Reviews for The Great Depression: America 1929-1941

The average rating for The Great Depression: America 1929-1941 based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-12-07 00:00:00 Anthony Parker I picked this up at the Evanston Public Library a week ago and read it prior to meeting with up with my former professor, political economist Dave Schweickart. It was a quick, easy, enjoyable, well worth the time even though David and I never got around to discussing the topic of the book, the depression of 1929-41. 'The Great Depression' was, like WWII, influential in my household growing up. All the grownups had lived through both, at least as children and, of course, with German occupation and/or domestic rationing, the war was characterized by deprivation just like the years prior to it. Other than the stories and the oft-repeated phrase (and its variants) along the lines of 'you have no idea of how lucky you are!' the Depression lived on in my family in a number of ways. There was a general consciousness of how much everything cost. One did not flush the toilet unnecessarily 'because water costs money'; one did not have snacks or leave anything on one's plate; one did not receive an allowance, one did special chores for a pittance; one got a job once one turned sixteen or one went to summer school; one left home and became self-supporting at eighteen; and so on. There was no family support for college. There was no thought of such a thing and I was later amazed to find some students financially helped by their families. Consequently, the Depression also lives on in me. I'm notoriously frugal, cheap, penny-pinching, miserly... But that's all legacy. This book is the real deal, an attempt to get at the period from both the top down and the bottom up, an account ranging from the White House and the Congress to the Hobo camps and Hoovervilles. As such, it is sympathetic, sympathetic to the victims and to the often hapless members of government attempting to come to grips with the crisis. As such, it is most certainly not sympathetic to the upper crust and to their representatives, Democrat or Republican, but increasingly Republican. Reading this book, written thirty years ago, is like listening to an extremely long speech by the junior senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders. Reading this book, or similar accounts, would likely inspire many to vote for him. The only flaws to this book are the repeated references to the administration of its time and their 'depression', i.e. to the Reagan presidency. While the comparisons may be substantially valid, they are given in the present tense, detracting from the historical tone of the rest of the text. Perhaps this was corrected in the other, later editions. And, oh, yeah. Hardcover books at the Evanston Public Library are fifty cents. Dad would approve.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-10-30 00:00:00 Michael Pinzine This is a well written book. Although at times Manichean in discussing class, McElvaine is very good at discussing individual actors, such as Hoover, Roosevelt, Hopkins, Long, and the rest. When it comes to discussing America and its values he shows a good deal of nuance and often much more hope and patience than you will encounter among left leaning academia. His long discussion of Depression era cinema is quite good even if he forgets to mention Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. This is a fundamentally progressive book in its view of history and humanity, with McElvaine arguing up front that progress can be stalled but never wholly repealed. This informs the worst part of the book. It was published in 1984 and he cannot help but comment and prognosticate on what was then current affairs. So you must suffer through his snide comments about Ronald Reagan, disgust with 1980s America, and his hope that the values of the Depression would have a resurgence. He praises Mario Cuomo and he ended the decade writing a biography that was a failed foray into political advocacy. As of 2018, it makes for a good laugh. I cackled when he wrote on page 280 "The 1982 congressional elections indicated that the Roosevelt coalition has life in it still." The coalition was dead soon after as were its values. Individuality has accelerated, living as we do in a world where it is easier to change genders than to get a meaningful pay raise. Indeed, today's Left politics of grievance is not based on broad solidarity but identity camps. Left appeals are couched today in individual and group specific rhetoric instead of those based on nation and class. The Left no longer cares about civic nationalism, cultural cohesion, or the sanctity of labor, while paying only lip service to limiting the power of corporations, all of the above being pillars of the 1930s Left. All in all, I doubt McElvaine feels comfortable with where things have gone because he wanted a return to broad class based politics and the Democrats are no longer in any meaningful way the party of Roosevelt. I do feel unfair to him though in attacking his presentism. Reading the book I saw many striking similarities with the 1920s, most of all the fact that our economic world has not recovered and nor had theirs recovered from World War I. We have no cushion, so any recession will likely be doubly worse than 2008. Yet, I will say there is one difference. I have almost no hope that we will politically survive the next cataclysm. To do so would require a class politics we do not have. Even in the 1920s labor unions were a force. Today they are the abused housewife of a Democratic husband that sometimes has a lesbian affair with a Republican woman looking for a quick thrill, also known as winning an election and then promptly securing tax cuts for the rich. But I digress, mainly because reading about the Left's many victories in the 1930s and comparing it to today, I am filled with a steady feeling of hopelessness. Let us return to the book. McElvaine is not exactly a class reductionist, but it is where he feels most comfortable. It leads to his considering race sparingly but fairly while making a very clumsy attempt at accounting for gender. His attempts are half-hearted and lead to half-baked ideas about male vs. female values and how the former undermines reform. It is best to return to the good, for in assessing why the New Deal never quite worked, he is at his best. Inherently, Roosevelt was unwilling to go far enough with reform while his attempt to pack the courts and later rid the party of its conservatives backfired. As an aside, the later does much to describe why America is now wholly dysfunctional. The parties are more pure and therefore cannot compromise, a process that started haltingly with Roosevelt in 1938. That said, the mystery of the New Deal is how did Roosevelt become so popular and influential. McElvaine provides a good answer; Roosevelt was a master politician with no equal in our history, who built a durable majority in breath-taking time. Old hardcore Republican voting blocks, such as Wisconsin and blacks, swung hard for Roosevelt. In addition, his enemies were borderline incompetent. The net result was a political triumph not matched since, and arguably only surpassed by James Monroe's presidency, although that moment of party domination was far too brief by comparison. If you get by the comments on 1980s America (and his laughable predictions) and take into account his bias towards progressive values and class politics, you have a humane portrait of the era. The book is accessible and provides a compelling and generally fair takes on the people of the era.