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Chapter 1

THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND ITS IMPACT ON

LITERARY PRODUCTION: AN OVERVIEW

The Present thesis aims at exploring the impact of great

depression on the American creative imagination and pinpoint how the

prevailing American reality was transformed into fictional idiom, with

especial reference to the novels of John Steinbeck, Nathanael West and

John Dos Passos. The authors selected for the study enjoy international

reputation for their contribution to American literature. They are also

known for artistically representing the disconcerting socio-economic

and cultural transformation in their novels. Despite the thematic and

contextual parities and affinities, these writers are recognized for their

masterful handling of the genre, narrative techniques and linguistic

accuracies in their own distinguishing means and methodologies and

their modes of perfections and presentation.

The creative consciousness does not operate in vacuum. It is

inextricably linked with the immediate social, economic, moral,

political, historical and cultural ambience that has produced shaped and

propelled it. One cannot deny the role of the individual psyche of the

author, the amount of sensitivity he is endowed with, of his

predilections, his means and methods of perceptions, his ability to

perceive the intricacies of situations, his linguistic dexterity and of his

notions of life and art, in the structure of his vision and art. These are

the intrinsic components of his vision. The external and contextual

forces, however, also play a role of crucial importance in carving the

vision and art of a writer. The authors selected for study here, naturally

were no exception. Contemporaneity governs the beauty and relevance

of their fictional art. They were inevitably influenced by the socio-

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economic and historico – political occurrences of their time. It was,

besides other things, the Great Depression that had a great impact on

their thematic and generic preoccupation. It therefore seems necessary

to trace out the magnanimity of the great slum called the Great

Depression and its socio-economic, historical and political dimensions.

Because highly disconcerting and loaded metaphors and symbols were

used to describe the poverty-stricken, desolated and deserted

American land, like ‘dust-bowl’, ‘desert’, ‘whirlpool of dust’, ‘sand

storm’, ‘wretched’ and ‘wasteland’, etc.

The Great Depression is significant from yet another point of

view. The Great Depression is often called a “defining moment” in the

20th century history of the United States. It certainly is considered to be

a spring source of poverty, hungry, unemployment, dispossession and

displacement. But more importantly, The Great Depression is also

known for its impact on the economic designing of the USA. It created

a platform to chalk out some methodologies, strategies and policies

that have a direct bearing on the American economists and

intellectuals. The Social Security system introduced during that decade

is an important component of America administrative machinery. Its

most lasting effect, it should be especially mentioned here, was a

transformation of the role of the federal government in their economy.

The Great Depression in fact, drastically changed economic of thinking

of the USA.

The Great Depression also greatly affected the political ideology

and warfare strategies of America. The contemporary American

literature in general and American novel in particular kept in pace with

stunning transformation and in the context of the present study, the

transformation from high voltage romanticism and consumption-

oriented predilections for the young generation, what Gertrude Stein

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called “The lost generation, to the slum of 1929 and also to the

American participation in the World War II”.

The Great Depression of 1929-33, in fact, was the most severe

economic crisis of modern times. Millions of people lost their jobs, and

many farmers and business were bankrupted. Industrialized nations and

those supplying primary products (food and raw materials) were all

affected in one way or another. In Germany the United States industrial

output fell by about 50 per cent, and between 25 and 33 per cent of the

industrial labor force was unemployed.

The thirties was a decade of scanty rainfall, draught,

foodlessness and joblessness. For eight years dust blew on the southern

plains. There came in a yellowish-brown haze from the South and in

rolling walls of black from the North. The simplest acts of life;

breathing, eating a meal, taking a walk; were no longer simple.

Children wore dust masks, women hung wet sheets over windows in a

futile attempt to stop the dirt, and farmers watched helplessly as their

crops blew away.

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s lasted about a decade. Its primary

area of impact was on the southern Plains. The northern Plains were

not so badly affected, but nonetheless, the drought, windblown dust

and agricultural decline were no strangers to the north. In fact the

agricultural devastation helped to lengthen the Depression whose

effects were felt worldwide. The movement of people on the Plains

was also profound.

Poor agricultural practices and years of sustained drought caused

the Dust Bowl. Plains grasslands had been deeply plowed and planted

to wheat. During the years when there was adequate rainfall, the land

produced bountiful crops. But as the droughts of the early 1930s

deepened, the farmers kept plowing and planting and nothing would

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grow. The ground cover that held the soil in place was gone. The

Plains winds whipped across the fields raising billowing clouds of dust

to the sky. The sky could darken for days, and even the most well

sealed homes could have a thick layer of dust on furniture. In some

places the dust would drift like snow, covering farmsteads and it was

extended from 1931 till 1939.

The Great Depression was an economic slump in North

America, Europe, and other industrialized countries of the world that

began in 1929 and lasted until about 1939. It was the longest and the

most severe depression ever experienced by the industrialized Western

world.

Though the U.S. economy had gone into depression six months

earlier, the Great Depression may be said to have begun with a

catastrophic collapse of stock-market prices on the New York Stock

Exchange in October 1929. During the next three years stock prices in

the United States continued to fall, until by late 1932 they had dropped

to only about 20 percent of their value in 1929. Besides ruining many

thousands of individual investors, this precipitous decline in the value

of assets greatly strained banks and other financial institutions,

particularly those holding stocks in their portfolios. Many banks were

consequently forced into insolvency; by 1933, 11,000 of the United

States banks had failed. The failure of so many banks, combined with a

general and nationwide loss of confidence in the economy, led to

much-reduced levels of spending and demand and hence of production,

thus aggravating the downward spiral. Murray Rothbard rightly points

out that:

It resulted in a deterioration in the output and

drastic rise in unemployment. The U.S.

manufacturing output got down to 54 percent of its

level in 1929, and unemployment had gone up to

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between 12 and 15 million workers, or 25-30

percent of the work force.[1]

The Great Depression began in the United States but quickly

turned into a worldwide economic slump owing to the special and

intimate relationships that had been forged between the United States

and European economies after World War I. The United States had

emerged from the war as the major creditor and financier of postwar

Europe, whose national economies had been greatly weakened by the

war itself, by war debts, and, in the case of Germany and other

defeated nations, by the need to pay war reparations. So once the

American economy slumped and the flow of American investment

credits to Europe dried up, prosperity tended to collapse there as well.

