Quotes / The Great Depression

Squirrel: But why didn't you save some money for the future, when times were good?

Victim of Bank Failure: I did.

— "A Wise Economist Asks a Question◊", 1931 Chicago Tribune editorial cartoon by John T. McCutcheon

Sure must be a great consolation to the poor people who lost their stock in the late crash to know that it has fallen in the hands of Mr. Rockefeller, who will take care of it and see it has a good home and never be allowed to wander around unprotected again. There is one rule that works in every calamity. Be it pestilence, war, or famine, the rich get richer and poor get poorer. The poor even help arrange it.

— Will Rogers, Diary of America

Underlying the film, there is an appeal to altruism. Now altruism is a brief phase through which some adolescents must pass. It is rather like acne. Happily, as with acne, only a few are permanently scarred. Yet the prince in the film is obliged to note that there are others in the world beside himself (not to mention a pauper duplicate), and to those others he must be responsible... I believe that my generation of Americans was the very last even to begin to take seriously that once-powerful invocation. But now the feature film's over. The newsreel begins. The Japanese sink an American gunboat on a river in China. Senator Gore is defeated for a fifth term. 'All is lost,' he declares, 'including honor.' The House Un-American Activities Committee is formed. The Munich Agreement is signed. Hitler takes over Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland.

— Gore Vidal on The Prince and the Pauper (1937), Point to Point Navigation

Written in a time period with a wealth gap comparable to that of 2011, the heart of the novel is the question of whether money alone accounts for the difference between the wealthy and the ordinary. Its answer is that it doesn't – that there is still something fundamentally different about the old money of Tom and the new money of Gatsby, and that Gatsby can never truly bridge that gap no matter how much money he has. In other words, the novel establishes that there is, in the realm of conspicuous consumption, no such thing as 'enough.'

— El Sandifer on The Great Gatsby

The United States really was a land of opportunity. So, my father could come from Russia and work in a sweatshop, and finally manage to get to college, and then see his son become a professor—that stuff was real. And it was real because there was a lot of manual labor around which could absorb the waves of immigrants... But in the 1930s, there was a big break in this system—the Depression ended those opportunities. And the United States has basically never gotten out of the Depression... if you can get into the high-tech industry, you probably were there already, and if you're working at sweeping the streets or something, that's where you're going to stay.

— Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power

Bam White took a short-term job, getting two dollars a day shooting cattle, work for a cowboy. The government hired cowboys because they would not go soft when it came time to look a hungry, wet-nosed calf in the eye and shoot her dead.
...It was hard for Bam to explain to the children what they were doing, killing animals that had been brought here for people to make a living. Nothing was right in the world anymore. And these animals were gonna die anyway, might as well get a buck or two for killing them.

— Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time (possibly the definitive book written for lay readers on the Dust Bowl)

"Hoover blew the whistle,
Mellon rang the bell,
Wall Street gave the signal,
And the country went to Hell."

— Anonymous, ca. 1932

And the stock market crashed, which led to economic downturn, which meant banks wouldn't lend anyone any money, which led to more economic downturn, which meant everyone stopped buying stuff, which led to more economic downturn. And hey, what if all the crops in the Great Plains were destroyed in a drought and then a big dust storm engulfed the area? That's right, more economic downturn.

— Oversimplified, "The Emu War"

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