Similarly, I've been reading William Leuchtenberg's Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal: 1932-1940
, and the introductory scene makes clear how different the 30s were:Many lived in the primitive conditions of a preindustrial society stricken by famine. In the coal field of West Virginia and Kentucky, evicted families shivered in tents in midwinter; children went barefoot. In Los Angeles, people whose gas and electricity had been turned off were reduced to cooking over wood fire in back lots. Visiting nurses in New York found children famished; one episode, reported by Lillian Wald, "might have come out of the tales of old Russia." A Philadelphia storekeeper told a reporter of one family he was keeping going on credit. "Eleven children in that house. They've got no shoes. No pants. In the house, no chairs. My God, you go in there, you cry, that's all."[...]"We are like the drowning man, grabbing at every thing that flotes, trying to save what little we have," reported a North Carolinian. In Chicago, a crowd of some fifty hungry men fought over a barrel of garbage set outside the back door of a restaurants; in Stockton, California, men scoured the city dump near the San Joaquin River to retrieve half-rotted vegetables. The Commissioner of Charity in Salt Lake City disclosed that scores of people were slowly starving, because neither county nor private relief funds were adequate, and hundreds of children were kept out of school because they had nothing to wear. "We have been eating wild greens," wrote a coal miner from Harlan County. "Such as Polk salad. Violet tops, wild onions, forget me not wild lettuce and such weeds as cows eat as a cow would not eat a poison weed."
There are times, in my experience, when liberals seem to favor exaggerating crises because the political system responds better to emergencies than it does to problems. But it's a good thing we're not facing down the 1930s! And it's in large part a consequence of the victories -- both intellectual and political -- liberals won in the aftermath of the Depression. If seniors didn't have guaranteed pensions and depositors didn't have FDIC insurance and banks couldn't turn to an empowered Federal Reserve and legislators didn't believe in stimulus this would all be rather worse. And it's that very success -- it's how bad things aren't -- that's actually the best argument for the final pieces of FDR's vision. Hopefully, in a few decades, when we face another recession, a relieved holographic twitterer or cochlear blogger can note that this would all be much scarier if Americans were still in the barbaric period where they couldn't depend on guaranteed medical coverage when the economy suffered its inevitable hard times.
