Benjamin Roth was born in New York City in 1894 and moved shortly thereafter to Youngstown, Ohio. He received a law degree and moved back to Youngstown after serving as an Army officer during World War I. When the stock market crashed in 1929, he had been practicing law for approximately 10 years, largely representing local businesses. After nearly two years, he began to grasp the magnitude of what had happened to American economic life, and in June 1931, he began writing down his impressions in a diary that he maintained intermittently until he died in 1978. His perceptions and experiences have a chilling similarity to our own era, and The Big Money believes that Roth's words—though they are 75 years old—have much to teach us today; we'll be serializing several excerpts.
You can read the first installment here. This is the second installment:
Aug. 5, 1931. I went to the fruit market house this evening. It was almost deserted. The farmers cannot sell their produce because men are not working and it has become fashionable for each family to have its own vegetable garden.
Aug. 6, 1931. At a public sale by the sheriff today on foreclosure by the bank the C—— home at 1— Elm Street was offered for the third time but no buyer found. It could be bought for $4400, and is really worth conservatively $7500. In 1929 the owner thought it was worth $11,000.
Aug. 7, 1931. Business is at an absolute standstill and the big stores are deserted even tho' they are all running sales and almost giving the merchandise away. Since the local savings and loan companies stopped paying out, nobody has any money and everybody seems scared and blue. We seem to have touched bottom in Youngstown and it hardly seems possible that things could get worse.
Aug. 8, 1931. My brother Morris has been out of work now for almost two years and can't find a thing to do. He is an engineer and a craftsman. [One of his close friends] was laid off by the Truscan Steel Co. two months ago and is not very optimistic. [My brother] Joe is [an accountant and is] still at Truscan but is afraid for his job. He says the air is tense and men are being discharged every day.
The Chicago Tribune announces that 100 theaters in Chicago and vicinity will close up. This is because of the tremendous overbuilding of theaters during the last 5 years of the boom. Each producer built his own chain of theaters and bought the real estate at fancy prices. Now they are going broke. In Youngstown movie admissions have dropped from 60 cents to 35 cents.
[Subsequent annotation dated July 10, 1970: Admission charges to a good movie theater are $2.50.]
Aug. 9, 1931. Professional men have been hard hit by the depression. This is particularly true of doctors and dentists. Their overhead is high and collections are impossible. One doctor smoothed a dollar bill out on his desk the other day and said that this was all the money he had taken in for a week. Lawyers are almost as badly off and most of them are not taking in enough to pay. We have been helped a little by foreclosure work which followed in the wake of the depression but most of it does not pay because the assets are worthless. Most professional men for past two years have been living on money borrowed on insurance policies etc. The only work that comes in now are impossible collections on a contingent fee basis. Everybody is digging up old claims and trying to realize on them. Tempers are short and people are distrustful and suspicious. There is nothing to do but work hard for less money and to cut expenses to the bone.