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Brother, can you spare a dime? 7/17/2014 11:14:12 AM
“Brother, Can You Spare a Dime,” lyrics by Yip Harburg, music by Jay Gorney (1931)
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Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad; now it’s done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime;
Once I built a tower, now it’s done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Say, don’t you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time.
Say, don’t you remember, I’m your pal? Buddy, can you spare a dime?
“In the song a beggar talks back to the system that stole his job. Gorney said in an interview in 1974 “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 song asks why the men who built the nation – built the railroads, built the skyscrapers – who fought in the war (World War I), who tilled the earth, who did what their nation asked of them should, now that the work is done and their labor no longer necessary, find themselves abandoned and in bread lines.” (Wikipedia)
“Buddy, can you spare a dime?” The song title and lyrics, penned eighty-four years ago by Yip Harburg, express conditions that existed in the Great Depression, the worst economic downturn that the world had ever seen. This tragic state was echoed “in 2007 and 2008 when the world reached new levels of wealth gap inequality that rivaled the years of 1928 and 1929.” (Wikipedia). This is a reminder to us that, after nearly a century, the world is not immune to economic devastation. If the world is not immune how can we, as individuals, expect any guarantee of economic security?
Every day, in every major city of the world, we hear a similar refrain, “Buddy, can you spare some change?” Or, we see someone standing with their hand out, holding a cap or an empty paper cup, pleading with a cardboard sign. Have we progressed at all? Who are these people? Is it possible that they’re just like us? Is it possible that they were once soldiers, leaders of industry, pillars of society? Surprisingly, many of them were.
