MATA HOLA
Period 6
4/1/13
Quotes of David Kennedy 1. One of the most surprising things that I discovered about Depression was the degree of passivity or docility with which people greeted it. 2. There were tens of millions of people living in poverty even before the great crash of 1929 3. Second, I think, is that we see here, you might say, the flip side of the famous American value of individualism, that if we congratulate ourselves for our success and give ourselves a pat on the back for boot-strapping ourselves up the ladder of social mobility, it follows naturally that if we don’t do that or slip down that ladder, we have nobody but ourselves to blame. 4. There had been an agricultural depression that, by 1929, was already a decade old. 5. Nearly half the American people still live in the countryside in the 1920s, and they lived in the grip of a chronic depression. 6. If you were black, if you were a famer, or if you were a recent immigrant living in
America in the 1920’s you did not share, generally speaking, in that so-called 1920s prosperity. 7. From the onset of the American industrial revolution in the early nineteenth century right down to the 1930s, the American economy was essentially on a roller coaster ride, where they’d have these periodic boom and bust cycles-depressions in the 1830s, the 1850s, the 1870s, the 1890s; right after World War I was another one-on a scale that we have not seen for the last half century. 8. Insofar as there is a consensus, it seems to be that the First World War so destabilized the major industrial economies and so disrupted the international system of trade and finance that it left in its wake a highly vulnerable system that finally succumbed a decade after the war’s conclusion, in 1929 or 1930, to all the liabilities that had been put into it, you might say, as a result of the