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 11th 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.’
from Fred: Interesting and sobering tale.
My paternal grandparents managed to hang on to their home only because a brother who worked for Sanitary Dairies of St. Paul. He had enough extra to pay the interest on their home mortgage. They were lucky.
from Chuck:
Opinion: The consequences of America’s moral drift:
Consumerism and the addiction economy are undermining the republic.
By Spencer Cox and Ian Marcus Corbin October 26, 2025 (6 min read). Printed in Washington Post, Oct 28, 2025
Spencer Cox is governor of Utah. Ian Marcus Corbin directs the Public Culture Project at Harvard and is a senior fellow at the think tank Capita.
In July 1926, President Calvin Coolidge delivered a speech near the Liberty Bell to mark the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. At the heart of his oration was a striking claim: The Declaration is a “great spiritual document,” composed of principles such as equality, liberty, popular sovereignty and the rights of man, hashed out in church meeting halls over generations, whose origins lay in “the unseen world” of American religiosity. Unless anchored by these deep “things of the spirit,” he warned, “all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp.”
Twenty-first-century America is starving for the spiritual depth and moral direction that Coolidge identified. Too many Americans, especially the young, feel adrift. This is visible in high rates of loneliness, depression, anxiety, suicide and drug overdoses. It is further manifested in the rising tide of mistrust and the poison of political hatred, descending to violence. The young man who is accused of killing Charlie Kirk in Utah last month spent much of his life in the addictive cocoon of online gaming and message boards.
The problem feels fundamental; many people, including many leaders, seem unclear about who Americans are as a people, who they want to become and what kind of world they want to help build. This drift amounts to a civilizational crisis of agency, interwoven with an epidemic of addiction. Addressing this crisis will require the nation — as it approaches its first quarter-millennium — to reimagine the bounds of public life.
In a 2023 Harvard study, 58 percent of young adults reported lacking meaning and purpose in their lives. Without a moral or spiritual orientation, shared values and projects that can give shape to a life, and knit a community together, start to seem inaccessible, relics of a bygone past. Such conditions lead to toxic politics and a turn to harmful substances and behaviors that grant a small hit of dopamine, or some thin imitation of belonging, but render us only more powerless and lonely.
Too much of American economic life is designed to amplify and profit from these addiction spirals. As historian Christopher Lasch put it in the 1970s:
“In a simpler time, advertising merely called attention to the product and extolled its advantages. Now it manufactures a product of its own: the consumer, perpetually unsatisfied, restless, anxious, and bored. Advertising serves not so much to advertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life.”
It’s one thing to buy well-made shoes because they protect your feet and look attractive. It’s another to buy yet one more pair of shoes because advertisers have convinced you that your present life is shabby but this next purchase will finally make you happy.
The online attention economy, especially social media, has intensified the reality Lasch described. Practically every aspect, down to the shade of red that alerts you to a new comment or like, has been calibrated not to make you wiser or happier but to get you hooked. Other examples of the addiction economy include the destructive rise of buy-now-pay-later financing, mobile sports betting, online pornography and vaping.
Shrinking the addiction economy will require Americans to upend decades of conventional political and economic wisdom. For some time now, we have imagined that robust moral judgments should be relegated to the private sphere, places such as churches, homes and private schools. Government, work, public schools and universities, in this vision, should not only remain neutral on large questions of the good life but also generally avoid those questions, for fear of starting conversations where perfect agreement is impossible. Instead, as employees, consumers, voters and leaders, they should focus on maximizing opportunities and resources to deploy in whatever way suits them. Under this paradigm, a chief executive is not obligated to ask whether his or her business is making life better or worse for customers, employees or the community, but only to offer products that people will purchase.
This approach is unable to sustain the well-being of the republic. An amoral public sphere ends up shaping even those private parts of the world where meaning is supposed to take shape. For that reason, public life also needs to become a place where people can reason together about the physical and spiritual health of society. Fundamental questions should be debated in the halls of government, in companies and schools — not just inside churches and homes.
Utah is exploring ways to bring moral reasoning into the work of government. We recently passed some of the country’s most powerful regulations to prevent social media companies from stealing children’s attention and agency. Utah has also launched lawsuits against TikTok and Snap Inc. to curb their use of addictive features — endless scrolling, push notifications and AI chatbots — designed to hook teens, often facilitating sexual exploitation and drug trafficking. A new year-long paid internship for gap-year students has benefited students and nonprofits throughout the state. The University of Utah now provides college credit for military service, religious missions and humanitarian work, recognizing the value that such service brings to the life and education of students and neighborhoods.
Education has the potential to be one of the most central forums for this revival. This could mean following the lead of countries such as France by requiring students to grapple with philosophy coursework during high school. It could also mean a renewed focus on the search for meaning in higher education. Too often, universities have presented education as glorified job training and allowed campus culture to be shaped by stultifying orthodoxies rather than intellectual vitality and openness.
But there are promising signs. A pilot program at Utah State University places questions of meaning, purpose and civic responsibility at the heart of general education. All enrolled students will engage with the works of Plato, John Stuart Mill, Lao Tzu and Alexis de Tocqueville, fostering civil discourse and critical thinking. A new initiative called the Catherine Project has led thousands of people through readings of great books, online, for free. At Harvard, the Public Culture Project serves the public interest by hosting conversations with leaders from across society on matters of moral and spiritual import.
The nation will need more ideas than the ones above. Our democracy will not last another 250 years if it is populated by communities lacking direction and animated by addiction. As Coolidge proclaimed, we cannot rely on material prosperity alone. We must recover the “things of the spirit” — meaning, purpose and reverence for the good — if America is to endure.
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Comments 1,171 Readers are responding: The conversation explores the impact of moral and spiritual orientation on young adults in America, with many participants expressing skepticism about the role of organized religion and political figures in providing moral guidance. Several comments highlight the perceived… Show more
WARNINGS: FINDING CASSANDRAS TO STOP CATASTROPHES By Richard A. Clarke and R.P. Eddy, 2017: The first 8 chapters detail the millions of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars lost to catastrophes,– natural and human engineered – due to people in power failing to act on the advanced warnings of experts. The last eight chapters estimates the billions of lives and trillions of dollars that could be saved if humanity collectively works to prevent the other dire warnings now being given regarding other threats (some existential). Chapter 11 “The Journalist: Pandemic Disease”. Most instructive is Chapter 9. It outlines three cognitive reasons why humans ignore such warnings.
Chuck Woolery
Former Chair, United Nations Association Council of Organizations
Former Issues Director, Global Health Council.
Former Action Board member, American Public Health Association.
Author of 1996 and 1997 Congressional testimony warnings regarding threats to US and global bio- security.
chuck@igc.org
6:50 p.m. Tuesday Nov. 4: In my corner of the world, as I write, we are voting for a new Senator in our local Senate District, and for four local school board members.