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PART THREETHE GOOD FASCISM:AMERICAI · Permanent Crisis in AmericaON THE night of October 22, 1929, one of America's most widelyknown economists addressed a great banquet of credit men. Notonly were Wall Street prices not too high, he told his delightedhearers, but we were really only on the threshold of the greatestboom in the nation's history. The prophecy evoked a burst of applause.Next morning, a few minutes after the great bell announcedthe opening of trading on the Stock Exchange, the storm broke.The greatest economic depression in our history was formallyushered in—though it had been in progress for some time. Fromthis point on, as the country slowly roused itself to a consciousnessof the far-spreading crisis, leaders in politics and business repeatedwith invincible optimism that it was all just a wholesome corrective.After several years a waggish commentator published a little volumecalled Oh, Yeah! It was a sardonic recording of the persistent andunconquerable stream of promises of quickly returning health.There you will find recorded the statements of statesmen, financiers,university professors, leading economists, and editors assuring thepeople that it was all a blessing in disguise, a corrective phenomenon,that the broad highway to renewed prosperity lay just ahead. All ofwhich proved quite conclusively that these men did not know whatthey were talking about because they had no understanding of theeconomic system under which they lived. 1Then came the collapse of 1933 on the grand scale—and a resumptionof the bright prophecies of happy days. From 1933 to*Ob, Yeah! compiled by Edmund Angly, Viking Press, New York, 1931.l66