irving Fisher, 10.
21. Isaac Asimov, “Liar!”
Astounding Science Fiction, May 1941, 45.
33. Walter B. Pitkin, Life Begins at Forty (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1934),
Dorothea Brande, Wake Up and Live! (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936), Carnegie,
How to Win Friends, Hillis,
Live Alone and Like It,
Irving Tressler, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (New York: Stackpole Sons, 1937),
Robert P. Crawford, Think for Yourself (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937),
Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich (1937; repr. New York: Tarcher and Perigree, 2016),
Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living (New York: John Day, 1937),
Norman Vincent Peale, The Art of Living (New York: Abingdon Press, 1937), Dix,
How to Win and Hold a Husband, Alcoholics Anonymous.
34. Margaret Case Harriman, “He Sells Hope,”
Saturday Evening Post, August 14, 1937, 12.
37. Harriman, “He Sells Hope,” 13.
38. Carnegie,
How to Win Friends, 43.
40. In 1922, Sinclair Lewis published
Babbitt, which satirized the conformity and hollowness of the American middle class, especially its businessmen. The novel primed Lewis to despise Carnegie. In two 1937
Newsweek columns devoted to
How to Win Friends and Influence People—one would not contain his contempt—Lewis dismissed Carnegie as the “Bard of Babbittry.” Carnegie, Lewis wrote, had achieved his own success by “telling people how to smile and bob and pretend to be interested in people’s hobbies precisely so that you may screw things out of them.” “Conceivably,” Lewis added, “one may sell 600,000 books and still be a failure.” Sinclair Lewis, “Car-Yes-Men,”
Newsweek, November 15, 1937, 31 and “One Man Revolution,”
Newsweek, November 22, 1937, 33.
41. Carnegie,
How to Win Friends, 126–8.
42. A reviewer for the
Nation wrote that Carnegie “has given us the best outline of the science of tail-wagging and hand-licking ever written.” Margaret Marshall, “Columnists on Parade,”
Nation, March 19, 1938, 328.
43. Carnegie,
How to Win Friends, 70.
44. Gordon Hutner,
What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 121.
46. Engels added, “the real motive forces impelling him [the thinker] remain unknown to him … Hence he imagines false or apparent motives.” Friedrich Engels, “Letter to Franz Mehring, July 14, 1893,” in
The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (1972; 2nd ed., New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 766.
47. Hutner,
What America Read, 122.
48. Watts,
Self-Help Messiah, 273.
49. Marshall, “Columnists on Parade,” 327. As for false consciousness, Marshall hit that note as well. “Carnegie has met a lot of rich men in his day,” she wrote.
“His rules for winning friends make it easy for him to get them to talk to him, and they have all told him the secret of their success, as rich men will. Inevitably, it has been some admirable talent for handling human relationships. Throw away your economic textbooks.”
50. Harriman, “He Sells Hope,” 12.
51. Carnegie,
How to Win Friends, 15.
55. See Darby, “Three-and-a-Half Million.”
56. “Candidates for the Best Seller List,”
Publisher’s Weekly, May 6, 1939, 40.
57. “Napoleon Hill is Dead at 87; Wrote Best-Seller on Success,”
New York Times, November 10, 1970.
58. Hill,
Think and Grow Rich, xv.
59. The publisher’s preface to the book, which seems likely to have been written by Hill since it proceeds in the same style of occasional CAPITAL LETTERS that Hill favors, mentions—in italics this time—that “
Riches cannot always be measured in money!” But little is heard on that score again. Rather, Hill offers anecdotes about how Carnegie believed his money-making formula “should be taught in all public schools and colleges” because “much of that which is taught in the schools is of no value whatsoever in connection with the business of earning a living or accumulating riches.” It seems not to have occurred to either Carnegie or Hill that not everything that goes on in schools has to connect to earning a living or accumulating riches. Still in the preface, Hill mentions a clergyman who used “the secret” “so effectively that it brought him an income of upwards of $75,000.00 a year.” No mention is made of how the priest can simultaneously serve God and Mammon. Ibid., 12, xvi, xvii.
60. Hill reproduces John Lowell’s
New York World-Telegram account.
61. Hill,
Think and Grow Rich, 78.
62. Ibid., xx. From the outset, the publisher’s preface warns readers to “be prepared, therefore, when you expose yourself to the influence of this philosophy, to experience a CHANGED LIFE which may help you not only to negotiate your way through life with harmony and understanding, but also to prepare you for the accumulation of material riches in abundance.” Ibid., xii–xiii.
