Pamela rainy kerber teaches a black a class on food during the Great Depression. She describes the ways family tried to stretch their food money and food supply often by gardening, buying cheap ingredients and eating the same thing over and over. Her class is about 50 minutes. Greetings everybody. This afternoon, we are going to be starting our discussion of the Great Depression. What we are going to be doing today is talking about how the Great Depression affected ordinary people. We are going to talk about the nuts and bolts of the situation and the things that people would have experienced in their everyday lives if they were seriously affected by the problems of that decade. I dont normally use images like this, but i am using this one for a reason. Grandma survived the Great Depression because her supply chain was local and she knew how to do stuff. That is a really important concept and we will come right back to it at the end of the class as well. This really is sort of the theme for the day. In terms of what we are going to be talking about, we are going to start with an overview of what the problems of the Great Depression were for ordinary people. Sort of the depths of the problems. Well talk about how families tried to cope in terms of their work strategies. About the process of asking for help. In the case of a disaster like this. Were gonna talk about keeping families fed. What did people do to try and put food on the table in the middle of the collapse like this . We will talk about how it changed americas food habits and we will come to sort of an interesting question. Did anybody starve . What was the real sort of impact of the Great Depression as far as mortality went . Let us start with the grim results of the economic disaster. The Great Depression was by far the worst economic collapse that the United States has ever experienced. The United States have had depression before. Some of them had been very, very steep depressions. They had been very serious situations, but the United States had never had a depression that was this long and this deep for so many years. There is a reason why it is called the Great Depression. It was a terrible, terrible, economic collapse. It was terrible in terms of what it meant for average people. Today, im going to be talking about the period from 1929 to 1933. Im dividing that for a reason. It is because before march of 1933, there was not much of a federal government response to the problems of the depression. Were going to be looking at those four years before any sort of major federal aid kicked in. During those four years, the economy basically tanked. By 1933, there was 25 unemployment. That means that 25 of working americans had no job whatsoever. There was also 25 under employment. Under employment means that people with a College Degree could only find jobs sweeping floors. It meant that people who want to work fulltime could only get jobs working parttime. It meant that people had jobs, but those jobs were paying less than they previously had. All sorts of School Teachers saw their incomes cut by 50 in the first four years of the Great Depression. All of those circumstances are under employment. 25 of the population was completely unemployed. Another 25 was under employed. Now, those numbers do not include people who technically were earning nothing. But were not counted among the unemployed. There were plenty of farmers during this period who were basically earning nothing. There were all sorts of farmers here in iowa who put their pigs on the train to go to chicago, hoping they would get a check back. That their pigs with cell and they would have some income. Unfortunately, a lot of those farmers, instead of getting a check had a bill. The cost to ship their picks to chicago then the pigs were worth. That is not under employment. That is not unemployment. It was and counted. Other things that were not counted were self employed people who were earning next to nothing. Lots and lots of people let their insurance policies laps. There were Insurance Agents who had no money coming in. There were doctors and dentists who had no money coming in. If someone had a whole list of bills in front of them, they would choose to pay for food, for shelter, before they would choose to pay for a doctor, because after all, he could not put the baby back. If that was the bill that was sitting there to be paid, the doctor did not get paid. There were all sorts of people earning no income who were not getting paid. The problem was, this was not just a year or two. The conditions stayed terrible. From 1929 to 1940. On average, during that period, unemployment was 20 . Unemployment was not going to go really below 20 until we get into the late up to world war ii. The american involvement and world war ii. These were very, very hard years, with a very high level of unemployment for large numbers of people. The problem also was that if you have money in the bank, probably lost it, because many banks closed in 1931, 32 and 33. If the bank closed in that era, your money was gone forever. Banks closed. If you want to ask for help, it was really difficult to do so. A lot of city and county governments, a lot of charities also went bankrupt in that time period. Even being poor was not enough. They were going to ask you if you were part of the word the pour before a charity was going to give you money. So, receiving a generally involved proving that you are a part of the war the poor. Not just meeting. Being needy was not enough. That meant that you had to conform to the moral standards of the community. It had to be suffering hardships