As a kid, I remember asking older family members what life was like during the Depression, and they pretty much said it was a lot of hustling, gardening, doing everything yourself, etc. They also stated that they ate a lot of staples they could buy in bulk like pasta, root vegetables (especially potatoes), cabbage, rice, etc and ate more organ meats like liver. Like, I get it, it sounds tough, but still doesn't sound too different from my own lifestyle when I experienced unemployment/underemployment and couldn't access any supports. I ate pretty much the same staples, walked everywhere and hauled groceries because I didn't have a car, and worked very physical construction jobs to get income. Is that pretty much what the Great Depression was like?
Contemporary politics and culture wars are off-topic, both in posts and comments.
This is just a friendly reminder that /r/askhistory is for questions and discussion of events in history prior to 01/01/2000.
The reminder is automatically placed on all new posts in this sub.
For contemporary issues, please use one of the many other subs on Reddit where such discussions are welcome.
If you see any interjection of modern politics or culture wars in this sub, please use the report button so the mod team can investigate.
Thank you.
See rules for more information.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
Average wage during the depression collapsed. Not just because so many were unemployed that brought down the average, but because with so many people competing for so few jobs employers had no incentive to offer higher wages. People would take what they could get.
So even being semi employed, most people were not getting paid enough to have a good living. Costs of goods fluctuated during the Great Depression, but generally wages for most people simply could not afford the basics for a family. Even a single person would struggle to
The Great Depression was bad enough that at the beginning of WWII the U.S. military had problems with recruits being underweight because they hadn’t gotten enough food for a decade. That was so serious that they lobbied congress to pass the school lunch program.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2010/04/too_fat_to_fight_obesity_and_n.html
Yeah, if you go a couple days without eating today you can go to an emergency room and they'll give you a turkey sandwich that could have been served at a nicer hotel in 1935.
Not many Americans starved to death during the Great Depression but the food insecurity was on a level not commonly seen today. My grandfather all sorts of weird nutrient deficiencies not commonly seen today and his mother was employed the entire time (his father died in the 20s).
Have you ever eaten hospital food????
Like a thick cut turkey breast & gouda sandwich on a brioche bun with sides and dessert, or some cheap deli meat turkey on white bread?
The latter. No chance that'd be at a fancy restaurant in 1935. If anything the food back then was more artisanal, so it's more like a cheap sandwich back than would be considered fancy today.
Also why don't people just go to a food bank if they're hungry? Assuming you have those in the USA.
If not, where do people go for free food if they really can't afford it? Church?
(Actually many food banks in the UK are churches)
Food banks are empty because so many people are using them. Right now, you can get 3 days worth of food once a month in some places, because that is all that they have. More people in need plus fewer people donating (because everyone has less right now) plus rising food costs = less to go around.
Where are you that food banks are empty? A big city? Poor area?
I've never known a food bank go empty. The UK government even funds them. It's not like it's just people giving food. And then churches fund them with donations. And people give extra food. You won't get anything amazing, but you'll get basics. Beans, rice, pasta, a small amount of fresh meat, uht milk, potatoes, tinned meat, tinned veggies, eggs, etc. it's nothing special, but since we also have excellent welfare compared to most other developed nations, it's good.
For example, UK disability benefits give more than in Germany, and things are cheaper in the UK. Disability is also way easier to get in the UK.
Please re-read your posts. You stated you are in the UK. You stated UK government funds your food bank for basics, and churches supplement that. You also stated that the UK welfare system is excellent.
That's all great for the UK.
This post and most comments are talking about the US.
S. Not K.
The US federal government does fuck all for food banks. And state budgets are being cut. The federal welfare system has had extreme budget cuts.
So yes. In several places in the US, the food banks are empty, church food pantries are empty, and people stand in line all day to be turned away because there is nothing left.
In today's world if you have parental rights for kids you could qualify for food stamps. Or if you are disabled or elderly. You can qualify for them if employed with children but earning too little income and sometimes if collecting unemployment.
At the start of the depression not so. Food banks are similar in the U.S. but not all churches have food banks. In the past you had to be a member to get church assistance and with something the size of the great depression the whole system was over stressed. The salvation army has been doing this since the late 19th century.
Also they did have the sort of cheap white bread we have today, perhaps with fewer preservatives.
Back then as well as today if you live in an large urban area you could get to a soup kicthen but that is just one meal a day. In a rural area not so much.
Not in any way arguing with the idea that nutrition was terrible at the start of WWII, but I’m curious if it was notably worse than in previous decades, or if that was just the point at which the government realized the extent of the problem and what had to be done to fix it. This was only ~50 years after the dawn of modern medicine, after all.
