Plague Journal, Day 75: Revisiting the Depression

I re-read some of the first volume of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, looking for historical parallels to our CoronaWorld collapse in the nation’s last similar economic calamity. 

After Black Friday, 1929, crop prices plummeted to levels below what they’d been in the Colonial era. In part because tariffs kept prices of manufactured goods high, farmers couldn’t come close to breaking even. President Herbert Hoover in 1931 created a Federal Farm Board, which paid farmers more than their produce was worth. But this exacerbated overproduction, the farmers’ main problem; since the Farm Board declined to limit production, farmers grew more crops, and the Board quickly ran out of funds. 

“By the time congressional secretary Lyndon Johnson arrived in Washington in December, 1931, the American farmer’s long slide toward ruin had become a headlong plunge. Foreclosures on farms — many by rural banks which themselves were teetering on the brink of failure — had reached a rate of 20,000 per month.” 

In the west Texas congressional district where Johnson lived, the 1931 cotton crop couldn’t be harvested because the 1930 crop remained unsold. Farmers let onions, tomatoes, and watermelons rot on the vine. Railroads for years had brought vagrants to the end of the local line, Corpus Christi; but by the end of 1931 even prosperous farmers were in debt; soup kitchens and relief agencies were overwhelmed by locals, not just strangers. 

“Relief funds were running out. Since President Hoover felt that any involvement in relief by the federal government would weaken the national character, relief remained the province of local municipalities and private agencies, and as winter approached, not only the municipalities of the 14th [Texas] District but its Red Cross and Salvation Army chapters and local relief committees were all running out of money. … Plain beans were what the hungry were given to eat. The Salvation Army had reduced its allocation for feeding each client to a penny per day. Its funds were virtually exhausted. And each day the soup-kitchen lines grew longer.”

The unemployed in America in 1932 totaled between 15 million and 17 million, 800,000 in New York City alone. Growing numbers of Americans were starving. More than 25,000 World War veterans, called “Bonus Marchers,” in May 1932 walked up Pennsylvania Avenue, setting up tents in parks, sleeping in abandoned warehouses. Congress declined to act. It gave $125 million to farmers to ease mortgage burdens, without easing interest payments or repayment schedules — a sum that proved meaningless. A relief bill aimed at farmers provided a family of four less than 50 cents a day. Tax and tariff reform bills went nowhere. 

Hoover declined to meet Bonus Marchers, instead erecting barricades around the White House; in July, he ordered the Army to use fixed bayonets and tear gas to drive them from the D.C. streets. He had been saying since Black Friday that the nation’s economic condition was sound, the economy would rebound. (In March 1930, he said within in two months; May: by fall; June: “the Depression is over”; December: “The fundamental strength of the economy is unimpaired.”) Why are men selling apples on street corners? “Many people have left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples.” To those begging for federal relief aid, public works spending, he said, “As long as I sit at this desk, they won’t get by.” He never visited a breadline or relief station, not wanting to witness suffering. “Nobody is actually starving,” he said. “The hoboes, for example, are better fed than they have ever been. One hobo in New York got ten meals in one day.” (He himself routinely ate seven-course dinners.) 

When Congress passed a public works bill in 1932 Hoover called it “an unexampled raid on the public treasury,” adding, “We cannot squander ourselves into prosperity.” The main action he approved: creation of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which stressed bailing out corporations, railroads, insurance companies, big banks; it gave $30 million to the states, a $90 million loan to the corporation president’s own bank. 

In rural areas, Populist policies gained favor, including strikes. Iowa farmers refused to deliver milk and other products in Sioux City, Des Moines, Council Bluffs, Omaha. Violence flared; respect for law plummeted. An Iowa lawyer about to foreclose on a farm was threatened with hanging by a mob brandishing a noose; in Kansas, a similar lawyer was found dead in a field; in Nebraska, a judge who’d approved farm foreclosures was dragged from his bench, blindfolded, stripped, beaten. Across the farm belt, at foreclosed farm auctions, prospective bidders were threatened; farms then sold for only a dollar or two, were returned to their original owners.

