The Untold Stories Of The Great Depression | When The World Breaks | Timeline

one of the great privileges of working at history here and making films together with our team at timeline is the access we get to extraordinary historical locations like this one stonehenge i'm right in the middle of the stone circle now it is an absolutely extraordinary place to visit if you want to watch the documentary like the one we're producing here go to history hit tv it's like netflix for history and if you use the code timeline when you check out you'll get a special introductory offer see you there [Music] do [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] do [Music] my father would drive me out he was incident my father was sometimes here sometimes not here he was really gone from the time i was about four but he'd show up from time to time and take me out for a ride in the car with a rumble seat but we drive out towards newark airport and it was called shantytown and there would be a couple of acres of tents and you'd see little bonfires and there were men who had left their homes or they couldn't support their families and they weren't vagrants because they lived there and these were people who didn't have any money and they had shame there's a lot of shame the the depression if there's another word to use to describe it was it was fraught with shame [Music] times was so bad at for everybody and so we were no different i remember one time my mother said to my father he was a cab driver there's no milk on the table don't you go out and hack bring in some money he says nobody's getting in taxis these days they can't afford it she says go out hold up a bank my father went out an hour and a half later came back he threw a quarter on the table he said here buy some milk he started to cry [Music] and my mother would sit there and look at him someday watching watching him smoke a cigar she said who do you think you are with the cigar rockefeller she came over and she broke the cigar from that point on my father smoked a pipe all comedy comes out of tragedy which is you know it's a shock it's a a social shock and it's a terrible thing for people to just have the rug pulled out but that's when human creativity sprouts it's forced have to do something about this gotta eat so where do we start they used to say my father couldn't work that was this they called that stock lines everybody used the same line he couldn't work there was no food in the house we couldn't pay the rent and the landlord was going to dispossess us and then came the depression [Music] and people left it was created from that period new york october 1929 everything was calm and peaceful in this great city then suddenly the bottom dropped out of wall street but were the brokers discouraged no they knew prosperity was just around the corner some preferred white bread some whole wheat others rye the birds had little choice i was born an orphan i didn't have any home so i was one of the kids who grew up coming out of absolute poverty i didn't have any future i didn't know what i wanted to be so i started hitchhiking across the country to see what would happen this was in 1929 in june 1929. and i hitchhiked up the coast to walla walla washington and then i wanted to cross the rockies and that was tough on hitchhiking so i started becoming a hobo on railroads i wrote freight trains across the country always kept going i had no money whatsoever with me maybe five dollars and every time there was a job offered i took it whether i knew what to do with it or not two bucks a day for this all i have to do is walk up and down turn the light on i don't know is this your regular job no no i don't believe in regular jobs i do this for a friend of mine i sub for him on his night off and all you got to do is walk up and down here that's all is it all right if i walk up and down with you sure it's a free country in it i got to new york i was sleeping in the ymca gym in brooklyn and there was a job open as a typist and i was on wall street and i was working away at it every day in august and july and then along came october and this was a great turning point in my life on october 29 1929 the depression the great depression started and they couldn't keep up with the way the markets were falling and prices were changing you couldn't sell your stock even if you wanted to and you knew it was going down because you couldn't get the you couldn't get the thing the message through everything was jammed the the people in the office at the national city bank of new york where i worked were all crying because they'd all invested all of their savings on them on wall street wherever you looked boys and girls were men and women were wondering what was ever going to happen to them and i was wondering a little about it but i was wondering that since the time i was born so i had an advantage over the rest of them contending with modern economic difficulties requires quite as high courage and as much enterprise as was displayed by men and women of covered wagon days i was born in brooklyn new york on a boarding house table and my father had come from glasgow scotland was in the first world war and he became a comic and i stayed in burlesque at the time uh their people wanted to laugh there was nothing to laugh about and they got together and said let's have a burlesque show what's that these gags and dance group and this and that my mother brought me to california she in a broken down car and she said i've got a feeling my son wants to be something so we traveled there were no hotels or anything we slept on dirty dirty mattresses it wasn't easy and no roads no maps are we on the way to california i think it's down that way you know that it was rough on my mother [Music] i remember being born so i have a total recall of all of my life when i was 19 years old i went to the greyhound bus to get on the bus i looked in the united cigar store window and there was a copy of a book there called grapes of wrath by john steinbeck i bought grapes of wrath got on the bus and rode through the dust bowl on highway 66 reading about in the book the book was something and steinbeck spoke to me so when i wrote the martian chronicles i borrowed the ideas for the martian chronicles from the grapes of wrath i remember trying to think about how i could take my bicycle and how i could put some wings on the sides of it maybe get a little bit of lift as i pedaled along and of course i built cockpits out of orange crates and and cans and things that resemble the throttle and here i've never even been in an airplane but but it was uh kind of make-believe and in those days you listened to the shadow and the creaking door and you you you didn't have the imagination stolen from you by the visuals of television you had to imagine all these things the the thing that was amazing about the times that we'll never see them again was that people were in my opinion heroically passive they just took whatever life handed them they obeyed the law as much as possible except when it came to feeding their families then they would steal or they would do anything that they had to do to survive i remember stealing food that bring home i remember looking behind the markets the garbage cows looking for were like like they had lettuce and still had some good leaves on them you know we did those things to stay alive and my father took off my my mother remarried and the stepfather who was the kind of had that kind of ethic that the man