There are several famous quotes about the cycles of history, i.e., Churchill, Burke, Santayana, Dickens; but our favorite comes from Mark Twain: "History doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes."
Are we the only ones who see an inordinate amount of "rhyming" going on in today's world as compared to the 1930s?
In the fall of 1929, newspaper headlines read, "Wall Street lays an EGG!" Late in the just ended "Oh-Oh" decade, Wall Street did it again. This time they really dropped a load on us.
In the '20s, real estate speculation was rampant. It crashed along with the stock market in the '30s. In the "Oh-Oh" decade we saw real estate speculation lead to the greatest increase in real estate values in modern times only to see it crash and take the economy down with it.
In the '30s, the Hooverites were screaming "austerity" and "cut the budget." The Keynesians were proposing deficit spending like had not been seen before to spur the economy. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in 1932, the economy had fallen 31.3 percent by GDP standards. The FDR administration tried every social and economic program they could think of to turn the economy around. By 1936, it was beginning to work with modest increases in GDP, but then they gave in to the Hooverites, raised taxes and cut spending. Accordingly, 1937-38 saw a reversal in the economy and the 1930s Depression lasted into World War II.
The United States has seen many episodes of xenophobia and "nativism," but it seemed to peak during the 1920s with the Emergency Immigration Act of 1921 and the National Origins Act of 1924 and then climax with the Mexican Repatriation Act of 1931 in which several hundred thousand Mexican-American citizens were rounded up and illegally deported to Mexico. Is the immigration issue of today any different?
In 1934, several billionaires, including DuPont and Goodyear, who were unhappy with FDR's "New Deal" started the American Liberty League. Many in this group were tied to the so-called "Business Plot" overthrow attempt of the FDR administration the previous year. The league's stated goals were to "defend and uphold the Constitution, foster the right to work, earn, save and acquire property." They felt the Roosevelt administration was leading the U.S. toward socialism, bankruptcy and dictatorship. The current tea party movement is funded by, among others, billionaires Rupert Murdoch and David and Charles Koch. The tea party movement has a similar agenda to that of the Liberty League of the 1930s.
It is interesting to us that the one thing that did not rhyme with the '30s were the Bush and Obama administrations' initial responses to the financial crisis. Unlike the Hoover administration, they decided to fight the impending financial crash from the get-go. These early efforts probably saved us from the third Great Depression instead of our current "Great Recession." As you can see from history, we are not out of this crisis yet. A wrong turn in policy could still very well put us on the road to the third Great Depression.
In the next 27 months, the nation will have two elections that will choose the leadership that will be tasked to navigate our nation and state through these critical times. Will we elect the leadership that can intelligently find the correct solutions to these complex problems or will we choose demagogues and ideologues that will make the situation worse?
History is replete with societies that chose the wrong path.
As Winston Churchill said during the 1930s, "The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see."
Laraine Blackham is a history, English and civics teacher at Woods Cross High School. Steve Blackham used to be a semi-retired homebuilder, but with the present economy he is now just unemployed.