Hoover in 1928 had won 40 of 48 states; in 1932, he won six. The GOP lost majorities in both houses: 101 House of Representative seats, the largest pickup in Democratic Party history, 11 Senate seats. These were bigger than the shifts toward Republicans in the 1920 election, when President Woodrow Wilson’s post-World War I internationalism and handling of the 1918 flu epidemic left his party profoundly unpopular. 

Hoover remained president until March 1, 1933. His State of the Union called, once again, for a balanced budget, modest government, and a sales tax whose burden would fall heaviest on the underclass. The poor marched in Lincoln, Neb., Columbus, Ohio, Seattle, Chicago; a Communist Party rally in Union Square, New York City, drew more than 35,000. 

In February 1933 banks went into deeper crisis. More than 5,500 of 13,000 had closed since Black Friday; the remainder had $6 billion to meet $41 billion in deposits, a balance they could cover only by selling mortgages that had shrunk to a fraction of their initial value. Facing a run, the governor of Michigan declared a moratorium for his state’s 550 banks. Depositors across the country began lining up to take money out. In a week, the Baltimore Trust Company paid out more than $10 million before the governor closed Maryland’s 200 banks. Kansas and Minnesota, North Carolina and Virginia followed suit; Ohio and Kentucky banks limited withdrawals to 5 percent of balances. Governors declared bank “holidays” in 17 more states. 

“Crisis was in the air,” wrote historian James MacGregor Burns. “But it was a strange, numbing crisis, striking suddenly in a Western city and then in the South a thousand miles away. It was worse than an invading army; it was everywhere and nowhere, for it was in the minds of men. It was fear.” 

The imminent collapse of the farming and banking sectors; the growing popularity of radical politics on both sides of the political spectrum; loss of respect for the rule of law: all of this and worse awaited President Franklin D. Roosevelt when he assumed office on March 4, 1933. 

Plague Journal, Day 74: Ideal Block, Mean Streets

Memorial Day: I walk on the block I want to live on. It’s like a lot of blocks within a mile of my apartment: one-way street, speed bumps, trees lining both sides; mostly three-floor brownstones, each with a ground floor level, a stoop leading to the two top floors, I presume a backyard.

I’m not sure why it strikes me as the quintessential Brooklyn block. It’s a shadier, more peaceable vision of the "Crooklyn" family’s block, five decades on. It’s my train from the opening scene of “Stardust Memories,” not the car I’m stuck on with lugubrious ghouls but on the track opposite, everyone dressed in white, drinking Champagne, laughing uproariously, Sharon Stone blowing me a we’ll-never-meet kiss.

Tonight, a twilit, sun-warmed slice of spring perfection, my Ideal Block residents sit out on more than half the stoops, in pairs, quartets, larger groups. Grill smoke wafts; music plays from unseen speakers: R&B, soul, jazz. In untrafficked CoronaWorld, I walk unfearful down the middle of the street. One family’s front door is open, though no one’s on the stoop; inside, the base of each step leading to the top floor is painted with a word or two, all in different colors, scripts: Peace, Smile, Love Often, Live, Happiness, Imagine, Courage, Faith, Hope, Believe, Dream. In some places I’d find this cheesy, but not on Ideal Block. Further up two men greet each other with a gesture I’ve seen a few times now in lieu of hugs, handshakes: an interlocking forearm grab, palm-to-elbow, something Shakespearean actors or Robin's merry men might employ.

When I lived in Santa Cruz, in my mid-20s, I was lonely enough one night to follow the sound of laughter and a bouncing bass line to a stranger’s house, where I poked my head through an open gate to see a score of people lounging in a backyard. Someone hailed me as if I were expected. I asked about the song. Quincy Jones, the party-goer said. It’s so great, I said. Grab a beer, he said. I did, and spent a lovely hour with friendly people I never saw again: UC Santa Cruz students, surfers, restaurant workers, all engaging enough for a slightly drunken evening. 

Now, in socially distanced CoronaWorld, I couldn’t stop even if I found the courage. 

