Lessons from the Great Depression

By Jim Jubak

When people my age -- I'm 57 -- or younger bandy about worries of a coming recession or even a depression, and I've heard a lot of that talk lately, I think we're playing parlor games.

We never lived through the Great Depression. Most of us have never even had an emotionally honest conversation with someone who did. I don't think we've got the foggiest idea what we're talking about when we worry about a global crash or glibly recommend stockpiling food and ammo.

Like children who have grown up in secure homes, we can indulge in a love for scary stories because, in our heart of hearts, we know the monsters will never get us.

Well, they almost did get my grandparents and parents. In 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression, my grandparents almost lost their house. Only a $3,000 second mortgage from friends saved them when my grandfather lost his job as a draftsman at what would become ExxonMobil.

Stitching together pieces of the past

I don't pretend I know what they felt like. Growing up, I didn't know that part of family history. Though I had talked with my grandmother about working in the garment district of New York's Lower East Side embroidering pillows at the turn of the century, those conversations were about hard times overcome by hard work, the immigrant dream. But I never talked with my mom or dad about the truly dark years, the years when it must have felt like all the family had achieved might slip away.

• Talk back: What lessons do you see in the Great Depression?

In the years since my parents died, I've tried to piece together that part of family history from deeds and mortgage papers that I inherited. I admit to a personal fascination with the people, often unidentified, who stare out at me from the old photos my mom had saved.

But I'm also trying to recover the experience of a critical generation, the last one in the United States to know what true economic hardship was like. Why bother? Because the future, the next 50 years or so, will be more uncertain than the past 50 years. Not as uncertain as the Great Depression, I believe and hope, but unsettling enough.

The promise of the United States has always been work hard, save hard and invest in education, and the future will be better for your children. I worry that the next 50 years could see that promise broken. The baby-boomer generation could mark a peak, at least an economic one, that members of the next generations won't routinely surpass.

Learning from an older generation

What we need is an emotional understanding of how it felt to live with uncertainty and still get on with life, and still trust that hard work had a point and still believe that the future will be a time worth living in. I think the experience of a generation that faced a greater degree of uncertainty can teach us something about how to face our own economic uncertainty.

Without that understanding, I think we're like the children so used to the sunlight that we tremble in scared delight at a passing cloud and yet fail to acknowledge the real power of the dark tornado on the horizon.

The house that my grandfather designed and that a master carpenter built in 1923 for $3,000 was the core of my grandparents' lives. The move to the wilds of New Jersey symbolized their move up from the tenements of Delancey and Orchard streets in New York, where they had been raised. They were the second family to build a house in a neighborhood that gradually filled up with other Poles and Ukrainians and Russians. My grandfather planted the yard with trees -- all cultivated European species -- and then laid out a fruit orchard in the back to make it seem more like the landscape in the Old Country.

Continued: Watching security slip away

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