The Depression hit hardest those nations that were most deeply

indebted to the United States, i.e., Germany and Great Britain. In

Germany, unemployment rose sharply beginning in late 1929 and by

early 1932 it had reached 6 million workers, or 25 percent of the work

force. Britain was less severely affected, but its industrial and export

sectors remained seriously depressed until World War II. Many other

countries also had been greatly affected by this unprecedented

upheaval.

The nations faced formidable challenges and were engaged in

preparing strategies to confront this gigantic problem. Almost all

nations sought to protect their domestic production by imposing tariffs,

raising existing ones, and setting quotas on foreign imports. The effect

of these restrictive measures was to greatly reduce the volume of

international trade. By 1932 the total value of world trade had fallen

by more than half as country after country took measures against the

importation of foreign goods.

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American polities naturally could not have remained unaffected.

The Great Depression had important consequences in the political

sphere. In the United States, economic distress led to the election of the

democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt to the presidency in late 1932.

Roosevelt introduced a number of major changes in the structure of the

American economy, using increased government regulation and

massive public-works projects to promote a recovery. But despite this

active intervention, mass unemployment and economic stagnation

continued, though on a somewhat reduced scale. About 15 percent of

the work force was still unemployed in 1939, at the outbreak of World

War II. In Europe, the Great Depression strengthened extremist forces

and lowered the prestige of liberal democracy. In Germany, economic

distress directly contributed to Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.

The Great Depression, at least in part was caused by underlying

weaknesses and imbalances within the U.S. economy that had been

obscured by the boom psychology and speculative euphoria of the

1920s. The Depression exposed those weaknesses, of the nation’s

political and financial institutions to cope with the vicious downward

economic cycle that had monstrously established itself. Prior to the

Great Depression, governments traditionally took little or no action in

times of business downturn, relying instead on impersonal market

forces to achieve the necessary economic correction. But market forces

alone proved unable to achieve the desired recovery in the early years

of the Great Depression, and this painful discovery eventually inspired

some fundamental changes in the United States’ economic structure in

the form of taxation, industrial regulation, public works, etc.

The Depression was eventually to cause a complete turn-around

in economic theory and government policy. In the 1920s governments

and business people largely believed, as they had since the 19th

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century, that prosperity resulted from the least possible government

intervention in the domestic economy, from open international

relations with little trade discrimination, and from currencies that were

fixed in value and readily convertible. Few people would continue to

believe this in the 1930s.

The Depression spread rapidly around the world because the

responses made by governments were flawed. When faced with falling

export earnings they overreacted and severely increased tariffs on

imports, thus further reducing trade. Moreover, since deflation was the

only policy supported by economic theory at the time, the initial

response of every government was to cut their spending. As a result

consumer demand fell even further. Deflationary policies were

critically linked to exchange rates. Under the Gold Standard, which

linked currencies to the value of gold, governments were committed to

maintaining fixed exchange rates. However, during the Depression

they were forced to keep interest rates high to persuade banks to buy

and hold their currency. Since prices were falling, interest-rate

repayments rose in real terms, making it too expensive for both

businesses and individuals to borrow.

The fundamental cause of the Great Depression in the United

States was a decline in spending (sometimes referred to as aggregate

demand), which led to a decline in production as manufacturers and

merchandisers noticed an unintended rise in inventories. The sources

of the contraction in spending in the United States varied over the

course of the Depression, but they cumulated into a monumental

decline in aggregate demand. The American decline was transmitted to

the rest of the world largely through the gold standard. However, a

variety of other factors also influenced the downturn in various

countries.

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The initial decline in output in the United States in the summer

of 1929 is widely believed to have stemmed from tight U.S. monetary

policy aimed at limiting stock market speculation. The 1920s had been

a prosperous decade, but not an exceptional boom period; wholesale

goods prices had remained nearly constant throughout the decade and

there had been mild recessions in both 1924 and 1927. The one

obvious area of excess was the stock market. Stock prices had risen

more than fourfold from the low in 1921 to the peak reached in 1929.

In1928 and 1929, the Federal Reserve had raised interest rates in hopes

of slowing the rapid rise in stock prices. These higher interest rates

depressed interest-sensitive spending in areas such as construction and

automobile purchases, which in turn reduced production. In 1920s,

with a radical change in the America life style in general and that of

young generation in particular had accelerated the purchase and

construction of flats, houses and apartments. The entire young

generation wanted to live independently away from the moral strictures

and conventional family conscription. They were infused with new

spirit of their time and squandered money ruthlessly. They were

governed by the dictum of boom and prosperity, and this attitude and

practice of the young generation is also considered one of the major

causes of the great depression. Bordo and White rightly point out that:

“Some scholars believe that a boom in housing

construction in the mid-1920s led to an excess

supply of housing and particularly large drop in

construction in 1928 and 1929.” [2]

By the fall of 1929, U.S. stock prices had reached levels that

could not be justified by reasonable anticipations of future earnings. As

a result, when a variety of minor events led to gradual price declines in

October 1929, investors lost confidence and the stock market bubble

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burst. Panic selling began on “Black Thursday,” October 24, 1929.

Many stocks had been purchased on margin that is, using loans secured

by only a small fraction of the stocks’ value. As a result, the price

declines forced some investors to liquidate their holdings, thus

exacerbating the fall in prices. Between their peak in September and

their low in November, U.S. stock prices (measured using the Cowles

Index) declined 33 percent. Because the decline was so dramatic, this

event is often referred to as the Great Crash of 1929.The stock market

crash reduced American aggregate demand substantially. Consumer

purchases of durable goods and business investment fell sharply after

the crash. A likely explanation is that the financial crisis generated

considerable uncertainty about future income, which in turn led

consumers and firms to put off purchases of durable goods. Although

the loss of wealth caused by the decline in stock prices was relatively

small, the crash may also have depressed spending by making people

feel poorer. As a result of the drastic decline in consumer and firm

spending, real output in the United States, which had been declining

slowly up to this point, fell rapidly in late 1929 and throughout 1930.

Randall E. Parker point out that :

“Thus, while the Great Crash of the stock market

and the Great Depression are two quite separate

events, it is rightly observed, the decline in stock

prices was one factor causing the decline in

production and employment in the United

States.”[3]

The next blow to aggregate demand occurred in the fall of 1930,

when the first of four waves of banking panics gripped the United

States. A banking panic arises when many depositors lose confidence

in the solvency of banks and simultaneously demand their deposits be

paid to them in cash. Banks, which typically hold only a fraction of

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deposits as cash reserves, must liquidate loans in order to raise the

required cash. This process of hasty liquidation can cause even a

previously solvent bank to fail. The United States experienced

widespread banking panics during 1930 and 1932. This wave of panics

continued throughout the winter of 1933 and culminated with the

national “bank holiday” declared by President Franklin Roosevelt on

March 6, 1933. The bank holiday closed all banks, permitting them to

reopen only after being deemed solvent by government inspectors.

