Images like this but i am using this one for a reason. Grandma survived the Great Depression because their 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 is sort of the theme for today and in terms of what we will be talking about, we will start with an overview of what the problems of the Great Depression work for ordinary people in sort of the depths of the problems and we will talk about how families try to cope in terms of their work strategies, and about the process of asking for help. In the case of a disaster like this and we will talk about keeping family spend what it people actually do to try to put food on the table and clapped like this. We will talk about it how would change americans food habits and the question of did anybody start and what was the real sort of impact of the Great Depression as far as mortality went. So lets start with the results of the economic disaster, was by far the worst economic collapse that the United States has ever experience in the United States and the depression, and some of them had abandoned very very steep depressions and had been in very serious situations but the United States had never had the department that was this long, the steep for so many years pretty and there is a reason why its called the Great Depression, it was a terrible terrible economic collapse and it was terrible in terms of what is meant for average people. Im going to be talking about the time from 1929 1933, dividing it that for a reason because the before march 1933, there is not much of a federal government response to the problems of the depression is that we will be looking at those four years before any sort of major federal aid kicks in. And during those four years, the economy basically thanks, by 1933, there is 25 percent of unemployment that means that 25 percent of working americans had no doubt whatsoever. There was also 25 percent of under employment, under employment means that people with a college degree, they could only find job sweeping floors and amid the people who wanted to work fulltime can only get work for part time and advanced that people had jobs and jobs work paying less than they previously had in all sorts of schoolteachers, solar incomes, 50 percent in the first four years of the Great Depression and all of those circumstances are under employment as 25 percent of the population was completely unemployed, and another 25 percent was under employed. Those numbers do not include people who they were earning nothing and not counted among the unemployed in their work farmers during this time who were basically earning nothing and all sorts of farmers here in iowa who put the pigs on the train to go to chicago hoping they would get a check back. That the pigs were itself they would have an income and unfortunately, a lot of this farmers instead getting a check, he got a bill because it cost more to ship their pigs to chicago in the pigs were worth and that is not under employment, that is not unemployment, it was not counted in the other things were not counted were self employed people who were earning next to nothing it and lots and lots of people that their insurance policies lapse so there were Insurance Agents who had no money coming in, doctors and dentists who had no money coming in and if someone had a whole list of bills in front of them, they would choose to pay for food, and shelter before they would choose to pay the doctor because he couldnt put the baby back and so if that was the bill that was sitting there to be paid, the doctor did have a similar all sorts of people earning no income who are not getting paid and the problem was this was not just a year or two, the conditions stayed terrible from 2029 1940 and on average during that time the unemployment was 20 percent and unemployment would not go below the 20 percent until we get into and lead up to world war ii, the american involvement in world war ii. These are very very hard years with a very high level of unemployment for large numbers of people the problem also was if you had money in the bank, you probably lost it because many banks closed and if it goes in that era, your money was gone forever so the banks closed and he wanted to ask for help, it was really difficult to do so because a lot of city and county governments, a lot of charities, also went bankrupt in that time and even being poor is not enough, they were going to ask you if you were part of that were the poor before charity was going to give you money. So receiving eta generally involves that you were part of the worthy core, not just for, that was not enough, that meant that you had to conform to that oral standards of the community and you have any suffering hardships that could not be considered as being your own fault and so there are a lot of single never married mothers who would not have been considered freighted because you lived outside of the moral confines of that society and the problem could be considered that was their fault that some people who were respectable, respectable disabled people, orphans and people temporarily disabled because they could no way be considered their fault and usually meant going to church, not drinking it, not living outside of conventional morality in your community so just being poor is not enough to get you help in the 1930s. Another issue to keep in mind as we talk about the 1930s, was the idea of relative deprivation it they felt into poverty not been poor at the beginning of the decade but all of a sudden, they had no job, on the senate no money was being rotted and they fell into poverty. What researchers at the time discovered it was how he felt about the problems of the 1930s, did not necessarily equal have for you are pretty people who had fallen into poverty felt like the situation was considerably worse than peoe who have been for all of long and those people who fall into poverty will discover had Serious Problems compared to people who have been poor all along. Another concept we need to remember when thinking about the 1930s, is shame and the