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I saw what the Depression was doing to my students. Often they could get no jobs, or jobs which were wholly inadequate. And through them, I began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men's lives. I began to feel the need to participate more fully in the life of the community.

From a generation that came of age during the Great Depression, millions of our country's best and bravest took up arms in a worldwide struggle against tyranny.

The greatest generation was formed first by the Great Depression. They shared everything - meals, jobs, clothing.

My parents were born in 1906 and 1907. I think the experience of the Depression greatly influenced the way they thought about the world.

World War II affected the male population in a very detrimental way. They were happy to be home, happy to be alive, happy they won, but they could not express to anybody the horror they had been through.

My parents were children during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and it scarred them. Especially my father, who saw destitution in his Brooklyn, New York neighborhood; adults standing in so called 'bread lines,' children begging in the streets.

The fact that the movement was carried on by women who, for the most part, had no money of their own and were totally inexperienced in organization, and that they won their fight in about two generations, makes a story often dramatic and always worth preserving.

It was good fortune to be a child during the Depression years and a youth during the war years.

In those years of the Fifties, in London and New York, I lived, without knowing it, in a time when the profoundest changes were happening: when a radical alteration was getting ready to happen in the way a society saw young girls. And, as a consequence, in the way they saw themselves.

Understanding the true causes of the Depression, as well as the real economic record of the United States in the 1930s, is an essential ingredient in anyone's economic and historical education.