Mugged by the Great Depression, my father lived his life waiting for it to happen again
Editor’s Note: To mark Father’s Day, this piece written about my dad in 1983 in The Des Moines Register seems remarkably relevant 25 years later as economic troubles beset a new generation of Americans. Dad would have seen it coming.
By James P. Gannon
For most of his life, my father lived in a psychological shadow cast by the economic catastrophe of his lifetime, the Great Depression of the 1930s.
He was a rising young businessman in Minneapolis in 1929 when the stock market crashed and ushered in a decade that impoverished and baffled him, striking blows against both his physical health and his confidence. Never before a sickly man, he developed asthma in the 1930s and probably had doubts about surviving the Depression, as he watched his business and his modest personal wealth wither in the Depression’s economic drought, just as the crops withered in the dusty failure years.
He survived it, and he later prospered, but he was not unmarked. For the rest of his ample life - all through the prosperous 1960s and into the early 1970s — he waited for it to happen again.
He was convinced that another economic crash would come, despite the strong tide of prosperity that the country rode in those years. Like a man who has been mugged, he walked through the rest of his life glancing over his shoulder, seeing dark visions in the shadows, one hand clasped firmly on his wallet.
The Depression changed his thinking about money, about life. Having lost everything once, he worked feverishly to restore his family’s financial security when given a second chance. He feared debt and hated borrowing. He became a fierce disciple of saving and a stern critic of any non-essential spending.
He lived modestly, and though he was extraordinarily generous to his children, he was miserly when it came to himself. He was a Cadillac of a man, but he insisted on driving Chevrolets. He was sure, in the midst of the country’s most prosperous era, that the politicians would ruin everything with foolish spending, inflation and debt, and thus bring on another economic debacle.
He was right, of course.
He died in 1973, just as everything started coming unstuck. He didn’t live to see the oil sheiks drive up the price of petroleum tenfold (he thought gasoline was high at 33 cents a gallon) and he didn’t live to see the bankers put the prime rate at 20 percent (he was outraged at the thought of a 7-percent mortgage) and he would not have believed farmland at $2,500 an acre (he bought some South Dakota rangeland at $10 an acre and was tickled pink to sell at $40).
He thought a budget deficit was a sin, and he never could have imagined that a President Reagan—Ronald Reagan, the guy he thought was the Great White Hope of the hard-money types!—would be proposing deficits of maybe $200 billion.
He was spared living through what he feared — a decade of roaring inflation that brought on, as he knew it would, an economic bust of high unemployment, business bankruptcies and farmers’ distress. He was as prescient as I was blind, and he would have called all that we have lived through an entirely predictable depression.
And now they say it’s ending, and maybe they are right. There are solid signs of life in the latest economic indicators, and the smart-money boys on Wall Street are betting millions that we’ve survived it all. The U.S. economy appears ready to rebound as lower inflation, lower interest rates and lower oil prices provide some stimulus, just as their opposites provided depressants.
But how will we all emerge from this, psychologically? That’s the question that my father’s example raises now. For we as a nation emerge twice-scarred from the economic turmoil of the past decade. After getting hooked on the inflation drug, can we go cold-turkey into a non-inflationary climate and adjust to it? How do we psychologically adjust to falling farmland prices, falling home prices, declining wage and salary gains?
Now the game has changed, and the new rules of play require a new mind-set. Borrowing more to buy more to cash in on inflation doesn’t work now; you’d better plan to live in that house you’ve got, because you’re not going to be able to automatically cash it in on a bigger one, thanks to inflation.
You can’t plan on a big inflation-driven pay increase any more, either, as millions of workers are discovering. It’s time to lower expectations — if we can. The inflation scar is only half of the psychological adjustment we face. For the many who have lost jobs, lost businesses, lost farms and lost faith in the future, there is the question my father faced: Will there be a second chance?
This depression–let’s not kid ourselves about what to call it — has severely shaken the confidence of millions of working men and women, investors, business executives, farmers, bankers. It will take time to repair that psychological damage.
There is now a new generation of‘ Americans who have been mugged by the economy. If today’s people have the guts and the drive of those who survived the Great Depression, they will survive — perhaps even prosper. But they will not walk away from this unmarked. They will go through life waiting for it to happen again.
Sorry, Dad, I didn’t understand before. Now I do.
This piece is reprinted in my book A Life in Print, a collection of my best work as a journalist, available from Blackwaterpublicatons.com.
-- James P. Gannon
Write a comment