The Concept of Shame and What Dr. Barnes Said About It

Some of my students - who should know this stuff already.

I was favorably impressed by the way the new president handled himself tonight in his first press conference. If Mr. Reagan was "The Great Communicator," then this fellow might go down as "The Great Persuader."



It's almost alarming how he can carry you along with what he says. He has taken power in a time very like that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first term. Comparisons are being drawn to it all the time. It's inevitable among people who are aware of History, particularly the History of their own country.



The Great Depression was a worldwide difficulty. It started earlier among American farmers than on Wall Street. It began almost at once in Europe when peace was restored in 1918 and the Versailles Treaty was signed in 1919. Countries on the losing side of the war, such as Germany and Austria, were ripe for the picking by people who said they could make everything better. But even countries which had been on the winning side of the war were desperate enough a few years later to let a Mussolini or his like take and keep the reins of government.



One thing had never been done before. Government social spending. Relief. Public expense for private benefit. We had always thought it to be a horrible concept, contrary to what the Bible teaches about how "by the sweat of his face shall a man eat bread all the days of his life." And in all the financial panics and recessions which had crowded our History since Independence was achieved and the Constitution laid down, the concept had never been tried. In the Panic of 1819, it wasn't even suggested. Nor was it brought up in the Panics of 1837, 1873, 1893 or any other time.



But the Panic that hit us in 1929 was bigger than anything previous to it. And it settled in for the long haul. It was more than a financial panic. It was the Great Depression. Truthfully, it had started for American farmers shortly after World War I. During the war, farmers enthusiastically responded to President Wilson's call for more grain to be grown to supply the troops, our allies, and our own home needs. They went down to their local banks and borrowed money to buy more land, more seed grain, newer and better equipment, and even home improvements. After all, the war was on. It had already been going nearly three years when we finally got involved, so it was easy to imagine it going on and on some more. The government would be a guaranteed customer and pay good prices to the farmers who had gone into debt to help the war effort and themselves.



But then a terrible thing happened, at least financially speaking. The Germans, who were still on French soil after four years of allied efforts to drive them out, were down to 1/2 of a potato per day and morale was pretty low. 9,000,000 battlefield dead had decided very little in over four years of nearly constant killing. So the Germans signed an armistice - a cease fire agreement - at 11 a.m. on 11 November, 1918. It wasn't exactly a surrender, but everybody took it for one. Soon the "doughboys" were coming home while a new horror began to kill them and many, many others in 1919. It was called the Spanish Lady and it was called some other things, but essentially it was the flu. The Spanish Flu killed people on several continents and in many nations. If you go to American cemeteries and see a small white stone with a sleeping lamb on top, you know that someone lost a child some time in the early twentieth century. If you see a whole row of them, such as in the cemetery in Moscow, Idaho, you can probably safely assume that they all died in 1919 of the Spanish Flu.



By the way, all the "experts" say that we're overdue for such a pandemic right now.



Farmers who were no longer getting big government checks for their big crops found that the bank which had loaned them the money only a year or so before was not going to be patient or understanding about the outstanding amount. People began to lose their farms, sometimes their homes, too. There were murders of bankers, suicides by farmers, and the very common event in the news in the twenties was a murder/suicide in which a man who faced the shame of being the first man since the Civil War or maybe even since the Revolution to fail on the same family's piece of ground, would kill his family, then his banker, then himself.



Well now, let's think about that. Killing himself I can see. It's wrong, sure, but it's sort of understandable. Killing the banker who had said "no" one too many times to pleas for more time before foreclosure on the land which was the collateral for the loan - well, sure, that was understandable. Not right, mind you. But understandable.



But why did so many of them kill their families, too? The same thing happened for a while among farmers during the 1980s. Remember?



You might use the word despair or perhaps the word outrage, and you'd be right. But essentially it was done out of shame. Shame is a terrible emotion to face. Many people would rather die than do so. The ancient Romans expected it of someone who had failed in some ignoble way. Modern Japanese, too.



Willard Barnes, PhD., taught Twentieth Century American History for many, many years at the University of Idaho in Moscow. I took both semesters of it from him and I loved the man. He was preparing to retire. I got in just under the wire or I'd have missed the great experience of learning from him. Some of what he taught us was already pretty well known by those 40 of us on campus who majored in History. 40 out of about 8,000. We all knew each other and often gathered together in little groups to grill each other with questions before a test. We liked History. We even loved it! We could take notes for 4 or five hours on a hot summer day and then stand around outside the Administration Building and talk for another hour, always about History. Yeah. We kind of knew our stuff, or at least a lot of it.



