Their every day lives if they were seriously affected by problems of that decade. Now i dont normally use images like this but im using this one for a reason. Grandma survives Great Depression because her supply chain was local and she knew how to do stuff. Thats a really important concept and well come right back to it at the end of class as well. This really is sort of the theme for the day. Now in terms of what were going to talk about. Were going to start with an overview of what the problems of the Great Depression were for ordinary people and the depths of the problem. Were going to talk about how families coped in terms of work strategies and about the process of asking for help in the case of a disaster like this. Were going to talk about keeping families fed and what do people actually do to try and put food on the table in the middle of a collapse like this. Well talk about how it changed americas food habits and did anybody starve . What was the real sort of impact of the Great Depression as far as mortality went. Lets start with the grim results of economic disaster. The Great Depression was by far the worst economic collapse the United States has experienced. They have had depressions before but some of them had been very, very steep depressions and very serious situations but the United States never had a depression that was this long and this deep for so many years. Theres a reason why its called the Great Depression it was a terrible, terrible economic collapse and terrible in terms of what it meant for average people. Today im going to talk about 1929 to 1923 and im divided that for a reason. Thats because before march of 1933 there was not much of a federal government response to the problems of the depression so were going to look at those four years before any sort of major federal aid kicked in. And during those four years the economy basically tanked. By 1933 theres 25 percent unemployment and that means that 25 of working americans had no job whatsoever. There was also 25 under employment and under employment means that people with a College Degree could only find jobs sweeping floors and it meant people that wanted to work fulltime could only get jobs working part time. It meant that people had jobs but those were playing less than they previously had. All sorts of schoolteachers saw their incomes cut by 50 in the first four years of the Great Depression. All those circumstances are under employment so 25 of the population was completely unemployed and another 25 was under played and those numbers dont include those. There were plenty of farmer who are basically earning nothing. Theres all sorts of farmers that put their pigs on the train to go to chicago hoping they would get a check back and they would have income. Unfortunately a lot of farmers instead of a check got a bill. It cost more than those pigs were worth to ship them. Thats not under employment or unemployment. It wasnt counted. Other things were selfemployed people. Insurance agents had no money coming in and doctors and dentists had no money coming. If someone had a whole list of bills in front of them that he would choose to pay for food and shelter so the doctor did not get paid so all sorts were not getting paid and the the conditioned stayed terrible. On average during that period unemployment was 20 and unemployment was not going to go really below 20 until we get into the lead up to world war ii to americans involvement in world war ii so these were very, very, hard years with a very high level of unemployment for large numbers of people. The problem also was that if you had money in the bank you probably lost it because many banks closed in 1931, 32 and 33 and if a bank closed your money was gone forever so banks closed and if you wanted to ask for help it was really difficult to do so. Because being poor was not enough. You had to be worthy poor before a charity gave you money so receiving aid generally involved proving you were part of the worthy poor not just needy. Being needy was not just enough. You had to conform to the moral standards of the community and had to be suffering hardships that could not be construed as being your own fault so theres a lot of single never married mothers that would have not been considered for aid because they lived outside of the moral confines of that society. Their problem would by local people be construed as their fault so the people with aid are people that are respectable widows and respectable disabled people. Orphans. People temporarily disabled something in no way could be considered their fault and respect built meant usually going to church and not drinking or living outside of conventional morality in your community so being poor was not enough to get you help in the 1930s. Another issue we need to keep in behind as we talk about the 1930s is the idea of relative deprivation. A lot of people during the 1930s fell into poverty. They had not been poor at the beginning of the decade but all of the sudden they didnt have a job. All of the sudden they were not bringing money in and they fell into poverty. What researchers at the time discovered was how you felt about the problems of the 1930s did not exactly equal how poor you were. People that had fallen into poverty felt like the situation was considerably worse than people who had been poor all along and those people that fall into poverty had Serious Problems compared to people who had been poor all along. Another concept you need to remember when thinking of it is shame. Now the reason why this is incredibly important was people who had groan up in the era prior to the 1930s, generally believed that if you were unemployed it was your own fault. If someone was unable to find a job it was their own fault. If you are hardworking and capable and if you are of a good moral standing you should be able to find a job. But the thing was they had never encounter and depression this deep. There were no jobs. It didnt matter if you were morally up right or worked hard and it didnt matter, there were no jobs to be had in many communities. A lot of people felt like they failed and this problem was personal to them. And that too will have a serious impact on their experience of the 1930s because theyre going to be resistant to ask for help and there were many, many