"A long, giddy boom fueled by irrational investment bubbles...lax regulators looking the other way...then rapid-fire crises and a downwar-spiraling slowdown..."

In the minds of many Americans, the economic crises of recent months displayed striking parallels to the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression. One couldn't help but wonder: Is this the start of a New Depression? What would it be like?

Our collective memory of that era now consists of Littlemore than time-encrusted clichés and scratchy newsreel images— grim men in soup-kitchen lines and a jaunty Franklin Roosevelt declaring: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” As the parents of the Baby Boomers pass from the stage, firsthand knowledge of 1930s America is vanishing.

To summon the Ann Arbor of that era, we need only turn to a vivid memoir, now little remembered, by the Michigan-born writer Edmund G. Love (’36). Published in 1972 by William Morrow & Co., the book was titled Hanging On: Or How to Get Through a Depression and Enjoy Life. In spite of its happy-go-lucky subtitle, it is a searing recollection of what the term “hard times” really means. One puts it down shorn of any glib nostalgia about “the greatest generation.”

Love, born in 1912, was a journalist, screenwriter, and novelist, who published some 20 books, including Subways Are For Sleeping, which became the basis of a hit Broadway musical in the late 1950s. But the two books of his most likely to last are his memoirs of growing to maturity in Michigan. The first of these, titled The Situation in Flushing, is about Love’s boyhood outside Flint — an evocation of small-town life that the New York Times’ reviewer called “enchantment, pure and solid.”

Love, born in 1912, was a journalist, screenwriter, and novelist, who published some 20 books, including Subways Are For Sleeping, which became the basis of a hit Broadway musical in the late 1950s. But the two books of his most likely to last are his memoirs of growing to maturity in Michigan. The first of these, titled The Situation in Flushing, is about Love’s boyhood outside Flint — an evocation of small-town life that the New York Times’ reviewer called “enchantment, pure and solid.”

Gerald Linderman, now professor emeritus of history, often assigned the book in his popular course in early 20th-century U.S. history. Hanging On carries the story through Love’s prolonged college career at Michigan. “The Great Depression of the1930s too often comes down to us as a series of statistics,” Linderman says. “We frequently use them to lighten the predicament of our own recession, e.g., ‘Our jobless rate is less than ten percent, theirs much worse at 25 percent.’

Edmund Love’s achievement in Hanging On is to reveal the human dilemmas beneath the numbers. ” By the time Love was in high school, his family had moved from Flushing to Flint, and his mother— the first woman of her family to attend college, and deeply committed to seeing her three sons college-educated — had died.

Love’s father, who had built a lumber and coal yard from the ground up, intended to honor his wife’s wish for their boys. He could certainly afford it. Flint in the1920s was riding the great boom in automobiles. “Prosperity touched everyone,” Love writes. “It was a poor man who couldn’t make money in Flint.” His daily paper route took him past dozens of new homes packed with new electric appliances, all purchased with the bounty brought by General Motors.

Yet it was “a conservative society. . .still basically oriented to the farms and small towns from which we had so recently come.” This clash of the old ethos with the new — the values of small-town individualism swamped by a crisis born of a complex urban economy — would haunt Love’s time in Ann Arbor.

Losing the Breezy Life

Hanging On begins when Love graduates from Flint Northern High School in the spring of 1929. He emerges from his house one morning to see his graduation present in the driveway — “a brand new Chevrolet Six sport coupe, a beautiful car, dark blue, with disk wheels and a rumble seat. ”All that blissful summer, he sported around town with the first love of his life. Then he spent a miserable year at the now-defunct Kemper Military School in Missouri, where his stepmother — a classic of the type — wanted him to go for toughening up. He returned to Michigan barely aware of the Wall Street crash and its repercussions: “I had no real understanding of life at all and I was about to enter a period when I would need all the knowledge I could get.”

Love’s father had been quietly devastated by the crash. Using the business as collateral, he had borrowed money to buy stocks. The stocks collapsed, leaving him deep in debt, and in that instant, Love says, “the pleasant rather breezy way of life which had marked our existence was gone.”

His maternal grandfather, who lived with the family, laid out the facts to Love. He used “a little phrase that was to become, in its many variations, the watchword of the next few years. Things would be better in the spring when people started building houses again. The situation was only temporary.”

Michigan Wakes to the Peril

Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the fall of 1930 hosted some 12,000 students, most of them from comfortable middle and upper middle-class families like Love’s. “School started just before the real pinch of the Depression set in,” he writes, “so that the general tenor of college life that fall was. . . closer in spirit to the twenties than it was to the thirties. The centers of campus social life were still the fraternities and sororities, and much emphasis was put upon good manners, In the era before men’s dormitories at the University of Michigan, Love moved into the rooming house of a Mrs. Schoneman on South Division, then pledged Phi Kappa Sigma (near the corner of South University and Washtenaw). With the Prohibition laws still in force, the nation was officially “dry.”

