Best 8 quotes in «the great depression quotes» category

Politicians continued their mantra, saying that Americans were much too smart to be fooled! As a nation we believed this nonsense. However, as a people, we had no idea what was happening and, even worse, we didn’t know to what extent the depression would affect us. The major problem was that the wealth of the nation was spread unevenly, with the rich getting richer and the poor being abused. A vast difference developed between the country’s productive capacity and the ability of the people to purchase manufactured products. In other words, the consumer base had been eroded to the point where Americans could no longer afford to buy the necessities of life, thus ending the need to manufacture things. As factories closed and people were laid off, the downhill spiral became complete. Everybody was left wondering what had happened to the country that had promised them an opportunity to have a better life than their parents had had. The 1930’s became the most difficult years that the United States had ever had to face economically, and the people we had entrusted with political power and our welfare, caved in to special interest groups. Rudy Vallée typified the era as he sang songs such as Brother, Can You Spare a Dime and Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries, through his handheld megaphone. The dances of the day were the Charleston and the Peabody and, if you believed the film industry, everyone was doing them. Hollywood provided a fleeting escape from reality. That is, if you could afford the price of admission to the theaters that had just opened in almost every hamlet in the country.

David Lawrence, founder of US News & World Report, warned, "Confiscation of wealth may satisfy the vengeful in us. It may sooth a retaliatory spirit. But it is the path of national suicide...There must always be the reward motive. To many people it is but another way to set goals of human ambition...When government kills the opportunity to earn, it sounds the death knell of the opportunity to serve.

This slice of life happened during the depression era, late 1920’s and early 1930’s in Hoboken, NJ. Will such hard times happen again as the “Rich get richer and the poor get poorer?” “Fischer & Koenig’s factory building had been built in a wedge of filled-in land between the cliff side road of the palisades and the railroad tracks. Although some unwieldy power tools had already been invented, and were in use since the end of the nineteenth century, they were seldom used at home or in small factories such as the one where my father worked. As in most shops of that era, everything was custom-made. My father did almost everything by hand, including the staining, polishing and finishing work of furniture, tabletops and caskets. It was an era when things were still done the old-fashioned way. With jobs scarce and difficult to find, he worked long hours in the cold building with nothing more than an open steel drum outside the door, in which scrap wood was burned so that the workers could occasionally warm their hands. Under these horrid conditions, it didn’t take long for his nose to run, his hands to become raw and cracked, and his lips to become chapped. It seemed that he constantly had a cold and problems with his feet. Studying the faces of people back then, you could see the intense hardship in their weathered faces.

New Dealers always seemed to be comparing actual capitalism with ideal government. They judged capitalism by its apparent effects and government by its announced intentions

Although the United States, with its unit banking laws, had thousands of bank failures, Canada, which permitted branch banking, didn't have a single failure during the Great Depression.

I can't speak. There are too many negatives. Too many questions...And all the things these hard times have taken from me. All the things I've had to give up. Except, perhaps, my dreams.

In Woolrich's crime fiction there is a gradual development from pulp to noir. The earlier a story, the more likely it stresses pulp elements: one-dimensional macho protagonists, preposterous methods of murder, hordes of cardboard gangsters, dialogue full of whiny insults, blistering fast action. But even in some of his earliest crime stories one finds aspects of noir, and over time the stream works itself pure. In mature Woolrich the world is an incomprehensible place where beams happen to fall, and are predestined to fall, and are toppled over by malevolent powers; a world ruled by chance, fate and God the malign thug. But the everyday life he portrays is just as terrifying and treacherous. The dominant economic reality is the Depression, which for Woolrich usually means a frightened little guy in a rundown apartment with a hungry wife and children, no money, no job, and desperation eating him like a cancer. The dominant political reality is a police force made up of a few decent cops and a horde of sociopaths licensed to torture and kill, whose outrages are casually accepted by all concerned, not least by the victims. The prevailing emotional states are loneliness and fear. Events take place in darkness, menace breathes out of every corner of the night, the bleak cityscape comes alive on the page and in our hearts. ("Introduction")

Nobody can go back to how it was. The dust bowl dried us all up bitter as seeds and spat us out all over the land and none of us yet has taken root.