Historical Image of the Day

Dorothea Lange photo of North Carolina tobacco sharecroppers, 1939.

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Cotton pickers, Arkansas, 1935

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This week's theme is agriculture in American history.

Cimarron County, Oklahoma, 1936

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Clifford Berryman editorial cartoon depicting Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace as Adolf Hitler and American farmers as goose stepping Nazis, Washington Star, February 16, 1938

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"Little Lefty," Cartoon from The Daily Worker, August 6, 1937

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"While Washington Makes Up Its Mind," cartoon by John T. McCutcheon, Chicago Tribune, 1930

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This week I want to focus images displayed and discussed at the excellent website Picturing U.S. History. This is useful stuff for thinking about how to use images in class. In truth, although I have collected these images on the site over the years, I don't have a very sophisticated pedagogy for using them. So this site is helping me think harder about how to use the images.

For the week I am going to highlight images they have collected of artistic representations of the Great Depression and New Deal.

"Forging Ahead," New York Federal Art Project, Works Project Administration poster, 1936-41.

Worst Argument Ever

UCLA economist Lee Ohanian blames Herbert Hoover for the Great Depression---because he was too generous to workers.

I develop a theory of labor market failure for the Great Depression based on Hoover’s industrial labor program that provided industry with protection from unions in return for keeping nominal wages fixed. I find that the theory accounts for much of the depth of the Depression and for the asymmetry of the depression across sectors. The theory also can reconcile why deflation and low levels of nominal spending apparently had such large real effects during the 1930s, but not during other periods of significant deflation.

Right, because workers making money and therefore buying things are irrelevant to the economy. Moreover, Ohanian completely ignores the social realities of 1930s America. Half of Europe was choosing totalitarian regimes and many people in the United States were looking at those options too. This argument, as are the arguments of economists way too often, is completely disconnected from historical context and actual life at the time. In addition, the lesson one might draw from this is that Ohanian also thinks the govenrment should do nothing for the unemployed or working-class in general today, which would be total political disaster, leading to social upheaval and who knows what result.

Absolutely asinine.

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Farmers evicted from their land, near Tyronza, Arkansas, 1930s.

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Rent strikers, New York City, early 1930s.

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As you can see in the caption to the photo, this building was the first office of Local 538 of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen, a local at the Oscar Meyer plant in Madison, Wisconsin.

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Minneapolis truckers' strike, 1934.

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Unemployment Council (a communist organization) led demonstration at City Hall, Tacoma, WA, 1931

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Disney animators strike, 1941

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Receiving supplies, Emerson Sit-Down Strike, St. Louis, 1937.

The Problem with the New Deal

The most frustrating public historical narrative of the last month or so is the right-wing talking machine saying that the New Deal didn't work, that it worsened the economy, or in the words of Republican congressman Steve Austria, that it started the Great Depression!

I've been tempted to talk abou this several times, but as I am not really a New Deal scholar, and as many more qualified individuals around the blogosphere have responded strongly to this (see this great discussion of Eric Rauchway's new book on the New Deal at TPMCafe), I chose not to.

But via Yglesias, Bruce Bartlett nails an important point, even if I don't agree with all the details. The problem with the New Deal wasn't that it was too large and wasteful and led to too much of a deficit. The problem with the New Deal was that it was not nearly large enough to overcome the Depression. Conservatives love to point out that it was World War II that brought us out of the Depression. Yes, but they totally miss the point. World War II was a massive unprecedented government investment and intervention into the American economy. It dwarfed the New Deal in size and scope. That's why it ended it Depression. Instead of understanding this, conservatives just like to make vague connections between war and economic growth, two things they like a lot, and not worry about the details. That other wars haven't led to simiarl economic booms doesn't seem to deter them. But then they are conservatives and are too often blissfully ignorant of reality.

The lesson for current policy makers is that there is a real dangerous of going too small, despite the seemingly huge size of the deficit. I am very leery of drawing too close of connections between the Great Depression and today. 1933 and 2009 are an awful long time apart, the economy and society are incredibly different between the two periods, and there are issues today that no one could have dreamed off 76 years ago. But if we are going to draw lessons from the past for present problems, we might as well actually understand what happened then so that we avoid unnecessary mistakes.

Historical Image of the Day

"Abandoned House, Haskell County, Kansas"

Photo by Irving Rusinow, 1941

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Works Progress Administration project, Utah, 1930s

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Secretary of the Treasury and patron saint of supply-side economics Andrew Mellon (left).

Of course, given that he held the position from 1921-1932, one might think that the supply-siders would not look at Mellon in such a good light. But then what's a Great Depression so long as rich people pay no taxes?