Great Depression

The Great Depression of the 1930s is the historical wound that underlies Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, a catastrophe that seemed to break the promises America had made to its citizens. The stock market crash of 1929, it was assumed, ended a particular version of history: optimistic, confident. The American dream faded. Yet, as Miller's introduction makes clear, myths as potent as that, illusions with such a purchase on the national psyche, are not so easily denied. In an immigrant society, which has, by definition, chosen to reject the past, faith in the future is not a matter of choice. When today fails to offer the justification for hope, tomorrow becomes the only grail worth pursuing. This is the context that Charley, Willy Loman's next-door neighbor, sums up when he says that "a salesman is got to dream," a line that captures not only Willy's life but a central tenet of his culture.

The Depression's Mark on Willy Loman

Death of a Salesman is not set during the Depression, but it bears its mark, as does Willy Loman, a sixty-three-year-old salesman who stands baffled by his failure. In memory, he returns to that period, as if personal and national fate were somehow intertwined. In spirit, according to Miller, Willy also reaches back to the more expansive and confident, if empty, 1920s, when, according to a president of the United States, the business of America was business. Since Willy inhabits "the greatest country in the world," a world of Manifest Destiny, where can the fault lie but in himself? If personal meaning, in this cheerleader society, lies in success, then failure must threaten identity itself. No wonder Willy shouts out his name—he is listening for an echo. No wonder he searches desperately back through his life for evidence of the moment he took a wrong path; no wonder he looks to the next generation to give him back that life by achieving what had slipped so unaccountably through his own fingers.

The Structural and Thematic Role of the Depression

The Depression is not merely a backdrop but a structural force that shapes the play's deepest tensions. Miller's play is about "the paradoxes of being alive in a technological civilization" and "the suppression of the individual by placing him below the imperious needs of society." The Depression represents the moment when the economic system that promised success to anyone with enough personality and drive instead delivered mass failure. Willy's personal tragedy—his inability to sell, his exhaustion, his sense of being "kind of temporary"—is the individual refraction of a collective historical trauma. The play, Miller has said, expresses "all those feelings of a society falling to pieces which I had," feelings that, to him, are one of the reasons for the play's continuing popularity. The Depression, in this reading, is the historical event that made visible the gap between the American dream's promises and its actual outcomes, a gap that Willy spends his life trying to deny.

The Depression and the Critique of the American Dream

Miller's play is not an attack on American values but an exploration of the betrayal of those values and the cost of this in human terms. Willy Loman's American dream is drained of transcendence; it is a faith in the supremacy of the material over the spiritual. The Depression exposed the fragility of that faith. What Miller attacks is not the American dream of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, but the dream as interpreted and pursued by those for whom ambition replaces human need, and for whom the trinkets of what Miller called the "new American Empire in the making" were taken as tokens of true value. When, on the play's opening night, a woman called Death of a Salesman a "time bomb under American capitalism," Miller's response was to hope that it was, "or at least under the bullshit of capitalism, this pseudo life that thought to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refrigerator, waving a paid-up mortgage at the moon, victorious at last." The Depression is the historical event that made such a critique necessary and possible, the moment when the system's promises rang hollow for millions, including the Lomans.