The Downturn Becomes the Great Depression
The Great Depression was especially demoralizing, following as it did, on the heels of the prosperous, comfortable 1920s. Many people were beginning to feel that the American dream — faith that any citizen could be financially successful, if he or she worked hard enough — was fraudulent, and before long there was a growing attraction to more radical solutions than those proposed by the two major parties.
It was not as though Americans had not faced and survived hard times before. Many industrial and unskilled workers, for example, were used to being unemployed for at least several months out of any year. But the extent and length of the Great Depression was almost incomprehensible to most Americans. By 1933, nearly one-quarter of the workforce had been laid off; counting their dependents, nearly one-third of the nation was living in poverty. As just one small indication, there were twenty thousand recorded suicides in 1931 alone, far more than the number of people who supposedly jumped out of windows during the stock market crash of 1929.
Business after business went bankrupt and hundreds of thousands were thrown out of work. Banks continued to fail. In the course of the decade, one-fifth of the nation’s banks closed, and many depositors never recovered their deposits. Some nine million families lost their life savings.
This was more than an economic downturn: It was a disaster. Its reach extended to families that previously thought they would never be touched by poverty. These were families that had spent years saving to buy a house or farm, automobile, and furniture. Now they found themselves with no money to pay their mortgages or debts from buying on installment. Those who had painstakingly built up their savings accounts were now forced to use those savings for the expenses of daily living — to buy food and clothing, heat their homes, pay taxes and debts. By 1934, two-fifths of the homeowners in twenty major cities had defaulted on their mortgages and lost their homes.
Families that had been less prosperous before the decade began had little financial cushion. Homeless families found refuge wherever they could — in one-room shacks, caves, and even sewer pipes. People subsisted on whatever was at hand. In rural areas, that might be weeds, dandelions, and berries. In urban areas, many ate garbage from produce markets and restaurants or stale bread and watery soup from a soup kitchen. In 1934, New York City statistics listed one hundred deaths from starvation. In the richest nation on earth, some forty million people came to know poverty first hand.
Early in the Depression, newspaper and magazine photographers began recording the "soul of the Depression," haggard men and women shuffling along in bread lines, children with solemn faces and bloated stomachs waiting to be served at soup kitchens, adults in ragged clothing selling apples on street corners. Statistics back up these painful images. In 1932, the worst year of the Depression, 28 percent of American families did not have a single employed person among them. By 1933, the income of the average American family had fallen by 40 percent, being reduced from $2,300 a year in 1929 to $1,500 in just four years. Even those people lucky enough to have a job faced reduced hours and large cuts in pay. By the middle of 1932, a large number of American workers were only working on part-time schedules.
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Dorothea Lange. (1895-1965) |
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If anyone can be called the chronicler of her generation, it would be Dorothea Lange. A photojournalist in a time when few women were employed in that occupation, Lange recorded the miseries of the Great Depression in a way that made the plight of the unemployed and the homeless starkly real to the rest of the nation. Born in New Jersey, Lange set out to become a teacher, but along the way her interest in photography led her to study with photographer Clarence White at Columbia University. In 1916, she opened her own photography studio in San Francisco. After the stock market crash of 1929, economic depression gripped the nation and Lange began to wander the streets of the city photographing the homeless. Later, as a photographer for the federal Farm Security Administration, she documented the migration of the farm workers, called "Okies," out of the Dust Bowl and into California where they mistakenly thought they would find jobs. She actually lived among the people in the migrant camps and collaborated with her husband, Paul Taylor, in producing a book of photographs entitled An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, published in 1939. Her most famous work, a stark, grainy black-and-white Depression shot of a gaunt mother holding a baby, while another of her hungry children rests her chin on the mother’s shoulder, helped galvanize the American people to support government relief. During the 1940s, she photographed the Japanese-Americans who had been forced to live in internment camps. Later she worked for Life magazine, photographing Mormon towns in Utah, and did a series on life in Ireland. But her most enduring work will always be those worn faces she captured on film, reminding us of the human side of the Great Depression.
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The Depression affected all groups in American society — white and black, urban and rural. Without a doubt, its most severe effects were felt by people who were already poor, one-parent families, people with disabilities that made it difficult for them to find work, those on public relief, and people working in low-paid, unskilled jobs.
