How the American spirit really survived the Great Depression

More than half a decade into the Great Depression, an Indiana commentator published a sad little profile of his fellow American.“Who is the ‘forgotten man’ in Muncie?” the piece asked.“I know him as intimately as I know my own undershirt … He is the little guy that takes odd jobs when he can get them … And there are hundreds of him in Muncie.

They are the original spirit that is America.”That original spirit is what many of us still prize in America, just as we honor the Americans of the 1930s and 1940s when we call them “the Greatest Generation.” After all, they managed to keep that spirit alive through a decade of economic darkness.Our great grandparents were so poor they saved tin cans, old rubber bands, balls of string and bits of gold, which they hid in the mattress.

They had no 401(k)s.Yet the same people sustained hope and rose up, collectively, to defend democracy in World War II.

How?To start, it helps to recall the scale of the downturn that confronted Americans in 1932.One in four was jobless.

The stock market had plunged to close to one-tenth of its old level. That year, a new candidate for the presidency emerged: Franklin Roosevelt, the governor of New York.Many Americans recalled Roosevelt as a military hand, for he had served as assistant secretary of the Navy during World War I.Roosevelt promised to restore the nation by helping the “forgotten man,” whom he defined as “the man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” He demanded a New Deal, broad action to revive the frozen economy.

Action would bring the jobs back, he said.Desperate, Americans got behind him. “If he burned down the Capitol,” said the humorist Will Rogers, “we would cheer and say, ‘Well we at least got a fire started, anyhow.’” Roosevelt did set plenty of fires — launching new programs that did help, or appeared to do so.Deposit Insurance gave Americans a modicum of safety when they placed what they could save in a bank.

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