Chris Cillizza’s first bulleted point in his Aug. 6 column [“A contest that, so far, defies nature”] declared “The unemployment rate has been over 8 percent for 42 straight months, a streak unparalleled in American history.” Perhaps technically accurate, as an occasional month here and there might have broken the string briefly.
But the statement gives the wrong impression in terms of the more important yearly averages during the 1930s. As shown in that standard source, Historical Statistics of the United States (Washington, 1975, vol 1, p. 126), the percentage of U.S. unemployed stayed in double digits from 1931 to 1940 (and was 9.9 percent in 1941), four of those years over 20 percent, until the huge stimulus spending during World War II pulled the economy out of what we continue to call the Great Depression.
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