The Emotional Life of the Great Depression

Description

The Emotional Life of the Great Depression documents how Americans responded emotionally to the crisis of the Great Depression. Unlike most books about the 1930s, which focus almost exclusively on the despair of the American people during the decade, this volume explores the 1930s through other, equally essential emotions: righteousness, panic, fear, awe, love, and hope. In expanding the canon of Great Depression emotions, the book draws on an eclectic archive of sources, including the ravings of a would-be presidential assassin, stock market investment handbooks, a Cleveland serial murder case, Jesse Owens's record-setting long jump at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, King Edward VIII's abdication from his throne to marry a twice-divorced American woman, and the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous. In concert with these, it offers new readings of the imaginative literature of the period, from obscure Christian apocalyptic novels and H.P. Lovecraft short stories to classics like John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Richard Wright's Native Son. The result is a new take on the Great Depression, one that emphasizes its major events (the stock market crash, unemployment, the passage of the Social Security Act) but also, and perhaps even more so, its sensibilities, its structures of feeling. Cover THE EMOTIONAL LIFE OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION Copyright Acknowledgments Contents List of Figures 1: Introduction The Conventional Wisdom So What? Methodology Caveats Hickok Revisited 2: Purging the Rottenness from the System: The Blessed and the Damned in the Great Depression The Liquidationists The Eschatologists The Babylonians The Keynesians 3: “I Saw One Woman Faint”: Toward a Sociology of Panic The Crash “You People Must Have Faith” Laboring under Too Much Emotion 4: Fear Itself: Polio, Unemployment, and Other Things on the Doorstep “Don’t Ever Kiss Your Children or Allow Them to Be Kissed” Fear of Falling Hardy Perennials? Glub Glub Cosmic Triggers 5: Awe: Toward a Depression Sublime The Last and Most Magnificent of Towers Men at Work Of Migrants and Grandmothers Famous Men (and Women) Downward to the Sublime 6: A Sordid, Futureless Mess?: Love in Hard Times Baby Face “Married. That’s What We All Ought to Do.” Double Solitaire Love Stories People . . . Still Gettin’ Married 7: What You Want to Hear: Hope in the Great Depression Liar! “He Sells Hope” How to Win Friends Think and Grow Rich Abandon Hope 8: “The Hazards and Vicissitudes of Life”: The Emotional Life of the Social Security Act The Old People’s Crusade In the Shadow of the Poorhouse Social Security in America Of Reservations and Reserves Notes CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 2 CHAPTER 3 CHAPTER 4 CHAPTER 5 CHAPTER 6 CHAPTER 7 CHAPTER 8 Bibliography Index