The story of rigging the American economic system doesn’t start with “What went wrong?” It starts with “What went right?”
America—like much of the world—had a boom-and-bust economy from the very beginning. George Washington was in his second term as president when, in 1796, a real estate bubble and resulting collapse shook the young country and hurtled it into a major financial crisis. Then, one after another, the booms and busts moved in cycles of about twenty years each. Land speculation, currency speculation, railroad speculation, and even speculation about war—all these triggered panics at one time or another. The specific details varied, but the overall pattern was clear. The economy would grow a bit, people would do a little better, and then speculation would start to bubble up. The promise of greater riches was like a song that started softly but soon got louder and more insistent—right up until the moment the music stopped and everyone ran for the exits.
Crashes came hard. They brought down many of the speculators, and millionaires sometimes watched their fortunes disappear with the delivery of a single letter or the loss of one ship. The busts bankrupted farmers as well as small business owners, who were caught short when prices dropped without warning or banks collapsed. The crashes hit factory workers and shop clerks, carpenters and ranch hands, leaving millions without work and struggling to feed themselves and their children.
From the 1790s to the 1930s, America had a boom-and-bust economy.
From the 1790s to the 1930s, America’s boom-and-bust economy was like a natural rhythm of the universe, sweeping in good fortune like a benevolent tide, then sucking it back out again with terrible ferocity.
ROCK BOTTOM
Then the really big one hit. This bust was so big and so thorough, and walloped so many people across this country, that it got its own name: the Great Depression. Thousands of banks failed. One out of every four Americans was out of work. A million and a half people were homeless, and hundreds of thousands of people took refuge in ramshackle camps around the country. Children went hungry, and crowds of people fought over scraps of food in the garbage. Today it is hard to appreciate how much this economic downturn tore through people’s lives.
In my family’s story, the Great Depression was a constant presence, not unlike a powerful but unseen character in a play. Babies’ births and the moves from one town to another were dated before, during, or after the disaster. (My brothers Don Reed and John were born “during,” and my brother David and I were born “after.”) Whenever relatives gathered or when someone was about to throw away an old pair of pants or a tattered armchair that was “perfectly good,” stories about the Hard Times were ready for the telling.
My Aunt Bee was born in 1901 in Indian Territory, in an area that later became Oklahoma. After she graduated from high school, she took a secretarial course and learned typing and shorthand. She worked at different jobs, sharing an apartment with first one friend and then another. She was the single roommate who was left behind as the other young women got married and moved on.
When the Great Depression hit, she moved back in with my aging grandparents, bringing home her pay envelope every week to keep them all going. When her salary was cut in half, she cried—not from the loss of money but from relief that she hadn’t been laid off. Nearly everyone else in the office had been sent home.
Years later, when I was a little girl, Aunt Bee would talk about the exact day the local bank failed. She told stories about people dropping packages and letting go of their children’s hands as they ran to find out the news; she described the crowd gathered outside the bank and the locked doors. My grandfather used to say that after the bank closed, all he had left from a lifetime of working construction were “my tools and the house I built with my own hands.” Aunt Bee’s half pay was their lifeline.
All across America, men who had no jobs and no prospects hitched rides in freight cars, dropping off to hustle up a meal and maybe a little work before moving on. My family lived in one of the hundreds of small towns where the train tracks cut across the prairie.
Aunt Bee said that a handful of strangers showed up nearly every morning at my grandparents’ back door. The men were always polite. They took off their caps, asking respectfully if there was anything they could do around the yard for a little food. She said they were gaunt, with dark circles etched under their eyes and clothes that hung loose: “All skin and bones.”
And that’s when the fights started in our family. “Mama would feed them,” Aunt Bee told me. “Day after day, she would dish up plates of stew or grits or whatever we had.”
Aunt Bee asked my grandmother to stop. She pleaded with her to stop. Finally, she yelled at her: “Stop feeding these bums! We don’t have enough for ourselves, and you’re giving away food.”
Bread lines formed in the cities, and in smaller towns, hungry men went door to door.
My grandmother would say nothing. She would just keep stirring pots on the stove and putting another round of biscuits in the oven. When Aunt Bee went off to work, my grandmother shared whatever they had. And every night Aunt Bee would cross-examine her: What happened to the potatoes she bought yesterday? Why were they running out of lard? Had Mama been giving away food again?
In 1969, my ninety-four-year-old grandmother had a massive stroke. As she lay dying, Aunt Bee sat by her bed for days at a time, holding the old lady’s frail hand. More than once, Aunt Bee told her how sorry she was that she had yelled at her for helping people so long ago. She bowed her head, and the tears fell into her lap.
I was born in 1949, years after the Depression had ended. Even so, I watched up close what Hard Times had done to people. Aunt Bee was the gentlest and most generous soul I knew—much kinder than anyone else in our family. Not only did Aunt Bee keep my grandparents afloat during the Depression, she quietly gave small bits of cash to pretty much everyone else in the family. She always set aside 10 percent of her small Social Security check for the Baptist church, then dug deeper to make contributions for missions and revivals. She dropped coins into every collection box in every grocery store or dry cleaners, and she was there to help every relative or neighbor who got into trouble.
That’s Aunt Bee on the right, with three of her former roommates.
Aunt Bee saved me, too. When I was struggling to hold down a job and take care of two small children and my life was pretty much a mess, Aunt Bee dropped everything in her world and came to rescue me. She lived with us for years, helping out with those two lively (and sometimes obnoxious) children, and I never once heard her raise her voice or even get a little stern. Frankly, she was a pushover, and we all knew it. Even Bonnie, her little long-eared cocker spaniel, would crowd Aunt Bee off the couch while we watched television.
And yet she had yelled at her mother for feeding hungry people, and yelling at my grandmother