people who went through this experience who never got over it who spent the rest of their lives feeling terribly ashamed of having been without a job in the 30s for no reason at all. They had no reason to feel ashamed but we dont always think in these logical ways when were faced with a crisis like this. If youre a part of a family facing a situation like this you had to figure out how you were going to manage if the bread earner was completely without a job or seriously unemployed and one way this happened is women go out to work. Now it was very difficult for women to find jobs in the 30s. It was not the usual path that people took. Africa American People often had jobs because of the generally low pay their husbands got but most white women once they got married got out of the workforce while the 1930s creates a situation where a lot of women had to find jobs but most of the jobs they find are poorly paid and in traditionally female occupations and some of those jobs saw declining income across the 30s. Those woman saw their pay cut by 50 and not only that by 1933 a lot were giving teachers ious telling them when we have money again well pay you. They needed to eat right then and sometimes they had to trade their ious to someone that would give them money. Other women did things like work in laundries for ten cents an hour or clean homes for a dollar a day or less and a lot of women took in borders meaning taking someone in your home and you cook and clean for them and then they pay you for the use of your home. Probably about the best you can do was Something Like one of my grandmothers did that was work for j. C. Penneys for 25 cents an hour. Startinger will i in the morning working until late at night and got an hour off at lunch and no breaks and that was consider and really good job so theres no way she was going to complain about the low wages and the long hours. Some women were very fortunate and had secretary positions and a lot of what im telling you is based on research i did in kansas about the 1930s and one of the kansas congressman in about 1933 got an irate letter of one of the constituent as man writing in a disgusted way about a woman who was working for wages in the congressmans office and he thought that job ought to be given to a man who had a family and the congressman wrote back you know i would employee a man but i dont know any men that can type and do stening graphy. I have to hire a woman so women with special skills were able to keep jobs through the 1930s but most women that worked had low wages working long hours in positions that largely men didnt want. Things like doing laundry. Things like cooking for other people and clean forking there people. Now it was a whole lot easier for women to work out side the home if they had no children or if those children were old enough to take care of themselves. The social convention of the time said that if you were a married woman it was your responsibility to be at home and take care of them and in fact one of the woman who i interviewed about her experiences told me. Mothers were frowned on the their children were put with babysitters so i did what i had to do after my children came. She stayed home and took care of them and did not go out to work. Another woman told me she would have loved to go out to work but the problem was her cloths were falling apart, she couldnt afford a babysitter and she couldnt afford to get to a job. She lived out in the country and so there was no way for her to work. She said to me, by the time i would have had extra clothes and hired a babysitter i would be working for nothing. We felt like it would be to our advantage to the childrens advantage for me to stay at home and patch and siouewsew, so she didnt even though her husband was earning as little as 4. 00 an hour. Even in the 1930s 4. 00 a month was practically nothing. She didnt have the clothes. Children also worked but usually not for wages. Child labor laws in this era made it difficult for children under the age of 14 so children did other things. They sold newspapers and shined shoes and they did jobs and odd jobs for the neighbors and many of them scavenged looking for coal and other things they sifted through dumps. Totally illegal but knew that he could earn five cent as bottle doing this as he was selling them to the bootleggers but he also lived at the edge of town and he could see where the bootleggers hid the booze and then theyre clients would come out and find it along the fence post and take it home with them after they paid their money. The sheriff would pay 50 cents for any bottle of booze that somebody had led him too and so this guy was selling bottles to bootleggers and figuring where they were hiding the bottles and letting the sheriff know and he was making a sideline for himself out of the bootlegging business. His wife was terrified afraid that the bootleggers were going to come and get him and i thought it was probably not an issue this many years after the fact but if he would have gotten caught he would have been in big trouble. This is his way of make money through the 1930s. Other families doubled up with the family. The part of the family that was least likely to get evicted from their home inviting other people to come and live with them sharing the cost of heat and food and housing. Other families even though they might be living in different locations also shared the costs. I had grandparents living in town whose parents were still on the farm. The parents on the farm could not make a living and so, my grandparents were making a relatively decent living by the standards of the day, sent home a lot of their money to their families to try and get them to keep their farms from going under. Theres all sorts of ways families cooperated together and then at the other end people left home. A lot of men left home when they became part of a long term unemployed. What youll notice the divorce rate does not go up but it goes down a little bit but divorces cost money. The abandonment rate goes one men unable to care for their families leaving home because they feel so ashamed thinking their families are better off without them. What the picture shows is what happened and that was young people leaving home. There were as many as a million transients on the road