The panics took a severe toll on the American banking system.

By 1933, one-fifth of the banks in existence at the start of 1930 had

failed. By their nature, banking panics are largely irrational,

inexplicable events, but some of the factors contributing to the problem

can be explained. Economic historians believe that substantial

increases in farm debt in the 1920s, together with U.S. policies that

encouraged small, undiversified banks, created an environment where

such panics could ignite and spread. The heavy farm debt stemmed in

part from the response to the high prices of agricultural goods during

World War I. American farmers borrowed heavily to purchase and

improve land in order to increase production. The decline in farm

commodity prices following the war made it difficult for farmers to

keep up with their loan payments. The Federal Reserve did little to try

to stem the banking panics. Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz, in

the classic study, A Monetary History of the United States, argue that

the death of Benjamin Strong, the governor of the Federal Reserve

Bank of New York, was an important source of this inaction. Strong

had been a forceful leader who understood the ability of the central

bank to limit panics. His death left a power vacuum at the Federal

Reserve and allowed leaders with less sensible views to block effective

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intervention. The panics caused a dramatic rise in the amount of

currency people wished to hold, relative to their bank deposits.

This rise in the currency-to-deposit ratio was a key reason why

the money supply in the United States declined 31 percent between

1929 and 1933. In addition to allowing the panics to reduce the U.S.

money supply, the Federal Reserve also deliberately contracted the

money supply and raised interest rates in September 1931, when

Britain was forced off the gold standard the investors feared that the

United States would devalue as well. Scholars believe that such

declines in the money supply caused by Federal Reserve decisions had

a severe contractionary effect on output. A simple picture provides

perhaps the clearest evidence of the key role monetary collapse played

in the Great Depression in the United States. In ordinary times, such as

the 1920s, both the money supply and output tend to grow steadily.

But, in the early 1930s, both plummeted. The decline in the money

supply depressed spending in a number of ways. Perhaps most

importantly, because of actual price declines and the rapid decline in

the money supply, consumers and business people came to expect

deflation – that is, they expected wages and prices to be lower in the

future. As a result, even though nominal interstates were very low,

people did not want to borrow because they feared that future wages

and profits would be inadequate to cover the loan payments. This

hesitancy, in turn, led to severe reductions in both consumer spending

and business investment spending. The panics surely exacerbated the

decline in spending by generating pessimism and a loss of confidence.

Furthermore, the failure of so many banks disrupted lending, thereby

reducing the funds available to finance investment.

The gold standard was another important cause of the Great

Depression. Some economists believe that the Federal Reserve allowed

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or caused the huge declines in the American money supply partly to

preserve the gold standard. Friedman and White have a valid point to

make in this regard:

“Under the gold standard, each country set a value

of its currency in terms of gold and took monetary

actions to defend the fixed price. It is possible that

had the Federal Reserve expanded greatly in

response to the banking panics, foreigners could

have lost confidence in the United States’

commitment to the gold standard. This could have

led to large gold outflows and the United States

could have been forced to devalue. Likewise, had

the Federal Reserve not tightened in the fall of

1931, it is possible that there would have been a

speculative attack on the dollar and the Unites

States would have been forced to abandon the gold

standard along with Great Britain. While there is

debate about the role the gold standard played in

limiting U.S. monetary policy, there is no question

that it was a key factor in the transmission of the

American decline to the rest of the world. Under

the gold standard, imbalances in trade or asset

flows gave rise to international gold flows. For

example, in the mid-1920s intense international

demand for American assets such as stocks and

bonds brought large inflows of gold to the United

States.” [4]

Likewise, a decision by France after World War I to return to the

gold standard with an undervalued franc led to trade surpluses and

substantial gold inflows. Britain chose to return to the gold standard

after World War I at the prewar parity. Wartime inflation, however,

implied that the pound was overvalued, and this overvaluation led to

trade deficits and substantial gold outflows after 1925. To stem the

gold outflow, the Bank of England raised interest rates substantially.

High interest rates depressed British spending and led to high

unemployment in Great Britain throughout the second half of the

1920s.Once the U.S. economy began to contract severely, the tendency

for gold to flow out of other countries and toward the United States

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intensified. This took place because deflation in the United States made

American goods particularly desirable to foreigners, while low income

reduced American demand for foreign products. To counteract the

resulting tendency toward an American trade surplus and foreign gold

outflows, central banks throughout the world raised interest rates.

Maintaining the international gold standard, in essence, required a

massive monetary contraction throughout the world to match the one

occurring in the United States. The result was a decline in output and

prices in countries throughout the world that also nearly matched the

downturn in the United States. Financial crises and banking panics

occurred in a number of countries besides the United States. In May

1931 payment difficulties at the Creditanstalt, Austria’s largest bank,

set off astringe of financial crises that enveloped much of Europe and

were a key factor forcing Britain to abandon the gold standard. Among

the countries hardest hit by bank failures and volatile financial markets

were Austria, Germany, and Hungary. These widespread banking

crises could have been the result of poor regulation and other local

factors, or simple contagion from one country to another.

Some scholars stress the importance of other international

linkages. Foreign lending to Germany and Latin America had

expanded greatly in the mid-1920s. U.S. lending abroad then fell in

1928 and 1929 as a result of high interest rates and the booming stock

market in the United States. This reduction in foreign lending may

have led to further credit contractions and declines in output in

borrower countries. Thomas E. Hall, J. David Ferguson point out that:

In Germany, which experienced extremely rapid

inflation (“hyperinflation”) in the early 1920s,

monetary authorities may have hesitated to

undertake expansionary policy to counteract the

economic slowdown because they worried it might

re-ignite inflation. The effects of reduced foreign

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lending may explain why the economies of

Germany, Argentina, and Brazil turned down

before the Great Depression began in the United

States. [5]

The 1930 enactment of the Smoot-Hawley tariff in the United

States and the worldwide rise in protectionist trade policies created

other complications. The Smoot-Hawley tariff was meant to boost farm

incomes by reducing foreign competition in agricultural products. But

other countries followed suit, both in retaliation and in an attempt to

force a correction of trade imbalances. Scholars now believe that these

policies may have reduced trade somewhat, but were not a significant

cause of the Depression in the large industrial producers. Protectionist

policies, however, may have contributed to the extreme decline in the

world price of raw materials, which caused severe balance-of-

payments problems for primary-commodity producing countries in

Africa, Asia, and Latin America and led to contractionary policies.

