What's Wrong with a Nice Little Recession?

 A Lot.

The Scream, by Edvard Munch.

I don't like recessions. I remember two of them with a particular lack of fondness - the Reagan recession in the early 1980s and the financial meltdown in 2007-2009.  Both of these economic events substantially altered the path of my life. 

Even little recessions can do a lot of damage. And then there is always the possibility that, with appropriate mismanagement, things can spin out of control.

Kind of like a nice little war.

Also kind of like 1929.

Let's have a look at Walker Evans, one of the most celebrated American photographers of the twentieth century. Evans actually started his photographic career at the beginning of the Great Depression, and for a while, things seemed to be going well. Hart Crane's poem The Bridge was published in 1930 with three photogravures by Evans. But his work was not necessarily putting a whole lot of bread on the table, a common experience for many Americans at that time. 

Between 1929 and 1933 President Herbert Hoover presided over an amazing economic death spiral. Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president in November 1932, but he did not take office until March 1933. Here's what Evans was doing a few months after the inauguration:

"July 13, 1933: A day in the life of an itinerant photographer. Evans was still in straitened circumstances, forced to cadge a midday meal with friends who were as badly off as he. 'Hungry, so walked to see Noda; they were in and I ate.' ... Considering Evans's situation, he was taking it with a certain equanimity: 'Not panicky, nor yet careless-bohemian about it.' ... 'Always wondering if past experiences with poverty have or have not depleted me.' ... That evening, another near-starving friend, the artists' model Avis Ferme, with whom he had once pursued a courtship if not an affair, telephoned him. He acknowledged a certain coldness in his attitude: 'I feel careless about it and don't know what that's a sign of. A sign that I am tired of the hypocrisy of sending stranded people around to unstranded people. Weary of this perpetual inability we all share to be strictly honest about our indifference. I don't care if Avis Ferme starves to death as long as I don't have to watch her do it; so I feel like writing that down."

(My source here is James Mellow's excellent biography Walker Evans, 1999. The quotations are on pages 195-196.) 

Things started going better for Evans in 1933. That year he had a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art, and he also went to Cuba to take photographs for a book by Carleton Beals entitled The Crime of Cuba, which was published the same year. His big economic break came in 1935, when Roy Stryker of what would become the U.S. Farm Security Administration hired him as a staff photographer. He took a leave from his staff job in 1936 to collaborate with James Agee on a project centered on sharecroppers in Alabama that eventually became the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. His later career included a lengthy stint at Fortune magazine and a number of years teaching at Yale. 

I'm haunted by what those early years of the Depression did to Evans, and I expect to many other people. Exhaustion is here, and despair is close by.

Not too many years later FDR suggested that government had a role in giving the people freedom from fear, and freedom from want.  

But this appears to be a controversial proposition today.

See also Wounded Souls, Little Karl, The 800-Pound Gorilla in the Oval Office.