worked you know the woman cooked the man worked and there was no work there was no work and that impacted on him and he turned just vicious suffering from that so the whole family unit suffered in so many ways the great depression of the 1930s is is not just another commodity bubble or price bubble it's it the reason it was so deep and lasted so long is because there was a convergence of so many things happening there was the great bubble in stock prices of course the 1920s that's what causes the stock market crash but we've seen stock market crashes of kind of comparable proportions without the ensuing great economic chaos so there's something more and deeper at work here in the 1930s and to be honest about it economic historians do not agree to this day about exactly what happened i remember when the banks closed in 32 and my mother called my brother and me and we were all playing in the yard she said i have bad news and i thought maybe a cherished relative had died or something and she said the banks have closed and you will not see the money that you have in the bank anymore because we'll probably never get it back we didn't have social security we didn't have a lot of the things that people have to date you know to guide them through rough times so it was uh i mean you were totally on your own i was guessed i was about 11 years old 1936 when a lot of people came to california from oklahoma and that you know the dust bowl but growing up in the area we like some of our friends we like to say we were poor but we didn't know it because everybody was poor i think maybe the oaky's made it because of sheer determination but if you didn't have any money and you didn't have a car that you'd have how are you going to make that move it was too tough although i do know one family who made it very successfully in canada and they told me stories of how they piled i think five or six kids the mother and the father the car with all their earthly belongings with frying pans and stuff hanging from the sides of the car just like the oakis did and they stopped off in little places and eventually one son was deposited in regina another one saskatoon another one in calgary they each tried to make their own way in various parts of canada it was you know charles dickens once showed us it was the best of times it was the worst of times believe me it was the worst of times people walking around without eating there's no need to talk a history of what happened in terms of the very famous rich who you know what happened to them but the the real the real you felt like the country was going down [Music] we lost our house in 1933 and they were thrown out on the street and it certainly is one of the most awful moments of my life ever and my father was not a worldly man when everybody was making money in the stock market and everybody was and people were saying gee joe what are we what do you do with him and i i got it he was keeping it in the house hidden and they said you know that's crazy the house compared down invested well he didn't know so he invested in 1928 i think he invested an electric bond and sharing anaconda copper and of course he bought on the margin as everybody did i mean that's what they they thought that was the way to do it and they were encouraged to do it by the brokers and when everything collapsed we lost everything and then we my father was never the same man [Music] and we were having lunch and a man that they knew a man at the bank who handled the mortgages came in and he said what are you people doing here and my mother said i'm not going to mention his name because he still has family in wilkes-barre my mother said mr x we're having our lunch would you like to sit down and have something to eat and he said you can't have lunch here this is not your house this is my house my father just by this time was just gone he just and my mother said my mother's a very strong woman very brave woman and she said she said well mr axa it's our house we live here it's our house he said look it's not your house and he went and he spit on the rug and with that i mean everybody just called the family just collapsed and we were herded out of the house our furniture was taken out everything was taken out of the house put on the street most of which disappeared shortly thereafter we went my mother had a sister who was married to a very decent man who was an old socialist and didn't believe in the stock market or you know profiting by anybody else's labor and he had a small furniture store in west pittston pennsylvania and uh we want to live with them i grew up in the depression but when you have nothing to contrast it with and all your neighbors are living the same way you don't know you're in a great depression or even a mild depression but one of our saving graces and i think this is true of many people around that time in a rural or a semi-rural area we had a very big garden which is twice as big as our house and we raised a whole lot of vegetables and so all summer we're living out of the garden and uh in a sense food is free in that way uh we raised chickens we had 25 chickens we didn't kill them very often because then you don't have as many eggs and i one of my chores was to gather all the eggs which happened daily and the family couldn't eat more than six or eight ten eggs a day and so we would give them to neighbors and it wasn't like i'll give you this if you give me that it was just here take some eggs and at other times they bring you milk if they had a cow that's how these programs work in the third world countries where they give a family a goat and that's not just they have milk they get enough milk for neighbors and in that way they can barter for other things and sometimes you can start a small business like a little dairy or something curiosity and challenges is what i think this work ethic produced you had to move on and you had you had to be creative you had to have a creative mind well things looks pretty tough but it ain't gonna be this way all the [Music] time the depression was a depression in the physical economic sense but in the social and the cultural and the spiritual sense it was a stimulation struggle and strife and trauma and tragedy are great sources of our greatest strengths and one way is that in current evolutionary thinking our basic social tendencies to to cooperate to trust to uh to sacrifice and to give are are a product of our collective sociality responding to struggle and and and threat right and so when we enter into historical times where there is resource deprivation or there are threats it's it turns out on and people feel routinely you know in the great depression or during wartime or during you know economic troubles people feel immediately this bonding tendency that's a great product of times of strife even now we are not so much divided as we are disconnected if we just power come from connection plug it in and you receive power so i enjoy connecting i have a hundred and six grandchildren including the president he is one of my god children 106. you know why because i listen i pray with them i talk with them i give them directions we got to go back to being parents my daddy just didn't and mama didn't raise me everybody in my community raised me i remember you you know in those days people would help each other you know if this person had something you didn't have you know you trade it for it or give it to her you know and you know that really brings out the best in people i opened