The Hungry Years: America in an Age of Crisis, 1929-1939 [Hardcover]

T. H. Watkins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 7, 1999

The acclaimed author of Righteous Pilgrim delivers this dramatic account of the Great Depression as seen by those who lived through it. Less concerned with the power brokers in Washington than with the daily struggles of ordinary people at the grass roots, The Hungry Years draws on little-known oral histories, memoirs, local press, and scholarly monographs to capture the voices of Americans in a time of unprecedented crisis. The result is narrative history at its best: a comprehensive single volume that traces the stages of the disaster chronologically without losing touch with the wounds it inflicted or the ways people responded. Humane and compassionate, historically sound, full of story and anecdote, The Hungry Years puts the reader at the very heart of the maelstrom that was the American Depression.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The late 1920s were a strange moment in American history: a time when it seemed possible for peace to reign around the world, with the United States as its supreme enforcer, a time when, as T.H. Watkins writes, "instant gratification in the matter of clothes and gadgets and even automobiles bloated consumer credit" and when speculation on the stock market reached rampant, unsettling highs. The moment ended in the failure of the market, then of the banks, and finally of the whole economy, leading to a massive depression that would last for a decade.

Published to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the crash, The Hungry Years offers a sweeping history of those terrible times. Watkins is slow to lay blame but quick to praise. He credits, for instance, the much-maligned Herbert Hoover, the president under whose watch the depression began, for his efforts in attempting to contain the widespread psychological damage that economic hardship wrought. He also offers a sometimes critical but generally appreciative account of the massive federal programs that the Roosevelt administration put in place to revive the economy--programs often characterized as giving working men only shovels on which to lean. But more important, he praises ordinary Americans for looking beyond immediate self-interest to find ways to help one another--and these ordinary Americans are the real heroes of Watkins's vigorous and exemplary historical narrative. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly

An entire library of books exists on various aspects of the Depression in America. It is therefore a daunting challenge to build something fresh and worthwhile using the well-worn facts and interpretations that form the bedrock of this literature. Montana State University's Watkins (Righteous Pilgrim, etc.) rises to the occasion, artfully assembling carefully selected anecdotes to deliver a brilliant, ground-level portrait of America as it struggled through the long and painful decade of the 1930s. Watkins makes good use of obscure memoirs, oral histories and local press clippings, taking readers deep into the lives of men and women (sharecroppers, auto workers, lumberjacks, students) as they navigated the catastrophe. People had various techniques for coping with the crisis. Some of the techniques were ingenious, many more were pitiful and some were downright evil. Watkins documents the search for scapegoats, especially the rise of virulent anti-Semitism propounded most notably by radio demagogue Father Charles Coughlin. And he elegantly portrays the radicalization of the masses and the rise of the American Communist Party. Exhaustive, eloquent and engaging, Watkins's graceful narrative simultaneously paints a panoramic picture of America and delves, with great understanding and sympathy, into the details of individual lives. No one with an interest in 20th-century American history can afford to miss it. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 608 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; 1st edition (October 7, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805016759
• ISBN-13: 978-0805016758
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.1 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,660,678 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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44 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Left Me Feeling Hungry, December 11, 1999

By 

Gerard Hildebrand - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Hungry Years: America in an Age of Crisis, 1929-1939 (Hardcover)

This should be my type of book: Serious history written for the general reader. The book provides statistics, anecdotes, political history, union history, Dust Bowl history, and it discusses the alphabet soup of Depression programs and the 1929 crash. Somehow all of this never comes into focus. There isn't a clear narrative. For example, we don't learn that the farm economy was depressed throughout the 1920's until page 340 or so--after Watkins had already discussed the causes of the Depression and after another section that took us up to the end of the thirties.

Watkins could do some fact checking as well. He says that the 1935 Social Security Act "did establish an unemployment and disability insurance program financed by a tax on employers--to be collected by the states, then distributed as unemployment or disability payments to those who qualified under state-established standards." The SSA did establish the unemployment insurance program, but a similar disability insurance program has never been created. It wasn't for lack of trying. Senator Wagner, who introduced the SSA in the Senate in 1935, introduced a bill to establish a Federal-State disability program in 1939, but he didn't succeed in seeing it enacted. (As of today only California, Hawaii, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island have disability insurance programs which pay benefits to workers who cannot work due to a non-work related disability.)

Watkins also claims that FDR's 1936 electoral victory "was greater than in any election since that of James Madison in 1820". James Monroe won the 1820 election.

But Watkins greatest failure is that he does not place many events in context. The Great Depression created the world we live in today - the Federal legislation on banking, securities, unemployment insurance, welfare, social security are treated with less emphasis than all the programs that came in and went in the Depression (the WPA, CCC, NRA). Yes, we should pay witness to those who lived through the Depression, but we should also pay witness to the world they created.

28 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Pretty weak, March 8, 2000

By A Customer

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This review is from: The Hungry Years: America in an Age of Crisis, 1929-1939 (Hardcover)

This book is certainly not a 'narrative history of the great depression.' Its scope is very narrowly focused on a short list of topics, most prominent of which are various union organizing drives. Unless you have some incredible interest in hearing basically the same story over and over again, this gets boring quickly. And all the glowing comments about the contributions of the Communist Party to the effort and to life during the 30's in general are just bizarre.

The author's economic knowledge is clearly very limited. There is absolutely nothing here about bank runs and the collapse of the credit system that lay at the root of the depression. And his attempts to scale various nominal numbers to current day values by simply using a price deflator don't take into account that people were a lot poorer then and the economy a lot smaller, so even expressed in real dollars the amounts in question are puny by modern standards. This clearly calls for framing everything in percentage change terms, which the author doesn't do.

Finally, as far as I could tell, there was little or no original research here. A "Narrative" history ought to at least entail the author's listening to some narratives from people around during the period. Instead almost all of the cited sources are popular histories and biographies about the period, which gives the book the tone more of a book report or term paper than a serious piece of history.

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Don't be fooled by the subtitle!, February 1, 2001

By 

Leonard Was (Hamtramck, MI United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Hungry Years: America in an Age of Crisis, 1929-1939 (Hardcover)

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When I saw this book and read the dustjacket notes I assumed it would be what the title suggested: a "narrative" history of the Great Depression, told primarily through the experiences of persons who lived through it.

I was sorely disappointed.

Make no mistake -- the book contains a wealth of well-researched data quite valuable to the study of the depression, but written like a college text, with appropriate footnotes, instead of as a literary exercise such as David McCullough's TRUMAN.

Nothing wrong with that, but the book should be marketed and reviewed as an academic effort rather than as a "narrative history."