reason why this is incredibly important as people who had enough in the era prior to the 1930s, generally believed it that if you were unemployed, it was your fault. Someone was unable to find a job, it was their own fault because if you work hard working and capable and good moral standards, you should be able to find a job. But they had never encountered a depression is deep, there were no jobs and it didnt matter if you are worked harder you are and it didnt matter if you went to church on sunday, there were no jobs to be had in many communities. A lot of people felt terribly ashamed and they felt that this problem is personal to them that you would have a serious impact on their experience in the 1930s, they will be resistant to ask for help and they are ashamed to ask for help and there were many many people who went, they never got over it, the spent the rest of their lives feeling terribly ashamed about having been without a job in the 30s, for no reason at all and they had no reason to feel ashamed. But we dont always think in these logical ways and were faced with a crisis like this. Now if you are part of the family was facing a situation like this, you had to figure out how to manage and how you will manage, the renderer in your family was either completely without a job, or seriously unemployed and one of the ways in the 1930s, women go out to work. It is very difficult for a woman to find a job in the 1930s, and it is not the usual path that married women took in the 1930s, africanamerican women have often had jobs after marriage because of the generally their husbands, while most white women once they got married they got out of the workforce in the 1930s, creates a situation where a lot of these women have to find a job that most of the jobs defined are very poorly paid and internationally, a male occupation. Some had declining income over the 30s and women were schoolteachers, a lot of them saw a pay cut by 50 percent and not only that, i 1933, a lot of towns were giving teachers ious and basically telling us that bullet you have money again, we will pay you in the problem was they needed to eat and so sometimes in a trade there ious at a discount to someone who would give them money. Some work in laundry for 10 cents an hour, clean homes for a dollar a day or less, a lot of women it took in boarders which meant taking in someone in your home and cook and clean for them and then they would pay you for the use of your home and probably about the best you could do with Something Like of my grandmothers did which was work for jcpenneys, for 25 cents an hour, she was 25 cents an hour, early in the morning working until late at night and got an hour off at lunch and no break. That was considered a really good job because there was no way that she was going to complain it about the low wages and long hours. Some of women were very fortunate and secretarial positions. A lot of women today based on research, that i did in kansas about the 1930s. One of the kansas congressman in about 1933, got a really outraged letter from one of his constituents and writing it and really disgusted way about a woman if it was working for wages and the congressmans office and he thought that job should be given to a man who had a family in the congressman wrote back and said you know, i would employ a man but i dont know any man who can type into stenography so i have to hire a woman. So women who had special skills, were able to keep their jobs in the 1930s pretty but most women who work at very low wages and working very long hours and positions that largely man did not want, things like doing laundry, things like cooking for other people and cleaning for the people pretty and now theres a whole lot easier for women to work outside of the home if they had no children, ae those children were old enough to take care of themselves in the convention, at the time and said that if you were a married woman and if you children, is your responsibility to be at home and to take care of them. One of the women i interviewed a batteries breezes told me that it was frowned upon if their children were with babysitters so i simply did what i had to do after my children came and she stayed home and she took care of them and she did not go out to work and another woman told me that she wouldve loved to have gone out to work the problem was her clothes were falling apart and she could not afford a babysitter, and she could not afford to get to her job she lived out in the country so thes no way for her to work and she said to me, at a time i wouldve had extra clothes and hiring a babysitter, i would be working for nothing and would be to our advantage for the childrens advantage for me to stay calm and patch and so and so thats what she did, she stated home and she patched and sewn it and did not go out to work even though her husband it that sometimes was earning as low as 4 a month so imagine trying to get by and even in the 1930s, 4 a month was practically nothing she could not going to work and she did not have the clothes pretty children also work, but usually not for wages and child labor laws made it vey difficult for the children under the age of 14, to work fod other things, they sold newspapers, sat under it shined shoes and odd jobs for the neighbors, and they scavenged along the Railroad Tracks looking for gold and things that had fallen off of the freight trains and they sifted through dumps or anything that might be edible or usable credit and sometimes they found other ways to make money and i intervieweda really wonderful older man, in kansas who told me his story about making money as an adolescent during the early 1930s pretty kansas still had a prohibition and bootleggers in the community and he knew who they were and he can sell the bottles to bootleggers for 5 cents a bottle, totally illegal but he knew he could earn 5 cents a bottle doing this so he was busy finding the bottles and selling them to bootleggers but he also knew the sheriff in town and because he lived at the edge of town he