my first official gym in oakland in 1936. so i was the first one to have women working out with the weights i was the first one to have old people working out with the weights i was the first one of athletes working out with the weights the word got around that joshua and he's done nut he's a crackpot you know got women working out with the way he's getting athletes working out with the athletes they'll get muscle-bound the old guy that'll drop a heart attack you can't believe what i went through boy it was tough not only to open the first gym and everything but then going through the depression so people had no money but that's how i started see i wasn't thinking of depression i was thinking of helping [Music] [Applause] [Music] is people a racket i ask you my low sell high five [Music] [Applause] i got a job in 1929 as i just graduated from high school as a messenger at salomon brothers and hustler i was one of the few people who got out of wall street in time because by september 1st i had to go to college so i got out of wall street and was out of it for four years my father was a insurance broker and agent and had a small business with very few employees and one day he came home we sat down at dinner and he said i just had to fire someone and this really upset me terribly and at that point he broke into tears i had never seen my father cry you know in those days ben didn't cry you know you weren't supposed to show your feelings or all the nonsense that prevails but i've never forgotten that i mean it upset him terribly and that he had to fire some this man because and he had to because he didn't have the income you know to pay the salary it was just or else he couldn't have brought home enough money to feed us in 1945 in november i came back from the war and i was in my air force uniform still i went back home see my mother and father we're driving around and i suddenly look in the corner of the bank and there i see mr x and i said hey hold it up for a minute will you i was 23 years old and i was just in great shape and i walked into the bank and i said mr x do you remember me he said no no what is it he said i'm busy and i said oh just this and i spit and he stood up and i hit him and it was it's crazy it was just one of those crazy moments i looked around and i was smiling and i looked and everybody was like this nobody moved nobody stopped me he was on the floor i said that's what you did to my mother and father it was the most satisfying day of my life ever ever still to this day there was a guy down the street who had a candy store candy store was always the center of life and his name was joe he was a very good looking guy always had a smile on his face he wore nice clothes and the nice thing about joe was if you in those days the daily news was two cents and i think on sunday was a nickel or whatever it was and uh you came in on saturday and you got the brooklyn section but you didn't have to pay for the for the paper until you got there on sunday and joe would always let you have the brooklyn section assuming that you would get the rest of the paper on sunday and pay the rest of the money so he was like you know sweetest man in the world one day we woke up the store was closed what happened joe hung himself we always i mean really i mean it's it still comes back this why i don't know couldn't pay the rent whatever it was uh those were some of the things that happened i think to so many people at that time everybody had a story [Music] from the time that the united states entered the era of the industrial revolution the early 19th century there were periodic gigantic swings in the business cycle and what we're called commonly depressions uh in the 1830s the 1850s the 1870s the 1890s a pretty sharp one in 1921 although it was quite brief so the great depression of the 1930s is not all that unfamiliar an episode except it's grander in scale and it lasts longer than the previous ones and there has been nothing comparable to it since you know it was just an abysmal event it was essentially a lost decade i mean there's a lot of workers uh in their prime working years that you know lost 10 12 15 years of a work history because of that it's almost like a murder mystery you know we all have our favorite who done it um and and the great depression is really about you know who killed the economy there was a whole generation of great economists who were brought into the economics profession precisely because they perceived that something had gone very wrong with our economic system and they wanted to understand what had gone wrong and furthermore try to figure out how to fix it so that sort of thing wouldn't happen again and the key to preventing a great depression is making your financial institutions fireproof if you like it used to be we built our cities entirely of wood we crowded everybody together and you could have things like the great fire of london at the end of the 17th century devastates a huge amount of the city and a lot of people you know lose their belongings and and many of them lose their lives so you want to build something much more like a modern city which has different kinds of structures more fire breaks more fire houses more fire engines and that's what we want to do with our financial system also there is no natural process which updates our regulations that historically something goes badly wrong and then we recognize that regulation got behind you know when we have these these times of crisis you know it's particularly important to think about all of these different dimensions and i think that most of the economic policy debates are focused on how do you deal with regulating financial markets and so forth and that's very important but you need to go beyond that to how do you have a more durable society in which when crises do happen you have a better safety net for people's lives if you're going to function you have to be certain about some things you have to be pretty certain about who you trust who loves you where the next meal is going to come from and what you're going to do if it rains you have to have that stuff figured out so that you can take risks and grow and all the other things that are so much fun to do now when that stuff gets disturbed it's physically and emotionally terrible there's a wonderful study that research teams went around the country doing these in-depth interviews and they're trying to discover all kinds of things about how the depression that affected people psychologically there was one consistent finding that they found in case after case after case that the unemployed man felt personally guilty and ashamed and mortified embarrassed humbled that he had been put in this situation now we can look back historically and think well wait a minute this unemployed man we're talking about here should have looked around him and seen there were 12 million 999 999 other people unemployed and it wasn't that he had suddenly personally failed or lost his moral fiber but the reflex of all kinds of unemployed people was to blame themselves for their situation and not to blame the system so this was an impediment to collective political action it was something franklin roosevelt remarked repeatedly to his campaign entourage during the presidential campaign of 1932. he said this is the worst crisis this country has faced since the civil war and why aren't people in the streets why aren't they rioting why aren't they demanding a political response to this [Music] in