People with children who used infant formula back then sometimes cut the amount given with water due to lack of money. Also if mother is not eating well the quality of her milk will suffer. In addition in the south there was beriberi(lack of thiamine ) because they ate so much cornmeal. Corn is actually a rich source of thiamine but it needs to be cooked under base conditions to release it(i.e. a Tortilla with lye not Cornbread). The midwest had goiter due to lack of iodine.
This is the time period(1920ies-1940ies) when a lot of those nutritional problems were discovered and also were starting to be address. Nutritional deficiencies were once a major cause of mental retardation and disability but with programs like school lunch and requirements to fortify certain foods it was solved.
I grew up in a part of the US that, for various reasons, wasn't *as* bad off as some of the rest of the US. My grandparents still never threw anything away, even into the 90s.
My grandparents also had a fundamental cynicism about certain things that seemed odd to me as a child of the prosperous 90s. They didn't trust banks or debt, didn't invest or try to get a bigger house or better car or any debt-leveraging purchases like that, and they were always incredibly frugal and careful with money. As if, any minute, everything they'd worked for could crumble to nothing.
In a sense it is a bit like modern day periods of unemployment or uncertainty, but imagine that almost everyone you know is going through that. Also, a lot of the social safety net that exists now for people in this situation didn't exist then. So if you lost your job, it wasn't "go on Unemployment for a few months and live hand to mouth to make that work", it was "starve next week". Not to mention the compounding of multiple issues, so you could lose your job at the plant today, think "well at least I have savings," and then turn around to find the bank failed and that savings is gone. And then think, "well I can always go home to the farm in Oklahoma" only to find the family farm in the middle of the Dust Bowl now. (Not that most people were dealing with all those things, but as an example.)
When my paternal grandparents (who'd been through the Depression as adults) died in the 70's, they had closets full of carefully washed TV dinner trays, and boxes and bins of all sorts of odds and ends. While they weren't super frugal, they definitely spent very carefully. But even though Grandaddy had and kept a good job through the Depression - they were one generation removed from hill farmers. They'd grown up poor and they'd heard tales from their parents and grandparents of previous hard times.
That's a factor I think many Americans don't give enough weight to. It's not just having lived through the Depression, it's generational memory. The Great Depression was, to many who lived through it (especially rural folks), just the latest in a long string of hard times. Something incomprehensible to many modern Americans because we've never had anything remotely like the many financial panics the US saw in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
I was telling a “frugal grandma” story to a friend once. Mine was born in 1903. Country thrift was a way of life even before the depression for her.
The story I was relating to him involved her saving Ziploc bags and reusing them.
He topped me by saying that his grandmother would actually mend Ziploc bags with scotch tape and reuse them.
Even if your farm wasn't in the Dust Bowl a very large number of farms had been indebted (for investments) during or bought with debt during the good times of WW1 so with banks crashing and agricultural prices plummeting a lot of people lost their farms too. Farming was in trouble even before the roaring 20s really. In fact in your example the reason you were not working on the farm in Oklahoma (or wherever) was probably that the farm was in trouble already.
"I ate pretty much the same staples, walked everywhere and hauled groceries because I didn't have a car, and worked very physical construction jobs to get income. Is that pretty much what the Great Depression was like?
For a fairly large segment of the population, that was pretty much what it was like. However, for other large segments of the population, it was worse, and you would be lucky if you could even buy potatoes.
Few people who say they are depression era are! Certainly, no one alive today has firsthand remembrance of those times.
I'm almost 70, and my parents were born in 1917. They both turned 12 in 1929, and the depression started that October.
My mom never said much, but they had nothing. Food and shelter were all they thought about. There were no jobs. Her father had no work then. He had some brief jobs with family members that didn't last. They lived on the kindness of others. They knew what being hungry was.
My dad's father was killed at work in June of 1929. My dad would have outbursts about it all his life. You learned not to ask or remind him about the situation else you would eat the back of his hand. He talked about people starving and other stuff that was part of his experience. Keep in mind there was no Social Security for widows and orphans back then. Starvation was real! So was suicide.
My parents were married in 1938, my mother lost her job because "married women don't work, there aren't enough jobs. It's your husband's job to take care of you." My father worked in a factory and went hunting or fishing for their food after work. If he didn't bring something home they didn't eat. They lived in a small rural area, so he could.
I remember going fishing with him in the 1970s. We got into a bunch of eels. He freaked. "Cut your line he yelled, don't bring them in the boat." He went on to tell me about not being able to catch anything one week, except eels. Eels are fatty and messy to handle. He's said they both thought they were nasty but better than being hungry. It was the only time I remember him being able to talk about depression ear, without smacking me.
