Pinched by Don Peck Read Free Book Online

wealth to begin with.
    T ECTONIC SHIFTS IN the economy shake the culture as well. By temporarily accelerating some of those shifts, the recession has made them and their cultural consequences plainer, and given us a preview of what’s in store for America in the coming decades—at least absent efforts to change the economic and social course the country now finds itself on. The fortunes of the rich are diverging from those of other Americans, as are the fortunes of Manhattan from those of Tampa. In less privileged parts of the country, a predominantly male underclass is forming, and that, in turn, is changing marriage, family, and community life in ways altogether foreign to the affluent nuclear families and young single professionals in and around Boston or Washington, DC.
    These varied experiences may partly explain the ambivalence with which some policy makers, themselves members of the meritocratic elite, have responded to high unemployment and economic distress. And they clearly have fueled the rising popular discontent that can be seen in public discourse and at the ballot box. In the Great Depression, iconic images of bankers selling apples on street corners helped build a sense that everyone was suffering together. Patently, that is not the case today.

3
TWO DEPRESSIONS AND
A LONG MALAISE
    A S OF THIS WRITING, IT’S BEEN ABOUT THREE YEARS SINCE THE financial markets crashed, and closer to four since the Great Recession officially began. More than two years have passed since President Barack Obama detected “glimmers of hope across the economy.”
    As noted earlier, at the current pace of the recovery, many more years will go by before unemployment rates again touch 5 percent, before most Americans pay down their debts, before housing values find their bottom and rise substantially again. Such a long recovery is not fated—technological breakthroughs, world events, and, not least, our own actions will all influence its pace. But it is possible that the economy won’t be truly vibrant again for a long time.
    Long, deep slumps are foreign to many Americans alive today, but of course they are not unknown in the nation’s history. The final two decades of the nineteenth century saw steady deflation, hard times for typical workers, and great tumult.
The Great Depression
and
the 1930s
are now nearly synonymous. Most recently, from 1972 through the early 1980s, the United States endured economic stagnation, wage erosion, and a series of painful economic shocks; in some respects, the weakness lingered until the mid-1990s. If we align Wall Street’s 2008 crash with the signal shocks of those periods—the panic of 1893, the crash of 1929, the oil shock of 1973—then we’d be sitting today in 1896 or 1932 or 1976.
    The longer society stews in a deep slump, the more it is altered.Changes to community character, generational ambition, and social harmony that are nearly imperceptible early in a downturn become suddenly overwhelming later. What follows is a pocket history of these three long downturns, with a focus on the enduring marks they left on America. Each delineates a major turn in the country’s economic, political, and cultural history. And each holds lessons for us in the present day.
THE GILDED AGE AND THE DEPRESSION OF 1893
    The last quarter of the nineteenth century was a period that in many ways recalls our own—a time of technological revolution, rapid global integration, vast economic change, rising inequality, market crashes, and long spells of disappointment and anxiety for many Americans. A series of financial panics rocked the country, culminating in the panic of 1893, a run on banks that crippled the financial system and ushered in a depression more severe than any the United States had yet seen.
    From the 1870s through the turn of the century, “the public features of economic stagnation became more recognizable with each passing decade,” wrote Alexander Keyssar in
Out of Work: The First