contradiction to the popular notion that the population of america was passive for the most part during the worst days of the great depression the opposite was true in chicago for example among african-americans it was not uncommon in the first full year of the depression 1930 to find hundreds of black men assembling in washington park on the south side discussing their plight and what they should do about it in august of 1931 over a thousand people maybe 5 000 marched on a home where a widow was about to be set out by the police and the sheriff's bailiffs and those thousands of people prevented her furnishings from being put on the street unfortunately uh there was a scuffle the police drew their weapons and killed three other demonstrators whites joined blacks in a massive march down south state street that had over 30 000 marchers parade past the funeral home where the bodies of the three deceased lay you tie that in interracial marches with the mid-1930s efforts of labor unions who are organizing in the mass production industries and you've got a blending of interests and the overcoming temporarily at least of past racial tensions in the 30s and this sort of sets the stage in the north for dr king being able to be successful we created in a sense parallel institutions parallel social institutions political institutions economic institutions cultural institutions which gave those of us who were young a feeling that we could have fun and if we were serious about the future we'd go to school we though we were poor we were not poverty stricken and there's a difference one is a condition in which you happen to be one is an attitude that one day things are going to change and you're going to be the beneficiary if you just continue stay out of trouble and get the kind of qualifications educationally in other words that will be needed to change your position so most of us of that generation at that time did that [Music] i was born in a house as opposed to a hospital segregated hospitals uh to segregate the graveyard so from womb to tomb we faced segregation and that meant not only the separation also meant restrictions of access to education and healthcare and job and development so we lived in the shadows of the great depression so most blacks during that period either knew living grandparents were big in slavery or there were many ex-slaves were still alive so the least educated the most vulnerable uh had took the greatest hit and is it it's an intergenerational continuity people who try to slice and dice history miss the fact that god does not miss one day since you start making days they're all connected so much of the art of the 30s literature and visual art is is rooted in an interest in uh understanding what's happening during the depression and particularly you know at the outset of it when 25 of americans were unemployed and this is you know this is a huge number and had a a devastating impact on people's lives and artists were responding to that impact uh even the artists who were carried over from the 1920s like ernest hemingway may be the best example of this hemingway was writing about individuals during the 1920s and the problems of individuals in the 1930s he continues to write these kinds of stories but then he writes a story about the spanish civil war for whom the bell tolls and he writes to have and have not in which in which the the main character concludes after you know terrible terrible events during the novel a man alone doesn't have a chance so their sense of the collective the need for other people to depend upon on on their fellows is something that comes up uh in in that literature even in the literature of people like hemingway who came in from the 20s it's very obvious in literature of steinbeck of course who's you know maybe the preeminent writer or the one who characterizes and in some ways caricatures the whole culture of the 30s one of the few songs at that time that really at least the broadway songs that that really hits the depression full-on i mean talks about it in no uncertain terms brother can you spare a dime is a very very powerful song written by yip haberg and jay gurney and both were card-carrying communists i don't say that disparagingly it's just a fact but they were in central park trying to think of a topic for a song and they ran across a man or obviously a harvard educated an ivy league man but he was down in his luck he was wearing evening clothes and he came up to up to them and surprised them by saying brother can you spare a dime and i thought that's that's the great title that's the way the story goes but it's a good song many ways great words and it refers back of course to world war one to the it's all about a guy who was a soldier in world war one and you know the american government uh really did the dirty on on on the soldiers the doughboys who'd fought in world war one they promised them a bonus at the end of the war they were getting this money and they never gave it to them and of course in the 1930s when hoover was still president we have the famous bonus army marching right the way across the country and setting up their tents outside the white house and the army actually being brought in to drive them out i mean physically violently drive them out but this song directly talks about those soldiers once in khaki suits gee we look swell full of that yankee doodle dumb half a million boots went slogging through hell and i was the kid with the drum i like that line i say don't you remember they called me al i mean so that's a great detail they call me al it was al all the time say don't you remember i'm your pal brother can you spare a dime very powerful song to a minor key eastern european jewish melody i mean very powerful stuff indeed but of course uh harbour went on to write a piece of call it fluff but certainly an escapist song somewhere over the rainbow you know like great all great songwriters they can write all kinds of material oh we ain't got a barrel of money maybe we're ragged and funny but we'll travel along singing a song side by side and you know people went on to sing that song in a very jolly fashion but actually the words are are very touching and in fact darkly touching and the the verse which nobody knows is um see that sun in the morning peeking over the hill i bet you know it always has i guess it always will that's how i feel about someone somebody feels about me we know we love each other and that's the way it'll always be and then it goes on with that we ain't got a barrel of money maybe we're ragged and funny we'll travel along singing a song side by side you know if i have my honey you know we just stick together and have spunk we'll we'll make it and it actually comes out of the music even more than i ever realized you know i realized in my shows you know halfway in i'll let everybody know you know this got everybody through the depression last time where do you live we moved from where uh near my aunt's house oh you see uh my aunt lived a little bit away from where we used to live she's a widow her husband died that's how she came to be a widow the stock market didn't kill him no he's one that the stock market didn't kill he died in september bc before the crash very sick man he had diabetes at 45 that's nothing i had chrysler at 110. eddie cantor was really one of the people who really changed our lives because he was on radio on sunday nights at eight o'clock and uh when he got on the air during the worst parts of the