65. In the introduction, Hill reprints a letter he received from one of his acolytes, Jennings Randolph, at the time a congressman from West Virginia. Randolph, who benefited from a commencement address Hill once gave, wrote Hill urging him to publish a book and share his wisdom with young people everywhere. Others, Randolph felt, would benefit as he did. “Millions of people are now facing the problem of staging a come-back, because of the depression,” Randolph wrote. “You know the problems of those who face the necessity of beginning all over again,” he added. “There are thousands of people in America
today who would like to convert ideas into money, people who must start at scratch, without finances, and recoup their losses. If anyone can help them, you can.” Ibid., 21.
74. Ibid., 14. “There are millions of people who BELIEVE themselves ‘doomed’ to poverty and failure, because of some strange force over which they BELIEVE they have no control,” Hill added. “They are the creators of their own ‘misfortunes,” Hill continues, “because of this negative BELIEF, which is picked up by the subconscious mind, and translated into its physical equivalent.” Ibid., 56.
79. Alcoholics Anonymous, vii.
80. The gendered pronoun misleads slightly. One of the testimonials in the book comes from a woman.
82. Alcoholics Anonymous, 1.
99. Ibid., italics in original.
101. “It is plain that a life which includes deep resentment leads only to futility and unhappiness.” That is no way of life for anyone, but “with the alcoholic whose hope is the maintenance and growth of a spiritual experience,” Wilson writes, “this business of resentment is infinitely grave. We found that it is fatal. For when harboring such feelings we shut ourselves off from the sunlight of the Spirit. The insanity of alcohol returns and we drink again. And with us, to drink is to die.” Ibid., 78.
104. Ibid., 10. Hence the very brief discussion of
Alcoholics Anonymous in
Chapter 6.
109. After “a year or so of the depression,” John O’Hara writes in
BUtterfield 8, “when they saw it was not a little thing that was going to pass, these men began taking stock of what life had given them or they had taken … Then a few men, a few million men, asked themselves whether the things they had bought ever had been worth what they paid for them. Ah! That was worth thinking about, worth buying heavy and expensive books to find out about.” See O’Hara,
BUtterfield 8, 28.
111. Alcoholics Anonymous, 80.
112. The echo of the theologian Reinhold Neibhur, who got his start in the 1930s, is deliberate.
114. If the United States needed a reminder that one cannot master fate, that black swans sometimes fly, it came out of the skies at Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941.
Chapter 8
1. The song, for which Guthrie wrote lyrics but no music, is undated, though it likely comes from the mid- to late 1930s. The lyrics refer to another unconventional pension scheme that arose in California in the 1930s, Ham and Eggs, which promised $30 every Thursday to every unemployed Californian. “Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust,” Woody Guthrie Publications,
http://woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Ashes_To_Ashes_Dust_To_Dust.htm.
3. Many of the terms used in the 1930s (the needy, the aged, old-age, crippled children, the blind) have, for good reasons, passed out of usage. I have chosen in this chapter to retain the terms, objectionable as they may be, on the grounds that introducing anachronisms is more objectionable still.
8. John E. Miller, “Townsend Plan.” Encyclopedia of the Great Depression, Vol. 2 (New York: Thomson Gale, 2004), 983. Edwin Amenta gives 1.5 to 2 million. Richard L. Neuberger and Kelley Loe cite at least 3 million. According to Miller, the organization claimed 3.5 million members.
Edwin Amenta, When Movements Matter: The Townsend Plan and the Rise of Social Security (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 116. Richard L. Neuberger and Kelley Loe, “The Old People’s Crusade,”
Harper’s, December 1935, 426.
10. Neuberger and Loe, “The Old People’s Crusade,” 426.
11. Amenta,
When Movements Matter, 74.
14. Economic Security Act: Hearings before the Committee on Ways and Means, House of Representatives (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1935), 680.
15. Gaydowski, “Eight Letters to the Editor,” 369. In his second letter, he warned, “Machines have supplanted muscle. Brains have supplanted brawn.” Ibid., 371. To the House Ways and Means Committee, he observed, “It is admitted by practically every student of today that the machines are constantly depriving men and women of the means of earning a livelihood. The day will surely come when machines will do practically all of the toil of the world.” By lowering the retirement age to match the number of those who lost jobs to machines, his plan, Townsend said, “is the only one so far submitted which will painlessly adjust humans to the inroads of the machine.” Ibid., 686.
