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With unemployment at 8.5 percent, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich finally called it:

This is still not the Great Depression of the 1930s, but it is a Depression.

Reich notes that if you count the underemployed (working less than the full-time hours they want), the rate rises to take in one of every six Americans. Put the economy on a war footing, he recommends, with government outlays for infrastructure and education. And hurry up with guaranteed health care for all.

Anyone disappointed that President Barack Obama didn’t make the pronouncement himself while on his European sojourn should consider that President Herbert Hoover wasn’t the one anoint his depression as “The Great,” either.

Hoover may have preferred the word “depression” to “panic” (or even to “recession,” I’ve heard), but he was far from the first president to use the D-word, according to the History News Network.

And it was likely Lionel Robbins — an economist and writer, like Reich — who first called it “The Great Depression” — in 1934.

By then Hoover was out of office, never having uttered the word “The” before the words “Great Depression” as president.

Related: When depressions were great

“I remember during the Depression — the Great Depression …”

Last fall in the run-up to the anniversary of Black Tuesday — and as our own clouds of economic doom seemed to be gathering — the Minnesota Independent carried a series of posts called “When Depressions Were Great” that took a look at what local newspapers were reporting before the crash of 1929. Iric Nathanson takes a similar but more detailed look back at a day during the depths of the Great Depression at MinnPost today — March 4, 1933, when banks in Minnesota took a state-ordered holiday to avert a run on their deposits.

National Portrait Gallery (Obama: Warren Perry)

Think it was mere chance that got Minneapolis a mention in President Obama’s address to Congress? It turns out that the select occasions in the past when Minnesota’s biggest city turned up in presidential addresses have always been during serious talk about tough times. In fact, it happened first during the first State of the Union of the Great Depression.

Herbert Hoover, annual message to the Congress on the state of the union, Dec. 2, 1930:

The world-wide depression has affected agriculture in common with all other industries. … The price levels of our major agricultural commodities are, in fact, higher than those in other principal producing countries, due to the combined result of the tariff and the operations of the Farm Board. For instance, wheat prices at Minneapolis are about 30 per cent higher than at Winnipeg, and at Chicago they are about 20 per cent higher than at Buenos Aires.

Herbert Hoover, address in Springfield, Ill., Nov. 4, 1932:

In speaking at Des Moines I gave some figures at which farm commodities could be sold in the United States from foreign countries, even in these days of distressing and even heartbreaking prices, if the tariff were reduced to a competitive basis for revenue. I can add some items that are especially applicable to the State of Illinois. … Your butter, which sells in New York at 22 cents, could be sold from New Zealand at this moment for 16 were it not for the tariff. And, as a matter of fact, your wheat, distressing as the price is, is selling in Minneapolis today at 12 cents above the Canadian price for similar grades.

Ronald Reagan, radio address to the nation on a House budget proposal, March 26, 1983 (on the other side of another economic crisis):

As inflation and interest rates come down and our tax cuts come on stream, families have more to spend or save, as you wish. And that is why savings and productivity are growing again. Recently I received a letter from the president of a family-owned lumber company in Minneapolis, one which — like so many other small firms — has been hard-hit by the recession. But now this man’s mood has turned optimistic. He told me that his sales for the months of December and January were the best for 3 months in his company’s 50-year history. And he wrote, “Mr. President, don’t get stampeded into some ill-conceived pump-priming scheme that will lead to another round of inflation boom and bust. You were elected to break that cycle. What you’ve done is working.” Well, my answer to that fine gentleman is, “I won’t be stampeded. I intend to do everything I can to protect this recovery all of us have worked so hard to achieve.”

Here’s a quote that’s worth a mention, though it doesn’t fit the pattern and came from a man who was not yet president. It’s a kind of bookend to Gov. Bobby Jindal’s remarks about Hurricane Katrina in the official Republican response to President Obama’s address last night.

George W. Bush, address accepting the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, Aug. 3, 2000:

And, in the next bold step of welfare reform, we will support the heroic work of homeless shelters and hospices, food pantries and crisis pregnancy centers — people reclaiming their communities block-by-block and heart-by-heart. I think of Mary Jo Copeland, whose ministry called “Sharing and Caring Hands” serves 1,000 meals a week in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Each day, Mary Jo washes the feet of the homeless, then sends them off with new socks and shoes. “Look after your feet,” she tells them. … “They must carry you a long way in this world, and then all the way to God.” Government cannot do this work. It can feed the body, but it cannot reach the soul. Yet government can take the side of these groups, helping the helper, encouraging the inspired.