that could not be construed as being your own fault. There were a lot of single mothers who would not have been considered for aid because they lived outside of the moral confines of that society, their problem could by local people be construed as their fault. So the people who got aid were people who were respectable windows, respectable disabled people, orphans, people who were temporarily disabled because of something that could in no way be considered their fault. And respectability usually meant going to church, not drinking, not living outside of conventional morality in your community. Just being for was not enough to get you help in the 1930s. Another issue that we need to keep in mind as we talk about the 1930s is the idea of relative deprivation. A lot of people during the 1930s fell into poverty. They had not been poor at the beginning of the decade and all of a sudden, they did not have a job. All of a sudden they were not bringing money in and they fell into poverty. What researchers at the time discovered was how you felt about the problems of the 1930s did not necessarily exactly equal how poor you were. People who had fallen into poverty, felt like the situation was considerably worse than people who had been poor all along. And those people who fall into poverty are going to discover they had some Serious Problems compared to people who had been poor all along. Another concept you need to remember when thinking about the 1930s is shame. The reason why this is incredibly important is that people who had grown up in the era prior to the 1930s, generally believed that if you were unemployed it was your own fault. If someone was unable to find a job, it was their own fault. Because if you are hardworking, if you are capable, if you have a good moral standard, you should be able to find a job. The thing was they had never encountered a depression this deep. There were no jobs. It did not matter if you were morally upright, it did not matter if you worked hard, it did not matter that you went to church on sunday. There were no jobs to be had in many communities. So a lot of people felt terribly ashamed. They felt like they failed. They felt like this problem was personal to them. That will also have a serious impact on their experience of the 1930s. Because they will be resistant to asking for help. They are ashamed to ask for help. There were many people who went through this experience who never got over it. Who spent the rest of their lives feeling terribly ashamed about having been without a job in the thirties for no reason at all. They had no reason to feel ashamed but we do not always think in these logical ways when we are faced with a crisis like this. Now if you are part of a family that was facing a situation like this, you had to figure out how you were going to manage. You had to figure out how to manage if the bread earner in your family was completely without a job more seriously unemployed. One of the ways this happened during the 1930s is that women go out to work. Now it was very difficult for women to find jobs in the 1930s. It was not the usual path that married women took in the 1930s. African american women had often had jobs after marriage because of the generally low pay that their husbands got. But most white women in the United States, once they got married, got out of the workforce. The 1930s creates a situation where a lot of these women have to find jobs. That most of the job they find a very poorly paid and in traditionally female occupations. Some of those jobs saw declines across the thirties. The women who were School Teachers, a lot of them saw their pay cut by 50 . And by 1933, a lot of towns were giving teachers iowa use. Basically telling them when we have money again, we will pay you. The problem was that they need to eat right then. And so sometimes they had to trade their ious at a discount to get money. Some clean homes for dollar a day or less. A lot of women took in boarders which meant you took someone into your home, cooking thing for them and they would pay you for the use of your home. Probably the best you could do is work at jcpenneys like my grandmother did. For 25 cents an hour, starting early in the morning and working late at night. She got an hour off at lunch and no breaks. That was considered a really good job. There was no way she was going to complain about the low wages and the long hours. Some women were very fortunate and had secretarial positions. A lot of what i am telling you todays based on research i didnt kings this about the 1930s. One of the kansas congressman, in about 1933, got an irate letter from one of his constituents. This was a man writing in in a disgusted way about a woman who was working for wages in the congressmans office and he thought the job ought to be given to a man who had a family. The congressman wrote back, i would employment but i do not know any men who can type and do stenography. I have a higher i have to hire a woman. So women who had special skills were able to keep their jobs through the 1930s. But most women who worked had very low wages working very long hours in positions that largely men did not want. Doing laundry, cooking and cleaning for other people. It was a whole lot easier for women to work outside the home if they had no children or if those children were old enough to take care of themselves. The social convention of the time said that if you were a married woman and if you had children, it was your responsibility to be at home and to take care of them. One of the women who i interviewed about her experiences said mothers were found upon then when