Bad for business

On June 5, 1931, a young Ohio lawyer made the first entry in what would become a decades-spanning diary.

"For the first time in my personal business life, I am witnessing a major financial crisis," Benjamin Roth wrote, less than two years after the stock market crash of October 1929.

"I am anxious to learn the lessons of this depression. To the man past middle life it spells tragedy and disaster, but to those of us in the middle 30s, it may be a great school of experience."

Much has been written about the Great Depression from the perspective of people at the top: Wall Street financiers, tycoons, the president (Herbert Hoover) who lost his job because of it, the president (Franklin D. Roosevelt) who won the top job by promising to pull the country out of it.

Historians and economists have filled libraries, too, about the effects on little people, on laborers and farmers and clerks who bought into the notion that by playing the market on margin they would become rich. We have seen their despairing eyes in the photographs of Dorothea Lange. We have heard their voices in John Steinbeck's (and Henry Fonda's) "Grapes of Wrath."

This is something new.

Roth is "a natural born Republican," and he frets about socialism, unions and government interference in business.

April 5, 1932: "It is common street talk now that we have not seen the worst of the depression. ... Insanity and suicide among prominent business men is on the increase."

This is his class, the professional class -- doctors, dentists, bank and steel mill managers, business leaders, but especially lawyers -- being put through the mill. They were cautious and responsible people, for the most part, he tells us ... except when they got caught up in the lure of easy money.

What happened? How could this have been avoided? How long will it last? Roth grapples with those and other questions that have a familiar ring today: Should government spend and pile up deficits to stimulate the economy? Should it take over failing industries? Are we headed toward socialism?

"For 10 years I have longed for normalcy," he wrote on Sept. 12, 1939, as the coming of World War II further complicated the picture. Four months later, in his first diary entry for 1940, Roth tried to sum up the turbulent decade just closed.

"It all seems like a bad dream," he wrote. "I have learned much but ... [my children] have known only blackest depression. ... All in all, the world of 1940 is not a pleasant one. We can only hope that a better day is dawning."