How A Different America Dealt with the Great Depression

via:PewResearch.org
Were confirmation needed that the American public is in a sour mood, the 2010 midterm elections provided it. As both pre-election and post-election surveys made clear, Americans are not only strongly dissatisfied with the state of the economy and the direction in which the country is headed, but with government efforts to improve them. As the Pew Research Center's analysis of exit poll data concluded, "the outcome of this year's election represented a repudiation of the political status quo.... Fully 74% said they were either angry or dissatisfied with the federal government, and 73% disapproved of the job Congress is doing."

This outlook is in interesting contrast with many of the public's views during the Great Depression of the 1930s, not only on economic, political and social issues, but also on the role of government in addressing them.

Quite unlike today's public, what Depression-era Americans wanted from their government was, on many counts, more not less. And despite their far more dire economic straits, they remained more optimistic than today's public. Nor did average Americans then turn their ire upon their Groton-Harvard-educated president -- this despite his failure, over his first term in office, to bring a swift end to their hardship. FDR had his detractors but these tended to be fellow members of the social and economic elite.

Still, as now, the public had some reservations about the stretch of government power and found little consensus on specific policies with which to tackle the nation's troubles.
Optimistic 'Socialists'

Broadly representative measures of public opinion during the first years of the Depression are not available -- the Gallup organization did not begin its regular polling operations until 1935. And in its early years of polling, Gallup asked few questions directly comparable with today's more standardized sets. Moreover, its samples were heavily male, relatively well off and overwhelmingly white. However, a combined data set of Gallup polls for the years 1936 and1937, made available by the Roper Center, provides insight into the significant differences, but also notable similarities, between public opinion then and now.1

Bear in mind that while unemployment had receded from its 1933 peak, estimated at 24.9% by the economist Stanley Lebergott,2 it was still nearly 17% in 1936 and 14% in 1937.3 By contrast, today's unemployment situation is far less dismal. To be sure, despite substantial job gains in October, unemployment remains stubbornly high relative to the norm of recent decades and the ranks of the long-term unemployed have risen sharply in recent months. But the current 9.8% official government rate, as painful as it is to jobless workers and their families, remains far below the levels that prevailed during most of the 1930s.

Still, despite their far higher and longer-lasting record of unemployment, Depression-era Americans remained hopeful for the future. About half (50%) expected general business conditions to improve over the next six months, while only 29% expected a worsening. And fully 60% thought that opportunities for getting ahead were better (45%) or at least as good (15%) as in their father's day.

Today's public is far gloomier about the economic outlook: Only 35% in an October Pew Research Center survey expected better economic conditions by October 2011, while 16% expected a still weaker economy. The Reagan-era recession found the public somewhat more hopeful than at present, but less optimistic than in the 1930s.4 In November 1982, with unemployment at its recession peak of nearly 11%, Americans believed their personal financial situation would improve over the next year by a 41%-to-22% margin.

However, the most striking difference between the 1930s and the present day is that, by the standards of today's political parlance, average Americans of the mid-1930s revealed downright "socialistic" tendencies in many of their views about the proper role of government.

True, when asked to describe their political position, fewer than 2% of those surveyed were ready to describe themselves as "socialist" rather than as Republican, Democratic or independent. But by a lopsided margin of 54% to 34%, they expressed the opinion that if there were another depression (and fears of one were mounting), the government should follow the same spending pattern as FDR's administration had followed before.
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source: pewresearch.org