The Great Depression Read Online Free

a harder time during the 1930s than Benjamin Roth and his immediate family. Presumably, those hardest hit left little by way of a permanent record of their experience, because they died of starvation or were silenced by abject poverty. A step up from that level provides us with the Depression images we carry in our collective back pocket: dust-bowl refugees, urban soup-kitchen lines, Tom Joad and The Grapes of Wrath .
     
    The endurance of those images is testimony to their truth, but Roth’s diary insists on an equal truth that is somewhat surprisingly absent from the nation’s 1930s yearbooks. Here is history told from the point of view of the Depression’s dramatically affected, but not its thoroughly trampled. At times—both when government aid is targeted directly at the poor and when a degree of prosperity returns in 1936—Roth seems a bit jealous that very little of the wealth being redistributed is ending up in the coffers of, say, lawyers such as himself. But he does not complain, and he does not propose a bailout for the professional class; instead, he redoubles his effort to understand the cycles of the economy and stock market and how best to invest. His mind is set on the potential for recovery, a particularly American predisposition.
     
    That was not typical of his time; it seems fair to say that no one in the 1930s paid as much attention to the stock market as Benjamin Roth, unless they were actually invested in it. Strangely, though, it is far more typical of our own era, when (depending on how one measures it) about half of Americans have money invested in stocks and when a simple act like sitting in an airport lounge or getting on an elevator can mean being bombarded with opinions of buy, sell, or hold. We are, as a consumer spending-driven, service-oriented, market-led country, more like Benjamin Roth today than we were when he was writing, and certainly more than we are like the steelworkers who were his contemporaries. Benjamin is our CNBC Everyman, transported back in time.
     
    Roth’s work has surprising literary power. He was not a professional writer; he was not immediately expecting a wide audience for these entries, and thus did not load them with fancy words, dazzling metaphors, or aphoristic sentences. (He did, though, have an ear for a cliffhanger ending to the individual notebooks.) Neither was he a trained economist or financial professional; especially in the early years of this diary, Roth seemed to genuinely struggle with some basics of investment and economics. He admirably held no illusions about his acquired expertise. As if constructing a kind of economic palimpsest, Roth would occasionally go back and annotate his earlier entries and did not hesitate to pronounce himself wrong. (Here, this hindsight commentary is indented on the page and marked with all-numeric dates [e.g., 8/13/52] to distinguish it from the real-time entries, where the full name of the month is spelled out.) Perhaps most important, though, Roth did not have the novelist’s or screenwriter’s luxury of knowing where the story was ultimately going.
     
    Yet it is the very limitations of Roth’s expertise that make the diary so compelling to us today. The diary forces us to confront that buried, throbbing sensation that tells us that no matter how prosperous or lucky or cunning the American economy has been for the past century, we still don’t have definitive, universal answers to some very fundamental economic questions, large and small, that almost obsessed Roth. How much debt is too much debt—for a household, a company, or a government? What is the most secure way to guarantee return on an investment without exposure to excessive risk (whatever excessive risk is)? How much can government prop up private enterprise without creating a moral hazard that hinders market dynamism? Why can’t economies continue to expand at a steady, manageable pace without lapsing into destructive boom-and-bust