Memo to media: You don't know squat about the real Great Depression

This morning Howard Wolfson was on Fox News and once again, a Democrat reared his doomsday head, saying these are the worst economic times since the Great Depression. Wolfson was on Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign team, so maybe the term ‘depression’ lingers. He also made a statement suggesting Republicans have controlled the economy for 40 years. So not only is Wolfson clueless about the history of the Depression, he’s rewriting modern history as well. Democrats had a chokehold on Congress from 1954-1994. And that time included a couple of Democratic presidents who were disasters when it came to spending and the personal economies of working Americans—Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Jimmy Carter come to mind.

I grew up in a small Southern town where there was a grand tradition of storytelling. I heard our elders talk about the Depression. About how a husband had to move thousands of miles away just to find a low-wage job. I heard talk of how the community came together to help one another—there were no massive government entitlements then. My grandfather became ill, and had blood poisoning. He almost died—he could barely feed his family, leaving no money for medical care. There were no doctors within 70 miles of his rural home, which he rented. He was a sharecropper. My grandmother and their oldest children helped him pick someone else’s cotton. My mom tells a story about ants getting on her baby sister—they would sit on a blanket beneath a tree while the others picked cotton.

My mother’s family knew hunger. They knew what it was like to not be able to afford a pair of shoes. They lived in dozens of places as my grandfather sought work. Because her own education was often interrupted, my mother insisted on an education for her children. My grandparents who lived in poverty raised children who climbed a rung higher and grandchildren who have excelled.

It’s called hard work, and that is necessary during good times and bad. Not even our current obese federal government can insure good times for all all the time. No government in history has ever done that.

During my grandfather’s day, taking anything from the government was a shameful thing to do. In the South, if a boy got a girl pregnant, he married her. How times change.

This isn’t a Great Depression. It doesn’t even come close. And Howard Wolfson wouldn’t know real poverty if it smacked him on his gloomy head.

Scene in the cotton field of the Baptist Orphanage, near Waxahachie (Texas). The photo reminds me of stories my grandparents told. Photo from Library of Congress; by Lewis Wickes Hine.