Two Eras Of Hurt

Kat Aaron

is a project editor with the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University in Washington

Some call this moment the Great Recession. As the hardship has lingered, others have begun calling it the Little Depression. But equating the hard times of the 1930s with the hard times of today is mostly overblown rhetoric. Or is it?

On the surface, the comparisons are obvious: a period of great wealth and exuberance followed by a stock market crash. After the crash, widespread economic pain. Millions of people out of work, thousands of homes lost. Families going hungry.

But much has changed. There are Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare, and Medicaid, none of which existed when the Depression hit. Breadlines and shantytowns, emblems of the Depression, are nowhere to be seen. Today, though, there is great hardship out of view. Behind closed doors, apartments and shelters are overcrowded, and cupboards are bare.

In interviews with dozens of people who lived through the Great Depression, similarities and differences between the eras emerge.

"People have so much more now than people had during the Depression," says Luanne Durst, who was born in 1931 in Rice Lake, Wis. But, she says, "I think it's a scary time for people. I think it's got to be pretty much like it was then."

There were certainly more people unemployed during the Depression than today, although it's hard to make direct comparisons, because the Bureau of Labor Statistics didn't start tracking unemployment as we know it until the 1940s. What we do know is that unemployment rose from 3.2 percent in 1929 to a staggering 20.9 percent in 1933, according to a research paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. The high-water mark of unemployment in this recession was 10.1 percent in October of 2009.

During the Depression, many people made their own work, or tried.

"Guys would be coming around from different neighborhoods, knocking on doors," says Saul Coplan, who was born in Philadelphia in 1932. " 'Can we mow your lawn, would you like us to clean your windows, is there anything we can do? Want us to shovel coal into the coal furnace?' And it was sad."