The Great Depression
Roscoe Bartlett was born in the Roaring Twenties, when jazz music flourished, flappers danced, and times were good. That all changed with the stock market crash of 1929, and the worldwide economy slipped into the Great Depression. It's hard to imagine today just how bad the depression was. During the 1930's 9,000 banks failed and depositors lost $140 Billion in deposits. American exports dropped 67% and the money supply shrank by a third, all in just four years. Unemployment in the US reached 25%.
But the numbers don't capture the personal hardships people faced in their daily lives. People who grew up in the Great Depression can often recall long unemployment lines, bankers reduced to selling apples for a living, or how their family gathered around the kitchen table to open their first can of soup in years.
Roscoe's own memories, however, seem to have faded over the years. When asked whether we were headed for a Second Great Depression, Roscoe replied that he had lived through the Depression, and "it wasn't that bad".
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