History is tricky business. We'd like it to give us the true story of the past. But along with the other liberal arts -- literature and philosophy -- whose domain it shares, history doesn't produce certitude about much of anything. Even when one has the salient facts right, there's the challenge offered by the theory that there are an infinite number of explanations for any one event. There's also "hindsight bias," the tendency to regard actual historical outcomes as more probable than alternatives that seemed real at the time.
Historians complicate understanding the true complexity of past human events, which were just as complicated and uncertain as current human events, by inventing labels for various historical periods. Like all labels, they oversimplify, and in that way do violence to reality.
Morris Dickstein, critic and professor of English and theater at the City University of New York, highlights this phenomenon in a new book on the 1930s, "Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression." In some respects, he could have been writing about Anchorage.
Life was miserable for many in America during the Depression: Unemployment nationally reached 25 percent a number of times during the 1930s. Many who had work worried that they might lose their jobs at any time, and many more just hung on, with no cushion should disaster strike. People pinched pennies and saved everything. It was an economic dislocation, and it was great.
But a decade is a long time, and life must be lived. So while people could not forget economic anxiety, they had to adapt and get on with their lives, and they did. And it is not callous to remember that most people did have jobs, and some even prospered.
The New Deal government met the unemployment and production crises by lobbying Congress to pump stimulus money into the economy, dispensed through such agencies as the Public Works and Civil Works Administrations, the Works Progress Administration and the Reconstruction Finance Corp. Under Franklin Roosevelt's leadership, Congress undertook such reforms as insurance for bank deposits, protection of labor unions, old age insurance, unemployment compensation, and direct support payments to widows, orphans and the disadvantaged, as well as substantial regulation of banking and the securities markets.
Not only did these efforts sustain the economy but the expanded bureaucracy needed to implement them itself constituted a vastly expanded economic sector. As a consequence, people did have money, though not a lot of it. And while it was hard times, to be sure, there were also a lot of good times being had.
Here is where Dickstein is useful. He reminds us that refrigerators and radios sold briskly, as did cigarettes. Tourism grew, people traveled, and motels sprang up across the country. Dances were a primary entertainment, and movies were huge. The director Busby Berkeley put together elaborate musical extravaganzas involving complex geometric patterns and large numbers of showgirls, and people were said to leave theaters giddy with excitement. The orchestra at the Starlight Ballroom in New York's Waldorf Astoria brightened many small-town Saturday nights
Both the stimulus and the bureaucracy helped save Alaska during the Depression. CWA and PWA grants and loans paid for paving Anchorage streets, and for a new City Hall, on 4th between E and F. A blockwide federal building was constructed between F and G.
Many young men worked in the Civilian Conservation Corps, clearing the right of way for the Glenn Highway, and for the arterials in what is now South Anchorage. Many of their fathers and mothers worked for the various New Deal agencies, all of which congressional Delegate Anthony Dimond worked assiduously to bring to Alaska. The Indian Reorganization Act provided support for Native villages and businesses, funding for boarding schools, and loans and grants for college.
It is not an exaggeration to say the New Deal flooded Alaska with money, relieving much that might otherwise have been unbearable.
Historians may label our current economic malaise the "Great Recession." If they do, the memory of "The Lion King" and "Wall-E" will be just a bit harder to uncover. But the good time they provided will be just as real as the jobs funded by federal spending today.
Steve Haycox is a professor of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
Steve Haycox
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