To enjoy the advantages of a free market, one must have both buyers and sellers, both bulls and bears. A market without bears would be like a nation without a free press. There would be no one to criticise and restrain the false optimism that always leads to disaster.
- Bernard Baruch, financier, statement before the Committee on Rules of the US House of Representatives, 1917

October 2009 marked the 80th anniversary of the stock market crash of 1929, which led to a financial and economic wasteland from which the United States and much of the world only emerged after World War II through the institution of the Marshall Plan. The Temporary National Economic Committee of 1937 showed that despite all the fiscal stimuli implemented by the US government to try to jumpstart the economy—namely, the measures introduced in Roosevelt’s New Deal—the lingering effect of the Depression remained. These days, it seems impossible to separate our understanding of the Depression and World War II. The war was an elixir to the Depression, and, more significantly, the atrocities of World War II overshadowed the domestic catastrophe inflicted by the trauma of 1929. There were breadlines, unemployment, and starvation, but American domestic life was spared the horrors of fascism.

The Depression occupies a lower ground, as it did then, when viewed from the lofty Churchillian promises that “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” would lead to the “broad, sunlit uplands” of peace, peace in his time. From the high ground of Churchill’s rhetoric, the Depression could be seen as less important, less consequential. Its historical wave lapped on the shore and was overcome by a much larger one. It is useful to recall that America has elected a number of presidents who fought in World War II, but no candidate that solely defined himself as a survivor of the Depression has held the highest office in the land. The narrative of Depression-era survival is stirring, but it was not the resonant narrative of a generation. Freedom of movement, expression, and belief—the victory of democracy over tyranny—were more important than any economic ill. Even though we were miserable, so our historical memory tells us, what came after it made the suffering well worthwhile. In hindsight, our basic need to be free was more important than our need to be rich.

Parallels to the depression