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[ { "body": "Overall it was harder to similar incidents to occur in the US as the command structure was different (the Soviets had rest independent launch capabilities with the military as opposed to POTUS). There were incidents were US military was suddenly on alert over false reports or glitches. (Note: during none of these was the nuclear \"football\" ever activated).\n\nOn November 24th, 1961 SAC had a communication failure with the three Ballistic Missile Early Warning Sites or BMEWS. Thule (Greenland,) Clear (Alaska,) and Fillingdales (England,) all lost contact with SAC, leaving them with two possibilities: enemy action (either cutting off communication or the BNEWS site had been taken out) or some sort of coincidental failure of the redundant communication systems at the same time. SAC order bases on alert with B-52 on stand by. Eventually the command made contact B-52 that was on airborne alert near Thule which managed to contact the base via radio confirming there had been no attack. As it turned out all of the communication lines ran through a single relay station in that had overheated. \n\nIn November 9, 1979 at NORAD HQ, SAC Command Post, The Pentagon National Military Command Center, and the Alternate National Military Command Center the display systems all showed incoming nuclear missiles. The Duty officer at NORAD contacted PAVE PAWS to determine that no early warning radars had picked \nup incoming or had any of the US satellites. The cause was later determined to a be exercise tape had been placed in the computer system. The officers in command at the time (especially in regards to the NORAD OIC) managed to call off the alarm in 6 minutes. This incident led to the creation off-site testing facility so any test wouldn't cause this again (this was after a Congressional hearing and GOA investigation recommend the move). \n\n3 June 1980: Single computer chip failure in the command system had random 0's display as 2's, thus showing that 2 missiles had been fired, the 200, etc. while precautions had been taken just in case (readying Minuteman missiles, bomber crews prepped for take off) it was not taken as seriously as the year prior due to the random numbers received and that all the commands were getting different displays.\n\nOn October 25, 1973: In response to intelligence that the Soviets were planning to intervene in the Arab Israeli conflict as the cease fire failed Nixon moved US force to DEFCON 3 as a show of force hoping to back the Soviets down. During this mechanics were repairing one of the Klaxons (the sirens) at Kinchole Air Force Base accidentally activated the whole base alarm system. In response to the alarm B-52 crews rushed to their aircraft and started the engines. Once again it was the duty officer who recognized that alarm was false, cancelling the alert and recalled the crews before they took off.\n\n\nThere were several close calls on both sides during the Cuban Missile Crisis two resulting from false alarms from Moorestown indicating ICBMS over the US due to a different test tape. In both cases the NORAD OIC waited until the expected nukes had gone off (they were reported over the US already and it limited numbers) and saw that they were false.\nIn another case a bear tripped an alarm at a USAF base casing a intruded alert and near scramble. while in another a Soviet Satellite blew up.\n\nSagan, Scott D.: The Limits of Safety , (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, (1993).\n\nEdited: left out 1973.", "created_utc": 1472580014, "distinguished": null, "id": "d72vtns", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/50bsls/we_hear_a_lot_about_single_soviet_officers_who/d72vtns/", "score": 785 } ]

[ { "body": "The CIA itself has a great deal of work on the subject of how well they predicted the downfall of the USSR. Since the 70's there were unclassified documents that showed the USSR's economy was struggling. These ppapers include the unclassified testimony from each of DCI Admiral Stansfield Turner's annual appearances before the JEC from 1977 through 1980 which described the economy as 'bleak' with an 'inevitable' downward trend. Other papers describe how much the USSR was suffering from over investment in defense and lacking in agricultural mechanization.\n\nThey did not predict Gorbachev's rise to power though that was because it was impossible to predict Chernyenko's death. When Gorbachev entered the CIA adjusted their predictions saying that his plans could delay the downward spiral but it was still coming because he could not cut defense spending without huge political controversy. In 1988 the CIA predicted Gorbachev would have to make a radical changes to consolidate power to make the changes to sustain the economy. \"Gorbachev's September Housecleaning\" was an intelligence paper describing the changes he would have to make. This also cited problems stemming from the 1970's and called the USSR less stable than any time since Stalin's rise to power. \n\nWhat the CIA did not predict was the collapse. They thought there was going to be civil unrest. \n\n**TLDR**: The economic and societal conditions made it inevitable that something would happen. That was clearly reported by the CIA. What actually did happen depended on people and decisions that were not inevitable.\n\nSources:\n\nhttps://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/97unclass/soviet.html", "created_utc": 1444066012, "distinguished": null, "id": "cvp3o8e", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nkxob/prior_to_1991_did_any_notable_political/cvp3o8e/", "score": 1281 }, { "body": "Not a political scientist but Paul Samuelson was a dominant figure in postwar economics and his famous principles textbook which was used everywhere for decades had a famously wrong analysis of the Soviet economy overtaking the US (the dates varied and [were constantly pushed out](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/01/soviet-growth-american-textbooks.html) as Soviet growth stalled). Brad Delong breaks down the economic analysis that led to this conclusion [here](http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/01/the-russians-were-coming.html), the tldr is that central planning could keep investment in capital high which implies higher growth. Whether that would have constituted winning the Cold War is another discussion but it's a claim along similar lines of thinking. ", "created_utc": 1444083214, "distinguished": null, "id": "cvpf29v", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nkxob/prior_to_1991_did_any_notable_political/cvpf29v/", "score": 164 }, { "body": "As a follow-up question, was it generally assumed that the Cold War would eventually go hot, so to speak? Or was there more optimism about things being wrapped up or toned down more peacefully? ", "created_utc": 1444064026, "distinguished": null, "id": "cvp2c4v", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nkxob/prior_to_1991_did_any_notable_political/cvp2c4v/", "score": 100 } ]

[ { "body": "Hello, and first of all, sorry for your loss. Let me first start by saying that I have very little background information here to go on.\n\nFirst of all, he was a ''spy for the US government''. This is not very clear to me what you mean by that (did he give any more specific information?). ''Spy'' is rather political or literary language, in intelligence there is no such a function. Usually when people mean spies, they mean what in intelligence circles was called an ''agent''. Their handlers, ''case officers'', work for an agency, like CIA or KGB etc.\n\nSo what I'm left wondering now is whether he was an agent recruited by the US intelligence in Berlin, or whether he was stationed in Berlin as a US intelligence officer. His nationality also would clarify something.\n\nIn general, spies were the infantry of the Cold War during the 1950's, and Berlin was quite literally swarming with it. As it became the focal point of the Cold War, both sides of the Iron Curtain used Berlin as a place to meet with agents, but also to recruit new ones. The West needed rapid intelligence on Soviet military capabilities on the other side of the German border, much of which could be obtained through speaking to Germans coming from the East to the Western sectors. The Soviets in their turn sent many ''illegals'', intelligence officers under false identity, into West-Berlin to set up clandestine networks in West-German society and to recruit among the numerous Western military officers stationed in Germany.\n\nThe vast majority of these contacts was cheap. Both sides gave virtually anyone a small bribe for a bit of gossip or a shred of military rumor, after which they had no further purpose anymore and were discarded. The US and UK at some point had the glorious idea to dig a tunnel underneath the Soviet military sector and wiretap its telegraph cables, since Soviet officials preferred to make use of cables that could not be intercepted from the air. The Soviets had a mole inside British intelligence however, again, who ratted them out and for a while they planted disinformation until they ''coincidentally'' discovered the tunnel during construction work.\n\nBerlin was a hotspot also because Western countries placed military SIGINT units there to eavesdrop on Warsaw Pact military communications and transmissions. They stationed technical specialists to operate intercept equipment and translators to process the material and forward the relevant bits to agencies such as the NSA in the US or GCHQ in the UK. As you mention your uncle's language proficiency, this is one thing he might have been doing in Berlin. But then I would be assuming he is an American, and was stationed by the US military (probably - like US Army or Air Force), as a linguist in West Berlin. But like I said, this is just one possibility among many. If he was an American citizen, you could probably ask for his records at the Department of Defense (I believe the NSA falls under it as well), and if they have nothing, try the CIA.\n\nThe CIA too of course employed people with language skills to operate in the field. West-German, British and American intelligence officers swarmed West-Berlin in the 1950's to recruit Germans and Russians within the Red Army, which had an enormous concentration there, and within the East-German government - especially in the background of the Berlin Crisis between 1958-1961. The CIA wanted constant updates on rumors that the Soviets might seal off East-Berlin entirely.\n\nBased on what you have provided, it could mean a lot of things. In general, the West was actively seeking to obtain military intelligence on the Soviet bloc in Berlin, either through recruiting human sources, or through SIGINT intercept stations. The CIA and British SIS were also particularly active there to recruit Soviet intelligence officers. Wherever there is a lot of intelligence activity, counterintelligence officers will quickly join the scene to see who from the other side is willing to dance.\n\n​\n\nDavid E. Murphy, Sergei Kondrashev and George Bailey, *Battleground Berlin: CIA vs the KGB in the Cold War* (1997) - this is the best book available on intelligence activities in Berlin.", "created_utc": 1584634616, "distinguished": null, "id": "fkxskq9", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/fl6zo5/my_great_uncle_passed_away_recently_and_he_was_a/fkxskq9/", "score": 94 } ]

[ { "body": "[I'm an average Soviet citizen in the mid-60s with a yearn to travel. How do I go about getting a passport?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/huhma6/im_an_average_soviet_citizen_in_the_mid60s_with_a/) with answers by u/AyeBraine and u/Dicranurus and u/Kochevnik81 deals with various aspects of the Soviet end of things.\n\n[What was it like to cross borders in the Soviet Union?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4stdfs/what_was_it_like_to_cross_borders_in_the_soviet/) by u/Holokyn-kolokyn talks a bit more about various parts of this idea.", "created_utc": 1630763806, "distinguished": null, "id": "hbkhns0", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/phhhlp/what_processes_did_americans_that_wanted_to_visit/hbkhns0/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "Obviously more can be said but [this answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1w5y5d/comment/cez9pbg/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) by u/LBo87 talks about Hitler's views of America considerably though it does not mention the role of the great depression.", "created_utc": 1684547715, "distinguished": null, "id": "jkuq0dv", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/13m71sm/what_lead_hitler_to_dramatically_underestimate/jkuq0dv/", "score": 4 } ]

[ { "body": "This is a really good question - it contains some complicated economics that even I get confused by and I study this, but I'll try to break it down. Basically, to get the gist of Germany's antebellum economy you need to know about Hjalmar Schacht and his MEFO scheme.\n\nHjalmar Schacht is an interesting character in general, but for our purposes he was made the president of the Reichsbank (something like the national bank of Germany) in 1933 after Hitler's takeover of the government. Germany was hit by the Great Depression like every other country, but Schacht came up with a clever scheme to restart the German economy while building up armaments. MEFO (Metallurgische Forschungsgesellschaft - metallurgical research society) was a fake company propped up by the government and formed from four huge German corporations - Siemens, Krupp, Rheinmetall, and Gutehoffnungshütte (many of these companies like Siemens and Krupp are still around today). The company was just a front to throw the Allies off the scent as the scheme was highly illegal according to Versailles, as were the promissory notes the company issued - MEFO bills. MEFO bills were paid instead of cash to large manufacturers as a kind of IOU - instead of paying directly up front, the German government would issue these bills through the MEFO company and would pay interest in exchange. An interesting quirk is that the bills could be extended indefinitely, basically ensuring a never-ending cash supply for the government to rearm while providing companies huge financial incentives to buy MEFO bills. According to this [page](https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/chap16_part12.asp) from Yale University:\n\n*The financing of the conspirators' huge rearmament program presented a twofold problem to Schacht. First, was the need of obtaining funds over and above the amount which could be obtained through taxation and public loans. Second, was the conspirators' desire, in the early stages of rearmament, to conceal the extent of their feverish armament activities. Schacht's answer to the problem was the \"mefo\" bills, a scheme which he devised for the exclusive use of armament financing (EC-436).*\n\n*Transactions in \"mefo\" bills worked as follows: \"mefo\" bills were drawn by armament contractors and accepted by a limited liability company called the Metallurgische Forschungsgesellschaft, m.b.H. (MEFO). This company was merely a dummy organization; it had a nominal capital of only one million Reichsmarks. \"Mefo\" bills ran for six months, but provision was made for extensions running consecutively for three months each. The drawer could present his \"mefo\" bills to any German bank for discount at any time, and these banks, in turn, could rediscount the bills at the Reichsbank at any time within the last three months of their earliest maturity. The amount of \"mefo\" bills outstanding was a guarded state secret (EC-436). The \"mefo\" bill system continued to be used until 1 April 1938, when 12 billion Reichsmarks of \"mefo\" bills were outstanding (EC-436). This method of financing enabled the Reich to obtain credit from the Reichsbank which, under existing statutes, it could not directly have obtained. Direct lending to the Government by the Reichsbank had been limited by statute to 100 million Reichsmarks (Reichsgesetzblatt, 1924, II, p. 241). Schacht has conceded that his \"mefo\" bill device \"enabled the Reichsbank to lend by a subterfuge to the Government what it normally or legally could not do\" (3728-PS).*\n\n​\n\nHere's a quick and dirty example - say the German government wants $100 worth of paperclips. As a paperclip manufacturer, I sign a contract with the government to produce the goods but instead of cash I'll be paid in MEFO bills. The bills can be exchanged for cash, so why would I want to keep them? Because, if I use the MEFO bills the government actually promises to pay me $100 with 4% annual interest. This is basically free money, so I start gobbling up paperclip contracts hoping to make a killing once I exchange the bills for hard cash. As you probably can already tell, this system is not at all tenable long-term. It's robbing Peter to pay Paul - when every company that has MEFO bills asks the government to pay up... well, too bad.\n\nThis did work, though, although we never got to see the house of cards fall down - Germany went from having virtually no weapons in 1930 to Blitzkrieging through Poland and France ten years later. All the MEFO bills had to do was get Germany to this point, as once the fighting started the government switched the economy to wartime mode and most civilian industries were repurposed to making weapons for the military. It is the horrible fact as well that a lot of Germany's wealth came from confiscated valuables from Jews and conquered people. Germany (kind of like ancient Rome) sustained itself through plunder - and that was just to keep itself afloat. MEFO bills and wartime economics are one thing, but the government had no real plans for a stable postbellum economy once the dust had settled. It was a flash-in-the-pan economic miracle that would have crumpled instantly once tested.\n\n​\n\n[https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/chap16\\_part12.asp](https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/chap16_part12.asp)\n\n[https://www.elibrary.imf.org/display/book/9781513511795/ch006.xml](https://www.elibrary.imf.org/display/book/9781513511795/ch006.xml)", "created_utc": 1678333076, "distinguished": null, "id": "jbhuup4", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/11gacwt/what_was_nazi_germanys_economy_like_how_did_they/jbhuup4/", "score": 9 } ]

[ { "body": "I'm an economist who knows something about the Great Depression but not much about WWI. That said, as an economist, I'd say the answer is no.\n\nThe Great Depression is traditionally said to have started in 1929, 11 years after WWI ended in 1918. While some people dispute both dates, that is a long time and many things happened during that period. Economic histories usually have a hard time making firm causal connections between two large scale events of modern history separated by so much time. To tackle this question, consider it from two directions: What was the effect of WWI on Europe's post-war population and economy and how did those contribute to long-term economic malaise. And what were the causes of the Great Depression in Europe and the European causes of the Great Depression in the US?\n\n**The Great Depression**\n\n***Global Trade and the Tariff***\n\nLet's start with the second question. In the US, the causes of the Great Depression are widely debated (stock market crash, collapse of world trade, fiscal austerity in response to a recession, monetary tightening in response to a recession - this is a common question at r/AskHistorians and one answer is [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fl13hb/the_great_depression_what_caused_it_to_last_so/)). One commonly discussed cause is useful to think about with your version of the question is tariffs, particularly the Smoot-Hawley tariff. The Smoot-Hawley tariff was proposed in the late 1920s because US domestic production was \"too high\", \"overproduction\". The tariff raised prices on imports to the US, which in theory would reduce American purchase of goods made abroad, allowing Americans to buy more American made goods, reducing overproduction. As an economic theory, this is gibberish, but with the excitement of electrification and industrialization, politicians felt that something big must be done. As it was, the US was exporting more than it was importing and its exports were growing faster than imports in the late 1920s. The rest of the world, of course, responded with their own tariffs, putting downward pressure on global trade and the global economy. In theory, this seems like a great explanation of why we had a Great Depression, but when economists run the numbers, this explanation falls short. International trade was too small of a part of domestic economies for even bad policy to have such a bad effect.\n\nUltimately, the effect of Smoot-Hawley on worsening the recession was relatively small, according to most economists. The bill passed in 1930, just in time to put more pressure on a bad recession, but economists today like to focus more on other issues as why the recession became a depression, why it got so bad. But before we turn to those other issues, this incident does a great job of showing something important, in the late 1920s, the US had a trade surplus to Europe, US exports were going great, and Europe was buying. So to answer part of your question, WWI did not lead to depressed demand for US exports in Europe in the late 1920s.\n\n***Monetary Policy and the Gold Standard***\n\nAnother \"cause\" of the great depression was bad monetary policy. After WWI, countries decided to go back to a gold standard, an economically inefficient and ultimately deflationary way to run money. Inflation reduces the cost of debt - if a country owes $1 in debt and inflation reduces the value of $1, then the country will have an easier time paying the debt. Many European countries had significant debt, and even before countries returned their currencies to the gold standard, they decided that the cost of the debt owed should be pegged to the value of gold, rather than the value of the countries currency. For this reason, Hyperinflation in Weimar Germany in the early 1920s didn't wipe out German debt. When the German currency stabilized, the Dawes plan enacted in 1924 saw private US loans to finance industrialization of the Rurh area in Germany, which would allow Germany to pay its debts to France and in turn France pay its debts to the US, ie the debts were privatized and made more complicated (and the German population more, umm, susceptible to anti-bank propaganda, but that's a different point). When we tell a story of the great depression as having derived from banks being overexerted and unable to cover liabilities, this is the international version of that problem. There is a US domestic version as well which has to do with the dust bowl, investment in US industrialization, and so on. And in general, the domestic version is more significant; US banks had loaned more to US customers than international customers.\n\nAnyway, all this debt meant an acceleration of the financialization of economies, back when there was neither the policy technology (quantitative easing, for example) nor the financial technology (interbank overnight lending, for example) to respond to crisis. And when crisis came, the monetary inflexibility of the gold standard and the policy inflexibility of national banks and governments led to the crisis and recession becoming a depression. So from this perspective, it wasn't the devastation per se, but the inability to come up with a policy solution to these problems. But again, the domestic issues were generally larger than the international ones.\n\n**The Roaring 20s**\n\nGoing back to the first part of my reformulation of your question, what was the effect of WWI on the post-war population and economies of Europe, I want to mention two things and put them aside. First, the largest economic and demographic crashes in Europe in this era occurred in France, Austria, and Eastern Europe, especially Poland, Russia, and Ukraine (note: WWI was fought in France, not Germany, and the German Army did much better than the German government). However, it is unclear to me how this question wants to handle the Russian Civil War. This war was from 1917-1923 (making 1923 a possible end-date of WWI), and led to about 10 million deaths. It also resulted in the establishment of a political system that may have performed worst in the world during the Great Depression (the Soviet Famine, Kazakh Famine, and Ukrainian Famine/Holodomor of the early 1930s). Second, the Spanish Flu began in early 1918, likely in Kansas and spreading to US Army bases their and hence to the rest of the world. Both of these events (the Russian Civil War and the Spanish Flu) became what they were because of WWI and both caused great devastation that had lasting repercussions. Neither should, I think, be said to have caused the Great Depression. But examples like these express how factors like politics and the environment have complicated and critical roles in the economy.\n\nImmediately after large wars, including WWI, there is often a short recession as the war economy ends, leading to layoffs in those industries, while the peace economy has not yet ramped up. Further, recessions are very common. At that time, it was normal to have more than two recessions in a decade (and it is still normal to have one to two per decade). In the US between 1918 and 1929, there were recessions in 1918–1919, 1920–1921, 1923–1924, and 1926–1927. In spite of this, the GDP for most Western European countries (and for the US) grew by around 20% during that period. In France and Germany, unemployment was very low - largely because the economic and population devastation meant there was lots of demand for work. This robust growth is one reason the decade is known as the roaring 20s. Because I know others might mention it, this growth was hugely unequal, and inequality grew during this decade in many places, especially in the the UK. For a darker view of the roaring 20s, see this previous answer [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5af6tj/how_did_the_roaring_twenties_happen_when_the/). However, in general, the devastation of WWI was followed by a period of technological innovation and economic growth in the US and Western Europe.\n\n**Conclusion**\n\nIt is easy to forget that economies have on average grown about 2% per year in the 20th century and recessions are common (to see how regular economist think of recessions and economic booms, note we call it the business cycle), and this pattern held during the 1920s. Significant world events like World War I and the Great Depression are a part of a large fabric of things which all influence each other. But the major causes of the Great Depression, whether they were the collapse of Global Trade due to tariffs in 1930 (not a popular explanation) or the inflexibility of monetary policy during the gold standard (more popular, partial explanation), were only tangentially related to WWI. The labor and consumer demand effects of WWI were significant, but economies and populations are resilient and those effects did not cause the Great Depression.", "created_utc": 1673326823, "distinguished": null, "id": "j3pno2s", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/107imfk/wwi_devastated_europes_population_and_economy_did/j3pno2s/", "score": 10 } ]

[ { "body": "He's a bit flowery in his language, but otherwise not far off for portions of 1933. However, he's omitting the context, and that's crucial to understand why this is taking place - so bear with me while I briefly detour into the relationship between the banking system and agriculture prices.\n\nWhen FDR takes office, his first priority is dealing with the imminent collapse of the banks. This comes about partially because Hoover had used the crisis of that winter to try to force FDR to continue his policies, something that [Rauchway covers nicely in his book.](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gndzij/im_eric_rauchway_author_of_winter_war_hoover/) Hoover halts any further assistance to troubled banks, there are runs on the ones that are still functioning, many others temporarily close their doors to prevent this, and there is no such thing as deposit insurance - which is created as a direct result from this crisis.\n\nSo if your bank fails, you lose everything. This was not just going result in the savings of tens of millions being wiped out; it also was going to destroy any chance of economic recovery for years. It wasn't the stock market crash in 1929 that wiped out capital for expansion; in reality that was probably less than 5%. That depended on bank loans, which even today with all sorts of creative alternative financing options still make up 70%+ of the sources of funding for business. FDR takes the crisis seriously enough that he calls Congress into special session and spends most of his first week in office dealing almost exclusively with it; his stopgap measures work well enough so that within a month something like 80% of the nation's banks have reopened after their books are examined.\n\nBut this first week only addresses part of the problem; a deeper one is the general weakness of balance sheets of banks, particularly when it comes to agricultural loans. FDR had not originally intended the legendary legislative blitz of the Hundred Days but the wild success of the Emergency Banking Act has him keep the special session of Congress around. The second piece of legislation he gets through it is to cut federal pay by 15% and the 25% of the federal budget that's consumed by veterans' benefits by an even greater amount - the former is controversial but probably fair given the 40%+ deflation that's taken place since 1928, the latter arguably may have led to outright starvation for some - with the third being to repeal the Volstead Act and Prohibition.\n\nBut there's good reason why 12 days after he takes office, he decides to finally begin spending some political capital on the very first piece of New Deal legislation, his fourth bill overall sent to Congress: the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which is aimed at raising prices for agricultural goods.\n\nWhy does that come first? It's important to keep in mind that agricultural deflation had been present not just since 1929 like the rest of the economy - where farm income falls a staggering 25% from 1929-1930 versus 6% overall - but all the way back to 1920. There are a few reasons for this, including the end of the boom created by farm exports to a starving post war Europe as it begins recovery, hard alcohol distillation (which had long served as a major safety valve for the consumption of excess grain production) ceasing with the advent of Prohibition, and the disastrous results of ~70 years of the subsidized expansion of agriculture to regions that didn't have the soil or rainfall to support it leading to the catastrophe of the Dust Bowl. This wasn't even all that new; during the last third of the 19th century most agricultural products are stuck in a deflationary stall, there's a brief recovery, things stall again, and then finally farmers have about a decade of boom times - which in turn leads to an awful lot of rather optimistic bank loans that are now underwater. \n\nTo illustrate just how bad this gets at the bottom, during a single day in March 1932 *a quarter of the state of Mississippi goes up for auction at foreclosure sales.* Keep in mind that relatively speaking this comprises a huge part of the country that is well along the process of losing everything; farmers made up about 25% of the population in 1930 and agriculture was one of the largest components of GDP at about 10%, versus 1.3% and 5% today. There is also barely restrained violence underneath the surface. From Jean Edward Smith:\n\n>\"When authorities in Council Bluffs arrested fifty-five demonstrators, more than a thousand angry farmers threatened to storm the jail unless they were released. Wisconsin dairy farmers dumped milk on the roadsides and fought pitched battles with deputy sheriffs. In Nebraska, farm holiday leaders warned that unless the legislature took beneficial action, “200,000 of us are coming to Lincoln and we’ll tear that new State Capitol Building to pieces.” In Idaho and Minnesota, the governors declared moratoriums on mortgage foreclosures until state legislatures could enact debt relief measures. In North Dakota, Governor William Langer mobilized the National Guard to halt farm foreclosures.\"\n\nIt is no surprise that after his advisors do more work, 3 weeks later FDR decides to go even further; he proposes another bill, the Emergency Farm Mortgage Act, which provides federal funding for refinancing farm mortgages that are facing foreclosure and provides direct loans to farmers at several percentage points less than they could get from a bank or S&L (if they're even available - which at that point they generally weren't.) It also plays a significant role in FDR's early foreign policy decisions; the refusal by Great Britain and France to budge - the pound rises to an unbelievable $4.25 per dollar - partially since they're trying to use that leverage to avoid paying war debts mean that what would happen under modern economic theory (a weak dollar making American agricultural goods cheap to purchase for international buyers and stabilizing trade flows) for a variety of reasons doesn't in 1933.\n\nSo this is the background for the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which takes an often literal knife to supply to try to stabilize pricing. The Secretary of Agriculture will now set outright quotas for production, and farmers will be paid directly by the government not to produce over it. This gets paid for by a tax on downstream buyers like canners, commodity brokers, and textile manufacturers, and their intense lobbying and a whole lot of pork barrel politics slow the bill down in the Senate - which has the unintended effect of allowing the later mortgage relief bill to get attached to the AAA by the time the whole thing passes on May 12th. \n\nWhen this starts getting implemented in the summer and fall of 1933, that's where Steinbeck's brutal images get conjured from, with producers implementing emergency measures like slaughtering otherwise healthy pigs and sows; there are stories that animal bodies are dumped in the Mississippi while people remain hungry in the cities. Another part of this is that while the concept and some legal and bureaucratic architecture of agricultural price stabilization go back to Hoover in 1929, there is none whatsoever existing at that point for federally administered food relief. Hoover is deathly opposed to any sort of federal involvement - he believes relief should be local and private - and it takes Congress until 1932 to even legislate that the grain that the Hoover Administration has purchased for 3 years get distributed by the Red Cross rather than destroyed.\n\nThe Roosevelt Administration has a very different philosophy on relief, but it's more a matter of trying to figure out how to implement it than political opposition (although even then the AAA and producers are generally opposed to surplus farm products being distributed in normal channels; they see the whole point of the legislation as to raise farm prices rather than feed hungry people, which isn't going to be the case if food is given away for free.) There is, though, significant public outcry as to food being wasted, and the administration pays attention; Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace says it is \"constantly on our minds.\"\n\nIn September 1933, FDR begins to break the deadlock, getting $75 million out of Congress to purchase surplus agricultural products for relief distribution, and later that year the Federal Surplus Relief Organization gets chartered. The complex relationship of how this all gets implemented with the AAA and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration under Harry Hopkins is best described by Roger Lambert:\n\n>\"With pork from the slaughter as its first commodity, the relief corporation received funds from both the AAA and the FERA to purchase additional food products. The FSRC bought or received from the AAA such diverse products as butter, cheese, apples, sugars, syrup, potatoes, flour, coal, blankets, and cotton. In general the FSRC gained control of surplus commodities in three ways. With funds derived from processing taxes the AAA purchased and donated farm products to the corporation, and, at times, the FERA supplied relief funds to buy needed goods or made grants to the state relief administrators to purchase local crop surpluses.\"\n\nThis all gets caught up in varying political fights; many producers succeed in selling the government agricultural goods at a profit that aren't necessarily the goal of the program. The FSRC gets replaced by the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation in 1935, which develops things like food stamps and school lunches, and does generally does a fairly thorough job of alleviating the worst of starvation during the Great Depression but not particularly efficiently. Both problems persist to this day.\n\nBut yes, for a few months in 1933 Steinbeck's assessment of agricultural product destruction is probably somewhat accurate, although he may be stretching quite a bit about the anger of the farmhands who did so.", "created_utc": 1649536251, "distinguished": null, "id": "i42u673", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/tztfqc/how_extensive_was_the_purposeful_destruction_of/i42u673/", "score": 930 } ]

[ { "body": "I feel that the question as framed is so broad that it may not be possible for any historian to answer in an objective way. \n\nWhile this is definitely a historical question, it is also a question of economics. Aside from the usual challenge of analyzing records from the past, you are also facing the difficulty unpacking a couple hundred years of economic theory, much of which is still hotly debated. Furthermore, even a hypothetically sound economic theory is subject to so many situational variables that predictions tend to be less accurate over shorter time-horizons (and more accurate over longer ones).\n\nI’m not well-versed enough in the *exact* historical circumstances of the Great Depression to answer your question in full, but I can provide you with context on the relevant economic theory. Rather than getting into a nuts-and-bolts debate on Keynesian versus Austrian versus Monetarist schools of thought, we need to talk about cause and effect, and how difficult it can be to parse from a specific time and place.\n\nAlmost any economist will agree with the following statement:\n\nExpansion of the monetary supply causes inflation in the price of consumer goods.\n\nThe caveat to that statement i, “Eventually.” The net impact of printing currency, will *eventually* devalue the individual units of that currency. Unfortunately, the world is incredibly complex, and by the time “eventually” comes around, so many forces have acted upon the market that individual causes and affects can appear hopelessly intertwined.\n\nTo demonstrate the problem, allow me to lay out a hypothetical scenario:\n\nThere is a magical town called “Anytown,” in which the citizens possess all of the raw materials, climatic conditions, and technologies in order to operate as a completely self-contained economy. Anytown uses silver as its currency, and there were only 100 silver coins ever minted.\n\nAnytown has a bakery that sells bread to the other citizens. Baker Fred knows how many loaves he can comfortably bake and self in a day, and sets the price at 1 silver coin per loaf. \n\nThis goes on for a while in perfect equilibrium, until Prospector Bob finds a vein of silver. Enough to mint another 100 coins! Bob mints the coins and goes on a spending spree. After Bob spends his windfall, the citizens of Anytown have a lot more silver jingling in their pockets. They would usually limit themselves to one loaf per day, but they are happy to eat more if they can afford it. Some citizens start to buy two loaves per day. Baker Fred sells out early for a few days, but doesn’t have the ability to bake more loaves. *Eventually* he raises his price to 2 coins per loaf. Voila. Inflation has taken place. The bread has not changed fundamentally in real value, but the price has gone up nonetheless.\n\nThis is all fine in theory, but nothing is ever so simple.\n\nImagine that while Prospector Bob is still minting his coins, several things happen:\n\nBaker Fred invents a new oven that bakes double the loaves in one day for the same effort. (Bread gets cheaper?)\n\nA hurricane strikes the town’s wheat field and destroys half the crop. (Wheat gets more expensive, and so does bread?)\n\nA subset of the town’s populace is discovered to have a genetic predisposition to Celiac disease. (Less people want bread anyway??)\n\nA factory totally unrelated to bread production lays off half of it’s workforce. (Less people have money to spend on bread? Maybe? It depends on if those factory workers were bread consumers! Maybe they prefer apples anyway? Need more data.)\n\nChanging technology, consumer preferences, and other variables all act upon the price of bread so that by the time Prospector Bob spends his coins, it may not be clear at all to an outside observer what his impact on the economy was. We can safely assume that his net impact across time was to raise inflation, but we can’t necessarily determine when or to what degree.\n\nWe also cannot rule emotion out of the equation. Consumer mindset can have massive impacts on an economy that may *appear* to contradict economic theory. For example, in times of crisis when governments tend to print more money, consumers are often in a state of panic. Occasionally this can lead to a massive uptick in consumers *saving* more money rather than spending it which effectively *removes* currency from circulation in the short-term. This can lead to a paradoxical deflationary reaction from inflationary monetary policy (again, in the *short-term*).\n\nAnyway, There are virtually infinite ways to interpret the question, “Did FDR prolong the Great Depression?”\n\nDid he expand the monetary supply? Absolutely. But that is only one piece of a *massive* puzzle.\n\nThe U.S. also entered the Second World War, which obviously necessitated massive government spending, but also helped position the United States to rise from the ashes as the only Western nation with completely intact infrastructure. Suddenly the U.S. is exporting consumer goods to Europeans desperate for them. That equals American jobs, a stronger dollar, and political hegemony in the Western world.\n\nTo what degree was FDR personally responsible for those effects? If he was responsible for them, to what degree was that his *intent* versus a happy by-product? \n\nHow do we separate political realities from economic realities? When the Great Depression hit, there were very real questions as to which way the political wind would blow regarding the the spread of socialism into the United States.\n\nIf I could provide a hypothetical that makes some bold claims for the sake of demonstrating the problem: \n\nImagine for a moment that indisputably sound economic theory states that a completely laissez-faire monetary policy would end the Great Depression as quickly as possible. But then imagine that the average citizen has lost his job, can’t feed his family, and if he doesn’t at least *perceive* the government action to help him, he is going to vote in a populist demagogue who wants to print a billion dollars for each American citizen, which will *undoubtedly* deepen the depression.\n\nCould you argue that FDR knowingly implemented irrational monetary policy in order to maintain political power and prevent even worse policy down the road? Yes, and people have made that argument. But these aren’t provable claims. You can chase these hypotheticals for ever, but they aren’t entirely frivolous either.\n\nPicking the apart the question of FDR’s *personal* culpability for a lengthening/shortening of the Great Depression essentially requires the historian to take a position on economic theory that is still argued over and bleeds into current events.\n\n Not to mention the challenge of separating FDR’s personal agency from forces of change outside his control.\n\nNone of this is to say that you won’t get some fascinating context from this community, but you may wish to pursue information from trained economists as well as historians.\n\nI apologize if this comment is outside the purview of the sub, but I felt it was important to point out the extremely broad nature of this question.\n\nGood luck!", "created_utc": 1667756439, "distinguished": null, "id": "ivb2lm5", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/ynqkex/did_fdr_prolong_the_great_depression/ivb2lm5/", "score": 9 } ]

[ { "body": "It's a bit off tangent, but some further background into what was happening with Russian life expectancies in the 1990s, can be found in this [answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/arz241/the_population_of_the_soviet_union_grew_rapidly/eh1mgln/) I wrote.", "created_utc": 1654616783, "distinguished": null, "id": "ibhz2mw", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/v6ux49/during_great_depression_americans_life_expectancy/ibhz2mw/", "score": 10 } ]

[ { "body": "To what extent did the Bonus Army fiasco damage Hoover's chances of re-election? Was his fate already sealed before this?", "created_utc": 1589991212, "distinguished": null, "id": "fr93v37", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/gndzij/im_eric_rauchway_author_of_winter_war_hoover/fr93v37/", "score": 24 }, { "body": "Thank you so much for your time today!\n\nI ask this with only a relatively basic knowledge of presidential history, but from my understanding, prior to his becoming president, Hoover was specifically known for his ability to organize government and solve crises, specifically poverty and hunger. Yet today, it feels like if he's famous for anything it's for botching his response to the Great Depression. What happened?", "created_utc": 1589991285, "distinguished": null, "id": "fr940f1", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/gndzij/im_eric_rauchway_author_of_winter_war_hoover/fr940f1/", "score": 46 }, { "body": "Hi, Dr. Rauchway. Thanks for doing this. \n\nWould you be able to describe the biases in the news media reporting on this debate? Were they generally unbiased, or did they lean towards or against the New Deal? Was the media polarized into pro- and anti-new-deal camps?", "created_utc": 1589990779, "distinguished": null, "id": "fr92z4s", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/gndzij/im_eric_rauchway_author_of_winter_war_hoover/fr92z4s/", "score": 20 } ]

[ { "body": "While more can always be said, below are some similar questions with answers:\n\n* u/Hyo38 asks \"Was FDR's New Deal a success or failure?\" - u/Medium_Collection answers [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/qyjbhl/comment/hliois0/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)\n* u/Foot-Note asks \"The Great Depression: What caused it to last so long, and were interventionist policies and the New Deal to blame? - u/llordlloyd and u/Kochevnik81 provide detailed answers [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fl13hb/comment/fkx0yzs/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)", "created_utc": 1651016025, "distinguished": null, "id": "i6bzh5o", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/ubn2h3/did_fdrs_policies_worsenlengthen_the_great/i6bzh5o/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "I will try to answer this the best that I can, but I would argue that it is hard to take the New Deal and lump it all together. Two great books that tackle this are McElvaine’s Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters for the Forgotten Man and his book simply titled The Great Depression. The former is a collection of letters written to the Roosevelts during the Depression and serves as, at least in my opinion, a template for the latter book’s creation. The New Deal is a less monolithic piece of legislature than it is often portrayed and talked about.\n\nI don’t have my sources immediately available, but the first thing to do is to split the New Deal into two parts, the early parts roughly 1933-1935/36 and the latter parts 1937-1941. This is because Roosevelts second term brought about a shifting political landscape as the overwhelming majority the democrats had in the Federal Government slipped a little bit in the election of 1936. This was caused by a small recession that occurred in 1935-1936 ish if I remember correctly.\n\nOn top of this the New Deal was not just one monolithic piece legislature like 2009’s TARP or the current BBB bills. It was a combination of a lot of smaller bills and executive orders, with a fair number of both being shot down by the Supreme Court. It is why the New Deal is sometimes referred to as “Roosevelt’s Alphabet Soup.” You had the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), The Emergency Conservation Work Act (ECW), and the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). These acts also created a ton of varied and different agencies to oversee their portion of the New Deal, with my personal favorite being the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).\n\nAdditionally, we need to look at the two methods that you mentioned were used to help the economy recover, Hoover’s Austerity and Roosevelt’s Keynesian economic ideas. Hoover, and by extension the Republican Party, believed that by cutting government spending and having fiscally conservative policies the markets would eventually self-correct and everything would sort itself out. It placed an emphasis on the individual person being fiscally responsible and “tightening their belts.” Whereas Keynesian economics believes that when the economy enters a depression the government should open the flood gates of government spending and try to put money in the economy.\n\nThese are super oversimplified explanations of these policies, but they get us to the New Deal more to your question of did the New Deal actually do anything? Unsurprisingly the answer is complicated, because Yes some programs did help and No some did not. Something you yourself noticed in your question.\n\nOverall, I do not think it is fair to look at the New Deal monolithically, each part is different. Individual parts helped in different ways and others did not. The CCC for example, Neil Maher cites this agency as having a roughly 80% approval rating in his book Nature’s New Deal. He also goes on to argue that the program put young men with little to no experience to work improving the country’s farmland, National Forests, and National Parks. There is a wealth of material championing the CCC, including myself. This goes back to the fact that in many ways you need to look at it piecemeal.\n\nMcElvaine ends his book with a similar stance if I recall, but I think he would agree that overall, I think it’s fair to say that the New Deal was a mixed bag policy that did not go far enough. Much like the criticisms of those modern-day policies from the 2007-8 recession. It definitely stabilized the economy for the most part and led to the US being able to tool up for the Second World War much faster. I think the best way to categorize the New Deal is that it stopped the bleeding, and helped to stabilize the economy, for the most part, but failed to go much beyond that.\n\nHopefully this makes sense and is not just the ramblings of a madman.", "created_utc": 1643214988, "distinguished": null, "id": "hub99m3", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/rymiie/how_effective_was_the_american_new_deal_in/hub99m3/", "score": 10 } ]

[ { "body": "There are a variety of reasons why Britain struggled in the 1920s, but the clearest explanation is monetary. British policymakers, most famously Winston Churchill, decided to return to the pre-war gold parity for the pound sterling, at a time when other countries had instead permanently devalued. From the standpoint of late 20th-early 21st century central banking orthodoxy, this decision was not just poor, it was downright perverse. But, as I will explain below, it reflected 19th century rather than 21st century logic on monetary policy, for obvious reasons, and if some (Keynes being the most famous) warned about its consequences, his was the dissident and not the orthodox position. The combination of postwar chaos, the Spanish Flu and monetary policy mistakes created a severe (and international) depression in 1920-21, but it was needlessly tight monetary policy that meant the UK did not entirely recover until after WWII. \n\nBritain had been the centre of the pre-war international gold standard. The Bank of England's role in managing that system has been somewhat exaggerated, but it was nevertheless the most important hub of international finance. The war had forced Britain to break the gold parity, and there had been considerable wartime and post-war inflation created both by scarcity of consumer goods, and pent-up demand. Adhering to the gold standard during wartime was simply too costly, and the war was too much a priority to sacrifice at the altar of hard money. - only the US among major powers stayed on the gold standard in wartime. And so, the value of the pound drifted downwards in terms of domestic goods (that is to say, there was inflation).\n\nReturning to the pre-war gold parity was seen as critical for restoring investor confidence in the pound, in UK sovereign debt, and in the UK's place in the financial world more generally. To accept the devaluation of wartime as a permanent rather than temporary measure would be both humiliating, and contrary to the central banking orthodoxy of the time: that confidence in gold convertibility was the mark of a well-managed economy. Britain was under domestic pressure to reject the gold standard orthodoxy, but this pressure was not as strong as elsewhere, and the establishment not as weak. In the UK, the Labour Party had brought the voice and issues of the working classes into Parliament, but the centre(-right) nevertheless held, and the government did what was necessary to return to the pre-war parity. Britain endured deflationary pressures, and successfully (though only briefly) re-established their domestic gold standard at the pre-war level. The enormous cost, in terms of unemployment and reduced export competitiveness, was borne by workers and taxpayers.\n\nHowever, several crucial things had changed, making the interwar period a fundamentally different (and more unstable) environment for monetary policy. For one, the relative strength of the British economy had changed. Prior to WWI, one could perhaps argue that the British economy was at least approximately the equal of the American economy, and had its own unmatched successes: it was still obviously the centre of international finance, and its investors owned an enormous portfolio of stocks and bonds representing much of the world's business and infrastructure, not to mention the debts of most sovereigns. The UK balance of trade was generally in deficit, but its balance of payments was in surplus: that is to say, the UK relied on investment income to support the value of the £. The war put enormous pressure on UK finances, and much of this portfolio was liquidated in one way or another. The Americans, meanwhile, did not suffer this setback, and increased their share of international finance continuously. \n\nBritish exports suffered from increasing competition during this period. From the 1840s until the late 19th century, British manufactured goods and services exports were a a very large component of world trade, and successfully competed even with domestic production across the world. By the end of the 19th century, Britain's advantage was eroding for a number of reasons: domestic production was slowly industrialising all over the world, including in the British colonies; Japan was beginning to compete in Asian textile markets; other European countries had caught up in terms of industrialisation, and had even outstripped British productivity levels in some industries (Germany in most heavy industries, for instance), though they maintained a lead in some of the lighter industries. The international trade and finance that Britain had intermediated recovered only slowly, and other countries competed both economically and politically in a way that had barely begun prior to WWI.\n\nIn terms of domestic politics, the countries of Europe had been transformed. While the beginnings of mass democracy, the labour movement, the welfare state, women's suffrage, and so on predate WWI, there is no question that the war permanently transformed both who had voice in politics, and what could be said in the political arena. The old liberal oligarchies found themselves challenged by new parties with different priorities. Whereas previously any issue that could unite both the liberal and conservative factions of the upper and middle classes would be taken for granted, such as balanced budgets and adherence to the gold standard, now these issues were all contestable and contested. Labour movements and unionization had fundamentally changed the nature of the wage bargain, and increasingly deployed their political, social and economic power towards the questions of employment, working hours, labour conditions, wages and benefits. Socialist parties across Europe were organising, participating and in some cases actively rebelling against the existing political order. The example of Russia validated both hopes for radical change and fears of it. And so, what might have been a painful but politically obvious decision to restore the pre-war economic status quo was instead a turbulent and messy bargain within and between countries, which would not last.\n\nThe extreme example is the chaos of Weimar Germany, where the failed Spartacus League uprising was just the beginning of two of the most turbulent and tragic decades in European history. Reparations, war debts both internal and external, and rising political violence meant Germany was understandably unwilling (perhaps even entirely unable) to return to the old orthodoxy, with stable currency convertible to gold and regular debt repayments. Any government that satisfied international creditors and made a serious attempt to balance the budget, as in the case of Bruning's chancellorship, would render itself politically toxic. \"Internal devaluation\" meant lower wages, rollbacks of benefits, increased unemployment, and general misery. This did not last, and the consequences of the attempt almost certainly include the rise of the Nazi party to power. France was not quite so unstable, but nevertheless did not return to the pre-war parity, and instead devalued the Franc by 80% (!). \n\nAll of this meant that Britain's attempt to return to the pre-war gold parity was far more than just a restoration of the status quo. The relationship of the general price level to the price of gold is only stable if both the scarcity of gold and the scarcity of foreign currency remain stable compared to the domestic money supply. Neither of those things held true. Gold production could not keep up with the enormous pace of global economic growth, especially in the United States. This caused gold prices to increase (which is deflation, if the gold-money parity is maintained). French devaluation led to the Banque de France accumulating an enormous store of gold, well beyond the level justified by the size of their economy. Thus, what seemed like the merely a conservative and common-sense restoration of an old and stable rule (\"the £ can be converted into a fixed amount of gold\") was instead a Quixotic overvaluation of the currency compared both with the domestic price level, and the new, much lower prices of foreign currencies.\n\nThe relationship between colonies and economic development is less clear, but in the short run, what could have been done to somehow leverage the Empire to solve any of this is not clear. The richer dominions had their own economic problems to deal with, and Britain had long since given away the power to levy whatever taxes they pleased on Canada or Australia. The poorer colonies in India or Africa did not have much surplus to expropriate, as they were already quite close to the level of subsistence. Extracting large amounts of revenue from very poor people is difficult, expensive, and largely self-defeating. Even the most rapacious colonial policy would almost certainly not have yielded economically relevant amounts of plunder, compared with the sheer size of Britain's industrial economy by the 1920s.", "created_utc": 1608478205, "distinguished": null, "id": "gghhxqw", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/kgj9yf/during_the_interwar_years_of_19181939_the_british/gghhxqw/", "score": 73 } ]

