Bruce Ramsey was a respected longtime business reporter for the Seattle P-I, and then an opinion journalist for the editorial page of The Seattle Times. Now, in addition to writing for Post Alley, Ramsey is researching and writing local history books. In addition to his fascinating book about the 1893 Depression in this region, The Panic of 1893, he has just published a valuable new book, Seattle in the Great Depression (WSU Press).
True to his roots as a journalist, Ramsey’s new book has a subtitle that reflects the author’s use of daily papers as the main source for his new history. This is explained as “history from the bottom up,” a fascination for local history that harks back to Murray Morgan’s Skid Road (1951), which told of lowlife characters such as Dave Beck and Doc Maynard. Also in this tradition is Seattle From the Margins (2022) by Megan Asaka, with its tight focus on casual labor pools.
Using newspaper coverage as his guide to the 1930s, Ramsey’s book is full of the anecdotes that caught the eyes of editors in daily journalism. Like the newspapers, there is built-in suspense, since editors don’t know about future developments and elections. Ramsey’s business journalism means that the book is also full of developers and financial details whose loans and bonds powered the surge of building in the 1920s and up to the early Depression.
It is not an interpretive history, but certain themes come through clearly, notably the flirtation with the Utopian Left and with Dave Beck’s high-wage, low-growth cartelism in the 1930s. Those ventures fizzled out after World War II, with the arrival of the Boeing Decades and the post-War boom, anchored by the Magnuson-Scoop-Ellis-Evans consensus…