could see for the bootleggers and the booze. And then their clients would come out and find it along the fence post and then taken them after they paid their money, while the sheriff would pay 50 cents for any bottle of booze that somebody had led him to read so this guy was selling the bottoms of the bootleggers and figuring out where they were hiding the bottles and then letting the sheriff know and so he was making a living sideline for himself out of the bootlegging business and his wife was absolutely terrified to have me tell the story because shes afraid the bootleggers would come and get him. And i think its on an issue this many years after the fact and if he wouldve been caught, he wouldve been in big trouble but this was his way of making money through the 1930s. In other families managed in other ways, together with the family the part of the family was leased likely to get evicted from their home and inviting other people to come and live with them and sharing the cost of the food and housing. In other families even though they might be living in different locations also shared the cost of the grandparents in town, whose parents who still lived in the farm and the parents on the farm it could not make a living it and so my grandparents were making a relatively decent Living Standards of the day, since houma a lot of the money to their families to try to help them keep their farms from going under narrow all sorts of ways that families cooperated together pretty and then the other end of the spectrum, people left home and automatic left, when they become longterm unemployed. And the 1930s camille noticed that the divorce rate did not go up, it did fact went down a little bit the divorces cost money and the abandonment rate goes up with men who are unable to care for the families because they feel so ashamed thinking their families are better off without them and with the picture shows what happened at the other end of the spectrum of that was people leaving home and their work as many as a million transients on the road in the middle of the 1930s, and a very large percentage of those were younger people under the age of 25, whose families simply could not afford to care for them anymore and so they hit the road. And they were wondering from place to place looking for jobs and looking for a handout in the 30s hoping that somewhere down the road that things will be better and unfortunately, a lot of the time it was not. Does anybody have any questions that you want to ask. Lets move on to the problem of asking for help. If you are one of these hoops family was completely had a money, no jobs to be had, for the sake that your extended family could not help you, your option then it was to ask for help, ask a charity, photo ask local governments for help. And going to a city, your county. This is not for a lot of people a very attractive option because they felt ashamed of being poor and unemployed and a lot of people who never could bring themselves to go in and say that i need help, we are not going to a manage and affect a lot of this and particular man in particular, no longer able to support the families who are so deeply ashamed of themselves that going into the Welfare Office was too hard for them but the interesting thing is i had a number of women tell me that my husband it would not go apply for aid but i did. Remember the children started to go hungry, the mothers tended to say enough of this, they would go in and they would ask for help. So that was often a part of what it meant to be a mom in the 1930s, was asking for help for your children. Before 1933, before we get a real federal presence and welfare, getting a date with a really personal process in ways that it would not be later and filling out forms, going to a rigorous examination where people had to figure out if you are part of the really for not and whether you work respectable to get a do not generally a married man or family would be considered a bert aid and single people were not because if they didnt have someone else depending on them, local government simply were not going to help them so you had to be part of the worthy poor and generally had a habit family then they would be sent him a aid you would get and not a great deal of aid but getting aid was a very public process because what happened after you got aid was your name within the paper and this was an era when local government publish every month their bills and instead of just having line where it said aid to the poor, and had a bunch of lines and listed by name the people who were getting money so everybody knew who in the community was getting aid and admit that you had to be willing it to have the whole rest of everybody see you in poverty and orderly order to do this which is another reason why a lot of people resisted asking for help. This meant that you were also open to public criticism because generally that lists in the newspaper of the things you were not allowed to buy with your aid, you were not allowed to buy, not pop, not allowed to buy candy, were not allowed to have a radio, you are not allowed to have a car, and if your family had any of those, you had to have a really good reason why are you were going to you under boost your aid and a lot of communities eventually got around this by only giving food to people instead of giving them the money and make their own decisions and began giving people food like and flour and maybe some pork if you work lucky in the very basics, potatoes, cabbages and carrots, and that way they could guarantee that the communities money was being spent on things that the community approved of. The amount of money was very very small, 1933, about the most that handy community could gift to an individual family came to about 2. 50, charities money and communities are out of money, and so 2. 