Reliving the Depression : PBS Documentary Links Present With the Fading Past

If you’re homeless, jobless or just plain hungry in 1993, that’s a depression.

Yet there’s bad and there’s real bad. And the Great Depression of the 1930s was real, real, real bad, a nightmarish economic holocaust from which the U.S. did not begin to stir until war engulfed Europe at the end of the decade.

Unfortunately, the memory of this dark period--passed down to many of us from our parents and grandparents who lived through and were shaped by it--blurs with each succeeding generation.

That’s why a four-part documentary series that begins tonight on PBS is so valuable. Like “The Civil War” and his “Eyes on the Prize” and “Eyes on the Prize II” accounts of the civil rights movement, Henry Hampton’s latest documentary is a gift to viewers, another case of artfully joined scholarship and entertainment in a single slab of joltingly honest, stunningly good television.

“The Great Depression” is a thick slab at that, consisting of three two-hour segments and a one-hour finale. The weekly air times are 9 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15 and 8 p.m. on KVCR-TV Channel 24, all on Monday.

Archival footage and Depression Era songs (“Brother, can you spare a dime?”) create a striking narrative here with descriptive anecdotes from ordinary Americans. From sharecroppers to activists, they flash back 60 years to a time when the nation’s unemployed totaled nearly 13 million and many who did have jobs earned low wages.

“You could get a 24-pound bag of flour for 29 cents,” recalls one man. “But where were you gonna get the 29 cents from?” A woman remembers the rich aromas that filled the house when her mother baked bread--bread that she and her siblings could not eat. The mother sold it to neighbors to make ends meet, and fed herself and her family from soup-kitchen handouts.

Still more jarring are stories about kids who “ain’t et for three days” and a starving family making dinner out of a dog. This is clearly not “The Waltons.”

Strength and courage amid destitution--epitomized by Dorothea Lange’s 1936 classic photo of a widowed migrant laborer with her young daughters--is the prevailing theme in this odyssey of suffering interwoven with politics. Yet no less powerful is its ugly subtext of racism and anti-Semitism. Discrimination and ethnic violence are seen rising here along with hard times. In 1933, for example, there were 28 reported lynchings of African-Americans in the U.S., and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal--with its revolutionary job-creating public works projects--was known in some circles as the “Jew Deal.”

Tonight’s first hour makes pioneering auto giant Henry Ford a metaphor for the easy credit boom that led to the bust. The Detroit-based Ford--himself a noted anti-Semite whose global empire employed 500,000 at its peak--controlled “the most important company in the most important industry” in 1927, says Joe Morton in a narration written by Steve Fayer. But the tandem of overproduction and underconsumption proved lethal, and even though Ford’s personal income in 1930 was $30 million, Morton says, his reputation and the nation’s economy collapsed almost simultaneously. Unlike today, there were no federal safety nets to break the public’s fall.

Sworn in as President less than eight months before the 1929 Crash, Herbert Hoover adopted a hopelessly inadequate plan to resuscitate the nation through private charities. A sign on a truck screams an angry protest: “In Hoover we trusted, now we’re busted.”

Some fascinating characters occupy the stage here, among them the legendary Pretty Boy Floyd, also nicknamed the “Sagebrush Robin Hood” for reputedly giving poor folks a share of his loot from robbing a string of Oklahoma banks. And in 1932, swaggering Gen. Douglas MacArthur is seen defying Hoover’s orders--just as he would President Harry Truman’s almost two decades later in Korea--by using federal troops to burn down the makeshift camp of more than 20,000 veterans who had come to Washington to demand early payment of a bonus they were authorized for service in World War I. The newsreel footage of police and troops devastating this army of the poor and unemployed is remarkable, and you can’t help wondering what even greater impact these scenes would have had were television there to beam them to the rest of the nation.

As it was, Hoover in 1932 was a landslide loser to Roosevelt who, despite his political compromises that undermined African-Americans, turned out to be the right President for the right moment in history.

Roosevelt’s city-building partnership with New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and socialist writer Upton Sinclair’s bid to become California’s governor are highlights of later episodes of “The Great Depression.” As is a section about boxing great Joe Louis, a black icon described by actor Ossie Davis as “our avenging angel . . . our own vision of eventual justice.” Maya Angelou reads a passage from her moving memoir, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” that describes the crushing blow to African-Americans when German Max Schmeling knocked out the “avenging angel” in 1936: “It was a people falling. It was another lynching. . . .” In their rematch, though, it was Schmeling who fell to Louis.

Some motifs of “The Great Depression” are timeless. Pictures of New York’s homeless street nomads are uncomfortably familiar, for example, as are congressional screams about big “government from above” when Roosevelt pushes federal levers to start the gears of recovery.

Yet even more than Roosevelt’s programs, says narrator Morton, it was the blitzkriegs of World War II that halted the blitzkriegs of economic despair, as money pumped into the war effort ultimately brought the nation to full employment in 1943.

It’s a bitter irony to keep in mind as today’s America looks toward a future of better economic times. Brother, can you spare a dream?