Work might get us down at times but it kids us into thinking we are useful and it puts a little money in our pockets. So, when it is taken away from us it kind of sucks.
I have written in another piece about the effects of unemployment. I am going to do so again, but taking it from different directions. And I am going to ask you to consider the importance of imagination and empathy to the historian. Indeed, I would go as far as to say that we cannot be a complete historian without either.
Imagination is necessary to understand times we have not lived in, to understand perspectives we don’t hold, perspectives we don’t even believe in. It is difficult to use it at times, and it is difficult to control it and stop it turning into fantasy. But unless we make use of it and at the same time, control it, we can never truly understand the past.
Empathy, on the other hand, is the ability to understand what another person is experiencing. The ability to see the events of history from their perspective. For example it helps us to understand hate felt for others, and so hate as a motivating force to explain events. In empathising we are forced to look even more closely at the context in which people lived. Which for a historian has to be a good thing.
So, let’s take a look at four anonymous individuals living in America at the height of the depression. What might they be feeling? I am deliberately choosing males as they were the perceived breadwinners at the time.
A young boy at the point of leaving school – anger at getting a bad start in life; frustrated, helpless
A young man, say 25, planning on marrying – devastated: his dreams, everything he had been planning for and looking forward to has been shattered
A man aged 35 with young kids – very worried: there is the mortgage to worry about first of all, and what future will there be for his kids.
A man entering the golden years (children have left home and it’s the time for him and his wife to enjoy the fruits of many years of labour) – he’s confident he will survive the crisis but he is bitterly frustrated that “his time” and that for his wife of twenty-five years is not going to be the reward they felt they had earned.
I have left so much out of these pen pictures: are they wealthy, middle class, working class or poor; are they white Americans, first-generation immigrants or African Americans? All these things matter hugely. But I hope my piece has served its purpose. We have to imagine those lives, imagine what they were experiencing, empathise with their anger, their deep frustration, their feeling of helplessness, if we are to get even close to understanding the Great Depression and their motivation to repeatedly vote for Roosevelt.