Narratives Focused on Mass Unemployment
We can look for lists of the causes of the Great Depression created during the
Great Depression. These stated or speculated causes tend to correspond to events
whose confluence brought on the Depression. For example, Willard Monroe
Kiplinger, the founder of today’s Kiplinger publications, offered the following
list of causes in 1930, early in the Depression:
The causes of unemployment are loosely stated as follows:
1. The development of machines which do the work of many men under the
direction of a few men; this is the technological aspect.
2. The overloading of industrial centres with men attracted or driven by
circumstances from farms to cities.
3. The entrance of women into jobs formerly held by men.
4. Immigration, which is now less of a factor in unemployment than years ago.
5. Business depression, which is such a broad subject as to include both
causes and effects of unemployment.
These are pretty theories, and there is a large element of truth in each of
them, particularly the first, relating to the development of labor-saving
machinery. The point needing emphasis is, however, that no one of them
supplies an answer, nor even all five, for all have ramifications that have
never been studied or explored by qualified authorities.26
Only one of Kiplinger’s five causes would come to mind today in our current
popular narrative of the Great Depression: the business depression, which today
most would say is related to loss of confidence. But Kiplinger published his list
in 1930, and as the Great Depression wore on, more and more people began to
think of it as driven by a loss of confidence.
Kiplinger’s list refers to facts, not to narratives, but we can suppose that each
of the five causes corresponds to a popular narrative of 1930 and thus is
connected to other narrative constellations that are difficult to study. It is worth
noting that some or many of these narratives probably had a long-term
orientation, implying that the Great Depression would go on forever.
As the 1930s wore on, the Great Depression narrative began to be infected

with stories of the environmentally catastrophic Dust Bowl in the central United
States, the sequence of storms from 1934 to 1940 that hit Oklahoma, Kansas,
Colorado, and Texas, blowing off improperly managed dried topsoil and
destroying farms. John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, which
chronicled the travails of a family of migrant farm workers, helped to cement the
association between the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. The Grapes of
Wrath was a best seller, later made into a 1940 movie starring Henry Fonda. The
book won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Nobel Prize in
Literature, and it has been assigned to US high school and college students ever
since. It is part of the constellation that has driven the Great Depression
narrative.
In her photographic record of the Great Depression, Dorothea Lange gave us
memorable photos of poverty-stricken people in the Dust Bowl. Along with
Lange’s stark portraits, photos of drab despondent men standing in a breadline; a
man selling five-cent apples, stacked neatly on a small wooden box or table on a
city street; people lining up outside banks; and life in a Hooverville (shantytown)
provide us with a visual memory of the Depression today.
The 1930s represented a turning point in economic measurement. Until then,
no statistics reliably measured unemployment. The national census of the United
States had provided numbers of people working and not working, but those not
working included the elderly, the sick, those pursuing an education, stay-at-home
mothers, and vacationers. By the 1930s, the statistics began to focus on the
unemployment rate, which measures employment based on the size of the labor
force, not on the size of the population. Since the end of the Great Depression,
the monthly announcement of the unemployment rate may have encouraged
thinking that we may be at risk for a repeat of that event. We can see the rise of
the term unemployment rate sharply in Google Ngrams, though a significant
increase did not occur until after 1960.
It may seem odd that the term unemployment rate did not receive more
coverage in the 1930s, but the lack of coverage may reflect the public’s lack of
familiarity with its quantitative representation. They did not yet clearly
differentiate between involuntary unemployment and laziness and pauperism. In
contrast, 
today’s 
narratives 
focus 
on 
blameless 
unemployment, 
the
unemployment of those sincerely trying to find a job.