The Greatest Time To Be an American

[From the ongoing Bonus section]

In 1928 the unemployment rate in the U.S.A. was 4.2% and the economy was booming. Then came the 1929 Stock Market Crash and the Great Depression. By 1933 the unemployment rate was up to 23.6%. Families with some means had to “retrench” as jobs and wealth disappeared. People without means were thrown to the streets and soup kitchens. The wealthy still did fine, for the most part.

Not only was there no work for millions of people but it was clear that society had no need for these people and just wanted them to go away.

The “People” voted in the New Deal which brought us Social Security and other social programs, but the New Deal didn’t end the Great Depression. By 1938 the unemployment rate was still 19%. But then came World War 2. By 1944 the unemployment rate was 1.2%. There was work for everyone and much of it was good paying work in the national interest. Suddenly Uncle Sam needed everyone. Women were brought into the workforce. Poor blacks from the South were encouraged to travel cross country to work in shipyards on the West Coast. Even if you weren’t in the military or involved in war production, the fact that everyone had jobs meant that everyone had money to spend so all other business also flourished. In five years the world changed beyond recognition... as quickly as everything had gone to hell after 1929.

Unfortunately, the story never ends and there’s always a dark side. This period also saw the Japanese population on the West Coast (but not in Hawaii) forced into concentration camps. The environmental damage resulting from the sudden creation of new shipyards and other wartime facilities (Oak Ridge and Hanford probably leaving the most poisonous footprints) was devastating. And the African American populations near the new shipyards would be abandoned to their own meager resources when the need for their services vanished at the end of the war.

But how great it must have been to have been an American for those few years when everyone was needed.