Let’s save string, make jam – and talk to each other

THE EXPERTS WHO drafted my elementary school’s history curriculum clearly did not want to frighten small children. Thus, I learned about the Great Depression relatively late in my educational career. Even then, amid the bounty of the Eisenhower era, I had difficulty imagining a world in which, for reasons still in dispute among scholars, economic activity had slowed to a crawl, much of the workforce was jobless and millions stood on line for soup. (Soup? Yuck.)

I turned to my father for enlightenment. What, I asked, was it like growing up during the Great Depression? Whereupon he gazed into the middle distance with a wistful countenance and, after an eternity, said: “Wonderful. Nobody had any money, so other things were important. We entertained ourselves. Took care of each other. Those were the best years of my life.”

I was reminded of that exchange by – guess what? – the current financial turmoil. Depending on your expert, it looks as if we’re headed for another Great Depression, or else we’re already there. This new version will no doubt entail prolonged economic stasis, widespread unemployment and soup lines at McDonald’s. Also factories rusting quietly, hedge fund managers leaping from Wall Street balconies and Treasury undersecretaries scouring still-solvent parts of the world for loose change. Brother can you spare a yuan?

But maybe the downturn will have an upside. Just as memories of the Great Depression could mist over the eyes of a former boy who lived through it, perhaps this version will cause us to slow down a bit, focus on important things, rediscover our humanity.

The outlines of this new golden age of rediscovered truths have begun to emerge. We’re driving and flying less (since we’re poorer). So we stay home more. This means fewer restaurant meals, theater tickets and skybox seats, and more home cooking, quiet evenings around the hearth and, possibly, more reading. In his graceful memoir Growing Up, Great Depression survivor Russell Baker wrote lovingly of a boyhood US home where several generations – forced by circumstances to live under the same leaky roof – would gather for a lively dinner each evening. “Talk was the Great Depression pastime,” he recalled. “Unlike the movies, talk was free, and a great river of talk flowed through the house, rising at suppertime, and cresting as my bedtime approached … I loved the sense of family warmth that radiated through those long kitchen nights of talk.” Togetherness could make a comeback, maybe even the lost art of conversation.

We will be making not just our own meals but our own clothes, as well as our own bread, jam, soap and furniture. We’ll perform our own oil changes and paper our own bathrooms (with share certificates). All of these chores will eat up enormous amounts of time, but we’ll be rich in that particular commodity, if poor in gainful employ. So we’ll have no excuses to avoid those secret, oft-postponed goals – learning Italian, writing that novel.

We’ll wear hats, of course. They warm your head, and that’s where you lose 50 percent of your personal wealth. Besides, everybody wore hats in the Depression. I have the Margaret Bourke White photos and Frank Capra movies to prove it. And we’ll go to the movies a lot. They’ll be in black and white, which is cheaper, grittier, more authentic. We’ll all be in solidarity with the working class and dream one day of being fortunate enough to join it.
And then, one velvet morning, happy days will be here again. The pendulum will swing and the business cycle will recycle. Credit will flow through the pipes and bankers will get bonuses again. We’ll be venturing out of our bunkers and sniffing the air for the scent of money.

But our hard-won depression mentality will endure. We will still be clipping cents-off coupons, saving string, buying slightly dented canned goods and smoothing out aluminum foil for reuse. We won’t slip back into those bad habits of under-saving and over-consumption that so recently led the world’s developed economies down the primrose path to penury.

\Yeah, right. More likely, we will start spending like Sarah Palin at Saks as soon as we’re solvent. We’ll splash out on flat-screens and iPods. We’ll re-re-mortgage the house, gorge on currency-linked inverse floaters and take out a Spouse Equity Line of Credit against our future partner’s future earnings.

After a few years of living large, the bill will come due once again and we’ll be back in a new Great Depression downturn. That’s because we’ve lost forever the real lesson of the real Great Depression: don’t listen to your grandparents. It was hell.