[ { "body": "John Kenneth Galbraith's highly readable, fact-filled, and authoritative bestseller *The Crash of 1929* does not bear out this tendentious interpretation. \\[Unattributed quotes are from this source\\]. \n\nThe 'Government's easy money policies' were a lack of policy and regulation. It was exactly a libertarian dream. The Federal Reserve was the weakest of institutions. Formed after one of the many previous crashes, it emerged 'from the panic of 1907, with its alarming epidemic of bank failures: the country was fed up once and for all with the anarchy of unstable private banking' \\[Paul A Samuelson, *Economics,* 1970\\] *.* Its board, who had other jobs and little to do as board members, didn't act even well into the crisis. Exactly as libertarians would desire. \n\nGalbraith's thesis centres on human psychology: 'Americans... were displaying an inordinate desire to get rich quickly with the minimum of physical effort'. He notes the Florida real estate boom of the mid-decade, which, incidentally, gave us the the term 'Ponzi scheme' after one of its promoters. 'The Florida boom was the first indication of the mood of the twenties. That the mood survived the Florida collapse is still more remarkable'. \n\nGabraith notes the half-truth in the first point: That in 1927, with the US stock market already running since 1924 with little pause, European central bankers came to the US to successfully urge for a lowering of the interest rate. This made funds available that flowed into stocks either directly, or more seriously, by underpinning lending to others who invested. The above argument rests on attributing to this move the blame for the Depression.\n\n'This view that the action of the Federal Reserve authorities in 1927 was responsible for the speculation and collapse has never been \\[in 1954\\] seriously shaken. There are reasons why it is attractive. *It is simple, and it exhonorates both the American people and their economic system from any serious blame* \\[my italics\\]. \n\n'Yet the explanation obviously assumes that people will always speculate if only they can get the money to finance it. Nothing could be further from the truth. There were times before and there have been long periods since when credit was plentiful and cheap- far cheaper than in 1927-29- and when speculation was negligible. Nor... was speculation out of control after 1927, except that it was beyond the reach of men who did not want in the least to control it. The explanation is a tribute only to a recurrent preference , in economic matters, for formidable nonsense'. Galbraith goes on to detail, often humorously, the growing stake those who should have been cooling the market had in inflating it.\n\n​\n\nHoover did not have interventionist policies after the crash. On the contrary, he adopted the orthodox free market idea of a self-correcting system. Indeed, he denied the very existence of the Depression: 'In June of 1930, Herbert Hoover was visited by a delegation of public-spirited men who urged an expansion of public works to ease the plight of the unemployed, who were then rising into the millions. \"Gentlemen\"the President said, \"You have come sixty days too late. The Depression is over\"'. \\[JK Galbraith, *Money,* 1975\\]. 'The modest tax cut apart, hoover was clearly averse to any large-scale government action to counter the developing depression'. \n\nThe *Securities Act* of 1933 and the *Securities Exchange Act* of 1934 merely curbed the worst excesses of speculation and margin trading that, by then, were known to have contributed to the crash.\n\nArgument number 3 depends on the proof of the previous arguments, which are erroneous. \n\nThe *Wagner Act* allowed labour to organise. The libertarian case assumes that if labour costs have no floor, then in a falling market eventually people will become cheap enough to be employed. The Depression itself was shocking because classical economic theories like this, long-held to be self-evident truths, were revealed to be failing to reveal themselves. People could be desperately poor and remain unemployed, as there was no demand for products, because people were not paid enough to create demand. Hence, Keynesianism.\n\nThese acts ensured the prosperity attending the Second World War was not directed largely into the hands of corporations, but emerged into the hands of working people, generating a burgeoning middle class and underpinning the prosperity of the 50s and 60s. The *Wagner Act* was passed in 1935: I feel the United States would not have been able to fulfil its role as the Arsenal of the Allies a few years later had ' *the last remaining bulwarks of productivity'* been dragged *'to their knees'.* In this period the US economy ramped up efficient production much, much faster than it had in the previous war when *laizzez faire* applied, the the role of Roosevelt is readily obvious in this. \n\nIt must be noted that there were endless warnings from classic economists from the mid 1930s onward that government intervention was inimical to growth. Sadly for them, these voices were constantly proven wrong by events. As is the basic contention of your friend's source: it is completely at odds with events as they played out.", "created_utc": 1584614562, "distinguished": null, "id": "fkx0yzs", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/fl13hb/the_great_depression_what_caused_it_to_last_so/fkx0yzs/", "score": 214 }, { "body": "Nothing that happened during the Hoover administration could possibly have \"caused\" the Great Depression. Like every other asset price bubble, the seeds of the depression were sown years before it began. The 1920s saw an unprecedented global mobilization of capital due to the development and mass marketing of new investment schemes and financial instruments. This led to more capital being available, and the standards of investment declining - in other words, if in the 1910s a bank would only capitalize a project expecting a 5% return, in the 1920s, a Wall Street Fund manager might be willing to capitalize a project with a 3% expected return, then a 2% one, then a 1% one. By 1928, this had led to trillions of dollars in today's money going towards zero or close to zero return investments. The Great Depression, like any crash caused by an asset bubble, was in reality a Great Correction. Trillions of modern dollars worth of capital had already been \"destroyed\" through investment in dying and declining industries, which managed to raise money by simple virtue of so much capital being available.There have been asset price bubbles caused by easy money policies, including the Japanese Asset price bubble, the many crashes of the Turkish economy during the Cold War, and the Asian Financial Crisis, but the Great Depression was not one of them. The monetary policies of all Great Powers in the 1920s would be considered extremely \"tight\" by today's standards. All the Great Powers used the Gold Standard, meaning they could not freely create money to begin with and inflation for decades had been zero or close to zero. There had been a few instances of expansionary monetary policy, such as Japan in 1877-78s and the Confederate States of America, but they were motivated by wartime finances, not economic recovery. It would not be extreme to say that the idea of expansionary monetary policy as an *economic* and not *fiscal* strategy had not been invented yet. Indeed, the first governments to embark on expansionary monetary policy for stimulus purposes were largely \"flying blind\" with no popular theory to back them up.\n\nAs we can see from the above, the government had no hand in the 1920s credit boom - the market, through the development of investment instruments and techniques to sell them - created that itself. The market did not self-adjust, it self-destructed. This helps answer [fee.org](https://fee.org)'s second point - there is never, will never, and has never been a self-adjusting mechanism in the market to the same extent that Classical economists suggested. The prevailing theory at the time the depression hit was that private businesses run rationally should respond to any decline in demand by downsizing, lowering prices, and lowering wages. The problem is that prices of inputs, outputs, and wages are \"sticky\" - there are costs associated with changing them. The reasons for this are manifold:\n\n* Labor unions, laws, personal relationships between employees and the unwillingness of workers to accept a wage cut make wages sticky.\n* Multi-year contracts and long-standing business relationships make prices of inputs sticky.\n\nPrices and wages are also both affected by psychological biases. Namely:\n\n* Anchoring - people with a point of reference are unlikely to make major changes from that point of reference, only small adjustments. For example, if 40% of the capital in the country is destroyed (as happened in the US and Germany during the Great Depression), suppliers may consent to a small decrease in prices, but will likely not agree to halve them.\n* Loss aversion - studies show that people are far more averse to losing something than they are eager to gain something. This is part of the reason that wages are sticky even in good times (workers are far less motivated to seek a higher paying job than to protect a job when the economy is bad), but also explains why it is so hard during downturns to adjust wages downwards.\n\nIn economics as in war, retreats often turn into routs. While President Hoover did engage in some interventionist policies, he was a believer in the free market and Classical economics. His speeches are full of confidence that the predictions of the classical economists would come true - that the market would adjust itself, and that the economy \"had turned the corner\". Problematically, those oversimplified theories were wrong for reasons that were not clear at the time.\n\nThe third point is wrong on two counts. First, FDR only expanded interventionist policies on paper - his budget was actually *more balanced* than Hoover's. Second, interventionist policies led to economic recovery in other countries. Japan was far more extreme in its intervention than the United States. Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo responded quickly to the crisis, abolishing the gold standard, slashing interest rates, funding military and civil projects, and running a deficit both through borrowing and printed money. While the economies of the United States was producing at 75% of 1929 levels in 1935, Japan was producing at 141.8%. Germany, which spent heavily into debt following Hitler's rise to power in 1932, expanded its production from 53.5% of 1929 levels to 94.0% within three years.\n\nThe fourth point just has no evidence to substantiate it. \"The last remaining healthy sectors\" implies that there were very few profitable companies in the Depression, but nothing could be further than the truth. The number of banks in the United States was not even halved during the recession - it declined by only 40%. In other words, even the majority of banks, suffering runs on deposits and a wave of defaulting borrowers, managed to stay in business. Some sectors, such as oil, defense, radio, paper, and hydropower, were in general doing quite well and were never \"brought to their knees\", before or after the Wagner Act. Case in point, between 1932 and 1954, the stock of the Container Corporation of America appreciated by 37,200%, in spite of the harsh labor laws during the depression and after World War 2.\n\nThe case of the Container Corp. of America reveals a bigger truth about recession and depression - the pain is never universal. Some companies - those that borrowed for low-return projects in the credit boom - fared poorly. Others did well. Put simply, asset price bubbles are the result of a lot of people investing a lot of money in a lot of companies with tight margins, and a lot of those companies failing at the same time due to a sudden shock. Bubbles can be the fault of the government, but this one was not.\n\nSources:\n\nSjostrom, William. Job Security in an Efficiency Wage Model, Journal of Macroeconomics.\n\nCrompton, John and Ji Young. Experiments Testing the Effectiveness of Purposeful Anchoring on Reference Price in the Context of Public Leisure Services.\n\nHiromi, Arisawa. Economic history of the Showa era.\n\nBokhari, Sheharyar, and David Geltner. Loss Aversion and Anchoring in Commercial Real Estate Pricing: Empirical Evidence and Price Index Implications.\n\nFisher, Irving. The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions.\n\nParker, Randall. Reflections on the Great Depression.", "created_utc": 1584663706, "distinguished": null, "id": "fkz6963", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/fl13hb/the_great_depression_what_caused_it_to_last_so/fkz6963/", "score": 11 }, { "body": "While you've gotten some interesting answers on this thread that hopefully should allow you and your coworker to learn a bit more about the topic, understand this: each of the answers you're asking for has been debated for 80 years and *are still debated today* in quite literally tens of thousands of PhD theses, partially form the basis of several different economic schools, and without an appropriate theoretical background in macroeconomics you're not going to be able to either effectively understand both the criticisms it raises or form an appropriate response to it. A lot of fields within history are fairly straightforward, but arguing how historical precedents apply to economic theory isn't, and on top of that in some ways you're asking an extremely broad question.\n\nSo rather than try to cram a semester long intro to macroeconomics course into a post, I want to do something different and provide three books to look at. Hopefully they can provide some context and coherent explanations for the questions raised in the article.\n\n>\"The government’s “easy money” policies caused an artificial economic boom and a subsequent crash.\"\n\nBesides a definitional problem of what qualifies as 'easy money' - Tier I capital requirements for banks (in fairness, Basel didn't start until 1974 so I'm using that as short hand for the predecessors)? Margin limits on the market? Central Bank policies? Decisions about the gold standard? - which government(s) are they talking about? I mean, we know exactly which banks started the meltdown of the financial system (Austria) and why (terrible lending and forcing healthy banks to absorb the portfolios of those that blew up), but that doesn't really give enough detail about the monetary policy that enabled the whole mess.\n\nFor that, however, I do have a great reference, which is the award winning *Lords of Finance* by Liaquat Ahamed which covers the central bankers of the 1920s and their disastrous mistakes - some of which were forced by the Gold Standard, which he explains more coherently than in any other source I've read - and how the combination of those mistakes led to the Great Depression.\n\n>President Herbert Hoover’s interventionist policies after the crash suppressed the self-adjusting aspect of the market, thus preventing recovery and prolonging the recession.\n\nAgain, definitional. 'Interventionist policies'? Hoover blocked almost every Federal relief program (he believed that was the role of private charities), the Fed was beyond ineffective at that point given the way the charter was written, and if 'self-adjusting' refers to either industrial capacity or bank balance sheets it's not exactly clear how either was 'suppressed' - I mean, something like a third of the state of Mississippi went up for auction in a single day in 1933, which tells you all you need to know about just how 'interventionist' things were.\n\nBut if you want to learn more about Hoover's responses, the collapse of the banking system in 1931 and 1932, and the complete ineffectiveness of the Fed, then *Herbert Hoover in the White House* by Charles Rappleye is one of the tiny handful of books that thoroughly explores his Presidential administration (easily the worst of the 20th century) rather than putting it in the context of the (extraordinary) life that he led before becoming one of the most infamous leaders in American history. One of the most interesting sidenotes of the book is the revelation that Hoover was nearly as paranoid as Nixon about his political enemies and authorized a politically motivated break-in that was in many ways worse than Watergate.\n\nFor #3 and #4, the debate over the New Deal remains robust today, but the best easily digestible source for an overview of the economic context facing the incoming administration is *FDR* by Jean Edward Smith. It's bite sized - something like 70 pages or so in the context of a full biography - but surprisingly thorough as an introduction. While he's a strong admirer of FDR, he also walks a fairly middle ground in addressing how untested the policies adopted were - and just how desperate the situation was that required them despite nobody really knowing if they'd work (and many of them didn't).", "created_utc": 1584679664, "distinguished": null, "id": "fkzt87l", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/fl13hb/the_great_depression_what_caused_it_to_last_so/fkzt87l/", "score": 7 } ]

[ { "body": "I can't comment on the role of the government in the crisis but I believe I can speak on the Federal Reserve's response to the crisis, which I've studied through studying monetary policy. I believe the Fed's actions are the most significant when discussing the Great Depression. So much so that Ben Bernanke, who would go on to become head of the Fed, apologised on behalf of the Fed for the crisis in 2002. I am no means an expert on this topic, there's definitely other users here who will be able to add more substantial comments.\n\nAt the time, the Fed's central body had less power than it would today. For a national decision to be made, each state's Fed would have to agree, which made responding to the crisis more difficult. An example of this was the issue of the Fed's role as the lender of last resort. When banks began to fail due to depositors withdrawing their cash in huge amounts (a bank run), the Fed's governors disagreed on what was the best approach. At a high level, one side wanted to lend to the banks, the other side didn't want to interfere. The latter side felt that allowing weak institutions to fail would allow a stronger economy to progress. One of such advocates was Herbert Hoover’s secretary of treasury, Andrew Mellon. \n\n One case the Fed initially took the wrong course of action is their interest rates. At the time, the US dollar was still on the gold standard. Policymakers wanted to prevent gold leaving the US to protect the value of the US dollar. To do this, they kept interest rates high and didn’t engage in open market operations (e.g. quantitative easing). Banks had no reserves from deposits due to the run on the banks and borrowing/lending fell. This meant money supply fell considerably, meaning businesses had restricted access to capital which contributed to the fall in aggregate demand, meaning that consumption and spending fell, harming economic growth.\n\nThe Fed’s initial response was proven to be incorrect when they began engaging in open market operations to increase money supply, which aided the recovery of the economy from 1933 onward combined with the measures of the new administration.\n\nSources:\n\n [https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/great\\_depression](https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/great_depression) \n\n Mishkin F. (2009), The Economics of Money Banking and Financial Markets, Ninth Edition. \n\nThis is the textbook my lecturer used and recommended us to read, there was a ton of other readings which I don't have access to currently.", "created_utc": 1585837582, "distinguished": null, "id": "fm7vesy", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/ftlaxk/the_great_depression_started_with_the_oct_1929/fm7vesy/", "score": 238 } ]

[ { "body": "I have answered a similar question recently about New Deal policies, but the core of the question is whether or not Keynesian economics is better than Austerity. The idea is that the New Deal failed and that had the Roosevelt Administration just continued with the Hoover Era austerity measures the economy would have \"self corrected.\" It really depends on your view of economics and how you view government intervention in the markets. Though historians like McElvaine ( a personal favorite) tend to side on the belief that the government needed to do something. Hoover's administration and the Republicans for the most part did very little, and there is a reason they lost the 1932 election in a landslide, and why Roosevelt and the Democrats would win the next 3 elections.\n\nThe New Deal was imperfect, but it did stabilize the economy during the 1930's. It may have not been a super success that brought the economy out of a slump instantaneously, but it stopped the free fall.", "created_utc": 1644337300, "distinguished": null, "id": "hw3jh99", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/sdploj/did_fdr_extend_the_great_depression_with_his_new/hw3jh99/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "Greetings! I'll be weighing in on the effects of the Great Depression on Japanese society and politics (spoiler alert: it's quite the rollercoaster). Unfortunately my knowledge on the impact of the Great Depression on China is rather lacking so hopefully another AH traveler with access to great sources or pre-existing knowledge on that will chime in with their tuppence on the matter. For now however, let's get started on the impacts of the Great Depression upon the Empire of the Rising Sun. \n\n*Note: As a shameless plug, parts of this response have been sourced and adapted from an earlier three-part response I made on the* [*interwar politics of Japan*](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/kn1f7k/what_was_the_internal_political_situation_like_in/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)*. Give it a read if you'd like to understand the long-term developments and context of the Great Depression in 1930s Japan.* \n\n**The Countryside and the Cities**\n\nWhen the New York Stock market crashed in October 1929, the Japanese economy was, like much of Europe and America, hit hard by the global impact of the resulting economic depression. Perhaps one of the most drastic consequences of the depression was the impact it had on one of Japan's key exports to the west at the time: **silk.** Between the end of 1929 and June of 1931, the price of silk fell by 60%, and by 1936 its price had dropped more than *any other* commodity on the international market, a major concern for Japan's industry. What was particularly damaging to the silk market (and by extension, the rise of nationalistic, anti-western sentiments) was the fact that **America was the main buyer of Japanese silk.** In the latter half of the 1920s for example, 60% of Japanese silk produced was often exported to the US, with just 10% being sold to other countries. \n\nThe impact this had, alongside the decrease in prices of other agricultural commodities such as rice and barley (which fell an average of 43% between 1929 and 1931), was disastrous for the common farmers. Due to the **tenant-system** of land ownership in Japan (in which farmers paid landlords a certain percentage of their crops' profit for continued use of plots), many small-scale landowners quickly found themselves accumulating alarmingly high level of debt. In line with this phenomenon, land disputes quickly rose in number as well, as tenant farmers refused to be evicted by financially-pressed landlords. \n\nIn the cities, the situation was equally (if not slightly less) dire, Andrew Gordon does a good job summarising the chaos that the Depression caused in urban Japan: \n\n> \"In the cities, the depression threatened shopkeepers and factory owners as well as their employees. Retail traders faced bankruptcy when wage cuts and job losses cut the buying power of their customers. **Annual rates of failure among Tokyo retail stores nearly doubled from 1926 to 1930**. The newspapers were filled with tales of small storeowners fleeing their creditors in the dead of night. Small-scale manufacturing businesses also failed by the thousands.\"\n\nUnemployment soared considerably, with some historians estimating nationwide figures between 1930-1932 at about 15% of the industrial workforce, with citywide figures often exceeding 20%. Such despair from the economic consequences inevitably caused social unrest amongst the Japanese workers and farmers, who believed that the government was doing a poor job of handling the crisis, and their complaints often targeted one group of businesses in particular: the ***Zaibatsu***.\n\n**The \"Capitalist Cliques\"**\n\nThe *Zaibatsu* refers to a group of large business conglomerates within 20th century Japan, who by the 1920s had risen considerably in power and influence over the economy *and* the government. Otherwise known as the \"Big Four\", these *Zaibatsu* were: Mitsubishi, Mitsui Sumitomo, and Yasuda. They had already progressed their power signifcantly in the banking sector during the **1927 financial crisis** in Japan, which saw over three-quarters of the nations banks fail. The *Zaibatsu* during the Great Depression were economically shrewd, but their face-saving methods came at the cost of public (and to an extent, political) prestige. When the Japanese government under Prime Minister **Osachi Hamaguchi** (a politician from the *Minseito* party) put Japan back on the gold standard at the onset of the depression, the timing could not have been worse. In January 1930, Japan's move back onto the gold standard and the subsequent fixed exchange rate came exactly when there was a global deflation and plunging prices worldwide. \n\nThe *Zaibatsu* realised that before long, the gold standard would have to be abandoned, and the yen would need to be devalued. Due to this insight, they began selling massive amounts of yen for dollars. The result was that when the Japanese economy did go off the gold standard in 1931, the value of the yen fell by half against the dollar. The *Zaibatsu* then happily doubled their profits by buying back the now-cheaper yen with the dollars they had initially exchanged them for. This prompted widespread social outrage at the Japanese economic and political system. The *Zaibatsu* were likened to corrupt, monopolistic, and profit-seeking elements of Japan's system, which many believed was now at a systemic **\"dead end.\"** \n\nNeither the *Minseito* government (which fell shortly after the attempted assassination of Hamaguchi in November 1930), nor their rivals in the *Seiyukai* party, seemed capable of halting the *Zaibatsu*'s rise. As a result, they were often seen as *supporters* of the *Zaibatsu*, and lambasted for their complicity in depriving the common Japanese worker of economic security during the crisis years of the Depression. One conglomeration of businesses formed in the wake of the Depression, the Imperial Middle Class Federated Alliance, issued the statement below summing up this belief:\n\n>“the established \\[political\\] parties have betrayed us, becoming the political lackeys of the capitalist cliques and trampling the middle class of commercial, industrial, and agricultural producers.”\n\n**Developments Abroad** \n\nAmidst the backdrop of Japan's economic depression, there were a series of other political developments abroad which further shifted the country onto a militaristic and nationalistic path. In 1930, Hamaguchi’s cabinet sent Wakatsuki Reijiro as head of the Japanese delegation to the London Naval Conference. Militant elements in the navy and in the populace had been calling for a revision to the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, which had set a shipbuilding quota on the United States, Great Britain, Japan, France and Italy based on tonnage. The Article of the Treaty dealing with this “tonnage ratio” is below:\n\n>“The total capital ship replacement tonnage of each of the Contracting Powers shall not exceed in terms of standard displacement, for the United States 525,000 tons; for the British Empire 525,000 tons; for France 175,000 tons; for Italy 175,000 tons; for Japan 315,000 tons.”\n\nIn the eyes of expansionist elements within Japan’s government, that ratio was far too low to enable the Navy to effectively challenge either the United States or Britain in a future war, and they called for a revision during the London Naval Conference. Unfortunately, the Western negotiators were unwilling to entertain Japan’s request for a 10:10:7 ratio, and Japan left the conference will little more rights than it entered it with. Keichi Yamasaki, a Japanese translator for the Pacific Affairs journal, published an article immediately after the signing of the London Naval Treaty regarding the opinions of the Japanese press, writing:\n\n>“The Japanese press is unanimous in rejoicing at the conclusion of the London Naval Treaty, considering it as a step forward in the direction of a further limitation of armaments, while it expresses its dissatisfaction over the inability to still go further toward the curtailment of naval expenditure.”\n\nPart 1 of 2", "created_utc": 1615555857, "distinguished": null, "id": "gqorhgz", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/m3fslj/so_its_generally_accepted_that_things_were_going/gqorhgz/", "score": 48 }, { "body": "Hello! sorry for the late response, and I see Japan has been covered already, so lets get into what was going on in Republican China during the Great Depression. No nation could escape a depression that was so.. great. And fortunately for us, there has been quite a revival in the interest of Republican China's economics in recent years. Perhaps unfortunately, scholars have yet to really reach a universally accepted decision whether the Great Depression specifically effected China as harshly as other nations or not. \n\nThe first important thing to note is that China's economy rested on the silver standard up to 1935. When the Kuomintang took control after the warlord period, Chinese currency in circulation was more or less useless (one could draw comparisons to modern Venezuela or Zimbabwe). When many think of the Republican period, one of the first things that comes to mind is certainly corruption, and while corruption was always an issue within the ranks of the KMT, China did see a period of stability and moderate economic growth beginning in early 1927 after the Northern Expedition. To be fair, it would've been hard for China to have fallen much further than where it stood during the Warlord period. \n\n**Shanghai, Urban Development and Silver**\n\nThe KMT made it a point to focus a lot of modernizing efforts on the urban coast. The greatest asset to China and shining beam of hope for Chinese nationalists was Shanghai, the most powerful of China's eastern ports. So it was in Shanghai that Chiang and the gang wanted to focus on. Early after unification, the KMT decided to develop bank credits through land mortgages in Shanghai in order to help finance their flourishing cotton-textile and silk reeling industries along the Yangzi Delta. Growth for these industries went swimmingly up to about mid-1930, and then things get really bad for China. Uniquely bad from most Western nations, as China not only had to fight off an economic disaster affecting the world, but also foreign encroachment. Keep in mind that while the Great Depression was wreaking havoc on the world economy Japan invaded and conquered Manchuria in 1931. In 1932 Japanese marines and KMT troops clashed in Shanghai. Chinese nationalists called for a boycott of Japanese products. Manchuria was a great loss indeed, although I wont go into specifics lets just mention that it was one of the largest producing areas of soybeans in the world, as well as hosting economically vital railways such as the CER which had been jointly operated and owned by the USSR and China (who was forced to relinquish control over to Japan).\n\nAcross the world exports of all luxuries took a nose dive, and silk was no different. Trade between rural and urban China worsened. Over in the West, drastic actions had to be taken. The gold standard was quickly dropped by nations still using it. In 1934, China was hit with a massive crisis; America passed the Silver Purchase Act and the price of silver began to fluctuate wildly. This forced the Nationalist government into action, and several banking and currency reforms were issued in 1935. The reforms again targeted that lucrative Yangzi Delta surrounding Shanghai. The hope was that a new Chinese currency which was devalued against the dollar and sterling would stimulate exports of silk. To address rural issues, the government injected money into rural financial agencies. This effectively began a period of hyper-inflation for the Nationalist government that still carries on over to Taiwan to this day. While we can speculate that the monetary stimulus' into rural China may have been effective, any benefits were decisively dashed by Japan's invasion of China in 1937. The invasion forced the KMT to pump even greater amounts of money into its military budget, and by the 1940s China's currency was once again worthless.\n\nLoren Brandt argues that continued growth in money supply, despite falling prices, indicates strong industrial and commercial activity within China. Indeed while Brandt's sources on China's money supply are controversial, the figures for industrial output seem to be more accepted. Regardless of what was happening with monetary policy, the Chinese economy in the early 1930s did experience strong industrial output and growth. Other historians have differing opinions. Wu Chengming wrote in the third volume of *History of Chinese Capitalism* that \"The economic crisis of 1932-1935 was, with the exception of the wars of invasion launched by foreign countries, the single most severe blow to the Chinese economy.\" So its safe to say that in urban China, the results of the depression, foreign invasion aside, are mixed and still in the process of being understood. Regardless, the depression did force the KMT into financial action, so there was a strong influence on Chinese monetary policy.\n\n**Growth in Rural Southwestern China**\n\nOur sources are more limited for rural China, and the most comprehensive study focuses on southwestern China, so I will too in order to avoid further speculation. So we're talking Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guizhou areas. These areas were fairly underdeveloped prior to the arrival of the KMT government during WWII, where they set up their third and final temporary capital in Chongqing and brought much industry with them as they fled Japanese occupation. This area may also be referred to as the Upper Yangzi. \n\nThese provinces relied heavily on agriculture (65% of the local economy according to Chris Bramall's figures), especially the illicit opium production. Industry made up \\~6% of output. The major exports from this area were silk, opium, and *tong* oil. Tobacco and sugar play a close second. So mostly luxury goods for the time period, all heavily affected by the depression. Sichuan provided \\~16% of all silk exported through Shanghai. According to the *Sichuan Yuebao* (Sichuan Economic Monthly, a contemporary magazine) the minor silk-producing center of Qionglai held trade that benefited 100,000 households. Perhaps an overestimate, but still important enough to be worth mentioning. Sichuan's exports do fall almost exactly half from its peak in 1930 from 31-34. Imports also fell. \n\nMany historians argue that this part of China, especially Sichuan, was at this time \"isolated\" from China. To argue this, they look at total % of exports and indeed we get a fairly clear picture: according to Maritime Customs documents (these goods shipped by river), 6-9% of Sichuan's total goods were exported and just over 10% for the Yun-Gui region. By contrast the national provincial average was around 15-17%. This suggests that this area was fairly self reliant and not so integrated with the national market, and even less so the international market. Even though silk was important, many silk producing regions of southern Sichuan actually traded much more closely with SE Asian states than they did internally. Still, there is some evidence that commodity prices fluctuated accordingly beginning with the silver crisis in 1934, corresponding with Shanghai and especially for the price of rice. But we still see a similar trend with China's urban centers, that is a decline in incomes but no decline in production. \n\nThere are also some external factors contributing to the local economy in southwest China during this period. The loss of Manchuria to Japan also extended into southwest China as they lots a reliable base of linen trade. Both Sichuan and Yunnan used their own currencies independent from the national government, leading to gross speculation by 1934. A local war named the Two Liu's War broke out in Sichuan in 1932-34. The CCP armies passed through Sichuan during the Long March, pillaging rice in some counties. And finally, a drought and famine began in Sichuan in 1934, and again in 1936-37, just as China as a whole began to slowly recover before the invasion. \n\n**Conclusion**\n\nSo in conclusion, did the depression affect China? Well, yes, but the ways in which it did are still undetermined. Still, we have some interesting evidence and work being done in the field giving us insight into how different areas of China coped. It is important to keep in mind that unlike most nations, China in this period was suffering greatly from external pressures, the largest two being a lack of foreign investment from 1931-37 and of course Japanese imperialism. The KMT was beset on all sides with troubles it had no ability to resolve. And the Nationalist government was still in its youth, just three years established when Black Friday hit, So it gives us a very unique case compared to all other nations during this period. \n\nLots of info in this post, and maybe a little hard to follow, so feel free to ask questions if clarification is needed!\n\n**Sources**\n\n*Distant Thunder: The Regional Economies of Southwest China and the Impact of the Great Depression,* Tim Wright\n\n*China During the Great Depression,* Tomoko Shiroyama", "created_utc": 1615600490, "distinguished": null, "id": "gqra18z", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/m3fslj/so_its_generally_accepted_that_things_were_going/gqra18z/", "score": 21 }, { "body": "In Japan, it had a huge impact. \n\nOne of the political driving forces in this period was a group of military officers (specifically the army) known as the *Kodo-ha,* or \"Imperial Way Faction\". They were deeply militaristic and committed to an expansionist Japan supported by the spiritual force of the soldier who believed in the ideals of a pre-Westernised nation. The origins of this are connected to the \"National Learning Theory\" promoted by Tokugawa thinkers but start to become active during economic difficulty in the 1920s. Officers in the military start to view the westernised big business (*zaibatsu*) as a barrier between traditional Japanese values, most notably a wedge between the Emperor and his union with the people. \n\nA particular gripe among the officers at the time was the conditions of rural Japan. Many of these men were originally from there and the widespread inequality angered them when compared to the profiteering of the conglomerates. They viewed this behaviour as unnecessary western greed which was opposed to their agrarian ideals. Following rice riots and famine in the 20s, the rural classes suffered further under a new type of landlord- urban businessmen buying up farms for cheap labour to fund their investments in the cities. If you want to look into this theme in particular the extremist group *Gondo Seikyo* is a good start. \n\nOne particular army officer convicted of attempting to assassinate the Prime Minister in 1932 sums up their motives well: \n\n*\"In utter disregard of the poverty stricken farmers, the enourmously rich Zaibatsu pursue their private profit. Meanwhile the young children of the impoverished farmers....attend school without breakfast, and their families subsist on rotten potatoes\"*\n\nThe Depression hit Japan hard but it was an opportunity for the *Kodo-ha*. To them, western ways had cleared failed and their influence started to grow considering they had rattled against this economic structure for a decade. Real wages were nosediving from 1931 onwards and more ears were listening to what the militarists had to say after a decade of competing opinion and mixed messages. For them, the solution was expansion into Manchuria to grow the economy and give Japanese manufacturing demand. \n\nOn the eve of war, the militarists had struck a deal with the *Zaibatsu* to help them fuel the machines of war while reaping the benefits of imperialism. Defence spending greatly improved the profit margins of businesses like Mitsubishi and Mitsui who also started to expand into the new region of the empire. Over 84% of assets in Manchuria were eventually owned by the Japanese conglomerates who used cheap Chinese labour to keep the fires going (roughly paid a third of a Japanese worker).\n\nWithout this, the Depression would have severely strained the *Zaibatsu's* finances. In response to the Depression much of their export markets in the early 30s had raised tariffs in response to the downturn. Despite being the focal point of the *Kodo-ha's* anger for decades, they realised their economic survival and growth was dependent on imperialism. I wouldn't go as far as to say that the Depression directly resulted in Japan's expansionism and brutal takeover of Chinese land, but it certainly sped up the ascension of the militarists and gave huge economic incentive to empire building. \n\nHope this helps, particularly in regards to changes in the political direction of Japan but also their Chinese province. I will leave it to someone more learned than I to comment on the impact for China proper! \n\nSources:\n\nHane M, *Japan A Short History* (London 2013)\n\nOvery R, *The Road to War* (London 2009)", "created_utc": 1615561023, "distinguished": null, "id": "gqp1f3w", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/m3fslj/so_its_generally_accepted_that_things_were_going/gqp1f3w/", "score": 10 } ]

[ { "body": "So it's 'hard times create strong men, strong men create easy times, easy times create weak men, weak men create hard times', but filtered through today's memespeak.\n\n[Which is to say, it's just the usual 'crisis of masculinity' claptrap](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/hd78tv/does_the_aphorism_hard_times_create_strong_men/), as u/Iphikrates explains.", "created_utc": 1637987689, "distinguished": null, "id": "hm8ljsf", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/r35aen/how_true_is_this_meme_in_ancient_context_ive_seen/hm8ljsf/", "score": 16 } ]

[ { "body": "Short answer:\n\nYou can't think of \"the other territories\" as one experience-- these were vastly different places, with very different kinds of economies, enormous differences in scale and history; the response to the Depression has to be considered in each case separately.\n\nThe Philippines were by far the largest of these territories, had a complex economy and a diverse response. Hawaii and Puerto Rico both had substantial populations-- the Depression conditions were likely worse in Puerto Rico; major hurricane damage, less military spending than in Hawaii, but also a more ambitious New Deal policy response. Alaska, Guam and USVI had tiny populations, Alaska in particular would have been largely unaffected with little integration into the world economy\n\n​\n\nDiscussion:\n\n**Alaska**'s population in 1930 was 59,000; was still substantially Inuit and hunter/trapper/settlers, living traditionally or near traditionally, with little to no integration into the world economy. A recession or depression doesn't matter much to people hunting for their food, making their own clothing, living \"off the grid\". Fur trappers and traders presumably experienced a decline in cash (or barter) earnings, but I can't find any documentation for that. The Klondike and Alaska Gold Rush was long over by the 1930s, fortune hunters had dispersed, you'll see population declines in some years of the teens and twenties.\n\n**Hawaii** was far larger -- 360,000 in 1930, and much more integrated into the economy. In this period, sugar was the engine of the Hawaiian economy, and the Depression hit sugar (and also pineapple) exports hard; something like one quarter of the workforce was counted as unemployed by 1935. Military preparations following Japan's occupation of Manchuria brought a great deal of investment, along with military personnel spending money to Hawaii by the late 1930s.\n\n**The Philippines**, by far the most populous of the places you mention (population near 13 million in 1930) had considerable export exposure, but seem to have done reasonably well during the Depression, with a diverse economy not subject to any one shock:\n\n>There is no doubt that the early and mid-1930s were not normal or generally prosperous times in Manila, but the city's economic complexity was such that there were offsetting conditions that mitigated the impact of the depression in most years. When exports were down in 1931 and 1932, employment in construction was up. When construction was at a low level in 1934, exports were up. When these were off together in 1935, female employment in cigarmaking was up, and the coconut oil mills were near peak production.\n\n**Guam** was tiny, 18,000 people in 1930. During the 1930s, Guam became an important communications node with a seaplane base, transpacific telegraph station, and a Chamorro population living traditionally or near-traditionally, substantially unaffected by the Depression. Of documented effects, you see the failure of the newspaper, the *Guam Recorder*, which is then bought by the US Navy. The Navy's influence was the dominant force in the cash economy of the island in the 1930s-- there was little integration into a secular global economy.\n\n**Puerto Rico** had a relatively large population of 1.5 million in the 1930 census, and an economy which beyond subsistence farming was dominated by sugar. The situation was made much more difficult by a devastating hurricane San Felipe which hit in 1928; the challenges of the Depression piled on an already difficult situation. The situation remained difficult throughout the 1930s, leading to considerable political and social discontent. Roosevelt's New Deal included a The Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration, which pursued the \"Plan Chardon\" -- one of the only genuine land reform initiatives in US history, this involved the purchase of large sugar plantations in excess of 500 acres, though it was never fully implemented. Other projects included public health and housing.\n\n**Virgin Islands**\n\nAgain, a tiny population in 1930 -- 22,000 people. I can't find any scholarly resources on their experience in the Depression, but as a sugar exporter the decline in international markets would have been felt. The USVI were a very new bit of the United States in the 1930s-- purchased from Denmark in 1917 for $25 million, they were administered by the Department of the Navy until 1931, then transferred to the Department of the Interior which appointed civilian governors. There was little to no tourism before the Second World War. The first Naval Governor regarded conditions as very poor before the Depression\n\n>. . \\[T\\]he urgency of the overwhelming clean-up task that the Americans were forced to undertake immediately upon assuming control of the islands in 1917. Naval administration Governor James Oliver presented the grim reality in his first annual report to the secretary of the navy, writing that \"the problems to be faced in the most elementary improvement of the present conditions in these islands with particular reference to sanitation, hygiene, public morality, finances, etc., are so many and so grave.\" Hospitals, health, and sewage systems were in unspeakable condition. There was no water system, a minimal and ineffective education system, no fire protection, and, worst of all, no employment for the population.\n\nSources:\n\n[Economic History of Hawai’i](https://eh.net/encyclopedia/economic-history-of-hawaii/)\n\n[Metropolitan Manila in the Great Depression: Crisis for Whom?](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-asian-studies/article/metropolitan-manila-in-the-great-depression-crisis-for-whom/7946038A7B8AD66793FC4A7BC4317B0B)\n\n[THE CRISIS OF THE 1930S in Enciclopedia de Puerto Rico](https://enciclopediapr.org/en/encyclopedia/the-crisis-of-the-1930s/)\n\n[The Dilemma of Puerto Rico](https://www.jstor.org/stable/40399114?Search=yes&resultItemClick=true&searchText=PUERTO&searchText=RICO&searchText=RECONSTRUCTION&searchText=ADMINISTRATION&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3DPUERTO%2BRICO%2BRECONSTRUCTION%2BADMINISTRATION%26amp%3Bacc%3Don%26amp%3Bwc%3Don%26amp%3Bfc%3Doff%26amp%3Bgroup%3Dnone&ab_segments=0%2Fdefault-2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=search%3A15af86b86bc4d43b1cd56a00af1d68ea)\n\n[Economic History of Puerto Rico](https://press.princeton.edu/titles/2468.html)\n\n[Transforming the Economy](https://www.jstor.org/stable/1029113)\n\n[1930 Federal Population Census](https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1930)\n\n[A Question of Custody: The Colonial Archives of the United States Virgin Islands](https://www.jstor.org/stable/40294161?Search=yes&resultItemClick=true&searchText=us&searchText=virgin&searchText=islands&searchText=naval&searchText=governor&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dus%2Bvirgin%2Bislands%2Bnaval%2Bgovernor%26amp%3Bacc%3Don%26amp%3Bwc%3Don%26amp%3Bfc%3Doff%26amp%3Bgroup%3Dnone&ab_segments=0%2Fdefault-2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=search%3A7e0fabafabf6b05f4c45568db18fce22)\n\nThere's relatively little published material for most of these subjects-- Puerto Rico has had the most scholarly interest, then Hawaii-- the National Archives have more material, like reports of the Governors, but this is all offline so far as I'm aware.\n\n##", "created_utc": 1561133688, "distinguished": null, "id": "erq2hy4", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/c38ymp/we_at_least_have_a_basic_understanding_of_what/erq2hy4/", "score": 479 } ]

