Before the 1929 crash, what was the mood of America?
DAVID KENNEDY: When we think of the 1920s and think about what the mood of the country was, much of our popular understanding of that is informed by famous old books like Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday, and we have this image of the 1920s as a decade that was slap-happy on bathtub gin and flappers and so on and so forth. But in fact, for large portions of the country, the 1920s was a depressed decade. There had been an agricultural depression that, by 1929, was already nearly a decade old. Farm prices were way below what they’d been before the First World War, and even further below what they had been in wartime. Nearly half the American people still live in the countryside in the 1920s, and they lived in the grip of a chronic depression. If you were black, if you were a farmer, or if you were a recent immigrant living in America in the 1920s, you did not share, generally speaking, in that so-called 1920s prosperity. If, on the other hand, you were a reasonably skilled urban wo
