n today.
The Great Depression has not been at all forgotten; directly and indirectly its memory still looms large in our culture. When the stock market crashed in 1987, it was the spectre of the 1929 crash and the Depression that was evoked. On the other side of the coin, it is essentially the political culture of the New Deal that the Republican congressional majority of 1994 has come to Washington bent upon effacing.
The remainder of this essay is devoted to examining the interaction of culture and economics in the 1920s and the 1930s. Our concern here is not with economics per se; we are not inquiring here directly into the causes, nature, and consequences of the boom, the crash, or the Depression. Our concern is instead essentially with how the people of the time viewed and responded to those events. Necessarily, however, we will devote much of our discussion to economic analysis, simply because economics was--though in very different ways--a major cultural preoccupation in both decades.
In the 1920s, the preoccupation was perhaps less with economics as a body of theoretical concepts than with business. Save among radicals and reformers (an increasingly marginalized group), a simple and comfortable form of classical economics was taken for granted. "Trickle down" economics--renamed supply-side theory by its supporters when it was revived in the 1980s, though its opponents continued to use the old name--was the economic policy agenda brought in by the Republicans in the 1920 election, though government intervention in the economy was so far from their thoughts that to even speak of a "policy agenda" is a sort of anachronism. Though the Federal Reserve System had been enacted into law by the Democratic Wilson Administration in 1914, it came into its own in the 1920s under the energetic leadership of Benjamin Strong, who was not the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board--the dominant Fed figure in modern times--...