17. Economic Security Act: Hearings before the Committee on Ways and Means, 680.
18. Gaydowski, “Eight Letters to the Editor,” 373.
19. I mention Father Divine later in the chapter, but here let me mention Father Charles Coughlin, whose radio show, broadcast from Detroit, reached millions. Coughlin began a proponent of the New Deal but over the course of the decade his views transformed into a nauseating blend of monetary reform, economic populism, anti-Semitism, isolationism, and outright sympathy for fascism. Huey
Long and his Share Our Wealth campaign, which, though less cockeyed than Townsend’s plan, also had its share of magical thinking. On
Father Coughlin and Huey Long, the best book remains Alan Brinkley’s Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Knopf, 1982).
20. The University of Wisconsin economist Edwin Witte, for example, produced a report for that group titled, unequivocally, “Why the Townsend Old Age Plan Is Impossible.” Witte calculated that funding the Townsend Plan would require the federal government to collect two to three times as much in taxes as federal, state, and local governments together collected for all of 1932. Moreover, it would require not a 2 percent tax on transactions but a 6 percent one, which would lead to runaway inflation. And all that assumed that one could successfully administer the plan. Witte had his doubts. How would the federal government make sure the more than 2 million places of business in the United States paid every tax on every transaction they made? And how would the federal government check to make sure that each of the 10 million pensioners had spent their $200 within thirty days? The administrative complexities, however, paled before the sheer daftness of the plan. Witte concluded that the “inflation and duplicate taxation involved in the Townsend Plan will cause prices to soar and soon, even with the $200 per month, the pensioners will not be better off than they were before, while those below 60 will be immeasurably worse off.” Edward Witte, “Why the Townsend Old Age Plan Is Impossible,” Social Security Administration,
https://www.ssa.gov/history/reports/ces/ces2witte6.html.
21. Neuberger and Loe, “The Old People’s Crusade,” 436.
22. Witte, “Why the Townsend Old Age Plan Is Impossible.”
23. Neuberger and Loe, “The Old People’s Crusade,” 436.
24. The Economic Meaning of the Townsend Plan: A University of Chicago Round Table (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), 24.
28. A third circle—the righteous—would also overlap with these circles. In
Chapter 2, I define the emotion as the sense of confidence and comfort that comes from being on the right side of a question, on the side of truth. I argue that righteousness rarely emerges from the self alone but rather 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. The righteousness that wound through the Townsend Movement followed the same pattern. His newspaper, the
Townsend Weekly, wrote, “This vision could not have come from the Evil One, but must have been God-given. It harmonizes so beautifully with ‘the wisdom from above’ ( James 3:14).” It exhorted followers, “Let’s be determined. God is on our side. So by all means let’s be united.” At the
Townsend national convention held in Chicago in 1935, members changed the lyrics of “Onward, Christian Soldiers” to “Onward, Townsend Soldiers.”
1 Among other uses, this righteousness insulated Townsend and his followers from criticisms of the plan. As one advocate explained, economists opposed the Townsend Plan “probably because they never thought of it themselves.” Quoted in Ibid., 189.
30. Schlesinger,
The Politics of Upheaval, 41. Edwin Amenta titled his 2008 history of the Townsend Movement and the rise of Social Security in
When Movements Matter: The Townsend Plan and the Rise of Social Security.
32. Paul H. Douglas,
Social Security in the United States (New York: Whittlesey House, 1939), 72.
33. Economic Security Act: Hearings before the Committee on Ways and Means, 1126.
34. Neuberger and Loe, “The Old People’s Crusade,” 426.
35. Frances Perkins,
The Roosevelt I Knew (New York: Viking, 1946), 281.
40. Down and Out in the Great Depression, ed. McElvaine, 103.
44. In his 1903 book
Economics: An Account of the Relation between Private Property and Public Wealth, Arthur T. Hadley closed his discussion of economic responsibility and compulsory insurance by observing, “If you give every man a right to a pension when he is incapable of self-support, you tacitly approve his failure to provide for himself and his children.” Hadley continues: “We need measures which shall increase individual responsibility rather than diminish it; measures which shall give us more self-reliance and less reliance on society as a whole. We cannot afford to countenance a system of morals or laws which justifies the individual in looking to the community rather than to himself for support in age or infirmity.”
