Historians have since learned that FDR's vaunted New Deal, with its massive new government programs and antibusiness regulations, had done nothing to end the Great Depression. After six years of FDR, unemployment in 1939 still stood above 17%. ~ Arthur L. Herman

The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in 1930 and lasted until the late 1930s or middle 1940s. It was the longest, deepest, and most widespread depression of the 20th century.

CONTENT : A - F , G - L , M - R , S - Z , See also , External links

Quotes

Quotes are arranged alphabetically by author

A - F

The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy. - Milton Friedman.
  • The Great Depression deserves its title. The economic crisis that began in 1929 soon engulfed virtually every manufacturing country and all food and raw materials producers.
    • Nicholas Crafts and Peter Fearon, "Lessons from the 1930s Great Depression", Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Volume 26, Number 3, 2010
  • The singer-songwriter has always played music that was stylistically rooted in the '30s and the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. But the fact of the matter is that none of us remember the Depression firsthand.
  • The average man won't really do a day's work unless he is caught and cannot get out of it. There is plenty of work to do if people would do it.
    • Henry Ford as quoted in The Zanesville Sunday Times-Signal [Zanesville, Ohio] (15 March 1931): On reasons for the Great Depression.

G - L

  • There was something superficial in attributing anything so awful as the Great Depression to anything so insubstantial as speculation in common stocks.
    • John Kenneth Galbraith, Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975) Chapter XIV, When The Money Stopped, p. 183-184.
  • Historians have since learned that FDR's vaunted New Deal, with its massive new government programs and antibusiness regulations, had done nothing to end the Great Depression. After six years of FDR, unemployment in 1939 still stood above 17%.
    • Arthur L. Herman, "The FDR Lesson Obama Should Follow" (10 May 2012), The Wall Street Journal, A15
  • I outlived the bastards.
    • Herbert Hoover, when asked how he dealt with people who blamed him for the Great Depression, quoted in The Court Years 1939-75 (1980) by William O. Douglas
  • In the large sense the primary cause of the Great Depression was the war of 1914-1918. Without the war there would have been no depression of such dimensions. There might have been a normal cyclical recession; but, with the usual timing, even that readjustment probably would not have taken place at that particular period, nor would it have been a "Great Depression."
    • Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Great Depression, 1929-1941 (1952) p. 2: Lead paragraph Chapter 1 : The origins of the Depression.
  • This is a nightmare, which will pass away with the morning. For the resources of nature and men's devices are just as fertile and productive as they were. The rate of our progress towards solving the material problems of life is not less rapid. We are as capable as before of affording for everyone a high standard of life … and will soon learn to afford a standard higher still. We were not previously deceived. But to-day we have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand. The result is that our possibilities of wealth may run to waste for a time — perhaps for a long time.
    • John Maynard Keynes (1930), "The Great Slump of 1930" , in Essays in Persuasion; Referring to economics and the Great Depression.
  • The explanation of this book is that the 1929 depression was so wide, so deep, and so long because the international economic system was rendered unstable by British inability and U.S. unwillingness to assume responsibility for stabilizing it by discharging five functions:

    (1) maintaining a relatively open market for distress goods;
    (2) providing countercyclical, or at least stable, long­ term lending;
    (3) policing a relatively stable system of exchange rates;
    (4) ensuring the coordination of macroeconomic policies;
    (5) acting as a lender of last resort by discounting or otherwise providing liquidity in financial crisis.

    • Charles P. Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929-1939 (2nd ed, 1986), Ch. 14 : An Explanation of the 1929 Depression
  • Although I was not aware of it at the time, the experience of growing up during the Great Depression was to have a profound impact on my intellectual and professional career.
  • The early thirties brought what liberal economists called the great depression and Marxist economists described as the great crisis of capitalism. It dawned on me that the economic world order was unreliable, unstable, and, most of all, iniquitous. I sought intellectual contacts and friendship with a group of socialist students and also with a small handful of communist-oriented students and unemployed workers.
  • If you look back at the 1929 to 1933 episode, there were a lot of decisions made that, after the fact, people wished they had not made; there were a lot of jobs people quit that they wished they had hung on to; there were job offers that people turned down because they thought the wage offer was crappy. Then three months later they wished they had grabbed. Accountants who lost their accounting jobs passed over a cab-driver job, and now they're sitting on the street while their pal's driving a cab. So they wish they'd taken the cab-driver job. People are making this kind of mistake all the time. Anybody can look back over the '30s and think of decisions which would have made millions—purchasing particular stocks, all kinds of things. I don't see what's hard about this question of people making mistakes in the business cycle. From the individual point of view, it's obvious.