The election resulted in a smashing victory for Roosevelt, who

won 22,800,000 votes to Hoover’s 15,700,000. The United States was

about to enter a new era of economic and political change.

In 1933 the new president, Franklin Roosevelt, brought an air of

confidence and optimism that quickly rallied the people to the banner

of his program, known as the New Deal. “The only thing we have to

fear is fear itself,” the president declared in his inaugural address to the

nation.

In a certain sense, it is fair to say that the New Deal merely

introduced types of social and economic reform familiar to many

Europeans for more than a generation. Moreover, the New Deal

represented the culmination of a long-range trend toward abandonment

of “laissez-faire” capitalism, going back to the regulation of the

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railroads in the 1880s, and the flood of state and national reform

legislation introduced in the Progressive era of Theodore Roosevelt

and Woodrow Wilson.

What was truly novel about the New Deal, however, was the

speed with which it accomplished what previously had taken

generations. In fact, many of the reforms were hastily drawn and

weakly administered; some actually contradicted others. And during

the entire New Deal era, public criticism and debate were never

interrupted or suspended; in fact, the New Deal brought to the

individual citizen a sharp revival of interest in government. Studs

Terkel point out:

“When Roosevelt took the presidential oath, the

banking and credit system of the nation was in a

state of paralysis. With astonishing rapidity the

nation’s banks were first closed -- and then

reopened only if they were solvent. The

administration adopted a policy of moderate

currency inflation to start an upward movement in

commodity prices and to afford some relief to

debtors. New governmental agencies brought

generous credit facilities to industry and

agriculture. The Federal Deposit Insurance

Corporation (FDIC) insured savings-bank deposits

up to $5,000, and severe regulations were imposed

upon the sale of securities on the stock

exchange.”[6]

By 1933 millions of Americans were out of work. Bread lines

were a common sight in most cities. Hundreds of thousands roamed the

country in search of food, work and shelter. “Brother, can you spare a

dime?” went the refrain of a popular song.

An early step for the unemployed came in the form of the

Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a program enacted by Congress to

bring relief to young men between 18 and 25 years of age. Run in

semi-military style, the CCC enrolled jobless young men in work

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camps across the country for about $30 per month. About 2 million

young men took part during the decade. They participated in a variety

of conservation projects: planting trees to combat soil erosion and

maintain national forests; eliminating stream pollution; creating fish,

game and bird sanctuaries; and conserving coal, petroleum, shale, gas,

sodium and helium deposits.

Work relief came in the form of the Civil Works Administration.

Although criticized as “make work,” the jobs funded ranged from ditch

digging to highway repairs to teaching. Created in November 1933, it

was abandoned in the spring of 1934. Roosevelt and his key officials,

however, continued to favor unemployment programs based on work

relief rather than welfare.

The New Deal years were characterized by a belief that greater

regulation would solve many of the country’s problems. In 1933, for

example, Congress passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) to

provide economic relief to farmers. The AAA had at its core a plan to

raise crop prices by paying farmers a subsidy to compensate for

voluntary cutbacks in production. Funds for the payments would be

generated by a tax levied on industries that processed crops. By the

time the act had become law, however, the growing season was well

underway, and the AAA encouraged farmers to plow under their

abundant crops. Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace called this

activity a “shocking commentary on our civilization.” Nevertheless,

through the AAA and the Commodity Credit Corporation, a program

which extended loans for crops kept in storage and off the market,

output dropped.

Robert F. Himmelberg point out that:

“Between 1932 and 1935, farm income increased by

more than 50 percent, but only partly because of

federal programs. During the same years that

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farmers were being encouraged to take land out of

production -- displacing tenants and sharecroppers

-- a severe drought hit the Great Plains states,

significantly reducing farm production. Violent

wind and dust storms ravaged the southern Great

Plains in what became known as the “Dust Bowl,”

throughout the 1930s, but particularly from 1935 to

1938. Crops were destroyed, cars and machinery

were ruined, people and animals were harmed.

Approximately 800,000 people, often called

“Okies,” left Arkansas, Texas, Missouri and

Oklahoma during the 1930s and 1940s. Most

headed farther west to the land of myth and

promise, California. The migrants were not only

farmers, but also professionals, retailers and others

whose livelihoods were connected to the health of

the farm communities. California was not the place

of their dreams, at least initially. Most migrants

ended up competing for seasonal jobs picking crops

at extremely low wages.” [7]

The government provided aid in the form of the Soil

Conservation Service, established in 1935. Farm practices that had

damaged the soil had intensified the severity of the storms, and the

Service taught farmers measures to reduce erosion. In addition, almost

30,000 kilometers of trees were planted to break the force of winds.

Although the AAA had been mostly successful, it was

abandoned in 1936, when the tax on food processors was ruled

unconstitutional. Six weeks later Congress passed a more effective

farm-relief act, which authorized the government to make payments to

farmers who reduced plantings of soil-depleting crops - thereby

achieving crop reduction through soil conservation practices.

By 1940 nearly 6 million farmers were receiving federal

subsidies under this program. The New Act likewise provided loans on

surplus crops, insurance for wheat and a system of planned storage to

ensure a stable food supply. Soon, prices of agricultural commodities

rose, and economic stability for the farmer began to seem possible.

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The National Recovery Administration (NRA), established in

1933 with the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), attempted to

end cut-throat competition by setting codes of fair competitive practice

to generate more jobs and thus more buying. Although the NRA was

welcomed initially, business complained bitterly of over-regulation as

recovery began to take hold. The NRA was declared unconstitutional

in 1935. By this time other policies were fostering recovery, and the

government soon took the position that administered prices in certain

lines of business were a severe drain on the national economy and a

barrier to recovery.

It was also during the New Deal that organized labor made

greater gains than at any previous time in American history. NIRA had

guaranteed to labor the right of collective bargaining (bargaining as a

unit representing individual workers with industry). Then in 1935

Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act, which defined

unfair labor practices, gave workers the right to bargain through unions

of their own choice and prohibited employers from interfering with

union activities. It also created the National Labor Relations Board to

supervise collective bargaining, administer elections and ensure

workers the right to choose the organization that should represent them

in dealing with employers.

