Talking about how the Great Depression affected ordinary people. We are going to talk about the nuts and bolts of the situation and the things people would have experienced in their everyday lives if they were seriously affected by the problems of that decade. I do not normally use images like this, that i am using this one for a reason. Grandma survived the Great Depression because her supply chain was local and she knew how to do stuff. That is an important concept and we will come back to it at the end of class. This is the theme for today. In terms of what we are going to be talking about, we are going to start with an overview of what the problems of the Great Depression were for ordinary people and the depths of the problem. We will talk about how families try to cope in terms of their work strategies, about the process of asking for help in the case of a disaster like this , we will talk about keeping families fed. To put foodple do on the table in the middle of a collapse like this . About how it changed americas food habits and then we will come to an interesting question did anybody star . Real impact of the Great Depression as far as mortality went. Lets start with the grim results of the economic disaster. The Great Depression was by far the worst economic collapse the United States has ever experienced. The United States had had depressions before, some of them had been steep depressions. They had been serious situations. The United States had never had a depression this long and this deep for so many years. There is a reason it is called the Great Depression. It was a terrible economic collapse. It was terrible in terms of what it meant for average people. Today im going to be talking about the period from 1929 to 1933. Im dividing that for a reason. Of 1933, there was not much of a federal government response to the problems of the depression. I am going to be looking at those four years before any sort of major federal aid comes in. During those four years, the economy tanks. By 1933, there were 25 unemployment. That means 25 of working americans had no job whatsoever. There was also 25 underemployment. Peopleployment means with a College Degree could only find jobs sweeping floors. It meant that people who wanted to work fulltime could only get time get jobs working parttime. It meant that people had jobs but those jobs were paying less than they previously had. School teachers saw their incomes cut by 50 in the first four years of the Great Depression. All of those circumstances are underemployment. Wasof the population completely unemployed, another 25 was underemployed. Those numbers do not include nothing,o were earning but were not counted among the unemployed. There were plenty of farmers during this period who were basically earning nothing. There were all sorts of farmers in iowa who put their patients pigs on theheir train to chicago hoping they would get a check back, that pigs would sell and they would get some money back. But it cost more to ship the pigs to chicago then the pigs were worth. That is not unemployment or underemployment, it is not counted. Another thing that was not counted was selfemployed people that were making nothing. There were Insurance Agents that had no money coming in. There were doctors and dentists that had no money coming in. If someone had a whole list of bills in front of them, they would choose to pay for food or shelter before they would choose to pay the doctor. He cannot put the baby back. Was the bill that was sitting there to be paid, the doctor did not get paid. There were all sorts of people not getting paid. The problem was this was not just one year or two. The conditions state terrible from 1929 to 1940. On average, during that period, unemployment was 20 . Unemployment was not going to go below 20 until we get into the lead up to world war ii, to american involvement in world war ii. These were hard years with a very high level of unemployment for large numbers of people. Was that if you had money in a bank, you probably lost it because many banks closed in 1931 to 1933. If a bank was that if you had money in a closed, your mons gone forever. Banks closed, and if you wanted to ask for help, it was difficult to do so. A lot of city and county government, a lot of charities also went bankrupt in that time period. Even being poor was not enough. They were going to ask you if you were part of the worthy poor , before a charity was going to give you money. Aid generally involve proving you were a part of the worthy poor, not just needy. Being needy was not enough. That meant you had to conform to the moral standards of the community and you had to be suffering hardships that could not be construed as being your own fault. Single,re a lot of never married mothers who would not have been considered for aid because they lived outside of the moral confines of that society. Their problem could be construed as their fault. The people who got aid were the people who were respectable widows, respectable disabled orphans, people who were temporarily disabled because of something that could in no way be considered their fault. Respectability usually meant going to church, not drinking, not living outside of conventional morality in your community. Just being poor was not enough to get you help in the 1930s. To keep inue we need mind as we talk about the 1930s is the idea of relative deprivation. A lot of people during the 1930s felt into poverty. They had not been poor at the beginning of the decade, but all of the sudden they did not have a job, they were not bringing any money in and they fell into poverty. That howrs discovered you felt about the problems of the 1930s did not equal just how poor you were. People who had fallen into poverty felt like the situation was considerably worse than people who had been poor all along. Those people who fall into poverty were going to had some Serious Problems compared to people who had been poor all along. Another concept yet remember is shame. Another concept about the 1930s you have to remember is shame. People