[ { "body": "You may find these threads interesting:\n\n[When the Great Depression is discussed, it is often to describe the impact...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fw3wrk/when_the_great_depression_is_discussed_it_is/) where deleted user(s) talk about a number of regions outsider the US.\n\n[How did the great depression affect countries besides North America and Europe?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/df18x3/how_did_the_great_depression_affect_countries/) written by u/Commustar discusses Africa.", "created_utc": 1631286856, "distinguished": null, "id": "hcbk9uc", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/plm4ra/was_the_great_depression_a_global_thing/hcbk9uc/", "score": 5 } ]

[ { "body": "How about a little class warfare to go along with your Sexism Wheaties?\n\nThe \"man played for a fool by his (usually adulterous) wife\" storyline, of course, probably goes back as far as you want it to. Stick with me here; yes, I'm about to make a point about 1950s television sitcoms using...late medieval poetry.\n\nA perfect example to draw on is the fabliau (ribald poem) *Berenger au lonc cul*, which in its preserved Old French versions is a simple story about a husband and wife. He's a knight, but not a good one--in fact, not really one at all, preferring to lie around and spend money instead of doing knightly things. He's finally shamed into action by his wife--but that \"action\" consists of going into the forest, beating up his armour, and returning to his wife talking of his fantastic feats of chivalry. But she twigs very quickly to the fact that while his armour may be grievously wounded, he's unscathed.\n\nSo the next time he heads out to make war on his breastplate, she disguises herself as a knight, follows him, and reveals herself in the heat of his \"battle.\" Altering her voice, she tells him he has shamed chivalry as well as himself, and offers him a chance at redemption. He can either joust this mysterious challenger to prove once and for all he's a Real Knight...or he can kiss her ass. Literally.\n\nThe fabliau is called \"Berengier of the Long Ass,\" so you know what happens next. During his humiliation, he notices that something is maybe not quite right with the anatomy (from the back, remember); she tells him that's why she is called *of the Long Ass.* And it wouldn't be medieval lit without the final coup de grace: the shame-faced husband arrives back at home with his head low...only to find his wife in bed with her very real paramour, Berengier.\n\nBut there's another version of this story. When Nuremberg barber-surgeon Hans Folz gets his hands on it, as we know from a fragmentary straightforward rendition, he makes some critical changes. It's not the wife versus her husband; it's the wife versus a poor artisan she catches on her property gathering wood so he can do his job. The same humiliation ensues. But in this case, the baker *does* realize, as Folz says, the difference between a pipe and a hole and two holes. And so this version of the plot ends with the baker paying his own visit to the wife, and restoring power to himself by raping her.\n\nWe've gone down this road for a reason. The difference between the French original and Folz's new version highlights the source of uncomfortable humor in the first which led to the 15th century need for the second. It's a classic \"world upside down\" trope. In *Berengier au lonc cul,* the knight is not a knight, the wife is not a wife--things are topsy-turvy, and to drive the point home she comes out on top. *Der arme Bäcker* on the other hand, is doing what is *right*: he's a baker, his ovens need wood, he's working hard for it himself to get the job done. Folz, whose career as a poet was rooted in his economic position as a barber (...it's a thing), is absolutely moralizing here. \n\nThe knight fails as a knight and that story punishes him by inverting the medieval gender hierarchy to the point of his being cuckolded; Folz's baker is succeeding as a tradesman and the story *rewards* him by restoring the rule of men over women even to the point of violating her body.\n\nI'm making the point with medieval examples because I think the use of sexual power and violence to relate the stories' moral drives home the core point: the Schlubby Man/Competent Women trope is about men's failure *to be men.*\n\nIt's no wonder, then, that the real flourishing of this trope in American pop culture is 1950s sitcoms: pretty much our go-to period for \"evangelizing a sexist gender hierarchy in mass media.\" Ralph in *The Honeymooners* or Chester in *The Life of Riley* don't just fail in the face of successful women, they fail--according to gender standards of the time--*as men*. Ralph's biggest failure is his inability to provide his wife with a \"proper\" life. Notably for an audience watching the show *on television*, Ralph can't even afford to buy Alice a TV. He schemes and fails to the relentless chorus of \"I told you so.\" In the face of his failures, he promises that next time will be different, next time he'll get that promotion, next time he'll make them rich, and then his promises lead into the next episode and the next failed effort.\n\nOr take Chester (who was actually originated on TV by Jackie Gleason, too, for a short bit before *Honeymooners*; the role was more famously and successfully played later by William Bendix), or the other favorite example of gender studies scholars here, Fred Flinstone. Their failures as husbands/fathers turns their wives into the *real* head of the household cleaning up their messes, so to speak.\n\nFor more recent examples, I'll point to *The Simpsons* and its massive influence especially in animation, visually shorting \"incompetent man\" with \"overweight.\" One of the key things about *Simpsons* that is sometimes lost today is that the earlier marketing push and focus of the show was actually on Bart! But when the focus switched Homer, the schlub to end all schlubs--*that* was when the show really became a success. Homer's constant failures to measure up *as a man*, not just a person, undergird some of the show's appeal.\n\nWhat do our 1950s and modern archetypes of the failed *man* surrounded by competent women have in common? With due nods to exceptions--*they are working class.*\n\nThis isn't just a trope about random men failing at being men. It is specifically about working-class men not living up to the proper standard, and more importantly, failing through their own faults. It's the flip side of the moral preached by *Leave It to Beaver* or *Family Ties* or you might say especially *Full House.* Competent as successful middle-class men, they are rewarded narratively with competence in the ultimate proving ground of gender norms: the family.\n\nI want to cut off the discussion and examples in the early 1990s as later developments, I think, will inevitably stray us too far into modern politics. /r/AskSocialScience might be a good place to discuss *Everybody Loves Raymond* or *Malcolm in the Middle* or, my favorite personal example, the cartoon *FoxTrot*.\n\nThus, while gender-role play is a stock tool of the World Upside Down, as the medieval examples show, it absolutely took on specifically modern manifestations in 20th century American pop culture, and the 1950s in particular. Though substantial numbers of American women had always worked, out of force or necessity, the visibility of women \"who should be housewives\" working--and being forced back out of the workforce after World War II--was rising. Restlessness over the gender norms on which the trope runs made it all the more powerful, but also all the more anxiety-provoking for some people. Men, who might feel targeted for emasculation by proxy; women, who might worry that no matter how beautiful and awesome they are, *this* could be their fate?\n\nDrawing what were initially fairly rigid though not unbreakable class boundaries around the Failed Man (and in contrast, the Successful Man) served two purposes. First, for the people (men) watching Ralph not buy Alice a television on the television sets they owned, it separated them from feeling like a target. Second, it reinforced the \"work hard and you will be successful\" ideal of postwar upwardly-mobile society. As scholars have argued, family-based programming in 1950s television actually helped coalesce and propagate a new sense of American identity as white, middle-class, suburban. \n\nIt's not an accident that the 1950s, and not earlier eras with similar social traits, became the go-to nostalgia decade of \"a simpler time\" in all its euphemistic glory.\n\nFurther Reading:\n\n* Richard Butsch has a great rundown of examples grouped by working/middle class families, \"Five Decades and Three Hundred Sitcoms about Class and Gender\" (2005) that's actually [available on academia.edu](http://www.academia.edu/8157207/Five_decades_and_300_sitcoms_about_class_and_gender_in_Edgerton_and_Rose_Thinking_Outside_the_Box_2005)\n* Tasha Oren, \"Domesticated Dads and Double-Shift Moms: Real Life and Ideal Life in 1950s Domestic Comedy,\" *Cercles* 8 (2003)\n* Erik Barnouw, *Tube of Plenty* (1990)", "created_utc": 1518632709, "distinguished": null, "id": "du8ud2o", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/7xhfll/the_storytelling_motif_of_an_ordinary_schlubby/du8ud2o/", "score": 1870 } ]

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[ { "body": "I think you are going to need a state by state answer. Statistically the number imprisoned almost doubled during the great depression. But congress passed laws to limit the selling of goods produced with prison labor (Notably the Hawes-Cooper Act). But I don't have enough knowledge to address how these twin stresses on the prisons and the prison population were dealt with in any particular locale.\n\nHere are a few sources:\n\nhttp://www.encyclopedia.com/article-1G2-3408900129/hawes-cooper-act.html\n\nhttp://law.jrank.org/pages/1782/Prisons-History-Modern-prisons.html\n\nBTW, this period saw the growth in black men being incarcerated grow three times faster than the general population so a state by state analysis should probably consider the racial differences in how prisoners were treated.", "created_utc": 1433634389, "distinguished": null, "id": "crxypom", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/38u5pz/what_happened_to_people_in_jail_during_the_great/crxypom/", "score": 331 }, { "body": "Not sure if its the location you were thinking of, but it was a common practice in many smaller Canadian towns for the homeless people who rode the rails to ask to spend the night in the local jail, where the personnel often gave them some amount of food, though that was a choice. This was particularly common in the winter to avoid the potential of freezing to death. \n\nSource: Pierre Berton, *The Great Depression.*", "created_utc": 1433649080, "distinguished": null, "id": "cry4zkj", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/38u5pz/what_happened_to_people_in_jail_during_the_great/cry4zkj/", "score": 57 }, { "body": "This question was [asked](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2d0mqr/did_people_try_and_commit_crimes_during_the_great/) and answered last year. Here is a copy of the top comment. by /u/leisure-lee\n\n\n----------------------------------------------------\n\n\nThe Great Depression's incarceration rates were the highest the nation had seen yet. The incarceration rate for federal and state prisons peaked at 137 per 100,000 in 1939. Rates dropped with the beginning of WWII as jobs and military service set the country back on the economic track.\n\n\nThe prison system, in reaction to the rising incarceration rates, responded with a parole system. Known as the Second Great Experiment, it was believed that putting the prisoners to work and/or teaching them a skill would improve them to make it society as a law-abiding citizen. For example, prisoners might be employed to make burlap sacks or in fields to collect foodstuffs. The income went back into the prison system. Once the inmate had proved his transformation, he could be placed on parole.\n\n\nI should also note that the majority of crimes were actually more violent crimes of passion and those related to prohibition. It would be foolish to think that theft was not a problem, but battling the more serious felonies were given priority. Facilities, such as Alcatraz, held particularly dangerous inmates apart from the lesser offenders.\n\n\nThough I have yet to find an account of some one trying to get into prison, I can't imagine this was the course for many, if any, persons. The environment of prisons were extremely unpleasant, low on supplies, uncomfortable, and brutal. Rape, gangs, and abuse from guards and prisoners alike were rampant.\n\n[http://www.triquarterly.org/reviews/doing-time-depression-everyday-life-texas-and-california-prisons-ethan-blue](http://www.triquarterly.org/reviews/doing-time-depression-everyday-life-texas-and-california-prisons-ethan-blue)\n\n\n[http://monthlyreview.org/2001/07/01/prisons-and-executions-the-u-s-model/](http://monthlyreview.org/2001/07/01/prisons-and-executions-the-u-s-model/)", "created_utc": 1433642153, "distinguished": null, "id": "cry22si", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/38u5pz/what_happened_to_people_in_jail_during_the_great/cry22si/", "score": 264 } ]

[ { "body": "Just a note, from an [answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9rm0m7/comment/e8i8d4t) I wrote to a similar question: from what Tzouladis writes, the USSR received 100,000 *applications* from Americans for immigration visas, but only took about 10,000, and maybe 100,000 foreign workers altogether.", "created_utc": 1588291038, "distinguished": null, "id": "fp43n7v", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/gb2rn0/what_became_of_the_100000_americans_who_fled_to/fp43n7v/", "score": 41 } ]

[ { "body": "I touched upon the topic in a few past answers, although there's always a lot more that can be said (especially regarding individual causes, consequences, and global spread). \n\nThe short answer is that gold backing of currency was an outdated and crippling ball and chain on the financial system. You can read about that in [this answer of mine](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8hhqi2/what_caused_the_great_depression_from_an_economic/dyk1gfw/) from a few years back. I also answered a similar question [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/75lc1x/i_remember_my_teacher_saying_that_the_stock/do95v88/) which you might be interested in. There's also [this slightly more simplistic answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/lcq404/29_stock_market_crash_where_did_the_money_go/gm1shl6/) looking at the mechanics of the stock market and the famous crash of 1929, which is often associated with the Great Depression.", "created_utc": 1625108613, "distinguished": null, "id": "h3n1h5u", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/obbesj/what_is_cause_of_great_depression/h3n1h5u/", "score": 5 } ]

[ { "body": "It almost always had to do with Gold Convertibility. Since the industrial era and the emergence of modern banking, if a Central Bank could defend it's currency's convertibility into gold at a set rate (or at least keep confidence in their ability to perform the conversion at a set rate) the value of that currency remained stable. This might sound like an arcane concept, but the mechanics were actually rather simple: in the past, you could show up to bank with paper banknotes and demand they be exchanged for the corresponding value of gold bullion.\n\nPrior to the second world war, suspending or eliminating gold convertibility was a sign that an economy was in serious trouble. But starting from the 1950s, gold convertibility fell out of favor with all governments and their respective central banks, although some Central Banks to this day maintain a \"Peg,\" that is to say actively defend their currency's convertibility with another currency. The United States ended gold convertibility fairly late, in 1976, but a number of countries still maintain a peg to the dollar. \n\nMaintaining set exchange rates does have some benefits: it allows businesses to confidently plan ahead for the things they will have to buy from abroad (insulating end consumers from uncomfortable price shocks) and if the exchange is set at a favorable rate it can encourage foreigners to take advantage of a given country's cheaper goods and services. The most common case where a peg is sensible to implement is when a very small country with few resources is already highly dependent on a larger country's economy to either buy or sell most of their goods and services (e.g. because The Bahamas both buy very many consumer goods from the United States and also provide a service to very many people from the United States — tourism — such that a freely floating currency would be more of a nuisance than anything else, officials in the Bahamas have chosen to go ahead and peg their currency 1-to-1 against the US Dollar. Another example are currencies from oil producing economies that are often also pegged to the dollar, both for political and economic reasons). \n\nBut fixing a peg, be it to gold or another currency, eliminates important policy tools that modern Central Banks rely on to act as economic shock absorbers, like influencing interest rates. This is because all the money lent necessarily needs to be matched by reserves, which ultimately means there is less \"slack\" in the monetary and financial system. So while international currency markets are fairly stable under fixed exchange rates, the economy as a whole is subject to much more turmoil. Prior to the very famous financial crisis of 1929, less serious but nonetheless disruptive global financial crises had occurred every five years or so (sometimes more often!) in the decades prior: In 1907, 1901, 1896, 1893, 1890, 1886, and so on. In fact, the unique circumstances in the lead-up, outbreak, and aftermath of the First World War which caused the lack of any serious economic crisis between 1907 and 1929 was very anomalous for the Gold Standard era, and contributed to making the 1929 crash all the more disruptive. I wrote about the 1929 crash, and how the Gold Standard contributed to it, in [this older answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/75lc1x/i_remember_my_teacher_saying_that_the_stock/do95v88/) which might interest you. \n\nIf you're interested in the modern history of global currencies, you can pick up B. Eichengreen's *Globalizing capital: a history of the international monetary system* (Princeton UP, 2008). It's the major source of the answer I offered here.", "created_utc": 1614216148, "distinguished": null, "id": "gonienn", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/lr99yp/what_were_the_most_stable_international/gonienn/", "score": 7 } ]

[ { "body": "**Eastern Europe**\n\nTraditional historiography of the Soviet economy held that the USSR was unaffected by the Great Depression and that the economy was thriving in spite of it. The second part is true, the first is not. The Soviet Union at the time of the stock market crash in the United States was in the middle of the highly successful First Five Year Plan which emphasized the production of capital goods (those that could be re-invested to create other goods, with steel being the prime example) and was able to overshoot its production targets. This and the following five year plan contributed greatly to the Soviet Union transitioning from an agrarian to an industrial economy before the outbreak of the Second World War. While industrial output grew at double digits, the overall growth rate of the Soviet economy was on the scale of the upper single digits when the agricultural sector is included.\n\nThe depression without a doubt affected the Soviet Union, however. According to earlier histories, the Soviet Union benefited from the Great Depression due to the ability to hire experts from the West, most prominently from Ford Motor Company, for cheap. These experts introduced to the USSR modern industrial management. However, the effect of this paled in comparison to the catastrophic drop in global food prices throughout the 1920s, one of the main causes of the Great Depression, and something that would continue during the 30s. Between 1926 and 1928, Soviet grain exports declined from 231,021,000 rubles to 51,512,000, owing both to greater diversion of food to feed the cities and falling grain prices . In the same period, imports of industrial machinery almost doubled to 247,300,000 rubles, driving the Soviet Union into a trade deficit by 1928. There is no way to objectively measure how much potential wealth was lost as a result, but it was certainly on the scale of hundreds of millions of rubles.\n\nThe Soviet economy, while successful on a numerical level, was at this point not offering its citizens a much better standard of living than before. Throughout the first two five year plans, industrial wages for Soviet workers actually dropped 17% on average. The emphasis for GOSPLAN, the Soviet central planning commission, was on increasing output, and the cheaper workers were, the better.\n\nHungary and Romania were two other economies dependent largely on exports of agricultural goods, with Romania also making revenue from exports of oil commodities. Falling grain prices led their governments to become largely insolvent, with the Hungarian government defaulting on its debt by 1931. Poland, meanwhile, was one of the hardest hit countries by the depression. Its economy attracted much foreign investment in the 1920s owing to economic reforms suggested by the renowned American economist Edwin Kemmerer. This made the contraction all the more severe, as many investors pulled out of the country in response to the market crash.\n\n**Asia**\n\nChina escaped the Great Depression largely unscathed. The traditional explanation for this has been the maintenance of the Silver Standard whereas the rest of the world was on the Gold Standard. Recent work by Shiroyama Tomoko has discredited this hypothesis, proving that the value of silver increased relative to the value of gold in the early 1930s and hurt China's export competitiveness. The replacement of the silver standard in 1935 with fiat currency addressed this problem and allowed the Nanjing government to recapitalize the market.\n\nJapan actually grew significantly during the depression. Whereas industrial output in the US and France declined more than 25% between 1929 and 1935, it actually *rose* by 42% in Japan during the same period. This has been attributed to the decisive response of finance minister Takahashi Korekiyo, whose policy of rapidly abandoning the Gold Standard, expanding the money supply, and expanding the state budget has been called \"proto-Keynesianism\". Aside from his financial stimulus, Japan also benefited from the occupation of Manchuria, whose industrial output by 1935 equalled that of Japan itself. In the puppet state of Manchukuo, companies connected to the Japanese army like the Manchurian Industrial Development Company (today known as Nissan) reaped immense profits using slave labor. \n\nThe depression in Japan and Manchukuo was extremely formative in the development of the post-war Asian \"developmental state\". In Japan, Takahashi had a lasting influence on the Finance Ministry and the Bank of Japan, and for the next five decades, both bodies would be controlled by \"inflationists\" who believed there was no end to printing money. The Manchukuo economic establishment, meanwhile, consisted mainly of \"reform bureaucrats\" with statist ideas who were gradually deported there by their more conservative colleagues in Tokyo. These bureaucrats re-aligned market incentives around their development goals and enforced oligopolies. The policies of the Japanese Finance Ministry and Manchurian central planners would be imitated by postwar Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and eventually the PRC.\n\nLike the Five Year Plans of the Soviet Union, the policies of Japan during the Great Depression have often been studied as a foil to unsuccessful recovery policies elsewhere. Some publications have suggested the Japanese bureaucrats synthesized a coherent Keynesian economic theory before Keynes, but this is wrong. In reality, most came from the Tokyo University Law School and had no theoretical understanding of economics whatsoever. This was the key to their success: they had no knowledge of the right thing to do, but also were not educated in the wrong thing to do. The economic mainstream at the time suggested that during a \"bust\", the market should fix itself and the government should focus on balancing its budget. These recommendations led to the tax and tariff hikes that worsened the crash elsewhere.\n\nIn India, overall economic output was relatively unaffected (with Angus Maddison estimating that Indian GDP actually grew from 1929-1934) but some industries suffered terribly. The worst effected were those depending on exports to Britain, which adopted protective trade policies. Five years after the 1929 market crash, Indian exports had fallen by more than half. India's paradoxical fate - an *overall* relatively healthy economy and severe decline in the export sector - had to do with its vast internal market. While industries depending on European consumption suffered, the standard of living for the great majority of Indians who were not fully integrated into the global supply chain did not change at all.\n\nThe situation was similar elsewhere in South Asia. In Burma, Indonesia, and the Philippines, essays by Peter Broomgard, Ian Brown, and Willem Wolters indicated that standards of living did not significantly decline despite the downturn in the global economy.\n\n**Africa**\n\nu/Commustar in [this answer](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/df18x3/how_did_the_great_depression_affect_countries/f34hb8q/) has already provided an excellent overview of the depression's impact in Africa. To summarize, in many parts of Africa, especially the Belgian Congo (in particular the mineral rich Katanga), Rhodesia, and South Africa, European colonizers had mobilized the local population to produce mineral and agricultural commodity products for export. These areas were heavily integrated into the global supply chain, and the collapse in commodity prices led to a wave of bankruptcies and layoffs in the primary sector. Colonial authorities increased extractive behavior in response to mounting debts, with policies ranging from agricultural purchase boards to forced labor.", "created_utc": 1586235532, "distinguished": null, "id": "fmnuclw", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/fw3wrk/when_the_great_depression_is_discussed_it_is/fmnuclw/", "score": 17 }, { "body": "I can speak for Brazil.\n\nThe depression can be seen as the last nail in the First Brazillian Republic’s coffin. For 40 years by the time the depression hit, every single government failed to address the social problems and demands for basic worker’s rights. By that time, there had already been one attempted communist revolution, called the Prestes Column, and multiple revolts by the subversive lower class of the military, called “Tenentistas”, who, being young and coming from the lower classes, desired reform for the outdated way the First Republic operated.\n\nThe reason the First Brazillian Republic could afford to ignore all these revolts and popular demand for reform, was because it was a well-structured Oligarchy. The vote was restricted to only men who were able to read, which excluded most of the then-illiterate population. And from what elections there were, that were most certainly completely rigged, with classic fraud stumbles like there being more votes than electors. The ones behind the frauds were the agricultural elite, that controlled the country’s main export, coffee. By the 20th century, coffee consumption was reaching its apex worldwide, and the ridiculous money those big farmers made allowed them to control the political enviroment completely, with no one being able to stand up to them. \n\nAs the 20s rolled in, the price of coffee started to drop. That was bad news for the national economy, and for the big farmers that controlled the country. They started doing some pretty insane stuff to fix the crisis, like infamously burning the coffee they produced to keep the prices high, while the government paid them tax payer money as reparations for the lost merchandise. As the power of coffee dwindled, other elites sensed opportunity to capitalize on the widespread discontent of the populous and universal want for change to finally have a nation-wide opposition to the coffee planters in the upcoming elections. Of course, that was a first baby step, as they would need a lot more support to break the traditional power sources of the country.\n\nThen, the depression finally hit. Of course, among the many things the people of the world stopped consuming in order to save money in these desperate times was coffee, bringing the depression to Brazil and collapsing the economy as well as the power core of the last 40 years of politics. Now, everybody was on board to take the candidate of the coffee lobbyists down with an unprecedented campaign in favor of opposition candidate Getúlio Vargas. It was a huge national event, everybody who was allowed to vote went out to vote, Vargas’ running mate was murdered and even the army was starting to consider abandoning the coffee producers... then the results came in, and Vargas was defeated. \n\nTo this day we don’t know how legit the result was for both sides, as both had signs of forgery, but following this there was a general uprising of indignation with the results. Army officials backed the revolters and began a march to the capital, declaring Vargas as the legitimate president. Vargas accepted the leadership of the revolution after it became clear the government was scared out of their minds and was losing ground to the revolutionaries, and joined the march to the capital, when the entire Brazillian army refused to start a civil war and defend the government, leading to a quick takeover by the revolutionaries. That would begin the “Vargas era”, that would cover 15 years total and see radical transformation to the country, but that’s outside the scope of your question.\n\nSo, basically the Great Depression was the final push needed to destabilize the already declining Republic and usher in a 15-year-long dictatorship in Brazil, that included reconciliation between Vargas and the coffee producers. \n\nSources: \n\n**Getúlio** trilogy by Lira Neto\n \n**Oswaldo Aranha: A biography** by Pedro Cortêa Lago\n \n**History of Brazillian liberalism** by Antonio Paim", "created_utc": 1586215227, "distinguished": null, "id": "fmmzrah", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/fw3wrk/when_the_great_depression_is_discussed_it_is/fmmzrah/", "score": 29 }, { "body": "While you wait for fresh answers from qualified experts, you may be interested in [this previous response](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/df18x3/how_did_the_great_depression_affect_countries/f34hb8q/) that specifically deals with the effects on African colonies, provided by /u/Commustar.", "created_utc": 1586211207, "distinguished": null, "id": "fmmsgwa", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/fw3wrk/when_the_great_depression_is_discussed_it_is/fmmsgwa/", "score": 7 } ]

[ { "body": "Well, it's definitely still a point of some dispute, that's for sure. I'll focus on Germany primarily, and I'll leave old Benito to someone else.\n\nFirst of all, it's important to remember one of the primary rules of free market capitalism: Recessions come and go. It is the natural assumption that any depression, recession and economic slump will eventually lead to recovery, making it very difficult for historians, economists and economic historians (the most thrilling of professions) to evaluate how much any particular policy or set of policies helps or hinders any given economic structure.\n\n#***Germany***\n\n####*The failure of liberal economic approaches, 1929-1933*\n\nThat said, let's jump into it. The fantastic *Germany and the Second World War* by a set of Germany's and Hungary's most renowned historians sponsored by the German military (the modern one, that is) dedicated its entire first volume to the, to quote the title, \"Buildup of German aggression\". The chapter \"From International Economy to Large-area Economy: The World Depression in Germany as a Crisis of the Liberal Economic System\" is a good entry-level read on the Great Depression.\n\n>It had its origin in the United States, where, after a prolonged phase of prosperity combined with an irrationally optimistic belief in the continuation of the boom, the first depression phenomena began to appear in 1929 as a result of a widening gap between production and demand, leading to ever greater uncertainty in the economic sphere. A hitherto well-nigh unbridled readiness for speculation succumbed, in October of that year, to an alarmed sobering-up at the New York Stock Exchange and led to its crash. The consequences were a decline in production, a slump in prices, and mass unemployment; because of the interlinked nature of international trade and capital, these consequences did not remain confined to the United States. \n>\n>Even though they hit Germany with full force, their overall effect was certainly no worse than in other industrialized countries, albeit differentiated in detail and degree. Austria, for example, experienced a deeper slump of its economy; in Britain the depression was of longer duration; the United States had, proportionately, a larger number of unemployed, and especially of unprovided-for unemployed. What made the great depression different in Germany was not so much its purely economic as its political effect and dimension. \n>\n>In Germany it acted as the acid test of democracy, just when the middle strata, which were particularly affected by the depression, were beginning to lose faith in purely economic solutions to economic problems and were falling victim to National Socialist propaganda.\n>\n>[Deist et al.: p. 159]\n\nOkay, so this is late 1929, some three and a half years before Hitler becomes Chancellor in January of 1933 to even be able to initiate any sort of policy to affect economic outlook. This might imply that Hitler didn't have anything to do with it after all, but it's worth remembering that economic crises almost always get worse after their beginning as the runaway effects of unemployment, panicking investors and price and wage instability chase each other to maximize havoc.\n\n>And the world-wide depression resulted in a shrinkage of the world market in practically every field. The longer the depression continued, the more the conviction gained ground in economic circles that this was not a transient but a more permanent phenomenon. From this conviction there arose a readiness to call the long-term validity of the existing international economic system into question; the wish to replace it by some other system, e.g. a national one, was increasingly voiced.\n>\n>[Deist et al. p. 160]\n\nIt should be noted here that the increasingly worsening economy and the related diminishing of the prestige of international capitalism, national revanchism in Germany became more pronounced as a feeling: With the territorial losses enforced on Germany after World War 1, the German state had lost 75% of its iron ore, 26% of its lead, 7% of its industrial base, 18% of its potato yield, 17% of rye and barley, 13% of wheat and 11% of oat [see Deist et al., p. 160], along with millions of ethnic Germans that could have been part of Germany's workforce - thus significantly hindering any attempt at German production autarky. This stung the German public, particularly in those areas where the supposed western democracies had not allowed ethnic German majorities to determine their own fates - like Austria, the Sudetenland and the Danzig Corridor. I wonder if those territories in this order will come up at some other point in history.\n\nBut regardless, Hitler was still far away from power, giving the possibilities to several governments (Müller, Brüning, Papen, Schleicher) to perhaps get something done. Well, they failed, typically because of the rivalling influences of Laissez-Faire capitalists and those that opposed them.\n\n* Müller, a social democrat and the last democratically majority-backed Chancellor in Germany before Konrad Adenauer in 1949, wanted to initiate common-sense budgetary reform in tandem with the conservatives, but his own social democratic faction, fearing any further monetary disadvantages for the working class, didn't take the bait. Müller's government broke apart and no further democratic majorities could be found, so that the ailing President Paul von Hindenburg had to jump into the breach and assist all further chancellors with his autocratic decrees, as was granted to him by the Weimar Republic's constitution. Three *Präsidialkabinette*, 'presidial cabinets', followed this decision by Hindenburg, none of which had consistent parliamentary majorities and all of which relied on presidential decrees.\n\n* Brüning as a Chancellor was an unmitigated disaster. Instead of adopting socialist policies and stimulating public growth by domestic government spending, he followed the classical liberal (\"libertarian\" for our American friends) model of driving down wages and prices in the hopes of getting capitalistic investments back up and running. Sadly, there were no magical capitalists with disposable capital that suddenly showed up. And why would they? It was the midst of an economic crisis. If the government restricts spending, it also restricts the demand of everything the government previously spent money on, further kicking several industries into the ground. Brüning did try, through protectionism, to save agricultural workers and farmers, already disadvantaged by the German climate and the nature of German farming structures against the more powerful agricultural structures in, say, the United States. However, no less than 177,000 hectares of agricultural lands [see Diest et al, p. 161] were subjected to forced public auction in the year 1931 alone.\n\n* Papen and Schleicher (with Schleicher's very short tenure in office, the two are usually counted as one and the same in most regards) \"deviated from Bruning's line in economic policy by endeavouring to lead the economy rapidly out of depression into an upturn phase\" [see Deist et al., p. 162]. Whereas Brüning had put his hopes in the rehabilitation of the banking system in the eyes of the German public, Papen tried to incentivize private economic initiative and sponsored job-creation programs. However, he too failed to increase domestic government spending and take on government debt to stimulate the private economy. Papen's intentions, no matter how good, failed to produce any significant results because he was unwilling to change the actual steps from what Brüning did. Papen and Schleicher thus too remained ineffective. However, it must be pointed that unemployment fell slightly, by about 160,000 persons between August and October of 1932. We are however still talking at a scale of around five million unemployed. It should however be pointed out that Papen achieved this token victory by, among other measures, allowing employers to withhold up to 50% of the pay of newly employed individuals. Now you have a bunch of low-wage people that are, de jure, \"employed\", but you also have the problem that they don't have money to actually spend in the private economy for several months because their employers are withholding half of their wages. Prices won't recover and stabilize with reemployment alone, you need to actually increase consumer spending as well. That said, the economy overall saw some noteworthy improvements. Output of both capital goods and consumer goods rose from early to late 1932 (although they stayed below the numbers of 1931). Furthermore, stock exchange quotations increased temporarily, in great parts thanks to psychological effects of the Papen government's efforts, which reassured at least parts of the investors. This improvement from early to late 1932 is the big point of conflict in the evaluation of the Hitler government's efforts. Would this improvement within the year 1932 translated into 1933 even without the Nazis? That's the big question.", "created_utc": 1555242309, "distinguished": null, "id": "ekv56hv", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/bd0vs5/both_the_italian_and_german_fascist_models_of/ekv56hv/", "score": 53 } ]

[ { "body": "There was the 1930 Sherman, TX race riot! It's not very widely known because there was a low number of casualties, but the Black part of town was destroyed and gov. Moody called for martial law at the urging of Texas Rangers (who were requested by the town to try and prevent a riot). \n\nThat's just one example that I know about because I studied it, but I know that aside from just good old-fashioned racism, one component of the aggression and violence is a sort of jealousy of the fact that most freedmans communities had a more or less self-sustaining economy (out of necessity and security in most cases). With the depression, EVERYONE was broke, so maybe seeing that their Black counterparts were suffering at the same level helped stem some of that racially motivated rage?", "created_utc": 1614670706, "distinguished": null, "id": "gpe6edy", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/jffmce/american_race_riots_occur_frequently_in_the_20th/gpe6edy/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "I have a somewhat older answer here, which I can't link because I can't find the old thread, dealing only with the rise of Fascism in Italy, and even that, from a rather specific angle. Since you correctly point out that Fascism appeared in the early 1920s and came to power in Italy almost a decade before the effects of the great financial crisis were felt there, I suppose the following – far from covering every one of your points – may help at least with this side of the answer. \n\nBroadly speaking, you are certainly correct that one should be careful with looking for one decisive factor in characterizing (or explaining) a complex and layered historical phenomenon. That said, one should also keep in mind that the crisis of 1929, while certainly the most memorable and dramatic from the perspective of the US, wasn't the only one moment of economical, social and financial crisis. And that economical factors certainly played a role in the affirmation of Fascism, as the Italian economical situation in the years 1919-22 wasn't exactly rosy. \n\nIt is, I understand, a rather long answer, but I would say that it kind of makes sense the way it is pieced together, as I tried to balance social, financial and political factors together.\n\n\n \n\n\nFirst, let's start by acknowledging that I don't know if I can really provide you with a satisfactory, comprehensive answer as to why Fascism came to be. \n\nThere is the problem with every \"why\" question – that searching for the \"causes\" of a social and political phenomenon does lead to the, at least implicit, assumption of some for of causality relation, which is very hard to prove, or even to substantiate in a proper sense. Such an inquiry is made more problematic for Fascism since our idea of \"fascism\" – and even of \"Fascism\" to mean exclusively the Italian specie – does not exist in an isolated space but, in its historical context, developed within a pre-existing political, social and cultural environment, of which Fascism came to be a dominant element, but never operating unilaterally over it, rather in a pattern of reciprocal influences. \n\nIt is therefore always difficult to trace a neat distinction between those traits which are \"fascist\" and those which are expression of the environment and landscape – between the \"true\" characters and the \"opportunistic\" traits of the system developing around the Fascist affirmation. \n\nThis is not to say that an investigation of Fascism and its origins is impossible – in fact there is a vast abundance of literature on the subject – but even within the context of a significant historical (and non historical) research, outside of a substantial agreement on certain main components of Fascism and on the fact that those played a role in its affirmation, it's very difficult to provide a general consensus on \"the causes\" of Fascism.\n\nWhich – it probably goes without saying – does not refute the existence of a general agreement on certain fundamental traits exhibited by Italian Fascism during its affirmation and subsequent transformation into Regime. The markedly anti-socialist and \"national\" ideological veneer, the practical collocation of the movement within the agrarian and industrial reaction, the strong confluence towards a nationalist platform in international matters, the ambiguous character of \"revolution-restoration\" that Fascism devised for itself. Such elements appeared, and were noted, already during the early years of fascist expansion, when other traits of the new movement appeared less noticeable (or were noted less).\n\nOn this ground, we have many – at times diverging – interpretations of Fascism, which goes to explain the many volumes dedicated to sum up those interpretations (in Italy alone, for instance: Casucci, C. - *Il Fascismo; antologia di scritti critici*, 1961 – De Felice, R. *Il Fascismo; le interpretazioni dei contemporanei e degli storici*, 1970 – Gentile, E. *Fascismo, Storia e Interpretazione*, 2002). And while we can certainly agree that some deserve more credit than others, their contribution is not merely limited to their supposed accuracy but also to their historical significance, as a few of those – such as the \"fascism-reaction\", the \"fascism-moral disease\" and the official Fascist one, the \"fascism as national revolution which completes the process of Italian Risorgimento\" – developed during the life-time of Fascism and therefore are, to an extent, part of the phenomenon itself. Incidentally, those are also the most closely related to the nature of your question, as their core resides in an interpretation of the nature and effect of the Great War on Italian, and European society.\n\n\nUnfortunately for us, even a thorough examination of those three, will take up most of this answer – but I suppose I'll end up mentioning them anyways. \n\nFor reference, and as a good starting point for a reader who isn't familiar with the development of fascism in Europe, I would suggest R. Paxton's *The Anatomy of Fascism* (2004) which provides a good balance between an examination of Fascism and an \"explanation\" of Fascism. In addition, for works more focused on Italian Fascism and its relations with liberal Italy, you may find easy to locate those of R. Bosworth.\n\n\n \n\n\nAs a last cautionary note, this answer was originally devised to approach the affirmation of Fascism from the angle of the supposed \"humiliation\" consequent to the diplomatic and political misfortunes of the Italian governments related to the difficult resolution of the so called \"Adriatic question\" – which is to say the definition of the Italian borders and position within the Adriatic sea after the victorious conclusion of the Great War, a long drawn dispute which found its main symbol in the contested city of Fiume. \n\nI would like to caution the reader not to assume those events to have played, by themselves, a decisive role in the affirmation of Fascism. I don't. And the choice to start from there is not uncommon in literature but, for me, somewhat accidental.\n\nIt is certainly true that Fascism displayed a peculiar eagerness for highlighting and avenging all sorts of \"national humiliations\", from Caporetto to Adua, from Versailles to Rapallo – but those were often political-rhetorical devices, ways for a political system to organize itself ideologically, like metaphors settle our thoughts to their proper place. The effect and impact of the Fiume controversy should be read through an examination of its reflection over Italy's internal policy, rather than in their objective development. On this matter one should agree with Salvatorelli and Mira (*Storia d'Italia nel periodo fascista*, 1964).\n\n> The Orlando-Sonnino phase of the Adriatic question, indecisive in so far as the question itself is concerned, detrimental to the general agreement between the three European powers, was disastrous for the Italian political climate.\n\n\nThe public mind certainly absorbed the controversy, the clamor surrounding it, the long state of tension which kept a looming echo of martial songs in the air, and made it into a theme in its own right. But the matter of Fiume was also a financial one, and a practical one. Considering it in such light, the objective matter was unfortunate – most observers agreed – and Italy had good cause to complain, but there were more urgent things to attend to. As senator and chief editor of the *Corriere della Sera* Luigi Albertini (one of the most prominent liberal-conservatives and man of absolute stature among the Milanese bourgeoisie) attempted to explain in a private letter to Prime Minister V.E. Orlando (April 10^th 1919), concerning the rumors (which had already begun circulating on the press) of the Italian delegation abandoning the Conference:\n\n> Those who envisage, for Italy and the world, the perspective of a triumph of our rights achieved by means of this petty blackmail – what are they thinking? Do they really believe that the country has nothing else in mind but Yugoslavs and Dalmatia? […] Nowadays the public opinion has much bigger concerns: they see the Bolshevik stain spread with vertiginous rapidity; they see the noise of revolutionary propaganda in Italy grow to an impassable volume; they take notice of some sort of bourgeois resignation, a form of passive wake, a fondness for novelty among those who have little to lose, of mistrust in the proper functioning of the ordinary restraints; they are forced to contemplate a general state of drunkenness in which the wildest vindications follow one another without any conciliatory sentiment being able to moderate them, to a gush of general madness which may come to pass without consequences, but which might also throw everything up in the air.", "created_utc": 1582580571, "distinguished": null, "id": "fiochqs", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/f8y9to/the_effects_of_the_great_depression_on_the_rise/fiochqs/", "score": 7 } ]

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[ { "body": "Greetings! Whilst more can, and definitely should, be said regarding the perception of the Great Depression in Europe, South America, Africa, and other Asian countries, you might find this longer thread on the *consequences* of the Great Depression on **China** and **Japan**, with great overviews of their beginning, middle, and \"end\" from u/Drdickles, u/redrighthand_, and myself. \n\nAs a tl:dr of the question in regards to Japan: most historians and economists of the time (and up until this day) refer to the Great Depression as the **Showa Depression**, in reference to the fact that it occurred in the early years of the reign of the Showa Emperor Hirohito (r. 1926-1989, often referred to simply as the 'Showa Era'). This is not to be confused with the **Showa Economic Crisis,** which occurred exclusively in Japan in 1927 with the banking sector, and saw almost three-quarters of the country's banks fail. Below is an extract from the my linked response which deals with the recovery from the Showa Depression, which Japan managed to recover from relatively quickly in comparison to the rest of the world (majority of economic historians agree on 1932 as the year of recovery, though a minority maintain that *full* recovery was not achieved until the start of the Second-Sino Japanese War in 1937). \n\n**Recovery?**\n\nWhen the *Minseito* government fell in 1931 and was replaced by a *Seiyukai* party led by Prime Minister **Inukai Tsuyoshi**, Japan managed to recover from the effects of the Showa Depression. This was due in part to the economic policies of **Takahashi Korekiyo**, who was finance minister under the new government. Described by some of his contemporaries as the \"**Japanese Keynes**\", Korekiyo's policies were a massive help to the Japanese recovery. He took Japan off the gold standard, approved major deficit spending to finance the expanded costs of empire in Manchuria, and increased government spending on arms manufacturing. It should be noted at this time that Korekiyo was rather ahead of his time for the title \"Japanese Keynes\", as John Maynard Keynes himself would not write his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money for another four years.\n\nBy 1932, Japan had mostly shaken off the impacts of the Great Depression, but the scars remained. Korekiyo's budgetary changes had increased the flow of money to the military, with three-fourths of all government spending being spent on them by 1937 (compared to just one-fourth in 1930). Further, the resentment felt by most Japanese at the \"free market\" system which the *Zaibatsu* (large business conglomerates who expanded their monopolies during the Depression) represented lingered well into the 1930s, with the government later going so far as to try and create \"**new Zaibatsu**\" in an attempt to downsize the economic dominance of the Big Four (Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Yasuda, and Sumitomo).\n\nThe government also stepped into the rural economy, providing debt relief and employment opportunities for farmers as well as workers in the countryside. However, the memory of the unrest and unemployment from the \"corruption of the cities\" also remained, and it was such resentment for urban capitalism which prompted the **assasination of Tsuyoshi on May 15th, 1932**. \n\nFor more on the role of Korekiyo and the ending of the Depression in Japan, the sources below provide an excellent discussion on the matter. Further, there is a rather nice biography by Richard Smethurst of Korekiyo on JSTOR which is also linked below, but sadly is locked behind a pay-wall. Hope this brief response helps, and happy history reading!\n\n**Further Reading and Sources**\n\nCha, Myung Soo. \"Did Takahashi Korekiyo Rescue Japan from the Great Depression?\" *The Journal of Economic History* 63, no. 1 (2003): 127-44. Accessed March 16, 2021. [http://www.jstor.org/stable/3132497](http://www.jstor.org/stable/3132497).\n\nNanto, Dick K., and Shinji Takagi. \"Korekiyo Takahashi and Japan's Recovery from the Great Depression.\" *The American Economic Review* 75, no. 2 (1985): 369-74. Accessed March 16, 2021. [http://www.jstor.org/stable/1805627](http://www.jstor.org/stable/1805627).\n\nOkura, Masanori, and Juro Teranishi. \"EXCHANGE RATE AND ECONOMIC RECOVERY OF JAPAN IN THE 1930s.\" *Hitotsubashi Journal of Economics* 35, no. 1 (1994): 1-22. Accessed March 16, 2021. [http://www.jstor.org/stable/43295966](http://www.jstor.org/stable/43295966).\n\nSmethurst, Richard J. *From Foot Soldier to Finance Minister: Takahashi Korekiyo, Japan’s Keynes* London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1tm7fs4](https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1tm7fs4)", "created_utc": 1615868499, "distinguished": null, "id": "gr397a8", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/m5ocf8/what_was_the_great_depression_called_outside_of/gr397a8/", "score": 7 } ]

