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When the New Deal Came to Town: A Snapshot of a Place and Time with Lessons for Today
It’s A Wonderful Life meets New Deal or Raw Deal? in this personal and social history of the New Deal from a conservative point of view, detailing the effects on the economy, culture, and the people of small American town from longtime Wall Street Journal editor George Melloan.
When the New Deal Came to Town is a snapshot of a time and Whiteland, Indiana during the Great Depression, one of the most fraught eras in American history.
Imagine yourself transported back in time to April of 1933 and deposited in a small American town, when a young boy named George Melloan moved with his family to this quiet hamlet during the middle of the worst economic period in American history. Part social history, part personal observations, When the New Deal Came to Town provides a keen eyewitness account of how the Depression affected everyday lives and applies those experiences to the larger arena of American politics.
Written with Melloan’s signature “clarity and polemical skill” ( The Washington Times ), this is a fascinating narrative history that provides new insight into the Great Depression for a new generation.
When the New Deal Came to Town is a snapshot of a time and Whiteland, Indiana during the Great Depression, one of the most fraught eras in American history.
Imagine yourself transported back in time to April of 1933 and deposited in a small American town, when a young boy named George Melloan moved with his family to this quiet hamlet during the middle of the worst economic period in American history. Part social history, part personal observations, When the New Deal Came to Town provides a keen eyewitness account of how the Depression affected everyday lives and applies those experiences to the larger arena of American politics.
Written with Melloan’s signature “clarity and polemical skill” ( The Washington Times ), this is a fascinating narrative history that provides new insight into the Great Depression for a new generation.
- GenresHistoryNonfiction
256 pages, Hardcover
Published November 8, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 16, 2018
Continuing my Johnson County series, this last week I finished up this nice account of the Great Depression by retired Wall Street Journal editor George Mellloan, who grew up in Whiteland, Indiana.
I found his stories of what the town was like when he was growing up very compelling and full of unexpected detail (I'm trying to picture taking an interurban into downtown Indy on a daily commute :0). He shared nice recollections of an eclectic, but warm and caring community that is long gone -- geographically and and culturally.
Today the town as it was then doesn't exist anymore -- Whiteland and Greenwood have virtually melted into a pseudo-heterogenous extension of the Indianapolis southside. Melloan reminds readers of what it used to be -- a tight-knit small farming community of people who grew tomatoes (in addition to corn and soybeans) and/or worked for the local Stokley's canning factory, and ran retail shops, which were replaced there and in Greenwood and Franklin by the mall we southsiders grew up going to.
Interspersed with his reminiscences of his and his family's experience during the '30s and '40s are a sort of people's history of the New Deal policies.
Melloan uses the lives of the business owners, journalists and neighbors to illustrate how New Deal policies affected everyday life.
Using individual people's experiences to illustrate the experience of a generation is tricky -- a tall order even if you have first-person interviews to back up what you're saying.
But I really did enjoy this -- it's really interesting to me to hear about the area where I live and near where I grew up -- how it used to be and communities that used to be there.
It's rare to read about this area of the state, because as I said in another review, these towns had more insular identities than as suburban bedroom communities at one time -- which isn't to say they have no identity as towns anymore -- but it's a lot different than it was 80 years ago.
Melloan began his journalism career locally, and it does him credit to consider his relatively humble beginnings to how he ended his career. A worthwhile and interesting read of a Midwestern history of the 1930s.
I found his stories of what the town was like when he was growing up very compelling and full of unexpected detail (I'm trying to picture taking an interurban into downtown Indy on a daily commute :0). He shared nice recollections of an eclectic, but warm and caring community that is long gone -- geographically and and culturally.
Today the town as it was then doesn't exist anymore -- Whiteland and Greenwood have virtually melted into a pseudo-heterogenous extension of the Indianapolis southside. Melloan reminds readers of what it used to be -- a tight-knit small farming community of people who grew tomatoes (in addition to corn and soybeans) and/or worked for the local Stokley's canning factory, and ran retail shops, which were replaced there and in Greenwood and Franklin by the mall we southsiders grew up going to.
Interspersed with his reminiscences of his and his family's experience during the '30s and '40s are a sort of people's history of the New Deal policies.
Melloan uses the lives of the business owners, journalists and neighbors to illustrate how New Deal policies affected everyday life.
Using individual people's experiences to illustrate the experience of a generation is tricky -- a tall order even if you have first-person interviews to back up what you're saying.
But I really did enjoy this -- it's really interesting to me to hear about the area where I live and near where I grew up -- how it used to be and communities that used to be there.
It's rare to read about this area of the state, because as I said in another review, these towns had more insular identities than as suburban bedroom communities at one time -- which isn't to say they have no identity as towns anymore -- but it's a lot different than it was 80 years ago.
Melloan began his journalism career locally, and it does him credit to consider his relatively humble beginnings to how he ended his career. A worthwhile and interesting read of a Midwestern history of the 1930s.
March 10, 2025
More memoir than history. I enjoyed the author's memories of Whiteland, Indiana, in the 1930s and 40s. Less enthusiastic about his economic ideas.
February 10, 2017
Show, don't tell.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews