The Myth of the Great Depression
David Potts (2009)
Scribe Publications; 420 pages.
*****

Years ago, in a high school history class, I got one of those dread assignments to go out and interview a grandparent about WWII at home.  I bottled the attempt at asking, and I was even more loath to be dispatched out to an old folks' home to interview someone there.  But I knew well enough what the interview should include: make do and mend, growing food, news on the wireless, that sort of thing.  So I made the interview transcript up.  (And got an A.)

Having far more ethical scruples now, I would of course never fabricate an interview.  The point of the story is that I got away with it then because I knew the dominant imagery; I might not have had the conversation, but I knew already the narrative I was meant to take from it. 

This is common enough for WWII, and common, too, for the depression of the 30s.  I'll bet most of us could bang out a good bunch of depression images, despite it having happened eighty-odd years ago, and despite never having experienced it.  Shoes worn through, evictions, dole queues, suicides, desperation and despair.

These images have become so dominant, David Potts argues, that they have become a modern myth. 

This is not a dramatically revisionist account that argues that such things never happened and the depression was all sunshine and kittens.  Rather, it's a work of thorough historical craft, informed by around 2,000 interviews.  Potts is an Australian academic, and reading this is like reading a how-to manual for research practice.  Take this example: it is true that during the depression child "malnutrition was widespread and sometimes led to illness and even to death" (26).  Good evidence for the depression as a period of horrendous suffering?  Think again.  In comparison with the 20s, the depression figures are either equivalent or lower. 

This illustrates Potts' key point.  It's easy to pick out a shocking statistic or distressing photograph and claim it as representative.  It makes a compelling political narrative.  It sells papers.  But it doesn't account for typical experience.  In fact, when most of the interviewees referenced a horror story, it turned out to have come from the papers: it wasn't something that had been witnessed or experienced. 

Potts doesn't deny the realities of poverty.  He argues that the depression brought into the national spotlight working class poverty latent through the 20s; it wasn't symptomatic so much as it was being, finally, discussed. 

The blurb promises that the book will "help us reconsider what is most worthwhile in life."  There are plenty of books out there which do the job much more directly (Voluntary Simplicity, or any of The Idler publications, for example), but there is certainly an anti-materialist thread here.  This seems particularly relevant as, after another recession, 'make do and mend' is invoked once again. 

Potts, at pains to present himself as not a political partisan, recounts at one stage a student leaping up in his lecture, berating him for betraying the working class.  In contemporary Britain, a central component of Leftist politics is emphasising the suffering of the poor (this seems almost the current raison d'être of blogs like Left Foot Forward).  The dominance of depression images of suffering suggests that this is a successful strategy.  But maybe it isn't.  In Australia, the depression saw the election of right-wing governments, who held onto power, Potts suggests, because "people found they were doing well enough to want to protect what they had." (335)

Potts' analysis is based on the Australian context.  I have to admit that the depression in Britain is a bit of a blind spot for me.  Do you think his argument might be applicable to Britain, or do you think circumstances there were much different to Australia?