A little history on the “Great Depression”.
I’m trying to find the original source since I highly doubt this “Forum Poster” wrote it.
A few excerpts;
On December 5, 1932 members of Congress were greeted by a crowd of 2,500 men, women, and children on the capitol steps chanting, “Feed the hungry, tax the rich!”
snip
The strains of the Internationale were ringing out from the metropolises of America. In New York 35,000 men and women packed Union Square to listen to communist orators. Led by Unemployed Councils crowds broke into groceries and meat markets in Oklahoma City, Minneapolis, and St. Paul. In Lincoln, Nebraska 4,000 men occupied the statehouse, another 5,000 took over Seattle’s ten-story County-City Building, and 5,000 Chicago teachers stormed the city’s banks. In Columbus, Ohio Louis Budenz led a mass march on the Columbus statehouse declaring, “We must take control of the government and establish a workers’ and farmers’ republic.” Governor Floyd B. Olson (Farmer-Labor) began building up his own left-wing army, announcing that he was “taking recruits for the Minnesota National Guard” and he wasn’t “taking anybody who [didn’t] carry a red card.” At the same time the response of the well-fed grew less sympathetic (if it ever had been sympathetic) and more violent. Businessmen formed associations of armed volunteers should the worst happen. Police were more willing to use the nightstick, elected officials more willing to call out troops. Father Coughlin was on the radio and Huey Long had Louisiana tied up neatly with a bow. An uprising either left or right in the cities seemed imminent. But as it was when the revolt began it was in the country.
snip
In conservative, Republican Iowa (Hoover’s home state) the embattled farmers had finally had enough. Under the leadership of one Milo Reno, sunburned men reached for their shotguns and pitchforks and proclaimed a Farmer’s Holiday. All roads leading into Sioux City were blocked by insurgents who refused to allow milk to enter (they were protesting being paid 2 cents for milk that was sold in the city for 8 cents). Sheriffs who tried to intervene were disarmed. One farmer told a reporter from Harper’s, “They say blockading the highway’s illegal. I say, ‘Seems to me there was a tea party in Boston that was illegal to.’” “You can no more stop this movement than you could stop the revolution.” Reno himself said, then felt the need to clarify. “I mean the revolution of 1776.” They farmers didn’t align themselves with communism or radicalism of any stripe, they saw themselves as Americans and revolution as an American tradition.
snip
Eventually the “uprising” was broken up with minimal force. But lawyers who tried to foreclose on farms found themselves being threatened (or killed) and in private meetings of the Farmer’s Associations men sang;
Let’s call a farmers’ holiday
A holiday let’s hold;
We’ll eat our wheat and ham and eggs
And let them eat their gold.
snip
Meanwhile the banking situation was worsening. Since the Crash the public had been hoarding gold which began vanishing from vaults at a rate of approximately 20 million dollars a day. Those who couldn’t get metal took paper, and so the Treasury found itself expanding the currency even as the gold upon which it was based was disappearing. The rampant extension of credit before the Crash meant that America’s 18,569 banks had about six billion dollars on hand to meet forty-one billion in deposits.
There’s more here http://www.alternatehistory.com/Discussion/showthread.php?p=8605287
Ping to read your link later. You may be onto something. You ever read The Fourth Turning? We’re due. Very shortly.
I’d have to find the book but that reads like the Amity Shlaes book from a few years ago.