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

“in September, 1938, the news of…the submission of Czechoslovakia to dismemberment—stood in the very center of American attention. Not until 1930 had there been such a thing as a world-wide news broadcast; now one could hear, in quick succession, voices from London, Paris, Berlin, and Prague, and millions of Americans were hanging on every word.”

“…although Roosevelt was bitterly hated by most of the well-to-do, he was genuinely admired and trusted by most of the poorer people of the country…they read a genuine friendliness toward them, a genuine desire to help them. Part of the failure of the press… lay in the failure of editors to understand the impress on these people’s minds of the New Deal relief policy and of Roosevelt’s own personality.”

“ 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.”