The Return to Anxiety

Exactly when a recession becomes a depression, whether we will have the one or, in time, both, what can be done to prevent a further slide into unemployment — these, certainly, are important questions. But at the moment they may not be quite so important as the fact that for the first time in at least a decade the state of American economic life has become problematic.

During the past ten or twelve years most Americans could feel a tentative security with regard to their own jobs. Knowing as they did that our post-war prosperity was tied to the fuse of a new and greater international catastrophe, they nonetheless felt that, at the moment, they did not have to worry about their immediate well-being. Within the basic context of anxiety that shapes our age it was possible to experience a certain relaxation. The depression memories that had burned themselves so deeply into the consciousness of millions were slowly eased: workers paid off debts and relieved mortgages, intellectuals developed theories of American uniqueness.

Now, at the beginning of 1954, when the country is not in a depression and there seems no serious likelihood that it soon will be, one can see, or sense, a return of that subterranean anxiety which is the traditional curse of life under capitalism.

Granted that we are not soon likely to repeat the catastrophe of the 1930s. Yet what matters for an understanding of the mood of the nation is the fact that hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions, cannot be sure that they will be working next month; that many more can be sure they will not be working full weeks; that slowly the prospect of pink slips and grey faces seems real again. No one wants it; everyone dreads it; but faced with the massive drifting of a national administration which challenges the administration of Ulysses Grant for mediocrity and surpasses it in cowardice, there is a strong feeling in the air that once again we are being shaped by those mysterious forces of capitalist society which can bring misery or, sometimes, plenty but never a sense of human autonomy and decision.

Sometimes economic trends can be read conveniently from indicators that are unorthodox, economically speaking, but revealing in human terms. When we read that help-wanted ads declined by 35 per cent between January 1953 and January 1954 and that some mid-Western papers print as many as 25 columns fewer of such ads per day than they printed last year, or that New York City’s relief rolls are now growing at the rate of one thousand persons every week, this tells us not only something immediate about the state of our economy but also about its impact on human beings. Or when we read that unemployment figures in Detroit have now reached 140,000 or 9.3 per cent of the labor force and that the total unemployment figure in the country as of February was double the comparative figure for 1953 and increased by 584,000 during the si...