We tend to remember the Great Depression as a pretty dark time in American history, and
it’s easy to imagine that nothing good came of it.
But that's not strictly true; in fact, times of great hardship are often times of great
innovation.
Here are a few things invented during the Great Depression.
Modern parks
Politicians in the 1930s believed that the best way to drag the country out of the Depression
was to put people back to work, so they devised a whole bunch of programs to make that happen.
One of the most successful was the Civilian Conservation Corps, a program which put three
million young men to work as conservationists, both building and maintaining the nation's
parks.
The CCC only lasted nine years, but at one point it employed five percent of the male
American population.
It was because of their efforts that we enjoy national and state parks as we do today; some
of the trails, campgrounds, and national park structures you've likely visited were originally
built by the CCC.
And the Corps was also responsible for over half of America's reforestation efforts, planting
more than 3.5 billion trees to replace those lost to forest fires, farming, lumber operations,
and erosion.
The Civilian Conservation Corps was defunded in 1942 largely because the money needed to
be rerouted to the war effort, but it became the model for similar conservation programs
that still operate today.
Electric guitars
When you lose your job, you have a couple options.
You could just play video games and feel sorry for yourself.
Or you can spam every employer out there who has anything resembling a job opening available.
Or you could throw it all in and start your own business.
“Jobias industries."
"Gobias.
As in, 'Go buy us some coffee!'"
"It's great!
Looks good.”
Given the lack of the first two options during the Great Depression, the latter was often
the only choice anybody had.
That’s what led Leo Fender into starting his business at the tail end of the Depression.
After losing his government job in 1938, he decided to pursue his lifelong interest in
electronics, and opened a radio repair shop, then going on to build amplifiers for local
musicians.
He later partnered with Doc Kauffman to build an electric lap steel guitar, and by 1950,
the Fender Musical Instruments Corporation was selling the first mass-produced electric
guitar: the Fender Telecaster.
You can probably guess what happened next.
Stars like Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Holly, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Mark Knopfler all bought
Fender guitars, and that’s by no means an exhaustive list.
Fender himself died in 1991, having never actually learned to play the instrument he
spent his whole life building and perfecting.
An infamous board game
The original version of Monopoly actually predates the Great Depression by about 30
years.
It was patented in 1903 by an activist named Lizzie Magie, who called it "The Landlord's
Game."
The game was a political statement, supposed to teach players about the evils of capitalism.
But in 1932, an unemployed and desperate guy named Charles Darrow decided to redesign Landlord's
Game, then went on to sell it to the Parker Brothers, becoming a millionaire in the process.
When asked how he'd come up with his phenomenal idea, he just shrugged and said:
"It's a freak.
Entirely unexpected and illogical."
In many ways, Monopoly became a hit because of those hard times; it was a way for the
destitute to escape the unfortunate reality of their lives and pretend to be rich for
just a couple of hours.
Canned meat
Spam was invented in 1937 as a way of selling unpopular cuts of pork.
But even during the Great Depression, people weren't too keen on the idea of canned, unrefrigerated
meat, despite the fact that it was an inexpensive and fast way to get food on the table.
As a result, spam didn't really begin to grow in popularity until World War II.
“What do you mean, ugh?
I don't like Spam!"
"Spam!
Spam!
Spaaaaam!"
Soldiers can't really drag around an ice chest all the time, so they don't often get to eat
actual meat.
Spam, however, is more like a facsimile of meat; sure, it's got pork in it, but it also
has plenty of salt, some sugar, water, and some less traditional things like cornstarch
and sodium nitrate.
Because Spam was shelf stable, it became an obvious choice for soldiers during the war,
and over 100 million cans of it were shipped to the Pacific Theater.
The economy
Today, we talk about the economy as a kind of semi-tangible force which keeps us all
employed and makes sure all those Wall Street bankers can afford their prime rib and fine
wines.
But the notion of "the economy" didn't really exist until the Great Depression.
When the Great Depression struck, things just sort of went bad, and no one could really
pinpoint the reason why.
At some point during the American government's mad scramble to figure out how to fix things,
someone came up with the idea of national income, which was just a way of expressing
the value of goods and services America produces.
Today we call it "gross domestic product."
People loved this idea because it was a gauge they could use to understand how bad things
were and whether they were improving.
“I recently invested in some shirts I got at a garage sale.
Left those at Wendy's on the way home, so…the economy."
Today, "the economy" is a talking point for politicians and one of the factors we most
strongly consider at the voting booth.