What’s the thing we are not seein
In late May 1930, O’Neil Kennedy made his way from his office at the corner of Pittsburgh and Peter streets to a platform several blocks away, on Church Street, for a ceremony marking the start of construction on a new Bell Telephone building in Uniontown.
(The building is still there, across from the Church Street parking garage.)
“OK.” Kennedy was the editor of the Uniontown Daily News Standard, a paper dedicated to the good fortunes of the Democratic Party – locally, statewide, and nationally.
Eight months earlier, in October 1929, when the New York stock exchange plunged, and then plunged again, Kennedy warned of “the end of Republican prosperity … at least that portion that lies in Wall Street. The glorious [President Herbert] Hoover bull market is now all bull.”
Though Kennedy was a partisan, he wasn’t rabid about it. He hoped the economic fallout might be confined to the denizens of lower Manhattan. Kennedy wrote it was time for the nation’s big banks to pool their resources to “stem the slide.”
It was up to the banks, he said, to “furnish an irresistible buying power to slowly but surely bring [stock] prices up to their rightful levels.”
Above all, there must be no panic. A panic of sufficient size and duration would “ruin … millions” of ordinary Americans.
Despite everything, Kennedy was hopeful, in part because of the Federal Reserve, a creation of the Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson nearly 20 years earlier. He called the Fed “the greatest safeguard” against an economic meltdown.
“The Democrats will save the Republicans in spite of themselves,” Kennedy chortled.
O’Neill Kennedy was heartened by the fact that Bell Telephone was itself confident enough to sink a million dollars into the local economy, despite the ominous rumblings from Wall Street. It was also the case, he pointed out, that West Penn Power was preparing to spend half a million dollars on a new trolley terminal.
(Today, the old terminal on Penn Street has been converted into use by Laurel Business Institute.)
Both were signs that the future would be bright – for Uniontown and for the nation as a whole.
That afternoon – it was May 29, 1930 – Kennedy attended a gathering of Fayette County real estate agents. The agents heard from Leonard P. Reaume of Detroit, the president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards of America.
Reaume was upbeat. Advances in technologies such as air conditioning, he said, were transforming the housing and commercial real estate markets, making even new homes and offices quickly obsolete.
A construction boom was in the offing, Reaume said. Over the next 15 years America would rebuild itself.
Kennedy, extrapolating what he heard, wrote that “the false optimism of five years ago is now replaced by real optimism.”
The fact that Kennedy missed the Great Depression – the biggest economic downturn in modern world history – even in the midst of it, should not be held against him.
Many other people did, too. The president of the United States, for one. The future president was another who failed, at least initially, to recognize that something was terribly wrong.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, then the governor of New York, sounded at first a lot like Hoover. The economy was fundamentally sound, he assured people.
Privately, Roosevelt asked aides to keep an eye out for business deals that he might cash in on. FDR was thinking of purchasing, not selling.
In retrospect, this failure of recognition makes no sense. The Great Depression was not only big, it was pivotal as well. It changed everything. Roosevelt’s response once in the White House to widespread misery would revolutionize the country.
As Joe Biden might say, here’s the deal, folks: The Great Depression was literally beyond imagining. To have predicted in three years from May 1930 that unemployment would skyrocket to 30%, that prices would fall by a third, and that total national economic output would be cut in half was beyond any reasonable expectation of what the future might hold.
It sets the mind to wondering: today, what are we missing, what are we not seeing? Is something lurking out there that’s simply beyond comprehension?
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.