Ralph Abernathy Quotes

I never felt the Great Depression firsthand. I learned about it at Harvard.

I've lived through the Great Depression.

In the Great Depression, you bought something if you had the cash to buy it.

The 1930s had been a time of tremendous economic distress. And the unemployment rate was enormously high by any historic standard.

They were the darkest of times, the years following the crash of the stock market in 1929. Thousands of people across the United States were cast out of their Jobs, off their farms, out of their homes and apartments, and into the crushing depths of poverty.

I came to the University of Chicago on the morning of January 2, 1932. I wasn't yet a graduate of high school for another few months. And that was about the low point of the Herbert Hoover/Andrew Mellon phase after October of 1929. That's quite a number of years to have inaction.

My parents were children during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and it scarred them. Especially my father, who saw destitution in his Brooklyn, New York neighborhood; adults standing in so called 'bread lines,' children begging in the streets.

Roosevelt or Ruin

I've always been interested in the Depression as this very dramatic pivotal period in American history.

Out of the ashes of the Great War came the freewheeling cultural renaissance that was the Jazz Age, but the decade-long party of flapper dresses and bootlegging came to a crashing halt with the Crash of '29 - triggering the Great Depression and the New Deal that would help America get back on its feet, just in time for another, greater war.

I was born in 1928 and by 1931 the Depression was beginning to mount.

We certainly had an upheaval at the start of the Great Depression, and that resulted in a lot of financial reform, but it wasn't done in one stroke, and it wasn't done immediately. The Depression was in 1929 and resulted in the Securities and Exchange Act of '33, '34, '35, '37, '39, and '41.

In the 1930s one was aware of two great evils - mass unemployment and the threat of war.

When I was born, the economy wasn't in a great state; it was the Depression, and my father had to be quick to try and find work.

The crisis of the 1930s and the populist reactions of that time must not be forgotten.

Debates go on to this day about what caused the Great Depression. Economics is not very good at explaining swings in economic activity.

Importantly, in the 1930s, in the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve, despite its mandate, was quite passive and, as a result, financial crisis became very severe, lasted essentially from 1929 to 1933.

I learned more about the economy from one South Dakota dust storm that I did in all my years of college.

The 24% unemployment reached at the depths of the Great Depression was no picnic.

I grew up in the heart of the Depression.

I was born during the Depression in a little community just outside Waco, and I grew up listening to Franklin Roosevelt on the radio.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was fortunate: He didn't take office until nearly four years after the Wall Street crash, by which time the Republicans' responsibility for the Depression was taken for granted.

I was born January 6, 1937, eight years after Wall Street crashed and two years before John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the plight of a family during the Great Depression.

I was a Depression kid, growing up in Oklahoma.

As a young man, I lived through the Great Depression, when banks failed and so many lost their jobs and homes and went hungry. I was fortunate to have a job at a canning factory that paid 25 cents an hour.