depression when people had no jobs there was no food on the table he would sing like potatoes are cheaper tomatoes are cheaper now's the time to fall in love he was encouraging people to fall in love oh well that was nice but he himself had gone through a very tough time he lost his home he lost his money and they were moving furniture out of his house and he was still able to go on radio and start cheering people up for those few minutes that we saw those guys do their stuff uh the whole world was full of hope say bye cracky that reminds me of something i forgot to remember listen next time you folks have to give a present to a bride and groom be sure you make that present in aladdin kerosene made a lamp now they can court in the dark before they get married you know after a while they get fed up on them they need a little light that letter from a father says here he had a falling out with his gal and he he wrote me he wanted me to sing i only want a buddy not a sweetheart i'll sing it for him but i bet a dollar he changes his mind what is that's a good example of a early broadcast now these were called syndicated shows uh they're 16-inch transcriptions uh each 15 minutes per side and these were pressed out by uh whoever put them out for the sponsor and they were sent out to whatever radio stations subscribed and wanted to play these shows and this quite obviously was very uh as aimed at a rural population and a population that would be interested in buying uh lamps because they they didn't have electricity at that point uh this is a sample of a show from the coconut grove orchestra here in in los angeles which was the preeminent nightclub certainly on the west coast and then one of the the world's you know prominent nightclubs uh so here's how the here's what the better half would be listening to so to speak this enchanting music has thrilled your favorite star and guided their dancing feat in gay fantasy while on the farms some people have to depend on lamps for their lighting uh here in los angeles and other part metropolitan centers uh even during the depths of the depression uh people were still having a good time you know it was not as though the entire population was destitute or anything like that you know it it certainly affected some people more than others my uncle by the way was a songwriter at that time his name was stanley damerel and he was writing in the depths of the 1930s depression in england and he he wrote songs of a complete escapism that one of them is sung today he wrote lady of spain i adore you and let's all sing like the bird is sing and he once explained why he wrote these songs well he said my partner and i said we couldn't compete with these american slick american love songs that always seemed to take place on a couch indoors so my partner and i decided we need to do songs that were about the outside like lady of spain and my uncle told me that things were so bad that some of his songwriting colleagues you have to listen very carefully to this some of his colleagues were forced to pawn pawn their own underwear which is something you can't get much lower than that pawning your underwear [Music] [Laughter] among the rugged peaks that frown down upon the borgo pass are found crumbling castles of a bygone age hollywood was at that time a little town a little country town you know and it was wonderful i loved it the movies kept going and well people needed something else you know and have their minds taken off their tragedy that goes on every day and until they get jobs we're six cents for children and 11 cents for grown-ups there was a penny tax and i remember you standing in front of the theaters and when an adult would go in with their 15 cents they'd get four pennies back and you'd say can i have one of your pennies mister to get into the movie and they most people gave you the penny but every now and then some big sport would give you four cents so you were well on your way into the movie of course then once you got in you opened the door down at the bottom and let two or three of your friends in and then there was a scramble always because when you open the door the light from the outside was usually during of course it was matinee the light from outside would come in and like ushers would come scrambling to find the kids who just got in there were the coming attractions which we still have that's all we have left of the way people used to go to the movies but when they back then they would see short subjects like a comedy short with laurel and hardy uh they might see a serial chapter you know a western that was continued next week they might see a news reel they would see a cartoon there were travelogues you know there were all sorts of of these subjects and people were just used to that seeing a whole variety of different shorts and then the big picture a full feature movies in the 30s ran the gamut from extreme poverty row things there were guys making westerns for 900 bucks you know there were big pictures that gone with the wind that were made for multiple millions studios were making 40 50 60 pictures a year a star could make two or three or four films a year director's the same so today a filmmaker might make a film every two or three years whereas john ford in 1939 1940 made six you know major classics that are considered today young mr lincoln drums along the mohawk grapes of wrath how green was my valley stagecoach all within a very brief span of time and of course the musicals too you know the gold diggers of 1932 the 1933 and all the girls came out you know all had blonde hair and all buzzfeed berkeley dance routines very glamorous and i grew up and we all did we all grew up with this fantasy world movies were important i saw things to come the film by h.d wells it came out in 1936 and when i saw that film i staggered out of that film i said the future is going to belong to me i'm going to make the future oh god is there never to be any age of happiness is there never to be any rest rest enough for the individual too much and too soon and we call it death but for man no rest and no ending he must go on conquest beyond conquest poor humanities so fragile so weak little little animals little animals if we're no more than animals we must snatch each little scrap of happiness and live and suffer and pass it is this or that all the universe or nothingness which shall it be which shall it be well one of the things i think that has been misstated about films of the 30s in the past is that um the movies provided escapism and it's true there were a lot of things like fred astaire and and musicals and comedies w.c fields and bob hope and the marx brothers provided escapist entertainment what's the show about it's all about the depression we won't have to rehearse that but there were just as many films perhaps that dealt with the reality of the depression but they have not been the ones that have been revived because they're some of them are pretty grim the wizard of oz the book and especially the movie were also about monetary policy about deflation there not being enough money so the word oz is short for ounce there's the yellow brick road the gold question which was so salient in that period the very dark part in the beginning the black and white part that's how people felt about monetary policy they knew there wasn't enough money but they also knew they viewed it as like the weather there's nothing they could do about it it was like a storm coming and they just had to weather