M - R

World War II ended the Great Depression with one of the great public-private industrial collaborations in the history of man. - Jon Meacham.
  • And we've had four more years pass where the age cohort that is most Democratic and most pro-statist, are those people who turned 21 years of age between 1932 and 1952--Great Depression, New Deal, World War II--Social Security, the draft--all that stuff. That age cohort is now between the ages of 70 and 90 years old, and every year 2 million of them die. So 8 million people from that age cohort have passed away since the last election; that means, net, maybe 1 million Democrats have disappeared--and even the Republicans in that age group. [...] You know, some Bismarck, German thing, okay? Very un-American. Very unusual for America. The reaction to Great Depression, World War II, and so on: Centralization--not as much centralization as the rest of the world got, but much more than is usual in America. We've spent a lot of time dismantling some of that and moving away from that level of regimentation: getting rid of the draft.
  • Facts are facts: No president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the Great Depression inherited a worse economy, bigger job losses or deeper problems from his predecessor. But President Obama is moving America forward, not back.
  • I think what happened during the Great Depression was that African Americans understood that Republicans championed citizenship and voting rights but they became impatient for economic emancipation.
  • Looking back the great American ‘stabilisation’ [and boom] of 1922-1929 was really a vast attempt to destabilise the value of money in terms of human effort by means of a colossal programme of investment [driven by too easy credit]... which succeeded for a surprisingly long period, but which no human ingenuity could have managed to direct indefinitely on sound and balanced lines. [and therefore it ended dramatically in the huge 1929 stock market crash followed by the Great Depression].
    • Dennis Holme Robertson in "How Do We Want Gold to Behave?." The International Gold Problem, Humphrey Milford (1932): As cited in imagi-natives.com; Also cited in: Murray N. Rothbard (2013) America's Great Depression (LFB) p. 1921.
  • Recovery measures work better when they raise confidence - as Franklin D. Roosevelt understood. His fireside chats, and his inaugural address proclaiming he would fight the Great Depression with the same resolve he would muster against a foreign foe, were aimed at reassuring Americans.
  • I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne. What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.
    • Karl Rove, Remarks of Illinois State Sen. Barack Obama Against Going to War with Iraq (2 October 2002); referencing the positions of former Pentagon policy adviser Richard Perle, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and chief Bush political adviser Karl Rove.

S - Z

  • Oh yes, and it was also valuable that the Chicago I went to was the best place in the world at that time in neoclassical economics. But that does not mean it was the best place in the world to understand the Great Depression. The Great Depression was not Euclidian geometry. I was very sensitive to this mismatch, that is to the fact that what I was learning in class could not rationalize for me that almost every bank in my neighborhoods in Northern Indiana and Illinois went broke and that almost all the money that my older brother had earned to go to college was lost. In a nutshell, about one third of the population had no jobs. And the two thirds who had jobs would not trade with them. The one third without jobs would gladly trade with them or gladly work for even less. But of course they couldn’t do that. To try and handle this kind of disequilibrium system with the historic tools of economics that were in the textbooks I was being assigned was impossible. So you can understand why, then, by complete good luck, I happily got out of Chicago.
    • Paul Samuelson, in Karen Ilse Horn (ed.) Roads to Wisdom, Conversations With Ten Nobel Laureates in Economics (2009)
  • I do not have a theory, nor do I know somebody else's theory that constitutes a satisfactory explanation of the Great Depression. It's really a very important, unexplained event and process, which I would be very interested in and would like to see explained.
  • During the Great Depression, levels of crime actually dropped. During the 1920s, when life was free and easy, so was crime. During the 1930s, when the entire American economy fell into a government-owned alligator moat, crime was nearly non-existent. During the 1950s and 1960s, when the economy was excellent, crime rose again.
  • From 1931 to 1935, I was an undergraduate at Cambridge in my father's old college, Gonville and Caius, which was particularly strong in medicine and the law. However, after two years of law I switched to economics, much to my father's disappointment. At that time the world was in the depth of the great depression and my motive for wanting to change subject was the belief, bred of youthful ignorance and optimism, that if only economics were better understood, the world would be a better place.
  • In the heart of the Great Depression, millions of American workers did something they'd never done before: they joined a union. Emboldened by the passage of the Wagner Act, which made collective bargaining easier, unions organized industries across the country, remaking the economy.
  • For me, growing up in the 1930s, the two motivations powerfully reinforced each other. The miserable failures of capitalist economies in the Great Depression were root causes of worldwide social and political disasters. The crisis triggered a fertile period of scientific ferment and revolution in economic theory.

See also

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