Finally, one earlier Minneapolis mention by President Obama:

Barack Obama, the president’s weekly address, Feb. 7, 2009:

From the beginning, this recovery plan has had at its core a simple idea: Let’s put Americans to work doing the work America needs done. It will save or create more than 3 million jobs over the next 2 years, all across the country — 16,000 in Maine, nearly 80,000 in Indiana — almost all of them in the private sector, and all of them jobs that help us recover today and prosper tomorrow. … Jobs that rebuild our crumbling roads, bridges and levees and dams, so that the tragedies of New Orleans and Minneapolis never happen again.

Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and other presidents mentioned Minneapolis during addresses they gave while visiting Minnesota, but there the reference was clearly for parochial purposes. The quotes listed above are the only other presidential addresses that mention Minneapolis listed at the University of California at Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project Web archive.

You can’t look at columns like Paul Krugman’s in The Times yesterday about “Franklin Delano Obama” and not see the new interest! Everyone is asking why doesn’t Obama simply emulate FDR? Why don’t we pick up and start a New Deal? Straight down the line, they have been comparing this recession with the Great Depression. The thing is, there is a substantial difference between now and then. Even Wall Street types were perfectly willing to give FDR dictatorial powers if he would cope with the financial crisis. Nobody’s mentioned that with Obama, and you won’t see it.

You cannot imagine how people were affected. People walked to work; the subway was a dime—John D. Rockefeller Sr. going out to the streets on 5th Avenue and handing out dimes to people. It was ludicrous. To put it in simple terms, parents would go to sleep at night hearing their children crying from hunger in their beds. And what could you do? You have not eaten yourself. That’s what I mean about the Great Depression. We are in a deep depression, but not like that.

Or better yet, do what The Associated Press reports that a Briggsville, Wis., man recently did: find a box of money that’s been stashed away since the Great Depression.

Dan Deming was tearing down an old shed on his Milwaukee-area farm when he noticed a metal box in the rubble containing $1,700 in bills dated from 1928 to 1934. The currency’s condition was too poor to interest collectors in his windfall, so Deming redeemed the cash with the U.S. Treasury Department for face value.

As our sister site, the Washington Independent, reported last week (a day before the failure of First Integrity Bank in Staples, Minn.), Wall Street is ready for 150 to 300 banks to fold in the next two years as the mortgage foreclosure crisis continues. With peace of mind from reforms that were put in place after the Great Depression of the 1930s and the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s and 1990s, many observers are relatively sanguine this time, in part because after years of mergers, there are simply fewer banks around to fail.

In theory, if the mystery lock-box depositor who unintentionally paid it forward had instead managed to find a reliable Depression-era bank or stock market investment in which to put what Deming guesses was his or her life savings, the money in the box might today have a value of $54,000 to $228,000. But finding such a bank would have been a crap shoot, considering that the annual number of Depression-era bank failures peaked at more than 4,000 in 1934, the year the latest bill in the box was printed.

Critics of the 200-page plan say it lacks focus and ignores the real problem of mortgage-backed securities and millions of foreclosures across the country. Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, said the economic collapse was not a failure of regulation, but a “failure of leadership.” Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., are working on an update of a Depression-era (there’s that word again!) plan that would facilitate a $300-$400 billion buyout of mortgages, allowing nearly 2 million homes to be refinanced instead of foreclosed.

But it’s not just Paulson’s speech today that is causing “Depression” to be invoked. Top economists and analysts are using the word to describe what they say is the worst financial crisis they’ve seen in their lifetime.

Continued: Click “Read more”

• Jeff Faux, founder of the Economic Policy Institute, writes today in The Nation that “we are now staring into the abyss.” Home prices are expected to drop another 10 percent, halting consumer spending that makes up 70 percent of our economy. It’s not the “Big One,” he says in his article “Are We Headed for the Next Great Depression?” But it’s A Big One, he says. And it will take years to recover.

 

• Nouriel Roubini, professor of economics at New York University who also served as an adviser in the Treasury Department, says we’re experiencing the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. He writes a lengthy and compelling article about how and why we are at increasing risk for the “mother of all financial meltdowns.”
• Allan Sloan at Fortune Magazine writes that we are suffering the aftermath of the collapse of at “Tinkerbell economy” that was dependent on money that disappeared like fairy dust. He cites leading political economist Allan Meltzer of Carnegie Mellon, who argues the current situation is unusual, but not unprecedented. The last time we saw a collapse like this? In 1929, he says. Which resulted in the Great Depression.

Photo: Franklin D. Roosevelt Library