I walk further south, past Fulton, turn east on Lefferts, another block where dozens are out enjoying drinks, grilled meats. Some are masked, some not; some are distanced, not all. I hear distant fireworks, a crackle which brings to mind a late afternoon last week in the Catskills, where I heard a steady series of single pops: rifle fire. Target practice, I thought, but then the sound shifted, echoed as if from a moving gunman; I couldn't tell. That felt foreign, ominous; this feels like a Fourth of July picnic. 

In the northern sections of Bedford-Stuyvesant I pass the shiny apartment buildings that have replaced aging brownstones, like silver-and-chrome caps in a toothy smile. These blocks see fewer stoops, more white folks out walking a variety of dogs. A colorful mural brightens a fence on a lot slated for another new building; Notorious B.I.G.’s message seems especially relevant. 

Walking north on Franklin I see a lamp sweeping. A cop car, I think, but the glare is too dim; it’s a man wearing a headlamp, sifting trash bags on the curb. I pass three trucks of an emergency ConEd crew, all masked save a guy lowering himself down a manhole. 

On the next block, an unmasked man and woman smoke in front of a house; an unmasked man approaches. 

“You look like you’ve been working out,” she tells the newcomer.

I glance. His tight T-shirt reveals muscles, a gut the size of mine. 

“Working out with some food, maybe,” he says.

“That’s what I meant! You look more pregnant than I ever did!” 

This brings to mind a walk The Girlfriend and I took a couple of summers ago, over several days around the east side of Lake Como. At the end of one afternoon’s journey we tramped into a small town, looking for our hotel. A middle-aged woman hailed us; she spoke no English, we no Italian. She seemed frazzled, a bit off, but unthreatening. She asked if we were a couple; we said we were. She reached out, put her hand on my belly, said a phrase of which I made out one word, understood to mean: “Look at this nice panettone you’re packing around!” She laughed uproariously. “Yes,” I said, through gritted teeth: “Panettone. Ha ha.” Now that’s our eternal word for my paunch: I’ve got to go for a run, work off a bit of the old panettone.

A couple of nights ago, at a similar hour, The Kid went for a walk by herself. This year she started traveling the city alone, with a city-issued bus and subway pass given to all public school students starting in 7th grade. But in CoronaWorld, this was an unprecedented event. When she returned she looked glassy-eyed, asked me to turn off the music. 

“What happened? Are you OK?” 

“I think so.”

On her way back, she said, a couple of blocks from home, a single man called to her. She couldn’t hear everything he said; either he wanted her to take a picture of him, or he wanted to take a selfie with her. She hesitated, said no. The man dropped his head to the side, uttered a syllable she took as part disappointment, part mockery: “No-oh!”

The Kid worried that she’d somehow offended him. Earlier this semester, she remembered, while she waited for a friend’s mom to give her a ride to her after-school writing program, a woman emerged from a house carrying balloons, asked The Kid to take her picture; The Kid unthinkingly obliged; they enjoyed a nice exchange.  

“Maybe this guy was just a tourist,” she said. “Maybe I was being rude.” 

“Was there anyone else around?” I asked. 

She shook her head: “No one on the whole block.” 

“You did nothing wrong,” I said. Your priority is your own protection and safety. Social convention, other people’s potential disappointment: those don’t register in comparison. It’s worth respecting your intuition; if you felt like the situation was dodgy, if you felt uncomfortable, then you did the right thing to decline, move on. A strange man’s hurt feelings matter not one whit. 

“I guess,” she said, slumping beside me on the couch. 

“One thing you can always say in CoronaWorld,” I add. “You’re not supposed to be within six feet of strangers. You probably shouldn’t be sharing phones or anything with a hard surface, either. These days, you can use that as an excuse. But you don’t really need one. If you feel like a situation’s potentially dangerous, heed that instinct.” 

This would never have happened three streets away, I think, on my Ideal Block. 

Plague Journal, Day 73: “All together, and one by one”

On our weekly family call, my sister who's a mayoral aide outlines the post-pandemic cuts faced by her sizable Western city in the budget year starting in July. 

