This is from a book I’m currently reading:

“(The president) and other government officials spoke and acted as if the economy had already rebounded. But in the real world, people turned off the heat in their houses and put on sweaters. They canceled their vacations. They abandoned their homes as mortgages were unpaid. Weeds sprouted in the cracked concrete of unfinished buildings. Some laid-off workers, too ashamed to tell their spouses, dressed for work and left home each morning, only to spend their days hunting in vain for jobs.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? That kind of thing is going on even now, but has been happening for some time. Most of us have been touched by the Great Recession – if not personally, at only perhaps one remove.

The book isn’t about the Great Recession, though. The passage above describes this country in the spring of 1930, and the president is Herbert Hoover. It’s from “Get Capone,” a new book by Jonathan Eig that’s subtitled, “The Secret Plot That Captured America’s Most Wanted Gangster.”

It isn’t the best Capone biography I’ve read, but it’s pretty good. Eig has an irritating tendency to get a name wrong here and there – which, granted, is only annoying to us history geeks/gangster aficionados – but it gives a good portrait of the man and his times. It’s also got an interesting theory about who actually was responsible for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, which always has been blamed on Capone. The theory, for what it’s worth, is that the massacre was masterminded by one of Capone’s hit men, “Three Fingered” White (gotta love those nicknames), but not at Capone’s behest. It was personal, revenge for the killing of White’s cousin by one of the men who eventually died on St. Valentine’s Day.

But what resonates as one reads the book is how similar the 1920s were to the period preceding the current recession, and how the Great Depression was very much like what we’re going through now. The difference is more one of degree and more apparent than real. After all, if you’re out of job at the moment, it isn’t any better than it was being out of a job in 1930.

But the ’20s were a go-go era. People partied hardy in the Jazz Age and didn’t think the party would ever end. And when it did stop, people felt blind-sided.

Of course, much of Capone’s story revolves around Prohibition, the foundation of his empire. We don’t have that now, at least not prohibition of alcohol. But the “drug war” this country has carried on for 30 years, and its massive failure, are simply a modern version of Prohibition and its effects.

Some find reading history depressing. It always points out how little we have learned. There truly is nothing new under the sun, and anyone who reads of the past with one eye on the present knows that our problems aren’t new. For me, though, the repetitiveness is fascinating. Yeah, it’s kind of a bummer to know people make the same stupid mistakes over and over, but it’s always amazed me how close some situations are. When I first read that above paragraph, I was stunned; I read a lot of history, so I wasn’t really surprised, but it was a real reminder of how little some things change in the better part of a century.

That’s why I wish more people were interested in history. It’s possible to draw a lot of wrong conclusions from a shallow reading of the past, but if you’re vigilant, there is much to be learned. Unfortunately, many in at least my generation of history were turned off because they were taught a dry litany of facts about kings and presidents and generals, things that didn’t personalize the past. But if you can make a person imagine what their own life would have been like in 1930 or 1860 or 1500, it’s going to mean something to them. And they’ll learn whatever lessons it teaches.

I’m not just talking about ancient history, either. I’m switching between “Get Capone” and rereading “Nixonland,” Rick Perlstein’s account of how Richard Nixon came back from political defeat in the 1960s and 1970s. Today’s culture wars are rooted directly in the tumult of the ’60s. Nixon – who, whatever else you can say about him, was among the most brilliant politicians in this country’s history – masterfully used the events of the time to rebuild a several-times-shattered political career. And the way he did that continues to affect the way politics is done in this country today. In some ways, what Nixon did to American politics is worse than what he did to the country as a whole during Watergate; Watergate at least forced him out of office, but we continue to suffer from the changes he made in how we elect people. (This is a bit of an oversimplification, but part of Perlstein’s point is that Nixon knew how to play on the worst instincts of populism, and that’s what enabled him to rise from the ashes.)

So Capone and Nixon aren’t just historical figures. How they lived, what they did and the times they lived in offer real lessons about our lives today. Understanding them, as interesting a mental exercise as it is, isn’t just an academic thing.

It’s even, in one respect, a hopeful thing. When you realize how similar the Great Depression was to the Great Recession, it also points up an important fact: This country has survived worse. It’ll survive what’s happening now.

Whether we’ll learn from our survival is another question.