During the 1930’s the United States suffered through a deflationary depression after the 1929 stock market crash. Wages were cut, jobs were lost, and many families endured serious economic hardship. Here is how they tightened their belts, got creative, and began surviving the Great Depression together:
Surviving the Great Depression
Most American families during the 1930’s felt the economic pinch as the US plummeted into the difficult decade named the Great Depression. The Dust Bowl, which was a drought afflicting many central plains and mid-west states, added to many family’s misery. It is unpleasant to run across mentions of starvation and the loss of children in first-hand accounts from the period. However, families pulled together and weathered the difficult decade with a lot of strength and integrity. My own grandparents were teenagers through the Great Depression who helped their parents run farms and bring in income. It was possible to get by if everyone worked together!
Fleeing to the Countryside
Most city dwellers and those living in town were only one generation removed from agricultural life. By 1932, when the Depression was in full-swing, there was an exodus of urban families to rural properties they were able to buy at foreclosure prices. The foreclosed-upon and displaced rural families joined grandparents or extended family members on their farms. It required everyone working, including the children, to keep gardens in high production and the farm generating enough profit to pay any existing mortgage plus property taxes.
Increasing Garden Production
In the 1930’s, even with falling food prices, it was still cheaper to grow your own food. Families often had stores of seeds they could use to start or expand their rural gardens. Children did not merely do the lightest outdoor work; they often engaged in strenuous labor in the crop rows alongside their parents.
Livestock Ownership Saved Lives
Nearly every farm had chickens and most had a pig that was fattened for harvest every year. A few kept a milk cow. Those who had adult breeding stock in the early 1930’s during the time when large numbers of families were fleeing to the countryside were lucky. They were able to sell and barter the offspring they produced to pay the mortgages and taxes required to keep their land. New families, who had just purchased foreclosure farms where all the livestock had been auctioned off, were in need of their own food-producing animals.
What About those who Stayed in Town?
Growing your own vegetables was considered both necessary and wise. Plowing up the sunniest portion of the yard became common. Physical work was honorable and a beautiful home garden was something to be proud of! Many Americans fell in love with home gardening and never stopped. (Those who did not care for vegetable gardening eventually found themselves cajoled into it during the Victory Gardening years of WWII in the early 1940’s.)
Surviving the Great Depression: Practical Skills Needed
Whether they stayed in town or moved to the country, families began to cut their expenses as much as possible. Practical and old-fashioned ways of doing things became desirable.
Uncommon Ingenuity
Both men and women found opportunities to display cleverness and devise functional, inexpensive ways to complete necessary tasks. A woman who could keep her family clean, clothed, and fed using whatever was at hand, including what her own hands foraged, gathered, or produced from her garden, was cherished. Men who could tinker an invention into existence to make life easier were prized.
Homemade and Handmade
During a deflationary depression, the prices of goods fall but there is not enough money in circulation to buy them. What little coinage or currency a family had went to paying mortgages and property taxes so they did not lose their shelter and the land feeding them. Whatever was left over had to cover the necessities of life, however far they could stretch.
The 1930’s Grocery Store
Was there no food during the Great Depression? There was – the stores were full – but the people had little money to spend. Grocery stores had wide offerings, including many name brand products we would recognize today. Families had to be careful with their spending, since up to 25% of the working adult population may be unemployed, so they bought mostly basic ingredients. Flour, baking powder, baking soda (sometimes called soda or bicarbonate), salt, and produce were the most common purchases plus milk, butter, eggs and meat if you were not producing your own.
When the Worst Happened
Families who lost their homes and farms completely often migrated to other states, looking for agricultural or field work. They lived out of their cars, tents, or shanty towns in difficult conditions. These families faced truly difficult times. (Books such as The Grapes of Wrath attempt to capture the painful plight of families displaced during the Dust Bowl who had to migrate for work.) Some of the most heart-wrenching images from the Great Depression depict these poor souls in their camps.
The Crash of 1937
The Great Depression spans the entire decade of the 1930’s. It began with the October 29, 1929 stock market crash (the kick-off event) and only ended after WWII broke out and demand for US goods and exports finally brought in a flood of money. While the stock market “bottom” of the Great Depression arrived in 1932, most families felt that 1933 and 1934 were the worst years they had to survive. There was a time of recovery in 1935-36 and then another stock market crash in September 1937 that frightened the populace into once again tightening their belts. The gardening, canning, animal husbandry, and food production skills learned earlier in the depression had not yet been abandoned. A quick return to austere thriftiness saved most families.
Aftershocks of Surviving the Great Depression
The downturn in 1937 that lasted into the early 1940’s concluded the Great Depression decade that left so many Americans traumatized, they engaged in cash hoarding and pack ratting of household items for the rest of their lives. Others were forced to repeatedly eat specific foods so often that they experienced food exhaustion and refused to eat those certain foods forever after. (My grandmother ate a lot of fried bologna ends through the 1930’s and after that she would not touch bologna, which I saw her continue to refuse through my childhood and adult years.)
Could It Happen Again?
What skills would we need if something like this happened again? Any ability to provide the necessities of life from raw materials would be useful: vegetable gardening, cooking from scratch, baking with only basic ingredients, sewing, soap making, carpentry, animal husbandry, and the common arts. Today many of these thing are charming and relaxing hobbies but they are also beautiful skills we could set our hands and minds to learning, just in case!
The Common Arts are the skills that provide for basic human needs and include agriculture, fabric-making/weaving, cooking, architecture, metalworking, woodworking, stone masonry, navigation, hunting, animal husbandry, and medicine.
Many of the historic details in this article were gleaned from the first-hand account of Benjamin Roth whose personal diary from the 1930’s has been published as a book titled The Great Depression: A Diary. (Afflink)
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