This afternoon, we are going to be starting our discussion of the Great Depression and what were going to be doing today is talking about how the Great Depression affected ordinary people. Were going to talk about sort of the nuts and bolts of the situation and the things that people would have experienced in their everyday lives if they were seriously affected by the problems of that decade. Now, i dont normally use images like this, but im using this one for a reason. Grandma survived the Great Depression because her supply chain was local and she knew how to do stuff. Thats a really important concept, and were going to 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 be talking about, were going to start with an overview of what the problems of the Great Depression were for ordinary people. Sort of the depths of the problem. Well talk about how families tried to cope in terms of their work strategies, about the process of asking for help in the case of a disaster like this. Were going to talk about keeping families fed. What did people actually do to try to put food on the table in the middle of a collapse like this . Well talk about how it changed americas food habits, and then well come to sort of an interesting question, did anybody starve . What was the real sort of impact of the Great Depression as far as mortality went . But lets start with the grim results of the economic disaster. The Great Depression was by far the worst economic collapse that the United States has ever experienced. The United States had had depressions before. Some of them had been very, very steep depressions. They had been very serious situations. But the United States had 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 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. 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 be looking at those four years before any sort of major federal aid kicked in. During those four years, the economy basically tanked. By 1933, there was 25 unemployment. That means that 25 of working americans had no job whatsoever. There was also 25 underemployment. Underemployment means that people with a College Degree could only find jobs sweeping floors. It meant that people who wanted to work full time could only get jobs working parttime. It meant that people had jobs but those jobs were paying less than they previously had. All sorts of School Teachers saw their incomes cut by 50 in the first four years of the Great Depression. All of those circumstances are underemployment. So 25 of the population was completely unemployed. Another 25 was underemployed. Now, those numbers dont include people who technically were earning nothing 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 here in iowa who put their pigs on the train to go to chicago, hoping that they would get a check back. That their pigs would sell and they would have some income. Unfortunately, a lot of those farmers instead of getting a check got a bill. It cost more to ship their pigs to chicago than those pigs were worth. Thats not underemployment. Thats not unemployment. It wasnt counted. Other things that werent counted were selfemployed people who were earning next to nothing. Lots and lots of people let their insurance policies lapse. So there were Insurance Agents who had no money coming in. There were doctors and dentists who had no money coming in. You know, if someone had a whole list of bills in front of them, they would choose to pay for food, for shelter before they would choose to pay the doctor, because after all, he couldnt put the baby back. And so if that was the bill that was sitting there to be paid, the doctor didnt get paid. So there are all sorts of people earning no income who were not getting paid. And the problem was, this wasnt just a year or two. The conditions stayed terrible from 1929 to 1940. On average during that period, unemployment was 20 . Unemployment was not going to go really below 20 until we get into the leadup to world war ii, to american 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 a bank, you probably lost it. Because many banks closed in 1931, 32, and 33. If a bank closed in that era, your money was gone forever. So banks closed. And if you wanted to ask for help, it to ask for help, it was really difficult to do so. Because a lot of city and county governments, a lot of charities also went bankrupt in that time period. And even, you know, 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. So receiving aid generally involved proving that you were a part of the worthy poor. Not just needy. Being needy was not enough. That meant that 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. So there are a lot of single 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 by local people be construed as their part. So people who got aid were respectable widows, respectable disabled people. Orphans. People who were temporarily disabled because of something that could in no way be considered their fault. And respectability usually meant going to church, not drinking. Not living outside of conventional morality in your community. So just being poor was not enough to get you help in the 1930s. Another issue to keep in mind 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 a sudden, they didnt have a job. All of a sudden, they werent bringing any 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 necessarily exactly 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. And those people who fall into poverty were going to discover they had some Serious Problems considered to people who had been poor all along. Another concept that you need to remember when thinking about the 1930s is shame. Now the reason why this is incredibly important is that people who had grown up in the era prior to the 1930s generally believed that if you were unemployed it was your own fault. If someone couldnt find a job it was their own fault. If you were capable, of a good moral standard, you should be able to find a job. But the thing was, they had never encountered a depression this deep. There were no jobs. It didnt matter if you were morally uprighting. It didnt matter if you worked hard. It didnt matter that you went to church on sunday, so people felt terribly ashamed. They felt like this problem was personal to them and that too is going to have a serious impact on their experience of the 1930s because theyre going to be resistant to asking for help. Theyre ashamed to ask for help. And there were many, many people who went through the experience, who never got over it. Who spent the rest of their lives feeling terribly ashamed about 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. Now, if youre part of a family that was facing a situation like this, you had to figure out how youre going to manage. You had to figure out how youre going to manage if the bread earner in your family was either completely without a job or seriously unemployed and one of the ways is that women go out to work. Now, it was very difficult for women to find jobs in the 1930s. It was not the usual path that married women took in the 1930s. Africanamerican women had often had jobs after marriage because of the generally low pay that their husbands got. But most white women in the United States once they got married got out of the workforce. Well, the 1930s creates a situation where a lot of the women have to find jobs. But most of the jobs they find are very poorly paid and in traditionally female occupations. And, you know, some of those jobs saw declining income across the 30s. Those women who are schoolteachers a lot