Much of the city’s revenue comes from tourism (sales and lodging taxes), which have dropped to near zero. Six of the city’s top 10 private employers are in retail, hospitality, or tourism. The mayor’s making assumptions that revenues will drop by $150 million — about 40 percent. 

About one in five city dollars is spent on insurance and debt service: untouchable (at least without screwing up the city’s bond rating, terrible long-term policy). Almost one in three dollars is spent on public works (roads, water, sewage, trash), one in six on fire and police: only so many cuts possible. 

Other departments will be gutted. Two of three city libraries will likely close. Parks will close. Bus service will be cut. Youth and family service programs will be slashed. Those affected by every cut: primarily the poor.

“It’s horrible,” she says. “It’ll be a disaster for so many people. But there aren’t any good choices.” 

My brother’s California business — wholesale flooring and custom moldings — is getting back to normal. That means he’ll resume traveling across the state, which means regular one-way drives of four or five hours, which means staying in hotels. He’s considering staying in more expensive chain hotels, which are being transparent about cleaning regimens. He’s likely to bring his own cleaning supplies, too. 

My sister in Washington Heights took a vacation day Friday, went with an Upper West Side Friend to visit a couple of friends in Westchester County. The three-hour visit took multiple planning phone calls, she said, as if they were planning a weeks-long joint vacation. 

The UWS Friend has taken a limited number of buses and subways but felt uncertain riding in a car. The Westchester couple didn’t feel comfortable about them arriving by train. They could all sit outside and remain socially distanced for a meal but needed to work out logistics for the food service. In the end one of the Westchester friends drove into the city to pick them both up, driving with the windows down; all wore masks throughout; they ate buffet style, taking care with all glasses and utensils. 

“The planning takes so much energy, and it’s so weird,” she said. “But I want to socialize with people if I can do it safely.” 

Later in the day she comes to visit me and The Kid; we climb in her back seat, masked, windows open, drive to Green-Wood Cemetery. It’s a gorgeous spring day; lots of folks are visiting, virtually all masked, and the almost 500-acre grounds offer plenty of room for distancing. It’s a fun Memorial Day activity, offering statuary, greenery, history, not least the dated, or recently resurrected, names. (The Kid, who loves names, says they move on 100-year cycles of popularity.) 

We drive back, slice up The Sister's delicious chocolate cake, visit with my sister’s dog; we try to stay six feet away from The Sister, mostly successfully. 

My mother got a haircut, a decision that surprised us all. She’s been using the same hairdresser since moving to the Bay Area from the Central Valley, about 15 years ago; during the pandemic, he’s seen a few select clients in his basement. Both he and she were masked, and he took what sounded like reasonable precautions. Still, she’s 89, at high risk for infection; it's better than a salon, but I thought it was a bad idea. 

A better idea: Two friends from the East Bay drove to see her, visiting outside, socially distanced, in her condo complex’s garden. The friends are worried about the nation’s political future; one, who’s keeping a blog, wonders how to keep safe while voicing protest. (One group she’s supporting, to register and get voters to the polls: Reclaim Our Vote.) She recalls her mother in their Jersey City home typing protest letters to corporations she thought were harming the public; now she’s writing supportive postcards to journalists reporting information that rebuts administration lies. She wonders if it’s time for a physically distanced series of protests, as recently in Tel Aviv, so people can remain safe and register dissent. 

“I worry — the least useful thing to do,” she writes. “Are we fooling ourselves that we can be safe, and that when it is safe to emerge that our democracy will still be there?” 

Others are pondering the same question. So far it seems the big winners from the Covid-19 era are centralizing giants: the Big 5 tech oligopoly (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft) now accounts for more than 20 percent of the S & P 500 index; autocrats in Hungary, Serbia, Cambodia have instituted emergency powers; China’s President Xi has moved to end Hong Kong’s special status. 

The novelist Marilynne Robinson sees our nation at a crossroads, noting declining life expectancy, not to mention national optimism, from before the Covid-19 era. She calls it "a crisis of civilization," writing, "We have been given the grounds and opportunity to do some very basic thinking. … We can consider what kind of habitation, what kind of home, we want this country to be.”