in the middle of the 1930 and a large percentage of those were young people under the age of 25 whos families simply could not afford to care for them anymore and they hit the road and spent a good deal of the 1930s wondering from place to place looking for jobs and a handout hoping that somewhere down the road things would get better and unfortunately a lot of the time the was not. Before i move on does anybody have any questions you want to ask at this point . Alright. Lets move on to the problem of asking for help. If you were one of these people whos family was completely out of money. There were no jobs to be had and lets say your extended family could not help you. Your option was to ask for help. To ask a charity or local government for help. Going to your city, going to your county. This was not for a lot of people a very attractive option because they felt ashamed of being poor and unemployed. Theres a lot of people who never could bring ourselves to go in and say i need help. Were not going to manage and a lot of, this applied to men in particular. Men that are no longer able to support their families and are so ashamed going into the Welfare Office was too hard for them. Whats interesting is i had a number of women tell me my husband wouldnt go in to apply for aid. The moment the children started going hungry mothers tended to say enough of this and to go in and to ask for help. And so that was often part of what it meant to be a mom during the 1930s was asking for help for your children. Now before 1933, before we get a real federal presence in welfare, getting aid was a really personal process in ways that it would not be later. It involved presenting yourself personally and filling out the form and going through a rig rigorous examination where they tried to figure if you were accept to be able get aid or not. Generally a married man or a family would be considered appropriate for aid. Single people generally were not if they didnt have someone depending on them local government simply was not going to help them so you had to be part of the worthy poor, you generally had to have a family and then they would decide how much aid you would get. It was often not a great deal of aid but getting aid was a public process because what happened after you got aid was your name went in the paper. This was an era when local governments published every month their bills and instead of just having one line where it said aid to the poor, it had a whole bunch of lines and it listed by name the people who were getting money so everybody knew who in the community was getting aid. Which meant you had to be willing to have the whole rest of everybody see your poverty in order to do this which is why another reason why a lot of people resisted asking for help. Now this meant you were open to public criticism because they generally had listed in the newspapers as well of the things you werent allowed to buy with your aid. It was called relief. You werent allow to buy pops or candy or you werent allowed to have a radio or a car and if your family had any of those you had to have a really good reason why or you were going to lose your aid. Now a lot of communities eventually got around this by only giving food to people instead of giving them the money and letting them make their own decisions how they use it they began to give people food. Things like lard and beans and flour. Maybe salt pork if you were lucky. Potatoes and cabbages and that way they could guarantee the communitys money was spent on things that that the community approved of. Now the amount of money was very, very small. By 1933, about the most that any community could give to individual family per week was about 2 and 50 cents. Most charities are out of money and most communities are out of money and so 2. 00 and 50 cents is about it. As you work on your projects you realize thats about as good as it got. Not a lot of money. A Research Report from a social Workers Organization said this was aid to the poor with a vengeance. Meaning that it simply wasnt enough money for a lot of families to get by in a good way. Aid was generally not available to transients and recent arrivals. Most places said if you hadnt live in the community for a year they were not going to help you. They wanted aid available to what they called home people only. Only. So if you needed help they would say wait a year and Something Else they did was to hand people a sack of sandwiches and put enough gas in their car to get them away and this was illegal in most places. You were not supposed to hand off your relief burdens to other communities in this way and the communities did it anyway. They were pretty desperate by the early years of the 1930s and did not have a lot of money to spent on the poor. If you werent getting lot of aid and you didnt have a lot of money, you had to find a way to keep your head above water and keeping your head above water could be quite a trick. A lot of communities when they started running out of money started giving families access to land instead. Lots of communities had undeveloped property and they could afford to buy seeds so what they did was handout to people plots of land and packets of seeds and say grow yourself food and theres more people often that wanted that than land that was available and if you didnt keep your land nicely weeded and growing you would lose to it somebody else that needed it. Also in little local newspapers they began running all kinds of articles about how to make your food budget stretch reminding people they could in fact eat leftovers. Ive seen articles reminding people they could in fact eat leftovers. Ive seen bread puding from stale bread and jelly. None of this sounded terribly appetizing and a lot was common sense and things that farm women already knew but who taught all kinds of skills. Their services were in high demand in the 1930s. Many communities offered free classes so people could learn how to cook cheap meals, how best to spend their money. They were teaching skills that farm women already knew. These particular skills were not what everybody had, so they were providing information for other people. How might you feed your family if you had absolutely no money . I had one woman tell me that macaroni was always cheap. You could alw