depression days, for sentimental or other reasons, will never get back their old
jobs.28
Employers need to balance morale and productivity. As Truman Bewley
found in his interviews of employers during a recession in the 1990s:
Managers were concerned about morale mainly because of its impact on
productivity. They said that when morale is bad, workers distract one another
with complaints and that good morale makes workers more willing to do
extras, to stay late until a job is done, to encourage and help one another, to
make suggestions for improvements, and to speak well of the company to
outsiders.29
It seems safe to conclude that employers are particularly concerned about worker
morale during hard times. They often try to boost their employees’ morale by
helping them feel successful in their jobs and by using a nondifferentiation wage
policy, paying high performers the same as low performers, despite the negative
effects on incentives to work hard.30 In addition, employers often continue to
employ weak employees for sentimental reasons or to maintain workplace
morale.
But there is a darker side to the story. The worst days of the Depression gave
employers a plausible excuse for laying off weaker employees without
generating stories of their inhumanity. When times are a little better, they would
rather not rehire the weak employees, which can lead to long-term
unemployment for those who have been laid off.

Modesty Fashions: Blue Jeans and Jigsaw Puzzles
Blue denim fabric, formerly considered appropriate only for work clothes,
started to become more fashionable during the Great Depression, though earlier
celebrities had made denim fashion statements. For example, James D. Williams,
governor of Indiana from 1877 to 1880, was nicknamed “Blue Jeans Bill”
because of his insistence on wearing them even to formal occasions. According
to one observer, for Williams the coarse blue fabric was “a symbol of equality
and democracy.”31 But it was not until the 1930s that the material gained
popularity. In 1934, the Levi Strauss Company created its first blue jeans for
women, naming them “Lady Levi’s.”32 Then, in 1936, Levi Strauss put the first
fashion logo on the back pocket of its blue jeans. Vogue magazine featured its
first blue jeans–clad cover model in the 1930s, and women started deliberately
damaging their new jeans to make them look worn, putting “an intentional rip
here and there.”33
We can trace blue jeans’ associations with different cultures over the decades.
In the 1920s and 1930s, blue jeans culture fit in with the poverty-chic culture,
the cowboy story culture, and the dude ranch culture. Starting in the 1940s, blue
jeans became associated with altogether different cultures, first with Rosie the
Riveter during World War II, and then with high school, youthful rebellion, and
women’s liberation.34 The blue jeans fashion truly exploded in the 1950s,35
propelled to new heights by the hit 1955 movie Rebel Without a Cause and its
handsome star James Dean, who died at age twenty-four, a month before the
movie was released, while driving his sports car recklessly. The death was
perfect, if ghoulish, publicity for the movie. Some fans of the film went to
extremes; for example, Douglas Goodall, a London mail truck driver, not only
wore blue jeans but also by 1958 had watched the movie four hundred times and
legally changed his name to James Dean.36 But by this time, the blue jeans
narrative was losing its connection with sympathy for poverty, and it may have
lost its status as an economic narrative. Nonetheless, the ubiquity of blue jeans
(based on their cheapness, practicality, long life, and others’ fashion decisions)
has allowed the blue jeans epidemic to continue spreading to this day.
Also connected to poverty chic was the jigsaw puzzle craze. To occupy
themselves during a quiet, stay-at-home evening, some people bought one of the
new cheap cardboard jigsaw puzzles (instead of the more expensive traditional