Sunday, November 01, 2015

These Are Not the Old Days I Miss

34 Photos From The Great Depression That Will Leave You Humbled

4 comments:

Deb said...

Great pictures, but crap captions with lots of "Hello, Editor" moments ("dispair", "looking for work in peas", etc.). Of course, I forget that Buzzfeed is aimed squarely at Millennials and this may indeed be the first exposure to the Great Depression for some of them.

Don Coffin said...

I'm an economist and one of my areas is economic history. In US economic history, the Great Depression is 1 of 2 20-ton elephants (the other is slavery). Deb's right about the captions, and it would be possible to do a second (and third and fourth and...) version of this with entirely different photographs. Anyone who idolized Douglas MacArthur should read about how he--against orders--attacked the Bonus Marchers. (That's just a side nasty comment.) We can forget, at this distance, how close things came to a total social breakdown.

But not everyone's lives got worse in the Depression. I could always infuriate my father by pointing out that the only time his family had live-in servants was, in fact, during the Depression...

mybillcrider said...

My parents were lucky during the Depression. My father had a job.

Deb said...

My parents were both born into large working-class families in the east end of London in the mid-1930s. As one of them commented, "We didn't know there was a depression going on, we assumed everyone had always been poor."