children were put with babysitters. I simply did what i had to do when my children came. She stayed home, she took care of them and she did not go out to work. Another woman told me that she would have loved to go out to work with the problem was that her clothes were falling apart. She could not afford to babysitter and she could not afford to get to a job. She lived in the country. There was no way for her to work she said to me by the time i wouldve had extra clothes and hiring a baby consider, i would be working for nothing. We felt it would be to our advantage for me to stay at home and patch and so. So that is what she did. She stayed at home she, patched and sowed and did not go out to work. Even though her husband at sometimes was earning as little as four dollars a month. Imagine trying to get by, even in the 1930s, four dollars a month was practically nothing. But she could not afford to go out to work. Children also worked but usually not for wages. Child labor laws in this era made it very difficult for children under the age of 14 to work for wages. So children did other things. They sold newspapers, they shined shoes, they did odd jobs for the neighbors, many of them scavenged along the Railroad Tracks looking for coal and other things that had fallen off a freight trains. They sifted through dumps looking for anything that might be edible or usable. And sometimes, they found other ways to make money. I interviewed a very wonderful older man in dodge city kansas who told me historian about making money as in adolescent during the early 19 thirties. Kansas still had prohibition and there were bootleggers that were there in the community. He knew they were. You could sell bottles to the bootleggers for five cents a bottle. Totally illegal, but he knew that he could earn five cents a bottle doing this. So he was busy finding and washing bottles and selling them to the bootleggers. What he also lived at the edge of town. Because of that, he could see where the bootleggers hit the boos and their clients would come out and find it along the fence posts and take it home with him after they had paid their money. The sheriff would pay 50 cents for any bottle of boos that someone had led him to. And so this guy was selling the bottles to the bootleggers, then figuring out where they were hiding the bottles and then letting the sheriff know. And so he was making a nice little sideline for himself out of the bootlegging business. His wife was absolutely terrified to have me tell this story because she was afraid the bootleggers were going to come and get him. It probably was not an issue this many years after the fact. But had he been caught, he would have been in big trouble. This is his way. They doubled up, those least likely to. Inviting them to live with them. Showing the cost of, heat food and housing. Other families, even though they might be living in different locations, also share the costs. I had grandparents who were living in town whose parents were still on the farm. The parents on the farm could not make a living. And so my grandparents were making a relatively decent living by the standards of the day and sent home a lot of their money to their families to try and help them keep their farms from going under. There were all sorts of ways that families cooperated together. Clean at the other end of the spectrum, people left home. A lot of men left home when they became part of the long term unemployed. What you will notice about the 19 thirties is the divorce rate does not go up. The divorce rate actually goes down a little bit. But divorces cost money. The abandonment rate goes up with a man who are unable to care for their families leaving home because they feel so ashamed. Thinking that their families are better off without them. What this picture shows is what happened at the other end of the spectrum. That was young people, leaving home. There were as many as 1 million transience on the road in the middle of the 1930s. A very large percentage of those were young people under the age of 25 whose families simply could not afford to care for them anymore. So they hit the road. And spent a good deal of the 1930s wandering from place to place looking for jobs. Looking for a hand out. Hoping that somewhere down the road things would be better. Unfortunately, a lot of the time it was not. Before i move on, does anybody have any questions that you want to ask at this point . All right. Lets move on to the problem of asking for help. If you were one of these people whose family was completely out of money. There were no jobs to be had. Lets say youre extended family could not help you, your option then is to ask for help. To ask a charity or local government for help. Going to your city, going to your county. This for a lot of people was not an attractive option because they felt ashamed of being poor and unemployed. There were a lot of people who never could bring themselves to go in and say i need help. We are not going to manage. In fact, this applied to men in particular. Men who were no longer able to support their families and so deeply ashamed of themselves that going into the Welfare Office was too difficult for them. What is interesting is that i had a number of women tell me my husband would not go in to apply for aid but i did. The moment women children started going hungry, mothers tended to say enough of this and to go in and to ask for help. That was often part of what it meant to be a mother during the 19 thirties. It was asking for help for your children. Now before 1933, before we get a real federal presence and welfare, getting aid was