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“Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” by E. Y. “Yip” Harburg and Jay Gorney
Published by Glocca Morra Music (ASCAP) and Gorney Music (ASCAP)
Administered by Next Decade Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used
by Permission.
ISBN 978-1-250-02035-2
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
C H A P T E R 1
End Times
It looked like society itself was disintegrating, and for the first
time in our comfortable suburban lives, we felt the atavistic
touch of panic.
For our parents and grandparents, however, these events
may have seemed a little more familiar. The country went
down virtually the same road in the years 1929–33, with
stock markets crashing, banks failing, factories closing, and
foreclosures mounting. So similar were the two disasters that
comparisons to the Great Depression became a media com-
monplace in 2008, the inevitable model to consider when
looking to make sense of the current debacle.
The literary critic Edmund Wilson called his book of
Depression essays The American Earthquake, and though
I’ve read it several times over the course of my life it wasn’t
until 2009 that I really understood what he meant by that
phrase. Had you been one of the many who put your savings
in stocks in the twenties, you would have watched your invest-
ments lose half their value, then lose half of what remained,
then half again. Had you bought your stocks on margin,
you would have lost it all at the very beginning.
Had you been one of the responsible ones who kept your
savings in the bank, you may well have lost it anyway. Finan-
cial institutions were exposed to the disaster by definition,
and when your local bank failed—as almost half of American
banks did in the years after the 1929 crash1—it was a pretty
sure bet that no nice man from the FDIC would show up to
make it all better. You simply lost most of your savings. And
when your town bank went down, your town went down, too.
In 1933, the fear among bank depositors grew so conta-
gious that state governors tried to stop the runs on the banks
by forcing them to close, or take a “bank holiday”—a move
that brought economic activity to a stop in the United States.
Pity the Billionaire | 15
* Of course, 1928 was not a Depression year. But Louisiana was so poor even
before the crash, and Huey Long would soon become such an archetypal Depres-
sion figure, that we include this episode as an honorary example.
20 | Thomas Frank
* A curious echo of Mellon’s dictum about hard times forcing people to “live a
more moral life” occurs in Robert Bork’s mournful meditation, Slouching
Towards Gomorrah, in which he briefly considers “a deep economic depres-
Pity the Billionaire | 21
sion” as one way of bringing about “moral regeneration.” The idea is immedi-
ately discarded for “lacking broad public support.” See Slouching Towards
Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (New York: Harper-
Collins, 2003), p. 336. The Galbraith quote appears in The Great Crash: 1929
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955), p. 199.
* Then again, maybe they would take it. Patman was a fiery left-wing populist
during the Depression, but today his congressional district is represented by
Louie Gohmert, a Tea Party favorite who has become famous for proposing a
zero percent corporate tax rate and for his trademark fear: that terrorists are
22 | Thomas Frank
planning to have jihadist babies born in the United States. The Patman quota-
tion comes from Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression
(New York: Pantheon, 1970), p. 285.
PITY
THE
BILLIONAIRE
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