Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? - New World Records

It will never be known if the New Deal would eventually have brought the country to full
recovery. America had been concerned largely with its own problems since 1929, but
events abroad brought the Great Depression to an abrupt end. Italy attacked Ethiopia in
1935, and civil war broke out in Spain a year later. After Germany invaded Poland in
September, 1939, it was only a matter of time before the United States was actively
involved in the spreading conflict. The American arms embargo was lifted in early 1941,
and House Bill 1776, making America the “arsenal of democracy,” paved the way for an
appropriation of seven billion dollars, then another of six billion, for a massive increase
of arms production. Pearl Harbor, the declaration of war, and the mobilization of fifteen
million Americans followed in short order. In two years the country went from a
depressed economy with a ten percent unemployment rate to full production and
employment. The Depression ended so abruptly, and under such dramatic conditions, that
its passing was hardly noticed. And as American troops went off to war, it was to the
music of the big bands of Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, and Benny Goodman, playing a
synthesis of what had been two different strands of American popular music—Tin Pan
Alley and jazz.
Popular music served most Americans during the Depression as either escape or
complaint. It seems remarkable that so little protest was voiced, so few attempts made to
use popular music for political purposes. But, for that matter, there was a remarkable lack
of radical political activity for a country going through such hard times. Once Roosevelt
had been elected, once the party held responsible for the financial crash had been voted
out of office, the country was content to have faith in its new leadership. In the end, the
major accomplishment of protest music in the thirties was to lay the groundwork for the
much more successful, much more popular protest music of the sixties.