The Great Depression: A Diary

Benjamin Roth

Jul 2009 · Sold by PublicAffairs

About this eBook

"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

In the early 1920s, Benjamin Roth was a young lawyer fresh out of the army. He settled in Youngstown, Ohio, a booming Midwestern industrial town. Times were good—until the stock market crash of 1929. After nearly two years of economic crisis, it was clear that the heady prosperity of the Roaring Twenties would not return quickly.

As Roth began to grasp the magnitude of what had happened to American economic life, he set out to record his impressions in a diary—a document that would grow to span several volumes over more than a decade. Penning brief, clear-eyed notes on the crisis which unfolded around him, Roth struggled to understand the complex forces governing political and economic life, yet he remained eager to learn from the crisis. As he wrote of what is now known as the Great Depression, "To the man past middle life it spells tragedy and disaster, but to those of us in the middle thirties it may be a great school of experience out of which some worth while lesson may be salvaged."

Roth's words from that unique time seem to speak directly to readers today. His perceptions and experiences have a chilling similarity to those of our own era. Fearful of inflation and skeptical of big government, Roth yearned for signs of true recovery, and eventually formed his own theories of how a prudent person might survive hard times. The Great Depression: A Diary, edited by James Ledbetter, editor of Slate's "The Big Money," and Roth's son, Daniel B. Roth, reveals another side of the Great Depression—one lived through by ordinary, middle-class folks, who on a daily basis grappled with a swiftly changing economy coupled with anxiety about the unknown future.

Ratings and reviews

I was very enthusiastic about reading this book after hearing about it on NPR's "Planet Money" podcast and immediately put it on hold at the library. It didn't quite meet my expectations but I am very glad to have read it. It is not a "day in the life" type diary (I didn't expect it to be but I was hoping for some of that kind of thing) but a diary of someone trying to make sense of the economics of his day. He looked at the depression as an opportunity to learn which is why I connected with him - the recent financial crisis prompted me to try to understand what had happened. To me, the toughest part of reading it is how it can get a bit repetitive at times but overall I would say it is an engaging book for the economics minded person. He references books he has read and events that happened but often without much detail and that just piques my curiosity and has prompted me to read more books about that era and even some written during that era.

About the author

James Ledbetter is current editor of Inc. Magazine, and former editor of "The Big Money," Slate.com's website on business and economics, and for Reuters. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, and Mother Jones, among other publications. Author of six books, including One Nation Under Gold (2017), Ledbetter lives in New York.

Daniel B. Roth, son of Benjamin Roth, is the former chairman of the law firm of Roth, Blair, Roberts, Strasfeld & Lodge in Youngstown, Ohio.