a really personal process in ways that it would not be later. It involved presenting yourself personally, filling out the form, going through a rigorous examination where people try to figure out if you were part of the worthy poor or not. Whether you were acceptable to get aid or not. Generally, a married man or a family would be considered appropriate for aid. Single people generally were not because if they didnt have someone else depending on them, local governments simply was not going to help them. So you had to be part of the where the port. You generally had to have a family and then they would decide how much aid you would get. It was often not a great deal of aid but getting aid was a very public process because what happened after youve got eight was your name went into the paper. This was an era when local governments published every month, their bills. Instead of just having one line where it said it had a whole bunch of lines and listed by name, the people who were getting money. Everybody knew who in the community was getting aid. Who in the community was getting a. You had to be willing to have the whole rest of the worlds your poverty in order to do this. Another reason is while lot of people resisted asking for help. This meant that you are also open to public criticism, because they generally had lifts in the newspapers of the things that you are not allowed to buy with your eight. It was called relief. What you are not allowed to buy with your relief. You are not allowed to buy pop. You are not allowed to buy candy. You are not allowed to have a radio. A car. If your family had any of those, you had to have a really good reason why, or you are going to lose your aid. A lot of communities eventually got around this by only giving food to people instead of giving them the money and letting them make their own decisions about how they used it, they just began giving people food. Things like large, beans, flower, maybe salt pork if you are lucky. The very basics. Potatoes. Cabbages. Carrots. That way, they could guarantee that the communitys money was being spent on things that the community approved of. The amount of money was very very small. By 1933, about the most that any community could give to an individual family was about two dollars and 50 cents. Charities were out of money. Communities were out of money. So two dollars and 50 cents was about it. As you work on your projects, you realize that that is about as good as it got in 1933. Not a lot of money. A Research Report from a social Workers Organization said that this was aid to the port with a vengeance. Meaning, that it simply was not enough money for most families to get by in any good way. Aid was generally not available to transience and recent arrivals. Most places had laws that said if you had lived in a community for a year, they were not going to help you. They wanted aid to be available to what they called home people only. If you arrived with your family needing help, they would say, wait a year, or Something Else that a lot of communities did was to hand the people a sack of sandwiches. Put enough gas in their car to get them across the county line and send them on their way. This was illegal in most places. You are not supposed to hand off your relief burdens to other communities in this way. The communities did it anyway. They were pretty desperate by the early years of the 19 thirties and did not have a lot of money to spend on the poor. If you werent getting a lot of aid and you did not have a whole lot of money, you had to find a way to keep your head above water. Keeping your head above water could be quite in track. A lot of communities, when they started running out of money started giving families access to land instead. Lots of communities had property, they could afford to buy seats. What they did was hand out people plots of land and pockets of seats and said here. Grow your own food. There were often more people who want to that then land was available. If you did not keep your plot of land nicely we did and growing vegetables, you would use your plot of land to someone who needed it. Also, in little no cool newspapers, they began running all kinds of articles about how to make your food budget stretch, reminding people that they could in fact it leftovers. I have seen recipes for leftovers for sandwiches made out of leftover beans. Stuffed peppers made out of odds and ends of him. Bread pudding made out of stale bread and old shelley. None of the sound it terribly appetizing. A lot of it was common sense. A lot of it was stuff that farm women are new. But, there were also other women who had grown up in town, whose families had more money, we did not in fact know all of this. So they were providing this information to people who did not necessarily have it. We talked before about Home Economics extension. About Home Economics trained women who taught all kinds of skills. Their services were in really high demand during the 19 thirties and they, and Many Community many communities offered free classes and opened it up to everybody so people could learn how to cook cheat meals. How best to spend their money. They were teaching a lot of skills that farm women already knew because they made do and did without all the time. These particular skills were ones that not everybody had, so they began providing those kind of information for other people. How might you feed your family if you had absolutely no money . Well, i had one woman tell me that macaroni was always cheap. You could buy big boxes of macaroni and expansively, and her way of making a healthy meal out of