The Forgotten Man, A New History of the Great Depression By Amity Shlaes; Harper, New York, 2008, 468 pages, $15.95.
Granddaddy fell off a two-story house and broke both feet in the Depression.
It was the era of The Forgotten Man. Before workmen's comp. Before Social Security. Before government cared about occupational safety or about family or, really, about the common man — grandfather or not.
The natural wisdom of Americans elected a leader in 1932 for the most desperate of times. They chose a government to preserve ordinary, everyday folk.
We're testing the limits of economic endurance again today.
Back then no one held the safety net for my Grandpa Jay. He was a big, loving-in-his-own-way, rough-laughing workingman in the tough prairie town of Lawton, Okla. Frontier rules still prevailed — make your own way.
Buffalo nibbled grass around ruts left by horse caissons out on Fort Sill. If it hadn't been for the artillery garrison, the U.S. government would have had no presence at all in my grandparents' lives.
Military demand for housing gave granddaddy work as a housepainter — until he couldn't climb a ladder. Yet he was the sole support of a wife and three school children of his own and two others taken in from family down on their luck.
Grandma Essie had spooned the last cornmeal into the cast iron skillet. Her children were going hungry.
What happened next was the defining story of my family. Manna fell from heaven. Well, potatoes actually.
My Daddy was tall and skinny but didn't miss a stride as he scooped up the bulging, burlap bag on the railroad siding as though he was paid to unload the boxcar.
You do what you have to do for family, when you literally are "The Forgotten Man."
The original use of the phrase meant the worker who never went on the dole. The person struggled but somehow made it with no more help than a providential sack of spuds the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe never would miss anyway.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt picked the name up like stolen taters for his presidential campaign to use about every common American. God love them, heaven made so many who needed a handout or a hand up.
FDR's brain trust got to work. The president's and wife Eleanor's skillful use of media cranked up. And the specter of a nation going under created a social experiment out of every working class American, forgotten no more.
The Amity Shlaes account is revisionist history — not original, but well-told: The line has it that FDR didn't end the Great Depression with the New Deal; that his anti-business vigor and monetary policy vacillation made things worse; and that only World War II ended the country's worst downturn ever.
The trouble with her view is the nation did sense a rescue mission and regain hope as a result. The government sun did come up again every day. The light around FDR's jaunty visage and sparky effort did counter the dark economy.
The vigor of Roosevelt's government dispelled even fear itself. His fireside chats made the White House a comfortable home for the nation to visit on the air. Lasting institutions such as deposit insurance reformed and protected banking.
Shlaes is right to remind us government can get in the way as FDR's did, creating a depression within the Depression. She is right about politics too easily diverting public works spending from its mission to rebuild the economy. And she is right that government takes steps in a national emergency we don't want from it all the time —— such as the current nationalization of industries.
But heroic measures electrified rural America. Americans went to work building roads and bridges and schools. Government organized writers and artists to make us sensitive to the desperate times, represented by Dorothea Lange's photograph of a migrant mother.
Those were noble and necessary acts of government we should not forget.
To say otherwise is like telling President-elect Barack Obama to stay in Chicago. Yet our once again fearful nation counts on him to avoid another Great Depression in the unforgettable FDR-style.
Sometimes you just have to scoop up the potatoes.
2 comments:
There has become a greater dependency upon government. People have generally forgotten to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and rely on their own hard-work, ingenuity and perspiration.
Rather than organizing at the grass-roots level, they prefer to leave it to those at the top to give them certain institutions. The result is the bureaucratization of these institutions, corrupting them with political interests and corporate wealth.
Many of the problems within our society may be traced back to a two-fold problem: an abandonment of personal responsibility, and public accountability.
One thing can be certain - and Amity Shlaes' book is one proof of this:
It was not government intervention which ended the Great Depression, but rather government policies contributed to it in the first place!
People must heed the timeless wisdom: A government large enough to give you everything is large enough to take it away.
"Many of the problems within our society may be traced back to a two-fold problem: an abandonment of personal responsibility, and public accountability."
And what I mean here is people have forgotten their own duties and responsilibities, while at the same time trusting in government without holding them accountable.
One humorist once said that people trust government so little that if the government openly told them they were lying, people wouldn't believe it!
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