What Happened to the Depression Generation

Social and economic disasters like the depression are assumed to affect powerfully and permanently the attitudes of those who live through them. Among many politicians, economists, and trade union officials the effects of the depression are clear and undeniable. The acceptance, for example, by all parties that full employment ought to be an automatic policy of all Australian governments is an obvious legacy of the depression. So too is the belief that governments must be able to exercise power over the banking system. At the level of folklore the depression is seen as having affected the individual psyches of those who experienced it. In some accounts the depression assumes the character of a diabolus ex machina: just as the hero is about to embark on his chosen career, along comes the depression. Out of work for years, he becomes bitter, resentful, alienated. When employment and affluence return he is money-mad and grasping, or security-conscious and a compulsive hoarder of paper, bits of string and old tins. In other accounts the damage is done to the children, because of the father's inability to provide, or because of the parents' later pressure on the children to choose secure but undesired jobs in order to escape a similar calamity. Juvenile delinquency, the 'beat' generation and an alleged decline in moral standards have all been blamed on the depression. There is some reality behind all these histories and hypotheses, and experience of the depression was widespread enough for politicians (especially from the Left) to remind their audiences of it from time to time. Harking back to the depression has begun to decline in frequency, since very many of those who were alive in the 1930s have died since. But the implication that there is, or ought to be, a 'Depression Generation', a group of Australians linked by common attitudes and the memory of common unpleasant experiences, lingers on. And, as the tales of folklore suggest, these experiences and attitudes are thought to have affected behaviour, then and later. In its general form, the notion of a 'generation' as a group of people linked by a common time of birth is a stock-in-trade of social comment, both professional and amateur. John Freeman, for example, argued in an obituary that Kingsley Martin's 'influence on the generation which became adult in the Thirties is incalculable'.1 The authors of

Depression (economics) · Economics · Keynesian economics · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Psychology · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics

• The Paradox of Partisan Trade Unionism

  Open Access•D W Rawson•British Journal of Political…•1974

  Add to list