The Great Depression: A Diary

When the stock market crashed in 1929, Benjamin Roth was a young lawyer in Youngstown, Ohio. After he began to grasp the magnitude of what had happened to American economic life, he decided to set down his impressions in his diary. This collection of those entries reveals another side of the Great Depression,one lived through by ordinary, middle-class Americans, who on a daily basis grappled with a swiftly changing economy coupled with anxiety about the unknown future. Roth's depiction of life in time of widespread foreclosures, a schizophrenic stock market, political unrest and mass unemployment seem to speak directly to readers today.

"[Roth's] entries compellingly detail the everyday."--Financial Times
"A fascinating read, and strangely familiar."--MoneySense
"Benjamin Roth has left us a vivid portrait of the Great Depression that is all the more powerful for the similarities and differences with the financial upheavals of today. Roth enables us -- in ways no historian can match -- to immerse ourselves in the sense of despair that Americans of that era felt and their hope that the economy would revive, long before it did. To read the diaries now is both enlightening and chilling."--Charles R. Morris, The Trillion Dollar Meltdown
"Here are brief, unsentimental, clear-eyed notes of the growing sense of hopelessness that came over Midwestern American life. This moving book is edited by [Roth's] son Daniel."--Spectator Business (UK)
"Mr. Roth's diaries ... are compelling reading, because they force readers to reflect on both the similarities and the differences between then and now.... We're all a little like Benjamin Roth, asking questions we don't know the answer to, and wonder, as he did 70 years ago, whether the crisis is, indeed, over."--The New York Times
"Roth's diary is plainly written and professionally edited. It is a window on another age."--The Seattle Times
"There is an honest searching quality to his day-by-day accounts of banks closing, bread lines forming, friends failing. Striving to understand, he provides a remarkable and often engagingly literate discussion of the great Depression's impact on people like him."--Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"We imagine the Great Depression at two extremes--Franklin Roosevelt's jaunty smile and the haunting images of Dustbowl destitution. But in between were everyday middle class strivers like Benjamin Roth, trying to sort through the wreckage. FDR and the WPA may be long gone but the professional class remains, and the record of its struggle in the Depression has been thin until now. Roth's incisive diaries are more than a precious time capsule. They speak to our economic hopes and fears directly, and to the bewilderment of our own time."--Jonathan Alter, The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope

James Ledbetter is the editor of The Big Money," Slate.com's web site on business and economics. Daniel B. Roth, son of Benjamin Roth, is the chairman of the law firm of Roth, Blair, Roberts, Strasfeld & Lodge in Youngstown, Ohio.

When the stock market crashed in 1929, Benjamin Roth was a young lawyer in Youngstown, Ohio. After he began to grasp the magnitude of what had happened to American economic life, he decided to set down his impressions in his diary. This collection of those entries reveals another side of the Great Depression,one lived through by ordinary, middle-class Americans, who on a daily basis grappled with a swiftly changing economy coupled with anxiety about the unknown future. Roth's depiction of life in time of widespread foreclosures, a schizophrenic stock market, political unrest and mass unemployment seem to speak directly to readers today.

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