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America: Boom, Bust, and Baseball Guide: The Family Faces the Great Depression
JAN 27, 2010
“We didn’t go hungry, but we lived lean” sums up the experience of many families during the 1930s.
“We didn’t go hungry, but we lived lean” sums up the experience of many families during the 1930s. For the vast majority of Americans, the Depression did not mean losing thousands of dollars in the stock market crash or pulling children out of fancy boarding schools, nor did it mean going on relief or living in a shantytown. In a typical family of the 1930s, the husband still had a job, although he probably took a pay cut to keep it, and the wife was still a homemaker. Life was not easy, but it usually consisted of “making do” rather than stark deprivation. Still the Depression caused a private kind of despair that often simmered behind closed doors-and for years after hard times ended. Caroline Bird called this psychological legacy the “invisible scar.”
The victims of the Depression were a varied lot. People who had always been poor were joined by formerly solid working-class and middle-class families who suddenly found themselves floundering in a society that no longer had a place for them. These proud people felt humiliated by their plight, and many blamed themselves for their misfortune. In a cartoon from the 1930s, a squirrel asks a man on a park bench why he did not save for a rainy day. “I did,” the man replies listlessly.
Downward mobility was especially hard for middle-class Americans. An unemployed man in Pittsburgh told the journalist Lorena Hickok, “Lady, you just can’t know what it’s like to have to move your family out of the nice house you had in the suburbs, part paid for, down into an apartment, down into another apartment, smaller and in a worse neighborhood, down, down, down, until finally you end up in the slums.” A wife broke into tears when her husband, a former white-collar worker, put on his first pair of overalls to go to work. After savings and credit had been exhausted, some families faced the humiliation of going on relief. Seeking assistance from the government hurt people’s pride and disrupted traditional patterns of turning to relatives, neighbors, churches, and mutual-aid societies in times of need, but sometimes there was no alternative.
One key to surviving the Depression was to maintain one’s self-respect. One man spent two years painting his father’s house (in fact, he painted it twice). Keeping up appearances, keeping life as close to normal as possible, was an essential strategy. Camaraderie and cooperation helped many families and communities survive as people found that they were all in the same boat. When a driver “accidentally” dumped a load of coal or oranges off the back of his truck, he was contributing to the welfare of the neighborhood. Hoboes developed an elaborate system of sidewalk chalk marks to tell one another at which back door they could get a meal, an old coat, or some spare change.
In many ways men and women experienced the Depression differently. Men were socialized to think of themselves as breadwinners; when they lost their jobs or saw their incomes reduced, they felt like failures because they couldn’t take care of their families. Women, on the other hand, saw their roles in the household enhanced as they juggled to make ends meet. Sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd noticed this trend in a study of Muncie, Indiana published in 1937: “The men, cut adrift from their usual routine, lost much of their sense of time and dawdled helplessly and dully about the streets; while in the homes the women’s world remained largely intact and the round of cooking, housecleaning, and mending became if anything more absorbing.” To put it another way, no housewife lost her job in the Depression.
Women made many contributions to family survival during the Depression years. With the national median annual income at $1,160, a typical married woman had $20 to $25 a week to feed, clothe, and provide shelter for her family, plus an occasional treat like going to the movies. Deflation had lowered the cost of living so that milk sold for 10 cents a quart and bread for 7 cents a loaf but housewives still had to watch every penny. Two friends split two pounds of hamburger for a quarter and took turns keeping the extra penny. Eleanor Roosevelt described the effects of the Depression on women’s lives: “It means endless little economies and constant anxiety for fear of some catastrophe such as accident orillness which may completely swamp the family budget.”
The Depression directly affected demographic trends in the 1930s. The marriage rate fell, as did the divorce rate, because people could not afford the legal expense of dissolving failed unions. The birth rate was the demographic factor most affected by hard times, as couples debated whether they could afford to raise a child. The birth rate had been falling steadily since 1800, but from 1930 to 1933 it dropped to a level that, if maintained, would have led to a population decline.
Hard times hit the nation’s 21 million young people aged sixteen to twenty-four especially hard. Although children often escaped the sense of bitterness and failure that gripped their elders, adolescents and young adults knew that making do usually meant doing without. The writer Maxine Davis, who traveled 10,000 miles in 1936 to interview the nation’s youth, described them as “runners, delayed at the gun…a generation robbed of time and opportunity, just as the Great War left the world its heritage of a lost generation.”
For such groups as African-Americans, farmers, and Mexican-Americans, times had always been hard and during the 1930s they just got a lot harder. As the poet Langston Hughes noted, “The Depression brought everybody down a peg or two. And the Negroes had but few pegs to fall.” Farm families struggled with declining agricultural prices, foreclosures, and in the Midwest, a terrible drought that contributed to the Dust Bowl migrations immortalized in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939). In the West perhaps a third of the Mexican- American population, mainly immigrants, returned to Mexico when work ran out and local relief agencies refused to extend assistance.
Almost all our impressions of the 1930s are black and white, in part because widely distributed photographs taken by New Deal photographers etched this stark visual image on the popular consciousness. And yet the Depression was not on everyone’s mind twenty-four hours a day. As the novelist Josephine Herbst observed, there was “an almost universal liveliness that countervailed universal suffering.” The home once again became a center of leisure activity, with an evening by the radio or reading aloud from books providing a cheap form of family entertainment. Columnist Russell Baker recalled a final Depression-era mainstay: “Talking was the Great Depression pastime. Unlike the movies, talk was free.”