To say it wasn't so bad if you were self-sufficient is ignoring reality.
Eta: I remember looking at my mom's family, the men were mostly over 6' tall and under 140 pounds. They thought they were well fed then. If you have never seen a grown man cry over a piece of dessert and I think you're missing something.
No, these people are long gone, I'm referring to memories from when I was kid.
I'm in my 50s and grew up with my depression era grandparents. They certainly carried the same mindset because they never escaped poverty. We had a big garden, foraged and hunted, went to town once a month for supplies, and never went to the doctor.
We lived in an abandoned house for free in exchange for being present to scare off troublemakers (lots of equipment on the farm where we lived). There was never quite enough food, and we ate every bit that was on our plates. To leave anything was sinful.
My grandpa's moved out at age 16 and became a farm laborer. He didn't earn much but had room and board. He stopped going to school in 6th grade to work more on his dad's farm, which we lost in the mid 30s. My grandma was the oldest of 13, and married at age 17 to escape that hell. I'm not sure she went very far in school though she could read and write.
When the war came, things turned around but they had so many kids they were always poor.
My grandpa's brother bought an old model T for $5 in the early 30s but tires were in short supply, as was gas. The roads were too terrible to drive on for most of the year.
My grandpa said they were so poor they didn't really notice the depression until they lost their farm.
Anecdotally, how it hit really depended on where you lived. My mom's grandparents were all dirt-poor rural farm workers in the Upper Midwest (some itinerant farmers, some hired help). Starvation was never an issue, because it was pretty easy to have a garden, raise livestock, and/or hunt. (Hunger and poor diet were issues, but that had been the case for people in their situation for generations.) If anything, the problem was the opposite: all of a sudden they had tons of food that couldn't really be sold for good money anywhere because demand and the foreign exports market collapsed. People who had loans suddenly couldn't pay them, and you definitely couldn't afford a new pair of shoes or any goods outside basic necessities.
That said, for a lot of farmers the Great Depression really started in the early 20s, when the end of World War I caused there to be much less food need (and thus, prices to drop precipitously). The Roaring Twenties were basically an urban phenomenon.
An issue with the great depression was the uncertainty especially with bank failures. If you saved 100 dollars from your job and put it in a bank. The bank could belly up the next week. Many companies were also going under during that time. With a decreased amount of social safety nets in pre new deal USA, it was tough even with semi employment because of the lack of a social safety net. When the us admin attempted to add more social safety nets to encourage savings in banks and small business investment large business owners attempted to overthrow the government. This was widely known by the populace who were lower middle class and lower class that the government can’t help them too much. This is a big reason why that generation did so much on their own, the government wasn’t allowed to help.
Under FDR the government helped a lot. WPA jobs and the TVA made a huge difference to many people.
The Business Plot likely didn't exist beyond some party talk.
The quality of life - even for the extremely wealthy - went down.
One side of my family was quite well off. The other side was not. The well off family lost ~50% of their net worth between 1929-1931.
For them, that meant losing household staff, going 3 years vs 2 years between new cars, and shuttering the vacation house. They had to close one of their businesses, and sell another. By 1936 their net worth had rebounded, and they were able to reopen their shuttered business. To read their letters, you would think that they were functionally bankrupt.
On the other side, “we didn’t have any money but we weren’t poor”. They took in borders to make ends meet, and for a long time, no one got any new clothes. Basically, they had (functionally) nothing, so they didn’t really lose anything.
The great depression isn't called ``the mild melancholy''. First, saying ``if you had a job it wasn't that bad'' is like saying ``famine isn't that bad if you have at least two meals a day''. The point is that few people had steady jobs, and even those who had a job were uncertain about keeping it. Your relatives seem to have gotten by relatively well-off. For others, it was eating at all that was the issue, not eating well.
When you were unemployed, you worked construction jobs -- so you weren't actually unemployed. In a depression, no one is building anything. People would have killed for very physically demanding jobs, but those were already taken. In the 1920's, most jobs were physical-- agriculture, factory work, construction, domestic laborers (i.e., ``maids''). There weren't many ``white collar positions''. If you are the only one in your family broke, you can ask for handouts. When your whole town is broke, there isn't anyone to ask. Imagine a city where the fortunate lived like you did when you were underemployed, and the unfortunate had literally nothing.
It wasn't equally bad for everyone. But the Dust Bowl wiped out a whole state.