50, was about it and so you work on your project, you realize that is about as good as it got in the 1933, not a lot of money in the Research Report from the social Workers Organization said this was aid with a vengeance meaning that it simply was not enough money for most families to get by in any good way. Aid generally was not available to transient and recent arrivals in most places had said that if you had not lived in the community for a year, they were not going to help you and they wanted it aid to be available to what they called the home people only and so if you were there with your family and needing help, they would say or Something Else and a lot of the communities did was to handed people, a sack of sandwiches, and enough gas to send them on their way across the county line and this was illegal in most cases, youre not supposed to hand off your burdens to the communities in this way in the communities did it anyway. They were pretty desperate by the earlier years in the 1930s, they did not have a lot of money to spend on the poor. If you are not getting a lot of aid, and you did not have a lot of money, you had to find a way to keep your head above water and keeping your head above water could be quite a trick. A lot of communities when they started to run out of money started to give families access to land instead, lots of communities had undeveloped property negative for the voice he does is over they did was an out people plots of land and a package of seeds and said here, grow your self some food and often more people who wanted that in the land was available and if you did not keep your land nicely groomed and growing vegetables, you would use your plot of land to somebody also needed it and also in rural local newspapers they began to run all kinds of articles about how to make your food budget stretch and reminding people that they could in fact eat leftovers. Ive seen recipes for leftovers for sandwiches made out of leftover beans, stuffed peppers made out of audits and ends and Bread Pudding made out of stale bread and none of this sounded terribly appetizing and a lot of it was common sense and a lot of it was stuff that they already made but there were also other women whose families had more money in town who did not in fact know all of this. So they were providing information to these people who did not necessarily habit and we talked before about Home Economics extension and about Home Economics trained women to work in the counties who taught all kinds kinds of skills. Their services were in high demand in the 1930s and they in many communities offered free classes and open them up to everybody so people good morning how to cook meals and best to spend their money and again, teaching a lot of skills that some women, the form women already knew because i did this all of the time but these particular stores were ones that not everybody had come the skills, they were providing this kind of information for other people. How might you feed your family if you had absolutely no money. What i have one more story that macaroni was always, your bike big boxes of macaroni inexpensively in her way of making a healthy meal out of macaroni, was of the cheese sauce, she instead bought flats of cans of tomatoes and spinach and yeah, i can see the faces back there and then mixed the tomatoes or the spinach dip with the macaroni and serve it up to the family but you know what, if you are hungry, it is amazing what tastes good. People ate a lot of eggs, eggs were a cheap source of protein and ive seen a diary where a farm woman literally they would eat those three times a day, and morning they were fried in atlanta were matched in a dinner, they were baked potatoes or Something Like that at dinner and so theres a whole range of potato dishes that she could used based on with the family audit will not based on what the family wanted but with the needed and based on her ability to imagine what you could do with potatoes. Cornmeal mush, we talked about this before, to which you add a little bit at a time so it does not get all company, you started up in nice and thick and you pop it into the bowl than if you have money, use a little bit of butter or syrup on their and you call it breakfast. And you pour it in a pan and you let it sit all day and at the end of the day you dump it out and then you fry it and then if you got syrup, or molasses or Something Like that, you pour that on and you call it dinner. The same woman who told me about the oatmeal and the macaroni and the tomatoes and the spinach, shes the one whoss husband sometimes was arnie as well as four dollars a month. She was about the most impoverished during the 30s 3s who i talk to. She said there were times when the only way she could think of to get her kids to eat the same thing day in and day out was at breakfast time to put the oatmeal in a bowl, and at lunch she put on a plate, and at dinner she put in a cup and try to form into thinking it was something different. At least it would look different. Even if it was the same thing over and over again. But theres all kinds of foods that were served in the same way in the 1930s, beans. My grandmother said i hoped by the end of the decade i would never see another being again. They had eaten beans, some of the people at eaten beans over the course of a decade. Cabbage, sauerkraut. We talked about haste before, right, that during the civil war or if youre living on the frontier you might end up eating paste for dinner in one form or another. One of the forms of paste id seen relative to the 1930s was called wisconsin gravy. Wisconsin gravy was either water or milk heated up with flour put in it and salt and pepper pored over toast. Paste over toast. If you had nothing else you had paste over toast for dinner. They ate wheat. They ate wild food. They gardened, they hunted, they fished. Dandelions when they became available in the spring were a really important salad ingredient. They used soup to stretch a lot of these ingredients even further. But sometimes that wasnt far enough. So in a lot of families that was selective starvation of adults, meaning adult would choose not to eat in favor of letting their children eat. Families stayed in bed all day and reduced their meals