An insight into the great depression.

The Dust Bowl had a major impact in this, too, as you had intra-national migration. Was a perfect storm.

I think I was in my 30s before I found out that 100s of stockbrokers didn't jump out of their office windows.

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Couple of UCLA economists say FDR's policies worsened and prolonged the depression in the U.S. by 7 years.

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When did they say this? I couldn't imagine a current state of California college professor claiming a beloved Democrat would have caused America harm with their policies.

The crash was a symptom, not a cause.

My grandmother was 12 years old when the stock market crashed. She lived in Shreveport where her father worked for Standard Oil. They weren't rich, but they had a few luxuries, including a piano. Nothing changed initially, but by December he lost his job and they all moved back to the old home place where he went to farming and got a part time job as a rural mail carrier. They didnt starve but times were pretty hard and a lot of people had it worse off than them.

My grandfather had to give up his dream of going to college and went to work in the woods cutting cross ties. It was backbreaking labor. He eventually went into sales and was very successful at it but he always regretted missing his chance at college.

The Grapes of Wrath was not a universal experience but to claim there wasnt a lot of hardship is revisionist fake news.

Cadillac decided to sell to black people and black people didn’t trust banks or could deposit so they had more cash after crash. Great Depression fun fact.

I feel like it’s a myth that teachers only teach the overindulgence and the stock market crash. I wasn’t taught that in the 90s and I don’t teach that to my students.

Best book I read on it:

Amity Sclaes’ The Forgiveness Man

That put a dagger in the heart of the myth the New Deal got us out of the depression.

My parents were both in their mid-teens in 1929, so I heard a lot of depression era stories. My mother's family owned a grocery store in in NO, she told me about all the people her dad gave credit, so they didn't go without, especially the Italian community. Of course, immigrant communities had a deep bind, they were from Sicily, as were most of the Italians in NO.

They had a large Italian contingent in north Mississippi, centered around Clarksdale, a lot of Chinese there also. My mother usually spent her summers there picking cotton to help out. A lot of people lost their farms, she said the WPA provided jobs, but not enough. The stories of the dust storms from Oklahoma were harrowing.

My father was from a French family in NO, not Cajun, they immigrated from Marseilles in 1788, his father was a trade emissary to France. I don't think the Depression had a great effect on them. But, one time I threw out a half glass of orange juice and I heard about how much they would have loved to have had that in the Depression, for weeks. I think I was the son that "threw away liquid gold" for a long time.