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In Every Cup of Bitterness, Sweetness: California Christianity in the Great Depression
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 September 2011
Extract
If the past decade has taught Americans anything, it is the danger of treating Wall Street as the sole indicator of the nation's economic health. Those who lived through the Great Depression learned this lesson also. Because so many more Americans and American institutions are investors in 2011 than in 1929, the stock market is a better measure today than it was eighty years ago, but as we relearned in 2008, 2002, and 1987, it is still possible to be blinded to significant systemic problems within and beyond the equity markets if all one does is follow the ticker. To be sure, a focus on Wall Street does not condemn an economic policy or history to failure or irrelevance. But the limits of such works, defined by their urban gaze, have a way of echoing across professions and disciplines that rely in various ways on the work of economists.
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References
1 Galbraith, John Kenneth, The Great Crash 1929 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955), 77–78Google Scholar; Investment Company Institute, Annual Report to Members, 2010 (Washington, D.C., 2010), http://www.ici.org/pdf/10_ici_annual.pdf, (accessed May 15, 2011)Google Scholar. According to Galbraith, about 5 percent of American households were invested in the equity market in 1929. In 2009, 44.5 percent of U.S. households representing 91.4 million people owned mutual funds.
2 This is not to suggest that economic historians have been blind to the crises in agriculture in the 1920s or its effects on the broader depression of the 1930s. Milton Friedman, Ben Bernanke, and David Wheelock are just a few of the many who have written on the issue.
3 Handy, Robert T., “The American Religious Depression, 1925–1935,” Church History 29, no. 1 (March 1960): 3–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Wheelock, David C., “Regulation and Bank Failures: New Evidence from the Agricultural Collapse of the 1920s,” Journal of Economic History 52, no. 4 (December 1992): 806–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Wheelock writes, “there were only 14 bank suspensions in New England from 1921–1929 and just 31 in California. By contrast, 2,652 suspensions occurred in the . . . states of Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas (220 in Kansas alone),” Wheelock, “Regulation and Bank Failures,” 808n13.
5 Watkins, T. H., The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America (New York: Holt, 1999), 339–44Google Scholar. See also John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash 1929.
6 Watkins, The Hungry Years, 341.
7 Ibid., 344–45.
8 Thomas Collins to Irving Wood, March 14, 1936, “Weekly Narrative Report for the Week Ending March 14, 1936,” Irving Wood Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. The average household income in 1930 was roughly $1,900 per year, though half of all households earned between $500 and $1,500 per year. See “Making Do: Family Life in the Depression,” 1930s Lifestyles and Social Trends (Gale Cengage, 1995), http://www.enotes.com/1930-lifestyles-social-trends-american-decades/making-do-family-life-depression, (accessed May 15, 2011); and “Money and Inflation 1930s,” The People History (2004), http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/1930s.html, (accessed May 15, 2011).
9 Lillian Mills to Laurence Hewes, August 9, 1940, “Monthly Narrative Report – July,” in Folder RR-CF-28-918-02, Box 25, “Coded Administrative Files, 1933–1945: Brawley” (National Archives Records Administration, San Bruno, California [hereafter NARA San Bruno]).
10 On the “whiteness” of the 1930s migratory labor force, see Gregory, James M., American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 52–62Google Scholar; and Stein, Walter, California and the Dust Bowl Migration (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1973)Google Scholar.
11 McClain, Alva, “The Four Great Powers of the End-Time,” and “Dr. Baumann's Comment,” The King's Business, February 1938 (Los Angeles, Calif.), 48Google Scholar.
12 “Signs of the Times,” Migratory Clipper, Indio, California, 6 April 1940. Microfilm held by NARA San Bruno.
13 “RADIO TALK by Father Charles Philipps. August 13, 1935, KQW 7:45PM – The Rehabilitation of Farm Life in California,” Rural Life File, Archives of the Archdiocese of San Francisco, Saint Patrick's Seminary, Palo Alto, California.
14 Thomas Collins, Weekly Report, 15 February 1936, “Coded Administrative Files, 1933–1945: Arvin” (NARA, San Bruno).
15 Thomas Collins, Weekly Report, 18 January 1936, “Coded Administrative Files, 1933–1945: Arvin” (NARA, San Bruno).
16 “Heart to Heart Talk,” Fall 1933. Charles Fuller Papers, Archives of Fuller Theological Seminary (hereafter: Fuller Papers, AFTS).
17 “Heart to Heart Talk,” March 1934, Fuller Papers, AFTS.
18 Ray C. Mork, “Weekly Letter from the Manager,” Covered Wagon News, 8 April 1939.
19 Philip Goff, By Radio Every Sunday: Charles E. Fuller, Religious Radio, and the Rise of Modern American Religion (unpublished manuscript); author correspondence with Philip Goff; “Finding Aid,” Charles Fuller Papers, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.