it the character dorothy she finds her own way this disastrous situation and she manages sort of by luck to slay at least one witch and then another by by cleverness and she actually manages to uh tame the wizard so tame the money and that was kind of a fantasy everybody points to the 30s as the great golden age of the filmmaking process but remember that the great filmmakers of the 30s they had learned their craft in silent films the craft of visual storytelling i remember my mentor alfred hitchcock saying that with the advent of sound we lost the art form of the moving image the talkies came in there was a greater sense of realism silent films had been almost dream-like in the way they presented their stories and and sound brought broader realism to the movies and there you saw that manifested in things like gangster pictures and backstage dramas and you saw more stories about working-class people as well as fantasy escape things with with uh rich folks in jeopardy [Music] into a cigarette and pump your blue [Music] [Music] people expected a cartoon with their movie show you could have you could leave out the newsreel you could leave out the two real comedy but you had to have a cartoon in fact there's a famous 1930s song that's called what no mickey mouse what kind of program is this and that was a song that was popular because it was a theater theater didn't show a cartoon that's what it was about disney was moving animation from this what they call rubber hose crazy style of drawing to a more realistic style of storytelling and all the studios followed disney but in the early 30s the depths of the depression those cartoons are particularly like psychedelic they're they're mind-blowing me me you funny little good for nothing me me am i the guy [Music] there's no realism here and the stories themselves are sort of these guys were just making it up as they went along storytelling even as in a short cartoon wasn't sophisticated as it would be ten years later when they made bugs bunny cartoons and daffy duck cartoons in this early 30s period they might start the story in one place and go outside and then suddenly they're going somewhere else they would just came up with these stories and they would just kind of draw them you know free form you know stream of consciousness that's how they look [Music] my first paycheck is from really paycheck it's from walt disney studio i was on bambi for three and a half years so that was never ideal they didn't pay me very much but then i loved the job i going back to the wa i remember s mcdonald's senator mcconnell wright he was a director i bought my painting and showed it to him so we get paid 96 a month so you turn turn into oil painting into watercolor or l4 lithograph so that's like getting into the wpa that's a good thing that that saved a lot of artists you know from solving dead the sensitive fingers of artists are poorly suited to manual labor and in finding suitable work for musicians and other artists the wpa has contributed greatly to the culture of america painters too contribute their bit to making the works program a real and permanent accomplishment these reproductions of the american scene of today will make this one of the most fertile periods of our country's art [Music] some of this work is done on canvas but much of it is created on the walls of our schools libraries and other public buildings in the form of mural paintings [Music] the fact that the government would experiment with the idea of putting creative people to work and and and getting a public good out of it uh was really piloted here at koi tower in san francisco it really was the pilot program that helped to launch the wpa the works progress administration's use of artists so the 26 artists who got involved and were commissioned to create these murals here at court tower were really the pioneers sort of the experiment that that worked and then it allowed public art to spread across the whole country it's a school of art called social realism and that's most of what's depicted in in these murals and social realism was really about capturing everyday life and helping to tell the story of the average person um as opposed to just what you know the news and the media sort of uh would sort of highlight back then and even today which is the story of the great man right the captains of industry and there is a an opportunity of creating community when you deal with a lot of public art and that's certainly been the philosophy of many of the murals that we have been commissioned by the arts commission over the years here in san francisco we are at lucy flower high school and this is the foyer of the school and this mural was created between 1938 and 1940 by edward millman he was an artist that was on the wpa and he wanted to create a mural about outstanding american women and at the same time he was studying a lot about the mexican muralist movement and prior to creating this he had actually gone to mexico and studied with diego rivera in 1934 so when he was sort of building the agenda for this image he wanted to really promote that kind of social realism within this sort of temple that you see here it took him two years to complete this image and then one year later it was deemed by the board of education as misery laden and depressing so they whitewashed it one year later this image is probably the most controversial in the city of chicago because it was so heavy and it was talking about so many core truths to what was happening at the time and you know the important thing to remember is artists are like a barometer of what's happening they record what's going on they tell these stories in creative and imaginative ways and when that kind of philosophical and intellectual creativity is covered up that's that's something that is really hard to take so when you walked into this room it was completely white in 1996 and so we did test after test to try to figure out how to unveil this powerful image it was a pretty magical time for us that was in 1997 and it took us about nine months to move throughout this entire room and then we had an unveiling ceremony and it was all about unveiling the history that it encapsulated so yes it was very precious to all of us involved and remain so and one of the main themes that emerge is in in in the arts of the 30s and the whole culture of the 30s is is the one that hemingway eventually comes to that the individual alone doesn't have a chance and so this idea that people need other people that the individual can be broken but then maybe stronger but but but so much of the of the art of the period was moving toward a sense and and the politics of the period moving toward a sense of the necessity politically for empathy for care for you know brotherhood for collective action whether it's in strikes or in you know the implementation of a social security system at the same time it's you know also strongly resisted by by by a whole other you know political set so so the 30s becomes a really polarized period politically you know between uh you know between these collectivist notions and the notions of of the individual that are still fairly strong um in in this country [Applause] you and you and you and you you've got a president now he gave the land a new deal you hold the cards how you deal you and you and you and you put shoulders to the plow he gave us what we asked for now pay him back somehow step out in front get back of the present and give a man a job franklin