Thursday, July 17th, 2008
In Lincoln’s day the task of the people was to preserve that Nation from disruption from within.
In this day the task of the people is to save that Nation and its institutions from disruption from without.
To us there has come a time, in the midst of swift happenings, to pause for a moment and take stock–to recall what our place in history has been, and to rediscover what we are and what we may be. If we do not, we risk the real peril of inaction.
READ MORE FROM MONDAY, JANUARY 20, 1941
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Thursday, July 17th, 2008
A little boy tried to hide his pet rabbit.
“He thinks we are not going to eat it,”
said his sister, “but we are.”
You could feel the Depression deepen, but you could not look out of the window and see it. Men who lost their jobs dropped out of sight. They were quiet, and you had to know just when and where to find them: at night, for instance, on the edge of town huddling for warmth around a bonfire, or even the municipal incinerator; at dawn, picking over the garbage dump for scraps of food or salvageable clothing.
 The Worst of Times: 1930 -1933 by Caroline Bird
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Thursday, July 17th, 2008
The following essay is an example of analytical history at its best. Without relying on narrative techniques, the Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith takes apart the economy of the 1920s and shows us how its weaknesses led to the Great Depression of the 1930s. In the course of doing so, he also “takes apart,” in the colloquial sense of that expression, the presidents of the 1920s and a number of their leading advisers.
    The effectiveness and power of the essay depend upon a number of factors. One is Galbraith’s mastery both of the facts he deals with and of the economic mechanisms of the society; he discusses few events that are not thoroughly familiar to students of the subject, but he has an unfailing eye for what is significant. Another is his gift for anecdote and the pithy phrase. As he says, the epigram that Elbert H. Cary of U.S. Steel “never saw a blast furnace until his death” is well known; but not everyone who writes about Cary knows enough to use it. Still a third is Galbraith’s ability to state his own opinions without qualification and at the same time without passion, to make the kind of calm, reasoned judgments that are characteristic of a convinced but unprejudiced and intelligent mind. All these qualities explain why his books, such as American Capitalism, The Affluent Society, and The Great Crash, 1929 (a fuller treatment of the subject of this essay), have been both popular and critical successes.
Galbraith on the Market Crash
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