People everywhere double down and lived with one another. In my father's family, everybody lived under one roof, four brothers and the parents and everybody did what they had to do to bring money to the house to put food on the table. Where I live in New England it was a double whammy of the textile industry phasing out and In the middle of depression the largest of the textile employers 36,000 people folded. The writing was long on the wall in they were not at peak employment by the time it closed and declared bankruptcy on Christmas Eve 1936, nice timing guys. My father and his cousins decamped into the mill towns of Massachusetts instead to corral hours and save income that they could bring home during the weekend. My father's college career, he would have been the first of the immigrant family, was cut short and he never did get to college. They had their own house a multi-family as was the rule in the day. This is how you got your start in life and everybody was under that roof at one time or another including myself born in 1953 in the shadow of all of this.
Being a "poor American" in the 1930s was a hell of a lot harder than being a "poor American" today, even with today's problems regarding massively overpriced housing, healthcare and educational costs.
Have you ever seen old-timey cartoons showing "hobos" or other poor people, wearing clothes with obvious patches? Such as (for example) a man wearing brown pants, but with a big pink-and-yellow flowered patch covering a hole in the butt? In the cartoons, such sartorial disasters were played for laughs, but there was actual truth behind the joke: clothing (and cloth in general) was so much more expensive compared to today, it was indeed realistic to show things like "I have a big hole in my pants, and not only can I not afford to buy a new pair, I can't even afford a patch made of matching cloth. I have to cover the hole with any piece of cloth I can find, even if it doesn't come close to matching the original garment."
My family is from Oklahoma. My grandfather grew up in the GD and it marked him his whole life. He never trusted banks. Had a survival mindset until his end of days. Lived in a tin roof house without running water or AC. Coal burning stove. Worked enough land to have food year round. Raised chickens, pigs and cattle.
Having enough “staples” to eat would have been a grand luxury to a lot of people.
There was no social safety net in those days. No Social Security, no SNAP, no housing or energy assistance, no unemployment benefits.
In an agricultural area suffering from the twin hammers of economic depression and the Dust Bowl, things could get dire pretty fast. If you couldn’t grow crops and couldn’t buy food, you just went without or left.
To be fair, Oklahoma (and surrounding regions) was hit the absolute worst. A working class laborer in the Mid-West might have it a bit better and be able to get some odd jobs, afford some staples, and, at least not suffer from the dust bowl.
My grandfather was a well driller during the depression. No one had money to put in a well and he did a WPA gig. Also, he was a great fisherman and hunter. He had four kids and a wife with cancer. He did what he had to do to get by. He was a great guy.
Remember the people who had it really tough died or due to lack of nutrients had fertility greatly impacted, or worked vert dangerous jobs due to lack of options and perished from workplace injury. Or just maimed in a time when that meant marriage and procreation was extremely unlikely
So those that survived and had kids aren't necessarily a good representative sample
One thing not mentioned was the fact that losing the banks didn't just mean losing your own personal money but also jobs. Employer then as now had bank accounts and if those failed the company would be unable to pay its employees, leases, invoices or purchase supplies.
Also being semi-employed does not do much good when everyone is too poor to buy your goods or services.
My great grandparents did survive the great depression but they owned their own land, grew food and raised farm animals for their own use and grew their own cotton for cash. They also hunted and fished as well as picked berries in the wild. And even then they were not rich people and most people were not that level of not in debt or self sufficient.
It depended on where you were. For anyone in the dustbowl it was life destroying. People in the financial sector in New York, life destroying. For most it was just hard times, not necessarily desperate times.
But Texas didn't have it as bad during those specific years. Our bad times tended to happen with droughts that would close down farms and ranches and cause an influx of poor rural folks to the cities with nothing.
Oil kept Texas afloat when the rest of the nation was really hurting. The reason it didn't help Oklahoma was because of the dustbowl.
My maternal grandparents were both from very poor families during the depression, especially my grandfather. He grew up in a one room hut my great grandfather built with no indoor plumbing or electricity. They grew/raised most of their food, and sold some when they went into town. My grandfather's clothes were made of sacks from food they would buy. He got one new pair of pants a year; My great grandmother would cut the bottoms off to make shorts in the summer, and then as he grew other times of year attach the cut off bits from summer to the bottoms of the pants.
My grandfather didn't have pasta until he was an adult, and always found it kind of weird. But he would eat anything. He joined the military when he was 18 to escape poverty.
1932 was the worst year of the great depression. From '33-'39 employment was below ten percent. The "depression" was due to stagnation. After the rich twenties they wanted things to return to "normal." I believe that we're depressed by billionaire stagnation now.