roosevelt's achievement is all the more remarkable because he had not only to invent the tools with which to fight the depression but he had to convince people that it was legitimate to do anything at all and there were a lot of people who were very very skeptical that there was anything that should be done here other than just let the thing go down the drain and eventually it would take care of itself [Music] there was a woman named lorena hickok that was employed by the roosevelt administration to go around the country and write reports about how people were dealing with the economic difficulties and you know what what she really came to say and especially like in the farm belt in different parts of the country is that she saw this kind of prevailing sense of despair you know people were becoming apathetic you know and and i think to a certain extent you know the new deal did play a role in kind of letting people know you know we're not going to let things continue and continue on as they as they have been you know we are going to try and improve the situation and i think that meant a lot to a lot of people i remember sitting by the radio whole family sitting by the radio listening to a fireside shot you know roosevelt that's my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself [Music] um there's your doctor mr president what will cure a depression and lick this old depression confidence hey it's our salvation reach it count it shout shouted confidence just have wake confidence open up the door take this right on we'll come back with more yesterday there were skies of prey but today is another [Music] there's a new day [Music] i think we'll win out not because of a government not even because of our leaders but the cause as a people we've had a vision and we've worked for it and we've seen it through okay the president of the united states inspired by the way by his wife eleanor uh at least overnight inspired directed but i don't know tended to want to give to the community greater opportunities than they had enjoyed i pledge myself to a new deal for the american people it opened thoughts opportunities about out of the new deal can we begin to create a real deal some people felt that fdr was the closest thing keeping us from having a revolution in this country in other words he was providing work with the wpa and all these different projects that uh if that would have happened there are those who contended we would have had a bloody revolution so you had a lot of social unrest at that time not like it wasn't necessarily over in europe but you had people that were out of work they were hungry they looked at fascism or communism and that that gave him a chance an opportunity maybe to climb up the ladder maybe there's something wrong with our system maybe we ought to do that so you saw that even at that time as a youngster i remember arguments between my father and other people about political things like that dealing not so much about washington politics but what the situation would have to be we'd have to go the european route in other words either fascism or communism because that's the way to do things right the new deal for all of its historical consequence it failed to end the great depression but it did something else and it did something i think that was part of a very high level visionary political calculus that roosevelt had in mind it used the moment of this enduring crisis to put in place a set of major reforms of institutional rearrangement of the whole social and economic landscape that stabilized the economy once it recovered with world war ii and provided the latticework or the scaffolding on which the american economy and indeed the international economy grew like crazy for a half century after world war ii you're always going to have boom and bust you don't want and you may even have panics to some degree you don't want those to become big depressions meaning output goes down quite a lot and then stays down and you struggle to recover you lose a decade you can lose a decade and we know from the japanese experience recently it can happen even today in relatively rich countries so i don't think there should be any presumption that we've grown out of depressions right maybe we've learned some things about how to avoid them maybe we haven't i mean that's what the discussion should really focus on [Music] it was crisis it was meltdown we feared that all the financial sector banks and security firms may go down the lost decade is a period of extremely low economic growth for the japanese economy so the business were not doing very well in general the sort of norm was that after you graduate from a college and you you go for a large farm and a large firm will keep you for life so you are on the track and you can plan your your life at the age of 22. that was a sort of typical picture because of the lifetime employment system they cannot fire the co-workers so what the many japanese companies did during the lost decade of the 1990s is to keep the core employees the keeps the workers on the lifetime employment system but stopped hiring so the first hit was not the company employees but the fresh out of college they couldn't find you know this famous lifetime employment we made a lost generation belonging to some community organization it might be family or company or school whatever it's very important very important and actually company corporation did a very important one japanese companies companies are heavily in charge of the sustaining many social security or social force practically rather than government itself but uh you know the lost generation didn't have a chance to to belong to that kind of community [Music] much [Music] stability of the society or stable healthy growth or development of society we have to rebuild that kind of community so that's real challenge but the answer is not getting but simply getting back to the old system we have to rebuild the concept of the cooperation we have to rebuild the concept of the employment or labor so that's a real challenge so we really need this sort of a destructive i mean [Music] creation [Music] what we can clearly see now is to avoid what happened in japan to avoid a lost decade here in the united states which at this point may or may not be unavoidable really honestly is that we need a massive injection a continued massive injection of economic stimulus the question is where is this going to come from the economy has four basic areas that we have that drive economic growth in the united states about 70 percent of economic growth comes from consumers well consumers have declining home values declining stock portfolios and one in 10 of them nearly is out of a job so that's really not going to be a place where we're going to see a lot of demand growing in the in the short to medium term until until jobs come back consumption is not going to drive our economy forward it's not where we're going to see our recovery and that's 70 percent of our economy so we've got to make up for that big chunk someplace else the other three places we can look to are business investment export growth and government spending businesses aren't going to invest until they see consumers so there's a little bit of a chicken and egg problem going on there exports are up a little bit but still it's a relatively small share of our overall economy so it's not clear how that that relatively small share can pull the whole us economy out and then the last place we can look