Invisible Scar: The Great Depression, and What It Did to American Life, from Then Until Now

by Caroline Bird

Book by Bird, Caroline

Genres: History, Nonfiction

Paperback

Published January 1, 1966

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Caroline Bird was the only child of Hobart Stanley Bird and Ida Brattrud. Her father was a crusading journalist and civil rights activist in Cuba before establishing a law practice in New York City. One of his ancestors was the first mayor of Madison, Wisconsin, and Caroline’s great grandmother taught in Madison’s first school. Caroline has had a lifelong interest in her pioneer ancestors and their photos were prominently displayed in her home.

As a child, Caroline frequently appeared in newspaper and magazine articles as an example of a child genius because of her association with Winifred Sackville Stoner, founder of the Natural Education movement. Caroline learned to type at a very early age and published Rhythms, a book of poems, at age 9.

Caroline spent her childhood in the Tuckahoe-Mohegan Heights area of New York and attended Public School #8. She graduated from Roosevelt High School in Yonkers at the age of 15 and attended finishing schools in Switzerland and Paris.

At Vassar College, Caroline majored in economics but left in 1934, her junior year. On 8 June 1934, Caroline married Edward A. Menuez and moved to Toledo, Ohio. Caroline earned a B.A. in American history from the University of Toledo in 1938 and her M.A. in comparative literature from the University of Wisconsin in 1939. Caroline and Edward had one child, a daughter.

When WWII began, Edward Menuez was working as a civil engineer in Trinidad. He felt compelled to join the Marines and shipped out leaving Caroline at home. While Edward was away, Caroline held several editorial positions . She and many other women were laid off at the end of the war as male editors returned to their desks. Caroline and Edward were divorced in December 1945.

Caroline had already moved from editorial positions to freelance writing. On 5 January 1957 Caroline married a fellow writer, John Thomas Mahoney. Tom Mahoney wrote magazine articles but also took on many other kinds of writing projects including co-writing or ghost writing a number of books. Tom was Caroline’s biggest fan and was responsible for her inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary by submitting her sexism speech to Vital Speeches.

In 1961, Tom and Caroline had a son.

In 1966, Caroline had her first adult book published under her own name by McKay. The Invisible Scar was a socioeconomic study of the Great Depression. Ideas for Caroline’s books come from real life and her family, like many others, had been adversely affected by the Depression. While doing research for The Invisible Scar at the FDR Library in Hyde Park, New York, and at Vassar College Library, Caroline and her husband bought a house in Poughkeepsie to add a country home to their Gramercy Park apartment.

Caroline’s next book, Born Female: the High Cost of Keeping Women Down, grew out of an article on discrimination against women in business that was rejected by the Saturday Evening Post. Years later when Sofia Montenegro, a Sandinista and probably the most prominent feminist activist in Latin America, was asked how she became a revolutionary, she said that she was 16 years old when she read Born Female and that it was a turning point in her life.

In 1975, Caroline wrote The Case Against College, which continues to be used in debates and discussed on college campuses today and is probably her most controversial book. She was always a lively and provocative speaker and was often asked to appear on college campuses, on TV and radio.

Caroline continued writing through the 1980's and 1990's.

Reviews

[Tobias · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps the best book I've read on the human impact of the Great Depression in the United States. For an accessible, journalistic or even impressionistic book, Bird covers a tremendous amount of ground - the politics of the New Deal (she stresses it was geared toward helping the middle class, not the genuinely impoverished), the economics, changes in business (one of her best chapters is how the Depression hastened a revolution in American business), and lastly on the human and social impact of unemployment. Also ends up being an interesting meditation on how events shape generational worldviews.

[Rob Bauer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Caroline Bird's book The Invisible Scar discusses the Great Depression, but rather than focus on its economic costs, she looks more at its psychological effect on Americans. There is a discussion of the stock market crash along with some statistics, however, Bird points out that less than 5% of Americans were involved in the stock market when it crashed. She goes to great length to discuss the conditions of people who suffered poverty during the Great Depression. She correctly describes how there had always been a significant number of poor people in the United States, but the Depression publicized poverty in a way that had not happened before. When the poor are poor, national leaders barely notice, but when many former middle-class Americans joined them in poverty in the 1930s, it became a crisis. Bird describes how the Depression influenced birth rates, suicide rates, and rates of business ownership, pointing out that many people tried to go into business for themselves when they could not find work. Even college enrollment and high school dropout rates changed noticeably.

