Dialectic with the Depression

There has been much discussion recently about the current economic crisis and the Great Depression. And while it has largely focused on how Obama is going to govern like FDR and how FDR's new deal was a dismal failure, I wanted to take a minute and offer a different view. The parrallel I see does not involve the executive but rather, the people. After reading through all the non-sense spewed about FDR's failures, I decided to go to a more reliable source: Howard Zinn. In A People's History of the United States Zinn's chapter on the Great Depression is entitled, "Self-help in hard Times". Zinn's claim is that in reaction to extremely difficult times, working people across the country banded together and did amazing things. He paraphrases Sidney Fine's description of the 1936 strike in Flint, Michigan -- the longest running strike in history.

Committees organized recreation, information, classes, a postal service, sanitation. Courts were set up to deal with those who didn't take their turn washing dishes or who threw rubbish or smoked where it was prohibited or brought in liquor...A restaurant owner across the street prepared three meals a day for two thousand strikers. There were classes in parliamentary procedure, public speaking, history of the labor movement. Graduate students at the University of Michigan gave courses in journalism and creative writing.

The effort is astonishing, so are the numbers. In the fall of 1934, 421,000 textile workers were on strike, an incomprehensible number by today's standards of union activism. However, and here's the parallel, those numbers are dwarfed when compared to numbers from Obama's field campaign. As a volunteer from the Virginia campaign, I can tell you that on the Saturday before the election Barack Obama had 13 thousand people knocking on doors for him in the state of Virginia alone. Voter contact numbers were out of control, just ask fivethirtyeight and the Washington Post . And the kicker, on election day Obama had one million door knocks in Pennsylvania! Is that a record? Please, someone let me know. The point I am making is that the real parallel between our current situation and the Great Depression is how people are responding to hard times. They are not sitting around, they are actively involved in the destiny of the United States. On Election Day, Barack Obama won in a electoral college landslide, but the intensity of involvement punches home the full story.

Finally, doesn't it seem like we are working in dialectic with the involvement of the Great Depression? Social Security, schools, city halls, murals, all of the products of the New Deal are still around. Conservativism then responded, and progressivism listened, so that the social involvement seen today is more moderate, not less powerful. That's the gist of the big idea, I would love to hear responses no matter what the view.

Thanks for reading Until The Sun Doesn't Rise. I'll be back tomarrow, unless...