is in terms of government spending to create economic demand that's exactly what we did during the great depression and it's something that we haven't really needed in in the same way that we need it now at any point since the great [Music] depression [Music] i think we progress in lurches i think we lurch forward i think we adopt a set of rules and a vocabulary and a standard for truth and that serves us well this is certainly true in science it serves us well right up until the moment where all of a sudden it isn't working and the whole world comes apart we don't know how to change it gradually we just have to wait for the iceberg and then a wonderful thing happens the world falls apart and we are able to stand there and say what are we really trying to do here what is our world really like one of our most important resources in this country is our creativity you know and and that if we can really kind of deploy that you know i think in many respects the answers to kind of working ourselves out of these economic troubles may not come from that you know the congress or you know or you know the house of representatives or you know big corporations or the federal reserve but it may be something you know things that go on in people's garages you know things like sustainable living tips you know alternative currencies we're going to see a lot of things happening on the ground that are going to be kind of important innovations we're i think it's kind of an inborn american trade that we have a tendency to kind of tinker and innovate when we're not happy with it with existing or outdated systems if you look historically a lot of strong businesses were started during a downturn in the economy during the great depression or other recessions we've had but i mean i was invested banker working 90 hours a week i'd never had the time to launch something like that well once i got laid off schedule opened up and i thought well now's as good a time as any all jobs seem to be so hard to get now that i think you're seeing people really just go after where their passions are as opposed to well this is where the money is so i think you're seeing a number of paradigm shifts more so than before and value shift in values i think and and i my hope is that they'll last um so that we'll have that there'll be more of a gap between these these boom and bust periods and so we'll see people tend to have short memories i think particularly when times do start to turn around welcome to new york city financial capital world welcome to wall street the heart of american capitalism i was a former vice president at deutsche bank there i helped manage a billion dollar trading business the crisis displaces a lot of people you know i lost my job you know it's adam smith invisible hand are smacking me around putting me to a different area of the economy but for me i'm i'm really happy with what i'm doing now showing people wall street telling my story i love to teach some people find inspiration you know they're saying hey here's a guy making lemonade out of limits you know other people say you know hey here's a trader that's been downgraded to a tour guide you know it's two different ways to look at it two years ago i was fully infiltrated in the financial industry which i loved and adored and had been doing since i graduated from college and as time passed i started to see everything going on in the financial markets just huge blow ups i then in fact got my pink slip and ended up being laid off and i often remember my mom saying like the farm is what saved her parents during the depression they also did like crazy stuff like you know sell moonshine i guess and you know like house different people coming over from europe that need extra housing and put them up but always kind of like thinking of different ways of being smart and making money and and saving their money i worked really hard in finance but i'm working a lot harder now than i ever worked in finance you know for for nothing basically you're you know hopefully to potentially attain something but it's a return to intelligence and creativity and you know this emergence of young entrepreneurs with socially conscious types of businesses were all kind of like bartering with one another of how to get work done and how to you know get a fashion show done with no capital while this person needs this exposure and i need this and let's like figure out a way to make this happen so yeah it's an interesting time and it's it's also like something great to be a part of i feel thing my husband fame uh was so cheap that once he took the kids and me out for coffee and donuts the kids loved it because they had never given blood before what a joke that's a beautiful joke in retrospect it may look like a great thing that happened that was a necessity to get us back on the track properly because after all we each of us are a part of human evolution and we take with us technology and we're speeding into the universe your experience that you had coming through those times sustain you they make you strong you're tested in the crucible of a fire the depression beat people down so there's wonderful and romantically to say look at how these people pull themselves up and make something of themselves but there's also that other half of the population that couldn't do that that were so beaten down by the depression that it it affected their mindset and people around them and their families for for years and years to come so unless you have that courage to keep on and those early days in the depression days molded a lot of people he gave them the courage and the strength to become somebody i would not say it makes us stronger i would say it makes us free it makes us more confident when it's all over it makes us confident in our ability to survive that part of it is true but it doesn't make our beliefs stronger it usually destroys them it doesn't make our family systems stronger it usually injures them it doesn't make our economic system stronger or our political system stronger it usually wrecks it so i don't think in those senses that it made us stronger i think what it did was force us to think freely and anew about our lives and the way we're going to judge truth the way we communicate to each other the people we're willing to trust and not trust i think it's a moment of enlightenment now it's usually accompanied by nausea we're so often saved in spite of ourselves you know the something arnold toynbee a great historian said that his lifelong study and he was no mystic he was a very practical man he said his lifelong study of history had led him to the conclusion that every time the puddle of human affairs was about to congeal completely the finger of god comes down and stirs and i thought it seems like that sometimes one of the beauties of that period was that though we had no money of any large except for that small upper five or six percent of the population who were jumping out of windows committing suicide because they couldn't take it we had ways to take it and that again is the factor that is a part of american life the american dream is that we can take it because it's going to get better

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 151,163

Rating: 4.8177118 out of 5

Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, the great depression, american history, jerry stiller, stock market crash

Id: x6DRBURPlxI

Length: 81min 39sec (4899 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 27 2020