of them saw their pay cut by 50 . And not only that, by 1933, a lot of towns were giving teachers ious, telling them when we have money again well pay you. The problem was they needed to eat right then, so sometimes they had to trade their ious at a discount to someone whod give them money. Other women did things like work in laundries for 10 cents an hour or clean homes for a dollar or a day or less. A lot of women took in boarders, meaning youd cook and clean for them and theyd pay you for their home. The best you could do is Something Like my grandmother did, she worked for 25 cents an hour, working till late at the night. She got an hour off at lunch and no breaks. That was considered a really good job so there was no way that she was going to complain about the low wages and the long hours. Some women were very fortunate and had secretarial positions and a lot of a lot of what im telling you today is based on research i did in kansas about the 1930s. And one of the kansas congressman in about 1933 got a really irate letter from one of his constituents. It was a man writing in and in a really 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 employ a man, but i dont know any man men who can type and do stenography. I have to hire a woman. And so women who had special skills were able to keep their jobs through the 1930s. But most women who worked had very low wages, working very long hours. In positions that largely men didnt want. Things like doing laundry, things like cooking for other people, cleaning for other people. Now, it was a whole 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 if you had children it was your responsibility to be at home and to take care of them. And in fact, one of the women who i interviewed about her experiences told me, mothers were frowned on then if their children were put with babysitters so i simply did what i had do after my children came. She stayed home, she took care of them. She did not go out to work. Another woman told me that she would have loved to go out to work, but the problem was her clothes 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 hiring a babysitter, id 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 sew. So thats what she did. She stayed at home, she patched, and sewed and did not go out to work even though her husband at some times was earning as little as 4 a month. So imagine trying to get by even in the 1930s on 4 a month was practically nothing. But she couldnt afford to go out to work, she didnt have the clothes. Children also worked but usually not for wages. Child labor laws made it difficult for children under the age of 14 to work for wages so they sold newspapers, they shined shoes. They did jobs odd jobs for the neighbors. Many of them scavenged along the Railroad Tracks looking for coal and other things that had fallen off the trains. They sifted through dumps looking for anything that might be edible or usable. I interviewed a really wonderful older man in dodge city, kansas, who told me his store 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 and you could sell bottles to the bootleggers for 5 cents a bottle. Totally illegal but he knew he could earn 5 cents a bottle doing this so he was busy washing bottles, selling them to the bootleggers and he lived at the edge of town. And because he lived at the edge of town, he could see where the bootleggers hid the booze and then their clients would find it along the fence posts and take it home with tell after they paid their money. Well, the sheriff would pay 50 cents for any bottle of booze that somebody had led him to. And so this guy was selling the bottles to the bootleggers. Then figuring out where they were hiding the bottles and then letting the sheriff know. And so he was making a really nice little sideline for himself out of the bootlegging business. His wife was absolutely terrified to have me tell this story because she was afraid the bootleggers were going to come and get him. But i thought it wasnt an issue this many years after the fact. But if he had gotten caught he would have been in big trouble. Other families managed in other ways. They doubled up with the family that 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 costs of heat and food and housing. Other families, even though they might be living in different locations, also shared the costs. I had grandparents who were 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 to help them keep their farms from going under. There were all sorts of ways that families cooperated together. Then at the other end of the spectrum, people left home. A lot of men left home when they became part of a long term unemployed. The divorce rate does not go up. The divorce rate goes down a little bit. But divorces cost money. The abandonment rate goes up with men who are unable to care for their families leaving home because they feel so ashamed and thinking that their families are better off without them. What this picture shows is what happened at the other end of the spectrum and that was young people leaving home. There were as many as a million transients on the road in the middle of the 1930s. And a very large percentage of those were young people under the age of 25. Whose families simply could not afford to care for them anymore and so they hit the road. And spent a good deal of the 1930s wandering from place to place, looking for jobs, looking for a handout. Hoping that somewhere down the road things would be better. Unfortunately a lot of the time it was not. All right. Before i move on, does anybody anybody have any questions that you want to ask at this point . All right. 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 to be had, and lets say your extended family could not help you, your option then was to ask for help, 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. Were not going to manage. And in fact, a lot of this applied to men in particular. Men who were no longer able to support their families who were so deeply ashamed of themselves that going in to that Welfare Office was just too hard for them. Whats interesting is i had a number of women tell me my husband wouldnt go in for to apply for aid but i did. 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 later. It involved filling out the form, going through a really rigorous examination where people tried to figure out if youre part of the worthy poor or not. Whether you were acceptable to get aid or not. Generally, a married man or a family would be considered appropriate for aid. Single people generally were not. Because if they didnt someone else depending on them, local governments 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. Its often not a great deal of aid, but getting aid was a very 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. And 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 that you were also open to public criticism because they generally had lists in the newspaper as well of the things that you werent allowed to buy with your aid. It was called relief. What you werent allowed to buy with your relief. You werent allowed to buy pop, candy, a radio, you cant 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. Now, a lot of communities eventually got around this by only giving food to people instead of making giving them money and letting them make their own decision about how they used it. They began just giving people food. Things like lard, beans and flour. Maybe salt pork if you were lucky. Just the very basics. Potatoes, cabbages, carrots. That way they could guarantee that the communitys