[ { "body": "This question [came up a while back](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1b7oxn/during_the_great_depression_would_it_be_a_good/) and I think my answer from that post still stands. In particular the desire to avoid jail, which inevitably meant hard labor and left you no better off than when you went in. Here's that answer:\n\nIf you were looking \"3 hots and cot\" during the Great Depression, getting picked up for some \"small crime\" might be an option, but certainly not a good one. Take vagrancy, for example, during California's \"Bum Blockade\" in the early 1930s those arrested were given a choice of \"[either leave California or serve a 180-day jail term with hard labor.](http://articles.latimes.com/2003/mar/09/local/me-then9)\" \n\nStuds Terkel in *Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression* similarly records one Louis Banks talking about his run-ins with the law as a vagrant:\n\n> I was in chain gangs and been in jail all over the country. I was in a chain gang in Georgia. I had to pick cotton for four months, for just hoboin' on a train. Just for vag. They gave me thirty-five cents and pair of overalls when I got out. Just took me off the train, the guard. 1930, during the Depression, in the summertime, Yes, sir, thirty-five cents, that's what they gave me.\n\n> I knocked on people's doors. They'd say, \"What do you want? I'll call the police.\" And they'd put you in jail for vag. They'd make you milk cows, thirty or ninety days. Up in Wisconsin, they'd do the same thing. Alabama they'd do the same thing. California, anywhere you'd go. \n\nMaybe if your situation was so dire that hard labor and terrible (if relatively) consistent food was preferable, then you might see getting arrested as an improvement. A consistent theme running through hobo stories, however, is that they were out there looking for honest work; serving a few months of hard time wouldn't leave you any better off then when you started.\n\nA better option was when various New Deal programs started setting up work camps. From *Hard Times* again, an Ed Paulsen happily recounts his time in a transient work camp:\n\n> They drive us up to an old army warehouse. They check you in, take off your clothers, run them through a de-louser, and you take a bath. It's midnight. We come out, and here's a spread with scrambled eggs, bacon, bread, coffee and toast. We ate a great meal. It was wonderful. We go upstairs to bed. Here's a double-decker, sheets, toothbrush, towels, everything. I sat down on this damn bed, I can't tell you, full of wonderment. We thought we'd gone to heaven. Hal's a young punk, he's seventeen. He said, \"What the hell kind of place is this?\" I said, \"I don't know, but it's sure somethin' different.\"\n\nStuds goes on to note that Ed was assigned a job with the National Youth Administration (and eventually with UNICEF). Ed says of that:\n\n> The NYA was my salvation. I could just as easily have been in Sing Sing as with the UN.\n\nIn conclusion:\n\n- Getting arrested for even a small crime meant you could look forward to jail and hard labor, which have always and will always, suck. \n\n- Getting into a New Deal labor camp meant getting a place to stay, food to eat, and a job to give you meaning. Vote FDR in '36.", "created_utc": 1407556617, "distinguished": null, "id": "cjl63wx", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/2d0mqr/did_people_try_and_commit_crimes_during_the_great/cjl63wx/", "score": 114 }, { "body": "The Great Depression's incarceration rates were the highest the nation had seen yet. The incarceration rate for federal and state prisons peaked at 137 per 100,000 in 1939. Rates dropped with the beginning of WWII as jobs and military service set the country back on the economic track.\n\nThe prison system, in reaction to the rising incarceration rates, responded with a parole system. Known as the Second Great Experiment, it was believed that putting the prisoners to work and/or teaching them a skill would improve them to make it society as a law-abiding citizen. For example, prisoners might be employed to make burlap sacks or in fields to collect foodstuffs. The income went back into the prison system. Once the inmate had proved his transformation, he could be placed on parole.\n\nI should also note that the majority of crimes were actually more violent crimes of passion and those related to prohibition. It would be foolish to think that theft was not a problem, but battling the more serious felonies were given priority. Facilities, such as Alcatraz, held particularly dangerous inmates apart from the lesser offenders.\n\nThough I have yet to find an account of some one trying to get into prison, I can't imagine this was the course for many, if any, persons. The environment of prisons were extremely unpleasant, low on supplies, uncomfortable, and brutal. Rape, gangs, and abuse from guards and prisoners alike were rampant. \n\nhttp://www.triquarterly.org/reviews/doing-time-depression-everyday-life-texas-and-california-prisons-ethan-blue\n\nhttp://monthlyreview.org/2001/07/01/prisons-and-executions-the-u-s-model/\n", "created_utc": 1407549485, "distinguished": null, "id": "cjl3bqp", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/2d0mqr/did_people_try_and_commit_crimes_during_the_great/cjl3bqp/", "score": 505 }, { "body": "In his book, \"Breaking Blue,\" Timothy Eagan mentions that police officers in Spokane, Washington, tended to be ex-loggers, and were hired for their ability to deliver a beating. The idea being that the police department was going out of its way to avoid putting people in jail, (where the city would have to feed them.) \n\n They'd beat people up for infractions, and either have their friends haul them outside city limits, or the police would throw them in an empty boxcar on a train leaving town.\n\nEagan interviewed a lot of people from that era, including police officers, in the course of investigating the role of the Spokane PD in a butter robbery and subsequent murder of a town marshal. ", "created_utc": 1407574419, "distinguished": null, "id": "cjlaxyt", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/2d0mqr/did_people_try_and_commit_crimes_during_the_great/cjlaxyt/", "score": 15 } ]

[ { "body": "Some insight into how rich people lived can be found in Benjamin Sopkin's life. Sopkin ran dressmaking factories (known as the \"Sopkin Sweatshops\") in the 1930s on Chicago's South Side where he employed mostly African American women. The communists helped the women organize a strike in 1933 and they eventually won. But during the strike, communists ran [this article](http://i.imgur.com/nVMWFuA.jpg) in the *Daily Worker* (the CPUSA's main organ) to ignite fury against Sopkin. It includes what he ate, how much he paid for golf, his custom-built Lincoln, and more. Take this as you will- it can probably be classified as communist propaganda, but it's interesting. \n\nAnd again, this proves writing about my dissertation on Reddit is vastly more fun than actually writing my dissertation.", "created_utc": 1453849244, "distinguished": null, "id": "czd58tx", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/42t0ba/what_was_it_like_to_be_rich_in_the_us_during_the/czd58tx/", "score": 272 }, { "body": "John F. Kennedy talked about this in an [interview](https://books.google.com/books?id=w3oiOriupLwC&pg=PT32&dq=%22I+really+did+not+learn+about+the+depression+until+I+read+about+it+at+Harvard%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=bHODU-XOEceAqgazvILgBA#v=onepage&q=%22I%20really%20did%20not%20learn%20about%20the%20depression%20until%20I%20read%20about%20it%20at%20Harvard%22&f=false). Even though he was teenager during the Great Depression of the 1930s, he said in an interview with TIME that he \"didn't really learn about the depression until [he] read about it at Harvard.\"", "created_utc": 1455973441, "distinguished": null, "id": "d06zwh4", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/42t0ba/what_was_it_like_to_be_rich_in_the_us_during_the/d06zwh4/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "I wrote an [answer here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ekxwou/the_new_deals_role_in_ending_the_great_depression/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share) on a similar question 9 months ago, which may be of interest. In short, the New Deal was a complex and changing set of policies, which is hard to assess overall.", "created_utc": 1602368276, "distinguished": null, "id": "g8dr5w6", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/j8szkc/did_fdrs_new_deal_actually_help_in_bringing_the/g8dr5w6/", "score": 13 } ]

[ { "body": "Yes, the Great Depression was enormously advantageous to Soviet propaganda. The Soviet Union was the sole industrial country left largely unaffected [outwardly] by the Depression, affirming the Bolshevik belief in the untenability of modern capitalism and aspiration for worldwide revolution (by the late 1930s this internationalism is lost in favor of Bukharin's 'socialism in one country’).\n\nWe can point to several factors helping the USSR: significantly, the Soviet Union, in 1929, did not rely on these international markets in the way that the West did. Internal production had been on the rise in the years preceding the Depression, which actually precipitated growth from Western investors. To import foreign goods yet overcome increased tariffs that were intended to mitigate the economic downtown within those countries, the Soviet Union just exported *more.* This was possible due to industrial impacts of the Five Year Plan; agriculturally it *was* carried out, but wasn’t viable (there’s only so much grain, and one of the immediate impacts of collectivization was a decrease in harvest) - this is one cause of many for the famines in Ukraine and Central Asia. But 1929 also marks Stalin’s rise as the singular leader of the Soviet Union; Trotsky was exiled early that year, while Zinoviev had been expelled in 1927 along with Kamenev. Rykov would be ejected from the Politburo the following year. The utopian fantasy of the Bolsheviks gave way to authoritarianism right as the sustainability of capitalism was thrown into question around the world.\n\tRussian-language propaganda would affirm the power of the Soviet system over that of the West, direction workers to embrace the *kolkhoz* and, increasingly, express concern over German and Italian fascism throughout the 1930s. Dovzhenko's Ukraine Trilogy, culminating in *Earth* (1930), affirms the benefits of collectivization while portraying Kulaks and religion in a remarkably negative light. *The Deserter* (1933) is not a particularly exceptional film, but it portrays a Communist worker in Germany who is repressed by the police, but embraces the Soviet system when he is sent abroad as a delegate. \n\nThis Soviet jubilance is coupled with Western skepticism of capitalism in the face of 30% unemployment. David Kennedy writes of this internal loss of faith in capitalism:\n\n>Disillusionment with Roosevelt ran deepest and most dangerously on the left, especially among jobless workers and busters farmers, among reformers and visionaries who had been led to giddy heights of expectation by Roosevelt's aggressive presidential beginning, and among radicals who saw in the Depression the clinching proof that American capitalism was defunct, beyond all hope of salvation or melioration.\n\nThe kinship between European, American, and Russian communists and socialists merits its own discussion; though after the Depression, I recommend Andre Gide’s *Return from the USSR* to see the impression the Soviet Union of the late 1930s leaves (while obscuring the nascent Purges).", "created_utc": 1609372372, "distinguished": null, "id": "ghjvwvl", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/kncazr/how_was_the_great_depression_viewed_in_the_ussr/ghjvwvl/", "score": 9 } ]

[ { "body": "[The Digital History] (http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/learning_history/children_depression/depression_children_menu.cfm) project website at the University of Houston, co-authored by Steven Mintz and Sara McNeil, has a brief blurb on cases of starvation in the U.S. during the Great Depression:\n\n> President Herbert Hoover declared, \"Nobody is actually starving. The hoboes are better fed than they have ever been.\" But in New York City in 1931, there were 20 known cases of starvation; in 1934, there were 110 deaths caused by hunger. There were so many accounts of people starving in New York that the West African nation of Cameroon sent $3.77 in relief.", "created_utc": 1354667590, "distinguished": null, "id": "c7bbx4x", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/149yg8/how_many_americans_died_of_hunger_during_the/c7bbx4x/", "score": 125 }, { "body": "Poor nutrition wasn't exactly rare in the U.S anyway.\n\nFor example \n\n>Pellagra is a vitamin deficiency disease most commonly caused by a chronic lack of niacin (vitamin B3) in the diet. \n\n>Pellagra can be common in people who obtain most of their food energy from maize (\"corn\" in American English)\n\n>In the early 1900s, pellagra reached epidemic proportions in the American South. **Pellagra deaths in South Carolina numbered 1,306 during the first ten months of 1915**; 100,000 Southerners were affected in 1916.\n\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pellagra \n\nI suspect that the situation was not appreciably better during the Depression. \n\nAs you mention, what frequently happens when people are malnourished is that their immune systems get weak, and then they catch pertussis or influenza or something and can't fight it off. The malnutrition is an important contributing factor. \n\n", "created_utc": 1354673884, "distinguished": null, "id": "c7bdpju", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/149yg8/how_many_americans_died_of_hunger_during_the/c7bdpju/", "score": 35 }, { "body": "I don't have hard figures on the impact of starvation during the Great Depression, but I do know that in 1933 the Federal government passed the [Agricultural Adjustment Act](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Adjustment_Act), which \"restricted agricultural production by paying farmers subsidies not to plant part of their land (that is, to let a portion of their fields lie fallow) and to kill off excess livestock.\"\n\nThe goal of this act was to limit the supply of agricultural products so as to increase their prices in the marketplace. This implies that there was an agricultural surplus rather than a shortage.", "created_utc": 1354683962, "distinguished": null, "id": "c7bghsf", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/149yg8/how_many_americans_died_of_hunger_during_the/c7bghsf/", "score": 5 } ]

[ { "body": "I'm searching around, and I can't find *any* sources that make the claim that the Soviet Union provided food aid to Americans either in the Dust Bowl, or the Great Depression more generally. I would actually be curious where and who is making this claim. \n\nI can provide a little context for where Soviet - US relations were in this period. The United States had withheld official diplomatic recognition of the USSR from its founding until 1933. While much of this was due to the bad blood around US and foreign [intervention](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b3q4r0/after_world_war_one_the_allies_gb_france_us_japan/ej1um8m/) in the Russian Civil War and the 1919 Red Scare in the US, a major stumbling block was the [issue](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a7whps/during_the_aftermath_of_the_russian_and_french/ec6r8he/) of unpaid tsarist-era debts - the Soviets refused to honor them, and the US insisted on repayment to bondholders.\n\nThe new Roosevelt administration was open to re-establishing diplomatic relations, however, and did so after a series of negotiations with Soviet Foreign Minister Maksim Litvinov in November 1933 (the issue of debt repayments was pushed off to be settled at a later time). William Bullitt, who had led a negotiating team to talk to Lenin on Wilson's behalf in 1919, assumed the post of US ambassador in December. \n\nSo right off the bat, I can't imagine that there would be *any* sort of aid traveling from the USSR to the US before December 1933, and thus not for the worst parts of the Great Depression. \n\nBut in addition, Soviet foodstuffs were not something that would be easily parted with. In no small part this is because the USSR had its own issues with food supplies, especially in 1930-1934, when famine conditions killed something like 5 to 7 million people across the USSR (especially in Ukraine, where it is known as the Holodomor). Much of the grain that the state did collect was for use as exports, as the Soviet government relied on selling grain on the international market in order to earn the foreign currency it needed to pay for imports of industrial materials and to pay for contracts with Western firms for the development of industrial facilities. Indeed, starting in 1929 the Soviet government had already signed agreements with such companies as Ford Motor Company, Caterpillar and DuPont for the construction of industrial production facilities in the USSR. \n\nWhile Russia had been the largest single exporter of wheat until 1914, during World War I, the Revolution and Civil War, wheat production had collapsed - the American Relief Administration was in fact allowed by Lenin's government to provide aid in the country from 1921 to 1922. Soviet wheat exports began to recover on the international market after 1926, and rose from 1.3% of total exports to 7% by 1931, but collectivization, famine and political crisis largely halted this growth. In the meantime, the major international wheat producers of the Interwar period - the United States, Canada, Argentina and Australia - accounted for some 90% of total exports. With the economic downturn, there was, if anything, a world glut in wheat and prices fell (this was particularly hard on the Soviets, as they continuously needed to sell more wheat to earn a steady amount of foreign currency). \n\nNow, US production of wheat in particular was hard hit during the Dust Bowl and associated drought conditions on the Great Plains - the Department of Agriculture provides the following data for winter wheat:\n\nYear|Production (1000s of bushels)|Price per bushel ($)\n:--|:--:|--:\n1915 | 640,565 | na\n1916 | 456,118 | na\n1917 | 389,956 | na\n1918 | 556,506 | na\n1919 | 748,460 | 2.10\n1920 | 613,227 | 1.48\n1921 | 602,793 | 0.945\n1922 | 571,459 | 1.04\n1923 | 555,299 | 0.945\n1924 | 573,563 | 1.32\n1925 | 400,619 | 1.48\n1926 | 631,607 | 1.21\n1927 | 548,188 | 1.16\n1928 | 579,066 | 1.03\n1929 | 587,057 | 1.04\n1930 | 633,809 | 0.694\n1931 | 825,315 | 0.382\n1932 | 491,511 | 0.391\n1933 | 378,283 | 0.777\n1934 | 438,683 | 0.844\n1935 | 469,412 | 0.827\n1936 | 523,603 | 1.02\n1937 | 688,574 | 0.977\n1938 | 685,178 | 0.574\n1939 | 565,672 | 0.694\n1940 | 592,809 | 0.69\n1941 | 673,727 | 0.957\n1942 | 702,159 | 1.11\n1943 | 537,476 | 1.39\n1944 | 751,901 | 1.43\n1945 | 816,989 | 1.50\n\nYou'll have to excuse this data dump - I mostly just want to show where wheat production hit its low in the mid-1930s, and show how prices collapsed with the onset of the world Depression. The Dust Bowl is connected with these events, but for what its worth that is more specific to droughts in 1934 and 1936, and major dust storms in 1935. It's worth noting that the US went from making up a quarter of world wheat exports in 1930 to a tenth of exports during the 1930s, and during the worst of the Dust Bowl years was a net importer, importing some 3.9 million bushels of wheat during 1934-1935 - but was able to import wheat nonetheless. In fact, attempts by a 22 countries to stabilize wheat exports and prices through price stabilization measures and export quotas under a Wheat Advisory Committee (formed in 1933) had largely come to nought, and the market mostly stabilized from the US needing to import wheat during the Dust Bowl (and the major wheat producers obliging in providing exports). \n\nSo in summation - it seems very unlikely to me that the USSR provided any substantial food aid to the United States during the Great Depression. Perhaps some nominal amount would have been provided for propaganda purposes, but even in the 1930s, the Soviet embassy in the United States was more interested in attracting skilled American workers to move to the USSR, and was more interested in attracting US corporate investment, than in providing something for free to people in the United States. What foodstuffs the USSR did put on the international market faced strong price and production competition from other countries, and also were meant to be sold for desperately needed foreign currency.\n\n**Sources**\n\nKotkin, Stepthen. *Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941*\n\nUS Department of Agriculture. \"Crop Production Historical Track Records\", April 2018. Available as pdf [here](https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/reports/croptr18.pdf).\n\nWay, Wendy. \"The Wheat Crisis of the 1930s\" in *A New Idea Each Morning: How Food and Agriculture Came Together in One International Organisation*", "created_utc": 1579811951, "distinguished": null, "id": "ffd26v3", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/esnpet/is_it_true_that_the_soviet_union_gave_food_aid_to/ffd26v3/", "score": 16 } ]

[ { "body": "I've heard a few stories from people who lived through it. One farmer told me that it was never as big a deal in the countryside as it was in the cities. While many people in the cities were destitute and standing in soup line (you can find pictures of this easily) there was plenty to eat on the farms. The farmer said that there wasn't a lot of variety, but there was always plenty on the table. For instance, you might have pork and corn and, say, apples, and that was all, but there was plenty of pork, corn and apples on the table. You never walked away hungry because you had eaten a whole plate of pork, a whole plate of corn, and maybe three or four apples.\n\nSomeone else who lived in the city told me another story. She said that her father lost her job in a brewery. Now, that could have had something to do with prohibition and is not directly related to the Depression. Anyway, he lost his job and couldn't find work. That may be Depression-related, not that he lost his job, but that he could not find another job. So her aunt started a business selling handmade candy door to door. This work supported four or five people because some made the candy in the home kitchen and her aunt did the sales and promotion, developing customers by word of mouth. By 1940, she was driving a new automobile and could even afford to take a cross country trip to see the Grand Canyon. Looks like people were saving money then, maybe not from 1929 at the start, but later into it, around 1935 or 1936, they were so accustomed to being frugal in the start that they were still living frugally when things picked up and then had extra money to put away.\n\nSome people and communities can navigate any economy.", "created_utc": 1587699732, "distinguished": null, "id": "foeb4jz", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/g6n5iu/what_was_the_great_depression_like_for_the/foeb4jz/", "score": 2 }, { "body": "My US History teacher in high school in the 80s told us about his experience being a child during the depression in San Francisco. He talked about stealing food. Sleeping in the ferry terminal until the first boats had all left, so it was obvious they weren’t waiting for a ferry and they got kicked out. Then getting a couple more hours sleep at the train station or bus depot, until they got kicked out of there as well. \n\nThat’s pretty much all I remember...", "created_utc": 1596060976, "distinguished": null, "id": "fzo1hf1", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/g6n5iu/what_was_the_great_depression_like_for_the/fzo1hf1/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "I do not know what the common man thought about the causes Great Depression. What I can tell you, is that Hoover was counseled by his economic advisers to do nothing. John Maynard Keynes' book, \"The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money\" wasn't published until 1936, well after the depression was well under way.\n\nHoover himself blamed WWI. With the effective destruction of an industrial powerhouse, introduction of unemployed soldiers into the economy, his theory wasn't terrible. Especially considering at the time, few people if any knew what the causes were.\n\nPolicies under the Hoover administration showed that those in charge really didn't know how to fix it. Andrew Mellon, Hoover's treasury secretary said,\n\n\"Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate... 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 from less competent people.\"\n\nAdd in the fact that the US government started a trade war with Europe, with the Smoot-Hawley tariff, refused to leave the gold standard (unlike Britain) and it's clear that no one in power knew (at least early on) what really caused it, and how to fix it.\n\nAt the risk of speculating, I would think most Americans would be worried about their next meal or getting a job, not what ultimately caused the mess in the first place.", "created_utc": 1445231141, "distinguished": null, "id": "cw4vcus", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/3p97tu/did_most_people_in_1930s_america_understand_the/cw4vcus/", "score": 81 }, { "body": "Somewhat of a follow-up question, somewhat of an attempt to give an answer from a different angle: other answers so far seem to focus on government policies, and how they show the people in charge didn't know what they were doing, hence the people on the street probably didn't understand what was going on either.\n\nHowever, couldn't we get insights from works from the time that *did not* focus on the government's role in economics, but still referenced the Great Depression in other ways? \n\nFor example, in [\"The Arts\" (1937) by Van Loon](https://archive.org/details/thearts00vanl) there's the following passage early on in the section on Egyptian art (emphasis mine):\n\n> [The Egyptian temple contained a] dark little room which served as a sort of town residence to the God who happened to be worshipped on that particular spot. I say \"town residence\" because the Gods, of course, were supposed to dwell in a realm of their own, situated far beyond the distand mountain ranges. But this idea was too vague, too remote, for the needs of the ordinary citizen. He needed something a little more concrete, something a little more tangible or at least visible. Even if he himself was never allowed to behold the Deity, he felt happy in the knowledge that the Deity sometimes visited a spot where a few highly privileged personages could behold his countenance.\n>\n> *Perhaps I can make this attitude clear to you by giving you a modern parallel. Take that mysterious yellowish metal which has become the great object of veneration of the people of today,* ***the gold supply of the nation upon which (as most citizens seem to believe) the safety of their country depends***. *Except for a few guards, nobody has ever seen it. Like an old Egyptian God it lies hidden in a dark cave, and even the President of the United States or the Secretary of the Treasury is not allowed to enter this holy of holies which contains the basis for our national credit.*\n> \n> Nobody so far has hit upon the idea of connecting this modern golden calf with some new form of ceremonial worship. But such a thing is not out of the sphere of what one might call \"spiritual possibilities,\" for stranger things than that have happened before and may easily happen again.\n> \n> If however, such a veneration of our gold supply should be elevated to the dignity of a regular national form of worship, then we would have a parallel to the religion of ancient Egypt. We merely need to substitute an invisible Deity for an invisible barrel of gold stones. And we must thereupon convert Wall Street and Broad Street and William Street into a series of great courts in which the populace will stand and wait, while way down in the dark and invisible interior of the Sub-Treasury some assistant Secretary of the Treasury intones, \"One billion and ninety-seven cents - two billion and forty-eight dollars.\" Whereupon the congregation, reassured as to the actual presence of the object of its devotion, returns happily to its daily tasks and duties, for all is still well with the world.\n\nOf course, I wouldn't call a highly educated, famous historian and writer of popular history books representative of the average man, but insofar as this is a reliable source, Van Loon suggests that many people *did* seem to believe the gold standard was important somehow, as the emphasized passage shows.\n\n(For the record: I'm just someone who found this book while studying art and finds it a very interesting historical artifact of the perception of art of one well-learned individual from the 1930s; it always struck me as interesting that in an attempt to make the writing more accessible Van Loon makes a lot of comparisons to his \"present time\", meaning the 1930s. So the book ends up being as much an impression of his experience of those days and how it colours his view of history, as being an art history book.) ", "created_utc": 1445259172, "distinguished": null, "id": "cw5312d", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/3p97tu/did_most_people_in_1930s_america_understand_the/cw5312d/", "score": 4 }, { "body": "Many of the causes were reasonably clear in hindsight, and the best account of these is JK Galbraith's *The Crash of 1929* which is perhaps the one economics book everyone should read, it's short, funny and direct.\n\nThe deeper problem was how to re-start a stalled economy, especially in the US context where economic orthodoxy demanded minimal government interference. Then as now, there was little consensus about the best course, and although Keynesianism as we know it was yet to be espoused, similar arguments were made in 1933 and 2009.", "created_utc": 1445261503, "distinguished": null, "id": "cw540gj", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/3p97tu/did_most_people_in_1930s_america_understand_the/cw540gj/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "It is true that the Great Depression by many measures still had a tight hold on many western economies at the start of 1939 when the “war economy” distortion of WW2 took hold. It is also true that, after a period of recession from mid-1945 to mid-1947, the US economy specifically began to grow prodigiously. The problem in assessing “why” this was turns on two difficult questions: (i) why did the Depression occur and last so long and (ii) which changes in the economies of the world occurred due to war *spending* versus the wartime and post-war diplomatic and political efforts to reform and redraw the global economy? I’ll address these in turn.\n\n**First**, it is generally understood that the Great Depression began with a financial crisis in 1929 that started on Wall Street, and quickly spread around the globe. But the strange thing about this financial crisis-induced recession is the fact it lasted *so long* compared to comparable ones in the past. (Before the 1929 Great Depression, Americans used the term “Great Depression” to refer to the four-year recession after the “Panic of 1873”, which was the longest, severest global crisis to that time.)\n\nWW1 had driven the economies of Europe off of the gold standard, and left the UK, France, and Germany hugely in debt (or indemnity in the latter case). This had transformed the financial industry, and dramatically changed the role of the US in the global economy as the key creditor. In addition, finance began to grow much faster and more creative while the regulatory apparatus did not change to meet the new risks this created. This turned the finance sectors of the US and UK in particular into ticking time bombs.\n\nAt the same time, global finance faced the large challenge created by Germany’s tottering economic and political position under the burden of Versailles Treaty reparations. Lenders in the US, being the only economy not suffering under huge WW1 debt, moved to provide credit to the Germans and redraw their payment schedule. At the same time, the US refused to write off the huge loans it provided to Britain and France during WW1. The strains of bickering over these issues among the allies, combined with diplomatic spats between France and Britain, lead to a severe reduction in trust and cooperation between the allies through the 1920’s.\n\nWhen the Great Depression hit with the 1929 Wall Street Crash, international cooperation held for a period of time. President Hoover gave a voluntary pause on war debt repayment to France and Britain. An ultimately failed effort was made to save Germany from economic and political collapse under the Versailles scheme. But just as the “first wave” of the Great Depression began to reach its “natural” (compared to prior experience) ending in 1931-32 another wave of crisis broke out. Starting with the UK the Western Allies began “competitive devaluations”, reducing the values of their currencies to increase exports. This set off a whirlwind of measures that left international trade a shadow of its former self. Hitler won the Chancellorship of Germany in 1933 and ended Versailles payments. In 1934, Britain and France defaulted on their WW1 debt. In retaliation the US passed the Johnson Act closing UK and French access to private US credit markets, and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Bill raising tariffs on everything in sight. The Europeans did the same. \n\nSo rather than recovering naturally from the 1929 shock, the West entered a new round of contraction of commerce and credit. In the US, FDR and his New Deal engaged in social and stimulus spending on an unprecedented level (though not large compared to spending that would come during the war). They hugely expanded federal regulatory power. And they intervened in several markets to prop up prices and wages to support workers. But, while this was hugely popular among farmers and the working class, there was not much understanding of how to do it effectively. Results were limited or even negative. \n\nWhich brings us to the Recession of 1937, a “second Depression” that struck just as things were improving. This is still one of the most contentious intervals in American economic history, so there is no consensus “right” answer as to why it occurred. But the simultaneous reduction of deficit spending in 1937, combined with changes in banking regulation in 1936 that caused a *new* financial crisis in the form of mass failures of small banks across the country, resulted in another round of contraction. This tumble resulted in a spike in unemployment that didn’t end until 1939.\n\nBut it is important to note that, by 1940 the US economy was improving. Skeptics point to the fact that in 1940 the US was starting to get large foreign contracts from the UK and France to equip there armies. And in that year the US began its expansion of its armed forces to prepare for war. But the sums involved in these efforts were still small compared to the “slack capacity” in the US economy. (Note that, because of persistent anger in the war loan default of 1934, British and French weapons purchases could only be payed for in cash. They could not buy with borrowed money, limiting the scale substantially.)\n\nBy early 1941, even prior to Pearl Harbor, the scale of war spending had changed. The US was moving all out to arm, with FDR’s promise to build “50,000 planes a year”. The Lend-Lease Act had saved Britain from its money problem (France was now out of the war). Knowing Congress would still not lend money to Britain, all Britain’s war materiel was made effectively free, to be paid for by American taxpayers and war bonds. As the war unfolded, the US put 10 million men in uniform and mobilized women into the workforce on a massive scale. The transformation of the economy was astounding.\n\nBut at the end of 1945, the bonanza ended. With victory, war production ended. Women left the workforce in droves (no one at the time knew this would only be temporary). The US was doted with factories and shipyards that were now useless and were scrapped or left to rot. The United States and United Kingdom both entered steep *recession* as their economies had to totally reorganize. The US and Britain found that all the economic capacity they had developed had little value in peace. They had millions of citizens with decades of backpay (or stacks of war bonds) to spend, but they needed to solve the problem of allocating those people into productive *peacetime* activities.\n\nThis brings us to the **Second** part of the question. Even during the war, forward-thinking officials in the US and UK were working to build a framework for diplomatic, political, and *economic* cooperation after the war. They wanted to be certain that the selfish breakdown of 1931-1934, that had turned the democracies against each other, would not happen again. \n\nThere were three main pillars of this program. *First*, in order to prevent competitive devaluations, they adopted the 1945 Breton Woods system of fixed exchange rates. And rather than implement this only bilaterally, they opened the system to all the allied nations that had fought beside them (which they called the “United Nations” during the war). The USSR declined to participate, but most of Western Europe and South America signed on. \n\n*Second*, they implemented a program of tariff reduction and trade-promotion to encourage commerce. For political reasons this wasn’t formally enshrined until the 1948 GATT, but measures started even during the war, allowing all participants to enjoy reciprocal “most favored nation” tariff status on most goods. This disallowed punitive bilateral steps, and established a framework for ever-diminishing trade barriers to allow the huge scale of international trade that we know today. \n\nAnd *third* through establishment of the World Bank (and Reconstruction Fund) and later the Marshall Plan, the Allies provided credit (or grants) to ensure prostrate foreign economies would recover more quickly. This allowed the economies of Europe to recover *much* faster than would otherwise be expected. And it provided a framework for a *global* perspective on economic policy.\n\nTaken together, this meant that the US emerged from the war into a global economic environment totally different than the one that had existed prior. And the results showed. The US started to recover in 1947, but didn’t start to *really* grow until 1949. This is important to contrast with Britain, which had been in a better position than the US prior to the war, but swiftly began to do far worse after the war. (I only reference this because it evidences the fact that the transformation of wartime economic activity into peacetime prosperity is *not* obvious or inevitable.)\n\nYour question is complex and is still politically fraught to this day. But the Great Depression is unusual among downturns for its length. It isn’t “natural” in a liberal economy for 15% of workers to remain unemployed for *years* on end if they are capable of being productive. The lesson I want to underline is the fact that the Depression was *extended* by a sequence of policy errors and miscalculations domestically and internationally. While the huge spending of wartime managed to temporarily utilize America’s slack capacity, it would *not* have been a lasting gain if everyone had gone back to making the same mistakes. The postwar international economic reforms were ultimately vital to the US’s lasting economic growth and prosperity. And the effectiveness and importance of international cooperation in alleviating recessions was shown by the success of cooperative efforts in preventing the 2008 Financial Crisis from turning into a decade-long economic depression.", "created_utc": 1570413066, "distinguished": null, "id": "f2uck4i", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/de9g2e/was_ww2_the_main_factor_that_ended_the_great/f2uck4i/", "score": 15 } ]

[ { "body": "If I can ask a dumb question: how do you prove a counterfactual?", "created_utc": 1461868940, "distinguished": null, "id": "d2l115t", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/4gsod9/my_friend_claims_fdrs_administrations_policies/d2l115t/", "score": 8 } ]

[ { "body": "The short answer is \"not really, unless you count leaving the gold standard as part of the New Deal.\" \n\nThe longer answer is that the New Deal is not a single program, but an \"alphabet soup\" of different things, including the creation of dozens of new organisations and pieces of legislation, each with its own acronym. Price Fishback, summarizing an enormous body of research, writes: *\"Seeking a pithy statement about the New Deal, people commonly ask: Was the New Deal a Success? The answer depends on a variety of factors: what policies are included, which outcomes are being measured, how large must the effect be to be considered a success. It is a treacherous effort to try to define a unified theme for the New Deal because there were so many objectives, often conflicting, that were being addressed.\"* Each reform had some effect on some aspects of the economy. Some of them probably helped a bit, others probably impeded recovery. Most just shuffled resources from one pile into another without having much macroeconomic effect, helping some people and harming others, or boosting some social outcomes (crime, mortality, etc) without necessarily having a big economic effect. This scattergun experimentation was intentional; FDR was a policy pragmatist who gave almost anything that might work a shot, rather than a perfectionist with a predetermined set of coherent policies.\n\nParadoxically, the New Deal was also quite small in terms of its net fiscal impact. FDR was willing to pass quite radical legislation changing the economic laws of the land, but he was much more reluctant to run large sustained budget deficits. If you want to change a country in the long term, changing the underlying laws about employment, taxation, investment and so on is a great way to do it. Many of the reforms introduced would endure at least until Ronald Reagan. The Banking Act of 1933 fundamentally changed American finance; the Wagner Act almost completely transformed industrial labour relations not only in the US, but also in Canada and Japan where US legislation was copied; Social Security remains one of the largest and most popular government programs right until the end of the 20th century.\n\nBut if you want to stimulate employment and investment in the short run, what you need is government spending in excess of taxation, and that largely didn't happen. The line usually used, at least by center-left economic historians (Romer, Krugman, DeLong, Eichengreen, etc...) is that fiscal stimulus wasn't even tried in the great depression; it probably would have worked, but we can't know for sure.\n\nMonetary stimulus was much more powerful. The previous monetary regime, the international gold standard, tied the hands of central banks, and the Fed was no exception. So long as the link between money and gold had to be maintained domestically (that is, holders of USD can exchange their currency for gold and vice versa), the central bank had to effectively accept inflation or deflation based on gold flows and demand for currency. Monetary reflation of the kind practised by post-1973 central banks in times of crisis would almost instantly force the US off the gold standard. FDR, unlike Hoover, was willing to accept this as a necessary consequence of saving the banking system. \n\nLeaving gold worked - the US went off the gold standard in 1933, causing large unsterilized gold flows into the US, and reflating the economy. The ongoing banking crisis stopped, deflation ended, and aggregate demand recovered throughout the 1930s. The case for this was made most strongly in Christina Romer's landmark 1992 paper \"What Ended the Great Depression?\" but this is now the orthodox interpretation, and is consistent with the experiences of other countries: staying on gold was a heavy burden, and recovery generally begins after exiting the gold standard.\n\nThe case that the New Deal actively impeded recovery is tricky to make, because of the complicated and interlocking set of interventions, all in the context of a broad and fairly rapid recovery from an extraordinary cataclysm. Mostly, one must believe that government intervention is fundamentally inefficient, and that markets recover quickly by themselves, which is more of an underlying ideological belief than something that can be shown clearly in the historical evidence. Nobody I know would describe Price Fishback as a raging leftist, but his analysis nevertheless tends to show small and mixed effects, not a heavy boot of government intervention stifling recovery.\n\n(Nitpick: The \"return to normalcy\" was Warren Harding in the 1920s, not FDR in the 1930s.)", "created_utc": 1599575117, "distinguished": null, "id": "g4fz6kv", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/iokxkl/did_fdrs_new_deal_actually_help_in_bringing_the/g4fz6kv/", "score": 8 } ]

[ { "body": "The mainstream Monetarist view on the banking system laid the majority of the fault squarely on the Federal Reserve, rather than individual banks. The government had systematically dismantled the power of individual banks since 1913, through the Federal Reserve Act, which created an entity designed to stabilise the American economy outside the control of Wall Street.\n\nThis entity has since gotten more and more sophisticated and capable, but at the time of inception, had a fatal flaw - nobody knew what it was supposed to do in a recession. Bank collapse had been fairly common in the past, having happened in 1907 and 1893. In both cases, J P Morgan stepped in to provide leadership and rally the banks to bail each other out, thereby preventing the banking run from spreading and bringing down the entire system. During the Great Depression, the banks had been castrated and there were now several thousand of them, with widespread decentralisation.\n\nIn 1929, the Stock Market crashed, this did not immediately lead to the Great Depression, but it did drain the value of assets on almost all bank balance sheets. The Fed then launched the real bills doctrine in 1930, which was designed to prevent inflation by constricting the money supply so that every note was matched by an equal-value asset. The combination of the two began to rapidly put banks in jeopardy, which forced them to reduce lending, putting more and more banks in jeopardy.\n\nIn this situation, the typical thing to do would have been to rescue and recapitalise the banks, and lower interest rates so that lending is spurred and the economy stabilises at a higher level. In fact, industrial production had only slipped slightly at the beginning of the Great Depression, and there was no indication that this would be any different from the many minor recessions the world had seen on an almost 5-year basis. Instead, the Fed raised interest rates in order to balance the fiscal budget, then sat by and watched the banks implode. \n\nThe recovery of each economy is correlated strongly negatively with the time the country spent on a real bills program like the Gold Standard. As a counterpoint, Japan abandoned the Gold Standard almost immediately, dragged it's interest rate downwards rapidly, recapitalised it's banks with substantial amounts of both private and government capital, and spent money like crazy on infrastructure projects to prop up the economy; consequently the Great Depression only lasted half a year for Japan.", "created_utc": 1573060259, "distinguished": null, "id": "f6pniz5", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/ds7xhx/i_was_reading_about_the_great_depression/f6pniz5/", "score": 5 } ]

[ { "body": "While I don't have detailed surveillance data on prominent figures of the 1920s/1930s, this claim seems highly unlikely to me. While some countries, including the US, were being to collect and publish economic statistics, for example US monthly employment statistics [date back to 1915](https://www.bls.gov/bls/history/timeline.htm), the modern national accounting framework was still under development in the 1930s by Colin Clark and Simon Kuznets, the US only published its first formal national accounts in 1947. The lack of such a framework made it hard for 1930s economists to understand not only what was happening (a problem still frequently encountered today), but what had happened a few quarters ago. \n\nMacroeconomic theory was also lagging: Keynes' *The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money* was published in 1936, well after the Great Depression had started (and it took years for economists to absorb it). Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's *A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960*, which focused attention on the role of the money supply, was only published in 1963, decades later, and subsequent research showing the importance of money supply for other countries was even later. The monetary hypothesis is important because it can explain why the Great Depression lasted so long, compared to most economic recessions. This understanding wasn't around during the 1930s, to quote from [eh.net's encylopedia article on the Great Depression](https://eh.net/encyclopedia/an-overview-of-the-great-depression/):\n\n>The economics profession during the 1930s was at a loss to explain the Depression. \n\nThe eh.net article notes evidence that the US Federal Reserve made glaring mistakes, by the standards of modern day macroeconomic theory:\n\n>Meltzer (1976) also points out errors made by the Federal Reserve. His argument is that the Federal Reserve failed to distinguish between nominal and real interest rates. That is, while nominal rates were falling, the Federal Reserve did virtually nothing, since it construed this to be a sign of an “easy” credit market. However, in the face of deflation, real rates were rising and there was in fact a “tight” credit market. Failure to make this distinction led money to be a contributing factor to the initial decline of 1929.\n\nThis doesn't rule out some genius who both happened to be in a prominent position and who understood macroeconomics much more than the leading economists of the day. But economic theory, like that of other sciences, tends to involve discoveries being made at similar times by several different people, for example marginalism in economics was proposed in the 1860s-early 1870s by Jevons in England, Menger in Austria, and Walras in Switzerland. Academics in a field talk to each other, so they tend to share a similar understanding of the pressing problems of the field and the data and other tools available to address them, particularly in the 20th century where the number of academics was much larger than in earlier centuries. \n\nOf course, this isn't proof positive of absence. One can always postulate cover-ups. But then one can postulate shadowy individuals deliberately creating the impression of an imperfect cover-up, and so forth, until I get reminded of the [iocane powder scene](https://youtu.be/9s0UURBihH8).", "created_utc": 1602486079, "distinguished": null, "id": "g8kkkx9", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/j9keez/was_the_great_depression_of_the_30s_bet_on_and/g8kkkx9/", "score": 6 } ]

[ { "body": "By 1932, GDP in America had fallen to -13%. And while unemployment peaked in 1933 at just under 25%, the slide in inflation began to turn around. Hoover had passed the Revenue Act of 1932 that increased taxes across the board. The top income rate rose from 25% to 64%. Corporate tax rates increased slightly and the estate tax doubled. Taxes were also placed on items such as guns, soft drinks, coal, communication dispatches as well as the first gasoline tax.\n\nThis preceded FDR's New Deal which passed in 1933 and by 1934, unemployment slowly began to drop and GDP rose and stabilized. In 1934, GDP growth jumped 10.8% and aside from a minor drop of 3.3% in 1938, it steadily rose every year after 1934. By 1936, unemployment was down to 17% and in 1940 had dropped to 14.6%. In 1941 as the country shifted into war preparation, it dropped below 10% for the first time since 1930. \n\nMost of this growth in the 1930s is attributed to New Deal and Second New Deal programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corp, the WPA, and the TVA. With the Lend-Lease Act and as the United States began preparing for war, economic growth became self sustaining. As defense spending increased, more people went to work which led to more federal revenue for more defense spending. In 1939, the United States budget was $9 billion. By the end of the war, it had increased to over $90 billion. War bonds also played a role in this as well. By 1943 with the war well under way, unemployment was down to 1.2%, GDP was growing double digits every year and inflation was stable at around 2%.", "created_utc": 1588506768, "distinguished": null, "id": "fpcn8ef", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/gci65s/how_did_the_united_states_become_a_dominant/fpcn8ef/", "score": 3 } ]

