The Great Depression! I remember being relatively rich before 1929. (My family owned two houses in Fort Worth, TX, and my father earned a great salary buying cotton for the Japan Cotton Co.)

So the great crash took almost everybody down. I remember my father traveling incessantly, working “on commission.” I remember my mother standing in horror when the Baptist Church delivered two boxes of groceries as charity to those who had been the deliverers in the past.

I remember being unable to join a grade-school club because the initiation fee was 25 cents. And I remember my 16-year-old brother, James, working his heart out in an ice cream shop and bringing his salary home to my mother in nickels and dimes.

Even children were inspired by the way F.D.R. worked to create the W.P.A. and other social services, efforts that created the Tennessee Valley Authority and shored up new kinds of jobs in the U.S. It took World War II for America to fully recover from the Depression. But by then we were the Arsenal of Democracy and ready to be the greatest industrialized nation and lead the world.

I feel the Depression pulled the country together. People sacrificed, skimped, made do and maybe that’s not such a bad thing for a nation overfed, over-entertained, overpaid and moving along very low on "sacrifice."

Perhaps the low blow of Wall Street will bring the nation to its moral senses. Maybe we’ll begin to concentrate on education, science and health and less on jazzy cars, celebrity worship and massive entitlement and willful selfishness.

Click here on this text to read my New York Post column.