MARK SMITH MORE COLUMNS Advertisement

You know, I'll be the first to admit to a distinct lack of knowledge regarding economics.

If I had completed my college degree, economics would have been at the opposite end of the table from such matters as history, geology, geography and even English, political science and what was known as RTVMP 31, or "free flicks."

I wouldn't know a debenture from a hedge fund, and to a great extent I wouldn't care.

But I do have some anecdotal feelings, if you will, regarding the Great Depression and who and what brought us out of it.

Yes, you can be cynical and cite Hitler and Hirohito as largely responsible for dragging us toward World War II and forcing us to begin spending like mad on things military.

What I keep coming back to, however, is a comment by Harry Hopkins, who in many ways was Franklin D. Roosevelt's alter ego.

Responding to criticisms of the New Deal and concerns about what people were going to do in the long run, he famously said, "People don't eat in the long run. They eat every day." I'm reminded of that when I think of my second wife's dad, a realty agent named Quentin Crane from the mountains of North Carolina.

He was allegedly a bootlegger in the '30s and around 1939 was given a stark choice by a local judge: He could go to jail or he could join the Army.

He chose the Army and never looked back, stayed in the Reserves until he finally retired as a master sergeant and never regretted a day of it. He fought with an artillery reconnaissance group of the 1st Cavalry Division in the Philippines (that shared background solidified our relationship -- another vet of the 1st Cav could do no wrong) and never regretted that either.

When I met him in the 1980s he was an unabashed supporter of Ronald Reagan and Sen. Jesse Helms, who hardly ever met a liberal he couldn't hate. Quentin never smoked, but he always carried a cigarette in his breast pocket. Meeting someone new he would pull it out and extend his hand, advising the person of tobacco's importance to Tar Heel State farming.

I learned that rather than send his blood pressure vaulting, it was best to talk about the UNC teams, "them Hee-yuls," or the Army and avoid politics.

One day, however, we were enjoying something of a family get-together, and the talk turned inevitably to the political realm. One of Quentin's relatives began bad-mouthing FDR and the New Deal, and I just kept my face zipped up.

Not Quentin.

He fired right back and told her she didn't know what she was talking about, that Roosevelt kept a lot of people -- people like him -- alive and eating and working.

A couple of the other old-timers nodded their agreement, and the topic was shortly changed to bundt cake.

I also thought about my own father.

About his early years I really don't know much. But I know that when he was drafted in 1940, he was 33 years old. Drafted. Into the Army infantry. And up to that time his best job had been as a soda jerk.

What had his life been like, this man who taught himself Japanese before the war simply because it interested him and who could speak a total of five languages fluently (he made his career, starting at age 50, as a technical translator for Chemstrand) and seemed to know something about every other language known?

All I can imagine is that he would likely have appreciated Quentin's experience and feelings.

It was historian William Manchester who opened his magnificant popular history "The Glory and the Dream" by quoting John Maynard Keynes as having responded to a question about the Depression that the last time such an event had taken place, it was called the Dark Ages and lasted for hundreds of years.

Today's financial pundits need to get a grip and remember what stemmed from the Depression -- Nazism and other forms of totalitarianism, concentration camps, the Soviet purges, Japanese expansionism, and eventually the slaughter of millions upon millions of human beings. The last thing needed was a Coolidge-like sense of let-the-private-sector-find-its-way complacency.

People eat every day, and every day the politicians fool around in Washington and Carson City is another day when jobs could be created -- not when the private sector gets around to it but quickly, now, when the people who are losing their jobs need it most.