GRIEF AND TRIUMPH

Soon enough, there will be no one alive who remembers The Great Depression, the 1930’s, when human failing, poverty, joblessness and Nature converged to give Americans a really bad time. Unemployment in the United States rose to 25%. People were hungry and lean and restive.
I lived in New Hampshire then, so that is where my memory takes me. In different regions of the country  grief and misery took many paths. In the the midwest it was a time of prolonged drought, over-tilling of the land and an ensuing dustbowl. The nation was witness to mass migration from the midwest to the west coast. `
Fortunately, after the 1929 financial collapse, populace president Franklin D, Roosevelt took the reins and with courage and strength led the nation into recovery. The preamble to the Constitution  clearly states that a duty of the government is  “to promote the general Welfare." That was the legal backbone for forming the Workers Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC). 8.5 million WPA jobs were created  for building bridges, dams, roads, public buildings and public parks. There were even programs to support the arts in music, drama, art and sculpture. (Long after World War II I had the good fortune of coming into possession of a 1.25 plaster bust of President Roosevelt, executed from life in the White House by artist/sculptor Charles Farrar under a WPA assignment. But that is another story).
The CCC employed young, unmarried men who lived in camps under a military discipline. The CCC  created many of the nation’s  public parks, planted trees, built roads, built buildings, and improved rural firefighting ability. A fortunate  outcome  of the CCC was to provide disciplined, trained manpower for the approaching war. 
Many sought to earn a dollar in unexpected ways. A large number became junkmen who scoured the country for scrap metal that included abandoned and aged factory and farm machinery and old automobiles. They sold their  truckloads of metal to junk dealers, who in turn loaded the metal onto rail cars bound for the west coast. From there it was  shipped to Japan. In Japan the metal was turned into Japan’s war machine, into ships, aircraft, mobile  equipment and guns that in a few years would be brought to bear against the United States in the ensuing far East war. So you see, in a large part, the Japanese war machine came out of the US Depression.
The Great New England Flood of March, 1936 was unexpected. A southerly wind and heavy rains  melted away the winter’s snow and caused massive flooding of the Merrimack and Connecticutt rivers. River ice broke up, piled  against and smashed bridges. Roads were washed out. The Merrimack River rose high above its banks, carrying buildings, lumber, furniture, oil drums and debris to the Atlantic. In Merrimack, my home town,  the Boston and Maine railroad, factories and homes were under water. 
In the years following the flood, the Army Corp of Engineers built dams and reservoirs along the rivers’ upper waters, to avert further flooding disasters.
But Nature wasn’t done. In September, 1938, a hurricane dubbed the Long Island Express struck Long Island and barrelled across New England, causing enormous damage. Houses were blown away, coastal settlements disappeared. One of the incredible sights, if you happened to be watching a pine forest, was to see an entire growth keel over, the sound drowned out by the roaring wind.
The government stepped in again to fund a harvest of the fallen trees. If left lying, pine borers would ruin the logs in a single season. That was when, at 14, I learned the pain and sweat of  wielding one end of a two-man crosscut saw,  the backbreaking feel of rolling logs up a sawmill ramp with a cant hook.  I grieved at the loss of my best friend who fell into the path of runaway rolling logs.
A fortuitous outcome of the hurricane was the creation of a store of lumber to construct barracks for military camps and internment centers for the upcoming war, as well as shipping crates for iend-lease articles.
Throughout the decade nations watched as Japan and  Germany prepared for a war they felt sure was coming. It began with the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, followed by invasion of Poland by German and Russian armies in 1939. We had little idea then, that in  two years the United States would be catapulted into a major worldwide conflagration that would take the lives of sixty million people.