[ { "body": "  Economists are fairly well agreed that the fiscal spending of the New Deal didn't bring the USA out of the Great Depression for two reasons:\n\n1. The New Deal spending was mostly matched by an increase in taxes, rather than being funded by deficits, so on Keynesian grounds we wouldn't expect the fiscal spending to have an impact. (Note, the 1930s were before modern statistical collections in the USA, so there is a bit of modelling involved, but work in the 1950s and 1970s estimated that in 1933 real GNP was $62.1 billion less than 1929, while the budget deficit was only $2b, and in 1935  it was a shortfall of $49.3 b versus a $5b deficit (Fishback, 2010, page 404 (20 in pdf) ). There was a sharp spike in the US federal deficit in 1936 - leading to an a $10.6b shortfall against a $7.5b deficit, but this period was brief, caused by paying a bonus to WWI Veterans, and then the government deficit fell as revenues started to come in from the Social Security Act of 1935. \n\n2. The Great Depression is generally agreed to have been caused by a contraction of the money supply, caused (unintentionally) by the US Federal Reserve and transmitted to most of the rest of the world via the Gold Standard. Economists are fairly confident in this one because there's a strong connection between when a country went off the Gold Standard (or, in the case of Spain, was never on it) and that country's recovery in the 1930s.\n\nThe USA saw increases in the gold supply due to a revaluation of gold in 1933-34 (the USA went off the Gold Standard in 1933), and then inflows of gold, principally from Europe, as fears built about the detoriating political and economic situation there - wealthy Europeans, even ones who weren't direct targets of Nazis, had reason to fear appropriation of their wealth if a war happened. \n\nThere was a sharp, severe depression in the USA over 1937-38, and then suddenly output started rising quite sharply, and this was before the US government really ramped up spending for WWII. This is somewhat a mystery of economic history, there is some evidence that it was probably increasing productivity, but why did it start rising in the middle of 1938? No one has come up with a good explanation of this. \n\nSpeaking more generally, the New Deal was not just about raising government spending, it was a complex package of policies, often changed throughout this time. One part of the New Deal was farm programmes that were explicitly aimed at reducing economic growth, so to the extent the farm programmes were effective then this was a barrier to recovery. There were also other acts, like the Banking Act of 1935 that gave the US Federal Reserve the power to change banks' reserve requirements, which it did, increasing them several times in 1936-1937, thus reducing the money supply and playing a hand in causing the severe depression in 1937-1938. \n\nSo the impact of the New Deal overall is hard to assess.  Conveniently, in 1995 (a few years ago now), a survey was done of economists and historians who were members of the Economic History Association. In this survey, they were asked to agree or disagree with a number of statements about US economic history, including the statement \"Taken as a whole, government policies of the New Deal served to lengthen and deepen the Great Depression\", found that 27% of economists agreed, and 22% agreed with provisos, while only 6% of historians agreed, and 21% agreed with provisos. So we can say with some confidence that in 1995 economists and, to a lesser extent, historians were divided on the question. (Less conveniently, to the best of my knowledge no one has carried out a similar survey since 1995.) And there has been a bit more academic research (I've added a couple of papers in the sources) directly on the topic and of course much more research on government interventions more generally, which might have changed opinions. But, overall, it seems fairly clear that there is quite a bit of grounds for disagreement about the role of the New Deal. \n\nWartime spending did stimulate the economy, but there is a bias in our measures of GDP and gross national income. The accounting framework was built around concepts of a market economy, in particular the definition of GDP is output minus intermediate consumption, where output is measured in terms of sales (intermediate consumption is things like burning coal to fuel a power station, or hiring a lawyer to write contracts, as opposed to using an asset like the power station itself). So if a firm produces a product that no one wants to buy, GDP is lower. This is hard to apply to government production which is supplied free of charge. Therefore goverment production is valued as the sum of costs: (wages + benefits paid to workers [called compensation of employees] + consumption of capital). This is true no matter how valuable or useless that output is. Consequently the US saw surging GDP growth in WWII, but this wasn't necessarily a desirable recovery from the point of view of a peacetime economy. WWII also saw suppression of civilian consumption (both directly via rationing, and indirectly via credit limits and price controls), and increases in labour supply (women entering the work force, retirees returning, working hours per week rising). So increases in economic output, but not so much in economic well-being. This is something to be aware of when discussing economies during large-scale wars. \n\nThe Economic History Association's website, eh.net, has a couple of interesting articles on the Great Depression in the USA and its recovery, including theories around why, which I recommend for more reading. \n\n**Sources**\n\n\nSteindl, Frank. *Economic Recovery in the Great Depression*. EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. March 16, 2008. URL http://eh.net/encyclopedia/economic-recovery-in-the-great-depression/\n\nParker, Randall. *An Overview of the Great Depression*. EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. March 16, 2008. URL http://eh.net/encyclopedia/an-overview-of-the-great-depression/\n\nPrice Fishback, *US monetary and fiscal policy in the 1930s*, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Volume 26, Number 3, 2010, pp. 385–413, (ungated copy)[https://watermark.silverchair.com/grq029.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAAngwggJ0BgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggJlMIICYQIBADCCAloGCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQM_IHhUG98HS5zVH2NAgEQgIICK91opGgnmvZaJ6th-L_AGWY79mzE7dXux63JpcHVH2C5vGGBFTDZMTFsLklQLmfFmVoA2EATP4b6k243vRRGOD2QSNYBLKAS_Kg1Jl_MfQKc98ceeX1bpX7jhpQT8Wwjwr2Td_842J8BjTFw7PPRaJToNAHu18_7SbooSvsZeAxR1QoxHOEqFc1hx5jU1tOQlzQKz777gQ-NTLcPLRdL0DKl9hB11olJ3unZfWPLh6LrpE2CvgA4l82PqsxPYxTvuLTt-Xbu3qBPkOz3EkOZ_JgeytvC6Yzruwuqn5dIMi1IjL9tLqWFKYM7qo3ZKMDmC-EyADghMr-UEyfmgcDbc9RrEX1HanT0mD9AMetgsjn9KR3IRSO9mzWVJyfeL0cJ6F26lapL5yNv_pbMpg431twtCqdr7QOsPFO7XqI70xqlfJqrUXl2XiR51dpdef2ZjTvO7XkpFSB0sVovnZpeAVUK9ZGbwJ9lxj1clddssQGF7mfBNkpPkC-ZXXh_rnrVyRUjYhDPk9gzSrZbiWIZtbGJTr0_-MwISdQDwzJ2ptFyH2ZY0isabK0INlTlEAybIQRszG0_MmhdvMSVCFPDkZJ2RYxIJbsj9w8CoezP2VtxVxlMnaateV6mXgJfcjp35Cf31iNen1vutOsWGtikVphlTZnjXicMsSraP4BXQdjj2ilvOVeF7EH01hMhWrkrAuziCkt76fzSSxWUQnxlEYWQrXbQOWZx97_2kw]\n\nRobert Whaples (1995), *Where Is There Consensus Among American Economic Historians? The Results of a Survey\non Forty Propositions*, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Mar., 1995), pp. 139-154 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2123771.pdf)\n\nHarold L Cole, Lee E Ohanian, (2004) *New Deal Policies and the Persistence of the Great Depression: A General Equilibrium Analysis*, Journal of Political Economy v112 n4 (200408): 779-816\n\nHannsgen, Greg; Papadimitriou, Dimitri. (2010) *Did the New Deal Prolong or Worsen the Great Depression?*, Challenge (05775132). Jan/Feb2010, Vol. 53 Issue 1, p63-86. 24p.\n\nHiggs, Robert. “Wartime Prosperity? A Reassessment of the U.S. Economy in the 1940s.” Journal of Economic History 52, no. 1 (March 1992): 41-60., a copy is available online at http://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=138   ", "created_utc": 1578429410, "distinguished": null, "id": "fdhsne7", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/ekxwou/the_new_deals_role_in_ending_the_great_depression/fdhsne7/", "score": 5 } ]

[ { "body": "Neither was particularly helpful, and recovery can be attributed more to the 1934 Reciprocal Tariff Act and the abandonment of the Gold Standard.\n\nAll economic historians agree that, by the end of the New Deal, the US economy \"had recovered\", exceeding 1929 production levels. They disagree as to the causes of the recovery. Traditionally, interpretations by both mainstream economists and historians saw the New Deal as the first application of Keynesian economics in the United States, but more recent work has revealed this as a fallacy. The New Deal years averaged a budget deficit of 3%, as the Roosevelt administration desperately tried to maintain a balanced budget. By his own admission, Roosevelt's policies were experimental and there was little theory behind them.\n\nThe widespread belief that the Second World War led to total economic recovery has also come under scrutiny lately, as its overall effect was simply the reduction of unemployment.\n\nTo understand the best possible response to the Great Depression in hindsight, we first must look at the causes. Between 1924 and 1929, the Dow Jones industrial average more than tripled, while private debt in the US economy soared to 180% of GDP. Both developments reflected a massive amount of investment in the US economy, and yet total industrial output and consumption were only growing in the low single digits. In simple terms, stockholders and banks were investing a lot of money for almost no gain.\n\nThe reasons for this were displacement of increasingly obsolete businesses - small-scale family farming, coal mines and smaller industries - by more productive businesses such as power farms, oil, hydropower, and electrified, partially automated industries. The normal gradual replacement of older business models by more efficient ones, however, did not occur, as the US had been functioning at a high-wage, high-employment equilibrium since the boom caused by the First World War, which temporarily led to a massive increase in demand for American agricultural and industrial goods. Relatively high wages led to high consumption and savings, both of which could \"cushion\" increasingly inefficient industries by providing them with a large enough market to avoid being squeezed out in the short term, and investors and creditors willing to bet on proverbial dinosaurs. In a tight labor market, competing firms offered shorter and shorter workdays and higher hourly pay, excabarating this situation throughout the \"roaring twenties\".\n\nIn 1929, the US economy was in dire need of an adjustment - coal mines, outdated factories, and farms needed to go out of business or be modernized, and \"newer\" industries needed to rapidly expand to absorb the resulting pool of unemployed. Government policy at the time ensured that the first would happen but not the second. When the 1929 market crash occurred, many indebted firms found that the drop in their stock value meant their assets now were smaller than their debts, leading to mass default on debts. This in turn led banks to lose loans receivable and be unable to honor saver withdrawals. In the end, in spite of the theoretically \"fixed\" value of loans compared the variable value of stocks, savers and banks ended up being \"investors in all but name\", seeing as corporate bankruptcy lead to loans being uncollectable, which in turn led to savings becoming uncollectable.\n\nNumerous economists since then, including former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, agreed that the banks should have received a capital injection in some form (Milton Friedman suggested a repayment of government bonds) to keep them liquid, but no such thing was done. In 1930, Congress made matters worse by passing the Smoot-Hawley tariff, which imposed trade barriers on countries that previously had friendly trade relations with the US. These countries retaliated, and while tariff revenue increased and imports declined, exports declined even more. Markets were further reduced by deflation - an estimated third of the invested money supply was destroyed in the crash and wave of bankruptcies, leading to falling prices which encouraged consumers to hold off on purchases. The government had no way of responding to deflation owing to the Gold Standard, which pegged the increase in the money supply to the value of Gold. Modern \"expansionary monetary policy\" was not possible.\n\nWith a good diagnosis of the cause, we can see in hindsight what the optimal response would have been to end the Gold Standard, increase access to foreign markets, depreciate wages by breaking unions, saving banks (likely with printed money) and supporting those advanced businesses that were still winning and seeing large returns on capital in the recession - those industries that had been *doing the displacing*.\n\nThe Roosevelt administration touched on two of these points - the Reciprocal Tariffs Act of 1934 increased foreign market access, and the administration ended the Gold Standard. The New Deal, however, had little real effect on recovery, and ended up wasting state funds on de facto zero return investments, mostly through the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps. This potentially controversial point is bolstered by a mountain of empirical evidence: for starts, despite a notoriously and often criticized \"conservative\" fiscal policy, Britain recovered around the same time as the United States, if not earlier. Germany, whose depression was initially more severe, experienced a more dramatic recovery and a much larger reduction in unemployment by 1935 due to the state taking control of unions and depreciating wages. This in turn led the average return on capital in Germany to increase from 5% to 15-20%. Japan's Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo is often praised for having the best response to the crisis - a mix of spending to increase demand from still-growing industries and currency depreciation led Japanese industrial output to actually double during the 1930s and for exports to increase substantially.\n\nThe war arguably helped even less. As mentioned, the New Deal, contra popular belief, was not damaging to the American budget, and the 1933-41 period actually saw lower deficits than during the Hoover administration. The war, in contrast, led to anywhere between 60 and 80% of US GDP over 4 years being spent on a near-zero return investment (war). Its only credible effect was, just like the New Deal's consumption increase, \"cushioning\" American industries - modern and obsolete - and reducing unemployment.\n\nWhile the Reciprocal Tariffs Act and end of the Gold Standard certainly helped, the US economy during the Great Depression largely recovered on its own, and indeed performed little better than the British economy which historians have long agreed was mismanaged. Roosevelt and his advisers are not to blame for this, as economics as a precise science had not yet come into being and the crisis was poorly understood by all schools of thought at the time. The seeds of the depression realistically were not sown in 1929 but 1919 - the crisis was a result of a decade of near-zero return investment in the US economy, as banks and stock buyers continued to effectively \"subsidize\" industries that had been overbuilt during the brief wartime boom. Throughout the depression, the US economy was in dire need of a government willing to mobilize the country's last remaining capital resources and throw them at those businesses that were still succeeding owing to their more advanced technology and superior productivity, while creating the trade conditions necessary for those businesses to succeed. The second was partly done through the Reciprocal Tariffs Act, but the first was never done. \n\nSources: \n\nFriedman, Milton and Schwartz, Anna. The Great Contraction, 1929–1933.\n\nBeaudreau, Bernard. Mass Production, the Stock Market Crash and the Great Depression.\n\nVatter, Walker and Alperovitz. The onset and persistence of secular stagnation in the U.S. economy: 1910-1990.\n\nMyung Soo Cha. Did Takahashi Korekiyo Rescue Japan from the Great Depression?\n\nOhanian, Lee. Why did productivity fall so much during the Great Depression?\n\nRitschl, Albrecht. Reparations, Deficits, and Debt Default: the Great Depression in Germany.\n\nFisher, Jonas and Hornstein, Andreas. The Role of Real Wages, Productivity, and Fiscal Policy in Germany's Great Depression 1928-37.", "created_utc": 1573801412, "distinguished": null, "id": "f7kb4e3", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/dwdaou/i_often_hear_people_say_that_the_new_deal_had/f7kb4e3/", "score": 14 } ]

[ { "body": "First and perhaps largest difference is exactly what sort of economy and labor market you are looking at. 1920-30's Labor market was dominated by Manufacturing and Agriculture where even a high school degree was not needed. The 20XX Economy is focused to a much higher degree on Service, Technology, and Industry where the right sort of degrees beyond High School are desirable and the wrong sort represent a lesser value (particularly compared to the cost of degree).\n\nI can't particularly speak to the Manufacturing/Urban experience, but I can speak to the Agricultural worker experience based on some interviews I did with family members and other research done specifically focused on the experience in the Dust Bowl areas of Kansas and the migration of \"Okies\" to California.\n\nSo I want to set a little background to the story. WW1 and the Spanish Flu outbreak were both interesting factors in the area that I studied. First nearly everyone lost a friend, neighbor, or family member to the Flu and like many other wars before and since, they almost all had pockets of veterans and KIA's. The 1920's saw a sort of mini baby boom coupled with economic good times as agricultural markets were high on demand after the war and this area had good weather to provide. Part of the boom in supply came about in part to a change over from horses to mechanical for powering the equipment. Fewer young people were needed to help keep the farm running, but a lot of profits were being \"plowed\" back into modernizing and expanding the farms to keep up. The demand for cash crops also pushed farming into more marginal grounds and a reduction in crops grown for foodstuff. Add in better medical facilities/improving infant mortality/longer life expectancy coupled with families still having larger numbers of children (Families in most of the areas I studied typically had more children than the national average but fewer that either survived to adulthood or remained on the family farm).\n\nAll of these factors led to a slightly larger generation than previous with parents/families/farms leveraged a bit more than previous generations, but they all seem to feel they were poised to make good money when the weather dry turned first. The first dry years were hard times. Crops were seriously damaged or failed entirely crippling income for entire communities. Even families who were careful in the finances found themselves needing to borrow money from the banks just to keep afloat. \n\nAs the drought on the Great Plains (and to some extent the South) intensifies, the second disaster hits: The Stock Market Crashes. Overnight many banks are suddenly in perilous positions. In particular in these areas their customers are needing to both withdraw their money to cover ballooning expenses with decreasing revenue and the customers also need loans to stay afloat. Many of these banks could take on that sort of pressure from their customers if the other markets/banks were still up and running, but now there was no money to move around to/from other banks and markets. What happens when the banks can't pay their customers? They close and have their assets (loans, property, accounts, etc.) sold to other banks in an attempt to make customers whole (or at least pay back whatever debts they had). So not only were these assets being sold for pennies on the dollar they were going out of the city/area/state/region. In several instances this meant that the owners didn't care as much about the community as long as they were able to get return on what they bought. Often this meant foreclosure and sale of property for loans that were delinquent/defaulted. \n\nSo now to the meat of the actual answer here. Again this is based more on the experience of people who lived it and not particular to media portrayal. \n\nFirst a great deal depended on the situation your greater family found itself in. The areas I'm talking about the family homestead farm was the backbone of the extended family farms of the subsequent generations. What I mean by this is often the original homestead farm was the nucleus that spawned off several other surrounding family farms run by the sons (or sons in law) of the original homesteaders. At this point (2nd/3rd generation) the family farms have become bigger operations, but there is some crowding as the next generation is looking to move out of the nest and start the next step. Many may have borrowed money from a bank to buy a bit of somewhat marginal farmland (all that was left/attainable/affordable at this point) that had produce decent yields over the last few years in the hopes that they would have a place of their own. Others were perhaps hoping that they could do so or were planning on inheriting and running the farm from the previous generation. Maybe you lived in these communities and your family either moved off the farms or were always involved in the other industries involved in the community (grocer, mechanic, hardware store, general store, equipment sales/repair, banker, etc.), your primary custom still involved these farm families. When their incomes started to dry up with the weather so did yours. \n\nWhere did this leave the person who was coming of age in the 1930s? The prospect of farming looked bleak. If your greater family was in a strong position you might have hope to work a few years more on the farm with the safety net of family to keep you afloat. If you were on your own, if you or your greater family was foreclosed and lost your cash crop land you were lucky to be left with a roof over your head. The job market is/was already flooded and prospects in the area look grim. To make matters worse some are predicting that the land may never recover as the top soil begins to blow away. Time to pull up stakes and move on much like your ancestors did.\n\nWhere can you go from here? California has a need for ag workers if you can get there. Bigger cities might have some jobs. Work programs from the New Deal were starting to come in if you could find a way in. \n\nOf the California route there were some options available for some. Some that I talked to had some extended family established out there from a generation or two further back. They for the most part were able to eventually secure better jobs/job prospects and had a bit of a safety net to lean on. They found themselves integrated into \"regular California society\" after a reasonable amount of time due to those connections. \n\nOthers weren't as lucky and found themselves quasi-homeless as they followed the various harvest cycles up and down the coast working from farm to farm. They were very much like the Okies as portrayed in the *Grapes of Wrath* or *Of Mice and Men*. When I talked with them (these interviews happened in the 1990s) they often expressed that they had a lot of sympathy for \"the Mexicans\" who they saw doing the same jobs at the time. I actually feel that there are several parallels between their experience and the experience that many migrants (legal and illegal) feel in this country to this very day. Terrible working conditions, fear of arrest, harsh/judgmental treatment from the general public, and lack of resources to better themselves were a big part of what they faced.\n\nFor those who \"escaped\" rural life for the city, they often found themselves in similar situations as the \"Okies\". Resources, job, and housing was hard to come by. Bums, vagrants, hicks, rednecks, shiftless, and other such terms faced by others I talked to. However, many had some skills and hard work ethics developed on the farm and at least the ones that I talked to were able to persist through hard times working odd jobs and gaining reputations as being the guy who could get things done/fix anything in the neighborhood.\n\nSo far I've talked mainly about the experiences of the young men. For young women, they faced a completely different set of challenges. This was an era that feature few working women in the sense that they worked at a career outside of being a wife at home or other \"domestic\" work. The experiences of those who were young women that I talked to ranged from the mostly domestic sort of jobs of nanny work, cook, baker, etc. to a few who became successful nurses and even an accountant. I have to put in a caveat here, I interviewed a few exception women who were real pioneers being some of the first women to graduate from colleges (not only in the family, but from the college itself) who I was blessed to call family. So as I said some personal bias in who I interviewed. \n\nOn the difficult end of that perspective for young women they faced the prospect of having a new young small family with a husband who was struggling to bring in income. There were a lot of heroic women that I talked to that managed to eek out a small garden while raising their kids (and often neighbors in exchange for needed goods) and often being able to sell baked items in order to afford modest meals for their family to help supplement their husbands meager income. Indeed I believe Rosie the Riveter was forged in the hard times and hard work of the decade before.\n\nSo to wrap a long story, at least some of their experiences were similar to the media treatment of the people caught in the \"border crisis\". Many others experienced similar coverage as you would see in the media when a manufacturing plant closes, some sympathy for their plight but little comfort. Likely what you are really looking for is the plight of the college educated and that is outside of my experience and background of study. I hope that someone can jump in and expand on that aspect as well.", "created_utc": 1556222498, "distinguished": null, "id": "elrubl9", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/bgwoet/how_was_the_generation_of_young_adults_entering/elrubl9/", "score": 8 } ]

[ { "body": "According the [this article](http://www.hnn.us/article/61931) on the History New Network, the term \"Great Depression\" was not widespread, at earliest, until 1952, when Harry Truman blamed Republicans for having “brought on the Great Depression.”\n\nAs per your comment about the Great Recession, there were some instances of people using the term \"great depression\" during the actual great depression, but the name was not the standard. The same article cited above references the economist Lionel Robbins who, in 1934, wrote the book \"The Great Depression.\" Also, during their times in office, Roosevelt and Hoover used the terms \"great depression,\" but it was more to describe the economy, and not the other things that \"the Great Depression\" entails.", "created_utc": 1408633875, "distinguished": null, "id": "cjwju86", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/2e6b0o/when_did_the_term_great_depression_become/cjwju86/", "score": 26 }, { "body": "[Google ngrams](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22Great+Depression%22&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t4%3B%2C%22%20Great%20Depression%20%22%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3B%22%20Great%20Depression%20%22%3B%2Cc0%3B%3B%22%20great%20depression%20%22%3B%2Cc0%3B%3B%22%20GREAT%20DEPRESSION%20%22%3B%2Cc0) shows it becoming widespread in books in the late 1930s\n\n", "created_utc": 1408638508, "distinguished": null, "id": "cjwm7lz", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/2e6b0o/when_did_the_term_great_depression_become/cjwm7lz/", "score": 14 }, { "body": "Using a method that I saw used by another flair in a similar way, I decided to go through ProQuest's New York Times archive.\n\nSearching for the phrase (in quotation marks) \"Great Depression\", and going from 1929 on, we get the following results:\n\n>| Decade | Front page | Non-front page | % Front page |\n|:-----------|------------:|------------:|------------:|\n| 1920-1929 | 8 | 47 | 17% |\n| 1930-1939 | 25 | 349 | 7.2% |\n| 1940-1949 | 12 | 248 | 4.8%% |\n| 1950-1959 | 19 | 414 | 4.6% |\n| 1960-1969 | 21 | 462 | 4.5% |\n| 1970-1979 | 56 | 1,036 | 4.3% |\n| 1980-1989 | 82 | 1,605 | 5.1% |\n| 1990-1999 | 103 | 1,284 | 8% |\n| 2000-2009 | 134 | 1,645 | 8.1% |\n\nThere are some confounding articles, however, that should be noted. For example, in 1924, there was an article titled \"GREAT DEPRESSION IN WHEAT MARKETS\", not talking about the Great Depression itself. Nevertheless, by 1930-1939, we can see the term already being used to apply to the economic situation, though not typically in front page article titles. For example, in 1933, the New York Times reviewed \"The Great Depression and Beyond\" by Lloyd M. Graves. It doesn't really hit the articles as a phrase (book reviews on books calling it the Great Depression did happen throughout the period of 1930-on it seems) until the 1950s-60s, though there are a sparse few as early as 1939 that say things like:\n\n>In the dark days of the Great Depression - June, 1932 - Mayor Frank Murphy of Detroit issued a call for a meeting of American Mayors to discuss pressing problems of municipal credit and unemployment relief.\n\nThere are some articles like this in 1939, 1941, etc., but front page articles don't really feature the phrase until the latter half of the 1950s.\n\nHope that sheds some light on it!", "created_utc": 1408650624, "distinguished": null, "id": "cjwsoyy", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/2e6b0o/when_did_the_term_great_depression_become/cjwsoyy/", "score": 4 } ]

[ { "body": "I'm not sure whether you mean: \"Why did the Great Depression not give rise to radical groups\" or \"Why did the Great Depression not give rise to Nazis\" so I'll try and answer them both.\n\nBut the US absolutely had radical political movements during the Great Depression - Charles Coughlin led a popular but incredibly anti-semetic and at times pro-fascist radio show, The Bonus Army marched on Washington D.C. and the Business Plot attempted to overthrow American democracy, the German American Bund was pro-Nazi and held a 20,000 person strong rally in Madison Square Garden, FDR himself radically redesigned the way in which the state would function.\n\nAs to why they were never as successful as the Nazis or why the Nazis existed in Germany but not in America let's compare the two countries a little. America had an entrenched 2 party system, with both parties being mass parties who appealed widely to the general public, the US has a mature democratic culture which placed emphasis on the importance of democracy and liberty. Germany was an immature democracy and had been an almost absolute monarchy which was extremely militarised and nationalistic with great emphasis placed on the military, it had mobilized to a far greater degree than America and lost the war, then had fought a civil war as a Communist revolution broke out, in which the state armed and sanctioned \"free corps\" various armed veteran groups who were allowed to coexist with the army. German democracy was immature and contained a large number of parties with narrow appeals (The Nazis were noted as being the only party which could actually claim considerable support from all sections of society). Germany also had large amounts of antisemitism before WW1.\n\nThe Nazi party was formed after WW1 and received around 5% of the votes in national elections but rose to prominence during 1929 when the Young Plan became an issue. The Young Plan was a renegotiation of Germany's reparations, in which the Weimar government negotiated a smaller debt which they were given more time to pay off. But renegotiating Germany's reparations meant they accepted Germany's war guilt and the Nazis strong opposition to this was popular with the media who backed them over the government. When the Great Depression hit the Nazis were prominent within media coverage and were able to claim that German Democracy was a failure given that it had overseen 3 disasters in 11 years (the German civil war, hyperinflation, and the Great Depression).\n\nThe Nazis were, therefore, a prominently placed political party, with broad appeal, fighting against an unpopular incumbent party and advocated for the end of a democracy which had lasted for 11 years, was imposed upon Germany, and was stricken by a number of crises and this was created by a far more militarized and antisemitic culture. The US never had a party like the Nazis who were similarly positioned before the Great Depression. The closest equivalent could maybe be the KKK who were rapidly declining in numbers due to various scandals and weren't a political party. And the US has unfavourable laws against 3rd parties. \n\nSources: \n\nIan Kershaw - Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris\n\nAdrian Weale - The SS: A New History\n\nJoshua Rothman - When Bigotry Paraded Through The Streets", "created_utc": 1598395611, "distinguished": null, "id": "g2uob4m", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/igk3a7/why_did_the_great_depression_give_rise_to_radical/g2uob4m/", "score": 8 } ]

[ { "body": "I will answer the second part of your question.\n\n>did any areas recover faster than the rest of the country?\n\nYes. It is important to understand that while the US as a whole was affected severely by the Great Depression, the impact of the crash varied from State to State and the three primary factors were the extent of the sectoral specialization, levels of the household debt of a particular State and spending by the Federal Government during the New Deal. For example, Agriculture, Banking, Mining, and Manufacturing were hit in a far harder fashion than Transportation and Service sectors. In general, the more specialized a particular region was, the more vulnerable it was towards external shocks and slumps in trade both internal as well as external. Similarly, high levels of debt that were accumulated during boom time forced a very painful deleveraging process that necessarily cut down Investment, Consumption and consequently Output. The third factor was the response by the Government in response to the crisis. Another component was the Banking policy which limited the size of the banks by imposing restrictions on expansion forcing most banks to remain relatively small and undiversified. This led to bank failures and worsened the situation further by reducing the confidence of the public in the Banking system as a whole until the whole sector was restructured (I have described that along with other policies that were implemented in detail [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5t7kkr/how_did_the_us_economy_recover_from_the_great/ddl6nhe/).\n\nResearch by Schwartz and Graham, Fishback, Wallis have found that States with lower household debt performed better than States with High Household debt when it comes Employment, Income, and Wages and Retail Sales (Retail Sales is considered to be a very useful metric insofar as the measurement of Consumption of both durable and non-durable goods are concerned and it is still used by the US Bureau of Labour Statistics). An increase of 10 percent in debt to income ratio above the national average resulted in the above factors being 2.5 to 3 percentage points lower. Now we come to sectoral specialization. Having a relatively low debt by itself did not save any State from the downturn. States on the East Coast had higher debt to income ratios than the ones in Mountain State and yet the latter had to bear a greater brunt owing to their dependence on Mining and Lumber Industry and less diversification. The collapse in Construction Industry created considerable difficulties because they could no longer find a buyer for the product. Similarly, States that derived a greater share of income from Agriculture fared far worse than others. Lower income States tended to suffer worse in these conditions. The relationship is less clear with regards to Manufacturing. On the other hand, the States that saw a greater fall in income between 1929 and 1932 because of their sectoral specialization also had a faster recovery in the period between 1932 and 1940. Average per capita income in 1929 was $845 in the Northeast, $631 in the Midwest, $661 in the West and $499 in the South\n\nNow, we come to State spending during the period of New Deal. There was (as expected) considerable variation on help provided and the impact it had on the economic performance. The Federal Government spending increased from 4 percent in 1932 to 8 percent of GDP in 1939. Similarly, the Federal share of total expenditure increased from 30 percent to 47 percent. The per capita amount received by South was less than West though greater than North East. Generally, the expenditure on public works was greater in those areas where there were more unemployment and spending on relief was greater where there was more distress. It must also be noted that was an arguable bias toward those areas where there was a greater volatility in support for Democrats. Nonetheless, the impact was mostly positive and the greater income allowed workers to spend on buying consumer goods allowing the economy to steadily recover. The increase in productivity cut transportation costs increasing the net price local sellers received. The efficiency was greater in those cases where spending was not solely used to reduce unemployment and substitute Capital by Labour. Moreover, the Federal spending was instrumental in equalizing and leading to greater convergence in growth rates between States. Federal expenditure was also important owing to the legal restraint on deficit spending by State and Local Governments which might have inhibited recovery. While positive on a whole, there may have been some crowding out of private Investment as it's share was considerably lower in 1940 when US real GDP reached the 1929 level.\n\nIn the final analysis, there was variation in recovery rate between different areas based on the impact of the Great Depression and other factors which I mentioned above.\n\nReferences:\n\nHousehold Debt and Economic Recovery: Evidence from the U.S. Great Depression by Katharina Gärtner; European Historical Economics Society Working Papers in Economic HIstory | NO. 36\n\nWhy Did Income Growth Vary Across States During the Great Depression? by Thomas A. Garrett and David C. Wheelock; Social Science Research Network\n\nThe Impact of New Deal Expenditure on Local Economic Activity: An Examination of Retail Sales, 1929-1939 by Price Fishback, William Horace,Shawn Kantor; National Bureau of Economic Research", "created_utc": 1496461360, "distinguished": null, "id": "die6ybf", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/6exr34/during_the_great_depression_were_there_any/die6ybf/", "score": 28 } ]

[ { "body": "To begin, I love your question (I may have written a few papers on this in grad school, but I digress...) and the multifaceted nature of it. For many reasons, simple questions like this are hard to fully answer without writing a great deal (I'm talking book length and/or multivolumes at that). However, I will do my best in providing both primary and secondary sources which answer your question. \n\n**Sources\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_**\n\nMy sources include Lynn Dumenil's *The Modern Temper* and Robert S. McElvaine's *The Great Depression America, 1929-1941* and *Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man.* (McElvaine is a great place to begin as he truly tries to capture the perspective of the ordinary man/woman/child of the Great Depression era). Also included are *The Great Gatsby* and \"Babylon Revisited\" both by F. Scott Fitzgerald.\n\n\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\\_\n\n​\n\n\"The forgotten Americans, however, have remained largely forgotten. The task of trying to remember them is a formidable one. The sources of traditional history--governmental records, organizational files, collections of personal papers, diaries, memoirs, newspapers--yield only spotty information about the problems and attitudes of the \"down and out.\" As with any historical inquiry, one must look at the sources available; unfortunately those of the lower class/es tend to leave the least amount in the historical record. Yet, what is unique about the Great Depression, especially during the FDR administration, is that many wrote to the President of the United States because they believed that Roosevelt *could* and *would* do something about their plight. \"President Roosevelt gave many people a feeling that he was their personal friend and protector, that they could tell him things in confidence.\" This was remarkable considering that the President would *respond and sign the letter* and that the public placed faith within the President after Hoover's lackluster years (prior to the election of FDR). \n\nA brief recap: the origins of the Great Depression and the Hoover administration. Prior to 1929, workers, particularly industrial/city workers proscribed to a belief McElvaine refers to as *acquisitive, amoral individualism*. Simply put, the 1920s ushered in a fervent belief in advertising, purchasing on credit, instant gratification (spending more/saving less), purchasing goods to alleviate anxiety created by the ads (note the capitalistic irony), and \"reverence for the almighty dollar.\" This was materialism and consumerism at unrealistic levels. Those who bought into the market place economics \"religion\" only really considered the present, not thinking of the potential ramifications of future economic cycles, other citizens and how they may or may not endure potential economic downturn, etc. The 1920s were one of the original \"me\" decades. However, despite urban dwellers literally buying into this ideology, McElvaine and Dumenil both note that those who remained in rural, insular communities were more of a \"hard sell.\" One reason for this was that the rural farmers technically felt economic downturn at the beginning-middle of the decade, of which they never fully recovered in part because of higher tariffs placed on agricultural products (meaning inflation on other necessary goods which the increased prices for their crops could not match/nullify). A result of Hoover and his administration from misreading the public and failure to anticipate the ramifications of decisions made--those in power during the '20s, those who prospered during the '20s, and those who could *afford* to loose in the stock market and *survive* economic downturns without really relying upon initiatives like food stamps became villified for becoming the personification of the excesses of the decade. \\[Dumenil explores this theme quite well.\\] This is where the flapper culture, and those who embodied it, became the scapegoats, the villains of the situation. \n\nFlapper culture was youth culture. Advertisements hocked the latest treatments and products which would seemingly turn back time and restore youth. Reverence for youth culture increased on par with reverence for consumerism. Youth culture also included products of pop culture such as literature, music, film, higher hemlines, greater acceptance of women wearing make-up, fast cars, etc. Here I turn to literature to examine public opinion of flappers and flapper culture. F. Scott Fitzgerald's *The Great Gatsby* and \"Babylon Revisited\" poignantly sum up the attitude before and after the Crash of '29. One of the main themes of *Gatsby* is the inevitable failure of living hard, fast, and without regard to the future. Gatsby embodies the initially naive rural son of immigrants struggling to achieve great wealth (which he does though through questionable means typically outside of the law), like many real individuals who migrated to larger cities in order to shuck the outdated cultural norms and to make a quick buck. Gatsby's death and the failure of society punishing Daisy, instead blaming Gatsby for Myrtle's death personify the actual dynamics of the wealthy surviving the Great Depression relatively unscathed and placing the blame upon the lower classes--those who felt the greatest impact of the economic downturn. \"They feel justified in holding the losers in contempt, in blaming them for their own problems, in telling them that they could find work if they really wanted to.\" By the time \"Babylon Revisited\" was published (1934), the trend for society turned toward a renewed reverence for agrarian culture and a rejection of the \"materialism, egoism, and philistinism.\" The most popular novels of the 1930s included those with small-town, agrarian themes such as *The Grapes of Wrath* and *Gone With the Wind*. \"Babylon Revisited\" deals with the theme of society's ability and/or willingness to forgive the ramifications of the laissez-faire attitude regarding business during Hoover's presidency. The main character Charlie Wales lost custody of his daughter Honoria to his sister-in-law and her husband. *Literally Charlie/flapper culture/wealthy class fights to regain his/its \"Honor\".* Another stroke of genius by Fitzgerald was the names of the sister-in-law and husband Marion and Lincoln. A derivative of Mary--usually one associates that name with the benevolent and merciful Virgin Mary and Lincoln--usually one associates with Abraham Lincoln arguably a benevolent and merciful president. The story depicts the struggle to regain Honoria, set-backs and misunderstandings caused by friends from the '20s (emblematic of the continuing economic downturn), and Marion's refusal to reunite Charlie with Honoria which leaves Charlie despondent and defeated. As of 1934, still in the thick of the Great Depression, many responded like Marion in refusing to immediately forgive the mistakes of the previous decade personified in the character of Charlie.\n\n​\n\nI hope this helps with your query, and I highly suggest reviewing *Down and Out* for the wealth of primary sources--letters--McElvaine collected.", "created_utc": 1571734690, "distinguished": null, "id": "f4pju5x", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/dkx6kp/how_were_flappers_viewed_by_americans_during_the/f4pju5x/", "score": 8 } ]

[ { "body": "You'd be hard pressed to examine the Delta Blues scene without talking about Lead Belly. Let me preface this by saying my focus is on Marxism and the student movements/militant movements of the '60s and '70s. So, while my Marxist theory is pretty strong, I don't want to give the impression that I'm an expert on the American Communists during your specified period. However, I do have a strong music-humanities interest in the blues, and have experience with left-wing publications in the US. By a strange coincidence, those two things very recently converged and brought to my attention some info you might enjoy.\n\nLead Belly's personal history was important to his rise. In particular, his former imprisonment was exploited to market him. In the seminal box-set/compiled history released by Jeff Place through Smithsonian Folkways, Place suggests that musicologist John Lomax used LB's criminal past to market him all over the country, particularly in New York City. John Lomax was the father of Alan Lomax, who would continue to associate with LB even after his father's death in the late '40s. Now, just because this portion of LB's life was manipulated, doesn't mean that his experiences with poverty, racism, and justice didn't shape his music. They certainly did, and you only need to look at the lyrics to some of his most famous songs: Jim Crow Blues and Midnight Special come to mind.\n\nBut we all know that being anti-war, anti-poverty, and anti-racism do not in and of themselves a Communist make, especially at a point in time when self-identification/actual party membership were more common than they are now. One other famous black American, Richard Wright, held similar views and officially joined the Party in the early '30s. You probably know Wright because of his famous novel *Native Son*, but he also frequently wrote for *The Daily Worker*, and one collection of his bylines includes a piece about Lead Belly's influence on the movements for black rights and economic equality. Woody Guthrie also wrote music with LB, and while Guthrie's anti-fascist sentiments are well known, his association to \"Communism\" isn't as clear as Wright's. While Guthrie did write articles for *People's World*, he was never a full member of the party (despite his claims to the contrary). So if you buy into guilt by association, maybe you can end there.\n\nHowever, LB's stances are far more nuanced than that. Though I've never been able to find a recording, LB did pen a song for Republican candidate Wendell Willkie, which supposedly supported Willkie's civil rights stance. One song I HAVE finally heard (thanks to the aforementioned Smithsonian set) is an ode LB wrote in his middle years for Princess Elizabeth's wedding. So, if your idea of a Communist doesn't include monarchist sentiments or reformist support of centrist Republicans, you might not think of LB as being on par with someone like Richard Wright.\n\nMaybe that opens up a more interesting question: what exactly do you mean by Communist? What's your criteria? If it's a theoretical or ideological one, using LB's music might help. Along with the aforementioned songs protesting war, Jim Crow, the prison system, and oppression, LB penned \"The Bourgeois Blues\", which makes direct reference to the traditional terminology of Marxist theory. His stances on those controversial issues also trend left, as does the occasional violence found in his lyrics. However, penning a song for a centrist doesn't exactly hold the revolutionary-Marxist line. So it really comes down to what you believe about political labeling. I won't speculate on what LB would have called himself, and would love if someone could post a paper or book where his opinions are directly stated.\n\nFor sources: in terms of the life and times of LB and a wonderful discography and short history, check out the boxset and book compiled by the Smithsonian Folkways. For the claims about Richard Wright, Earle Bryant edited a collection called *Byline Richard Wright* and many back articles can be found with a bit of digging. In terms of Woody Guthrie's politics and his relationship to LB, check out Ed Cray's *Rambling Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie*. Claims about LB's song writing for Willkie are admittedly sketchier, dating back to a the April 1962 issue of *Negro's Digest*. This source also mentions the Princess Liz song, which is also included with the box-set.\n\nEDIT: Because this got a few more views than I expected, I edited the poor writing. The only substantive factual change I made was definitively claiming that CPUSA had more members in the mid '30s than they do today. Sourcing for that claim comes from *The Communist* newsletter the group sent out, as well as relative numbers pulled from the current website and archival information on dues paid.", "created_utc": 1501183342, "distinguished": null, "id": "dkt3suf", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/6pvvql/the_great_depression_was_both_the_height_of/dkt3suf/", "score": 78 }, { "body": "First, some background: in the 1920s, a whole host of record companies realised that there was money to be made by recording the music of ethnic communities, recording urban versions of the blues such as Ma Rainey's 'Bo-Weevil Blues' in 1923 (which likely sounds more like jazz than blues to you - in 1923 these boundaries were much more blurry). Paramount Records recorded a Texan country blues musician called Blind Lemon Jefferson, releasing his music in 1926. Record sales charts don't go as far back as 1926, but Jefferson was clearly very successful, and Ted Gioia in *Delta Blues* thinks that Jefferson sold in the six-figures range - which would still be impressive today. \n\nAs a result, other record companies wanted their own Blind Lemon Jefferson, and in 1929 - shortly after the stock market crash - they discovered the Mississippi Delta had a rich vein of singers. So note that Blind Lemon Jefferson is *country blues* or *Texan blues* but not *Delta blues*, which is a bit more of a specific genre with a certain sound and a specific location.\n\nIn general, rural black people in the Mississippi Delta often lived on cotton plantations like Dockery Farms, a plantation with about four hundred black tenant families. This was a village of its own, effectively, run by a white man called Will Dockery who profited so much from Dockery Farms that he retired to Memphis and was well-known as one of the most generous philanthropists on the Delta. Dockery Farms, in particular, hosted Tommy Johnson, Robert Johnson, Son House, Charley Patton, and Howlin' Wolf at various points.\n\nAnd in terms of how much a plantation worker on Dockery Farms would have been exposed to Communist beliefs, it's probably fairly low. Stephen H. Norwood argues that while there was *some* biracial unionism in the South in particular industries - lumber and mining - biracial unionism in particular was brutally opposed by the Southern political system, which as Gerald Friedman argues, was strongly authoritarian, with Democratic politicians not likely to face penalties at the polls for being associated with brutally breaking strikes. Similarly, living in a Southern state in the 1930s, the majority of the residents on Dockery Farms would have been disenfranchised, unable to vote in the political system. Black unionism in Mississippi - what was then a majority black state despite its voting patterns - would have upended the Mississippi political system, and so it was brutally suppressed. In any case, there was little unionism or Communist agitation on plantations like Dockery Farms.\n\nAll of this means that Delta Blues in particular was not likely to be a place where Communist blues singers flourished. To the extent that Lead Belly - as mentioned by /u/A_Dissident_Is_Here - is an exception, it's because Lead Belly was championed by the father and son musicologists/song collectors John and Alan Lomax. The Lomaxes recorded Leadbelly in prison, and once he was out of prison, promoted him heavily, turning him into a star in certain circles. While John Lomax soon retired, Alan Lomax acted as Leadbelly's manager for several years afterwards. And Alan Lomax had far-left political leanings; as late as 1979, the FBI was considering pursuing allegations against him (but while they extensively monitored him, they never went as far as charging him). In Alan Lomax's company and circles, it's unsurprising that Lead Belly picked up some Communist ideas. Certainly the people who rediscovered the Delta Blues in the late 1950s and early 1960s championed that music in part because of leftist beliefs about the wisdom of the proletariat. One imagines that Son House - when rediscovered in the 1960s - would have been exposed to actual Communists in his time playing at folk music festivals.\n\nProminent African-Americans in the urban North did have links to Communism in the 1930s, with the popular singer Paul Robeson famously being a fellow traveller whose passport was confiscated in the McCarthy era. Langston Hughes travelled to the Soviet Union in 1932, and Ralph Ellison had leftist sympathies. But those were celebrated, educated literary figures, where the Delta Blues singers were poor, rural and often illiterate people making music that - despite the later reverence for it - was not seen as high art worth close listening and investigation. Wondering about the political leanings of Charley Patton in 1936 is something like wondering about the political leanings of T-Pain today. \n\nOtherwise, I should point out that it's often difficult to tell from the recorded works of 1930s Delta Blues musicians what their political leanings might have been. Firstly, the lyrics in the music are often elliptical, trading on suggestive images rather than, you know, outright discussion of the need to join unions. After all, part of the appeal of the Delta blues is that it's easy to put your own concerns into those elliptical, suggestive images. \n\nSecondly, the record company employees who travelled to places like Dockery Farms to record blues musicians were often seeking music that was as 'down home' as possible - much of the audience either lived in such settings, or had family connections to such settings. As a result, there's some discussion in books like Elijah Wald's *Escaping The Delta* or Ted Gioia's *Delta Blues* that the stuff we now associate as Delta Blues was only a particular portion of those musicians' repertoire. So if a Robert Johnson did have a song called 'I Believe I'll Dust My Copy Of *The Communist Manifesto*', it likely wouldn't have been recorded, as it would have gone against the general vibe the record companies wanted from musicians like Johnson.\n\nSources:\n\n* *Escaping The Delta* by Elijah Wald\n\n* *Delta Blues* by Ted Gioia\n\n* 'Bogalusa Burning: The War Against Biracial Unionism In the Deep South, 1919' by Stephen H. Norwood in *The Journal Of Southern History*, 1997\n\n* ' The Political Economy of Early Southern Unionism: Race, Politics, and Labor in the South, 1880-1953' by Gerald Friedman in *The Journal Of Economic History*, 2000\n", "created_utc": 1501197898, "distinguished": null, "id": "dktgu4h", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/6pvvql/the_great_depression_was_both_the_height_of/dktgu4h/", "score": 26 } ]

