In a 1954 book, Denis Brogan, a professor at Cambridge University in England, looked back at the descent into the Great Depression between 1929 and 1932 and explained the significance of Franklin Roosevelt’s election from an English perspective. The second selection is from an oral history conducted in the 1970s with an ordinary resident of London, who recalled life in the 1930s.

Denis W. Brogan, “From England”

No event … has so colored the European view of the United States as “the Depression.” The first news of the crash of 1929 was not ill received. There was not only a marked feeling of Schadenfreude at the snub that destiny had given to the overconfident masters of the new world, but also a widespread belief that the extravagant gambling of the New York market was one of the chief causes of our ills. … But as the extent, depth, and duration of the American depression began to be appreciated, as its impact on all the world, especially on the dangerously unstable political and economic status quo of Germany and Austria, became more evident, as the old wound of unemployment was made to bleed more deeply in Britain, the tendency to blame the United States became overwhelming. Gone were the illusions about the “secret of high wages.” If ever found, it had now been lost.

American politics was seen as not only sterile but positively immoral and dangerous. … American business and its political arm, the Republican Party, had been tried in the balance and found wanting. And it is safe to say that the election of F. D. Roosevelt was welcomed in every country of Europe as good news almost overshadowing the nomination of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of the German Reich.

Gladys Gibson, a Resident of London in the 1930s

Most of the unemployed were genuinely seeking work. A heavy snowfall was a blessing, when men with broken boots earned a little money by sweeping the streets. The Boroughs [a form of local administration in London] took on unemployed, in strict rotation, for thirteen weeks of unskilled work. It sometimes put a man back in benefit and took him off the hated dole. The situation began to change after Munich, when more men found work. Salvation came with the War, when the despised unemployed became valued workers or serving helpers.

Source: Joseph, Franz M., As Others See Us. © 1959 Princeton University Press, 1987 renewed PUP. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

Nigel Gray, The Worst of Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression in Britain (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1985), 54.