But what we got from Dr. Barnes, the smiling, square-headed, white-haired man of maybe five foot nine, was understanding. We might know our stuff, but after we'd heard him say it, we understood it and felt strongly about it.



He taught us that, when FDR introduced Social Security, many people liked the idea of it as long as they weren't the ones getting it. They wanted the widow over the way to get it, because her kids were all gone away and she was ailing, but they never dreamed that times might get so hard, in city, town or farm, that they, themselves, might have to go "on relief." That would be shameful. Too shameful to bear.



Dr. Barnes said that his job was to tend the family pigs. He, like many other Americans back then, tended to blame the depression on the man in the White House, Herbert Hoover. He so disliked the president, he said, that he named all his pigs Hoover. Lots of people were now mentioning the unmentionable - government social spending! But Mr. Hoover wouldn't hear of it, at least not to the extent that many were beginning to say it had to be done. So lots of folks drew the conclusion that he didn't care, had no empathy, and wasn't trying. Nothing could have been further from the truth. He worked long, long hours, wracking his brains and those of other famous "brains" to find a solution to the Great Depression. But Banks continued to close and die, taking with them the life savings of many hard-working Americans.



In the election of 1932 Mr. Hoover was defeated by a Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a man who, because of his willingness to take care of the poor at the expense of those who paid the most taxes, namely the wealthy, was considered a traitor to his class. His Republican cousin, TR, had also been a "Progressive" and had been hated for the same thing by his fellow blue bloods.



Now I'm not going to discuss FDR's "alphabet soup" of make-work projects. That's for another time. I want to tell you what Dr. Barnes said about the shame that people felt when FDR's Social Security checks had to come to them to save them from hunger, homelessness, and even death in the Great Depression.



Dr. Barnes told us about a contemporary play that was being performed at the high school in his little farming community. So up-to-date was this play that it was actually about the Depression. He said that on the night the play was performed (They'd only do it once, since the whole town could get into the auditorium.) he thought everyone was enjoying the play very much. But at the end, when the heroine was compelled to "go on relief," the whole town wept.



Now he explained to us that they weren't weeping because of the death of the woman's husband. Many of them had faced such things and could be stoic about them. Nor were they crying over the debts that had piled up that the lady couldn't pay. Everybody could identify with that, and while it might have freed up the flow of their tears, it wasn't the actual cause of them. No, he said, they weren't crying about these things. They were crying, because they were ashamed for her. She had gotten something for nothing. Through no fault of her own she had been forced to accept "government relief." The whole town wept out of empathetic embarrassment and shame for the poor woman.



Three or four generations have lived or come into being since then. We hear that there are third and fourth generation families who have had some form of public assistance constantly since those days. It's hard to imagine. But I experienced shame a couple of years back. I'm still experiencing it. It was so easy to slip into the circumstances that seemed to require it. I lost a job that I'd had for about twenty years. I tried other jobs, but I couldn't stop getting angry, chiefly at myself, for the way I performed those jobs. I did well in part time work outdoors, but it brought in less than we needed, and I wasn't healthy enough to do it full time. Finally, after resisting it for about two years, I acceded to my wife's request to apply for Social Security "disability" insurance. I knew that I wasn't disabled, but we were broke, so I went in and applied, feeling ashamed for even being there.



A nice young man filled out forms by asking us questions. Then he set up an appointment with a doctor who contracts out to the federal government. He was a Psychiatrist. Nearly a month later, we attended the appointment. He was a nice guy. It was easy to chat with him. We joked and verbally cavorted for about 45 minutes. My various difficulties with life did come up, but he didn't seem too worried about them. When we left his office, I told Sheryl that I was more convinced than ever that I was not actually disabled. A little excitable, yes. But not actually disabled.



Two months later we were living with my wife's folks, a shameful thing in itself for a guy in his fifties. I got a call from a young man one day who said he worked at the local Social Security office. I assumed he had more questions. Instead, he told me that I'd been granted 100% disability! I'm still stunned by that to this day. Apparently, the nice, chatty guy considered me to be a "broken" person or something. While most people who apply for Social Security disability insurance are turned down constantly until they get a lawyer to fight for them, I was approved on the first application.



This has led me to do much thinking since then. I still do part time work outside in the warm months. But, other than that, I'm pretty useless. I wish I could talk to Dr. Barnes about all this, but he's probably gone beyond the veil by now and I don't know where he went to live when he retired. One thing I'm sure of, though. There's still shame involved in being on relief.