[ { "body": "I can speak to your original question, but not to your rephrased one, as my interest is in comparative economic development so I don't know much about the details of US policies.\n\n\nIt is, in general, very hard to rigorously explain the economic history of a particular country at a particular time (with some exceptions, e.g. a war raging across the land sucks, hyperinflation sucks, the modern Saudian economy is about oil, etc). My guideline is that if it's using maths more advanced than what I learned at primary school, I'm skeptical. \n\n\nIn part, this is because in any sizeable economy, at any one point in time, a myriad of different things are happening, so it's quite possible with a bit of ingenuity to explain nearly any change by pointing to something other things that changed at the same time and make a very plausible sounding explanation, but then it turns out that these things applied to a different economy at the same time, or the same economy at a different time, but the outcome was quite opposite.\n\n\nAnother part of the problem is that economies aren't static. If something changes then people change in response to it, for better or worse. \n\n\nTherefore economic history of the type that seeks to explain the impact of the New Deal in the USA depends on assumptions about what would have happened in the absence of the New Deal - the counter-factual. A counter-factual introduces a fair bit of subjectivity. And that subjectivity results in immense arguments when it comes to questions that are politically polarizing, like government spending, everyone agrees that governments fail and markets fail but we all start with our own priors about which ones are more likely to fail, and discussions get highly heated fast. And even summarising the debate can be hard.\n\n\nConveniently, in 1995 (a few years ago now), a survey was done of economists and historians who were members of the Economic History Association. In this survey, they were asked to agree or disagree with a number of statements about US economic history, including the statement \"Taken as a whole, government policies of the New Deal served to lengthen and deepen the Great Depression\", found that 27% of economists agreed, and 22% agreed with provisos, while only 6% of historians agreed, and 21% agreed with provisos. So we can say with some confidence that in 1995 economists and, to a lesser extent, historians were divided on the question.\n\n\nLess conveniently, to the best of my knowledge no one has carried out a similar survey since 1995. And there has been a bit more academic research (I've added a couple of papers in the sources) directly on the topic and of course much more research on government interventions more generally, which might well have changed opinions on the New Deal specifically. \n\n\nSo, I think your friend's confidence is unwarranted. But I'm not confident about that. :)\n\n**Sources**\n\nRobert Whaples (1995), *Where Is There Consensus Among American Economic Historians? The Results of a Survey\non Forty Propositions*, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Mar., 1995), pp. 139-154 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2123771.pdf)\n\nHarold L Cole, Lee E Ohanian, (2004) *New Deal Policies and the Persistence of the Great Depression: A General Equilibrium Analysis*, Journal of Political Economy v112 n4 (200408): 779-816\n\nHannsgen, Greg; Papadimitriou, Dimitri. (2010) *Did the New Deal Prolong or Worsen the Great Depression?*, Challenge (05775132). Jan/Feb2010, Vol. 53 Issue 1, p63-86. 24p.", "created_utc": 1563952635, "distinguished": null, "id": "eup7chn", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/cgwz00/did_fdr_prolong_the_great_depression_by_8_or_so/eup7chn/", "score": 6 }, { "body": "This is not an answer, so I hope the mods will allow it. I was wondering if you could provide a link to the economist article so we could see what kind of sources and thinking the author used to frame his argument?", "created_utc": 1563910277, "distinguished": null, "id": "eum1y6p", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/cgwz00/did_fdr_prolong_the_great_depression_by_8_or_so/eum1y6p/", "score": 4 } ]

[ { "body": "Morès seem to shift in alignment with events cataclysmic (and increasingly catastrophic) caused by exponential upticks in tech, and speculation, without regard to ripples, which in turn lead to market upsets and subsequent wars, to offset.", "created_utc": 1557288866, "distinguished": null, "id": "emsvpd9", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/amdk71/does_anyone_know_how_after_the_great_depression/emsvpd9/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "First and foremost is the fact that the CCC had well defined policies of segregation, and the fact that camps would be segregated by race. Yet, in some cases camps were segregated and in others they were integrated, it really depended on the region in which the camp was located in and the housing available. \n\nSo conditions varied, as for who they benefited it's sort of a mixed bag, and ties into the policy issue listed above. The War Department was in charge of training and housing the men, as the camps were under military command. Since this was the case they followed the military policies of segregation. This understandably caused friction among the enrollees, and can been seen in the protest that occurred at Preston Hollow in 1933. Company 235-C, note the \"C\" stood for \"colored,\" protested the removal of two colored clerks and their replacement by white clerks. So in terms of equality they were found lacking, as many camps were still hot beds of Jim Crow era segregation. \n\nThe next complication is that the actual recruitment and enrollment process was done by the Department of Labor, so now there are two government departments involved with differing policies on race. As per Roosevelt's directive, each state would have a quota based on population. With restrictions placed upon who could serve based on age, veteran status, and workplace experience. In the legislature that formed the Corps it \"forbade the program from discriminating 'on account of race, color, or creed.'\" (Maher 106) So while still segregated, the Corps could not discriminate on who could work in the CCC. As such the Corps was supposed to be a very diverse organization due to the above mentioned quotas. Yet what is on paper and the reality are generally two separate things. \n\nThe truth of the Matter was that black enrollees struggled to get into the Corps, and then once in faced incredibly hostile environments. In many cases they were moved to the most remote camps away from white settlements that were unwelcoming to the black workers. While for white immigrants like Eastern Europeans the camps were seen as places to Americanize these workers. So while diverse, it really depended on who you were. The pay was equal across the board, but the jobs that were given to the men were not. Even in segregated camps it was unlikely for black workers to hold positions of authority, and the technicians brought in to train workers were rarely non-white. \n\nFinally there is the collective memory of the Corps and what they were. The collective cultural memory of the CCC is of young white men going out into the woods and building trails in National Parks. This can be seen through the recruitment posters of the time, the advertisements that were run, and the photos taken of enrollees. The majority of these are depicting white men doing the work. \n\nOwen Cole Jr. wrote the book The African-American Experience in the Civilian Conservation Corps, which details the life of African Americans in the CCC, unfortunately I have not had the chance to read this text. Additionally I suggest reading Neil Maher's Nature’s New Deal as he devotes an entire chapter to Labor and who the enrollees were. Through my own discussions with Neil Maher there is also a lack of information on minorities in the CCC. \n\nIt should also be noted that the CCC was decried as Un-American and Fascist by both the Right and the Left respectively. That being said, it is still the most popular government program in US History with a public approval rate of around 80%. It was not until after the closure of the program in 1942 that the organization became romanticized by later forestry and NPS employees. Rightly or wrongly so. This means that the Corps history is not as cut and dry as Historians like myself would like. \n\n \nReferences\nMaher, Neil. 2008. Nature's New Deal. New York: Oxford University Press.\nPatton, Thomas W. 2001. \"A Forest Camp Disgrace: The Rebellion of Civilian Conservation Workers at Preston, New York, July 7, 1933 .\" New York History 231-258.", "created_utc": 1587440618, "distinguished": null, "id": "fo1spky", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/g16avg/in_the_united_states_during_the_great_depression/fo1spky/", "score": 5 } ]

[ { "body": "Its true that most Amish communities were relatively stable during the Great Depression. Obviously, it would vary among groups and locations, but [this short piece](http://www.goshen.edu/mqr/pastissues/Jan14Jellison.pdf) gives some nice details and there's more in the book \"The Great Depression in America\" by Young and Young.\n\nThere's a few points to keep in mind:\n\n* Amish people were much less likely to be in debt than a typical American. They preferred to own property outright and tried to avoid dealing with banks and lawyers when possible.\n\n* Amish still had to deal with a reduction in sales of their farm/craft goods. A lot of their income depended on sales to people outside the community, and many of those people were broke.\n\n* The Amish primarily lived in rural northeastern US, so they didn't have to deal with things like the dust bowl. Also, most of the non-Amish around them lived similarly simple lifestyles, as electricity and industry were not really common outside of larger cities. So while the Amish weren't hit as hard as the city dwellers, neither were many of their neighbors. The worst effects of the Depression were in large urban centers and the Plains states.", "created_utc": 1399768192, "distinguished": null, "id": "cheteqs", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/258cl3/how_did_the_great_depression_affect_amish/cheteqs/", "score": 182 }, { "body": "I remember asking my grandmother about the depression several years ago before I became \"heathen\". Most of the food and income in the community was and still is based off of agriculture which was very hard to do during the blowing winds of the dust bowls. Milking the cows with a lantern during the day, having crops blown away, etc made for even harder work than normal, but the Amish have always planned ahead (canning fruits, meats, vegetables, etc; rarely have house payments, and no car payments)and stuck together so while times were tough they were easily survivable.", "created_utc": 1411760769, "distinguished": null, "id": "cktdbya", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/258cl3/how_did_the_great_depression_affect_amish/cktdbya/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "I'm not sure if this comment will be high quality enough, but we covered this pretty well in one of my political economy classes. The main reasons presented by Dr. Melanie Kolbe of the Graduate Institute of Geneva were:\n\n1.) The lingering of the Haymarket Square bombing on the American conscious. The late 1800's were rife with nationalist sentiment against foreigners, anarchists, and communists, who were often viewed as one in popular thought. \n\n\"The mainstream media and trial attorneys invoked a narrative of\nAmerican nationalism in order to imagine the Haymarket anarchists\nas the dynamite-wielding leaders of “an incendiary and alien rabble.”58The stridency of this rhetoric is implicated in long-term patterns of American xenophobia over the course of the nineteenth century\" [Clymer 2002]\n\nSocialism became viewed as anti-American, and this allowed for detractors of socialism to frame discussions of class strife as distinctly traitorous, violent, and destructive to society. \n\n2.) Following Manifest Destiny, there was a very low population density in a lot of the Central US. This directly contrasts from the harsh inner city conditions that triggered Socialism in Europe. Because people could just go get a farm, they had an alternative outlet to socialism for a long period in America's formative years. Stiglitz argues that this created the conditions necessary for the productivity shocks in agriculture that led to gluts in the labor market prior to and during the Depression. \n\n3.) To an extent, I think that socialism did catch on. Garraty 1973 suggests that the economic response the US took to the depression was comparable to the German National Socialist response to a poor economy:\n\n\" CONSIDER FIRST how the two governments dealt with poverty and mass\n unemployment. Both combined direct relief for the indigent with public-\n wvorks programs to create jobs. The Americans stressed the former, the\n (Germans the latter, with the result that while acute suffering was greatly\n redticed in both nations, tunemployment declined much more rapidly\n in Germany. Congress appropriated $3.3 billion for public works in 1933,\n l)ut Roosevelt, unconvinced that public works would stimulate the economy\n and fearful of waste and corruption, did not push the program. Briefly,\n during the winter of 1933-34, he allowed Harry Hopkins to develop his\n Civil Works Administration, wlhich found jobs for over four million\n people, l)blt in the spring the program was closed down to save money.\n Only in 1935 did federal public works become important. Then, under\n Hopkins's WVorks Progress Administration and Harold L. Ickes's Public\n Works Administration, countless roads, schools, bridges, dams, and public\n buildings were constructed.4\" \n\nWhile the US didn't carry out such atrocities as the Nazis, their economic response was heavily reliant on state intervention, to a degree many today would consider to be socialist.", "created_utc": 1484165860, "distinguished": null, "id": "dcau1r7", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/5n9hn9/during_the_great_depression_why_didnt_socialism/dcau1r7/", "score": 8 } ]

[ { "body": "I personally am an economic conservative, so while I will try to be unbiased please note that I may consciously or subconsciously be biased one way or the other.\n\nThere are two main economic critiques of the Great Depression. I say main because I am sure that there will be Marxists and Austrians flooding in (well, maybe not) to chip in their theories. But the two main theories are that of John Meynard Keynes, or the \"Keynesian\" school, and that of Milton Friedman, or the \"Monetarist\" school.\n\nBoth schools generally accept that the initial stock market crash was something that would happen. It was something with a very low chance of occurring, but by no means something that shouldn't have happened at all.\n\nHowever, where they disagree is on what the proper response should have been by the government.\n\nIn the case of Keynes, the argument is essentially that around this time, aggregate demand, or basically how much people and companies wanted things, was low. In other words, people weren't spending money. The general economic theory was that people spend money to buy goods, which causes companies to expand production (in anticipation of future sales), which increases employment (and, after the population is almost entirely employed, wages), which in turn increases the amount of money people have, which in turns causes them to spend more. As a result, Keynes advocated that in this scenario, the government should have stepped in and provided employment, \"digging holes and then filling them back in\" if necessary. The idea was that the government, by providing workers with jobs, gives them money to spend, thus increasing investment and thus increasing employment. This is what we typically call fiscal policy.\n\nOn the other hand, the Monetarists led by Friedman argued that the Great Depression was caused by flawed monetary policy, or control over the supply of money. His argument was that because the Federal Reserve failed to support failing banks, people lost their savings, or those that did save their savings would hide it under their beds instead of storing it in a bank. As a result, banks could not lend money (as people didn't have any to save, or were scared that their bank would collapse also), which prevented companies from investing in the aforementioned cycle above, which would thus stall employment opportunities. The Monetarists thus argue that this failure to do so caused the recession to drag on for longer than necessary (hence, \"depression\"), because there was no capital for companies to borrow from at low enough rates.\n\nTo be perfectly frank, the Keynesians and the Monetarists agree on like 95% of most economic issues. In fact, Churchill used to refer to economics as \"any two economists will give you two opinions, except if one of them is John Meynard Keynes, in which case you will have three opinions.\" ", "created_utc": 1410817233, "distinguished": null, "id": "ckj9qg2", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ghqdd/im_reading_milton_friedmans_capitalism_and/ckj9qg2/", "score": 61 }, { "body": "I think it is quite fair to say that in the economics literature, Friedman is largely considered to be right in this regard.\n\nFriedman's core claim in his 1963 *Monetary History of the United States* is that the Federal Reserve made the Depression worse than it otherwise would have been via contractionary monetary policy in 1929-30. The Fed failed to be expansionary enough to offset the fall in aggregate demand in 1929-1933; as a result, nominal incomes fell in half, prices fell by a third and real output fell by about 25%. The early literature is summarized in [this 1976 Meltzer article.](http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1694&context=tepper)\n\nThe Friedman-Schwartz hypothesis is largely taken as correct by [Bernanke (1983 AER)](http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/dpaterson/econ532/10twenties/bernanke.pdf), which documents the role of financial factors in prolonging the Depression from 1930-1933. Note that he explicitly states in the opening paragraphs that he is not attempting to explain the decline in output from 1929-1930, seeing as it had been adequately solved by Friedman-Schwartz. Financial factors largely work to explain the prolonged nature of the Depression, but do not account for the drop in output from 1929-1930.\n\nBarry Eichengreen, Jeffrey Sachs, and Peter Temin have focused on the role of the gold standard in inhibiting recovery from the Depression; see this [representative 1985 JEH article.](http://www.earth.columbia.edu/sitefiles/file/Sachs%20Writing/1985/EconHistory_1985_ExchangeRatesandEconomicRecovery_Dec1985.PDF) Again, they take the Friedman-Schwartz view of the Great Contraction for granted; footnote 1. Exchange-rate factors and nations' ties to the gold standard largely account for the speed or sluggishness of their recoveries, but not for the collapse in 1929-33 itself.\n\nChristina Romer's [influential 1992 JEH article](http://eml.berkeley.edu/~cromer/What%20Ended%20the%20Great%20Depression.pdf) focuses on the sources of recovery from 1935-1945, largely taking the Friedman-Schwartz view of the events of 1929-1933 for granted. \n\nThe role of tariffs is considered in Crucini and Kahn (1996 JME); their results are usefully summarized in [this 2003 followup piece.](http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr172.pdf) In brief, tariff wars mattered but were small relative to everything else that was going on.\n\nA useful 1997 review article is available [here,](http://www.nber.org/papers/w6060.pdf) which also takes Friedman and Schwartz seriously.\n\nA recent paper is [Eggertsson (2008 AER)](http://www.econ.brown.edu/fac/gauti_eggertsson/papers/Great_Exp_AER.pdf), which again focuses on the recovery but takes Friedman and Schwartz in stride.\n\nYou may also be interested in the [1993 symposium](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.7.2) on the Depression held by the *Journal of Economic Perspectives.*\n\nThat gets at your money-and-the-Depression question. I'll have to reserve broader comments on Friedman and *Capitalism and Freedom* for another post.\n\nI am largely citing from the scholarly economics and economic history literatures here; mods please let me know if that's a problem.", "created_utc": 1410843957, "distinguished": null, "id": "ckjmkat", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ghqdd/im_reading_milton_friedmans_capitalism_and/ckjmkat/", "score": 15 } ]

[ { "body": "May I ask if you have a particular country or group of countries in mind? The issues are different for the West versus the Communist countries. \n\nI'll add that the US was relatively unusual in having such a long Great Depression, at least amongst those countries for which we have suitable economic data, generally the countries that left the gold standard early in the 1930s (or in the case of Spain, were never on it), recovered sooner, before WWII (though typically without hitting the strong growth of the post WWII era). \n\n**Source**\n\nBernanke, Ben S. *The Macroeconomics of the Great Depression: A Comparative Approach.* Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking 27 (1995): 1-28. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/1169/item/2399", "created_utc": 1576971793, "distinguished": null, "id": "fblw2wi", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/edmsxz/the_great_depression_was_almost_immediately/fblw2wi/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "The general consensus of economic historians is not much, if any.\n\nThe causes of the Great Depression are argued about a lot, but the consensus is more towards the monetary side: the US Federal Reserve's actions or lack thereof, and the operation of the inter-war Gold Standard.\n\nThere was a lively theory of economic criticism in the 1930s and for a few years afterwards known as \"liquidationism\" that the Great Depression was an overhang from the 'excesses' of the 1920s. But this is no longer held, for a variety of reasons. Some main ones are evidence that the increased prosperity of the 1920s was based on real improvements in productivity, not just debt-financed spending (as was often thought at the time - this was before modern GDP statistics were available) and evidence that the money supply was important. On the money supply issue, Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz in their 1963 book \"A Monetary History of the United States\" documented changes in money supply in the USA and linked it to recessions, they documented a sharp drop in the US's money supply in 1929. Work by various other researchers has documented on an international level strong linkages between the timing of a country's recovery from the Great Depression and when it left the Gold Standard (or was never on it), strengthening the monetary causes hypothesis. I expect the unprecedented economic boom years of the 1950s and 1960s post WWII also played a part in disfavouring the liquidationist hypothesis as those boom times didn't end in a Great Depression.\n\nCoolidge has been criticised for not acting more to curb stock market speculation, but a recent paper (Tacoma, 2019) presents evidence that he did seek to talk it down, and lacked powers under the US Supreme Court at the time to regulate directly (Tacoma, pages 368-370). Plus stock market crashes have happened before and since, under a variety of different political systems and political leaders, without being followed by a Great Depression.\n\nArguably Coolidge could have done things like appointed better people to the Federal Reserve, or been more forceful about the operation of the Gold Standard internationally, but these are arguments in hindsight. Generally people in the 1920s lacked the economic statistics and the economic theories that we have today, much of what we know has been learnt from painful experience.\n\n**Sources**\n\nParker, Randall. “An Overview of the Great Depression”. EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. March 16, 2008. URL http://eh.net/encyclopedia/an-overview-of-the-great-depression/\n\nTacoma, Thomas. 2019. “Calvin Coolidge and the Great Depression: A New Assessment.” Independent Review 24 (3).", "created_utc": 1591658012, "distinguished": null, "id": "ftf539s", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/gz6jlm/how_much_did_calvin_coolidge_contribute_to_the/ftf539s/", "score": 9 } ]

[ { "body": "It depends on when and how they bought. If you got some stocks in 1920, paying out of your hard-earned wages, you were fine; July 1920 is a convenient starting point because the Dow Jones is at about 1000 then. It goes down to about 750 at the nadir of the crash, but recovers the 1000 level by 1933 and from there it's all upwards; when you consider that the stocks would have been paying dividends the whole time, someone who bought in 1920 would come out fine.\n\nOn the other hand, if you bought at the height of the boom in 1929, say the day before the crash, ouch. Double ouch if you bought on margin; in case you don't know how that works, you put up 10% of the price of the stock, and the broker lends you the rest *with the stock as collateral*. If the stock price rises, you can sell the stock, pay back the loan, and pocket the price rise. If the stock price declines, you have to either put in more money so that your equity remains above some level (today 25% minimum, but the law that established that minimum was written after the Great Depression, by one of those odd coincidences), or give the broker the stock - so you lose your whole investment. Still worse, imagine this scenario: You buy some stock priced at 100 dollars, putting in $10 of your own money and borrowing $90 from the broker. The stock declines to $50; your equity plus collateral is now $60, your loan is $90, so the broker calls you up to say \"either put in 30 bucks, or give me the stock\". You think the market will rise again, so you put in the $30. The stock declines to $25; you're on the hook for another 25, which you put in. The stock declines to $10, which is what you originally paid; you don't have the fifteen dollars you need to cover the margin, so the broker repossesses the stock, probably cursing himself for lending to such a deadbeat. Your loss is the whole $65 you put in, and you don't even have the stock any more.\n\nThe invention of margin buying, and its becoming a widespread tool, was one reason for the stock market boom in the twenties; it follows that a lot of people were buying on margin, and it is likely that most of them were wiped out right away in the days following the crash.\n\nIf, however, you either didn't buy on margin, or you had sufficient cash reserves to cover your calls, you were still not in great shape if you happened to buy just before the crash. The Dow peaked at 5200; it didn't recover that level until 1959! That's some long-term investing, there. However, the comparison is a bit misleading in three ways: First, the Dow is not the stock market as a whole - it's just a convenient measure because it goes back so far and is easy to find data on. If you invested in Random Non-Dow Company Inc, you might do better or worse. Second, that 1959 level suffers from some inflation; without doing the math, 1963 when it hits 6000 might be a better estimate of recovery in real terms. Third, the index value doesn't account for dividends. If you reinvested dividends, especially during the crash itself so that you got a bunch of cheap stuff and benefitted from the subsequent recovery, you would get your money back way more quickly - not giving a specific year here because it's so dependent on the yield.\n\nTLDR: If you bought in 1925 and reinvested dividends through the crash, you were probably fine. The closer to the crash you bought, and the more you bought on margin (or sold in a panic) the worse off you were.", "created_utc": 1467519895, "distinguished": null, "id": "d4xcptd", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/4qyauh/what_happened_to_investors_during_the_great/d4xcptd/", "score": 32 }, { "body": "That was a good read and addressed questions I had always wondered about thanks!", "created_utc": 1467538615, "distinguished": null, "id": "d4xisar", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/4qyauh/what_happened_to_investors_during_the_great/d4xisar/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "The Great Depression was absolutely transformative for Latin American countries on several levels, though its effects do vary from country to country. In general, its main effect (as BarCasaGringo has pointed out) was the collapse of both the political and economic order that had prevailed since the late 19th century, typically described as oligarchical liberalism centred around export-led economic growth. (In broad strokes: *Crecimiento hacia afuera*replaced by *crecimiento hacia adentro*.) The order that replaced it was (in general) less liberal/more authoritarian, less oligarchical/more populist, more interventionist, far less international/more nationalist, and reflected both the increasing power of the state, and the greater weight of the urban lower classes in political economy.\n\nThere were two major shocks in the Great Depression. The first was the near-total shutdown of global capital flows following the Wall Street crash of 1929. American finance had become (since taking over for Britain the end of the first world war) the major source of new investment funds, which had been used by Latin American states to finance rapid infrastructural development (notably but not exclusively railroads) and to \"solve\" the problem of perpetual government deficits without having to increase unpopular taxes. All Latin American states had a fiscal structure based around taxing imports, which was a politically convenient method of raising funds, but which required high levels of trade in order to maintain state solvency. (Note: this is unlike \"deeper\" methods of income or consumption taxation, where governments can raise or lower taxes on the domestic population, regardless of the trade situation.)\n\nSo, this was the game as it was played in the export-oriented period: secure high levels of investment with the promise of future export earnings; invest that money in high-growth, export-oriented sectors; export primary products to earn foreign currency revenues; tax the resulting imports of manufactured goods to pass the fiscal burden onto consumers and close the fiscal loop. So long as there was stable international demand for primary products, and the rapid pace of economic growth was enough to compensate for the ever-increasing debt burden, Latin America could grow quickly without having to confront painful social, political and economic reforms. (Just how painful and uncertain that process could be, Mexico learned the hard way in the 1910s...)\n\nBut all this was contingent on the industrialized world's ever-increasing appetite for primary goods. This model had already started to creak at bit after 1900 through the 1920s, as protectionism started to return to fashion, and as industrial alternatives to primary commodities started to come into existence (chemical dyestuffs, synthetic rubber, chemical fertilisers, synthetic fibres, etc...) which undermined any export economy unlucky enough to specialise in those goods (Manaus, Nitrates and Guano in Chile and Peru, for example). Increased industrial production of foodstuffs was also a double-edged sword, which allowed agricultural regions to increase their production of wheat, meat and sheep, but also allowed their competitors (Aus, NZ, Canada, Russia, US, and European farmers behind tariff walls) to compete with exports.\n\nAll this meant that Latin America was already tending towards industrialisation, though in a \"staples thesis\" sort of way, driven by export processing and urban demand for consumer goods rather than heavy industrial goods. New kinds of politics were arising in this context, sometimes, this was at odds with the oligarchy of the \"oligarchical\" liberalism of the previous period (One might look at Yrigoyen in Argentina, or the abortive reformism of Madero in Mexico) and sometimes this was simply the breakdown of oligarchical alliances (the Guerra de los Mil Dias in Colombia). But as the world economy came back together in the 1920s, the old export-driven model was at least still vaguely feasible, and so it trundled on without complete collapse (except of course in Mexico, where everything really did fall apart, though also transformed more radically under Lazaro Cardenas in the 1930s.)On the eve of the Great Depression, then, Latin American states were still heavily dependent on international trade and capital flows, not only to sustain the economy, but also the polity.\n\nThen, quite suddenly, it all stopped. The threat of the Hawley-Smoot tariff act started an international trade war. Germany defaulted on its debts, and the resulting standstill agreement froze international credit markets. Countries began leaving the international gold standard, even though international debts were supposedly denominated in gold. Demand for exports dropped to very low levels, causing a simultaneous price and quantity shock. Foreign currency revenues, traditionally obtained by taxing imported manufactures, dropped to very low levels, leaving Latin American governments with almost no choice but to default on their international debts. (The usual consequence, being locked out of capital markets, was far less relevant when those same capital markets were not lending.)\n\nThe old system simply did not function in this environment, as the entire fiscal and political basis for the existing regimes evaporated. The incumbent regimes, mostly semi-democratic hybrids of the old oligarchy and the new urban populism, disintegrated or were overthrown. In their place (generally) came populist authoritarians: for instance, Getulio Vargas in Brazil or Lazaro Cardenas in Mexico. Uriburu in Argentina was more authoritarian than populist, but then Argentina was further along in the incorporation of the urban working classes into the political system; Peron would later be a clearer model for Argentine populist authoritarianism. Gaitan never actually comes to power in Colombia, but his anti-oligarchical, populist strain of liberalism becomes a major force in this period, and his eventual assassination set off decades of violence (bad enough to be known as THE violence, *la violencia*.) In any case, incumbent regimes were discredited, and the replacements were those who could put together a working political coalition under the new circumstances, usually with broad application of charisma and force. (This was hardly unique to Latin America, of course; anyone looking at Europe in the 1930s would not struggle to find \"populist authoritarians.\")\n\nEconomically, Latin American states turned inwards. At first, this was mostly because they had no choice in the matter; nobody was buying what they were selling, and there was no money to borrow, so the price of manufactured imports shot upwards. This collapsed standards of living, at least in the short run, but it also incentivised domestic industrialisation. The relative investment value of an export-oriented farm or mine vs. a domestically-oriented factory changed dramatically in favour of import-substituting manufactures. While the great depression was not the beginning of Latin American industrialisation (that started in the 1890s, really) it was a very powerful shove down that path.\n\nThe rise of manufacturing also empowered the urban working classes, whose output was suddenly much more critical than it had been previously, leading to their increasing incorporation in the coalitions of the new governments, and putting the \"populist\" in populist authoritarianism.\n\nGradually, these measures became less a matter of necessity and more a matter of policy. Raul Prebisch would bring this vision to CEPAL in the 1950s, along with his famous thesis that the relative price of primary goods would always fall in the long term. (Understandable, if one starts from the 1890-1900 period, and measures until WWII - the trend would have been obvious, though it is less clear that this is true in general.) Latin American states generally moved decisively towards \"inward facing growth\" and stayed there as a matter of policy preference for decades afterwards, until the late 1960s.", "created_utc": 1590768708, "distinguished": null, "id": "fs7o1sh", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/gpzgm8/the_great_depression_latin_america/fs7o1sh/", "score": 2 }, { "body": "So, the Great Depression had a tremendous effect on Latin America, where it is commonly known as the Crisis of 1929. However, the effect that it had on the region was completely different from the effect that it had on the United States and Europe. To understand why, it is important to understand the attributes of the ruling oligarchic elite of many Latin American countries on the eve of the Great Depression. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, many countries in Latin America came under the political domination of their own oligarchic elite. These oligarchies were mainly made up of an alliance of large landholders, the owners of import–export houses, and a wide array of other social actors which came to dominate both the political scene and the economies of these countries. These oligarchies were also characterized by their near religious belief in classical liberalism and nineteenth-century positivism, which allowed them to consolidate and justify their support for the socioeconomic order from which they benefited. This particular order was part of the Anglo-centric world market, where the law of comparative advantage dictated that countries like those in Latin America were better suited for the production and export of raw materials, while industrialized nations like Britain had the advantage of being able to convert those raw materials into finished consumer goods. That economic order was then combined with the classical liberal and positivist belief in that very order being seen as not only the best mode of conduct for Latin American economies, but the closest thing to the natural order. The laws that governed this social and economic order upon which the oligarchies rested were believed to be scientifically proven facts of nature, and therefore any attempt to alter the order in any way was seen as illegitimate interference. That’s normally lead to various repressive practices being institutionalized in these oligarchic regimes as a response to social movements like organize labor and calls for political reform. These regimes, including the government of Porfirio Diaz in Mexico between 1876 in 1911, the rule of Julio Argentino Roca’s National Autonomist Party in Argentina between 1880 and 1916, and the colloquially named practice of “política café com leite” in Brazil between 1889 and 1930, we’re all emblematic of this phenomenon.\n\nIt was because of these social, political, and economic realities that led to the radically different responses to the Great Depression in Latin American countries than in the United States and Europe. Using the United States as an example, it took several years until classical liberalism as championed by Herbert Hoover was finally discredited, with the electoral landslide achieved by Franklin Roosevelt as indicative of the American electorate’s complete lack of faith in the old economic order and its faith in a laissez-faire response to the Depression. However, this would not occur until a little over three years after the first days of the Depression. Meanwhile, many Latin American countries experienced such change far earlier. The effects of the Depression were such that the old social and economic order we’re almost immediately discredited. If I looked at the political history of Latin America in 1930, nearly every major country experienced some form of political upheaval as a result of the global economic crisis. Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Peru, and Cuba all experienced some form of regime change in one form or another during that single year. Venezuela would not experience such upheaval until a year later. Because the old oligarchic order had prevented their nations’ from industrializing in accordance with the law of comparative advantage, the orders’ downfall brought about efforts at state-directed industrialization and other forms of intervention in the economy, which allowed these states to recover from the effects of the depression at a much greater speed than in the United States and Europe.", "created_utc": 1590452449, "distinguished": null, "id": "frtkve0", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/gpzgm8/the_great_depression_latin_america/frtkve0/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "FDR's people were concerned that his political opponents would use his paralysis against him, and they had reason to be concerned. Because they did do that occasionally. \n\nWhen Roosevelt was campaigning in the western U.S. during his first campaign for president, on October 14, 1932, the United Press syndicate service ran an article that read in part:\n\n> \"Roosevelt's audiences in some quarters were lukewarm or curious.\n>\n> \"He probably benefited himself in certain quarters by a show of vigor and health counteracting the impression in some sections that maybe the Democrats had a 'wheelchair candidate'.\"\n\nIn 1938, Charles Davenport, a geneticist and a prominent proponent of eugenics in the United States, [wrote a letter](https://books.google.com/books?id=Zk8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA3#v=onepage&q=davenport&f=false) to the editors of *Life* Magazine arguing that FDR's disability made him a dangerous man, comparing him to Joseph Goebbels:\n\n> Why not look up history to see how dangerous is the ambitious, mentally well-endowed, physical cripple, whether the crippling was congenital or acquired? From Tamerlane to Goebbels (the clubfooted), physical cripples, genial, gentle-hearted, charitable men, like Georges Couthon and Talleyrand, have led revolutions and aspired to dictatorships while burdening their country with heavy taxes and reducing its finances to chaos. The physically defective man tends to compensate for his defect...\n\nAs Roosevelt's health had begun to fail by the time of the 1944 election, his critics felt more emboldened to mention his physical capabilities. The October 17, 1944, *Chicago Tribune* ran an op-ed:\n\n> \"Evidence increases that Mr. Roosevelt is not in fit physical condition to meet those demands [of serving another term as President]. His absences from his office because of illness, some of which have been concealed by censorship, have become more frequent...In opening his speaking campaign before the teamsters in Washington, Mr. Roosevelt spoke from a wheelchair. It was the first time he found it necessary to do so in a public appearance.\"\n\nSo it wasn't so much that the press didn't report on it out of a sense of patriotism or a sense of decency, but more because FDR and the Democrats were uncooperative, and did not want to give political fuel to their opponents. \n\nAccording to a 1936 article in *Editor & Publisher* magazine, whenever a photographer would try to circumvent FDR's unspoken rule of no photos getting in and out of cars, and no photos in his wheelchair or braces, the Secret Service would [confiscate the film](http://ideas.time.com/2013/07/12/the-myth-of-fdrs-secret-disability/). Nonetheless, his paralysis was written about in *Time* magazine, the *New York Times Magazine*, and *Life* magazine, among other publications, particularly early in his presidency, if only in passing.\n\nThe public generally did know that FDR had suffered physically from polio or a polio-like ailment, but there was a lot of confusion and misinformation as to the degree of his affliction. The Roosevelt administration did not offer much to reporters in the way of details. In fact, there were suggestions by FDR's people that [he was getting, or had got, better](https://books.google.com/books?id=1koEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA15#v=onepage&q&f=false). \n\nIn 1997, the *Palm Beach Post* [published an article](http://i.imgur.com/pr9vxfo.jpg) in which they interviewed four seniors, recalling what they knew back then. They all said they knew about Roosevelt's condition, but three of them said the details were only vaguely understood. \n\nThe public slowly began to learn about the extent of FDR's physical limitations after his death. A multi-volume biography of Roosevelt by Harvard professor Frank Freidel, published in 1952-54, talked about FDR's paralysis [at length](https://archive.org/stream/franklindrooseve001746mbp#page/n109/mode/2up). This was the first major biography of FDR after he had died, and was written with cooperation from the Roosevelt family. A chapter entitled \"Infantile Paralysis\" began with a self-deprecating quote directly from FDR's personal diary, written on September 16, 1921:\n\n> \"I have renewed my youth in a rather unpleasant manner by contracting what was fortunately a rather mild case of infantile paralysis.\"\n\nIn 1961, Eleanor Roosevelt published her autobiography, detailing the circumstances around FDR's paralysis, and [plainly stating](https://books.google.com/books?id=1sXtAAAAMAAJ&q=eleanor+roosevelt+autobiography+%22he+was+unable+to+walk%22&dq=eleanor+roosevelt+autobiography+%22he+was+unable+to+walk%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjioJf-7uTVAhUF-J8KHZcLCVoQ6AEILDAB) that \"for the rest of his life he was unable to walk or stand without the braces and some help, though he could still swim and play water polo.\"\n\nAny last straggler who hadn't yet heard about the extent of FDR's physical condition heard about it once Eleanor's book was released.", "created_utc": 1504000144, "distinguished": null, "id": "dm9w8v0", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/6wpmu0/its_common_knowledge_that_reporters_opted_not_to/dm9w8v0/", "score": 53 } ]

