The Great Depression: A Diary [Hardcover]

Benjamin Roth (Author), James Ledbetter (Editor), Daniel B. Roth (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 13, 2009

This title offers a first-person diary account of living through the Great Depression, with haunting parallels to our own time. Benjamin Roth was born in New York City in 1894. When the stock market crashed in 1929, he had been practicing law for approximately ten years, largely representing local businesses. After nearly two years, he began to grasp the magnitude of what had happened to American economic life, and he began writing down his impressions in a diary that he maintained intermittently until he died in 1978. Roth's words from that unique time seem to speak directly to readers today. His perceptions and experiences have a chilling similarity to our own era. Like many of us, Roth struggles both to understand and to educate himself about what was going on around him. He is sceptical of big government, yet ultimately won over by FDR's New Deal. This collection of his diary entries, edited by James Ledbetter, editor of Slate's "The Big Money," reveals another side of the Great Depression - one lived through by ordinary, middle-class folks, who on a daily basis grappled with a swiftly changing economy coupled with anxiety about the unknown future. It is highly topical - and timely. The greatest financial disaster since the Great Depression has many Americans wondering what things were like as the Great Depression unfolded and people did not yet know how or when it would end. It is clear-eyed, readable - and eerily familiar. In short, concise, and thoughtful entries, Roth chronicles the most telling moments of the Great Depression, from the drop in the price of movie tickets to Hoover's failed free-market solutions to the rise in foreclosures in his hometown and how to benefit from 'bargains' at the much-diminished stock exchange. It is published one-year after the bankruptcy of Lehman Bros sent the world markets on a deep downward slide, and around the 80th anniversary of 'Black Tuesday'. It is presented in a beautiful package - endpapers using original diary entries, period photos throughout, and gorgeous interior design.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Charles R. Morris, The Trillion Dollar Meltdown
“Benjamin Roth has left us a vivid portrait of the Great Depression that is all the more powerful for the similarities and differences with the financial upheavals of today. Roth enables us -- in ways no historian can match -- to immerse ourselves in the sense of despair that Americans of that era felt and their hope that the economy would revive, long before it did. To read the diaries now is both enlightening and chilling.”

Jonathan Alter, The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope
“We imagine the Great Depression at two extremes--Franklin Roosevelt's jaunty smile and the haunting images of Dustbowl destitution. But in between were everyday middle class strivers like Benjamin Roth, trying to sort through the wreckage. FDR and the WPA may be long gone but the professional class remains, and the record of its struggle in the Depression has been thin until now. Roth's incisive diaries are more than a precious time capsule. They speak to our economic hopes and fears directly, and to the bewilderment of our own time."

New York Times
“Mr. Roth’s diaries … are compelling reading, because they force readers to reflect on both the similarities and the differences between then and now…. We’re all a little like Benjamin Roth, asking questions we don’t know the answer to, and wonder, as he did 70 years ago, whether the crisis is, indeed, over.”

Spectator Business(UK)
“Here are brief, unsentimental, clear-eyed notes of the growing sense of hopelessness that came over Midwestern American life. This moving book is edited by [Roth’s] son Daniel.”

MoneySense
“A fascinating read, and strangely familiar.”

Financial Times
“[Roth’s] entries compellingly detail the everyday”

Seattle Times
“Roth’s diary is plainly written and professionally edited. It is a window on another age.”

Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“There is an honest searching quality to his day-by-day accounts of banks closing, bread lines forming, friends failing. Striving to understand, he provides a remarkable and often engagingly literate discussion of the great Depression’s impact on people like him.”

About the Author

James Ledbetter is the editor of "The Big Money," Slate.com's Web site on business and economics. Prior to joining Slate, he was deputy managing editor of CNNMoney.com, a financial news site. He is the author of several books, a former senior editor of Time Magazine, and his writing has also appeared in several other US publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Nation, Mother Jones, Vibe, Newsday, and The American Prospect. He lives in New York, NY.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: PublicAffairs; First Edition edition (October 13, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 158648799X
• ISBN-13: 978-1586487997
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1.2 x 9.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #580,272 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

64 of 69 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Surviving. October 4, 2009

By Matthew Stewart

Format:Hardcover

What makes this book important are its clear similarities to the events of today. In fact, it's hard to read the book and not get the two eras a little confused. Bank closings? Check. Recovery Act bills and government spending? Check. Bankruptcy? Check. Foreclosures and federal foreclosure prevention programs? Check. Partial and full takeovers of industry? Check. Smaller paychecks every year? Yep. (While the editors admit to the release of the book being spurred by the current economic crisis, the cyclical nature of this type of event means the book would actually have been just as important in 1999 or 2006 as it is today.)