The great progress made in labor organization brought in

working people a growing sense of common interests, and labor’s

power increased not only in industry but also in politics. This power

was exercised largely within the framework of the two major parties.

However, the Democratic Party generally received more union support

than the Republicans.

In its early years, the New Deal sponsored a remarkable series of

legislative initiatives and achieved significant increases in production

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and prices -- but it did not bring an end to the Depression. And as the

sense of immediate crisis eased, new demands emerged. Businessmen

mourned the end of “laissez-faire” and chafed under the regulations of

the NIRA. Vocal attacks also mounted from the political left and right

as dreamers, schemers and politicians alike emerged with economic

panaceas that drew wide audiences of those dissatisfied with the pace

of recovery. They included Francis E. Townsend’s plan for generous

old-age pensions; the inflationary suggestions of Father Coughlin, the

radio priest who blamed international bankers in speeches increasingly

peppered with anti-Semitic imagery; and most formidably, the “Every

Man a King” plan of Huey P. Long, senator and former governor of

Louisiana, the powerful and ruthless spokesman of the displaced who

ran the state like a personal fiefdom.

In the face of these pressures from left and right, President

Roosevelt backed a new set of economic and social measures.

Prominent among these were measures to fight poverty, to counter

unemployment with work and to provide a social safety net.

The Works Progress Administration (WPA), the principal relief

agency of the so-called second New Deal, was an attempt to provide

work rather than welfare. Under the WPA, buildings, roads, airports

and schools were constructed. Actors, painters, musicians and writers

were employed through the Federal Theater Project, the Federal Art

Project and the Federal Writers Project. In addition, the National Youth

Administration gave part-time employment to students, established

training programs and provided aid to unemployed youth. The WPA

only included about three million jobless at a time; when it was

abandoned in 1943 it had helped a total of 9 million people.

Dixon Wecter point out that:

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“But the New Deal’s cornerstone, according to

Roosevelt, was the Social Security Act of 1935.

Social Security created a system of insurance for

the aged, unemployed and disabled based on

employer and employee contributions. Many other

industrialized nations had already enacted such

programs, but calls for such an initiative in the

United States by the Progressives in the early 1900s

had gone unheeded. Although conservatives

complained that the Social Security system went

against American traditions, it was actually

relatively conservative. Social Security was funded

in large part by taxes on the earnings of current

workers, with a single fixed rate for all regardless

of income. To Roosevelt, these limitations on the

programs were compromises to ensure passage.

Although its origins were initially quite modest,

Social Security today is one of the largest domestic

programs administered by the U.S.

government.”[8]

In 1936, the Republican Party nominated Alfred M. Landon, the

relatively liberal governor of Kansas, to oppose Roosevelt. Despite all

the complaints leveled at the New Deal, Roosevelt won an even more

decisive victory than in 1932. He took 60 percent of the population and

carried all states except Maine and Vermont. In this election, a broad

new coalition aligned with the Democratic Party emerged, consisting

of labor, most farmers, immigrants and urban ethnic groups from East

and Southern Europe, African Americans and the South. The

Republican Party received the support of business as well as middle-

class members of small towns and suburbs. This political alliance, with

some variation and shifting, remained intact for several decades.

From 1932 to 1938 there was widespread public debate on the

meaning of New Deal policies to the nation’s political and economic

life. It became obvious that Americans wanted the government to take

greater responsibility for the welfare of the nation. Indeed, historians

generally credit the New Deal with establishing the foundations of the

21

modern welfare state in the United States. Some New Deal critics

argued that the indefinite extension of government functions would

eventually undermine the liberties of the people. But President

Roosevelt insisted that measures fostering economic well-being would

strengthen liberty and democracy.

In a radio address in 1938, Roosevelt reminded the American

people that:

“Democracy has disappeared in several other great

nations, not because the people of those nations

disliked democracy, but because they had grown

tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing

their children hungry while they sat helpless in the

face of government confusion and government

weakness through lack of leadership....Finally, in

desperation, they chose to sacrifice liberty in the

hope of getting something to eat. We in America

know that our democratic institutions can be

preserved and made to work. But in order to

preserve them we need...to prove that the practical

operation of democratic government is equal to the

task of protecting the security of the people....The

people of America are in agreement in defending

their liberties at any cost, and the first line of the

defense lies in the protection of economic

security.”[9]

Before Roosevelt’s second term was well under way, his

domestic program was overshadowed by a new danger little noted by

average Americans: the expansionist designs of totalitarian regimes in

Japan, Italy and Germany. In 1931 Japan invaded Manchuria and

crushed Chinese resistance; a year later the Japanese set up the puppet

state of Manchukuo. Italy, having succumbed to fascism, enlarged its

boundaries in Libya and in 1935 attacked Ethiopia. Germany, where

Adolf Hitler had organized the National Socialist Party and seized the

reins of government in 1933, reoccupied the Rhineland and undertook

large-scale rearmament.

22

As the real nature of totalitarianism became clear, and as

Germany, Italy and Japan continued their aggression, American

apprehension fueled isolationist sentiment. In 1938, after Hitler had

incorporated Austria into the German Reich, his demands for the

Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia made war seem possible at any

moment in Europe. The United States, disillusioned by the failure of

the crusade for democracy in World War I, announced that in no

circumstances could any country involved in the conflict look to it for

aid. John Kenneth point out that:

“Neutrality legislation, enacted piecemeal from

1935 to 1937, prohibited trade with or credit to any

of the warring nations. The objective was to

prevent, at almost any cost, the involvement of the

United States in a non-American war.” [10]

With the Nazi assault on Poland in 1939 and the outbreak of

World War II, isolationist sentiment increased, even though Americans

were far from neutral in their feelings about world events. Public

sentiment clearly favored the victims of Hitler’s aggression and

supported the Allied powers that stood in opposition to German

expansion. Under the circumstances, however, Roosevelt could only

wait until public opinion regarding U.S. involvement was altered by

events.

With the fall of France and the air war against Britain in 1940,

the debate intensified between those who favored aiding the

democracies and the isolationists, organized around the America First

Committee, whose support ranged from Midwestern conservatives to

left-leaning pacifists. In the end, the interventionist argument won a

protracted public debate, aided in large measure by the work of the

Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies.

