Depression references not valid, some say

Catherine McNicol Stock, who literally wrote the book on the Great Depression’s impact on the Northern Plains, wonders if some media commentators know what they’re talking about when they compare that era to the current financial crisis.

“I’m not saying this isn’t bad or that people aren’t suffering,” said Stock, a professor of history at Connecticut College, “but get back to me in 10 years.”

Stock’s sentiment was shared by two other scholars and some Mitchell-area Great Depression survivors who were interviewed recently by The Daily Republic. The Depression survivors will be profiled in a series beginning with today’s edition and continuing through Thursday.

Great Depression references have abounded in the media lately. A recent issue of Time magazine, for example, featured an illustration on the cover in which Barack Obama was made to look like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The headline on the illustration read, “The New New Deal.”

When 92-year-old Ida Carpenter, who is profiled in today’s edition of The Daily Republic, was asked if she sees any valid comparisons between now and the period she knows as the Dirty ’30s, she seemed perplexed that such a question could be posed seriously. Then she laughed.

“Not yet,” she said.

Responses from the other four Depression survivors who were interviewed ran the gamut from Carpenter’s flat rejection to more nuanced opinions, like the one given by Walter Schramm, of Winner.

“It will be a different kind of depression because the original depression was caused by no rain and dry times,” Schramm said. “Now the depression is going to be caused by companies making money, spending more money than they can make and going broke and having the government bail them out. It’s an absolutely different world.”

The scholars’ opinions, meanwhile, were consistent: Each said they understand the natural tendency of people to compare the current crisis to the Great Depression, but they think many of the comparisons are invalid.

Stock wrote “Main Street in Crisis: The Great Depression and the Old Middle Class on the Northern Plains.” In both the book and a recent interview, she said it’s important to remember that South Dakota and other Great Plains states were affected by more than just the economic downturn that came to be called the Great Depression. They also were affected, at the same time, by an ecological disaster known as the Dust Bowl.

The Dust Bowl, Stock wrote, “was made up of two concomitant catastrophes”: a collapse in farm prices and a severe drought, each of which predated the 1929 stock market crash that is viewed as the beginning of the Great Depression.

“In fact,” Stock wrote, “by 1929, life in the Dakotas was already so difficult that October’s ‘big event’ seemed curiously irrelevant.”

The strife on the Plains was compounded during the 1930s by record hot-and-dry summers, grasshopper plagues and giant, wind-blown walls of dust that came to be called “black blizzards.” John Miller, a professor emeritus of history at South Dakota State University, said the converging calamities were enough to inspire visions of the apocalypse.

“The severity of the Depression, combined with the dust storms and the drought, led some people to think it was the end of the world — that it was like biblical prophecy being fulfilled,” Miller said. “If we went through something like that today, the reaction would probably be something similar.”

Ralph Brown, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of South Dakota, said the modern tendency to compare economic downturns to the Great Depression exposes the United States as something of a “nation of whiners.” That whining, he said, is a product of the rapid standard-of-living advances that many Americans have come to take for granted. When the march of progress slows even a little, some people overreact.

“I would say, yeah, we’re in some tough sledding,” Brown said. “There’s no question about that. But in my view, it’s nothing compared to the Great Depression.”

Brown has the statistics to prove his point. Unemployment percentages soared into the 20s during the Great Depression, but they haven’t even approached 10 percent during the current crisis. From 1929 to 1933 in South Dakota alone, the number of banks decreased by 184; conversely, during the current crisis, widespread bank closures have remained an unrealized fear. Per capita personal income plummeted by 58 percent in South Dakota during the Great Depression — the worst such drop in the nation, according to Brown — but no such precipitous drop has been noted as part of the current economic situation.

The current crisis may be more comparable to the recession of 1981-82, Brown said, than the Great Depression. He warned, however, that the situation is still evolving and could get worse.

For now, Brown said, “To compare what we’re going through with the Great Depression is really not a very valid comparison.”

Tags: dust bowl, great depression