The Great Depression: Who done it?
Charles R. Morris has presented us with
a very thoughtful popular history on the origins of the Great Depression. He
pulls together the thoughts of four really good books on the subject without
getting too bogged down in technical jargon. They are Barry Eichengreen’s
“Golden Fetters,” Liquat Ahamed’s “The
Lords of Finance,” Robert Gordon’s “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” and
Frederick Lewis Allen’s popular history of the 1920’s “Only Yesterday.”
To Morris and most of the economics
profession the cause of the Great Depression was the imbalances that arose out
of World War I with its interaction with the gold standard. This is more a
Hooveresque version of the cause compared to Roosevelt’s view that causes were
domestic; namely rampant speculation, the unequal distribution of income and
the 1920’s depression in agriculture. Morris debunks all of the Rooseveltian
causes and notes that agriculture wasn’t that bad off in the late 1920s. He
does not however note the revolution in agricultural technology caused by the
introduction of tractors eliminated the need for forage crops that accounted
for 40% of the U.S.’s agricultural output. That alone would have triggered a
fundamental restructuring of the industry.
Morris is very good at discussing the
impact of electricity, automobiles and radio on production and the lifestyles
of average Americans. The 1920’s truly brought with it a revolution in
production and consumption. He also has vignettes about the rise and fall of
the Samuel Insull, the utility mogul and Ivar Kreuger, the global match king as
there empires collapsed under a mountain of debt.
If he holds out one party for special
opprobrium it is Germany in its failure to step up to its reparations
obligations after the 1924 Dawes Plan knocked them down enough to satisfy
Keynes. Simply put they never were going to pay and it was the entire
reparation process that put an inordinate amount of stress on the global
financial system. However it is unrealistic to assume that any 1920’s social
democratic government would have put on such a squeeze on their domestic
economy as the French did following their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of
1870.
As a result if a lay reader doesn’t want
to slog through the four books I mentioned above, Morris’ alternative is well
worth the read.
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