Beginning in June 1931, Benjamin Roth recorded in a series of notebooks his observations on the events in Youngstown, Ohio. Highlighted are the sad state of his legal practice throughout the depression years, bank closings and reopenings, steel production levels, growth in the ranks of the unemployed, and extreme deflation in the early years of the depression. Though having no investments of his own, Roth recorded stock prices and dividend payments, and much of the discussion surrounds the best way to have invested if he had been able. Roth worries most about a period of strong inflation spurred by the policies of the Roosevelt administration and about middle-class professionals such as him being bypassed by the growing recovery, but also about the anti-Semitism of the campaign by Republican Alfred M. Landon in the 1936 presidential election, Hitler's takeover of Europe, government control, socialism, losing the gold standard and the rise of organized labor, especially when it led to strikes and violent confrontation in Youngstown. He worries, too, about collecting what is due his practice without causing hardship.

I know little about investing, but Roth's progression through the years of the depression is evident. At first, he believes that government bonds would have been the only safe strategy; later fears of inflation push him toward stocks, preferred and common. When the recovery stumbled greatly in mid 1937, he comes to believe that only having a pot of cash available and shifting among different strategies the follow the curve of boom and bust is prudent. In the end, he aligns himself somewhere between the speculators who he blames for the crash and the long-term, bonds-only investor he would have been earlier in the crisis.

Roth's theorizing about investment strategy is nothing more, because he is too short on cash to do anything with his ideas. (While the book offers few details, the late 1940s and following decades were more profitable for Roth and his law office, which is still in operation with his son and editor at the helm. Roth and his wife also left behind the Benjamin W. and Marion B. Roth Foundation, a charitable organization.) What he offers in addition to his hypothetical musings on where to allocate non-existent savings is a picture of depression-era concern and struggle among the middle, professional class -- not the union workers, not the migrant fruit pickers and not the stockbrokers driven to despair by losing everything. It is an important perspective.

The parallels to today are rampant, despite the obvious changes over the years. I find it hard to sympathize when Roth complains that only the working class is getting the benefits of the recovery, this due to federal requirements for shorter work days, increased pay and recognition of unions. The fear of socialism because of government spending I do not share, but many do today; bold government spending is what ended the Great Depression, though only when war gave the administration full license to do so. What I do share with Roth is resentment of those who play with the market as speculators, not as investors. He makes that distinction clear, and the blame is just as evident. Along with deregulation, those speculating in real estate, bad real estate loans and petroleum futures share a great deal of the responsibility for the fact that millions of us now make less money than we did two years ago, and that college graduates cannot find jobs, and that many formerly employed no longer have any job or are working well beneath their abilities. Yet he leaves room in his view of the market for a person not to hide his savings away but to invest it in growing business and government bonds, putting it to work while reaping the benefits -- but in a way that is both responsible and prudent.

I read this book in 24 hours. The format of short diary entries combined with the thrill of following the ups and downs of Roth's community and the country in light of today's situation made it easy. I'd recommend you pick it up and do the same.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Comparative reading November 9, 2009

By Busy reader

Format:Hardcover

As a child of the Depression I found The Great Depression: a Diary very interesting and informative. My father was not a professional person and I am sure he did not have any stocks, but the traumatic events that occurred happened to everyone. There are so many similarities to todays events: bank closings, credit problems, the closing of so very many businesses and the institution of so many programs to save jobs and the economy and very few of them having the stimulus needed. I also found it interesting to track the professional person as I have worked for lawyers and they seem to suffer immediately from a downturn in the economy. Apparently it was the same many years ago. A very good read and I would recommend it to anyone who lived through the great depression or would like a comparison of the present situation and the dark days long ago.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent first-person historical account of the Great Depression November 4, 2009

By C. A. Mott

Format:Hardcover

I purchased The Great Depression: A Diary after reading Joe Nocera's excellent column about the book which appeared in the New York Times on October 17th. I was most impressed by the book and recommend that it be placed on everybody's list. It would be a great Christmas present for anyone old enough to have lived during the Great Depression, and an eye-opener for those who are struggling to make sense of our current economic situation. As it has been said, "Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it."

I found the book hard to put down and believe that it has great historical value. We have all read histories of the Depression, but to read the day-to-day account of a young lawyer who was living it in real time is unique. It was amazing to me to be able to follow the history as it was being made, and it gave me much greater insight into how the so-called middle class suffered. I give it my 5 star approval.