Word: great
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...years ago next week the U. S. entered the tenth and worst depression in its history. On the morning of October 24, 1929, the stockmarket that had been slowly declining skidded sickeningly, plunged down, and kept on going. Unknown to anybody, its future unforeseen, its consequences incalculable, the Great Depression set in. But it was not called that. The names that people give to things reveal what they think about them, and the name that the U. S. gave to its crisis was the ringing and melodramatic Crash...
...Great Depression sank in, many a layman and many a sociologist pondered on what the next ten years would bring. Rightly they foresaw a decade of struggle, of widespread distress, of mounting tension. Hopefully some of them dreamed of a return of the bull market whose knell was sounded when the clang of the bell ended trading on Oct. 24. Gloomily, more of them saw ruin ahead, riots, revolution, convulsions and crisis. On schedule the tests of U. S. strength arrived: unemployment increased, banks failed, riots shook the country...
...This month the Boston Conference on Distribution met, argued about production and distribution, decided that high costs of distribution were a big factor in the U. S. dilemmas. Meanwhile silent, big-tied Distributor John Hartford, president of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Co., ran the world's biggest chain store, distributed more food to more people, and probably more cheaply than any organization had ever distributed...
Heavy as was the cost of the depression in terms of human distress, its intellectual wreckage was almost as great; like those dump heaps of wrecked cars that lie out-side U. S. towns, U. S. brains contained large and unsightly piles of wrecked theories, junked plans, smashed hopes-a wheel off an old 1933 model Technocracy, an axle from Share the Wealth, a busted headlight from Production for Use, fragments of Marxism and the planned economy, half-a-dozen old Utopias that never ran. Here & there under the wreckage were old pieces of twisted slogans, moneychangers...
...great was the wreckage and so widespread the crisis that what the U. S. had left in the way of wits, worldly goods and political institutions, looked impressive. No catalogue could communicate the wealth of U. S. natural resources, no two experts could wholly agree about the maze of surplus commodities, farm income, legislative measures, mortgages, Government loans, the export market, yield per acre, drought and erosion, that is known as the agricultural problem. But in simple, physical terms, the U. S. still had, after ten years of Depression...