The Great Depression is all over the news again. Some blame the current economic climate in the United States on the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (1932), which, up until 1999, separated investment from commercial banking activities. In other words, deregulation.
Or, one can go the chart way, as ritzholtz.com does, overlaying the 1929 Dow with the 2000 NASDAQ. The similarities are eerie, and if we follow chart logic, then we have not yet reached rock bottom. The good news: we’re not that far from rock bottom. The bad news: the Dow chart only spikes confidently upward in 1942, after the US has entered a war.
There’s another connection, albeit a somewhat specious one, between Prohibition and the War on Drugs. The argument is specious because repealing Prohibition did not have a positive, immediate effect on the economy. It did not put more money into people’s pockets. But it did, as the organization Law Enforcement Against Prohibition notes, stop the violence that bootlegging created.
Heck, even we at GreatHistory.com know that the Great Depression, one of the defining eras of the last century, should continually be revisited. And just last week Peter Culos wrote about how the recession might be a boon to the arts.
The folks over at the National Endowment for the Humanities look at the more cultural effects of the Great Depression in its July/August issue. Morris Dickstein’s book, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, due out this month, tells us that not all was dark and gloomy, culturally speaking, during the 1930s. In fact, people looked to art, film, literature, music, and other areas of leisure to escape their deplorable economic positions.
Harlem Renaissance, anyone?
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