NOTE:  I’ll be offline through Nov. 1.  Our thoughts particularly with the people of Jamaica in the wake of the monstrous hurricane.

Heather Cox Richardson has a very excellent summary of the 1920s in her Letters fr0m an American for October 28, 2025.  It is well worth your time to read and reflect.

The Great Depression which followed the Roaring Twenties, was disastrous, but not for all.  “Catastrophe” can spell “Opportunity” for those positioned to survive.  “Buy low, sell high” comes to mind.  The Oligarchs of the time had the cushion, the connections, the savvy, that the rest of the population did not have.  There were the haves and the have nots….  Of course, the entire story is extremely complicated.  But I think this is a good time for sober reflection.

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Every family has its story, if there were ancestors around during the Dirty Thirties.

I’ve done family history for years, so I have a few off-the-cuff insights, from what I learned from Mom and Dad’s family experiences.  Fill in the blanks with your own.  I will only summarize my own, the blanks filled in by actual demonstrable facts.

Mom’s parents were farmers who came to ND in 1905.  Grandpa clearly had ambition to be a ‘cut above’ the average.  He was an activist in the local scene.  He had smarts.  (I only talk about the men, here, because then only the men were generally the legal entities.)

The 1920s dawned fairly well for this farm family.  WWI and the WWI Flu were in the rear view mirror.  Grandpa was an inventive sort, and patented something called a Fuel Economizer in about 1924 which was good enough to be purchased by somebody for  few hundred dollars.

Grandma and Grandpa purchased a neighboring parcel of land on contract for deed, enlarging their farm.

In my hands, here as I type, are two stock certificates issued to Grandpa, one issued June 15, 1927, the second April 20, 1929.  They were farm related, and I found them in the farm junk when I was closing out the farm now ten years ago.

Also in the farm junk was a series of letters from a lawyer where the Busch’s lost their additional land for non-payment on the contract they had signed.  The back story is they did not have the money, and it was in the 1930s.

Grandpa was in the founding group of the North Dakota Farmer’s Union about 1928, and judging from some letters published in the County weekly paper he was an enthusiastic union organizer.  His local had a bank account; he apparently was Secretary-Treasurer.  The last of the few checks written is below, dated October 12, 1929.  The dream was ending.  In the 1930s, the family story goes, the oldest daughter, my Aunt Lucina, saved the farm literally by paying the taxes and living at home while teaching school.

The Bernard’s family story is similar, but simpler.

Dad graduated from high school in May, 1927, and his plan was to matriculate at the University of North Dakota in the Fall.

The family would probably be considered middle class at the time.  Grandpa for years had been Chief Engineer at the local flour mill, and his brother was chief miller.  It was a small operation, but seems to have had perhaps 15 employees, and important to the town.

In May of 1927, the bank holding the family savings went under – I think fraud was the suspicion.  In the same month, the flour mill closed, and Grandpa’s job went with it.  All plans changed for everyone.

I didn’t show up on the scene till 1940s, but I remember my grandparents Bernard living in a tiny house in Grafton; and my grandparents Busch plugging along as small farmers in North Dakota.

WWII brought employment and some sense of prosperity, along with the tragedy of the War, and that is yet another story.  Their son, George, was a Naval officer and his ship docked at Tokyo September 10, 1945.  He had been on the ship since January of 1943, one of a great many family and community stories of WWII crossing many borders.

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None of us know for sure what’s ahead for all of us as 2025 ends.

Are we in the early 1920s, or the early 1930s.  Be alert.

POSTNOTES:   Grandpa Bernard was 57 years old when his job disappeared in 1927; he turned 65 in 1937, about coincident with the enactment of Social Security (1935, first social security checks 1940).  Grandma was homemaker, so probably not covered at the time.

Medicare and Medicaid was signed into Law on July 30, 1965, a day after my first wife’s funeral.

In checking references, I happened across the SocialSecurity.gov site which goes into great detail about income security history.  The thrust seems to be less about federal social security than individual responsibility (as in privatizing).  I have not checked this further at this point.  Check for yourself.  There is a long history of getting rid of social security as a government responsibility,  This is what raises my antennae about the longer narrative.

COMMENTS (also see end of post):

from Joyce: My parents did okay during the depression; my Dad was employed as an English teacher and soccer coach in the New York City public schools, and he was never unemployed. My parents married in 1935, and were even able to tour Europe in 1938.

from SAK:  Since we corresponded about Lincoln & the recent book Team of Rivalsby Goodwin and since you mentioned the great depression of the 1930s as well as Heather Cox Richardson, you might also be interested in her “letter” of the 11^th of February, 2025:

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-11-2025

It’s about both Lincoln & the depression. What she wrote reminded me of acquaintances who have drifted, sadly as she describes, into followers of those who manipulate them in order to further their own interests, not the country’s. As the wise British labour leader Aneurin Bevan said: “The whole art of Conservative [Tory party] politics in the 20th century, is being deployed to enable wealth to persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power.”

Here’s how Heather Cox Richardson ends her letter:

‘But those who objected to the liberal consensus rejected the idea that the government had any role to play in the economy or in social welfare and made no distinction between the liberal consensus and international communism. They insisted that the country was made up of “liberals,” who were pushing the nation toward socialism, and “conservatives” like themselves, who were standing alone against the Democrats and Republicans who made up a majority of the country and liked the new business regulations, safety net, infrastructure, and protection of civil rights.   [Here she means during the decades pre-Reagan]

That reactionary mindset came to dominate the Republican Party after Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. Republicans began to insist that anyone who embraced the liberal consensus of the past several decades was un-American and had no right to govern, no matter how many Americans supported that ideology. And now, forty-five years later, we are watching as a group of reactionaries dismantle the government that serves the needs of ordinary Americans and work, once again, to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of an elite.

The idea of a small government that serves the needs of a few wealthy people, Lincoln warned in his era, is “the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.’