I had relatives, now deceased, that lived through it. They were poor but they made do. Even in their old age, they would avoid being wasteful of food, clothing, things like that. They'd cut apart clothes kids outgrew and sew them into quilts, they'd set up elaborate hand-me-down programs where person A gives their used item to person B, who gives their item to person C, etc.
That said, their attitude was mostly, "It wasn't great, but eh, we got by." A lot of traveling to look for work, and one of my relatives had a grudge against Brown and Root for stiffing him of a day's wages even many many decades later.
My grandma would never eat concord grape jelly. Apparently that's all they ate during the depression and promised herself she'd never eat it again once she grew up.
My other grandma graduated valedictorian and wanted to go to college so bad but of course that was out of the question. She ended up being a cafeteria worker and happy to have that job. She would tell me that people were so embarrassed to accept government help. She couldn't understand how people (today) could act like the government owes them assistance money.
You should probably try and critically evaluate why living like that is bad.
Lots of people nearly starved.
It was the worst economic disaster in the US. No employment; no Social Security; no unemployment benefits; no SNAP; no HEAP. You got nothing. And people had no unions so IF they got injured on the job, which happened a lot - you're SOL for disabilty too. It was a horrible time.
The great depression is the start for some of these programs.
They did have unemployment before the depression but it was a state programs and thus eligibility and amount paid varied wildly. The great depression was so bad it put a lot of pressure on State Budgets. Some states had programs for the elderly but again not all and varied wildly and few collected it.
Social Security was started in 1935 both as a way to provide for the elderly and a way to get some older people out the workforce to free up jobs for younger people. It also created Federal unemployment insurance. It also was more limited than it is today as it didn't originally cover disability(just the blind) or widows. It also didn't cover agricultural and domestic(maids\servants) workers. It did cover mothers and children.
The predecessor to food stamps comes out in 1939 but again much more limited and would end in 1943.
The right to unionize was also born due to the great depression National Labor Relations Act(1935).
But with such limitations it was indeed a horrible time too little covered.
There was virtually zero social safety net. No food stamps, no Medicaid, no SSA, no SSI, no CPS, no foster care system. It was sink or swim. Only church or township charities.
If you were able-bodied and of working age, you stood a better chance. If not, you depended upon charity or relatives, or you were screwed.
My family came from severe poverty so I'm not sure if this was from the depression or just abject poverty but my grandmother was one day reminiscing about her childhood (at my prodding) and told me about her favorite uncle. Apparently he would give each of the kids a piece of fruit every Christmas. I think it must have been an orange or banana, something they couldn't pick from a tree in her area because we always managed to find a plumb tree or something when I was a kid.
She didn't tell me that to make a point about fruit being so rare for them. She was really just sharing a good memory.
Remember that there were a lot less small luxuries in the world. You couldn't watch YouTube for free entertainment or get a McDonalds hamburger when you had a little extra money or play your old Playstation games from before you were poor. There was no goodwill or Walmart to buy cheap clothes and other goods
Did you enjoy that lifestyle?
No, but I still had a roof over my head and food on the table, so it wasn't hellish either.
Or kids?
Didn't help that FDR killed off live stock to keep prices high for the rest of the farmers. They paid the farmer to kill off their stock.
Look at sanitation practices and widespread disease. Meat safety was very poor for example.
My grandmother lived pretty good but her dad was a traveling civil engineer so they moved all around the country until my grandma was in high school.
My dad was born in the 30s. They were a continuation of hard times on the farm, but in addition to the usual hard times, there was no cash. They didn’t go hungry because the extended family had a large general farm. They didn’t have cash for things they didn’t produce, but there was a bit of a barter system at the store for trading your butter or eggs for goods. My dad got one pair of overalls that had to last through four kids, and you can see that same pair of overalls on every (rare) photo of the kids from that time period.
All of the kids grew up insanely frugal and with hoarding behaviors. Dad didn’t trust banks, and only believed in wealthy through the accumulation of property, which could not be taken away from you.
My mom’s family was urban. They suffered far less, although Grandma was frugal and saved every plastic bag and rubber band and piece of string and so on. It was a very different and more transient experience for the educated urban family.
I think your perception is skewed by the fact that we have experienced, in the last 17 years, the worst economnic conditions for working people since that time. And its still getting worse.
I think it was like a survival Super Mario where people were forced to eat questionable mushrooms and fight turtles to the death. At least that’s what I got out of The Grapes of Wrath
[deleted]
How is it possible for bread to be $3 a hundred years ago when bread costs like $1 today?
Sorry, I thought this sub was for serious discussion. I didn't realize this was for shitposting.
Who is shitposting?
I just looked up bread prices a hundred years ago and they were like 5 cents to 10 cents. Not remotely $3.