While listening to NPR this morning, the host used the term 'Great Recession' when referring to the time between 2008 up until recently. I haven't heard this term be used to officially describe that time period, I've only heard 'recession' used. This made me wonder about the Great Depression time. I wonder if 'Great Recession' will be used to describe 2008-12 in future history books (or wikipedia).
I apologize if a similar question has been asked before. I searched for this topic but did not find anything.
According the this article on the History New Network, the term "Great Depression" was not widespread, at earliest, until 1952, when Harry Truman blamed Republicans for having “brought on the Great Depression.”
As per your comment about the Great Recession, there were some instances of people using the term "great depression" during the actual great depression, but the name was not the standard. The same article cited above references the economist Lionel Robbins who, in 1934, wrote the book "The Great Depression." Also, during their times in office, Roosevelt and Hoover used the terms "great depression," but it was more to describe the economy, and not the other things that "the Great Depression" entails.
Google ngrams shows it becoming widespread in books in the late 1930s
Using a method that I saw used by another flair in a similar way, I decided to go through ProQuest's New York Times archive.
Searching for the phrase (in quotation marks) "Great Depression", and going from 1929 on, we get the following results:
| Decade | Front page | Non-front page | % Front page | |:-----------|------------:|------------:|------------:| | 1920-1929 | 8 | 47 | 17% | | 1930-1939 | 25 | 349 | 7.2% | | 1940-1949 | 12 | 248 | 4.8%% | | 1950-1959 | 19 | 414 | 4.6% | | 1960-1969 | 21 | 462 | 4.5% | | 1970-1979 | 56 | 1,036 | 4.3% | | 1980-1989 | 82 | 1,605 | 5.1% | | 1990-1999 | 103 | 1,284 | 8% | | 2000-2009 | 134 | 1,645 | 8.1% |
There are some confounding articles, however, that should be noted. For example, in 1924, there was an article titled "GREAT DEPRESSION IN WHEAT MARKETS", not talking about the Great Depression itself. Nevertheless, by 1930-1939, we can see the term already being used to apply to the economic situation, though not typically in front page article titles. For example, in 1933, the New York Times reviewed "The Great Depression and Beyond" by Lloyd M. Graves. It doesn't really hit the articles as a phrase (book reviews on books calling it the Great Depression did happen throughout the period of 1930-on it seems) until the 1950s-60s, though there are a sparse few as early as 1939 that say things like:
In the dark days of the Great Depression - June, 1932 - Mayor Frank Murphy of Detroit issued a call for a meeting of American Mayors to discuss pressing problems of municipal credit and unemployment relief.
There are some articles like this in 1939, 1941, etc., but front page articles don't really feature the phrase until the latter half of the 1950s.
Hope that sheds some light on it!
A related question if I may piggyback: What exactly is the definition of a panic? I did hear a few people at the time describe it as, and I thought of it myself as, the Panic of 2008, but that term never gained traction.
I'd like to remind everyone in the thread that we have a rule against discussing events that occurred less than 20 years ago. The 2008 recession definitely falls within that window. Please keep the discussion focused on the Great Depression, and avoid discussion of modern economics.