The Vanishing Americans

April 4, 1994

I’m not referring to that 1920s movie, “The Vanishing American” about the sad history of American Indians, starring then screen idol, Richard Dix – who did not look much like an Apache, Cheyenne, Navajo or member of any other tribe (he did wear a headband).

The theme of this “Musing” is the vanishing Americans of which I am one. My 18th birthday occurred in October, 1929, about three weeks prior to the catastrophic stock market crash which was the specific signal and forerunner of the Great Depression of the 1930s. “WALL STREET LAYS AN EGG” was the full-page headline of the show business newspaper, “Variety.” We vanishing Americans are those who had direct experience and have personal memories of those years of fear, deprivation, and social turbulence. Those who are ten or so years younger than I am have childhood memories and the tales of their elders. Those my age and older are regularly checking out of this earthly sphere. By the dawn of the 21st century, our ranks will be thin indeed.

One of the more difficult tasks of living is to appreciate fully and understand past events of which one has had no personal experience. I do not believe I can communicate the pervasive feelings of despair and insecurity when millions could not find a job. These were not untrained persons – they were educated, trained chemists, engineers, managers as well as skilled craftsmen – carpenters, electricians, shipwrights, all the trades.

Aristides, in his column in “The American Scholar” (Summer, 1993) writes how the famed music conductor, Herbert von Karajan, “who, when asked where he wanted to go by a Paris cabbie into whose cab he had just stepped, is said to have remarked, ‘It doesn't matter. They want me everywhere.’” In the Great Depression, millions were gripped by dread, “It doesn’t matter. Nobody wants me anywhere.”

Relatively, I was well off – [I] had a job. But I knew many not so fortunate. And, while the newspapers and radio could not keep up or deliberately ignored some of the worst events, there were enough communications, rumor and anecdote to create nation-wide insecurity and also to make thousands, if not millions of Americans ask, seriously, if we wouldn't be better off under a Socialist or Communist economic system.

Recognizing that there is no authentic substitute for personal experience, nevertheless I hope that some might read of those tough times to better understand both their own times and “old-timers” such as I am. For starters consider:

REDEEMING THE TIME, Volume 8, Page Smith

THE POLITICS OF UPHEAVAL, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

THE GREAT DEPRESSION, T. H. Watkins

Or assemble your own bibliography.

How bad were things? Just a few citations:

“One vivid, gruesome moment of those dark days we shall never forget. We saw a crowd of some fifty men fighting over a barrel of garbage which had been set outside the back door of a restaurant. Americans fighting for scraps of food like animals.” (Louise V. Armstrong, WE, TOO, ARE THE PEOPLE.)

“At England, Arkansas, a band of 500 farmers armed with shotguns and rifles asked a Red Cross administrator for food. When he told them he had no more requisition blanks, they invaded the town’s stores and the alarmed merchants gave them $900 worth of groceries....” ‘Paul Revere just woke up Concord. Those birds woke up America,’ Will Rogers wrote in his column.” (Page Smith, p. 288.)

A western rancher who lost everything when beef dropped to four cents a pound and the mortgage was foreclosed on cattle and land, said, “Now I’m cleaned out, and by God I won’t stand for it. I’ve played the game according to the rules. I knew cows. I saved my money.... I didn’t booze, gamble, or run around with whores, and still I’m cleaned out and by God I won’t stand for it.” When asked what he intended to do, the rancher answered, “‘That’s what I want to talk to you about. What we’ve got to do is to have this revolution you used to preach about.’ The rancher’s plan was to destroy the bridges over the Mississippi, cutting the East off from the food-producing West, ‘until those damned Eastern high-binders are starved to death.’” (Page Smith, p. 290)

The same historian tells the story of John B. Nichols, head of the Oklahoma Gas Utilities Company, “who proposed having all food left on plates in restaurants scraped into five-gallon containers to be passed out to the unemployed who could qualify for it by chopping wood contributed by farmers (it was not clear what the farmers were going to do for wood, or for food, either, for that matter). Nichols added, ‘We expect a little trouble now and then from those who are not worthy of the support of the citizens, but we must contend with such cases in order to take care of those who are worthy.’”