Among her candidates for reevaluation: the outflow of American capital, growing enrichment of a few, pervasiveness of poverty; the devaluation of humane studies, thereby freedom of thought; the entrenchment of notions of scarcity; and the diminishment of the public commons and ideas of public good. 

“All this comes down to the need to recover and sharpen a functioning sense of justice based on a reverent appreciation of humankind, all together and one by one,” Robinson writes. 

A high school classmate responds to one of my posts with a meme accusing me of “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” telling me to calm myself, offering me a binkie. In response I link to the digital version of Sunday’s New York Times entire front page, listing 1,000 of our fellow Americans who have died of Covid-19, along with a few descriptive words for each. It’s a journalistic triumph; it’s heartbreaking; it represents about 1 percent of American lives lost so far. The Kid and I spend time reading the brief descriptions, one by one. 

(New York state numbers on Sunday: 362,764 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 0.3 percent; 97 dead, to a total of 23,488, up 0.5 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 646, to a total of 91,467, up 0.7 percent.) 

Plague Journal, Day 72: CoronaWorld's Killing Me Blues

CoronaWorld’s Killing Me Blues

City’s shut down, I can’t my nails done.

My hair needs a cut, sure wish I could get one.

I’m wearing a mask, I hate how my breath feels.

Wanna go to a bar, I’m sick of take-out meals.

Can’t meet my friends, no rendezvous — 

Got the CoronaWorld’s killing me blues, CoronaWorld’s killing me blues.

Used to go to a job, that changed in a heartbeat.

I’m on the welfare line, economy’s mincemeat.

Trump sent me a check, a drop in the bucket; 

Billionaires getting fat, then tell me to suck it.

I’m washing my hands, I’m six feet from you —

Got the CoronaWorld’s killing me blues, CoronaWorld’s killing me blues

Chest’s feeling tight, I can’t take a deep breath.

I’m staying inside, I’m trying to cheat death. 

I’m feeling so tired, but maybe I’m lazy.

All the sirens going by are driving me crazy. 

Hospitals all jammed up, all the morgues, too. 

Got the CoronaWorld’s killing me blues, CoronaWorld’s killing me blues.

Some say it’s a hoax, say it’s a con job.

They want to go to the gym, they’re forming a lynch mob.

They’re blaming Bill Gates, they’re blaming the Asians,

They’re blaming immigrants, anyone but Caucasians.

Give ‘em four more years, they’ll be killing the Jews.

Got the CoronaWorld’s killing me blues, CoronaWorld’s killing me blues,

CoronaWorld’s killing me blues, CoronaWorld’s killing me — blues.

(New York state numbers on Saturday: 361,515 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 0.4 percent; 109 dead, to a total of 23,391, up 0.5 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 1,089, to a total of 90,821, up 1.2 percent.) 

Plague Journal, Day 71: Misinformation, Disinformation

One of my Los Angeles friends texts, “I officially have no idea what’s going on. If I had to give a press conference I’d say, I have no idea what’s going on. It makes my head hurt, and my eyes squint.” 

I haven’t heard from L.A. Friend in days; her message mentions nothing specific. But it weirdly corresponds to my train of thought; her text interrupts my compilation of a list of distractions created by the president and his minions over the past few days. He: 

— threatened to withhold federal dollars to states expanding voting by mail; 

— accused election officials in Nevada and Michigan, without proof, of law violations;

— lied about voter fraud; 

— accused China of meddling in the 2020 election, without proof; 

— accused President Obama, without proof, of orchestrating a “deep state” conspiracy against him; 

— said he was taking hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic treatment against Covid-19; 

—said Fox News is doing too little to help him win the 2020 election; 

— retweeted criticism of his FBI director; 

— endorsed false allegations of jury misconduct in the Roger Stone trial; 

— violated public health guidelines about wearing masks; 

— said he would force governors to open houses of worship as “essential,” a power presidents do not possess. 

Until today I had never heard of the debating technique “Gish gallop,” knowing only the Trumpian variant described by ally Steve Bannon as “flooding the zone with shit.” Consider my and my friend’s zones well flooded. 

