Question

Please outline how the Great Depression offers the most useful insights to present-day Americans from both policymakers and the general public in understanding the world and making choices about how the United States should interact with it?

Answer 1

The Great Depression's most devastating impact was human suffering. World production and living standards plummeted precipitously in a short period of time. In the early 1930s, as much as one-fourth of the labor force was unable to find work in industrialized countries. While conditions began to improve in the mid-1930s, it was not until the end of the decade that total recovery was achieved.

During the 1930s, both labor unions and the welfare state expanded significantly. Around 1930 and 1940, membership of the union more than doubled in the United States. The severe unemployment of the 1930s and the passage of the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act (1935) promoting collective bargaining stimulated this trend. Through the Social Security Act (1935), which was passed in response to the hardships of the 1930s, the United States also established unemployment compensation and old-age and survivor insurance.

Combined with a growing consensus that government should attempt to maintain jobs, this perspective has led to much more liberal policies since the 1930s. Legislatures and central banks around the world are now trying to prevent or mitigate recessions on a regular basis. It is again a largely unanswerable question whether such a transition would have happened without the Depression.

To Americans, the 1930s will always put together memories of breadlines, street corner apple sellers, shuttered factories, rural poverty, and so-called Hoovervilles (named after President Herbert Hoover), where homeless families sought refuge in shelters filled with salvaged wood, cardboard, and tin. It was a time when thousands of teens were drifters; many marriages were delayed and obligations were endless; birth rates declined; and children grew up rapidly, frequently assuming responsibility for adults if not the task of soothing their parents.

Americans have been shocked by their "Great Depression" because they have never had such a widespread economic decline before. That's why they didn't even start talking about the approach to war or the risks of totalitarianism until the end of the 1930s, unlike their foreign counterparts.