The Great Depression Read Online Free Page B

Youngstown today has a fraction of the steel industry and population that it had in 1930; even by the late thirties, the steel industry’s need for cheap water-based transportation had moved much of the area’s production westward to the South Chicago-Gary, Indiana, area, so that shipments could go out via Lake Michigan. In a triumphant document issued in 1950 to celebrate its first half century of existence, Youngstown Sheet & Tube declared that it “looks forward to another fifty years, and then another, ad infinitum, of continued service to its buying public, its employees, its shareholders and its country.” That infinite vision no doubt made sense to the company and even to Roth at the time—this was one of the largest firms in a region that in midcentury was alone producing more steel than, say, France. But in reality the company would not last another two decades on its own, nor Youngstown’s industry as a whole much more than another thirty years.
     
    As I write this in June 2009, General Motors, once the largest private company in the world, has been delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. Benjamin Roth, I think, would probably not have recognized a world in which General Motors was not a major engine of the U.S. economy. Based on his diary, however, I think he would have soon grasped how it could come about. Stock markets and individual sectors may go up or down, for months or decades at a time, but certain broader economic forces—in his time, the international movement of gold or the buildup to war; in ours, deindustrialization and globalization—will always assert themselves.
     

The actual diary page.
     

CHAPTER 1
     
    JUNE 5, 1931-OCTOBER 17, 1931
     
    FOREWORD
     
     
    For the first time in my personal business life I am witnessing a major financial crisis. I am anxious to learn the lessons of this depression. To the man past middle life it spells tragedy and disaster but to those of us in the middle thirties it may be a great school of experience out of which some worthwhile lesson may be salvaged. With this thought in mind I am going to write down brief accounts of developments as they occur from time to time.
     
    JUNE 5, 1931
     
    Benjamin Roth
2032 Elm Street
Youngstown, Ohio
     

VOLUME I
     

PERSONAL NOTES ON THE PANIC OF 1929
     
    BRIEF RESUME OF EVENTS PRECEDING THE PANIC 1931
     

JUNE 5, 1931
     
    I was mustered out of military service on December 5, 1918 and returned to Youngstown to open a law office. I found business humming. The return of thousands of soldiers to civil life had brought a boom to real estate, clothing and other retail trades. When I purchased my first civilian suit I found I had to pay $70 for a suit that might have cost half that amount a few years before. Silk shirts with big candy stripes were in style for the men and the usual price was $10 to $12 for an ordinary shirt. In a similar way shoes and other items were expensive. I was amazed to find mill-workers in Youngstown wearing these silk shirts without a murmur. I also learned that during the war and still in 1919 these mill-workers had earned enormous wages—from $10 to $35 a day.
     
    This feverish prosperity and easy money continued through 1919 and 1920. In 1921 came a steel strike in Youngstown and for awhile it looked as tho we were heading for a depression but in 1922 things picked up again and continued in a hectic spiral upward until the big stock market crash in October 1929.
     
    As I look back now I can understand how America during the years 1919 to 1929 was called upon to supply the needs of both Europe and America—after five years of wartime destruction. In Europe the industries and railroads had been destroyed and America was called upon to rebuild Europe to supply her returned soldiers with food and clothing and other necessities. At the same time the enormous similar demands of our own country had to be satisfied. I know now—but I did not know it then—America also supplied Europe