In an Appalachian mountains school, a child who looked sick was told by her teacher to go home and get something to eat. “I can’t,” the girl replied, “It’s my sister's turn to eat.” (Watkins p. 57)

Some statistics: Arkansas – unemployment rate in 1933: 39%. Missouri, Texas and Oklahoma ranged from 29 to 32%. Oklahoma had a net loss of more than 440,000 in the 1930s. (If you have never read THE GRAPES OF WRATH or seen the classic movie you missed the striking portrayals of the Dust Bowl and the human misery experienced by the so-called “Okies” and other displaced migrants.)

Robert Frost’s “A Question” encompassed the the despair:

A voice said, look me in the stars
And tell me, men of earth
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth.

Radical remedies were proposed and acquired considerable support:

Huey P. Long proclaimed a SHARE THE WEALTH program. The slogan: “Every Man a King.” Income taxes were to be so progressively graduated that no person could have a fortune of more than $5 million. What would the plan provide:

Every family in the country would have five thousand dollars plus an auto, radio, a guaranteed income of two to three thousand dollars – old age pensions, college education for all deserving students, a thirty-hour week, a month paid vacation. By the end of 1933, SHARE THE WEALTH claimed a membership of 4 – 6 million, with 27,431 clubs representing every state in the union.

Did you ever hear of Dr. Francis Townsend? He proposed a system, called of course, THE TOWNSEND PLAN. Every person 60 years or older would receive $200 a month – provided that they did no other paid work and also spend the entire $200 the same month it was received. How [was it to be financed]? By the assessing of a 2% on all goods at each stage of production. Did people like the Townsend Plan? By the end of 1934, there would be more than 5,000 Townsend Clubs with a membership of 2 million.

(These amounts were 1930s dollars – one could support a family on $1,200 to $1,500 a year.)

Then there was EPIC (End Poverty in California). Led by author Upton Sinclair – again, graduated income tax, heavy taxes on corporations, insurance companies, banks. Unused land taxed at 10%. Trade agricultural surplus for goods manufactured in state-owned factories – whole program coordinated by credits and scrip. Sounds weird today – but Sinclair and his running mate captured the Democratic nominations for Governor and Lieutenant Governor. The Republican Party mounted an enormous media effort, heavily financed. Sinclair lost election by only 260,000 votes: Republican Merriam received 1,138,000, Sinclair. 879,000, and a third candidate, running against both, received 302,000 votes.

FDR and the New Deal, in my view and that of many others, prevented some variety of substantial revolution. I have always been both amused and teed off that FDR saved the economic scalps – incomes and fortunes of those who hated and reviled FDR and Mrs. Roosevelt the most.

The Public Works Administration, the WPA, and the CCC may have had their administrative flaws, but [they] quieted substantial amounts of social unrest.

The Social Security Act of 1935 was in some aspects a response to and compromise with the TOWNSEND PLAN. Incidentally, the Social Security Act originally included National Health Insurance! But pressure from the AMA succeeded in eliminating such provision from the Act. (Now, 59 years later, we are again futzing around with National Health Insurance. I’m extremely doubtful that anything much will happen. The profits of the large insurance companies and (again) the pressures of the AMA are Golden Calves still worshiped.)

So what advice does this member of the vanishing Americans offer? Not much. The human family has always had to endure pain, grief and hunger in the midst of plenty. Will Durant, the famous historian, when asked if history has any irrefutable lessons, he replied with three sayings:

The mills of the gods grind slowly but grind exceeding small.

The bee fertilizes the flower it robs.

It is in the darkest night that the stars shine brightest.

And, I would add Pogo's profound insight, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”