The Great Depression
The Lived Experience of the Great Depression
A Hooverville in Seattle, Washington between 1932 and 1937. Washington State Archives.
In 1934 a woman from Humboldt County, California, wrote to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt seeking a job for her husband, a surveyor, who had been out of work for nearly two years. The pair had survived on the meager income she received from working at the county courthouse. "My salary could keep us going," she explained, "but - I am to have a baby". The family needed temporary help, and, she explained, "after that I can go back to work and we can work out our own salvation. But to have this baby come to a home full of worry and despair, with no money for the things it needs, is not fair. It needs and deserves a happy start in life".16
As the United States slid ever deeper into the Great Depression, such tragic scenes played out time and time again. Individuals, families, and communities faced the painful, frightening, and often bewildering collapse of the economic institutions on which they depended. The more fortunate were spared the worst effects, and a few even profited from it, but by the end of 1932, the crisis had become so deep and so widespread that most Americans had suffered directly. Markets crashed through no fault of their own. Workers were plunged into poverty because of impersonal forces for which they shared no responsibility.
With rampant unemployment and declining wages, Americans slashed expenses. The fortunate could survive by simply deferring vacations and regular consumer purchases. Middle- and working-class Americans might rely on disappearing credit at neighborhood stores, default on utility bills, or skip meals. Those who could borrowed from relatives or took in boarders in homes or "doubled up" in tenements. But such resources couldn't withstand the unending relentlessness of the economic crisis. As one New York City official explained in 1932,
When the breadwinner is out of a job he usually exhausts his savings if he has any.… He borrows from his friends and from his relatives until they can stand the burden no longer. He gets credit from the corner grocery store and the butcher shop, and the landlord forgoes collecting the rent until interest and taxes have to be paid and something has to be done. All of these resources are finally exhausted over a period of time, and it becomes necessary for these people, who have never before been in want, to go on assistance.17
But public assistance and private charities were quickly exhausted by the scope of the crisis. As one Detroit city official put it in 1932,
Many essential public services have been reduced beyond the minimum point absolutely essential to the health and safety of the city.… The salaries of city employees have been twice reduced … and hundreds of faithful employees … have been furloughed. Thus has the city borrowed from its own future welfare to keep its unemployed on the barest subsistence levels.… A wage work plan which had supported 11,000 families collapsed last month because the city was unable to find funds to pay these unemployed - men who wished to earn their own support. For the coming year, Detroit can see no possibility of preventing wide-spread hunger and slow starvation through its own unaided resources.18
These most desperate Americans, the chronically
unemployed, encamped on public or marginal lands in "Hoovervilles,"
spontaneous shantytowns that dotted America's cities, depending on bread
lines and street-corner peddling. One doctor recalled that "every day …
someone would faint on a streetcar. They'd bring him in, and they
wouldn't ask any questions.… they knew what it was. Hunger".19
The
emotional and psychological shocks of unemployment and underemployment
only added to the shocking material depravities of the Depression.
Social workers and charity officials, for instance, often found the
unemployed suffering from feelings of futility, anger, bitterness,
confusion, and loss of pride.20 "A man is not a man without work," one
of the jobless told an interviewer.21 The ideal of the "male
breadwinner" was always a fiction for poor Americans, and, during the
crisis, women and young children entered the labor force, as they always
had. But, in such a labor crisis, many employers, subscribing to
traditional notions of male bread-winning, were less likely to hire
married women and more likely to dismiss those they already employed.22
As one politician remarked at the time, the woman worker was "the first
orphan in the storm".23
American suppositions about family
structure meant that women suffered disproportionately from the
Depression. Since the start of the twentieth century, single women had
become an increasing share of the workforce, but married women,
Americans were likely to believe, took a job because they wanted to and
not because they needed it. Once the Depression came, employers were
therefore less likely to hire married women and more likely to dismiss
those they already employed.24 Women on their own and without regular
work suffered a greater threat of sexual violence than their male
counterparts; accounts of such women suggest they depended on each other
for protection25
The Great Depression was particularly tough for
nonwhite Americans. "The Negro was born in depression," one Black
pensioner told interviewer Studs Terkel. "It didn't mean too much to
him. The Great American Depression . . . only became official when it
hit the white man". ((Studs Terkel,Hard Times: An Oral History of the
Great Depression(New York: Pantheon Books, 1970), 81-82)).
Black workers
were generally the last hired when businesses expanded production and
the first fired when businesses experienced downturns. As a National
Urban League study found, "So general is this practice that one is
warranted in suspecting that it has been adopted as a method of
relieving unemployment of whites without regard to the consequences upon
Negroes".26 In 1932, with the national unemployment average hovering
around 25 percent, Black unemployment reached as high as 50 percent,
while even Black workers who kept their jobs saw their already low wages
cut dramatically.27