My Senior Seminar on the Great Depression

In what was either blind luck or remarkable foresight, over a year ago, I agreed to teach a senior seminar this spring, and I decided to do it on the Great Depression.  With the events of the last few months, that has turned out to be a very timely topic. 

In teaching American Economic History last semester, we spent a couple of weeks on the Great Depression.  At the end of the semester, I asked the students what they thought were the two or three most surprising things they learned all semester.  The clear majority vote was for "the whole section on the Great Depression."  They all agreed that they were "victims" of what I call the "high school history" version of the Great Depression:

1. Laissez-faire caused the boom of the 20s and the stock market crash
2. Hoover believed in laissez-faire and did nothing to counteract the recession
3. FDR and the New Deal saved us from disaster
4. World War II got us all the way out

The senior seminar is designed to critically assess each of those elements of the high school history version, not to mention talk about the missing Prince from that production of Hamlet:  the role of the Fed.  I'm particularly excited about this course because several of the AEH students are taking it and I know that they are coming in already engaged in the material.  And with only 12 or 13 in the class, we can do some serious work together.  It should also be interesting to see what sorts of research topics they pick and how that work turns out.  I have posted a PDF of the not-quite-final syllabus here.

As you can see on the syllabus, I'm also expecting them to read this blog and Liberty and Power on a regular basis, given how much we've been talking about both the Depression and the current crisis.  Several times in AEH I sent them links to posts here or at L&P (especially by Bob Higgs, who they were also reading), and I know that a few of them read it regularly.  We'll see if the better ones feel gutsy enough to contribute!

After spending 6 years in admin and 1 on leave, coming back to the Economics classroom here has been a revelation in one terrific way:  our students are MUCH better than they were 7 years ago and I'm really excited to do this work with them.

Comments

[Ed Weick]

Steve, If you ever want any input from the front line trenches about our current version of a great depression, please let me know how I might help.
ED

[James H]

Steve, What are your thoughts on Lawrence Reed's article on the subject?

http://www.mackinac.org/4013

[Steve Horwitz]

That Reed monograph is quite good.

[Rafe Champion]

The high school history version got a big leg up from writers like Martha Gellhorn and John Steinback. This is a neat critque of "The Grapes of Wrath" that probably did more to spread the story than all the economists put together.
http://www.sydneyline.com/Cultural%20Cold%20War.htm
"As an adolescent in Sydney during the 1950s, I read The Grapes of Wrath with a sense of great excitement. At the time, our English teachers at high school were trying to enthuse us with studies of eighteenth century English essayists and Victorian romantic poets. Those of us with literary inclinations, however, found this curriculum tedious and irrelevant and instead became furtive devotees of American novels, especially, in my own case, the works of Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway. We had come to their writings via the Hollywood movies based on their books. It was not until decades later that I discovered that these writers and several other Americans I admired had been Marxists and Communist Party sympathisers. Hemingway was a Soviet supporter abroad, most notoriously during the Spanish Civil War, and at home, a contributor to the Communist Party cultural journal, New Masses; Steinbeck, while not a party member, was a political pilgrim to the USSR in 1937. His first wife, Carol Henning, who encouraged his political writings in the late 1930s, was a Marxist who at the time took him to party meetings in San Francisco."

[RickC]

Rafe,
Thanks for the link to the Windschuttle article. I read his "The Killing of History" a couple of years ago. Passed it on to nephews and others to alert them to the problems in that field. Excellent book, excellent article.

[Rafe Champion]

Rick, in case you have nephews and others involved in lit theory, one of the best critiques of pomo lit theory was written by two Australians. http://www.the-rathouse.com/RC_FreadmanMiller.html

[Bill Stepp]

Another book that offers insight here is Alfred Haworth Jones's _Roosevelt's Image Brokers: Poets, Playwrights and the Use of the Lincoln Symbol_ (1974). He discusses the role FDR's literary worshipers Carl Sandberg, Stephen Vincent Benet, and Robert E. Sherwood played in helping their political patron win a third term.
By tying FDR to Lincoln iconography and manipulating his (supposedly) Lincolnesque imgage, they whooped up support for New Deal programs. No wonder he was named Time magazine's "Man of the Year."

The book quotes Congressman Frank Dorsey of PA saying, "Lincoln was the progressive, the new dealer of his day."
On the other hand, Hoover said that, "Whatever this New Deal system is, it is certain that it did not come from Abraham Lincoln."

Uh, no, come to think of it, it came from one Herbert Hoover.

[Brian Pitt]

Sounds like a quite interesting course. Will you let us know if your students get "chilled" by the similarities of the events of the 1920s-30s and today?

[RickC]

Rafe,
Thanks. I'm interested myself. Great review by the way. I've been enjoying your website for some time. Your insights into Hayek and Popper have helped me develop my own thoughts.

[Jonathan Bean]

Steve,

I arrived here at Southern Illinois in 1995. The job description had two "essentials": a course on economic history, and a course on "The Great Depression in the U.S." I spent an entire summer (and more) plunging into book after book, article after article. I ended up loving this course. With 16 weeks, lecture and discussion, I get to cover it all. Students are surprised that POSITIVE things happened in the '30s and FDR had nothing to do with them. And who doesn't love Hollywood's Golden Age? I like your syllabus, although our focus is different (mine is economics + Everything Else). It's at http://tinyurl.com/7qq6w7 Perhaps we need a Great Depression Studies blog. lol

[Steve Horwitz]

Actually Jonathan, a GD blog would be a really cool idea in the current climate! There's plenty of crap out there to respond to. It would be also cool if you were teaching that course at the same time as I was teaching mine.

[Mike Holly]

Republicans are to blame for causing the Great Depression and the current economic collapse by favoring monopolies, big business and the wealthy. These policies squeeze the masses between relatively low wages and high taxes and prices. The Federal Reserve is forced to try to maintain the standard of living by expanding the money supply, which produces unsustainable credit-driven booms. Eventually, consumers’ credit runs out, especially since the debt financing from the savings of the wealthy is at high interest rates. When markets fall, brokerage firms, that lend money on the margins (e.g., several dollars for every dollar an investor deposits), call in loans, which cannot be paid back. Banks fail as debtors default on debt.

Democrats make sure depressions continue until world war. They believe in a nationally planned economy including higher taxes on corporate profits, increased federal government control over the economy and money supply, intervention to control prices and agricultural production, complex social programs and wider acceptance of unions. Interference in the economy help cause depressions, and government efforts to prop up the economy after only makes things worse by delaying the market's adjustment. We need a new political party that favors free markets, small business, the middle class and antitrust.

[action movies]

i consider myself to be one of the most addicted moviegoers.it not my fault, it just my friend who got me into it!but i love it. And I know its hard during the end of the simester. You just don’t have time!