Arthur T. Hadley, Economics: An Account of the Relation between Private Property and Public Wealth (New York: G.P. Putnam’s and Sons, 1901), 62–3. In 1908, the founder of the Prudential Insurance Company, John F. Dryden, who, admittedly, had something to lose from the state entering the insurance
business, spoke in more apocalyptic terms. “To admit,” he argued, “that state aid or support in old age for the large majority of wage earners is in fact a pressing necessity is to concede that the social and economic development of the country has been in the wrong direction, that the education in thrift has been defective, and that the virtues of intelligent self-denial and self-sacrifice have been replaced by considerations of selfish indulgence and indifference to the welfare of others.”
John F. Dryden, Addresses and Papers on Life Insurance and Other Topics (Newark: Prudential Insurance Company of America, 1909), 122.
46. Economic Security Act: Hearings before the Committee on Ways and Means, 917.
48. John T. McCutcheon, “A Wise Economist Asks a Question,”
Chicago Tribune, August 19, 1931.
49. Social Security in America: The Factual Background of the Social Security Act as Summarized from Staff Reports to the Committee on Economic Security (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1937), 159.
50. Economic Security Act: Hearings Before the Committee on Finance, United States Senate (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1935), 100.
51. True, the lawyer who represented George P. Davis, a shareholder in the Edison Electric Company of Boston who sued the company to enjoin it from collecting the compulsory insurance taxes required by the Social Security Act, argued in front of the Supreme Court in 1937 for the “the virtues of self-reliance and frugality” and proposed that “aid from a paternal government may sap those sturdy virtues and breed a race of weaklings.” But this argument was more hypothetical than sincere, intended to get at the question of whether the Social Security Act violated the Tenth Amendment, which reserves for the states powers not specifically delegated to the federal government. What
if, Davis’s lawyer argued, Massachusetts believed that old-age pensions sapped self-reliance and frugality and shaped its laws accordingly? Must it let the virtues of its children be sapped “because some other philosophy of government finds favor in the halls of Congress?” (Yes, the Supreme Court answered in a novel interpretation of the Constitution, so long as the federal government provided for the “general welfare” of the nation.) “Supreme Court’s Majority Decision Backing Old Age Feature of Security Law,”
New York Times, May 25, 1937.
52. In 1932, Armstrong published
Insuring the Essentials: Minimum Wage Plus Social Insurance—A Living Wage Program (New York: Macmillan, 1932).
53. Report to the President of the Committee on Economic Security (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1935), 23–4.
57. Social Security in America, 144.
58. Report to the President, 25.
59. The “depression has largely wiped out wage earners’ savings and deprived millions of workers past middle life of their jobs,” planners observed, “with but uncertain prospects of ever again returning to steady employment.” Ibid.
60. Social Security in America, 194.
64. Even I have trouble following it. From Barbara Nachtried Armstrong’s
Old Age Security: Staff Report: “a person (1) who has been insured 5 years and has made at least 200 weekly tax payments shall be entitled to a pension of 10% of the average weekly wage, such average not to be in excess of $55 weekly upon which weekly tax payments have been made. Thereafter there shall be added to his pension 1% for each 40 weekly tax payments, this added amount not to exceed 1% for each year of insurance after the qualifying period, except that the annuity shall never be less than the actuarial equivalent of the worker's own contributions made before reaching the age of 65 years.”
65. Specifically, the plan would pay 1/2 of 1 percent on the first $3,000 contributed; 1/12 of 1 percent on the next $42,000 contributed; and 1/24 of 1 percent on any amount over $45,000 contributed. This sounds more complicated than it is. In 1937, a skilled worker in the iron and steel industry—a machinist or a roller—who worked nine months or more earned a little over $2,000 per year
1 (over $35,000 today; it was a good job). So say a machinist in an open-hearth furnace who was thirty-five years old in 1937 and made exactly $2,000 per year started paying Social Security in 1937 and worked for thirty years. (Forget about inflation for a moment.) When he retired in 1967 the man would have contributed $60,000 over his lifetime ($2,000 times thirty years). Upon retirement, he would receive a monthly pension of $56.25 ($15 for the first $3,000; $35 for the next $42,000; and $6.25 for the remaining $15,000).