But “the thing I didn’t realize was that Ann Arbor was a wet island in the midst of a dry sea. I soon discovered that a seedy looking character arrived at the back door of the fraternity house every Friday afternoon and dragged two or three gunnysacks into the landing at the bottom of the fire escape.

Then, cupping his hands, he would yell up the stairs, ‘Bootlegger!’ The boys would come running. . . .“Anyone who wanted a drink could have one.”

By the summer of 1931, many students were waking up to the peril their families faced at home. Love returned to Flint to find that his confident father— in some sense the tragic hero of this story — had become a grim figure preoccupied with small schemes to make his dwindling payroll. His stepmother, so recently a country-club social climber, had “changed so completely that I hardly knew her. I came home to find a woman whose hair had turned gray, who was thoroughly frightened.” They
could give no more money for Love to make it through Michigan.

"It was a peculiar thing about my father and everyone else. No one had any perspective on things. We were living in a world where all the people were broke, where everyone was struggling for survival, where forces beyond our understanding and remedy were operating on us, and still we were embarrassed to death at our predicament.. . . [N]early everyone still thought in old-fashioned terms. A man’s troubles were his own troubles and it was expected that he would face them and surmount them by himself. A long, giddy boom fueled by irrational investment bubbles. . .lax regulators looking the other way. . . then rapid-fire crises and a downward-spiraling slowdown."

So Love plugged along on his own. By today’s standards his expenses look paltry — $49 for a semester’s tuition; $30 for books and fees; $80 for room rent; two meals a day at his fraternity for $10 a week; breakfasts at a diner totalling $1 a week — yet there was never enough to be sure of getting through the term. In the fall of 1932 “the Ann Arbor that I went back to was like a ghost town.” Of 28 members of his fraternity’s pledge class, only six remained in school, while the fraternity as a whole had dropped from 70 to 32, and “all the campus gathering places had closed.”

Love became resourceful, even cunning, about money, getting by through a combination of scrubbing pots in the kitchen of the Gamma Phi Beta sorority house and a series of scrappy stratagems and lucky breaks. Every small event of daily life on and around the campus became an opportunity to make or save a crucial dollar or two. Love rounded up black cats to sell to fraternity pledges in a “Hell Week” prank, taking a $39 profit that paid his bills for a time. He scored a freak-luck win at a horse race — his first ever — at a track in Windsor, Ontario. Rival lawyers paid him for his testimony about a fatal auto crash he chanced to witness. He won enough at a fraternity craps game to eke out another semester’s worth of tuition. His father sent him cash after cobbling together and selling a new house constructed all out of scrap lumber.

This was typical of what Love describes as the quintessential Depression experience — “hanging on.”

People talked about the upturn that would come the next spring. The next spring people would say that the upturn would come in the summer, and so on. The thing is that people really believed this. They had a blind faith in it, and because they did, they set up a pattern of living. It was called “hanging on.”. . . If you had a job, you hung onto it any way you could. You took less money and worked longer hours. If you were behind on the house payments or the car payments, you gritted your teeth and held on, scraping up enough to prevent foreclosure or repossession until things got better.

The Lost Golden Age

Some students in Love’s story scrape and struggle to make it through the University of Michigan, then find after graduation that the world outside Ann Arbor is far grimmer, and their time on campus begins to look like a lost golden age. Love’s ruined love affair with a girl named Jill Ryan, launched in a lecture course in the old Haven Hall, is in part a casualty of this phenomenon.

Jill graduated on time, leaving Love still scraping along. She went home to bleak scenes in Youngstown, Ohio, then tried to convince herself she cared for Love as much as he did for her simply because she missed college life so much. When they made their final break, Love’s heartbreak was softened by his relief at no longer having to worry about how he could possibly support a wife.

Eventually Love dropped out completely to help save his family. He drove a coal truck through a brutal winter in Flint. Then, in another marvellous act of generosity, his father released him from responsibility, insisting that he go back to Ann Arbor. He took his degree in 1936, seven years after finishing high school, worked for a time, then returned to U-M for a graduate degree during the run-up to World War II.

The result of this experience, shared with most of his generation, Love says, was a transformed worldview. The inflated optimism of the late ’20s gave way to a cold, clear-eyed realism.

"My generation came to the Depression governed by a set of principles deeply rooted in the past. We emerged from it with an entirely different set of principles. A whole way of life disappeared in those years — a whole set of attitudes. My generation learned to look at things as they were, not as they were supposed to be."

If that outlook came at great cost, it was, at least, a true education.

James Tobin is an associate professor of journalism at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. This article was adapted from the LSA Magazine of the University of Michigan.