who had grown up 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. Youou were hardworking, if were capable, if you were of a good moral standard, you should be able to find a job. They had never encountered a depression this deep. There were no jobs. It did not matter if you work morally upright, it did not matter if you worked hard. It did not matter if you went to church on sunday. There were no jobs to be had in many communities. A lot of people felt like they had failed. They felt like this problem was personal to them. That is going to have a serious impact on their experience in the 1930s. They are going to be resistant to asking for help. They are ashamed to ask for help. There were many people who went through this experience who never got over it, who spent the rest of their lives feeling ashamed about having been without a job in the 1930s, for no reason at all. Had no reason to feel ashamed, but we do not always think in these logical ways when we are faced with a crisis like this. Of a family that was facing a situation like this, you had to figure out how you were going to manage. You had to figure out how you are going to manage if the bread earner in your family was without a job or seriously underemployed. One of the ways this happens is that women go out to work. It was difficult for women to find jobs in the 1930s. It was not the usual path that married woman that married women took in the 1930s. Africanamerican women had often had jobs after marriage because of the generally low pay their husbands got. Most white women, once they got married, got out of the workforce. The 1930s creates a situation where these women have to find jobs. Find arehe jobs they poorly paid and in traditionally female occupations. Some of those jobs saw declining income across the 1930s. Those women who were schoolteachers on their pay cut by 50 . By 1933, a lot of towns were giving teachers ious, a sickly telling them when we have money again we will pay you. The problem was they needed to eat right then. Sometimes they had to trade their ious at a discount for someone who would give them money. Other women did things like work in laundries for . 10 an hour or a clean homes for a dollar a day or less. A lot of women took in borders which meant taking someone into your home and cooking and cleaning for them and then they would pay you for the use of your home. The best you could do was Something Like one of my grandmothers did, which was work for jcpenney for . 25 an hour. Thestarted early in morning, working until late at night, she got one hour off at lunch and no breaks. That was considered a good job. There was no way she was going to complain about the low wages and the long hours. Some women were very fortunate and had secretarial positions. I am telling you is based on research i did in kansas about the 1930s. One of the canned goods one of the kansas congressman got an irate letter from one of his constituents. It was a man riding in 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. Back, youssman wrote know, i would employ a man but i do not know any man who can type induced demography. I have to hire and do stenography. Had special skills were able to keep their jobs through the 1930s. Most women who worked had very low wages working very long hours in positions that men did not want. Laundry,ke doing things like cooking for other people, cleaning for other people. It was a lot easier for women to work outside 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 and you had children, it was your responsibility to be at home and to take care of them. One of the women who i interviewed about her experiences told me mothers were frowned on if their children were put with babysitters, so i did what i had to do after my children came. She stayed home, she took care of them, she did not go to work. Another woman told me she would but hered to go to work close were falling apart, she cannot afford a babysitter, she cannot afford to get to a job. She lived out in the country. There was no way for her to work. She said, by the time i wouldve had extra close and a babysitter, i would be working for nothing. We felt like it would be to our advantage for me to stay at home and patch and so. And patch and sew. That is what she did. She did not go out to work even though her husband was earning as little as four dollars a month. Evenne trying to get by in the 1930s, four dollars a month was practically nothing. But she cannot afford to go out to work. Children also worked, but usually not for wages. Made itbor laws difficult for children under 14 to work for wages. Children sold newspapers, they shined shoes, they did odd jobs for the neighbors. Many of them scavenged along the Railroad Tracks looking for coal and other things that had fallen off freight trains. They sifted through dumps, looking through anything that might be edible. Sometimes they found other ways to make money. I interviewed a wonderful older city, kansas, who told me his story about making money as an adolescent during the early 1930s. Kansas still had prohibition and there were bootleggers that were there in the community, he knew who they were. You could sell bottles to the bootleggers for five cents a bottle. Totally illegal, but he knew he could earn five cents a bottle, bottless busy selling to the bootleggers. He also lived at the edge of town. Because he lived at the edge of town, he could see where the bootleggers hid the booze and their clients would come out and find it along the fence posts and take it home with them after they paid their money. . 