"I don't think the worst is over," Larry Summers, the president's top economic adviser, told the Financial Times in July.Īt the same time, the economic skies have cleared enough for musings to emerge about the shape of our postrecession world. The bright spots are limited, to be sure, and much of the country is still in an economic stranglehold, with 16 percent of the workforce unemployed or underemployed, 7 million additional homes at risk of foreclosure over the next year, and welfare rolls on the rise. These days the analogies seem less prevalent, as the same forecasters who last winter warned of another historic tar pit point to the first green shoots of recovery. Just a few months ago, stories comparing our current financial woes to those of the Great Depression were everywhere, as reporters dusted off all the stock images of a cratering economy: tent cities, drought, abandoned boxcars, mental breakdowns, crime sprees. Every few pages, in fact, Terkel's award-winning oral history fluoresces with surprisingly positive testimony: alongside fear, hunger, and desperation, there was also "fun" in soup lines, "hope" and "excitement" in job queues, and light-hearted resilience in the face of "hard times." But it isn't unique in its distance-emotional, social, and economic-from the worst of the '30s. Was Zerbe's experience unusual? It certainly departs from the usual Depression gloom. Yet for him "there was never any sign of poverty," just a few nattering headlines in the newspaper. Central Park was a jungle of cardboard shacks, unemployment hung above 20 percent. "The Thirties," he told Terkel, "was a glamorous, glittering moment." In Zerbe's New York City there were no bread lines, no apple salesmen, and certainly no worried faces as he partied in the Rainbow Room with Roosevelt's heirs.
Jerome Zerbe, a celebrity photographer for Parade magazine, not only remained stylish during the downturn, he remembered it fondly. Early in Studs Terkel's Hard Times, before the tales of Depression-era woe get rolling, we hear from a startling young man.
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