Some of Bird's points are worthy of discussion. She writes about the concept of superfluous people, meaning people that are playing no productive role in society. This idea of some being superfluous connects with the concept of public relief. Relief carried a heavy stigma in the 1930s and caused some people to try to differentiate between those poor who deserved relief and those who did not. Debate still surrounds these issues today. Who should qualify for public relief, how much they deserve to get, and what to do about individuals playing no productive role in society (either by choice or by circumstance) remain important questions that makers of public policy still struggle with. They might do well, however, to read this book rather than basing their ideas off their imaginations and what they’d like to be true about poverty.

In any case, readers looking for a psychological study of the social impact of the Great Depression will enjoy Bird’s book. It’s a different way of examining the influence of one of the United States’ darker decades, but a useful one.

[Raymond · Rating 4 out of 5]

Invisible scars were borne by a host of Americans who lived through the Great Depression of the 1930s. Caroline Bird's book, "Invisible Scar," was made largely incidental through the passing of decades. By the advent of the 21st Century, Great Depression survivors and the ways in which their lives and hopes and thinking were altered no longer had urgency. Now America is once again caught up in a depression/recession/downturn/economic upheaval. There is not yet even a name for it. People are being wounded, once again. Wounds leave scars. Bird's book has new timeliness. What do these economic sieges inflict upon people?

[Steve Barrera · Rating 5 out of 5]

An account of the Great Depression, by a journalist and scholar who lived through the time as a child. It has about a dozen chapters, each focused on a specific topic, such as unemployment, public sentiment, or the New Deal programs. There is some chronological ordering to the topics, as they start with the crash of 1929 and end with the build up to WWII, with a final chapter, "The Invisible Scar," on how the Depression left its mark on the middle aged policymakers of the 1960s, which is when the book was published. Overall, the narrative is one of spiralling economic despair and stagnation. In Caroline Bird's words, "[D]uring those long...years of standstill everybody and everything marked time." She argues that the Depression had a lasting impact that was deeper than that of the world wars, and that American society buried the memory of it in its collective consciousness, in part out of guilt that it was the war, with all its carnage, that got the U.S. out of economic trouble. In describing the events of 1929 to 1941, the text includes a lot of minutiae that are not backed up by detailed notes, though there are some references at the end of the book that could be researched further. Still, I had to wonder if the author wasn't repeating anectodal evidence passed down from the time period. She also occasionally includes her personal memories in the discussion, which is revealing. The narrative confirms much that might be considered conventional views about the Depression years understood as a social era: that the econonmic emergency inspired a sense of togetherness and urgency about the need for change, and that it triggered a new willingness to accept government solutions to social and economic problems. There are parallels to our time (I write this review in 2024) such as a new class consciousness and concern for inequality, anxiety over the cost of raising a family and deferment of marriage and childbirth, and disillusionment about the value of a college education. You can also see in the narrative the beginnings of the modern economy, with its managed corporations, mobile workforce, and dependence on consumerism as the source of economic growth. Overall this is a great survey of the time period, which comes across as authoritative, since it comes from someone who lived through it. The book introduces the reader to a plethora of ideas and facts about the Great Depression, and includes plenty of references which invite further research. I think it should be read by anyone interested in understanding this monumental historical event.

[Roberta · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book backs up all the stories that my mother told me and then some. It is well-researched and full of detail but it is also easy to see the Ms. Bird had her own opinions about some of the reasons that things went so very wrong and how ordinary people were affected.

[Kristine Lenda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Super helpful for a paper that I had to research and I ended up liking the book itself more than I had originally expected.

[David Oser · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good. It's a great social history both of the 1930s and the 1960s when it was written.

[Catherine Richmond]

The current administration seems to be following Hoover's playbook for driving the US into another depression.