By Bruce B. Brugmann
My grandfather’s drugstore in Rock Rapids, Iowa, was the only store on Main Street to survive the Great Depression. C. C. Brugmann had invested heavily in RCA records for his store just before the crash came in 1929 and the investment almost wiped him out. But he survived and became an instant expert on the Depression.
As one of the few Democrats in town, he would tell me that it was the Republicans and their policies of speculation and trickle-down economics and two-chickens-in-every- pot Herbert Hooverism, that created the Great Depression. He would explain that it was the Democrats, Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, using the power of government, that saved the farmers and the townsfolk and the country. He loved to tick off the specifics: how FDR imposed price supports to protect farmers from the vagaries of the weather and market, brought electricity to farmers (REA), greenbelts to protect their soil, banking reforms and federal funds to revive the local failed banks, WPA projects to put the unemployed to work and build much needed infrastructure, fair trade to protect small businesses from the chains, cheap public power with TVA, the entire state of Nebraska, and other lucky places. I’m just a little guy, he would say, and the market doesn’t give a damn about me. I need some help now and then from the government.