that two meals a day so that everybody would conserve as much energy as possible and not get as hungry. They also relied on the kindness of friends and strangers. Are all kinds of kids he showed up in school not have an eaten, and were earning very little themselves getting frantic about this. I interviewed a woman who had been a teacher throughout the 1930s, and she said i had these little children come to school falling asleep in class. They did not have anything to eat. She was someone who was really well connected in town. She went around to all the womens clubs because they met up once a week and she went around to them and said please, give me your leftovers. The womens club started giving her the leftovers and she starred distributing them at school so that kid had something to eat. She also noticed a bunch of those children had no clothes to wear to school. So when her brother died during the 1950s, they decided instead of asking for flowers at the funeral that would ask for overalls. Overalls in childrens sizes so that she could then pass out overalls to students who have no clothes. Teachers were a really important part of feeding and clothing kids throughout the 1930s. On the issue of clothing, what is she wearing . This anybody know what she is wearing . Kate . [inaudible] she is wearing a flour sack him a big flour, 50, 100pound kinds. And also feed sacks in the 1930s were made out of fabric. You did not want to waste fabric. So this is like a white flour or feed sacks and what you do is simply bleached out the name of the company. Sometimes mothers didnt do a real good job and 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 if they put a pretty pattern under feed, the farm women would insist their husbands by that brandon cid. I know my greatgrandmother did that and made my greatgrandfather move hundred pound bags of feed to get the patterns she wanted. These are a couple of real honest to goodness feed sacks. Here you can get instructions. Most are women already knew how to do this but other women learned and dressed their families. People saved everything they could in order to clothes themselves. Why is this called a hoover belt . Hoover was present at the time and you is not approved on very well by the american populace after he refused to do anything about the depression. He did somethings d not do the people interpreted as enough. These shantytowns at the edge of major cancer called hoover ville and that lots and lots of people lived where the families ran out of money. Whether it was food, wethers clothing, whether it was shelter there were a lot of people who were making due or doing without during the 1930s because they simply did not have the wherewithal to do otherwise. Now, one 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. The answer is that the Great Depression was an era where cheap nutritious food was in vogue and that food generally lacked in taste. This food was not the haute cuisine. It was very, very bland. One Great Depression recipe that ive i seen that looks really, really horrible was a casserole recipe where you took spaghetti and your world the spaghetti for 20 minutes. Thats about twice as long as you really should boil spaghetti. You mixed it with boiled carrots chopped up, and then put white sauce over the whole thing and make it. I cannot imagine eating this. However, it was a cheap. It was filling. All of you are making horrible faces. This is not great food but it is food that will get you buy. It was plain, starchy and filling. There is also out there on the web a really wonderful site called Great Depression meals with clara. I think it is called Great Depression meals with clara. Clara was an elderly italian grandmother who lived through the Great Depression whose grandson was really interested in Great Depression cooking and the origins of the meals she cooked it you can look at and see some of her meals. One of her meals was called for manzanillo, and the poor mans meal was a fried potato to which the cook added a chopped up hot dog, and you fry it all up and you serve it. Hotdocs were cheap. Potatoes were cheap, and supposedly this case good. I dont think its exactly my cup of tea. Some of you might like it. Creamed chipped beef on toast, okay, thats one a number of your grandfathers would eat during world war ii in the army. They use a bunch of colloquial name for which i will not use right now but you take mixed into it chopped up chipped beef which if youve ever had it is really, really salty but you mix it into the white sauce, pour it over toast and you call that a meal. Hoovers stew was a name given to all kinds of meals that people ate during the 1930s. One recipe called for a 16ounce box box of noodles like macaroni and spaghetti. You cook that, you add sliced hotdogs and then you at two cans of stew tomatoes, one can of stewed peas or corn including the liquid, and then any other cheap vegetables that you might have, and you call it dinner. This is basically a mess plus hotdogs. Ive also seen mashed potato things where you also cut up a a bunch of hot dogs and stick them into the mashed potatoes at attractive angles and make it look fancy. A lot of Great Depression food is just simple. It is basic. It is meant to fill you up. If you wonder why even in the 1950s americans were still eating a lot of the stuff, it was comfort food that people are gotten used to during the 1930s, and event it still meant being fall and being fed in the 1950s and later. I got fed a lot of this kind of stuff as a kid because my grandmother was feeding a young family during the 1930s and use a lot of recipes that were a lot like this. So my mothers memory meant i ended up eating a lot of the stuff even into the 60s and 70s. Its 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, but the question that people ask a lot at the time is did anybody starve . And i decided okay i will be careful about this. I started looking for articles come looking for what historians had to say about this and you know what . Nobody has really thoroughly