23

The United States joined Canada in a Mutual Board of Defense,

and aligned with the Latin American Republics in extending collective

protection to the nations in the Western Hemisphere. Congress,

confronted with the mounting crisis, voted immense sums for

rearmament, and in September 1940 passed the first peacetime

conscription bill ever enacted in the United States - albeit by a margin

of one vote in the House of Representatives. In early 1941, Congress

approved the Lend-Lease Program, which enabled President Roosevelt

to transfer arms and equipment to any nation (notably Great Britain,

the Soviet Union and China) deemed vital to the defense of the United

States. Total Lend-Lease aid by war’s end amounted to more than

$50,000 million.

The 1940 presidential election campaign demonstrated that the

isolationists, while vocal, commanded relatively few followers

nationally. Roosevelt’s Republican opponent, Wendell Wilkie, lacked

a compelling issue since he supported the president’s foreign policy,

and also agreed with a large part of Roosevelt’s domestic program.

Thus the November election yielded another majority for Roosevelt.

For the first time in U.S. history, a president was elected to a third

term.

American participation in the World War II gave a sharp turn to

the great depression as well as to the world history. As the details of

the Japanese raids upon Hawaii, Midway, Wake and Guam blared from

American radios, incredulity turned to anger at what President

Roosevelt called “a day that will live in infamy.” On December 8,

Congress declared a state of war with Japan; three days later Germany

and Italy declared war on the United States.

The nation rapidly geared itself for mobilization of its people

and its entire industrial capacity. On January 6, 1942, President

24

Roosevelt announced staggering production goals: delivery in that year

of 60,000 planes, 45,000 tanks, 20,000 antiaircraft guns and 18 million

deadweight tons of merchant shipping. All the nation’s activities -

farming, manufacturing, mining, trade, labor, investment,

communications, even education and cultural undertakings - were in

some fashion brought under new and enlarged controls. The nation

raised money in enormous sums and created great new industries for

the mass production of ships, armored vehicles and planes. Under a

series of conscription acts, the United States brought the armed forces

up to a total of 15,100,000. By the end of 1943, approximately 65

million men and women were in uniform or in war-related occupations.

Finally reconstruction of America was geared up by the

American economic policies, socio-political remapping and

technological innovations. Rain in the fall of 1939 had already

drenched the soil, awakening its fertility, and America was pulled out

of the Great Depression.

The Great Depression ignited the intellectual social scientists

and creative writers. They seriously addressed the issues generated by

the Great Depression, the disruptions, dejection, dispossession and

displacement, it brought about; the socio-moral and psychological

upheaval it caused to was creatively and critically taken up for surgical

analysis.

The Great Depression was a period of global economic disaster

that lasted from the early 1930’s until the early 1940’s. Caused by a

combination of factors - including a comedown from the 1920’s era of

speculative success - the Great Depression caused misery in many

countries. In the US, which is widely regarded by many historians as

having been at the root of the crisis, thousands of people lost their

homes and millions found their spending power dramatically reduced.

25

The crisis would last until World War II, and is now regarded by many

analysts as the benchmark for economic disasters. The recent global

credit crunch, for example, is often compared to the Great Depression

as a measure of its severity. This indicates the degree to which the

Great Depression was a cultural as well as an economic phenomenon.

The disconcerting event had shaken the America on creative

consciousness. It has been a very effective impetus for the creation of

enduring intellectual, critical and literary discourses. Many writers

contributed and write about this era.

Its seems that, the great crash on the Wall Street market had a

huge impact in the rates of unemployment during the crisis, leading to

a general panic not just for consumer but suppliers as well since they

were having an overstock in supplies since the people did not have

enough money to buy goods.

Charles R, Hearn mentions changes in the behavior of the

population were also a factor in this crisis. The author mentions that in

1929 the rates of suicide increase rapidly since many companies were

ruined or were in bankruptcy.

Another change was the rates of fertility and

family, which decrease in a nearly 20% by 1934.

Many young couples were afraid of having children

for their finances, the widespread poverty was

affecting all the aspects of a family life and women

prefer not to have children. [11]

Friedman and Schwartz (1963) argued that the Great Depression

was exponentially magnified by the Federal Reserve’s failure to

conduct effective monetary policy in the years leading up to, during

and shortly after the economic recession. Temin (1976) suggests that

the Great Depression can be explained as a large negative shock to

aggregate demand. Temin (1976) contradicts Friedman and Schwartz

26

(1963) by saying that studying only monetary policy factors, will yield

an incomplete explanation of the Great Depression. Instead, the decline

in money growth may expose the underlying forces of the Great

Depression. Temin (1976) looks primarily at interest rates to explain

the monetary policy changes of the time period.

Romer (1993) studies the Great Depression from a different

angle. She claims:

“that economists generally accept that the stock

market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression are

limitedly related. She then takes a closer look at the

relationship by speculating that consumers’ fear of

the uncertainty of future income caused them to

buy less durable goods. Using the standard

Keynesian model, Romer (1993) explains that this

decline in spending caused a decline in aggregate

income. She also explains the psychology of

consumers by providing reasons why an event such

as a stock market crash would cause consumers to

be temporarily uncertain about their future

income. This ‘uncertainty hypothesis’ as she calls it,

which predicts that there should be an inverse

relationship between consumer spending on

durable goods and uncertainty of future income, is

backed by statistical evidence in the months

following the 1929 crash. Romer (1993) also

explores the notion (which is directly opposed by

Temin(1976)) that the link between the stock

market crash and the Great Depression is propelled

by the fact that the crash reduced a large portion of

U.S. wealth, subsequently causing a decline in

consumption.” [12]

Dixon Wecter in his book The Age of The Great Depression

1929 – 1941 described:

“the American society during the Great Depression

era , how the American society changed from the

rights to rags.He talked about the new design for

living during Great Depression era, why ? the

impact of this severest and longest depression upon

daily life could be observed everywhere, the

average woman’s world of cooking , mending

,sewing and keeping house continued than that of

the average man, that is , so long as there was food

27

to cook , clothing to repair and a roof overhead. He

talked about women’s clothes during the 1930s,

concerning the long skirts and more feminine

modes which had begun to repudiate the boyish

angularity of the jazz – age flapper. He talked

about the relationship between husband and wife,

how the family hide the shabbily children from the

visitors? How is the hospitality gone from the

society. he mentioned how The unemployment had

entered into the grain of American life. He

mentioned the relationship between the citizen and

the government and how the disaster helped

American to recollect that they were one nation.”

