Susan in NC’s Reviews > Since Yesterday: The 1930s in America, September 3, 1929–September 3, 1939 > Status Update

“ To find a scapegoat is to be spared, for the moment, any necessity for further examination of the facts or for further thought.”

“… this “emergency” had become semi-permanent. The economic system had pulled out of its sinking spell of 1929-33 only to become a chronic invalid, whose temperature was lower now in the mornings but showed no signs of returning quickly to normal. Americans were getting used to the fact that nine or ten million of their fellow-countrymen were out of work.”

“ Year after year the Administration found the number of unemployed men unexpectedly large, found its funds running out, confronted the new crisis with a new appeal to Congress for more billions, and hastily improvised new and glowing plans. The prevailing pattern was one of administrative makeshift.”

“ The dilemma was practical. One managed as best one could, was continent or incontinent according to one’s individual need and one’s individual code, whether of morals or aesthetics or prudence or convenience. If the conventions were in abeyance, it was simply because the times were out of joint and no longer made sense; but that did not mean that one might not long for wedded security.”

“Hundreds of thousands of young people who wanted to get married could not afford to. The song “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby” dated from 1928, but it might well have been the theme-song of the nineteen-thirties. The marriage rate per thousand population fell from 10.14 in 1929 to 7.87 in 1932…When it was so difficult to marry, an increase in pre-marital sex relations was almost inevitable.”

“…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…”