Everyday Living
The Great Depression, the worst economic crisis in U.S. history, affected almost all Americans and their families to some degree. Only the very rich avoided having to make lifestyle changes. At least 25 percent of the American work-force was unemployed by late 1932. Those who managed to keep their jobs saw their salaries decline by 40 percent and their work hours cut back. Prices of goods had also dropped but not enough to offset unemployment and salary cuts. Frequently, a wage earner found himself supporting relatives who had lost their jobs or helping struggling friends.
Families did their best to carry on and keep their lives as close to normal as possible. They devised ways to "cut corners," "make do," and "keep up appearances." Cutting corners and making do meant reducing purchases of goods at stores and growing or making daily-use items at home. Families canned vegetables and fruit from their gardens. Clothing was sewn on a foot-operated (nonelectric) sewing machine or purchased at secondhand stores. A favorite way to "keep up appearances" was to paint the house; a fresh coat of paint on the outside said all was well inside.
The new game of miniature golf was an inexpensive form of entertainment during the Depression. ©Minnesota Historical Society/Corbis Corporation. Reproduced by permission.With almost no extra money to budget for entertainment, Americans needed their leisure-time activities to be cheap or free. Popular at-home activities included card games, board games, puzzles, listening to the radio, reading, and having friends over. Children often spent after-school hours and summer days designing and building their own toys. Scrap lumber, orange crates, or discarded wheels from roller skates could be the raw materials for exciting construction projects. Away from home, entertainment included school and church socials, movies, dances, sporting events such as community baseball games, driving about, and a new source of fun rapidly growing in popularity—miniature golf.
The Depression caused changes in family structures: Marriages were postponed, fewer babies were born, and households combined to aid those out of work. Many teenagers stayed in school and lived at home longer because there were no jobs. On the other hand, some teens, feeling they were a burden to their families, left home and hit the road or the railways. Many Americans depended on strong family ties to see them through the hard times. For others the economic pressures were overwhelming and broke their families apart.
The first excerpts in this chapter portray family life during the Depression; they come from Volume Two of Stories and Recipes of the Great Depression of the 1930s, published in 1993 by Rita Van Amber of Menomonie, Wisconsin. Van Amber, who lived through the Depression, remembers how her family of ten children dealt positively with daily hardships: "We didn't know we were poor." With the help of her daughter, Janet, Van Amber has compiled three volumes of recipes and remembrances of the 1930s.
The second excerpt, taken from a 1935 pamphlet by Kingsley Davis titled Youth in the Depression, describes the problems facing youths and the public education system during the Depression. Whereas twenty-first-century American students can count on attending public school from kindergarten through twelfth grade, consistency in public education was not a given in the United States during the 1930s. Public school funding came largely from property taxes, and schools experienced their bleakest years from 1932 to 1936, when a considerable number of Americans could no longer pay property taxes on their homes. The hardest hit were schools in poor districts and rural districts. School budgets were cut in most districts. The budget cuts resulted in shortened school years or school days, lower teacher salaries, teacher firings, inadequate funding for books and supplies, cuts in the number and variety of classes, and larger class sizes. A significant number of schools, particularly rural schools, closed altogether.
The third excerpt comes from "Till the River Rises," a chapter in a book titled These Are Our Lives, compiled by writers of the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) and published in 1939. Americans who were barely making it economically before the Depression were the most severely affected in the 1930s. This group included factory workers, who were constantly susceptible to job loss; coal miners; poor farmers; black Americans; and the elderly. They sometimes became homeless and had nowhere to go except to a nearby Hooverville, a shantytown of temporary dwellings. There they constructed a crude shelter from scrap metal, cardboard, or lumber and survived as best they could. "Till the River Rises" is a fascinating look at life in a Hooverville.
This is the complete article, containing 753 words
(approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page).
