'Like Judgment Day' … How commentators viewed the Great Depression

The Crash of 1929 was an apocalypse, Northumbrian towns were worse than those in occupied France and even the Times admitted there was great poverty

Pope Pius XI said that the Great Depression of the 1930s was "the worst calamity that has befallen man since the Flood". Such pronouncements might be expected from the Vatican, but apocalyptic language became commonplace during the "devil's decade".

The writer and critic Edmund Wilson likened the crash of the US stock market in 1929 to "a rending of the Earth in preparation for the Day of Judgment". The economist John Maynard Keynes suggested that the world in the grip of the economic blizzard was entering a new dark age that would last a thousand years. The French premier Li(C)on Blum was one of many who compared the Depression to Armageddon, declaring that its effects were as traumatic as those of the first world war. The poet Edwin Muir described the army of unemployed as "the dead on leave".