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

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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.

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.

.

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."

We live in an era in which politicians of both major parties try to outdo each other in their denunciations of government. President Reagan provided the verbal apotheosis of this anti-goverrnmental attitude, and his accolyte, George W. Bush, a political insider if there ever was one, continues the cynical and insidious calculated assault on the nature of government and its relationship with the people. Many Americans today feel a profound alienation from government and truly believe their interests are contradictory of those of government. T. H. Watkins, author of the elegant, compelling and profound history of the Great Depression, "The Hungry Years" must wince every time he hears these voices. Professor Watkins knows of another time in our past, one of great social dislocation and mass suffering; one where men and women yearned for work and from work, hope; one where the threads which bound us together as a nation were slowly, but steadily, fraying. His remarkably beautiful and tremendously affecting work stands as a reminder that there was a time in our not too distant past where one man, crippled and conflicted himself, sought to alleviate that suffering in a program which would redefine a citizen's relationship with his or her national government.

"The Hungry Years" above all serves as a philosophical keystone that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal sought to change governmental indifference into governmental action, attempted to create a symbiotic and caring relationship between the common person and government, and served to remind all Americans that activism in the name of justice and dignity is a pivotal characteristic in our national character. Watkins clearly analyzes the myriad of dreams, laws, acts, decisions and outcomes of the New Deal, and he is frank in discussing shortfalls and disappointments. Underlying the discussion, however, is his unabashed admiration for the tenor of the early years of FDR's adminstration. "For a time, millions of Americans -- white, black, and brown, male and female, urban and rural, young and old, white-collar and blue-collar -- had been given a sense of their own worth and power, the notion that by joining together they could control at least some portion of their lives, however imperfectly, however briefly."

This admirable volume rings with authenticity, primarily because the author so assiduously assembled anecdotes and interviews with those directly affected by the Great Depression. Human voices, laden with sadness and anger, ringing with rage at loss and suffering and growling with the ominous timbre of class war, appear on every page. These voices, magnificently interstitched with careful research (even his footnotes are written gracefully), control the book and serve to focus our attention on the human consequences of the era. Each chapter could stand on its own, but I found his discussion of artists, actors and writers in the New Deal absolutely rivetting, as were his astounding accounts of the impact of natural disaster on the geographic and emotional landscape of the land.

"The Hungry Years" will serve as an important example that history can read as literature and move readers in the same way as art. Satisfying intellectually and emotionally, "The Hungry Years" inspires historical imagination and furnishes us with a vision of a society not at odds with government, but aligned with a President who perceived that government's most serious and honored obligation is to alleviate suffering.

Rating this book is somewhat difficult. On the one hand, it does appear to be well researched and footnoted. On the other hand, I agree with the other reviewers who found it less accessible, and less user friendly than it could be. A good editor could rather easily pare this massive tome down to half it's length without sacrificing any valuable content. And reordering it a bit might go a long way towards making it seem to flow better.

The author could have chosen a strict chronological order. Or he could've fully explored the causes and effects of the Great Depression. Instead, he did a little of each, but without fully conveying a sense of either.

Like others have said, a history of this period should've been right up my alley, but I'm finding useful information to be hard to come by in this book without a lot of careful weeding out of the extraneous. The noise to signal ratio is higher than I'd like, but the book does contain a lot of interesting data.

This should not be one's first primer on the Great Depression, nor it's causes, nor what it was like to actually live through the Great Depression. Rather, it should serve the role to really fill in the gaps left by other books that address those individual topics in more detail or in more accessible manners.

As another reviewer has pointed out, the cover and back of this work is more than a bit misleading. I love popular history. I like first hand accounts when ever possible. I read these books, not only to be informed, but to also be entertained. History does not have to be dry. History can be fun, the good and the bad. The study of any historical era, at my level, needs to be not only informative, but needs to be a pleasure to read. This book, for me, did not fill this bill. I have spent quite a lengthy life time reading history text books. I learned a lot from them and I learned a lot from this particular work. I did not though, enjoy reading this one. It was simply too text bookish to fill my needs at this time. If you want good, first hand oral histories, there are better ones out there. If you want a somewhat dry, but well researched account of the Great Depresstion, then this book will certainly meet your needs. I wish the publishers had marketed this one a bit differently.

The impact of the Great Depression can not be covered comprehensively in any one book. Mr. Watkins attempts to show the perspective from the populace point of view than the Washington D.C. political maneuverings is so-so. The author is somewhat successful in his approach, but winds up giving more of a general overview at key aspects of this major calamity. The late Studs Terkel's "Hard Times" is more powerful because the collected interviews are down-to-earth and more detailed than "The Hungry Years." However, Mr. Watkins' book is a good general review of such topics as the emotional and physical toll it took especially on the poor, minorities and the working class. Other areas touched upon are the rising power of collective bargaining, the development of regional planning with a specific focus on the Tennessee Valley Authority, rural electrification, the Dust Bowl ordeals, black sharecroppers and California Chicano farm pickers, the increase power of demagogues and the ineffective flirtation with Communism. The writing style is much like a reporter with very little flair but not bordering on stale academic prose. The book, however, does have its moments of richly written events about the suffering endured by Americans. If you are interested in the Great Depression, this is as good a place to start as any.

One will not learn the cause of the Great Depression from Watkin's book (for that read "Creature from Jekyll Island" by G. Edward Griffin) or learn of the Wall Street greed factor (for that read Sy Harding's "Riding the Bear") that contributed so much to the Depression's birth. This IS a rather interesting collection of anecdotes/stories that vividly paint how the Depression was, just don't pay full price or you'll regret it.
Unfortunately, we are headed for another Depression this decade as the crushing amounts of personal/corporate/government debt
ruin the employment and investment scenes.