An exclusive excerpt from Dancing in the Dark, a cultural history of the Great Depression.

A great deal has already been written about the documentary impulse in the 1930s, the widespread effort to examine people's real lives to show how they were coping with adverse conditions that seemed unprecedented. But the Depression also challenged key tenets of the American ideology. Longstanding beliefs were called into question, especially the myth of success enshrined in the notion of the American Dream. The thirties was the first period in which the phrase "the American Dream" was commonly used, just when its premise of limitless opportunity and economic abundance seemed suddenly in doubt. There had been many earlier recessions and even depressions in the American economy, but none had lasted so long and cut so deep—and, above all, none exerted the immense psychological impact of the Great Depression. The Depression weakened many Americans' most common assumptions: that reverses in the business cycle were brief and temporary, that jobs would always be available to those willing to work, that businessmen were the oracles and seers of society, that the younger generation would always be able to come up in the world and do better than its parents.

During the period between the Civil War and the stock market Crash, the respected figure of the businessman was the major icon of popular envy and imitation, the shining example of competitive triumph that was also wise, ethical, and beneficial to society. The need to restore "confidence" was a universal theme of the early Depression years, starting with Herbert Hoover, who kept insisting that "conditions" were "fundamentally sound" and the effects of the Crash were largely a problem of morale. Advertising agencies encouraged more promotion by insisting that the Depression was mainly a spending problem: Worried consumers had simply become too tightfisted. According to Roland Marchand, to encourage businesses to advertise, they "preferred to portray depression consumers not as impoverished or unemployed but as hoarders who resisted spending their money."

The other side of the confidence problem was the equally universal theme of fear, most famously articulated in Roosevelt's confidence-building 1933 inaugural address: "First of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror." This fear had reached a climax in the virtual collapse of the economy in the four months between the 1932 election and FDR's inauguration in early March, culminating in the bank crisis, which had been building for two years and is today considered the linchpin of the Depression, even more than the stock market Crash. "In Hoover's last days in office, the old order tottered on the brink of disaster," notes Leuchtenburg, and by inauguration day, thirty-eight states had closed their banks. An early (and relatively conservative) member of FDR's Brains Trust, Raymond Moley, later likened the whole Depression to a bank crisis: "A Depression is much like a run on the bank. It's a crisis of confidence. People panic and grab their money." This historical overview is too lofty and olympian, too insensitive to the real human lives that were at stake in people's fears. A more apt psychological analogy was made by one observer in the New York Times in 1932, who likened the mood of the time to the depressive phase of the manic-depressive cycle, marked by hopelessness, panic, listless inactivity, and deep apprehensions about the future. He even compared "the current forecast of permanent depression" with "the fear of the patient that he will never recover."

This is perhaps facile, like Moley's image—as if the fault lay in people's minds alone, not in their real condition—but it does hit upon a crucial feature of the years after the Crash. In the inner lives of Americans, a deep strain of depression was one mark of the Depression, a tendency for people to turn the crisis inward, to blame themselves, to target their own shortcomings and failures, not those of the system. This self-blame, rooted in American individualism and self-reliance as well as in Protestant notions of personal accountability, was where the still-dominant American success ethic played its baneful and destructive part. As one psychiatrist who had trained with Freud later told Studs Terkel, "Everybody, more or less, blamed himself for his delinquency or lack of talent or bad luck. There was an acceptance that it was your own fault, your own indolence, your lack of ability. You took it and kept quiet." Thanks to this "kind of shame about your own personal failure ... there were very few disturbances." A bartender who was very young then tells Terkel a similar story, repeated in many other accounts of the period. He remembers the worry and sense of relief he had overheard in adult conversations in the farm belt, "the fascination with catastrophe" as mortgages were foreclosed and other farmers were forced off the land: "The dominant thing was this helpless despair and submission. There was anger and rebellion among a few but, by and large, that quiet desperation and submission." Unlike Europeans who turned to Fascism, Communism, or militarism in those hard times, most Americans remained passive, even self-accusing, in the face of Depression conditions. They neither rebelled nor submitted to the despotic rule of a would-be savior. This looks even more remarkable today than it did then.

Thanks to both the economics and the psychology of depression, the early 1930s saw a decline in the marriage rate, the divorce rate (people couldn't afford to separate), the birthrate, and even, as far as it can be known, the frequency of sexual relations. "Sketchy evidence suggests that due to the tensions of hard times, sex within marriage decreased," writes Susan Ware. "Fear of pregnancy was a major factor, but feelings of inadequacy on the part of the male and lack of respect for the unemployed man from his wife also played roles." One woman told Lorena Hickok of her fear of pregnancy, balanced by a fear of withholding sex from her depressed husband:

I suppose you can say the easiest way would be not to do it. But it wouldn't be. You don't know what it's like when your husband's out of work. He's gloomy and unhappy all the time. Life is terrible. You must try all the time to keep him from going crazy. And many times—that's the only way.