macaroni was not she sauce. She instead bought whole flats of cans of tomatoes and spinach. I can see the faces back there. They would mix the tomatoes or mix the spinach and the spinach with the macaroni, heat it up, serve it to the family. Did not sound very good, but you know what . If you are hungry, it is amazing what tastes good. People ate a lot of eggs. Eggs remained a cheap source of protein. Ive seen a diary where a farm woman literally fed her family potatoes three times a day. In the morning there were fried. At lunch they were mashed. At dinner, oh gosh, she usually did like baked potatoes at dinner. There was a whole range of potato dishes that she could do based on what the family wanted. Not based on what the family wanted. Based on what the family needed. Based on her ability to imagine what you can do with potatoes. Corn meal mush. Corn meal mush. Weve talked about it before. Boiling water to which you add corn meal a little bit at a time so it does not get all clumped. You stir it up and when it is nice and thick you pop it in someones bowl. You put in a little bit of butter and surf if you have money and you call it breakfast. Then you will have leftovers, so you let it sit all day, and at the end of the day you dump it out, slice it up and fry it. Then, if youve got syrup or molasses or Something Like that, you pour that on and you call it dinner. Believe it or not, you could do the same thing with oatmeal. I have never tried it, but you can do exactly the same thing without me. There are a lot of people who have very little money who were feeding their families corn meal mush or oatmeal three times a day. Just sort of imagine what it would be like to eat that. The same woman who told me about the oatmeal and the macaroni and the tomatoes and spinach, she is the one whos husband sometimes was earning as little as four dollars a month. She was the most impoverished person during the thirties who i talk to. She said there were times when the only way she could think of to get her kids to eat in the same thing day in and day out, was that at breakfast time, she would put the oatmeal enable. At lunch, she would put it on a plate. At dinner, she would put it in a cup. To try to fool them into thinking that it was something different. At least it would look different. Even if it was the same thing over and over again. There is all kinds of foods that were served in the same way in the 1930s. Beans. My grandmother said, i hope i hoped by the end of the decade i would never see another been again. They had eaten beams, so many pinto beans over the course of the decade. Cabbage. Sauerkraut weve talked about paste before that during the civil war, you are living on the frontier, you might end up eating paced for dinner and one form or another. One of the forms of paced ive seen, relative to the 1930s was called wisconsin gravy. Wisconsin gravy was either water or milk heat it up with flower put in it, and salt and pepper port over toast. Paste over toast. You had nothing else. You had paced over toast for dinner. The eight wheat. Wild food. They guard and, they hunted, they fished. Dandelions, when they became available in the spring, were a really important solid ingredient. They used soup to stretch a lot of these ingredients even further. Sometimes that was not far enough. In a lot of families, there was selective starvation of adults. Meaning adults would choose not to eat in favor of letting their children eat. There were families that state in bed all day and reduced their meals to two meals a day so that everybody would conserve as much as energy as possible and not get hungry. They relied on the kindness of friends and strangers. There were all kinds of kids that showed up to school not having eaten. School teachers who are earning very little little themselves are frantic about this. I interviewed a woman who had been a teacher throughout the 1930s and she said, i had these little children coming to school and they were falling asleep in class. They had nothing to eat. So she was someone who is really well connected in town. She went to all the womens clubs. The womens clubs met about once a week. She went to them and said please, give me your leftovers. The womens clubs started giving her their leftovers. She started distributing them at school so that kids had something to eat. She also noticed a bunch of those children had no close to wear to school. When her brother died during the 19 thirties, they decided that instead of asking for flowers that the funeral, they would ask for overalls. Overalls in childrens sizes, so that she could then pass out overalls to her students who had no clothes. Teachers were a really important part of a feeding and clothing kids throughout the 19 thirties. On the issue of clothing, what is she wearing . Does anybody know what she is wearing . A flower sack. She is wearing a big bag of flour sack. The 52 to 100 pound kind. Also feed flags were made out of fabric. You did not want to waste fabric. This is like a white flower or feet sack and simply bleach out the name of the company on. Sometimes mothers did not do a really good job. Ive seen stories about girls being horribly embarrassed by things like premium across the front of their dresses. You could also buy flour sacks and feed sacks. With pretty patterns on them. Companies realize they put a pretty pattern on their feet, the farm women would insist that their husbands by that brand a feat. I know that my great grandmother did that and made my great grandfather move hundred pound bags to feed to get the patterns she wanted. These were real honest to goodness feed