Making sense of this crazy world

Roosevelt's package of new laws and initiatives that together constituted his New Deal for America, offered three things: Relief, Recovery and Reform. It set out to save Americans from the Great Depression and to save capitalism from itself.

I think it’s important to focus on 1932 in the Great Depression because it shows the depth of the impact the depression had on people’s lives, it shows how choices are important in history as they are in life, and it shows how democracy can work to stabilise a state that’s in deep trouble.

I’m going to begin this week with a song. But don’t worry – I’m not going to sing it! The song depicts how men who had contributed to America’s economic well-being and who had fought for their country were now left begging for small change. Because this week, we’re looking at the impact of the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression that followed in its wake.

A tragic tale of how badly things can go wrong when capitalism is unregulated.

If radicals and newer immigrants faced American intolerance, so too did a group of people who had been in America much longer, had not asked to be there but who, as a consequence, had already suffered in ways no human being should have had to endure: African Americans.

Last week we were looking at divisions in American society, well America was not only divided, it was a remarkably prejudiced, intolerant society. Examples are many but I will focus this week on immigrants and the ‘Red Scare’, and particularly on the trial of two Italian-born immigrants: Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

We can see divisions in American society on a number of fronts: politically, racially, between the poor and the rich, but America was no more split than it was between the city and the countryside. Rural America was ill at ease with the apparent self-indulgence, materialism and the looser morals that they saw in city life. They were concerned that Christian values seemed to be breaking down, and with them, the traditional country values of clean living, hard work and thrift. I’m going to look at two cases that highlighted that split. Hopefully, this episode will give you an insight to the way America is split today.

I’ve been looking at industrial revolutions and the development of capitalism. First, in Britain, the world’s first industrial revolution, and then moving across the Atlantic to America and this week I want to dig a little deeper into the kind of society that developed in America in the 1920s.

Last week I gave you the positive spin on the way capitalism developed in America in the 1920s. Well, this week we’ll be looking at the worrying side, the dark side even. It shows that there are always, or nearly always, two ways to look at things, and it also shows the shortcomings, even the danger, of capitalism
 

Herbert Hoover, in accepting the Republican nomination to run for president in 1928, said ‘One of the oldest and perhaps the noblest of human activities has been the abolition of poverty … we in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of our land.’ And that’s what were setting off to look at next: capitalism in America.
 
 
Intro and outro music curtesy of slip.stream:
https://slip.stream/tracks/58fb6726-c035-4d10-a8e8-eba70e5164ad