[ { "body": "So you're specifically asking for sources and not answers to all these questions, and I want to avoid breaking the rule against just dropping a couple links and leaving it at that, so I'll try to provide a little more information as far as what you're likely to find useful in these books and which of your questions they're likely to answer. \n\nI suppose I'll also add to this preface to say that I'm not sure what level of school this assignment is for- I might be assuming here you have access to a university library (or to ebooks through your university library) otherwise I'm probably just giving you a rather expensive recommended reading list. \n\nTo start off with a massive volume, *The Weimar Republic Source Book* is a great resource to get started on probably all of your questions except the final one (how they recovered). It's a compilation of primary sources, many of which deal with politics, ideology, and class in Weimar Germany but with plenty of sources about the social life (art, music, technology, sexuality, etc) in the late 1910s, 1920s, and early 1930s. \n\nThomas Childers's *The Nazi Voter: Foundations of Fascism in Germany* is the best place I can think to turn to for your questions about how middle-class people's lives changed during the Depression in Germany, as well as your \"what changed politically\" question. There's a lot of statistical methods discussed in this book, which may or may not be what you're looking for, but the statistics-heavy sections are always supplemented with pretty clear explanations on how and why the Nazi party organized its political campaigns the way it did, and how successful it was in each effort. On a related note, I'd also recommend a book that Childers edited called *The Formation of the Nazi Constituency*, which investigates different social groups/social classes and their support for the Nazi party. Definitely also a great resource for the middle-class during the Weimar Republic years. \n\nTheodore Abel's book *Why Hitler Came Into Power* is a truly incredible collection of primary sources. If I recall it's entirely comprised of personal narratives from members of the Nazi party in the 1930s about why they came to support the Nazis with no (or almost no) commentary from Abel himself. It's a really fascinating primary source to read alongside the two books about Nazi voters I mentioned above.", "created_utc": 1589946894, "distinguished": null, "id": "fr7gmay", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/gn34p0/any_good_sources_for_info_on_the_great_depression/fr7gmay/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "Not to discourage further discussion but you may be interested in an answer I wrote to a [similar question](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ekxwou/comment/fdhsne7?context=1) 2 months ago.", "created_utc": 1583127377, "distinguished": null, "id": "fj904w5", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/fc47dk/how_and_why_did_the_great_depression_end_in_the_us/fj904w5/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "EDIT: To actually answer your question, your professor is a little off about Las Vegas. \n\n\"Crime and mobsters\" didn't build Las Vegas. Captial did. The \"Outfit\" was merely a source of money that filled the gap between one group of financiers (railroads, mining companies, even Los Angeles Vice cops) and the next group (Howard Hughes, Kirk Kerkorian, Steve Wynn, etc.). Las Vegas was \"Sin City\" long before organized crime arrived and well after they left. \n\n(Before I begin, I studied Urban History at the University of Nevada - Las Vegas under Dr. Eugene Moehring, and was a volunteer at the Chicago History Museum, and I'm entering this on my iPad, so I'll go back and source this as best I can when I get home)\n\nTo understand Las Vegas, you have to go back to the natural environment. It had *some* water (compared the scorched desert caliche in the area that surrounded it) and not much else around it for miles. The Southern band of Paiute that lived there originally were one of the few Ute nations that practiced agriculture on a wide scale. And when the Latter Day Saints came to area (remember, their original claim for their Deseret Territory stretched from Salt Lake City to San Bernadino County, California) they were merely setting up a waypoint named \"Paradise Valley\" as a rest stop for pioneers travelling between Salt Lake City and the Pacific. \n\nThe Mormons originally abandoned the area because they failed to negotiate water rights with the Paiute, but the railroads and mining concerns moved in for much of the same reason the Mormons settled there: It was a convenient stop between a lot of points (Reno, Southern California, Arizona, etc.) and pretty much didn't have a lot going for it... except for a couple of key law quirks.\n\nSee, Nevada only became a state because the Union desperately needed a voting free state sympathetic to the Republicans so Lincoln could get some laws passed, a transatlantic railroad approved, and they could properly tax the massive Comstock Lode coming out of Northern Nevada. So that's why Nevada became a state with a population much lower than usually needed for statehood. Because of the low population and the \"rugged\" miners and laborers settled in a sparsely populated territory, local law enforcement mostly turned a blind eye to gambling, liquor laws, and prostitution. Oh, they were illegal, but nobody truly enforced anything for the most part.\n\nNow, fast forward to the Great Depression. Nevada was small and losing even more population due to a lack of big mining strikes. There was even talk of reverting Nevada back to territory status and dividing the land between Utah, Arizona, and Idaho. So the state did anything it could to attract more population and revenue (without raising taxes). So they legalized \"gaming\" officially in 1931, and that same year, lowered the residency requirement to six weeks and reduced the restrictions on divorces. The result? Hundreds of rich guys sent their soon to be ex-wives on two month long \"vacations\" on dude ranches around Reno and Lake Tahoe in order to get divorced. Nevada got a little bit of a bump in population and taxes, but it really didn't turn it around until FDR started enacting his New Deal.\n\nAt this point Las Vegas was a tiny speck on the map, but with the New Deal, construction began on the Boulder/Hoover Dam, there was a new mining lode found in Southern Nevada, and miners and workers flocked to the town. And with oil, cattle, and military industries moving into LA, their population exploded too. And a smart Los Angeles vice cop named Guy McAfee realized they would never win against all the gambling in town, so he smartly invested in some property on Arrowhead Highway (Now \"Las Vegas Boulevard\" or \"The Strip\" after Los Angeles' \"Sunset Strip\") when the first hotels started opening there. (Fact: the \"Las Vegas\" you think of when you think of \"Las Vegas\" is actually unincorporated Clark County. Las Vegas itself is just a small area around Fremont Street on the north end of the valley) \n\nSo now, you have places like El Rancho Vegas, Pair-O-Dice, and the Frontier Club building what would become the strip. Now, the next big pieces of the puzzle started falling into place: \n\n- The air conditioner was invented in 1902 by Willis Carrier (my pick for \"Most Underrated Inventor Ever\", but this is /r/AskHistorians, so that's just my opinion) and then miniaturized for window units by the 1940's. This made a town that regularly topped 100 degrees by 9am semi-habitable for most of the year.\n\n- The Air Force was founded, and with it came an expansion of Nellis Air Force Base and nuclear weapon testing 100 miles north near Yucca Mountain. This meant a lot of young men with steady paychecks in one of the most boring and spartan landscapes in the world just hours away from Las Vegas.\n\n- Air travel became popular. Up till now, Reno and Tahoe dominated Nevada politics and revenue. Now, built up right next to a large mountain range, Reno lacked enough room to expand their runways to accommodate the larger jet aircraft needed to fly tourists from the Midwest and East Coast, and later large \"whales\" (gamblers capable of spending $10 million and over per visit) from Asia and Australia. Las Vegas? It's biggest asset was miles upon miles of open land. \n\nSo Las Vegas weathered the Great Depression mostly with revenue from railroads, mining, and eventually New Deal government investments. Was organized crime a factor? A little, but for the most part they were coming from the west coast and not the large families that ran New York or Chicago. The \"numbers rackets\" and underground casinos popular in other cities couldn't come into Vegas and get enough traction to rival the large hotel/casinos because those were mostly operated by local Nevadans with established political connections and operated legally and out in the open. \n\nNow, many probably think Ben Seigel (No one ever called him \"Bugsy\" to his face) \"founded\" Las Vegas. And to some extent, he did create a formula that attracted the Outfit's attention: \n\n- Up till this point, Hotel/Casinos in Las Vegas almost universally had a \"Wild West\"/Cowboy theme (called \"Sawdust joints\" because of the rustic decorations and accomedations) to cash in on the \"Dude Ranches\" that became popular destinations for the previously mentioned divorcees and the popular movie genre of the time. But Seigel? He brought a Havana/Tropical theme focused on the luxury of Bastista era Cuba. These early \"mobster\" casinos were called \"carpet joints.\" \n\n- Everything was cheaper/discounted because the major income wasn't gaming or dining, but laundering money from other \"less than legal\" operations within the Genovese crime family. From heroin dealing to \"numbers\" to laundering union pensions. \n\n- Local entertainment up until this point were whatever musicians Las Vegas could attract from Los Angeles. But now that these locations were tied in with franchises on the East Coast and Havana, world class entertainers would be expected to fly all the way out to some podunk little town out west if they wanted to continue to get top billing in the larger clubs out east.\n\nSo, yeah, for a while organized crime bank rolled Las Vegas' explosive growth starting around 1946, the RICO act was enabled in the 60's, and busting mafia organizations and large scale criminal enterprises became easier. Owning anything in Las Vegas made you a target, so many gangsters unloaded their casinos at a severely discounted rate to businessmen such as Howard Hughes (who came to Vegas originally for aviation and not gaming) and Kirk Kerkorian. The Lefty Rosenthal ordeal (fictionalized in the movie \"Casino\") and the Frontier bust in the 70's were kind of the last gasps of organized crime's control over Las Vegas before gentlemen like Bob Stupak and Steve Wynn began to turn the town decidedly more corporate.\n\n**TL;DR: The mafia didn't \"build\" Las Vegas. It had a huge impact in it's history, but was only really influential between 1946-1970. Before that, federal investment is mostly responsible for Las Vegas becoming the city it eventually became.** ", "created_utc": 1365559504, "distinguished": null, "id": "c9c16ct", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1bzymg/howwhere_did_organized_crime_go_to_during_the/c9c16ct/", "score": 37 }, { "body": "The mob was around before, during, and after prohibition. Bootlegging (and later drug running) was an easy way for criminal organizations to make a lot of money but there have always been a lot more other ways they've made money and gained power. Protection and extortion rackets are common, smuggling and hijacking are very common, loan sharking and usury of course, while gambling (numbers, lotteries, illegal casinos) and prostitution have been around forever. And organized crime has always worked closely with major instances of political corruption (Tammany hall, the Chicago machine, etc.)", "created_utc": 1365546772, "distinguished": null, "id": "c9bwd0j", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1bzymg/howwhere_did_organized_crime_go_to_during_the/c9bwd0j/", "score": 12 }, { "body": "This is a very complex question because during that time the mob was at their hey-day. In Chicago you had Capone vs O'Banion. In New York you had Luciano with Carlo Gambino on his way up which is a great story. Luciano was consolidating power and creating the modern mafia (five familes, hierarchy etc.). There were crime families in places you would not even think such as Buffalo and Cleveland. You had Jewish mobsters and hitmen (murder inc., Meyer Lansky), Irish (Joe Kennedy made a portion of his fortune from bootlegging), Black (Bumpy Johnson in Harlem). There are plenty of books out there and if you are truly interested in it I would definately check them out. I rrrrreaaalllllyyyy am into these stories and the history of organized crime but this question would require a 600 page book.\nTheir go to crimes were obviously bootlegging, prostitution, extortion, theft, illegal gambling casinos, numbers...the list goes on. \nP.S. there are plenty of documentaries, shows, and movies about these subjects as well. Happy Hunting.", "created_utc": 1365552235, "distinguished": null, "id": "c9byf63", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1bzymg/howwhere_did_organized_crime_go_to_during_the/c9byf63/", "score": 5 } ]

[ { "body": "First some major points, the Joads were farmers/unskilled workers. These employment groups were hit hardest by the depressions as the industries that used them cut production while farming which had never enjoyed the boom of the 1920's collapsed. There were little employment opportunities for such people in most of the country, many went to California as it was the last main agricultural area left after the Dust Bowl destroyed prairies.\n\nAs for places not hit by the depression there were few and most couldn't support refugees. You might get some semi-contained towns that hadn't been connected to the wider economy but these were also just as likely to be devastated when a bank or local industry failed.\n\nThe area around Houston, Texas had the depressions effect muted by an oil boom but that employed mainly semi-skilled labour and rich oil men does not translate to employed unskilled labourers. \n\nReally there were few other alternatives but to go west.", "created_utc": 1417011738, "distinguished": null, "id": "cmdk5k3", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/2nh0xz/what_areas_of_the_us_were_hit_the_least_by_the/cmdk5k3/", "score": 48 }, { "body": "Honestly the places that were truly hit the least were the Native American Reservations but that was simply because they were used to having almost nothing in the first place. Many Reservations were and still are in economic disrepair. \n\nThe question you're asking though is quite different. For farmers and unskilled laborers there weren't very many choices, it didn't really matter where they went.\n\nThe Great Depression was one hell of a monster. As others have stated farmers were hit the hardest with mechanization flooding the markets (to the point that the U.S. paid farmers to burn their crops) and causing the dustbowl simultaneously and the crash of the stock market was the icing on the cake. The boom of the 20's and the use of credit evaporated when the banks emptied and the people freaked. We were already reaching a point of manufacturing more than our people could buy, even before the crash.\n\nHere's a good source for more information\n\nThe Great Depression: 1929-1941 by Robert S. McElvaine\n\nThere's reason it took the industry of fighting a world war to break us out of that slump.", "created_utc": 1417027667, "distinguished": null, "id": "cmdrovf", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/2nh0xz/what_areas_of_the_us_were_hit_the_least_by_the/cmdrovf/", "score": 23 } ]

[ { "body": "Hoover had, in my opinion, little to do with the actual ONSET of the Depression and merely suffered the wrath of the fact that people need to blame...someone. And you can blame the President, while you cannot blame faceless brokers at the NYSE.\n\nAn unregulated and unmonitored Stock Exchange, which had been doing...whatever it wanted since long before Hoover was essentially your primary cause.\n\nI'm sure you could argue Hoover could have done things, but that's like trying to say Louis 16 could have prevented the French Revolution. Several of Hoover's plans to fix the depression actually backfired or had to be labeled as a 'No Gain' at best. \n\nI would encourage a period-appropriate expert to weigh in!", "created_utc": 1382449135, "distinguished": null, "id": "ccx2gh2", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1oyy8d/how_much_blame_could_we_actually_give_to_herbert/ccx2gh2/", "score": 18 }, { "body": "The question should not be how much blame could we give to Herbert Hoover, but who would blame Herbert Hoover. Let's answer this question from the perspective of the two main schools of economic thought. Neither the keynesian or the monetary interpretation blamed Hoover for starting of the Great Depression. They both blamed the fault-lines in the roaring twenties' economy.\n\nSources:\n\n* [Interpreting the Great Depression: Hayek\nversus Keynes](http://ineteconomics.org/sites/inet.civicactions.net/files/INET%20C@K%20Paper%20Dinner%201%20-%20Skidelsky_0.pdf) (p.4), by [Robert Skidelsky](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Skidelsky,_Baron_Skidelsky)", "created_utc": 1382454407, "distinguished": null, "id": "ccx46a8", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1oyy8d/how_much_blame_could_we_actually_give_to_herbert/ccx46a8/", "score": 4 }, { "body": "Hoover didn't cause the depression,but he definitely made the depression worse. Contrary to popular perception, he has extremely active, though unlike Roosevelt he felt constitutionally constrained. His worst policy was pressuring companies to keep wages high, despite a rapid deflation. This exacerbated the effect of that deflation, ensured high unemployment, and prevented markets from clearing and adjusting. He also raised tariffs, despite america's massive current account surplus, which kicked off an international round of tariff hikes. It is worth noting that his basic belief, the need for higher wages and prices, was enthusiastically adopted by the Roosevelt administration, which is part of the reason the early new deal was such a bizarre agglomeration of programs. ", "created_utc": 1382503285, "distinguished": null, "id": "ccxntls", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1oyy8d/how_much_blame_could_we_actually_give_to_herbert/ccxntls/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "It's hard to say for sure without the source, but it sounds like they're using different definitions. Specifically you have to differentiate between the potential labour force, which is everybody in a certain age range, and the actual labour force, which is everybody who actually wants to work, e.g excluding housewives and such. \n\nThe unemployment rate was 19.3% at the peak of the recession according to more recent Canadian government estimates (they didn't calculate the unemployment rate at the time), as per StatCan (https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-001-x/1992003/87-eng.pdf). That would be as a percentage of the potential labour force.\n\nSimultaneously, it's easily possible that 30% of the actual labour force was out of work, which would point to a labour force participation rate of 19/30=63%, which is very plausible, it's 66% today.", "created_utc": 1573036245, "distinguished": null, "id": "f6ouuro", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/dsaxtq/question_about_a_great_depression_statistic/f6ouuro/", "score": 3 }, { "body": "Thanks!", "created_utc": 1573047741, "distinguished": null, "id": "f6p56s6", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/dsaxtq/question_about_a_great_depression_statistic/f6p56s6/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "In many ways, a lot of local cuisine is inspired by financial necessity - after all, the local speciality is usually something very available in the area, and so cheap because of supply and demand.\n\nI'm researching the Victorians atm, and [these](http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/895772386) [books](http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/881518514) tell me that stews, casseroles and soups were extremely common at the time because meat was very expensive, so most people who could afford meat could only afford small amounts and not the best cuts. These dishes make tough cuts of meat palatable and can be bulked out with cheaper ingredients, and many of the dishes popular at the time are still enjoyed today: Irish stew, Lancashire hotpot, and the classic British beef stew with suet dumplings.\n\nPotatoes also became much more widely eaten in the Victorian era due to the Corn Laws, which made bread much more expensive, and also because potatoes were a cheap crop to produce, providing plenty of storable food and growing in poor soil. We still use a lot of Victorian potato recipes, and they are often linked to the regional cuisine of the areas that were most impoverished - and thus, needed to rely on potatoes - at the time. This is especially true of recipes that substitute potatoes for a more expensive ingredient, such as Scottish potato scones, Lancashire butter pie, boxty, potato bread.\n\nThese are just some examples, and the ones I have references for. I've certainly heard of a lot of other dishes that they developed from economic necessity; cajun cuisine is something I hear this about a lot. But I don't have references for that.", "created_utc": 1482500442, "distinguished": null, "id": "dbjlq13", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/5jv7ca/i_once_heard_anecdotally_that_dishes_like/dbjlq13/", "score": 17 }, { "body": "During the depression, the government issued large numbers of cookbooks which used little-known and less costly ingredients. Many of these were to be cooked in a casserole type dish/pan. These were highly influential books, and definitely increased the \"popularity\" of casseroles. So, I can't say that the cheapness was the only reason for the interest in casseroles during the depression, but that was a major reason, along with the government-issued cookbooks.\n", "created_utc": 1482516793, "distinguished": null, "id": "dbjwvp2", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/5jv7ca/i_once_heard_anecdotally_that_dishes_like/dbjwvp2/", "score": 8 } ]

[ { "body": "And as a follow-up question, who benefited from the Depression? ", "created_utc": 1516853089, "distinguished": null, "id": "dt7c2u5", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/7st2a3/was_the_great_depression_global_or_just_limited/dt7c2u5/", "score": -7 } ]

[ { "body": "If you were looking \"3 hots and cot\" during the Great Depression, getting picked up for some \"small crime\" might be an option, but certainly not a good one. Take vagrancy, for example, during California's \"Bum Blockade\" in the early 1930s those arrested were given a choice of \"[either leave California or serve a 180-day jail term with hard labor.](http://courses.csusm.edu/econ327rb/LAPD%20Blocked%20Dust%20Bowl%20Migrants%20at%20State%20Borders.htm)\" \n\nStuds Terkel in *Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression* similarly records one Louis Banks talking about his run-ins with the law as a vagrant:\n\n> I was in chain gangs and been in jail all over the country. I was in a chain gang in Georgia. I had to pick cotton for four months, for just hoboin' on a train. Just for vag. They gave me thirty-five cents and pair of overalls when I got out. Just took me off the train, the guard. 1930, during the Depression, in the summertime, Yes, sir, thirty-five cents, that's what they gave me.\n\n>I knocked on people's doors. They'd say, \"What do you want? I'll call the police.\" And they'd put you in jail for vag. They'd make you milk cows, thirty or ninety days. Up in Wisconsin, they'd do the same thing. Alabama they'd do the same thing. California, anywhere you'd go. \n\nMaybe if your situation was so dire that hard labor and terrible (if relatively) consistent food was preferable, then you might see getting arrested as an improvement. A consistent theme running through hobo stories, however, is that they were out there looking for honest work; serving a few months of hard time wouldn't leave you any better off then when you started.\n\nA better option was when various New Deal programs started setting up work camps. From *Hard Times* again, an Ed Paulsen happily recounts his time in a transient work camp:\n\n> They drive us up to an old army warehouse. They check you in, take off your clothers, run them through a de-louser, and you take a bath. It's midnight. We come out, and here's a spread with scrambled eggs, bacon, bread, coffee and toast. We ate a great meal. It was wonderful. We go upstairs to bed. Here's a double-decker, sheets, toothbrush, towels, everything. I sat down on this damn bed, I can't tell you, full of wonderment. We thought we'd gone to heaven. Hal's a young punk, he's seventeen. He said, \"What the hell kind of place is this?\" I said, \"I don't know, but it's sure somethin' different.\"\n\nStuds goes on to note that Ed was assigned a job with the National Youth Administration (and eventually with UNICEF). Ed says of that:\n\n> The NYA was my salvation. I could just as easily have been in Sing Sing as with the UN.\n\nIn conclusion:\n\n- Getting arrested for even a small crime meant you could look forward to jail and hard labor, which have always and will always, suck. \n\n- Getting into a New Deal labor camp meant getting a place to stay, food to eat, and a job to give you meaning. Vote FDR in '36.", "created_utc": 1364578253, "distinguished": null, "id": "c94q5lv", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1b7oxn/during_the_great_depression_would_it_be_a_good/c94q5lv/", "score": 20 }, { "body": "I can provide a general answer, but don't have any sources, so I will refrain from doing so. \n\nI'll just say that you may want to narrow down the location you are talking about, and what type of person you mean. Getting arrested in small town Mississippi as a vagrant black man would be very different than being arrested as an out of work drunk white man in New York.", "created_utc": 1364565309, "distinguished": null, "id": "c94m8lf", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1b7oxn/during_the_great_depression_would_it_be_a_good/c94m8lf/", "score": 20 }, { "body": "Didn't O. Henry write a story about this very phenomenon? I can't recall the title, but it involved a beggar trying to get into jail on Christmas so he could be warm or something", "created_utc": 1364569424, "distinguished": null, "id": "c94nc4h", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1b7oxn/during_the_great_depression_would_it_be_a_good/c94nc4h/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "First, I would argue that it is fallacious to say that the US was every truly \"isolationist\". Ever since independence, the US tried to and necessarily had to maintain relations with the other nations of the world. A better term, in my opinion, would be \"unilateralist\" as the US often acted on its own accord rather than within the confines of Old World diplomacy dominated by European powers and issues.\n\nSecond, so-called \"isolationist\" policies like the Smoot-Hawley Tariff definitely helped to exacerbate the Great Depression. However, it really depends on who you ask for what caused the Great Depression and why it lasted so long. A nice overview of the aggregate reasons are that rising interest rates prior to the stock market crash led to a cash crunch, which helped to spur economic pessimism in the country that led to people limiting consumption and investment, which resulted in a depressed aggregate demand. The inability of the government to contend with people's sinking expectations of the economy was what really helped exacerbate the issues and prolong the Depression as people would have no reason to spend or invest if they think things are just going to get worse. There are also many other issues that led and prolonged the Depression.\n\n\"Isolationist\" policies like S-H definitely exacerbated the Depression, but it would be short-sighted to put too much weight on them individually.", "created_utc": 1478723624, "distinguished": null, "id": "d9tbwu0", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/5c2m68/popular_wisdom_is_that_isolationism_prolonged_the/d9tbwu0/", "score": 10 }, { "body": "This question seems to be US-focused, but similar policies were followed in many countries. The 1930s is not a period I ever specifically studied, but with the help of some background knowledge and internet research I can hopefully shed some light.\n\nTrade policies in the 1930s are characterised as \"beggar-thy-neighbour\".\n\nHere's roughly how it worked. A country saw that 1) it has a trade deficit with another country and was building up a debt, or 2) cheaper imports were undercutting local products, meaning firms were laying people off, closing, etc.. It's worth noting that the gold standard meant that the value of the currency could not depreciate to help balance imports & exports.\n\nSo, the government decides to introduce trade barriers. Typically these were tariffs on imports but they could also be quotas or other measures. The idea of tariffs is that if imported goods cost more, people (and industries) will buy less. Fewer imported goods reduces the trade deficit, and means people will buy more locally produced goods, stimulating the national economy. Great!\n\nExcept that other countries now see imports from your country undercutting their products, and start getting upset if they have a trade deficit with you. So they start putting up barriers against your goods.\n\nThe end result is that there are barriers to trade all over the place and trade falls.\n\nNow, a fundamental assumption of liberal economics is that trade is a good thing. It allows competitive advantage to flourish. If I can produce oranges more efficiently than you and you can produce hats more efficiently than me, it benefits both of us to trade. It doesn't matter if that trade is between towns or between countries.\n\nHowever that view can and has been criticised, particularly by development economists. Some form of protection can help \"infant\" industries to grow (or give declining industries time to recover) without being competed out by larger, more developed international competitors. Most developed countries have been through some form of protectionist regime. The risk is that because they're isolated from competition, industries become or remain inefficient, which either hurts your own consumers or means they'll be out-competed when barriers are relaxed. The trick seems to be getting the policies right, and relaxing them at the right time, and it's not entirely clear whether that can be done by judgement more than luck.\n\nTo look at a concrete example: the UK. Bear in mind all of this is specific to the UK and the experience of other countries - perhaps the US especially - may be very different.\n\nThe UK began raising tariffs in 1931 with the Emergency Abnormal Importations Act. This was followed by the Import Duties Act in 1932, which imposed a 10% tariff on manufactured imports (with various exceptions). Duties were raised further over the course of the next few years.\n\nIncreasing the price of something doesn't necessarily reduce consumption, so did these duties actually decrease imports? The 'beggar they neighbour' paper linked below finds that increased prices actually *didn't* reduce imports, **but** imports did nonetheless fall. The authors put this down to businesses and consumers responding to calls to import less.\n\nWhat was the impact of these policies on the economy as a whole?\n\nThat's less clear. For the UK at least, it *doesn't* seem to have had a major impact on growth. There are arguments that reducing industrial imports actually had a beneficial effect. There were effects on productivity, because industries were sheltered from competition. However whether this was worth it if it protected employment is a trickier question, and partly a normative one. (What's more important, jobs now, or higher productivity, lower prices and maybe more jobs later?)\n\nAs an endnote, the tariffs introduced in the UK in the early 30s were retained through the 40s and 50s, and have taken some blame for the low productivity of British industry in the post-war period. As I said earlier, the longer-term effects of barriers can be negative, if they're not removed at the right time.\n\nSources: \n[Returning to Growth: Lessons from the 1930s](http://www.ehs.org.uk/dotAsset/10f6d106-2bd7-4332-bba4-266407367e77.pdf) \n[Beggar Thy Neighbour: British Imports During the Inter-War Years and the Effect of the 1932 Tariff](http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/college-social-sciences/business/economics/2010-papers/economics-papers-2010/10-31.pdf) \n[The macroeconomics of protectionism: the case of Britain in the 1930s](https://michaelkitson.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/kitson-and-solomou-cje-1989.pdf)", "created_utc": 1478728404, "distinguished": null, "id": "d9tfw83", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/5c2m68/popular_wisdom_is_that_isolationism_prolonged_the/d9tfw83/", "score": 5 }, { "body": "I actually just answered a bit about Smoot-Hawley [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5c2cg6/the_last_time_the_republican_party_had_control_of/d9udcjm/). ", "created_utc": 1478792202, "distinguished": null, "id": "d9uewee", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/5c2m68/popular_wisdom_is_that_isolationism_prolonged_the/d9uewee/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "While most poor and middle class people were heavily affected either directly or indirectly due to layoffs, lack of job opportunities, bank failures, and foreclosures, for the wealthy, it largely depended on how you had your money invested.\n\nOne notable example is the case of Groucho Marx. Both he and his brother Harpo had invested their money almost entirely in the stock market in the late 1920s because the market was booming. In May 1929, five months before the crash, Groucho even wrote an essay for the *New Yorker* [about his investments](https://books.google.com/books?id=6JLSVj4dF6IC&pg=PT28) entitled \"Buy It, Put It Away, and Forget About It\".\n\nWhen the stock market crashed, [he lost everything](https://books.google.com/books?id=WTW-BZ7HEjwC&pg=PT120). All $240,000 of it. (That's about $3.3 million in 2017 dollars.) That was an enormous fortune for somebody who, up until that point, had only ever been a stage actor. He would claim later that this event brought on insomnia that he battled the rest of his life. \n\nJoseph Kennedy, father of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, on the other hand, made out like a bandit. In the mid-1920s, he had heavily invested in a movie studio called Film Booking Office of America. In 1928, he helped arrange a merger between FBO, the Keith-Albee-Orpheum chain of vaudeville theaters, and RCA (Radio Corporation of America) who had developed a sound film technology but had no movie studio nor theater chain with which to use it. In the process of arranging this merger, Kennedy sold off his shares of stock in FBO to this newly-formed company called RKO (who would go on to be one of the major Hollywood studios from 1930 to 1955), and divested himself of much of his other stock as well. The merger was completed by mid-1929, just before the stock market crashed. \n\nIn David Nasaw's book about the Joseph Kennedy, *The Patriarch*, he [wrote](https://books.google.com/books?id=EGrvgTj4Xh8C&pg=PT98):\n\n>\"He had entered the [film] industry a rich man but departed a multimillionaire...On November 30, 1926, after ten months in the film business, his 'capital account' held $373,394 and his real estate holdings were limited to his modest house in Brookline. Less than three years later, on October 31, 1929, after the stock market crash, his capital account held $1,740,494 (more than $22 million today) and he had bought two new houses for the family. His net worth was five times what it had been three years earlier. And that doesn't take into account his real estate holdings.\"\n\nSo while many of Kennedy's business associates were losing money hand over fist, still being heavily invested in the market, he retained most of his fortune. He was thus able to buy real estate and other investments cheaply from others who were selling it off in order to stave off their stock market losses.\n\nJoseph Kennedy did so well that John F. Kennedy, who was twelve years old at the time of the crash in October 1929, [later claimed](https://books.google.ca/books?id=w3oiOriupLwC&pg=PT32) he didn't learn about the Great Depression until he read about it in books when he went off to Harvard in the fall of 1936.\n\nOthers with insider information also came out of it relatively unscathed. Albert Wiggin, president of Chase Bank, began selling off his stock in the bank he ran in [September 1929](https://books.google.com/books?id=5dK6AQAAQBAJ&pg=PT97) and made $4 million before the crash hit, while publicly committing his bank to investment in the market. Others, like oil magnate J. Paul Getty, were able to buy commodities on the cheap after the crash and build a fortune as the market eventually returned to their Roaring Twenties heights over the next couple decades.\n\nContrast that to wealthy economist Irving Fisher, or to General Motors co-founder [William C. Durant](https://books.google.com/books?id=2BMpAQAAMAAJ&pg=Pa4&sig=ACfU3U1Pr9FSPly-9wNO3WsPBSD9uCqSpQ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=bankruptcy) who went from multimillionaire status before the crash to flat broke by 1936. Even worse was the case of the Studebaker car company's president Albert Erskine. His company [lost it all](https://books.google.com/books?id=9OhAraLtgxcC&pg=PA39) in the early years of the crash, in which he was heavily invested, and he committed suicide in 1933.", "created_utc": 1491769907, "distinguished": null, "id": "dg1njfo", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/64bfcy/how_wealthy_did_you_have_to_be_to_not_be_affected/dg1njfo/", "score": 42 } ]

[ { "body": "If inflation is too much money chasing too few goods, causing a drop in the value of the money, a depression is the reverse: goods and services drop in value, and money rises. And the people who are badly affected by inflation do better in a depression, and vice-versa. People with debt benefit from inflation: assuming their interest rate is fixed , inflation corrodes their debt, makes it easier to get the cash to repay it. And in a depression, people with cash savings are in a better position than people in debt, because their money grows in value. One group who notoriously did worse in the Great Depression therefore were farmers. Farmers who grow crops, like wheat, corn, etc. typically have only one season a year where they have significant cash income, and so it has long been normal for them to use credit over the rest of the year, and was so in 1929. If they had a mortgage on their farms as well, that became a double problem, for not only was it harder to earn the cash to pay their mortgage , but because they had placed the value of their farm as surety against the loan of money, when the value of their farm dropped they were called upon to pay the difference in cash. Along with the people who were in debt, there were also investors, who'd put their money into other assets. And, unfortunately, anyone who put money into a bank at the time could also be counted as an investor, as it was before the FDIC guaranteed deposits. Banks then, like now, only had on hand a portion of the money deposited, and when the Depression hit, a number of them failed.\n\n One example of someone with more cash and little debt was W.C Fields. Before he went into making movies, he'd been a very successful juggler in Vaudeville, and distrusted Wall Street. As he traveled around he seems to have had a habit of setting up small bank accounts in towns he played, which meant he diversified his risk: some of those banks failed, and some did not.( After his death, a legend grew that there had been hundreds of them, and under assumed names, but it turns out to have been 24 of them all under his own name)\n\nBut of course a Depression also results in a very slow economy. Even if you are sitting on a pile of money, it can be hard to earn more of it. In this, Fields was also lucky, because the movie industry was one of the few that did pretty well during the Depression: people wanted to escape their misery for a few hours of watching films. Fields therefore actually had a good Depression.\n\nJames Curtis : W.C. Fields", "created_utc": 1537797543, "distinguished": null, "id": "e6jr40s", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/9i9llt/did_everyone_fare_horribly_during_the_great/e6jr40s/", "score": 3 } ]

[ { "body": "\nThe general idea that the US got out of the crisis only in 1940's after the spending in World War 2 is not quite true. The US economy started recovering in 1930's when the State started applying a wide variety of measures to stem the drop. Indeed, by 1937 Industrial production in the US had reached the levels in 1929. It is important to understand that the measures applied by the Roosevelt Government were not something that necessarily came out of blue. Many policies were in fact, a continuation of Hoover's policies which in turn were influenced by the policies pursued during World War 1.\n\nTo understand it, we must understand the nature of crisis (I have explained the background here), it's impact because certain legislation that was passed by Congress during Roosevelt's presidency was prepared during Hoover's time and certain policies were in fact continuation of Hoovers. The reason is that without stabilization of the financial system it was impossible to use an effective fiscal policy. To give a short summary they were paid through increasing growth that gave more tax revenue to the government and enabled it to engage in deficit spending. The Federal Government eliminated the gold standard which led to increasing money supply that ended deflationary pressures, creating FDIC that guaranteed savings which prevented further bank runs, establishment of government owned corporations that bought stocks in failing banks and resolving them to be later bought by up profitable banks and heavy investment in public projects.\n\nThe New Deal included three components as Wiki tells us- Recovery, Relief and Reform. It was not possible for providing relief and recovery without reform. The United States was facing an unprecedented economic disaster due to systematic breakdown of the financial system that was caused by failure of banks, deflationary pressure that was exacerbating the pressure of the recession by increasing the value of debt held by financial institutions, businesses and households and collapse of trade because of Smoot-Hawley tariff act that was passed inspite of the fact that the United States was in trade surplus and which reduced global trade from 30 percent of GDP to 10 percent of GDP.\n\nThe Banking Act of 1932 allowed the Federal Reserve to act as a lender of last resort by using government securities as a collateral in addition to gold and commercial paper. This was designed to beat deflation. Both the Acts succeeded in their objective. Industrial prices stopped dropping and reached pre crash levels by July 1932. This was why Roosevelt blasted Hoover for excess spending. The Federal Reserve had purchased an enormous amount of government securities reaching around $ 1 billion by the end of April 1932.When the act expired, the economy once again worsened paving the way for the Banking Act of 1933. It was already began to prepared by\nHoover's team but passed by Roosevelt.The previous act had led to large scale hoarding of gold and much of it had started going to Europe. The Reserve banks had required holding gold which amounted to 40 percent of paper currency they issued. Foreigners and domestic holders of paper currency were fearing that it would not be redeemed. Many banks were once again in the fear of suffering bank runs. The Federal Reserve governors requested President Hoover to close banks for some period of time but neither Hoover nor President Elect Roosevelt were sure about it. \n\nUltimately, Roosevelt after coming into office on March 4 acted decisively ordering the closing of banks. The Banking Act of 1933 passed by Roosevelt was closely related to Banking Act of 1932 and Re Construction Finance Corporation Act. The Corporation was established by the Federal Government by selling treasury bonds as a joint stock company which was to finance insolvent banks by lending them money so that they could pay depositors, buying assets which had long term value but had dropped dramatically in the short term which was to serve as collateral etc. This was managed by independent managers. It was modeled on the War Finance Corporation which was established by the Federal Government during World War 1. It's initial capital was $500 Million but was later expanded to $ 1.6 Billion as it borrowed that money from the US treasury and the public. This idea was also applied by Park Chung Hee in South Korea during the 1960's who set up similar policy banks to fund industrialization and which was also very successful. \n\nHoover's advisers and the governors of Federal Reserve Bank of New York had already put together a plan to restore credibility of the banking system.This was done by increasing money supply by holding the assets of banks as collateral instead of gold. Banks were divided into 3 classes - Class A, Class B and Class C. Class A banks were sound financial institutions, Class B were weakened from the crisis but would be able function and were to re open but continued to undergo a long period of resolution and Class C banks were to be permanently closed. This worked and after the banks were reopened there were more deposits than withdrawals. Currency held by the public had increased by $1.78 billion in the four weeks ending March 8. By the end of March, though, the public had redeposited about two-thirds of this cash. Wall Street gave it's approval with the Dow Jones ending up 8 points at 62.10. Roosevelt ended up increasing the power of RFC by allowing it buy prefered stocks in some banks.The purpose to increase confidence such that they would start lending to businesses and guarantee by government allowed them to invest in more riskier assets rather than just holding safe treasuries. Later, many programs like public works were financed by the government in this way. As the loan re payment began the pressure on the RFC began to reduce. This increased public confidence, boosted industrial production and recovery. By the time the institution was closed in 1957, it had invested around $ 57 Billion through investments in large scale projects and failing banks, working with FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) so that open banks could take over failing banks and lost only $ 5 Million from two banks.\n\nDuring the period of World War 1, the US Government had set up War Industries Board where there was considerable amount of cooperation between the Government and Enterprises. The experience in particular led to a rather permissive attitude towards Industrial trusts and oligopolies that had come dominate the American economy. There was a view that State intervention in order to bolster competition would lead to a needless wastage of resources. Thus the Government discouraged excessive intervention by the Justice Department and US Trade Commission. This continued even during the first phase of the 'New Deal', where the primary purpose of the Government was to restore production that had fallen at least by 30 percent and Competition was viewed to have failed. In some ways, many policies under Roosevelt were a continuation of the ones under Hoover as I mentioned above. The people who advised Roosevelt and designed the National Industry Recovery Act were influenced by the policies that were pursued in the period post World War 1. Many economists also supported them with the argument that because of 'economies of scale', large scale enterprise were efficient.\n\nFor instance, Section 8 of the Agricultural Act allowed the Secretary of Agriculture to engage in agreements with Producers, association of producers and other engaged in handling Interstate or foreign commerce of agricultural commodities. Such acts therefore enabled agreements that were considered to be in \"restraint of trade\". This was not exactly new. In 1918, Congress passes the Webb Pormene Act which allowed certain degree of exemptions from Anti trust laws to exporters for purpose of selling goods abroad that would compete with foreign manufacturers. The primary purpose of these interventions were to cut costs, improve competitiveness (as opposed to competition) and output.This was hardly unusual though. Finland's forestry sector operated as a cartel from the early 20th century in order to maintain it's competitiveness as it was the country's chief export and there is evidence that it helped the country's economy remained steady even during economic downturns of it's trading partners. The country enacted an anti cartel law in 1958. Much of these laws along with laws on Foreign Investment were only abolished once Finland joined the European Union in 1993. Similarly, the Industrial Rationalization plan imposed by MITI in Japan on the country's small business sector in 1963 allowed it to remain efficient and cut costs.\n\nHowever by 1936, Roosvelt turned his ears towards those who thought that Competition was key to restoring prosperity. Part of the problem was that under Roosvelt, the Government had tried to maintain the previous cartel like arrangements while at the same time trying to preserve small scale enterprises by preventing large scale firms from cutting prices in order to drive the former out of the market. Many of these economists were actually supported by the pro free market economists of Chicago School like Frank Knight, Jacob Viner and especially Henry Simons. The Chicago school initially were strong proponents of anti trust and viewed it as fundamental part of a well regulated market economy and preferable to State direction and planning. Simons favoured breakup of large monopolies and Nationalization of Enterprises in Industries like Railways where (in his view) that Competition could not effectively be maintained. This ended the era of neglect that lasted from 1915 to 1936.\n\n\n\n", "created_utc": 1486758950, "distinguished": null, "id": "ddl6nhe", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/5t7kkr/how_did_the_us_economy_recover_from_the_great/ddl6nhe/", "score": 17 }, { "body": "A similar question was answered by /u/Logan_Chicago regarding FDR's New Deal and its effect on the economy, you may find it useful.\n\nhttps://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/24fzux/liberals_usually_praise_fdrs_new_deal_for_saving/ch6ty5x/ ", "created_utc": 1486743874, "distinguished": null, "id": "ddktrxc", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/5t7kkr/how_did_the_us_economy_recover_from_the_great/ddktrxc/", "score": 5 } ]

[ { "body": "There will be plenty more to say, but our FAQ contains some material on Howard Zinn's history here:\n\n[Howard Zinn's \"A People's History of the United States\"](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views#wiki_historians.27_views_of_howard_zinn.27s_.22a_people.27s_history_of_the_united_states.22)\n\nHobsbawm is considerably more highly regarded as an historian within the academic world than Zinn is, but we've also looked at his oeuvre through a critical lens here:\n\n[Thoughts on Eric Hobsbawm?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/lzh5uh/thoughts_on_eric_hobsbawm/)", "created_utc": 1684740913, "distinguished": null, "id": "jl4ots5", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/13oiqmk/most_of_what_i_know_about_us_and_european_history/jl4ots5/", "score": 18 } ]

[ { "body": "I would argue Dunbar-Ortiz is correct here. When she calls the Scots-Irish the \"foot-soldiers of British Empire building\" what she is first referring to is not the settlement of Appalachia, but the Ulster Plantation and the colonization of Northern Ireland. The lowlands of Scotland had been embroiled in border conflicts for centuries leading up to the Wars of the Three Kingdoms leading to the development of a distinct class of raider labelled \"Border Reivers\" emerging in the 1300's.\n\nThe alignment of the region with Protestantism and political factions that favored colonization projects meant Lowland Scots-Irish soldiers were a go-to when recruiting soldiers for the pacification of Northern Ireland. Down the line, poor-living conditions in Northern Ireland and an increasingly antagonist relationship with the English powers-that-be lead to widespread immigration of \"Ulster Scots\" or as they are known here in America \"Scots-Irish\" to Colonial America. Distinct from the various English settlers that came before them, the Scots-Irish quickly established their own communities. Starting in Pennsylvania, an increasing scarcity of coastal land caused them to gradually settle the Appalachians pushing the frontiers of the British colonies westward. \n\nDescribing the colonization of Appalachia and the Ohio Valley as syncretic and open to indigenous practices is not something I have heard before. While there was certainly exchange and syncretism between the Scots-Irish and the American Indians of the region, the Scots-Irish were fairly notable for being very aggressive in their frontier settlement and expansion. James Leyburn estimates that the majority of the fighting with Indians on the frontier was done by the Scots-Irish from New England to the Carolinas. Scots-Irish communities were at the forefront of the genocidal settler colonization project and were often some of the most vocal proponents of aggressive expansion into Indian lands. \n\nAs far as African influences, the Appalachians had much lower levels of slavery than other regions south of the Mason-Dixon, so while there certainly were influences I don't think it makes much sense to distinguish them for this when the influences are so much more pronounced in other areas of America. \n\nEdit: I just realized you were probably referring to Appalachian music when talking about African influences. I was wrong to dismiss African influences altogether, this is certainly a significant aspect of Appalacian culture, but in the time period we are discussing and in the topic of frontier expansion I am not aware of significant African influences. \n\nFrederick Jackson Turner was an early historian to emphasize the role of the Scots-Irish on the frontier, and as such their role has been absorbed into the greater mythology of the the frontier. Andrew Jackson being the archetypal Scots-Irish American has further added to this particular mythology. So while Dunbar-Ortiz is correct, it is also important to evaluate this with a grain of salt. The violence of the Scots-Irish has been greatly emphasized in the creation of frontier narratives, but it is still an essential part of frontier history. \n\n\"People With No Name\" by Patrick Griffin is a great source for learning more about the role the Scots-Irish played in the colonization of the Americas, and especially their role on the frontier. \n \nJames Leyburn's \"The Scotch-Irish: A Social History\" is a bit older but is another great source. It's where most of my info here is derived from.", "created_utc": 1679344430, "distinguished": null, "id": "jczvc7g", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/11wlch5/in_an_indigenous_peoples_history_of_the_united/jczvc7g/", "score": 72 }, { "body": "May I ask where you received this level of public education in the United States? \n\n\"the colonization of Appalachia and the Ohio River Valley was described as more syncretic and open to indigenous practices, as well as open to African practices from enslaved peoples.\" \n\nIs not something I would associate with the public education I received and would have been something only discussed in specialized history classes towards the end of my undergraduate level education in History.", "created_utc": 1679334736, "distinguished": null, "id": "jcz64i2", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/11wlch5/in_an_indigenous_peoples_history_of_the_united/jcz64i2/", "score": 10 } ]