I’ve read nothing smarter — certainly nothing more succinct — about the president’s public health and re-election strategies than a post written by NYU’s Jay Rosen: “The plan is to have no plan. …  to default on public problem solving and then prevent the public from understanding the consequences of that default. To succeed will require one of the biggest propaganda and freedom of information fights in U.S. history.”

The president governs not the nation but to seek benefits for him and his circle. He plays not 12-dimensional chess but the 24-hour news cycle. His every flaw and foible is known, or knowable. (This was true in 2016.) His misdeeds, missteps — such as forcing a crush of travelers through U.S. airports in the middle of a pandemic — succeed not by remaining unexposed but by burial in a relentless pile of confusion.

Will it work? It did, with fewer resources, in 2016. It did in England, where Brexit’s political engineers ran a similar campaign, unsullied by quaint notions of decency and truth. I confess ignorance until this week of Dominic Cummings, whose 260-mile trip with Covid-19 symptoms to stash his kids with relatives with the U.K. under lockdown has incited calls for his resignation (which Prime Minister Boris Johnson, grateful for Cummings’ services, will almost certainly ignore). 

Photo courtesy of BBC

Last year The New Statesman ran a Cummings profile, in which Harry Lambert penned a paragraph that remains apt on multiple continents: “Yes … you should try to win an election, but first you must be decent, and fair, and tell the truth. Winning an election is the game, but there are rules. The problem for those outraged by Cummings is that they may be wrong. What appear to be rules are in fact only conventions, and cannot be enforced. If voters want to elect liars, democracy empowers them to.”

Liars have used mass media to influence voters for more than a century. A University of Pittsburgh economist has published a paper on Father Charles Coughlin, the 1930s radio priest whose anti-Semitic, populist, and fascist messages spoke to millions of Americans (including my grandfather, who considered him essential listening). The article concludes that exposure to Father Coughlin's radio program: reduced Franklin Roosevelt’s vote share in the 1936 election; boosted creation of local pro-Nazi chapters; depressed sales of World War II bonds; increased negative feelings toward Jews.

In the digital age, disinformation (spread intentionally, as by Putin and the president) and misinformation (spread by the credulous) are simpler, ubiquitous. Prospect Magazine writes about the circulation of Covid-19 conspiracy theories, boosted by everyone from fascists to anti-vaxxers to Luddites fearing 5G technology. (I recently tracked one such lie.) Our information infection will persist long after Covid-19; as the article notes, “It is far from clear that democracies can survive the longer-term destabilisation of objective truth.”

The article’s worth reading in full. I’ll cite one section, exploring why the anti-vaccination message often dominates online discussion despite its speciousness: “It tends to get spread not, like its contrary, with a careful presentation of the facts, but with more engaging emotive content (‘Do you love your children? Then why would you hurt them?’). And it is more diverse: in contrast to the stark medical facts, there are a host of anti-vax 'narratives' to draw you in. 

“‘It’s like going into an ice cream shop,’ says Neil Johnson, a complexity theorist at George Washington University. ‘You’ll always find a flavour that appeals to you, and online it’s only one step away.’”

Meanwhile, the worst predictions of Covid-19 case spikes following the nation’s earliest reopenings, in Georgia and Florida, have yet to come to pass. Montgomery, Ala., is seeing a spike threaten to overwhelm its hospitals, but so far that’s true of few other cities. On the other hand, remove from national trend lines New York state (where cases and deaths have been declining for weeks; in the city, emergency rooms are seeing half their normal Before CoronaWorld caseloads) and you see a plateauing of cases (around 20,000 a day) since early April. We’ve ramped up testing in that stretch; but European countries testing at similar rates have seen average daily cases drop by as much as 90 percent. 

As with so much with Covid-19, we’re flying mostly blind. The upshot? Waves of viral infections will likely roll across the country for months. Deaths, now more than 90,000, will continue to pile up. Will voters care enough to cast out the person most responsible? 

(New York state numbers on Friday: 359,926 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 0.5 percent; 287 dead, to a total of 23,282, up 0.4 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 1,262, to a total of 89,732, up 1.4 percent.)