Status Updates From Since Yesterday: The 1930s ...

“…a worn and haggard Hoover…was told that on his last morning of office the banking system of the United States had stopped functioning. “We are at the end of our string,” said he. “There is nothing more we can do.”…For all Hoover’s asperities, his awkwardness, his political ineptitudes, he had been a resourceful and resolute soldier of a doomed order, and deserved no such personal humiliation.”

“The unhappy President believed that Roosevelt was irresponsibly ready to see the country go to pot in order to get the credit for rescuing it…Roosevelt felt that as a private citizen until March 4, he himself must not join in Presidential action; and also that it was unreasonable to expect him to tie himself to the policies of an unsympathetic and already discredited administration…”

“There were still ambiguities and contradictions in the program: how, for example, could a Federal government assume so many duties and obligations and simultaneously reduce expenses?…It was difficult to judge the real significance of a program which contained so many potential contradictions. But Roosevelt’s confidence was infectious, his smile was winning, and the times were on his side.”

“Not only were ideas boiling; the country was losing patience with adversity. That instinct of desperate men to rebel which was swelling the radical parties in a dozen Depression-hit countries and was gathering stormily behind Hitler in Germany was working in the United States also. It was anything but unified, it was as yet little organized…”

“ Events were moving fast in that summer of 1932, ideas were boiling, and counsels were divided. The Democratic candidate was astute: he had less to lose by facing two ways than by standing fast; by talking about candor than by exercising it.”

“The capitalist system had become so altered that it could not function in its accustomed ways, and the consequences of its failure to function had become too cruel to be borne by free men. Events were marching, and Herbert Hoover was to be among their victims, along with the traditional economic theories of which he was the obstinate and tragic spokesman.”

“…at a time of such widespread suffering no democratic government could seem to be aiding the financiers and seem to be simultaneously disregarding the plight of its humbler citizens…the days had passed when men who lost their jobs could take their working tools elsewhere and contrive an independent living, or cultivate a garden patch and thus keep body and soul together, or go West and begin again on the frontier.”

“In May and June, 1931, capital was fleeing both countries [Germany & Austria], foreign loans were being withdrawn, and a general collapse seemed imminent—a collapse which might cause the downfall of Germany’s democratic government. For that cloud on the German horizon which in 1929 had seemed no bigger than a man’s hand was now growing fast: Hitler’s Brown Shirts were becoming more and more powerful.”

“Not until November 13 did prices reach their bottom for 1929. The disaster which had taken place may be summed up in a single statistic. In a few short weeks it had blown into thin air thirty billion dollars—a sum almost as great as the entire cost to the United States of its participation in the World War, and nearly twice as great as the entire national debt.”

“…men and women had discovered, to their great alarm, that the slow gains of weeks and months could be swept away in a few precipitous hours… In poured the selling orders by hundreds and thousands; it seemed as if nobody wanted to buy; and as prices melted away, presently the brokers in the howling melee of the Stock Exchange were fighting to sell before it was too late. The great Panic was on.”

“All the time, as prices ebbed, insecurely margined traders were being forced to sell. As October continued and there was no smart recovery, a note of uncertainty, of urgency, of stridency, even, came into the clamor that all was well. Perhaps, after all, it was not.… The decline became more rapid. Surely this must be the bottom, the last chance to buy cheap. Or was it the beginning of the end?”

“…the most that is really expected of the government from month to month, in relation to the progress of the national economy, is that its policies of taxation, regulation, subsidy, and the like, shall if possible be helpful to business rather than hurtful…Otherwise the government is expected to keep its hands off.”

“Not that Herbert Hoover shares the widespread belief that the speculative debauch in the stock market is a happy and healthy phenomenon. On the contrary, he has been supporting the Federal Reserve Board in its unavailing efforts to check the flow of credit into speculation…But by this time the boom is well beyond control, except by some drastic measure which might bring on the very crash it was intended to avert.”

“The optimism of prosperity is everywhere. Well, not quite everywhere. The farmers of America are not prospering: hard times have been almost incessant on the farms since the post-war collapse of agricultural prices in 1921.”

“Suppose we go into a broker’s office this morning. It is crowded…every seat is taken…All eyes are riveted on the trans-lux screen, across which runs an endless procession of letters and figures—the record of sales taking place on the New York Stock Exchange... in the whole United States, probably well over a million people are thus speculating with borrowed money…”

“None of us is aware, on September 3, 1929, that the people of the United States are crossing one of the great divides of national history. The way ahead is hidden, as always, by fog. Surely, we imagine, there is higher ground just ahead. Yet at this very moment the path under our feet is about to turn downward.”

“Since Lindbergh’s flight to Paris in 1927 the adventurers of the air have been crossing oceans boldly, airplane stocks have been soaring, and the Post Office Department has been successfully flying the mail across the country; but passenger flying in the United States is still in its hazardous and uncertain infancy.”

“There is plenty of tension…and for years past the attentive students of international affairs have been intermittently predicting a major war…Mussolini is cherishing dreams of empire; there are Arab riots in Palestine; and Gandhi is giving trouble to the British in India. But still in the main the lines drawn at Versailles in 1919 are holding, and the democratically governed nations are on top.”

“Not yet has…the radio variety show been perfected, nor can you listen in on a world-wide broadcast, but the crooners…are on the air in full force. The average price of a radio set is still as high as $135, for the low-priced small sets have not yet come on the market. In these prosperous times, however, radios are being bought in quantity…and already some twelve million American families own them.”

“…the invasion of the movies by sound is not yet complete. Even in the big cities there are still silent pictures competing with the talking ones. The migration of Broadway stage celebrities to Hollywood has been under way for some time…the studios are fumbling uncertainly with the new medium, and still the critics regard the “talkie” as something of an awkward parvenu.”

“In New York they are tearing down the old Waldorf-Astoria to make room for a skyscraper to end skyscrapers, the Empire State Building. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., has architects quietly at work making preliminary plans for a big mid-town development which he hopes will have a new Opera House as its central feature…”

“…to understand the changes in American life during the nineteen-thirties, we must first recall what things were like before this period began—before the Panic which introduced the Depression. Perhaps the most convenient way of doing this is to imagine ourselves re-living a single day in 1929…September 3…for it was then that the Big Bull Market reached its peak…”