Imagine a time when the rich got phenomenally richer as the stock market went up and up, and even small-time investors magically made money on Wall Street. Prosperity appeared unending, and the banks seemed too big to fail. Everybody piled on; it was the American wayuntil a rude awakening when the market crashed.
Sounds much like the present, except the hats were more glamorous.
When it all fell apart, and a new president suggested government relief programs to help the nation through the crisis, he was called a socialist, a communist and worse.
There was also a flu epidemic that year. And, for hip city dwellers, unmarked speakeasys serving fancy cocktails were all the rage.
The parallels are striking. The 1930s are increasingly a touchstone for our own times.
For a comprehensive introduction to the era that is oddly resonant in 2009, PBS offers a five-part film series from “American Experience,” beginning Monday with “The Crash of 1929.” The films will air on five consecutive Mondays, locally at 8 p.m. on KRMA-Channel 6.
The five films making up “The 1930s” cover the financial crash and Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Dust Bowl and Hoover Dam and the cultural icons of the age, notably a racehorse named Seabiscuit.
The films would be engaging enough as historical documents at any point, but the whole enterprise feels newly relevant, 80 years later.
Questions about the role of government in that decade have resurfaced today. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was assailed as un-American. Those complaints have a familiar ring as President Barack Obama encounters angry resistance in dealing with the current recession. Even some of the editorial cartoons look familiar.
The dramatic highs and lows of the period are also reminiscent of recent history, and archival clips document both the optimism of the Jazz Age and the desperately bleak 1930s.
The daughter-in-law of one Wall Street insider, Jesse Livermore, talks about his two yachts, private railway car and five homes, including an apartment on Fifth Avenue that he bought to have a place where he could change clothes for the theater.
They didn’t know they were rich, says one, because everyone they knew had multiple homes and hired help.
On Nov. 2, “The Civilian Conservation Corps” fleshes out the history with the reminiscences of old-timers recalling what the CCC did for them — “three squares a day” and “the only time in my life I had two pairs of shoes.”
The government relief program that took 3 million unemployed young men ages 17 to 23 and put them to work in the outdoors was tremendously popular with the public. Evidence of the program is all around us.
Roosevelt realized that the idea of work was much more important than relief, author/journalist Jonathan Alter explains on-screen in the “CCC” film. Doing forestry, conservation, flood relief, dam building and road projects proved beneficial not just for the men doing the physical labor, but for the country and the national mood. (In Colorado, the CCC camps were divided into two districts, reporting to Grand Junction and Fort Logan.)
The films are heartbreaking, inspiring, full of glorious vintage footage and oddly reassuring. There’s something about rising to the occasion that always seems truly patriotic.
The American idea, from the beginning, has been to never let a serious crisis go to waste.
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
