Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
John Marsh
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Emotional Life ◽  
Emergency Relief ◽  
The Great Depression

The introduction follows Lorena Hickok, a field investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Agency, as she circulated about the country during the Great Depression, reporting back to Washington, D.C. what she discovered about how Americans felt during the decade. They felt, to judge by her reports, despair, anger, and pity. The introduction argues, however, that the emotional life of the period exceeded these admittedly widespread responses, and it lays out what a fuller account of the emotional life of the Great Depression would look like. It also describes and defends the study of emotions against recent challenges—made most forcefully by Walter Benn Michaels—that feelings only distract from a properly structural understanding of capitalism. It discusses, too, the continuing presence of the Great Depression, why it matters, and what an emotional history offers to a renewed understanding of it.

Public Relief and Private Employment in the Great Depression

1981 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Joseph Wallis ◽  
Daniel K. Benjamin
Keyword(s):  
Federal Government ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Federal Budget ◽  
Single Factor ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Emergency Relief ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Private Employment

The unemployment relief programs introduced by the federal government in the 1930s were the largest single factor in the growth of the federal budget over the decade. We develop a model that enables us to estimate the effects of the relief programs on private employment. Cross-sectional data bearing on the operation of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration rejects the hypothesis that the federal relief programs reduced private employment. Individuals did respond to the incentives of relief benefits, but only by moving between relief and non-relief unemployment.

The Emotional Life of the Great Depression

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Marsh
Keyword(s):  
Stock Market ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
American Woman ◽  
American People ◽  
Emotional Life ◽  
Grapes Of Wrath ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Social Security Act ◽  
Structures Of Feeling ◽  
Stock Market Investment

The Emotional Life of the Great Depression documents how Americans responded emotionally to the crisis of the Great Depression. Unlike most books about the 1930s, which focus almost exclusively on the despair of the American people during the decade, The Emotional Life of the Great Depression explores the 1930s through other, equally essential emotions: righteousness, panic, fear, awe, love, and hope. In expanding the canon of Great Depression emotions, the book draws on an eclectic archive of sources, including the ravings of a would-be presidential assassin, stock market investment handbooks, a Cleveland serial murder case, Jesse Owens’s record-setting long jump at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, King Edward VIII’s abdication from his throne to marry a twice-divorced American woman, and the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous. In concert with these, it offers new readings of the imaginative literature of the period, from obscure Christian apocalyptic novels and H.P. Lovecraft short stories to classics such as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Richard Wright’s Native Son. The upshot is a new take on the Great Depression, one that emphasizes its major events (the stock market crash, unemployment, the passage of the Social Security Act) but also, and perhaps even more so, its sensibilities, its structures of feeling.

Remaking the Heartland

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Wuthnow
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Objective Observer ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Changing Times ◽  
Middle West

For many Americans, the Middle West is a vast unknown. This book sets out to rectify this. It shows how the region has undergone extraordinary social transformations over the past half-century and proven itself surprisingly resilient in the face of such hardships as the Great Depression and the movement of residents to other parts of the country. It examines the heartland's reinvention throughout the decades and traces the social and economic factors that have helped it to survive and prosper. The book points to the critical strength of the region's social institutions established between 1870 and 1950—the market towns, farmsteads, one-room schoolhouses, townships, rural cooperatives, and manufacturing centers that have adapted with the changing times. It focuses on farmers' struggles to recover from the Great Depression well into the 1950s, the cultural redefinition and modernization of the region's image that occurred during the 1950s and 1960s, the growth of secondary and higher education, the decline of small towns, the redeployment of agribusiness, and the rapid expansion of edge cities. Drawing arguments from extensive interviews and evidence from the towns and counties of the Midwest, the book provides a unique perspective as both an objective observer and someone who grew up there. It offers an accessible look at the humble yet strong foundations that have allowed the region to endure undiminished.

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