sacks here. You could get instructions. Most farm women already knew how to do this, but other women earned learned and dress their families. People saved everything they could in order to clothe themselves. They housed themselves in any way they could. Why was this called the hoover the hoover ville . Hoover ville was the president at the time. He was not looked upon very well by the americans after he refused to step in and do anything about the depression. He did something, but he did not do what people interpreted as enough. These shantytowns at the edge of major towns called hoover veils. Thats where a lot of places where people lived when they run out of money. Whether it was food or clothing or shelter. A lot of people were making due or doing without during the 1930s because they did not have the wherewithal to do otherwise. None of the questions that we have is how did the depression change americas eating habits . There is a recent book about how the Great Depression changed how america eight and the answer is that the Great Depression was an era where cheap, nutritious food was it invoked but it lacked and taste. This food was not what we would call oat cuisine. It was very very bland. One Great Depression recipe that i have seen that looks really really horrible, was that there was a casserole recipe where he took spaghetti and you boiled the spaghetti for 20 minutes. That is about twice as long as you should boil spaghetti. We are talking mushy spaghetti. And you mixed it with boiled carrots chopped up and then put white sauce over the whole thing and baked it. I cannot imagine eating this. However, it was cheap, it was filling, all of you are making horrible faces. This is not great food but it is food that will get you by. It was plain, it was starchy, it was filling. There was also out there on the web a very wonderful site called Great Depression meals with clara. I think that is what it called. Clara was an elderly italian grandmother who lived through the Great Depression whose grandson was interested in Great Depression cooking in the origins of the meal she cooked. You can go see some of her meals. One of her meals was called the poor mans meal. The poor mans meal was a friday toe to which the cook added a chopped up hotdog and you fried it up and served it. Hot dogs were cheap. Potatoes were cheap. And supposedly this tastes good. I do not think its exactly my cup of tea. Some of you might like. It creamed chipped beef on toast. That is one a number of your grandfathers wouldve eaten in the army in world war. You take white sauce, you mixed into it chipped beef. If you have ever had it, its very salty. You mix that into the white sauce and port over toast and call that a meal. Hoover stew was the name given to all kinds of meals that people ate during the 19 thirties. One recipe calls for a 16 ounce box of noodles. Like macaroni and spaghetti, you cook that and to that you add sliced hotdogs and then you add to cans a stewed tomatoes, one can of stewed peas or corn including the liquid. And then any other cheap vegetables you might have and you call it dinner. This is basically a mess plus hotdogs. I have also seen mashed potato things where you also cut up a bunch of hot talks and stick them into the mash potatoes at attractive angles and make it look fancy. A lot of Great Depression for this simple. It is basic and meant to fill you up. So if you wonder why, even in the 1930s 19 fifties, americans were still eating a lot of that stuff. It was comfort food people had gotten used to during the 1930s. To them, its still meant feeling full and fed. I get fed a lot of this stuff as a kid because my grandmother was feeding a young family during the 19 thirties and used a lot of recipes that bullet like this my mothers memories meant i ended up eating a lot of this stuff even into the sixties and seventies. It is not cuisine, it is just plain old food. Now we get to the sad part. We have already been doing a lot of the sad part. The question that people asked a lot at the time is that did anyone starve . Im going to be careful about this. I went into jstor and looking for articles from historians. And you know what . No one has really thoroughly tackled the subject. There are bits and pieces of information out there. Bits and pieces we can come to some conclusions with, but this is an area where historians have not done enough work. President hoover said late in his term as president in 1932 or so. No one is actually starving. But, i think it is pretty clear that at least a few people were. In new york city in 1931, the Health Department reported the deaths of 95 people by starvation. Theyre probably were more. Those are the people who got reported in one place and when youre. We these stories of extreme poverty in the 19 thirties abound. I dont think it takes a whole lot of time talking to older people before you start hearing stories that make you think that maybe a few more people did start. I have my great grandfathers story. He was a farmer and farmers were making next to nothing in his part of kansas because of the dust bowl. He was working on a road road project. His friends in he would have lunch in the middle of the day and there was one man who would not sit with them. He was referred to as the antisocial man who set by himself and did not talk to a lot of people. One day someone got close enough so he could look into his lunch pail and see what was in there and it was potato peels. They finally got the story out of him. And every day he was coming to work with the pale full of potato peels for lunch. He and his wife had decided that was