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The Great Depression: A Diary (Hardcover)

~ (Author), James Ledbetter (Editor), Daniel B. Roth (Editor)
4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
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Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Justin Moyer moyerj@washpost.com If economists sound like party poopers in bailout-happy 2009, imagine how much more dismal the dismal science seemed to a struggling Youngstown, Ohio, lawyer in the 1930s. Benjamin Roth's "The Great Depression: A Diary" offers a firsthand account of hard times along the Mahoning River in short entries that brim with the frustration of a man trying to save his failing law practice. A fiend for macroeconomics who was more likely to list stock prices in his private journal than discuss his wife or children, Roth struggles with the same issues that vex Ben Bernanke today: inflation, protectionism and whether deficit spending really stimulates the economy. Like many other stiff-upper-lipped professionals of his generation, Roth is anti-interventionist, anti-whiner and anti-Roosevelt. (Turns out Obama's election wasn't exactly one-of-a-kind: "the Democrats will win [in 1932] because everybody wants a 'change,' " Roth writes.) Except for his patrician disgust with King Edward's decision to abdicate the British throne for the "twice-divorced" Mrs. Simpson and his occasional "long[ing] for normalcy," Roth withholds the personal take on poverty that made Studs Terkel's "Hard Times" and Ben Reitman's "Sister of the Road" cultural treasures. "Diary" is a valuable document, but it offers underwhelming lessons about man's powerlessness before market forces.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.


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.”

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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 288 pages
  • Publisher: PublicAffairs (October 13, 2009)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 158648799X
  • ISBN-13: 978-1586487997
  • Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #7,257 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #4 in  Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Regional U.S. > Midwest
    #5 in  Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Lawyers & Judges
    #8 in  Books > History > United States > 20th Century > Depression

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38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Surviving., October 4, 2009
By M. Stewart "stewie81" (Chicago, IL, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
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.
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars It sounds like a great idea, but. . ., October 29, 2009
By Aaron C. Brown (New York, New York United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)      
. . .in the end it doesn't deliver.

I was excited about this book as it a new primary source about a pivotal period in economics that remains controversial. While we have many accounts of the Depression, they were written after the events they describe and generally with strong points of view. This is a diary written contemporaneously by a man who didn't know how things would turn out, and wrote to help himself make sense of events rather than to convince others of a preconceived opinions.

The first disappointment is the book contains virtually nothing about life. Only a few period details slip in; learning about the major local banks closing through newsboys shouting "Extra" at four o'clock in the morning; movie theaters cutting costs by eliminating vaudeville acts between features. There is nothing personal, not even personal economics: did he have accounts frozen at banks, did he hoard cash, what cutbacks did he make when times got bad, did he use script or barter when banks were closed? As a result, non-financial history buffs will find nothing of interest, and the book is very dull.

I think this led the published reviewers and also M. Stewart to exaggerate the similarities with today's events. The author records only a few bits of economic data: downtown real estate vacancies, prices of half a dozen stocks and capacity utilization at local steel mills. At that superficial level, all business cycles seem the same. Once again, there are a few interesting bits. The double liability of bank shareholders seemed to be a major impediment to equilibrium and local property taxes based on pre-Depression appraisals forced the demolition of useful buildings. Depending on your politics, you can read this as evidence that government economic interference exacerbated the Depression, or that the government should bail bankers out and accept deficits as the price of restoring economic health. Another difference that gets noted in passing is holdover personal debts from the 1920s and early 30s meant many of the middle class people the author describes had negative net worth as late as the end of the decade, something today they would either discharge through personal bankruptcy or settle earlier in one way or another.

The book provides a test of Nassim Taleb's narrative fallacy. He argues that people define eras after-the-fact, then write histories which ignore everything unrelated to that definition as irrelevant, and thereby present neat cause-and-effect stories of reality that is far more chaotic. This diary has to be considered contrary evidence. The author knows from the beginning that he's living through the Depression, and records the same type of economic information and events that figure in the histories. "The depression" is all he ever calls it, although it had many different contemporary designations, and he always dates it from the 1929 stock market crash. He mentions the major national and world events remembered today, and no others. When Germany invades Poland in September 1939 he calls it the "second world war," an inaccurate description at that date and a term that had not previously been recorded before 1942. In August 1940 he refers to Germany's "blitzkrieg" against England, although what was later named the "London Blitz" did not begin until the next month. Taleb might argue that is why this diary was published and millions of others ignored, or perhaps that the coherence was introduced in the editing process. But taken at face value, this book says the Depression was a lot like what history books describe.

However, little of the book is concerned with large events. The constants are complaints about how little money he was making practicing law, calculations of how rich you could get if you bought at low prices and sold at high ones, and stories of people who went broke buying at high prices and selling at low ones. The reasoning is shockingly superficial for an intelligent man who spent a decade thinking about things, he drifts from one pompous non-actionable theory to another, without acknowledging the shifts.

He relies on undefined moral terms, you are supposed to make "prudent" investments in "first class" securities selling below "intrinsic value" and sell when speculative fever heats up. Of course, if you lose money you bought imprudent second-class securities above intrinsic value during rampant speculation. There is no concept of statistical risk, no theory of value or equilibrium, no economic reasoning; just childish regret that it is impossible to transact at historical prices. Of course, he is not the first person to be tantalized by stock prices going up and down, and how easy it seems to be to make or lose money, but he may be the smartest person to spend ten years thinking and writing about it without digging deeper. He is a perfect illustration for the definition of the stock market addict William Worthington Fowler penned sixty years earlier: "'If' and 'but' are the most frequent conjunctions in his vocabulary. His whole life is a series of regrets, and strange to say, these regrets are more often for what he might have made, but did not, than for what he has actually lost."
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Comparative reading, November 9, 2009
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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent first-person historical account of the Great Depression
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. Read more
Published 17 days ago by C. A. Mott

5.0 out of 5 stars Non-Fiction at its finest!
THE GREAT DEPRESSION

This book actually is written in the 1930's and beyond, as the Great Depression actually rolled out. Read more
Published 22 days ago by Kenneth Karl Bock

5.0 out of 5 stars Lessions Learned
Benjamin Roth was anxious to learn the lessons of the Great Depression. He obviously learned them and passed them along to his son, Dan Roth. Read more
Published 23 days ago by Stephen E. Cohen

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