“Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” is of course one of the, if not the, most recognizable songs of the Depression Era. The words are by Yip Harburg (1896-1981), the music by Jay Gorney (1896-1990). It was written in 1932 as part of a review called Americana.
Any way you look at it, it is a song with strong political overtones about a guy who did what was expected of him, worked hard, built his own American Dream only to be thwarted by circumstances beyond his control.
By 1929, the Depression had been going on for three years and so many, like the singer in the song, had been reduced to begging to get by. The lyrics touch on the plight of farmers, construction workers, those who worked on the railroad, and finally those who had served their country in wartime as among those who had been forgotten. What would not have been lost at the time is the lyric referring to “Yankee Doodle Dum” and the evocation of the bonus marchers who came to Washington, D.C. looking for a promised payment of a post-WWII bonus only to be dispersed by military force.
As Harburg said in a 1974 interview:
I didn’t want a song to depress people. I wanted to write a song to make people think. It isn’t a hand-me-out song of ‘give me a dime, I’m starving, I’m bitter, it wasn’t that kind of sentimentality’…the man is really saying: I made an investment in this country. Where the hell are my dividends? The song doesn’t reduce him to a beggar. It makes him a dignified human being, asking questions—and a bit outraged, too, as he should be.”
The Social Welfare History Project
With that kind of motivation behind the song, it is not surprising that many Republicans at the time considered it to be anti-capitalist propaganda, which almost got it dropped from the production. Similarly, business leaders attempted to exert influence to keep it off the radio because, as William Zinsser put it, it was “sympathetic to the unemployed.” In the end, their efforts were unsuccessful because of its popularity. This is, by the way, what Karl Marx would have called a contradiction of capitalism, something that expresses a negative view of the capitalist system but is allowed to exist, and is even promoted, because it’s making somebody money.
I should note, however, that although Harburg was never a member of the Communist Party, he was blacklisted from working in his chosen field for twelve years between 1950-1962.
“Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” has been widely covered by artists like Tom Waits and Judy Collins and has become an established part of our culture signifying hard times that come to hard working people through no fault of their own – an idea that many people seem to think is dangerous.
Here is the 1932 version by Rudy Vallee.