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Great Depression Book Review
The roaring Twenties was a period of transformation, at which time many Americans possessed, automobiles, and radios, and telephones. Automobile innovations brought the need for good roads (increasing 10% to 80% of families owning cars). The radio brought people closer to each other. The telephone connected families and friends together. In the 1920s, the 18th amendment to the U.S. Constitution was approved, the period of Prohibition. The 1920s started with American troops returning from Europe after WWI and going back to their family and friends, after lasting about four years. Another two occurrences during the 1920s were — the 19th amendment granted women the right to vote changed America. And on the radio became a family experience, where everyone would gather around the radio and listen to the news. Furthermore, harmonious styles were shifting in the 1920s and Louis Armstrong making a prominent figure during the Jazz Age. The Jazz Age glorified city life. Americans — including many African American sharecroppers from the South — were leaving their farms in record numbers to live and work in places like Chicago and New York City. F. Scott Fitzgerald called it a time when ‘the parties were bigger, the pace was faster, the buildings were higher, the morals looser”.
Hard Times: an Oral History of the Great Depression by Studs Turkel is an insightful book providing an oral history of the compilation of historical information of interviews with people having a personal experience. There are numerous selections from Hard Times where the audience can read different perspectives of people. Going through wealth to losing their possessions to the stock market, standing in bread lines, farmers losing a fortune during the dust bowl, the New Deal presented by Franklin D. Roosevelt, The Works Progress Administration WPA and three strikes all taking place during the great depression. The roaring 20s had led to the great depression and how Americans had to survive (which was a theme in the book) during times of fears and hopelessness in the world. I was relieved when the Crash came. I was released. Being in business was something I detested. When I found out that I could sell a song or a poem, I became me, I became alive. Other people didn’t see it that way. They were throwing themselves out the window. Someone who lost money found that his life was gone. When I lost my possessions, I found my creativity. I felt like I was being born for the first time. So for me the world became beautiful. The stock market crash was the fastest economic turn in world history, thus prices and profits fell, and incomes were destroyed. In 1932-1933, national employment reached 25%; this event was the first time in US history more people are emigrating rather than migrating because of immigration laws strictly enforced during the depression – 2 million people lose their homes and start to migrate around the country. Sterkel is illuminating that the occasion has come to prompt to the oblivious minority in the misfortune. Through his book he interviews those who have lived through the Depression, he even includes the voices of younger people who know little of hard times. Throughout Hard Times, the theme is whatever the hopelessness of a catastrophe, the community always forms. We had guys patrol the plant, see that nobody got involved in anything they shouldn’t have. if anybody got careless with company property – such as sitting on an automobile cushion without burlap over it – he was talked to. The most frequent form of the community mentioned throughout the book is the labor union, possibly vividly in 1939, Flint Sit-Down Strike. In demand to soothe equally Chrysler management and Michigan governor Frank Murphy, protestors form a small community in the plant, safeguarding no car parts, machinery, or other business property is damaged. Through the book, Terkel shows a good job exemplifying the suffering expressions of the Depression survivors with more disordered words of the young. The conclusion of his novel shows, a young man is curious about the difficult era left on his father. And an elder woman is curious if the adolescents of their sixties will consent the change her group cannot. However, the oral collection of Hard Times is merely enough to show us in-depth details because Studs Terkel is selecting interviews of his choice and some words or sentences may be altered in the process.
Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
The Depression led people to do desperate things to survive. Horace McCoy, novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Displays a ludicrous instance of what American popular culture occurred through an economic disaster. The novel revolves around a marathon dance contest, which operates as a metaphor for life during the 1930s in America. What is believed to be an entertaining and fun dance becomes tireless, competitive work between Robert and Gloria, as well as for the other contestants. The marathon is basically a survival of the fittest and only one couple will win 1,000 at the end. ‘He accused me if cheating –’ she said. ‘Then he hit me and started choking me –‘ ‘Go on, kids,’ Socks said. ‘Act as if nothing has happened…’.The dance was draining, physically and emotionally challenging; the marathon is unlawful. A pregnant woman is dancing for hours on end; therefore, it is entailing a lot of arduous effort of the contestants who are going insane as a result. The promoter’s Socks, Rocky tries to put on a false marriage ceremony to uproar advertising between Vee Lorell and Mary Hawley for a hundred dollars. Additionally, the dance contest is held inside, in a huge hall located on an ocean pier. For thirty-six days (879 hours) of the marathon, the competitors are confined, closed off from nature and from sunlight; this occurrence becomes a significant meaning in McCoy’s novel, as the ocean and sunlight are imagery. The ocean represents the constant flow of life and sunlight represents hope. The dancing was a way to avoid the contestants’ lives and the reality on what was happening on the outside because they had a place to sleep and food was provided for them. Therefore, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Is a basic structure of capitalism, by the promoters Rocky and Socks are both making the decisions for the people and controlling the contestants; they have built a marathon as to gain profit. McCoy’s philosophy about consumerism is no one is safe, and, in the book, it shows the audience the emptiness of the individuals. And at the end the marathon the dance had exhausted Gloria and thus, accelerated her death (Robert thought it was best for her), because Gloria was a lost cause, she was already in bad shape and in misery from the beginning of the book. He shot her to no longer let her endure life. McCoy does not seem optimistic about the future of America; California as a metaphor and the end of growth.
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