Wayne Jett - The Fruits of Graft: Great Depressions Then and Now

C ountless volumes tell of the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. Americans carry scars inflicted during that time of starvation, scarcity, broken families, unfulfilled dreams and thrashed optimism. We look back with more sorrow, and forward with more doubt, than before the travail and regression of 1929-1940.

Soft-coal miners competed for jobs paying 50 cents for 12 hours of labor in a 30-inch-wide mine shaft. Prairie farm families fed bramble weeds to livestock and childrennettles or nettle soupto ease hunger. Southern sharecroppers plowed behind a mule sun-up to sundown for 50 cents. Entire families chopped cotton, using hoes to cut weeds and to thin over-planting, for 50 cents an acre when they could get the work. These stories and worse are told again and again, so they will be remembered.

Living the Great Depression carved indelible questions into American minds: Why? Why is this? What caused this to be, that nobody can have anything? Why have so many lost everything they had? What made it, all of a sudden, so nobody can make a living, let alone get ahead? What is it? Who did it? Why are our lives like this?

Who can we shoot? was the question, as Steinbeck framed it in The Grapes of Wrath, which burned in the minds of Oklahoma farmers pushed off land during ownership consolidation of the Thirties. Whether the question was phrased with threatened violence attached is beside the point. The point is that the questionWho did this?was never answered.

Experts say answering the question is impossible. Prominent economists insist any attempt to explain what caused the Great Depression is a search for the Holy Grail. By this they mean the effort to explain is salutary, but naively motivated and doomed to failure.

They are wrong. This book tells the specific actions taken, and who took them, to cause the Great Depression. Scholars of the period will see facts newly assembled in context and economic principles correctly applied here. Actions and consequences are reported for all to consider.

Culpable parties did not appear suddenly in the American landscape in 1929 and disintegrate in 1940. They infiltrated deeply into American society before the Great Depression and remained fully engaged afterwards. Those who unleashed wrath upon America were not foreign foes. They were a small number of dominant elitists in America and Europeexceptionally powerful ones with vast capital and government influencewho aspired to gain full power and ever greater riches for themselves.

Alliance between elite private interests and government power historically was called mercantilism. This oppressive system reigned in western civilization during the Dark Ages, but it failed to snuff outsome say it made more keennatural aspirations for liberty and opportunity. Hard-won political rights of common people finally vented those aspirations, gave rise to the Enlightenment and allowed markets to develop operating practices called capitalism.

Especially in the United States, republican democracy and capitalism produced a burgeoning middle class capable of rivaling the dominant elite for business and for political influence. In the early 20 th Century, mercantilists acted to turn the tide back in their favor. They brought on the Federal Reserve System, the graduated federal income tax and the Great Depression in aggressive moves to destroy the middle class and to achieve unchecked dominance over all governments and people globally.

We have been misled about these matters and about economics. Keynesian economic theory, which purportedly guides U.S. economic policy today, is not applied to improve conditions or prospects of humanity. Keynesian theory is used to confuse and mislead non-economists, and to disguise motives and actions of mercantilists.