A GIFT OF HOPE

A Secret Gift: How One Man's Kindness--And a Trove of Letters--Revealed the Hidden History of the Great Depression
_ Ted Gup

In telling their stories, the book becomes a portrait of endurance and recovery, as well as of a community in the throes of the Great Depression.

Before the stock market crash of 1929, Canton was a busy industrial city, home to Hoover and Republic Steel. But it was kneecapped by the Depression, with unemployment running as high as 50 percent. Local banks failed, taking all the deposits with them. Assistance programs there frequently ran out of food. Malnourished children in homes their parents couldn’t afford to heat got sick; some died.

The devastation hit all levels: The people who received $5 from B. Virdot included a grocer who’d gone broke extending credit to his customers, and a man who lost his family’s mansion after putting it up as collateral for the farm machinery business he had inherited.

The letters, Gup writes, “reminded me of the difference between discomfort and misery, between the complaints of consumers forced to rein in their spending and the keening of parents whose children went hungry night after night.” They also show that a gesture of generosity can deliver, along with small relief, good fortune that rings with hope.