[ { "body": "\"Earlier history\" is a pretty broad date range, so I'm going to try and touch on a few different periods. \n\n**Bison and feral pigs**\n\nFirst, the biology:\n\n\"On average, large-bodied species live at lower densities than small-bodied ones.\" [(1)](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/016953479390199Y) Because bison are bigger animals, there will be fewer of them than pigs. \n\nBison are herbivores. While they consume a variety of plants, their diet is still far more restrictive than omnivorous pigs who will eat just about anything. \n\nFemale bison reach sexual maturity after 3 years. Pigs reach sexual maturity in their first year. Bison typically have a single calf per year. Pigs can have 2 or more litters of 4-6 piglets each year. That means that half the pig population can be hunted each year and their numbers will still increase. \n\nBison have natural predators in the US like wolves, bears, and coyotes. Feral pigs aren't the natural prey of any North American predator (although panthers and others may still go after them.)\n\nBison live out on open ranges. The feral pigs are often in wooded areas which provide them better protection from hunters. \n\nThe bison population has also been dealt several large blows since the Ice Age. Slow-moving and possibly unaccustomed to human predators, they were easy targets for Pleistocene humans. Around 11,000 years ago, there was a large die-off of megafauna in the now-United States.[(2)](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283696932_Pleistocene_Overkill_and_North_American_Mammalian_Extinctions) The timing correlates with humans getting situated after their arrival and overhunting their prey. The timing also correlates with a major shift in climate. Besides a warming environment, the bison had to cope with changes in the composition and distribution of edible flora. [(3)](https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_1651) DNA evidence shows a decrease in genetic diversity and local extinctions in parts of North America in the Late Pleistocene. [(2, again)](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283696932_Pleistocene_Overkill_and_North_American_Mammalian_Extinctions)\n\nHaving survived into the Holocene, we're going to jump ahead several millennia to 1804. The bison have a new population of humans to contend with. Lewis & Clark and crew spend several years on their expedition. They keep detailed catalogues of their food. Lewis writes that a single bison will feed the entire party for a whole day. They'd have to kill 4 deer or 8 pronghorn for a ration equivalent to one bison. Between April 25th, 1805 and July 13th, 1805 they hunted 44 bison. From June 30th, 1806 to August 18th, 1806 they hunted another 55 bison. [(4)](https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1523-1739.1999.97417.x) This was almost the beginning of the end for bison and it's what I presume you're thinking of when you talk about earlier history overhunting. The 19th century saw the bison population dwindle from tens of millions to around a thousand individuals. Bison hunting *was* extremely popular. But there was more going on. Bison can suffer from a number of illnesses and parasites. These can be transmissible between bison and domestic cattle. There is evidence that even before the hunting boom bison populations were shrinking because of disease. There was also increased competition in the biological niche because of the introduction of cattle and feral horses.[(5)](https://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?pid=S2007-33642021000200171&script=sci_arttext&tlng=en)\n\nSo, why was it easy to overhunt bison? It's a combination of population botlenecks, slow replacement rates, disease, and competition. Feral pigs have none of that working against them. \n\n​\n\n**Blackfin cisco and Asian carp**\n\nBlackfin cisco were large fish, among the largest deepwater fish. Again, large animals tend to be fewer in number. \n\nCommercial fisheries had begun exploiting fish in the Great Lakes by the 1840s. Population depletion was noticed and was met with efforts to increase fishing efficiency.\n\nThe alewife and lamprey were among other species introduced to the lakes in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The lamprey would directly prey on the cisco while the smaller alewife would compete with or eat their offspring. \n\nBy the 1850s the lakes were visibly polluted by industry and dams were affecting the ability of the fish to spawn. [(6)](http://www.glfc.org/pubs/TechReports/Tr20.pdf)\n\nClimate change for aquatic species is a chain reaction that includes warming and algae growth and depletes oxygen from the water, especially at the depths cisco prefer. As the climate changed through the 20th century, the cisco underwent long-term stress trying to cope with malnutrition and suffocation. [(7)](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11160-017-9480-3#Fig1)\n\nThe blackfin cisco may have had a limited diet, feeding almost exclusively on a species of mysis shrimp. [(8)](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwinhOCuxdf7AhVGIDQIHf-aAgoQFnoECF8QAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sararegistry.gc.ca%2Fvirtual_sara%2Ffiles%2Fcosewic%2Fsr_coregonus_nigripinnis_e.pdf&usg=AOvVaw1oy-vveYBwjS6He78VGVDY)\n\nThe last blackfin cisco recorded officially was in 1960. They are believed to be extinct, though other cisco species remain. Between 2002 and 2012 over 100 samples of deepwater ciscoes were taken from Lake Huron. Over 2000 individual ciscoes were collected. None were identified as blackfin cisco. [(9)](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwilha3X39r7AhWiJzQIHe9tAREQFnoECAYQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.researchgate.net%2Fpublication%2F278676189_Evaluating_the_current_status_of_deepwater_ciscoes_Coregonus_spp_in_the_Canadian_waters_of_Lake_Huron_2002-2012&usg=AOvVaw0iTcaaa9ZA8KxWlHMUdYl-)\n\nAsian carp don't have as broad a diet as feral pigs, but they do seem eat a variety of plankton and molluscs, giving them more food options than cisco. [(10)](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10530-008-9265-7) They also aren't deepwater fish, so they aren't being as affected by the depletion of oxygen from the water. They grow quickly. There isn't enough information to compare reproduction rates between blackfin cisco and Asian carp, but an inference can be made based on the carp's population boom and the cisco's extinction. \n\n​\n\nUsually the answer to these questions about invasive species comes down to high reproductive numbers, few predators, and not being too picky about diet. \n\n​\n\n​\n\n(1) Peter Cotgreave, The relationship between body size and population abundance in animals, *Trends in Ecology and Evolution*, 11/13/2003\n\n(2) David Meltzer, Pleistocene Overkill and North American Mammalian Extinctions. *Annual Review of Anthropology*, 10/2015\n\n(3) J. Tyler Faith , North American Terminal Pleistocene Extinctions: Current Views, *Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology*, 2014\n\n(4) Paul S. Martin, Christine R. Szuter, War Zones and Game Sinks in Lewis and Clark’s West, *Conservation Biology*, 12/24/2001\n\n(5) James H. Shaw, Neither stable nor pristine: American bison populations were long influenced by humans, *Associación Mexicana de Mastozoología*, 05/2021\n\n(6) LaRue Wells and Alberton L. McLain, Lake Michigan: Man’s Effects on Native Fish Stocks and Other Biota, *Great Lakes Fishery Commission Technical Report No. 20*, 01/1973\n\n(7) Paris D. Collingsworth et al., Climate change as a long-term stressor for the fisheries of the Laurentian Great Lakes of North America, *Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries*, 2017\n\n(8) Nicholas E. Mandrak and Becky Cudmore, Assessment and Update Status Report on the blackfin cisco Coregonus nigripinnis in Canada, COSEWIC status report, 2007\n\n(9) Evaluating the current status of deepwater ciscoes (Coregonus spp.) in the Canadian waters of Lake Huron, 2002-2012, with emphasis on Shortjaw Cisco (C. zenithicus)\n\n(10) Schuyler J. Sampson et al., Diet overlap among two Asian carp and three native fishes in backwater lakes on the Illinois and Mississippi rivers, *Biological Invasions*, 2009", "created_utc": 1669979322, "distinguished": null, "id": "iylxptc", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/z9ay7k/in_the_earlier_history_of_the_united_states_why/iylxptc/", "score": 11 } ]

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[ { "body": "/u/restricteddata answered [a similar question about five years ago](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4ir62r/is_it_true_that_japan_offered_to_surrender_on_the/d317aq1/). The short version is that some members of the Japanese government were in favor of a *conditional* surrender, but not an *unconditional* surrender. Unfortunately, they didn't go into whether or not Truman was informed, hopefully somebody can shed some light on that as well.", "created_utc": 1632417821, "distinguished": null, "id": "hdzjwln", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/ptzk32/in_oliver_stones_the_untold_history_of_the_united/hdzjwln/", "score": 366 } ]

[ { "body": "More can always be said, but while you wait for new answers, you may wish to read the [FAQ section on Zinn's work.](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/us_history#wiki_historians.27_views_of_howard_zinn.27s_.22a_people.27s_history_of_the_united_states.22)", "created_utc": 1605410493, "distinguished": null, "id": "gcbxc2t", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/jubaen/is_howard_zinns_a_peoples_history_of_the_united/gcbxc2t/", "score": 212 }, { "body": "I recommend you read [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9ixjmr/is_howard_zinn_being_intentionally_misleading_in/) from /u/Freedmenspatrol that addresses some specific questions about the book, while also touching on more general criticisms.\n\nI also rather enjoy [this review](https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/howard-zinns-history-lessons) from Georgetown professor Michael Kazin. Kazin is genuinely frustrated with the way Zinn dismisses the motivations of those he disagrees with, attributing nearly everything to manipulation and deception. This may be a *People's History*, but those people are constantly being duped and defrauded to the extent that you have to wonder if Zinn thinks much of them at all:\n\n> Zinn’s big book is quite unworthy of such fame and influence. A People’s History is bad history, albeit gilded with virtuous intentions. Zinn reduces the past to a Manichean fable and makes no serious attempt to address the biggest question a leftist can ask about U.S. history: why have most Americans accepted the legitimacy of the capitalist republic in which they live?\n\nKazin also criticizes Zinn for leaving out religion. What does that look like? Well:\n\nAfter a remark about inter-religious motives for urban violence in the 1840s, \"religious\" only appears 5 more times in the book- that's 412 pages of my PDF version. In fact, the word \"Christian\" only appears 16 times in all 622 pages; \"Catholic\" only 19, \"Methodist\" and \"Baptist\" only twice, \"evangelical\" only once. \"Jewish\" appears 12 times and \"Jews\" 13 times, but if we take out references to Jewish people in other countries, organization names, and where they're an example of an immigrant group, that leaves just two instances. A handful of other Protestant sects are name-dropped exactly once when they opposed a war, Islam, Hinduism, Orthodoxy, and Buddhism are entirely absent.\n\nThis is easily explained by Zinn's historical perspective, but not excused. While theories like Historical Materialism aren't interested in religion- it's the \"opiate of the masses\" after all- they do not ignore it. They offer idiosyncratic interpretations of its function and nature. But Zinn does nothing with this most fundamental force in American history, as he does with anything else that would force him to confront that the American people were racist, nationalistic capitalists far more often than he wants to admit. Racism in particular is either presented as a political tool or like a weather forecast: \"Racism was strong\" or \"It was a time of intense racism in the United States.\" The way it integrated itself into the minds of American people is hardly addressed. Yes, Zinn has chosen a particular topic to write about here, but that's not a choice you can make freely. You have to prove that that topic can stand on its own, and Zinn does not. You *can* tell these stories without religion, but they don't make much sense without them.\n\nTo borrow from [another critique](https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/Wineburg.pdf), this is because Zinn operates with \"yes-type questions: \"according to historian Aileen S. Kraditor, yes-type questions send the historian into the past armed with a wish list [...] 'If one historian asks, \"Do the sources provide evidence of militant struggles among workers and slaves?\" the sources will reply \"Certainly.\" American history is 250 years of millions of people; you can write a history of *anything* and provide ample evidence. Did people think the US should be a monarchy? Yes, and I can provide plenty of primary sources to prove it. That's a bad take though, because it's not *representative*. This is the metric by which Zinn's history fails. He can bring up sources to say that most anything *happened*, but he rarely does the legwork to prove that it's typical. Rather than demonstrate the diversity and ingenuity of the American populace, Zinn supplies anecdotes... and more anecdotes.\n\nWe can talk all day about Zinn's \"bias,\" though I don't think it will get us anywhere. Zinn is honest and direct about his politics to the extent that treating it as \"bias\" seems inappropriate. Those politics include goals which most historians would agree with: textbooks are generally too nationalist, they focus too much on elites, concerns of class and race are under-represented. I am glad that Zinn's book got people thinking about this. He covers more of the late 19th and early 20th century labors issues than many popular authors or school textbooks, and the resulting discussions of class are necessary, if not well supported by history. These messages are *A People's History's* saving grace.\n\nNevertheless, it is not a good introduction on how to do history. Zinn's citations are absent or muddled in a single-page \"bibliography.\" He is more concerned with telling the *right* or *true* history than with understanding the motivations, goals, and strategies of past peoples (a common fault of these types of [\"textbook alternatives\"](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6cym7x/james_lowen_in_lies_my_teacher_told_me_claims/dhyu8at/?context=3). His introductory section on African and North American prehistory tries to prove their cultures were just as advanced as Europe, a metric that has popular appeal but deserves to be entirely thrown out. Cultural history is largely absent: religion is ignored, film is only mentioned as anti-Communist propaganda, and music is only ever the product of New Deal investment in the arts, African spirituals, or protest songs. The result is a book that mentions \"war\" at least 970 times and whose focus on the wars, business, and politics of American history make it feel a lot closer to standard curriculum material than it would like to admit.\n\n**TL;DR** Zinn leaves out a lot of history and voices, dismissing views he doesn't agree with as deception by elites and rarely justifying why he's left out what he has.", "created_utc": 1605420261, "distinguished": null, "id": "gcclqfr", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/jubaen/is_howard_zinns_a_peoples_history_of_the_united/gcclqfr/", "score": 361 } ]

[ { "body": "/u/CommodoreCoco and /u/freedmenspatrol have previously taken a dim view of Howard Zinn. The Commodore links to a previous answer by freedmenspatrol before answering [Is Howard Zinn's \"A People's History of the United States\" Worth Reading?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/jubaen/is_howard_zinns_a_peoples_history_of_the_united/) himself.\n\nOthers may have more to say.", "created_utc": 1643335242, "distinguished": null, "id": "huixoa3", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/sedxp9/how_accurate_are_zinns_a_peoples_history_of_the/huixoa3/", "score": 29 } ]

[ { "body": "Very interesting question(s)!\n\nTo begin with your specific one about the use of “Indian Country” in U.S. military manuals: I am not aware of any specific historical studies showing that to be the case. The point of reference is usually the same story about Richard Neal as described by Dunbar-Ortiz. Unfortunately, the book leaves out the important part of the story involving military manuals. Richard Neal’s use of the term “Indian country” in relation to a military operation in Kuwait sparked the response of Native American Veterans condemning it. Pentagon spokeswoman Michelle Rabayda then responded to the condemnation by saying that “Indian country” had no official definition in military manuals. This story dates from 1991 and the Associated Press was one of the news outlets covering it (link in the notes below). In relation to military manuals, the same event is referred to by Stephen W. Silliman (2008) and Al Carroll (2008). If “no official definition” was the actual phrasing used, then that’s very different from a term not being included in military manuals. Therefore, Dunbar-Ortiz probably interpreted the wording “no official definition” along the lines of “Indian Country” actually being used in military manuals, but without a specified definition attached to it. By contrast, Silliman offers a completely different interpretation of it by saying that the term ‘was not part of any official manual or training’. Silliman based this on a more obscure newspaper article that I have no access to, but luckily Silliman’s article is open access, so you can have a try at finding the article he cites. So in terms of your specific question about military manuals, I am not aware of any research on that specific topic, and the statement by Dunbar-Ortez is probably based on the Neal incident. \n\nWhen historians don’t use footnotes for their claims, it is often due to the statement or the message of the statement being considered general knowledge. My impression is that the decision not to expand on the history and the widespread usage of the term was made on that basis. (I am happy to have further discussions about what counts as “general knowledge” and the misuses of (lack of) notes/references, but I don’t want to sidetrack from the question that you asked.) There is a comprehensive and reliable open-access piece on the recent history and usage of the term “Indian Country” in the military can be found in Stephen W. Silliman’s article titled: The “Old West” in the Middle East: U.S. Military Metaphors in Real and Imagined Indian Country. I mention this because in the last paragraph, you write ‘So I'm left seeing that clearly the phrase is at least likely used unofficially’, from which I infer that you are interested in knowing just how widespread the use of that term is. \n\nSilliman’s article notes that there hasn’t been a systematic history of how this specific usage of the term emerged within the military. (Though this was published in 2008, so someone might have done so since.) The article begins by discussing the history of the term since the Vietnam War. He points to the works of four other historians who noted the use of the term in war related newspaper coverage, popular books and films in the 1970s. In the notes at the end of my post, I added references to them, with the exact page numbers that Silliman also notes. Silliman also points to the work of historian David Stannard, who argued that the ‘official government language’ used the same term. Silliman himself quotes an exchange between a congressman (John Seiberling) and Captain Robert B. Johnson from the transcripts of the war crime hearings following the 1971 Mỹ Lai Massacre:\n\n“Johnson: Where I was operating I didn’t hear anyone personally use that term “turkey shoots”. We used the term “Indian Country”.\n\nSeiberling: What did “Indian Country” refer to?\n\nJohnson: I guess it means different things to different people. It is like there are savages out there, there are gooks out there. In the same way we slaughtered the Indian’s buffalo, we would slaughter the water buffalo in Vietnam.”\n\nAlthough Silliman cites a no-longer-accessible website as a reference to this, you will find the transcript in the Dellums Committee Hearings on War Crimes in Vietnam, which is accessible via Archive.org (I added a reference to it below). Silliman then goes on to use examples for the usage of the term dating from the Gulf War (the same story about Richard Neal), Iraq and Afghanistan. The article also includes a table of quotes showing 13 instances of newspapers, media outlets, and comments using the term in relation to military operations. The list included outlets such as Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and Fox News. I think the widespread use of the term is important to mention, as coupled with the interpretation of the Pentagon response (“no official definition”) in the Neal case, it can be used as further contextual evidence for the presence of the term in military manuals. \n\nWhat I personally think would be more fascinating to look at is why the same story and statement appears twice in the book. First, on page 57 and then on page 193. In the first instance, Dunbar-Ortiz refers only to “Indian Country” appearing in “military training manuals”. In the second instance, she refers to both “Indian Country” and “In Country” appearing in military training manuals. She further mentions that the “In Country” was derived as a shorthand from “Indian Country” during the time of the Vietnam War. This difference is interesting, as the first one appears in her article written in 2004 (link below), while the second one seems to indicate further research into the use of “In Country”. So this raises a third possible answer to your question, which is that while “Indian Country” is not defined (or used) in military training manuals, its derivative “In Country” is being used so. (Remember here that the Pentagon’s response only mentioned “Indian Country” and not “In Country”, and specifics matter when it comes to official communications). \n\nWhat I have written is just a very brief snippet of Silliman’s article. It is free to read, so I’m sure your curiosity and eagerness to check notes/references will lead you to read the relatively short article. I also hope my answer explains on what grounds I think that Dunbar-Ortez (and/or the editors) considered not including further examples/references to the usage of the term. You are certainly starting to think like a historian, which is always great to see! Following references and footnotes is where the extent of historical research often gets revealed. So it is always worth reading the notes/references as you go along regardless of the author.\n\nAs for your final question: “how do I go about not even necessarily checking the claims made in this book, but simply finding more reading on them?” - It depends on how much you want to engage with a text, and I don’t think that question should be conflated with what is bad or good history. There is definitely an interesting question here, which is about why you should trust historical research or how reliable historical research is generated, but that’s beyond the scope of my post.\n\nReferences and Notes:\n\nRobert Imrie, ‘Tribes Angered By General’s Reference to Enemy Land as ‘Indian Country’’ - 21 February 1991, Associated Press. Accessible via this link: https://apnews.com/article/ce150feb55e4a9058c307295efc07f4a \n\nStephen W. Silliman, ‘The “Old West” in the Middle East: U.S. Military Metaphors in Real and Imagined Indian Country’, - American Anthropology, vol. 110, issue 2, 2008, pp. 237-247. Accessible for free via this link: http://www.faculty.umb.edu/stephen_silliman/Articles/oldwestinmiddleeast.pdf \n\nBooks mentioning the usage of the term in Vietnam War related materials:\n\nCarol Burke, Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane, and the High-and-Tight: Gender, Folklore, and Changing Military Culture. (Boston: Beacon, 2004). - page 109\n\nRichard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building. (New York: Schocken, 1990 [1980]). - page 368\n\nTom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007, revised edition) - pages 175-259\n\nDavid Espey, America and Vietnam: The Indian Subtext. Theme issue, “Uprising: The Protests and the Arts,” David Landrey and Bilge Mutluay, eds. Journal of American Culture and Literature, 1994: 128– 136.\n\nDavid Stannard, American Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) - page 251.\n\nRoxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, ‘Indian Country’, Accessible via wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20080218180259/https://www.counterpunch.org/ortiz10122004.html \n\nCitizens Commission of Inquiry (ed.), The Dellums Committee Hearings on War Crimes in Vietnam (New York: Vintage Books, 1972) - see pages 52-53. Accessible via this link: https://archive.org/details/dellumscommittee0000unse", "created_utc": 1628697535, "distinguished": null, "id": "h8jq21a", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/p26shp/im_reading_roxanne_dunbarortizs_an_indigenous/h8jq21a/", "score": 11 } ]

[ { "body": "While there is always more to be said about history, you can find a large amount of discussion on this subject [here,](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1zd1wz/ive_heard_many_people_say_in_zinns_peoples/) [here,](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/uo4zh/meta_lets_have_a_serious_talk_about_howard_zinn/) and [here.](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/38slae/what_is_your_opinion_on_howard_zinns_a_peoples/)\n\nThese discussions also link a number of articles written by well-known historians [here,](https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/Wineburg.pdf) [here,](https://newrepublic.com/article/112574/howard-zinns-influential-mutilations-american-history) and [here.](https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/howard-zinns-history-lessons)\n\nAll due credit to the redditors who contributed to these discussions; there were too many to tag individually.", "created_utc": 1572186208, "distinguished": null, "id": "f5fs6s4", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/dnt1gf/what_do_historians_think_of_howard_zinns_a/f5fs6s4/", "score": 425 }, { "body": "I recommend reading the critique in chapter 3 of Sam Wineburg's Why Learn History and then the responses from the Zinn folks at:\n\nhttps://www.zinnedproject.org/news/what-sam-wineburg-gets-wrong-about-teaching-aphus\n\nhttps://www.howardzinn.org/history-distorted-sam-wineburgs-critique/\n\nPersonally, and despite being politically aligned with Zinn, and responses notwithstanding, I find the particularities of Wineburg's critiques to be useful. He argues that Zinn gets some stuff wrong, including on the Rosenburg case, but also that the authoritative voice isn't that useful to society any more. Rather, we should be learning to apply evidence to claims critically.\n\nIn my life and career, Zinn played an important role, but by the time I read his work I already knew how to take a book that was largely a synthesis of secondary sources with a confirmation bias. I think it had also been useful as a way of writing back against power. But it has real limits.", "created_utc": 1572210918, "distinguished": null, "id": "f5i4oau", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/dnt1gf/what_do_historians_think_of_howard_zinns_a/f5i4oau/", "score": 30 } ]

[ { "body": "Well since Virginia was the home to the first permanent English settlement, it kind of got to be the de facto most powerful state from the get-go. And it was ideally-positioned on the Chesapeake Bay with easy access to the James and Elizabeth rivers (and the other 150+ rivers dumping into the bay), making it ideally positioned as a hub for trade and inland exploration and settlement. Plus it was essentially right in the middle of the mid-Atlantic east coast, ultimately making it centrally located among the thirteen colonies. \n\nThe first permanent colony was established in Virginia in 1607, and when the first attempt to colonize Massachusetts bay failed a year later, Jamestown kind of became the primary focus for colonizing for the next few years. It wasn’t until 1620 that Plymouth, the second Massachusetts colony, was established. And by 1629 Virginia had stabilized enough to have been chartered as a royal colony and used as a base from which to establish the province of Carolina in the land to the south, then Maryland to the north in 1632. \n\nMeanwhile more and more New England colonies were popping up, but they were all generally smaller and were all sharing the Massachusetts bay, while Virginia (and Maryland) pretty much entirely controlled the much larger Chesapeake Bay. Plus the land in Virginia was generally better for farming, and the winter weather was considerably less extreme than it was further north, making it easier for colonists to not die as much.\n\nThere’s lots more that more qualified people could talk about but generally Virginia had the benefit of being first, being ideally and ultimately centrally located, being big, having an early population advantage, having an early trade and exploration advantage, having fertile land that made other states dependent on Virginian agriculture, having weather that wasn’t *that* deadly, and so on.", "created_utc": 1626476778, "distinguished": null, "id": "h5geb5e", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/ol4o7t/ive_read_before_that_virginia_was_the_most/h5geb5e/", "score": 4 } ]

[ { "body": "[This thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5fg3z2/how_accurate_is_oliver_stones_untold_history_of/) with /u/restricteddata may be of interest, especially this paragraph:\n\n>In general, the Stone/Kuznik stuff has the sniff of late 1980s/early 1990s leftist \"revisionist\" scholarship to it. It isn't the worst, and some of those points are worth making. But it is not representative of what most historians think about this stuff, which, again, is somewhere more in the \"center\" than either the \"revisionist\" vs. \"orthodox\" approaches these days. It turns out history is super complicated and its hard to make it support one political ideology or another. On the whole, it feels a little outdated — the historical community has already spent 20 years going over this stuff and getting out of it anything that had value and integrating it into a more nuanced model of the end of World War II and the Cold War.\n\n/u/restricteddata also looks at a different claim [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1sgr02/did_reagan_turn_down_a_treaty_with_gorbachev_that/cdxgwog/) about if Reagan turned down a treaty with Gorbachev, and /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov and restricteddata team up on [this question](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5mmwy0/did_president_truman_really_have_gender_identity/dc6b6fq/) on if Truman had \"gender identity\" issues.\n\nHaving said all that, there are many claims being made not included in the answers above, so more answers are welcome. It may help to ask about a specific claim you're wondering about, since not everyone has had time to watch the series or read the book.", "created_utc": 1596836198, "distinguished": null, "id": "g0q4oe9", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/i5fr2k/oliver_stones_the_untold_history_of_the_united/g0q4oe9/", "score": 17 } ]

[ { "body": "Since OP wasn't very specific about what he wanted to know was accurate, I'll piggyback on his post and ask some things I was wondering: \n\nOliver Stone seems to be making the claim that if Henry Wallace had been president instead of Truman, we might not have engaged in a Cold War with the Soviet Union. Specifically, he states in so many words that Truman was out of his depth when it came to matters of foreign policy, that the Roosevelt administration (and Wallace by extension) had a plan of non-antagonization and partnership with the Soviet Union, and that Truman, who was not included in this plan made a huge course change once he took office. He also claims that Truman used atomic bombs on Japan when he didn't really need to in order to end the war quickly. He claims that the real reason Japan surrendered quickly was that the Soviets declared war on them, not because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He also implies that Truman's motivation for using nuclear weapons was to send a message to the Soviets and to have a better bargaining position for postwar territory negotiations. \n\nHow accurate is this? If that is all really true, then it really changes my view of the whole Truman administration and even the Cold War. ", "created_utc": 1480446327, "distinguished": null, "id": "dakvzth", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/5fg3z2/how_accurate_is_oliver_stones_untold_history_of/dakvzth/", "score": 26 }, { "body": "Related question: does anyone know of a documentary or documentary series, similar in scope, but with a heavily conservative bias?\n\nI just finished watching this series on Netflix too. It seemed extremely thorough and accurate, though the narrator's opinions were obviously coming from a strongly liberal standpoint. I happen to agree with him, but I'm wondering if there's an equally accurate conservative version of history out there, so I could get the counterargument.", "created_utc": 1480417358, "distinguished": null, "id": "dakd6h4", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/5fg3z2/how_accurate_is_oliver_stones_untold_history_of/dakd6h4/", "score": 45 }, { "body": "It would be easier for our users to answer your question, /u/ThunderMcCloud, if you could point out some claims that you would like us to verify. Not everyone with the expertise required has the time (or will for that matter) to watch 12 episodes of a documentary.", "created_utc": 1480422018, "distinguished": "moderator", "id": "dakeq39", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/5fg3z2/how_accurate_is_oliver_stones_untold_history_of/dakeq39/", "score": 28 } ]

[ { "body": "More can always be said on the matter, so if anyone wishes to provide their own critique of Zinn's book, please feel free to do so (bearing in mind subreddit rules, of course). For the meantime, the book [has its own FAQ-linked thread](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/umph1/im_thinking_of_reading_a_peoples_history_by/), though that's old as blight. [This thread has links](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dnt1gf/what_do_historians_think_of_howard_zinns_a/) to previous AH discussions on Zinn, while [this second thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e0nzsh/is_howard_zinns_a_peoples_history_of_the_united/) features u/Bodark43 and u/Kochevnik81 providing their own recommendations.", "created_utc": 1593619273, "distinguished": null, "id": "fwlezal", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/hjcgnt/critiques_of_howard_zinns_a_peoples_history_of/fwlezal/", "score": 14 } ]

[ { "body": "Someone else can chime in, about other countries. But both the effectiveness and originality of that militia system in the 13 Colonies has been greatly exaggerated, as well as its reputation as a guarantor of people's rights.. It was pretty much copied from the existing English militia system. There regiments of militia were raised, armed and equipped and led by the local lord or noble, with the local land-owners paying for arms, horses, etc and/or Parliament allocating funds. In England, this system showed its limitations during the English Civil War: the local taxpayers were unwilling to pay, in hard times; regiments did not want to operate outside of their areas; and their officers were often mediocre , gaining their positions by rank, not by ability. Faced with a real military challenge from Charles I in 1644 , the Parliamentary leaders, like Fairfax, Ireton and Cromwell, mostly abandoned the system to create the New Model Army, with professional officers and soldiers who would march to anywhere they were needed, and national funding.\n\nTransplanted into the 13 Colonies, the militia system never went through the New Model Army reform. The scattered , varied militias functioned well enough to handle the limited military tasks of subduing/eliminating the Native Nations ( though Metacom's War would be quite a challenge ). It is true that , because most of the colonists were farming, many owned guns, and many of them were apparently very good at hunting with them, and so good shots. But the militias like their English counterparts operated locally, were often led by amateurs, were badly supplied, and unwilling or unable to stay in the field for long. Like their English counterparts, they were not up to a real military challenge. This was revealed in the French and Indian War, when George Washington and the efforts of some of the governors could do little more than keep an army in the field, until a real professional army was imported ( and, of course, the expense of importing and garrisoning that army was one of the colonial complaints that would lead to the next war).\n\nThough some local militias would be a part of the initial 1775 revolt against oppressive British rule in Boston, there soon were units of Loyalists as well, like Butler's Rangers, who fought *for* that oppressive rule. And Washington would again find that , though some militia soldiers and officers had had experience in the French and Indian War, militia units that joined his army were still often poorly officered, barely trained, and indifferently equipped. Professional troops who opposed them discovered they would often be panicked by a bayonet charge. As happened in the Battle of Long Island, where many optimistic militia riflemen were overwhelmed and nailed to trees by Hessian bayonets. Washington tried hard to train his men, equip them properly....but he also lamented the quality of the militiamen and found his greatest success in mostly avoiding decisive, pitched battles.\n\nAnd after the War, no militia would ever \" overthrow or intimidate its own government when it became oppressive\". Instead, in the two existing cases that could be called \"government oppression\", the militia were part of that- they were supposed to take orders from the governors, and did so . When the farmers of western Massachusetts rebelled at the oppressive demands by the Boston-controlled government that they pay their taxes in cash, they took up arms, in Shay's Rebellion. But the militia that was sent out to suppress the rebellion by the government did so- if unwillingly. Likewise, when there was a farmers revolt against a tax on whiskey, in Pennsylvania, Washington would call upon governors to send militia to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion; and the militia, obeying the governors, did so. And though Jefferson would make noises in favor of the occasional popular revolt, the Founding Fathers generally had a fear of \"the mob\" . They certainly didn't have one in mind when they wrote militias into the Constitution.\n\nThis is not r/politics, but obviously the authors are trying beat a path to the exalted \" well-regulated militia\" in the common conservative interpretation of the second amendment in the Constitution. Exalt they can for the present, if they like, but there's not much historical basis for their claim.\n\n[C.H. Firth : Cromwell's Army](https://books.google.com/books/about/Cromwell_s_Army.html?id=hx4kAAAAMAAJ)\n\n[Fred Anderson : Crucible of War](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/3463/crucible-of-war-by-fred-anderson/)\n\nBrown, R. (1983). Shays's Rebellion and Its Aftermath: A View from Springfield, Massachusetts, 1787. *The William and Mary Quarterly,* *40*(4), 598-615. doi:10.2307/1921810", "created_utc": 1614091752, "distinguished": null, "id": "gogqo15", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/lqcjg2/a_patriots_history_of_the_united_states_claims/gogqo15/", "score": 11 } ]

[ { "body": "This is not meant to discourage new answers, but we do have [a whole section](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views#wiki_historians.27_views_of_howard_zinn.27s_.22a_people.27s_history_of_the_united_states.22) of the FAQ dedicated to Zinn!", "created_utc": 1439574207, "distinguished": null, "id": "cu302uo", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/3gzzr0/so_i_just_started_reading_a_peoples_history_of/cu302uo/", "score": 60 }, { "body": "I would say that Howard Zinn's *A People's History* is the worst kind of history that can be written. He started with a premise that he wished to prove (the \"the people\" have been the systematic victims of the ruling class) and he strung together all the pieces he could find, usually using secondary material (how else could you write a 500-year history, really?), to make his argument, without any regard for the nuances of historicism (i.e., he presents conflicts from the point of view of modern sensibilities, without accounting for the sensibilities of the era(s) under investigation). \n\nI read most of the book, but I stopped at the section on the Korean War, in which Zinn cites MacArthur's incursion into North Korea which drew in the Chinese military as evidence that Democratic and Republican presidents (Truman being president at the time) were both alike in their imperialism. I don't care if the point was correct or not -- but Zinn glossed over the fact that Truman *recalled* MacArthur and that historians look at this as one of the prime examples of the struggle between civilian and military power in the United States, and one in which the civilian government clearly won. To bring this up would have complicated his argument, so he chose (and he actively chose to do this, as this is very common knowledge) to misinform his audience rather than contend with the nuances of history.\n\nAs he states himself in the afterword of later editions of the book, \"*I had no illusions about 'objectivity,' if that meant avoiding a point of view. I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit . . . I wanted, in writing this book, to awaken a greater consciousness of class conflict, racial injustice, sexual inequality, and national arrogance*.\"^1 His book is a polemic, and it would never have been published by an academic press. \n\nWith all that being said, his book reveals much about the darker side of American history that is not taught in primary or secondary schools in the United States. If that is the extent of your education on history, and you don't plan on reading much else anyway, then his book is a fine introduction to the \"harsh realities\" of the American past. There is absolutely nothing in his book, however, that is not covered in mainstream academic books and articles. Of course, you won't find an academic source that covers all 500 years of American history, and so you will spend a great deal of time sorting through material to find out all the information you want. Thus it is no surprise that his work remains so popular among disillusioned Americans who were taught as youngsters that the United States could do no wrong. \n\n**1.** Zinn, Howard. *A People's History of the United States, 1492-Present*. New York: Harper Collins, 2007. <-- edition I cite", "created_utc": 1439575391, "distinguished": null, "id": "cu30w6e", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/3gzzr0/so_i_just_started_reading_a_peoples_history_of/cu30w6e/", "score": 230 }, { "body": "It's worth locating Zinn within the historiographical tradition of American Progressivism. Beginning in the late 19th century, a number of professional American historians (e.g., Frederick Jackson Turner, Carl Becker, Charles Beard) used social-scientific methods, as well as a rigorous reading of archival sources, to place the study of American history on a more \"scientific\" basis.\n\nThese historians have been labelled \"Progressives\" because they had an ideological affinity with the political movement of the same name. The Progressives were reformers who were concerned by the social upheavals of industrializing America, especially with the concentration of power in the hands of corporations and political parties.\n\nAn important part of their agenda was hem in the power of \"interests\" - particularly corporations who were driven strictly by the profit motive - and to return authority to the public, particularly in the form of government regulations that would break up trusts and protect the poor.\n\nProgressive historians tended to see American history in this light: it was a continuous struggle between the \"people\" and the \"interests\", in which the interests would try to consolidate their power by corrupting the political system, while the people would use democratic methods - protests, reform movements, popular agitation - to uphold the public good.\n\nZinn was writing very much in this tradition, updated to reflect the social struggles of the 1960s: the Civil Rights and anti-war movements. His history is one in which elites are always venal and self-interested, and constantly in struggle with \"the people\", particularly poor and marginalized groups.\n\nDoes this necessarily make his work \"inaccurate\"? Not necessarily. All historians, whether they admit it or not, work within a particular narrative and intellectual framework - it's impossible to write a history that doesn't have a particular bias or point of view.\n\nThat being said, you should understand that there are other intellectual traditions to choose from: positivism, Marxism, the Annales school, poststructuralism, Whig history, and so on. So enjoy the eye-opening aspects of his book, but be aware that it's possible to interpret the same events in a very different fashion.", "created_utc": 1439584139, "distinguished": null, "id": "cu36rbk", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/3gzzr0/so_i_just_started_reading_a_peoples_history_of/cu36rbk/", "score": 38 } ]

[ { "body": "There's a whole FAQ section that's dedicated to Zinn:\n\n[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/us\\_history#wiki\\_historians.27\\_views\\_of\\_howard\\_zinn.27s\\_.22a\\_people.27s\\_history\\_of\\_the\\_united\\_states.22](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/us_history#wiki_historians.27_views_of_howard_zinn.27s_.22a_people.27s_history_of_the_united_states.22)\n\nYou - and your Dad- might also be interested in this [very good critique](https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/howard-zinns-history-lessons) of Zinn in *Dissent* magazine. Note this isn't what Bill O'Reilly thinks of him, but what's in an openly left-leaning magazine.\n\nYou won't find many historians who think much of Zinn. I myself would like to, I don't know, hire ninjas to replace every copy of Zinn with Jill Lepore's *These Truths.* Unlike Zinn, she's a real historian, actually does research. If Zinn's big complaint was that the common people of the US have been neglected in the history books, she does her best to include them.", "created_utc": 1574548011, "distinguished": null, "id": "f8fqbw2", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/e0nzsh/is_howard_zinns_a_peoples_history_of_the_united/f8fqbw2/", "score": 14 } ]

[ { "body": "Zinn has been praised for opening up his readers' minds to fresh perspectives on history as it is usually told at school, and criticised for the way in which he's interpreted the evidence to do so. There will be more to say, especially as [the resource on Zinn we offer in our FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/umph1/im_thinking_of_reading_a_peoples_history_by/) is eight years old and no longer remotely meets the standards of this sub. But it does cover some basics across multiple posts, and links to some of the resources you are asking about, so it will have to do for now.\n\nHopefully others with more time than I have right now will swing by to answer you directly in more detail. Meanwhile, with a hat-tip to u/DanKensington...", "created_utc": 1597569659, "distinguished": null, "id": "g1pzemr", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/iamzey/how_did_the_public_react_to_the_role_of/g1pzemr/", "score": 4 } ]

[ { "body": "[This is most likely the edition you have.](https://books.google.com/books?id=i50MAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false) Scribner's put out the last edition of the six-volume set in 1922, revised and updated by colleagues (I see James Alton James [1864-1962], then a professor at Northwestern, sometimes attached) under the credited copyright of Ella A. Andrews. She was the widow of Elisha B. Andrews, as shown on the copyright catalog's [page 1398 here](https://books.google.com/books?id=8VkcAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA1398#v=onepage&q&f=false). As to the reason for this edition, it was likely demand (the set was Andrews's magnum opus, and to bring it up to the war and its aftermath was valuable for Scribner's) and possibly the likelihood of royalties for Ella Andrews and/or other collaborators despite the fact that, as a former president of Brown, Elisha and Ella were both probably born into wealth and stayed there. I don't know much about her qualifications and connections, but the *American National Biography* reference essay on Andrews may talk about her as well. Unfortunately I don't own a set of those, but they are widely available references at major libraries (sometimes online). If someone can find a volume I of the 1922 edition online, they may say more in the foreword, preface, or introduction; ~~I was unable to locate one.~~ edit: I [finally found one.](https://books.google.com/books?id=OpwMAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=editions:pChSzqOoPvAC&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiahba6uKnaAhVNRK0KHefOBX8Q6AEIXjAJ#v=onepage&q&f=false) It explains in the Publisher's Note on page 6 that James Alton James updated the volumes through Taft, but that Paul L. H~~owa~~aworth - about whom I've found little other information in my cursory look - did the final revision for the 1922 edition.\n\nedit: Added James's dates; Haworth; etc", "created_utc": 1523147631, "distinguished": null, "id": "dwzr9ab", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/8alrbd/i_just_found_all_six_volumes_of_elisha_andrews/dwzr9ab/", "score": 12 } ]

[ { "body": "It was a useful corrective to a nationalist and exclusionary form of US history taught in schools, so in that sense it is quite effective, but as a work of history it's quite unbalanced and generally flawed. Of course, Zinn didn't claim to be writing history so much as a political tract.\n\nMichael Kazin's [article](http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/howard-zinns-history-lessons) on it in *Dissent* pretty much sums up my feelings.\n\n>To borrow a phrase from the British historian John Saville, Zinn expects the past to do its duty. He has been active on the left since his youth in the 1930s. During the 1960s, he fought for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam and wrote fine books that sprang directly from those experiences. But to make sense of a nation’s entire history, an author has to explain the weight and meaning of worldviews that are not his own and that, as an engaged citizen, he does not favor. Zinn has no taste for such disagreeable tasks.\n\n>The fact that his text barely mentions either conservatism or Christianity is telling. The former is nothing but an excuse to grind the poor (“conservatism” itself doesn’t even appear in the index), while religion gets a brief mention during Anne Hutchinson’s rebellion against the Puritan fathers and then vanishes from the next 370 years of history.\n\nYou should read it, but as a political manifesto rather than social history - which are the terms Zinn set out anyway.", "created_utc": 1433602920, "distinguished": null, "id": "crxjtfr", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/38slae/what_is_your_opinion_on_howard_zinns_a_peoples/crxjtfr/", "score": 66 }, { "body": "I'd say yes--for a lot of hairy philosophical reasons I won't lay out here. But it is overall a pretty expansive and incredible look at some aspects either totally disregarded or ill-framed by typical historians. \n\nIf nothing else (and there's plenty of criticism to be had for Zinn and others like him, i.e. Lies My History Teacher Told Me, etc.) Zinn highlights something that is true of all history writing--it is written from a specific perspective, for a specific audience. And that means that every aspect of it is infused with a particular ideological and political set of assumptions that select, reflect, and deflect reality (thanks, Kenneth Burke). If you really REALLY want to get into the weeds about how the historical sausage is made, you can inflict some serious pain with Hayden White's Topics of Discourse. ...or you can just read Zinn. \n\n\nEdit: wrods aare tough", "created_utc": 1433601500, "distinguished": null, "id": "crxj866", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/38slae/what_is_your_opinion_on_howard_zinns_a_peoples/crxj866/", "score": 24 }, { "body": "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=zinn&restrict_sr=on\n\nsure read as much history as you can and Zinn's book has influenced thousands of (left leaning) historians. Read it interrogate it and move on to works more focused than a survey course book can be. If your question is about how \"unbiased\" it is that's a different story. It has numerous factual errors and ideologically railroads the narrative over the truth. search through the askhistorians backlog on howard zinn (whose received a lot of pages of comments here over the years). so take some of the things he says with a huge grain of salt.", "created_utc": 1433602668, "distinguished": null, "id": "crxjpm0", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/38slae/what_is_your_opinion_on_howard_zinns_a_peoples/crxjpm0/", "score": 5 } ]

[ { "body": "There isn't a book that will tell the *exact* same stories as Zinn, nor is there really *anything* like a less-biased history. \n\nOf course bias isn't really the issue - all historians write with a bias, and the good ones try to be aware of that. The real issue with Zinn is that in his worse points, he makes broad claims that aren't really backed up properly with evidence. With that said, it's still the history of the US where I learned about Dorr's Rebellion and the New York Anti-Rent War.\n\nIf people are interested in reading history from a broadly Marxist background, then I would suggest substituting out Eric Foner for Zinn. Foner uses the tools Marxist historiography, but doesn't try to warp the historic narrative to fit a preconceived ideology. His masterwork is *Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution*, which is monstrously huge and covers the 1865-1877 era. His *Story of American Freedom* is a one-volume history of the US which probably most closely approximates the materials and themes that Zinn addresses.\n\nStill, if you want the most up-to-date one volume US history, Jill Lepore just released *These Truths: A History of the United States*. I haven't read it myself, but Lepore is a great historian and writer, and has covered a wide variety of topics in American history, from King Philip's War to Wonder Woman.\n\n", "created_utc": 1553558935, "distinguished": null, "id": "ejdpfvz", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/b5gra6/theres_obviously_a_lot_of_appetite_for_a_book/ejdpfvz/", "score": 26 }, { "body": "As far as an introductory general history of the US from a leftist perspective, I think [this](https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/10/the-limits-of-liberal-history) article from Current Affairs (“The Limits of Liberal History”) does a good job evaluating Lepore’s book. They find it rather lacking in labor history (Zinn’s bread and butter), and recommend Erik Loomis’ A History of America in Ten Strikes. Loomis is a well respected labor historian and I strongly recommend his book. It takes the working class’ (including slaves, women, and other traditionally marginalized groups) through American history to the present, using strikes to illustrate moments of continuity and change. I think it is extremely accessible the way you are looking for, it’s short (200 pages with big font, as compared to Lepore’s door stopper), and he gets a lot of mileage out of using, say, the Mill Girl strikes to talk about patriarchy and education in antebellum America. \n\nEdit:\nA quote from the Current Affairs piece to get people to read it: [“ ‘Politics’ [as Lepore writes about it] is not about what happens in ordinary people’s workplaces, but about what the government does, and so Eleanor Roosevelt and Thurgood Marshall are significant while Jessie de la Cruz, Hattie Canty, and Luisa Moreno are not. I don’t think you really realize just how limited Lepore’s history is until you pick up a book documenting the excluded parts”] (https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/10/the-limits-of-liberal-history)", "created_utc": 1553619233, "distinguished": null, "id": "ejfgio5", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/b5gra6/theres_obviously_a_lot_of_appetite_for_a_book/ejfgio5/", "score": 3 } ]