Wasn't It Great?

"And they're totally wrong!" Char Miller says, chuckling. "The world of the Depression is supposed to be black and white. . . . We think of the world then only happening in black and white. Dorothy goes from black-and-white Kansas into Technicolor Oz. The Kansas part is the Great Depression that we know."

Miller is a history professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, currently a visiting professor at Pomona College in California. The students get younger all the time, and the Depression gets further away in memory, more beautifully black and white, and if he's lucky, when it's time to teach the 1930s in America, Miller can still assign the kids to interview an elderly relative about what it was like back then. The students, he says, come back understanding a little better why their grandmother saves so many rubber bands, thumbtacks, empty spaghetti sauce jars.

And if they're looking for any 21st-century analogue to the suffering Americans endured in the 1930s, Miller will helpfully suggest the many avenues of abundant gloom in environmental disaster.

"Global warming is the Great Depression," he says. (Perhaps you'd like to audit his class on water and the West?)

Bruce Jackson also teaches the Great Depression, a graduate seminar, at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), and his focus is on literature and art. The syllabus makes it clear: The American creative output in the disastrous '30s is probably some of our finest -- from Steinbeck to Shirley Temple, from "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" to the work of John Dos Passos, from the best of Faulkner to "We're in the Money." You could spend all semester talking about the FSA photographs alone, and then wish you'd talked more about the buildings, the bridges, the murals, and then realize you barely got into what was going on in the movies. Even in the darkest times, 75 million Americans a week were finding a way to go to the movies, Jackson points out.

(A 15-cent movie ticket in 1933, adjusted for inflation, should cost only $2.40 now. Tell us again how everything's okay?)

And what you're studying the whole time is a profound pain, which no longer hurts. "We don't feel old pain," Jackson says. "What we remember are the narratives . . . what survives are the memories."

The visuals and language of the Depression can be so compelling that even the most checked-out undergrads find themselves briefly absorbed in it.

"Nothing is quite so riveting as the lecture you give on the great crash [of the stock market in 1929] and what followed," says Georgetown history prof Joseph A. McCartin, and he's talking about an 18- to 22-year-old audience that easily zones out on much of history. "There's this hunger in this generation for discussing collective purpose," he says. "There's a spiritual hunger for something larger to be a part of. They remember 9/11 and being urged to continue shopping. It's so different from anything they know, and they're fascinated."

We love stories of being broke, broker, brokest, broken. "It's a fantasy we reenact in a lot of ways," McCartin says. "What is 'Survivor' about, after all? What happens when you don't have anything left? It's a deep trope in society."

And did we mention the art?

"What happens," Jackson asks, "when something so horrible is so beautiful?"