how they were going to manage. The wife and children needed the potatoes more and he would eat the peels and they would somehow keep going. He was so embarrassed about this that he would not sit with the other men. Once they knew this information, the other men started making him come and sit with them and present everyone. Everyone took turns bringing him something for lunch every day. The sad irony of all this is that, out of those potatoes, he was getting the vitamins basically and his kids were getting the starch. Between the two of them, no one was really getting a meal. But there are all kinds of stories like this about the Great Depression. Was it known that potato peels had vitamins back then . No it was not. He was doing what made sense to them. We now know that the kids were missing out on all the vitamins or a lot of them. They just knew that the kids need more food. Now in some communities, the hunger was very widespread. This was especially true in some communities of tenant farmers. We have a picture here from a tenant family from alabama. Tenant farmers, at the best of times, limped along year to year because the land owner or the store owner would loan them money. And most tenant farmers of course had no land and were deeply in debt because of this particular system. In alabama, this was an African American tenant community and the store owner who had been lending them the money they survived on died in 1932. His widow immediately demanded payment of all of the farmers. They had no money, they had no land, they had no way to support themselves and they had no way to leave. They did not have vehicles, they did not have the money to get out. Eventually the red cross figured out what was going on there and arrived to help. By that point, the situation was dire. The regional red cross director said you cannot imagine the horror of it. Starvation was horrible. In areas where people owned their own land. People things were not usually this dire. Farmers were are often not making any money but the picks they were not sending to market they could eat. The garden they could plant and eat. The corn they could eat. But that was not true if the weather did not cooperate. Here we have a picture of dust bowl conditions in eastern colorado in the 1930s. That is a dirty storm, not a thunderstorm, a dirt storm. Much of the great plains experienced severe drought through the 1930s. Those droughts made it through the midwest in 1934 1936. Because of that it was entirely possible to start on a farm that you owned in a number of places in the 1930s. Because you cannot grow if you do not have any water. Now when you look at the cities, things are somewhat different. It was really pretty easy for adults to hide if they were hungry. But it was rather different with children. Children were supposed to be going to school. The schools kept track of physical conditions of children. They discovered in a lot of small towns, the situation was particularly acute. In mining communities in particular. There was the reappearance of rick its in many communities. That causes bode bones because of a lack of vitamin d in the diet. Tuberculosis increased significantly. There were some communities where 60 or more of the children were malnourished. The people who are the most sick and most malnourished often were not the people who started the depression poor. They found that in families where there was just general unemployment it 40 of 40 of families where the wage earner was unemployed, people were ill. If however you add in the people who had started out middle class and become for you, you discover that 60 of those families were in poor health. People who had lost status and gone from being middle class to being poor were often much secure than those who had started the depression in poverty. And so there was only speculation at the time about why that might have happened. But, these formerly middle class families where families that had skills in dealing with poverty. They were not used to it. They did not necessarily know how to scrimp and save. They were probably more resistant to asking for help. They were more embarrassed about being impoverished. And given what we know about stress and illness, they were probably highly stressed and therefore vulnerable to severe illness from hunger. What probably happened more in the 1930s than people dying of starvation was people die of illnesses they normally would not have gotten had they not been hungry. So what is the take away from all of this . Hungary was widespread. It was caused by jobless nurse rather than being caused by a sheer lack of food nationwide. And people who had previous experience with food innovation were better off than those without. So this is true. Grandma did survive the Great Depression because her supply chain was local. She was growing food. She knew how to get by and she knew how to do stuff. She knew how to feed herself. She knew how to innovate. And one of the things we also know is that if she knew how to ask for help, she was going to be a whole lot better off than those who did not. So lets and there and we will continue with this on friday. Thursday night on American History tv. A look at the american revolution. Beginning at eight eastern, historian up next on real america. We work again. A 1937 film promoting new deal programs that put unemployed African Americans to work in infrastructure, health care, education and the arts. The final four minutes of this film show the final scene of a federal theater production of mcbath with an African American cast
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