Reviews

THE GREAT DEPRESSION, b. 1929, d. 1939 (?)—you have to think about those hard times in a context of chronology and generations. For anyone 45 and over the Depression happened too recently; the memory is still painful, we can still see the breadlines and the shantytowns, the Hoovervilles, in the mind’s eye. We may be inclined to simplify a little, to say that FDR and the New Deal “saved the country,” though we know well how much of the economic and social programs were palliatives, and we recognize that in the end the advent of World War II really took up the slack in the economy and blunted what was described, euphemistically, in the late thirties as “the recession.” For the young, on the other hand, the Depression happened too long ago; it is remote, sealed away as history. They are variously “making it” or “rejecting the system” in their own terms. They do not wish to be scolded: “You know, when I was young and the Depression hit this family….” But the Depression is simply too immense an event, too deep a rupture in American history, to be assimilated into analysis by age groups. Quite apart from the sharp memories of the middle-aged and in spite of the...