Benjamin Roth's chilling chronicle of hard times.

Benjamin Roth was born in New York City in 1894 and moved shortly thereafter to Youngstown, Ohio. He received a law degree and moved back to Youngstown after serving as an Army officer during World War I. When the stock market crashed in 1929, he had been practicing law for approximately 10 years, largely representing local businesses. After nearly two years, he began to grasp the magnitude of what had happened to American economic life, and in June 1931, he began writing down his impressions in a diary that he maintained intermittently until he died in 1978. His perceptions and experiences have a chilling similarity to our own era, and The Big Money believes that Roth's words—though they are 75 years old—have much to teach us today; we'll be serializing several excerpts.

You can read the first installment here. This is the second installment:

Aug. 5, 1931. I went to the fruit market house this evening. It was almost deserted. The farmers cannot sell their produce because men are not working and it has become fashionable for each family to have its own vegetable garden.

Aug. 6, 1931.  At a public sale by the sheriff today on foreclosure by the bank the C—— home at 1— Elm Street was offered for the third time but no buyer found. It could be bought for $4400, and is really worth conservatively $7500. In 1929 the owner thought it was worth $11,000.

Aug. 7, 1931. Business is at an absolute standstill and the big stores are deserted even tho' they are all running sales and almost giving the merchandise away. Since the local savings and loan companies stopped paying out, nobody has any money and everybody seems scared and blue. We seem to have touched bottom in Youngstown and it hardly seems possible that things could get worse.

Aug. 8, 1931. My brother Morris has been out of work now for almost two years and can't find a thing to do. He is an engineer and a craftsman. [One of his close friends] was laid off by the Truscan Steel Co. two months ago and is not very optimistic. [My brother] Joe is [an accountant and is] still at Truscan but is afraid for his job. He says the air is tense and men are being discharged every day.