[13]

By examining the uneven fate of manufacturing industries

during the 1930s, Michael Bernstein presents:

“a powerful new interpretation of the Great

Depression. The depth and persistence of the

slump, he argues, cannot be explained by cyclical

theories alone, but by the conjunction of a crisis in

financial markets with a long-run transformation

in the kinds of goods and services required by firms

and households. By focusing on evidence from

specific industries, Professor Bernstein provides a

more detailed picture of what happened to the

American economy in the thirties that was so

different from previous downturns.” [14]

Do events of the 1930s carry a message for today? Lessons from

the Great Depression provides an integrated view of the depression,

covering the experience in Britain, France, Germany, and the United

States. It describes the causes of the depression, why it was so

widespread and prolonged, and what brought about eventual recovery.

Peter Temin also finds:

“parallels in recent history, in the relentless

deflationary course followed by the U.S. Federal

Reserve Board and the British government in the

early 1980s, and in the dogged adherence by the

Reagan administration to policies generated by a

discredited economic theory—supply-side

economics.” [15]

28

The Great Depression not only caused a massive worldwide

unemployment, but it also led to the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany,

World War II in Europe, and the tragic deaths of tens of millions of

people. The sequence of policy errors committed by powerful, well-

meaning people in several countries and the gold standard in place at

the time, caused the disaster. There were attempts to reduce

unemployment in the United States by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal,

and in Germany by Hitler’s National Socialist economic policies.

The economic setting in the major industrialized countries during the

1920s and the gold standard that linked theory economies together is

discussed. The triggering event that started the economic decline--the

Federal Reserve’s credit tightening in reaction to perceived over

speculation in the U.S. stock market is taken into consideration. The

policy bungling that transformed the recession into the Great

Depression is detailed: Smoot Hawley, the Federal Reserve’s

disastrous adherence to the real bills doctrine, and Hoover’s 1932 tax

hike. This is followed by a detailed description of the New Deal’s

shortcomings in trying to end the Depression, along with a discussion

of the National Socialist economic programs in Germany.

The Great Depression of the 1930s turned the lives of ordinary

Americans upside down, leaving an indelible mark on the nation’s

psyche. The Great Depression: America in the 1930s is award-winning

historian T. H. Watkins’s lively political, economic, and cultural

account of this age of hardship and hope. This companion volume to

the public television series The Great Depression tells the story of a

decade of disaster, challenge, and change. It begins with the most

devastating economic crash in modern history and recounts an epic

narrative of human suffering, social turmoil, and a political revolution

29

that transformed the outline of American life and government - from

unprecedented federal programs such as Social Security, the Civilian

Conservation Corps, and massive public works projects to local grass-

roots movements whose energies helped forge a new relationship

between citizens and their government, citizens and their presidents.

During this great era a new kind of hope was born, one that would not

only help lead the way out of the despair of the depression but would

live on to inspire postwar crusades for civil rights, women’s rights,

environmentalism, and other social movements. Illustrated with more

than 150 photographs, documents, and posters - many of them

published here for the first time - The Great Depression stands as the

essential chronicle of a decade that shaped America’s consciousness

and character forever in an age not unlike our own.

The twenties and thirties witnessed dramatic changes in

American life: increasing urbanization, technological innovation,

cultural upheaval, and economic disaster. In his fascinating book, the

prize-winning historian David Kyvig describes everyday life in these

decades:

“when automobiles and home electricity became

commonplace, when radio and the movies became

broadly popular. The details of work life, domestic

life, and leisure activities make engrossing reading

and bring the era clearly into focus.” [16]

In contemporary American political discourse, issues related to

the scope, authority, and the cost of the federal government are

perennially at the center of discussion. Any historical analysis of this

topic points directly to the Great Depression, the “moment” to which

most historians and economists connect the origins of the fiscal,

monetary, and social policies that have characterized American

government in the second half of the twentieth century. In the most

30

comprehensive collection of essays available on these topics, The

Defining Moment poses the question directly: to what extent, if any,

was the Depression a watershed period in the history of the American

economy? This volume organizes twelve scholars’ responses into four

categories: fiscal and monetary policies, the economic expansion of

government, the innovation and extension of social programs, and the

changing international economy. The central focus across the chapters

is the well-known alternations to national government during the

1930s. The Defining Moment attempts to evaluate the significance of

the past half-century to the American economy, while not omitting

reference to the 1930s.

It also seems worthwhile to make a detailed statement on the

ways and means of creative engagement with the problematic of the

Great Depression. The discussions and references made above clearly

indicated the immensity, intensity and gravity of the Great Depression

and its direct impact on the scientific and surgical analysis.

This grave event had greatly impacted fictional writing too. The

fictional treatment of the event, however, has a very refined and subtle

touch as it does not take a recourse to dispassionate, scientific

dissection.

The Great Depression has been the subject of much writing, as

authors have sought to evaluate an era that caused financial as well as

emotional trauma. It authentically represents that heart –shattering

reality or recreates it in such a way that bears stunning resemblance to

whatever actually happened in the daily life of America in 1930s.

The Great Depression provided to the America or creative

writers fresh subjects, new reality and forceful style. A brief discussion

on the fiction written during this decade would buttress the point and

would also create a logical perspective to underscore the significance

31

of the great depression in the oeuvre of the writers selected, namely,

John Steinbeck, Nathanial West and Dos Passos.

James T. Farrell wrote The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan at

a time of national despair. Farrell creates a greater amount of

possibility by sympathizing the endemic problem of poverty and

hunger. He transcends the stark reality of sterility, drought and hunger

and creates a structure of multiple possibilities of meanings. The reality

of Depression however remains the basis of his fictional oeuvre.

Tobacco Road is a novel by Erskine Caldwell .Tobacco Road is

set in rural Georgia, several miles outside Augusta, Georgia during the

worst years of the Great Depression. It depicts a family of poor white

tenant farmers, the Lesters, as one of the many small Southern cotton

farmers estranged by the industrialization of production and the

migration into cities. The main character of the novel is Jeeter Lester,

an ignorant and sinful man who is redeemed by his love of the land and

his faith in the fertility and promise of the soil.

