Pew Research: "How a Different America Responded to the Great Depression"

TIME Archive

Link to December 14 Pew Research report.

Excerpt:   Were confirmation needed that the American public is in a sour mood, the 2010 midterm elections provided it. As both pre-election and post-election surveys made clear, Americans are not only strongly dissatisfied with the state of the economy and the direction in which the country is headed, but with government efforts to improve them. As the Pew Research Center's analysis of exit poll data concluded, "the outcome of this year's election represented a repudiation of the political status quo.... Fully 74% said they were either angry or dissatisfied with the federal government, and 73% disapproved of the job Congress is doing."

This outlook is in interesting contrast with many of the public's views during the Great Depression of the 1930s, not only on economic, political and social issues, but also on the role of government in addressing them.

Quite unlike today's public, what Depression-era Americans wanted from their government was, on many counts, more not less. And despite their far more dire economic straits, they remained more optimistic than today's public. Nor did average Americans then turn their ire upon their Groton-Harvard-educated president -- this despite his failure, over his first term in office, to bring a swift end to their hardship. FDR had his detractors but these tended to be fellow members of the social and economic elite.

Still, as now, the public had some reservations about the stretch of government power and found little consensus on specific policies with which to tackle the nation's troubles.