66. As proposed to Congress, the plan covered domestic and agricultural workers. The Committee on Economic Security acknowledged the administrative difficulties the inclusion of these groups would pose. (Would farmers have to start cutting checks for their farm hands? Were housewives to pay matching payroll taxes for their cooks?) Nevertheless, the committee thought it worth the trouble to include everyone. In testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, however, the secretary of the treasury disagreed; Congress agreed with the secretary of the treasury; and in a single stroke about half of the workers in the United States were excluded from the program. For an argument that racism did not motivate this decision, see Larry De Witt, “The Decision to Exclude Agricultural and Domestic Workers from the 1935 Social Security Act,”
Social Security Bulletin 70. 4 (2010): 49–68. In the legislative history of Title I, however, one can discern the racism of Southern congressmen. They watered
down a provision in the bill that stipulated that states must “provide a minimum assistance grant which will afford a reasonable subsistence compatible with decency and health.” As the University of Chicago economist Paul H. Douglass noted at the time, “One reason for this change was the fear on the part of many southern Senators and Representatives that the earlier provision might be used by authorities to compel the southern states to pay higher pensions to aged Negroes than the dominant white groups believed to be desirable.”
Social Security in America, 195. Douglas,
Social Security in the United States, 100.
67. Douglas,
Social Security in the United States, 116.
68. Social Security in America, 138.
74. Social Security in America, 204.
76. Quoted in Schlesinger,
The Coming of the New Deal, 308.
78. Frank Parker Stockbridge, “Social Security, Or De Levee Done Bust,”
Saturday Evening Post, March 14, 1936, 37.
82. Alf Landon, “I Will Not Promise the Moon,” speech, September 1936,
Vital Speeches of the Day, October 15, 1936, 27.
83. Quoted in Schlesinger,
The Politics of Upheaval, 635. As I also describe in
Chapter 2, the pay envelope campaign launched Roosevelt into his own righteous flights. In a speech at Madison Square Garden, he denounced those who conducted the campaign as “the enemies of peace” and part of the “forces of selfishness” acting out of a “lust for power.”
85. Garet Garrett,
Saturday Evening Post, September 19, 1936, 104.
86. Parker Stockbridge, “Social Security, Or De Levee Done Bust,”
Saturday Evening Post, March 7, 1936, 10.
88. Economic Security Act: Hearings before the Committee on Ways and Means, 680, 903.
89. Douglas,
Social Security in the United States, 57.
91. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Message to Congress on Social Security.”
92. Social Security already threatened to undermine the family. “[T[here was—and there still is—” Barbara Nachtried Strong wrote in the unpublished
Old Age Security: Staff Report, “extant in the United States a conviction that it is the duty of the children, and not that of the state, to take care of the old. It is assumed that if the state relieves the children of the responsibility, family ties are loosened, and since the family is one of our most highly valued institutions, this danger is to be avoided at all costs.”
93. Berkowitz,
America’s Welfare State, 48. You can see the difference between the two plans by comparing how Ida May Fuller would have fared under the original Act and how she fared under the 1939 revised Social Security Act. Under the original Act, Fuller would not have qualified for an annuity. The 1935 Act required that an individual had to have contributed at least $2,000 into the system and have paid into it for at least five years. Fuller did neither. Like everyone else, she began making payroll contributions in January 1937, and she retired in November 1939. Over that time, she contributed all of $24.75. (Her employer contributed another $24.75.) Under the 1935 Act, she would have received a lump sum payment of $51.23 (her $49.50 contribution plus interest). Under the 1939 Amendments to the Act, however, she did qualify for an annuity, which would be calculated according to a new, more generous formula. Assume, for the moment, that Fuller had paid into the system for five years and just reached the $2,000 threshold. Under the old benefit formula, she would have received a monthly annuity of $10. Under the new formula, which proceeded from the average contribution made and not the total, she received a monthly annuity of $22.54. If Fuller had had a spouse, her husband would have received an additional benefit of $11.27, assuming, that is, that he did not qualify for his own annuity. Or consider the average worker during the 1930s, one who made $2,000 per year and worked for thirty years before retiring. Under the original plan, as calculated earlier, he would receive a $57.50 per month annuity. Under the amended plan, he would receive $86.67 per month. And his spouse would receive $43.33 per month. And his dependent child, if he had one, another $43.33 per month. And voila, no more $1.5 billion future reserve.
94. Quoted in Berkowitz,
America’s Welfare State, 66.
95. Social Security in America, 268.