Irene Hunt in his novel No Promises In The Wind fictionalizes

the painful drama of the contradiction and collusion of dream and

reality, fear and frustration. For millions of people in 1932, a job, food

to eat, and a place to sleep were simple needs, yet dreams in the midst

of the Great Depression. At just 15 years old, Josh has to make his own

way through a country of angry, frightened people. No Promises in the

Wind (1970), takes place in the 1932 during the Great Depression. The

book is about growing up during the Great Depression, that meant

growing up fast as young Josh soon learned Josh’s main talent lies in

the piano, having been taught by his mother. He and his friend Howie

were praised by their teacher, Miss Crowne. However, while living

with the continuous ridiculing and temper of his father, he sets upon

the decision to leave Chicago and find a living on his own.

32

In Jackie French Koller‘s Nothing to Fear , thirteen-year-old

Danny and his family are struggling to make ends meet in New York

during the Great Depression. His father leaves to search for work, and

Danny and his mother do what they can to survive. With his mother

pregnant and unable to help, Danny is forced to beg for food. Through

it all, they retain their good humor and family pride, and in the end

help arrives. Thirteen-year-old Danny and his family are struggling to

make ends meet in New York during the Great Depression. His father

leaves to search for work, and Danny and his mother do what they can

to survive. With his mother pregnant and unable to help, Danny is

forced to beg for food. Through it all, they retain their good humor and

family pride, and in the end help arrives in a most unexpected guise,

“Rich, rewarding historical fiction.”

Nothing to fear, a great book, emphasizes courage during hard

times. The setting is New York City. During the Great Depression,

about a 13 year old boy named Danny’s dad goes away to find work,

promising to be home by Christmas. While his father is gone Danny

has to take care of his sickly mother and his two year old sister. Not

only does he have to take care of them, but he has to go to school,

work at a store to pay back for a broken window, and shines peoples

shoes to make a couple of extra cents (his mother uses have of it for

life insurance, much to his disliking) He often eats very little;

sometimes not at all. One of his friends gets evicted, and ends up living

in a box at Central Park. His best friend Mickey adds some comedy to

this book. During this hard time with people even committing suicide

all around him, Danny tries his best to be brave. While Danny’s father

is away searching for a job, his mother gets sick right after she has

another baby. Then she goes into a coma. This is one of the hardest

times for Danny. He almost runs away but a friend stops him and

33

persuades him to stay. Then a guy named Hank comes and helps take

care of the family.

Thornton Wilder in his novel Heaven’s My Destination

intermingles the tragic – the Great depression – with hilarious tone.

Beside these novelists, the following writers and novels also directly or

indirectly, explicitly or implicitly, in some way or the other deal with

the themes emanating from the great depression. A sensitive reader can

easily discover the Great Depression lurking beneath or looming large

over the fictional domain:

The Grapes of Wrath, written by John Steinbeck , Harper Lee’s

To Kill a Mockingbird , Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin , John

Dos Passos’ Big Money, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby ,

Richard Wright’s Native Son , Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also

Rises, Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth , Nathanael West’s The Day of

the Locust , Josephine Winslow Johnson’s Now in November, William

Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury , Christopher Curtis’ Bud Not

Buddy, Linda Crew’s Fire on the Wind, Mildred Taylor’s Hear My Cry

, Richard Peck’s A Year Down Yonder, Dan Bylsma’s Pitcher’s Hands

Is OUT! , Ann Tatlock’s A Room of My Own, James Lincoln Collier’s

Worst of Times, Dennis Hasley’s Amazing Thinking Machine, Robert

Newton Peck’s Extra Innings, Yoshiko Uchida’s Jar of Dreams, Tony

Earley’s Jim the Boy, Robert Newton Peck ‘s Arly’s Run , Mildred

Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust.

There are other writers of the lost generation who deal with the

problems generated by the Great Depression apparently though their

central thrust appears to be on the problematic of different nature.

Hemingway’s novels, for instance, are mainly concerned with war,

with the problems of sex and violence. Nonetheless the annihilation

nadir and existential angst narratives and also the code, the code hero

34

and the ‘courage to be’ he advocates can be associated with the

creative endeavors to confront the ghost of the Great Depression that

kept on haunting and hovering over the era.

Another important lost generation spokesman is Fitzgerald who

very subtly and microscopically delineated the young generation given

to colossal waste and hedonistic ways of life, finally leading to what

he called in a different sense a ‘crack up’. His delineation of the

corruptions of the business world also links him up with the writers

preoccupied with the problematic of the Great Depression.

It is however in the authors selected John Steinbeck, Nathanial

West and Dos Passos, the minute of the Great Depression find highly

effective, appealing and engaging manifestation. The following three

chapters, therefore, are devoted to an in-depth analysis of the selected

novels of the selected authors respectively.

35

REFERENCES:

1. Rothbard, Murray N. America’s Great Depression (1963), P32.

2. Bordo, Goldin, and White , eds., The Defining Moment: The Great

Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century,

(1998),p23.

3. Parker, Randall E. ed. Reflections on the Great Depression (2002)

interviews with 11 leading economists.

4. Friedman, M & Schwartz, A. J. (1963). A Monetary History of the

United States,1867-1960. Princeton: Princeton University Press (for

the National Bureau of Economic Research).p66.

5. Thomas E. Hall, J. David Ferguson, The Great Depression: An

International Disaster of Perverse Economic Policies, University of

Michigan Press, 1989.P 24.

6. Terkel, Studs. Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great

Depression, New Press,2011.p31.

7. Robert, F. Himmelberg, The Great Depression and the New Deal,

Greenwood Press, 2001.p74.

8. Wecter, Dixon. The Age of the Great Depression, 1929–1941

(1948) p 34.

9. Gay, E.F., The Great Depression. Foreign Affairs, 10(4), 1932.pp.

529-540.

10. Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Great Crash 1929, Pitman Publishing

Corporation , 1948.p71.

11. Charles, R. Hearn. The American Dream in the Great Depression,

Greenwood Press,1977 . p 43.

12. Romer, C. The Nation In Depression. The Journal of Economic

Perspectives 7, (1993). p39.

13. Wecter, Dixon. The Age of the Great Depression, 1929–1941

(1948), p55.

14. Michael, A. Bernstein. The Great Depression: Delayed Recovery

and Economic Change in America, 1929-1939, Cambridge

University Press 1993 , P 65.

36

15. Temin, Peter. Lessons from the Great Depression, MIT Press, 1989,

p55.

16. David, Kyvig. Daily life in the United States, 1920-1940: How

Americans lived through the “Roaring Twenties” and the Great

Depression, Ivan R., 2004.p23.