Winter of Despair

From Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal by William E. Leuchtenburg:

The persistence of the depression raised questions not merely about business leadership but about capitalism itself. When so many knew want amidst so much plenty, something seemed to be fundamentally wrong with the way the system distributed goods. While the jobless wore threadbare clothing, farmers could not market thirteen million bales of cotton in 1932. While children trudged to school in shoes soled with cardboard, shoe factories in Lynn and Brockton, Massachusetts, had to close down six months of the year. With ten billion dollars in bank vaults, hundreds of cities felt compelled to issue scrip because there was not enough currency in the town. Some groups even resorted to barter....

The savage irony of want amidst plenty drove farmers to violent action. As farm income dipped sharply while taxes and mortgage obligations remained constant, thousands of farmers lost their land for failure to pay taxes or meet payments. One account reported that on a single day in April, 1932, one-fourth of the entire area of the state of Mississippi went under the hammer of auctioneers....

It was frequently remarked in later years that Roosevelt saved the country from revolution. Yet the mood of the country during the winter of 1932-33 was not revolutionary. There was less an active demand for change than a disillusionment with parliamentary politics, so often the prelude to totalitarianism in Europe....

Many Americans came to despair of the whole political process, a contempt for Congress, for parties, for democratic institutions... "There is no doubt in the world," wrote William Dodd, " that both political parties have been bankrupted."

Many believed that the long era of economic growth in the western world had come to an end.