50 forff would pay any bottle of booze that somebody had led him to. Selling the bottle to the bootleggers and then figuring out where they were hiding the bottles and letting the sheriff no. He was making a nice sideline for himself out of the bootlegging business. Wife was absolutely terrified to have me tell this story because she was afraid the bootleggers were going to come and get him, i thought that was probably not an issue this many years after the fact. If he had gotten caught, he would have been in big trouble. This was his way of making money in the 1930s. Other families managed in other ways. They doubled up with the part of the family that was least likely to get a victory from their home, inviting other people to live with them, sharing the costs of heat and food and housing. Families, even though they might be living in different locations, also shared the pot. I have grandparents who are living in town whose grandparents were still on the farm. The parents on the farm could not make a living so my grandparents who are making a relatively decent living by the standards of the day sent home a lot of their money to their families to try to help them keep their farms from going under. There were all sorts of ways that families cooperated together. At the other end of the spectrum, people left home. When theyen left home became part of the longterm unemployed. What you will notice about the 1930s is the divorce rate does not go up the divorce rate goes down a little bit. Divorces cost money. Goes up,onment rate with men who are unable to care for their families leaving home because they feel so ashamed, and thinking their families are better off without them. This picture shows what happened at the other end of the spectrum, and that is young people leaving home. There were as many as one million transients on the road in the 1930s. A very large percentage of those were young people under the age of 25 whose family cannot afford to care for them anymore. They hit the road. They spent a good deal of the 1930s wondering from place to place looking for jobs, looking for a handout, hoping that somewhere down the road things would be better. A lot of the times, it was not. On, does anybody have any questions you want to ask at this point . Lets move on to the problem of asking for help. If you were one of these people whose family was completely out of money, there were no jobs and lets say your extended family cannot help you. Your option was to ask a charity or to ask 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. There were a lot of people who never could bring themselves to go in and say i need help. We are not going to manage. This applied to men in particular. Men who are no longer able to support their families who are so ashamed that going into that Welfare Office was too hard for them. I had a number of women coming my husband when i go in to apply for aid but i did. Startednt the children going hungry, mothers tended to say enough of this and to go in and ask for help. That was often part of what it meant to be a mom during the 1930s was asking for help for your children. Get a 1933, before we federal presence and welfare, getting aid was a personal would not beys it later. It involved presenting yourself personally, filling out forms, going through a rigorous examination where people try to figure out if you are part of the worthy poor or not, if you are acceptable to get aid or not. Generally, a married man or a family would be considered appropriate for aid, single people were not because if they do not have someone else depending on them, local government was not going to help them. You had to be part of the working poor. You had to have a family. Then they would decide how much aid you would get. It was often not a great deal of a. Getting aid was a very public process. What happened after you got aid was your name went in the paper. This was an era when local government published every month their bills. 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. Everybody knew who in the community was getting aid, which meant you had to be willing to have the rest of everybody see your poverty in order to do this , which is another reason why people resisted asking for help. Also open tou were theyc criticism because generally had lists in the newspaper of the things you are not allowed to buy with your aid it was called relief. What you are not allowed to buy with your relief. You are not allowed to buy candy, you are not allowed to have a radio, you are not allowed to have 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. A lot of communities eventually got around this by only giving food to people instead of giving them money and letting them make their own decisions about how they used it. They began just giving people food just giving people things like lard and beans and flour and maybe salt pork if you are lucky. Carrots, theyes, could guarantee the communitys money was being spent on things the community approved of. The amount of money was small. 1933, about the most any community could give to an individual family per week was 2. 50. Most charities were out of money, most communities are out of money and 2. 50 is about it. ,s you work on your projects you will realize that is about as good as it got in 1933. Not a lot of money. A report from the postal Workers Organization said this was aid to the poor with a vengeance, meeting it was not enough money for most families to get by in any good way. Available to transients and recent arrivals. Most places had laws that said if you have not lived in a community for a year, they were not going to help you. They wanted aid to be available for home people only. If you arrived with your family needing help, they would say wait a year or Something Else that a lot of communities did was to hand the people a stack of sandwiches, put enough gas in their car to get them across the county line and send them on their way. This was illegal in most places, you were not supposed to hand off your relief burdens to other communities, but communities did it anyway. The earlydesperate by years of the 1930s and did not have a lot of money to spend on the poor. If you are not getting a lot of aid and you do not have a lot of money, you had to find a way to keep your head above water. Keeping your head above water. Ould be quite a trick a lot of communities, when they started running out of money, started giving families access to land instead. Had of communities undeveloped property, they can theyd to buy seeds,