tackled this subject. There are bits and pieces of information out there, bits and pieces that i think we can come to some conclusions but this is an area where historians just have not done enough work. President hoover said, late in his term as president 1932 or so, nobody actually is starving. But i think its pretty clear that at least a few people were. In new york city in 1931 the Health Department recorded the deaths of 95 people by starvation. There probably were more. Those were the ones who got recorded in one place in one year. The stories of extreme poverty in the 1930s abound, and i dont think it takes a whole lot of time talking to older people before you start hearing stories that make you think that yeah, maybe a few more people did star. I have a story that was my great grandfathers story. He was a farmer. Farmers were making next to nothing in this part of games is because of the dust bowl so he was working on a road project. He and his friends every day at lunch would sit down and open up their meal pails and have lunch in the middle of the day but there was one man who would that sit within. They refer to them as the antisocial man and every day at lunch the antisocial man would go and sit by himself and he didnt talk to people a whole lot. So one day someone got close enough so he could look into his lunch pail and see what was in there. It was potato peels. They finally got the story out of him, and everyday he was coming to work with a pail full of potato peels for lunch. He and his wife had decided that that was how theyre going to manage. Their children and his wife needed the potatoes more. He would eat the peels and some out there would just keep going but he was so embarrassed by this that he wouldnt sit with the other men. Once they knew this information the other men started making him come and sit with them and everybody took turns bring him something for lunch every day. The sad irony of all of this was that out of those potatoes he was getting the vitamins basically and his kids were getting the starch. Between the two of them nobody was really getting a meal but there are all kinds of stories like this about the Great Depression. Was it known that the potato peel had vitamins back in . No, it wasnt. He was doing what made sense to them. We now know the kids were missing out on all the vitamins or a lot of the vitamins. They did know that ben. They just knew those kids needed more food. In some communities the hunger was really widespread. This was especially true in some communities of tenant farmers. Where the picture here of a tenant family from alabama. Tenant farmers at the best of times limped along yeartoyear because the landowner or the stone owner would loan the money and tenant farmers had no land and there also deeply in debt because of this particular system. This was an africanamerican tenant community, as a stone owner had been lending them all 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. They had no way to leave. They didnt have vehicles. They didnt have the money to get out. Eventually the red cross figured out what was going on there and ride with help, and by that point the situation was dire. The regional red cross director said you cant imagine the horror of it. Starvation was horrific. So those families were, in fact, starving. In areas where people own their own land things are not usually this diet. Farmers often were not making any money because the takes they couldnt send to market they could eat. The garden they could plant and eat. The corn they could eat. That wasnt true if the weather didnt cooperate. He we have a picture of dust bowl conditions in eastern colorado in the 1930s. Thats a dirt store. Thats not a thunderstorm. Thats a dirt storm. Much of great plains experience severe drought during the 1930s. Those droughts made their way into the midwest in 1934 in 1936. And because of that it was entirely possible to starve on a farm that you owned in in a r of places in the 1930s, because you cant grow if you dont have any water. Now, when you look at the cits 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 a cute, in mining committees particularly a cute. They had the appearance of rickets in a lot of communities. This boy has rickets. It causes bowed bones because of lack of vitamin d in your diet. The reappearance of rickets, tuberculosis increased significantly and there are some committees where 60 more of the children were malnourished. Now, the people who were the most sick and the most malnourished awful were not the people who started the depression poor. They found that in families where the ropes just general unemployment that 40 of the children or excuse me, 40 of families with a wage earner was unemployed, people were ill. If, however, you add in the people who had started out middle class and had become poor, you discover that 60 of those families were in poor health. People who had lost status, and gone from being the class to being for were often much sicker than those which started the depression in poverty. There is only speculation at the time about why that might happen, but these formerly middleclass families were families that had the least skills in dealing with poverty. They were not used to it. They didnt necessarily know how to scrimp and save. They were probably more resistant to asking for help, 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 dying of illnesses they would not normally have gotten had they not been hungry. So whats the take away from all of this . Hunger was widespread. It was caused by joblessness rather than being caused by a sheer lack of food nationwide, and people who had previous experience of food innovation were better off than those without. So this is true, grandma did survived the Great Depression because her supply chain was local. She was growing food. She knew how to get by. In she knew how to do stuff. She knew how to feed herself here 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 people who did not. All right, lets in there and will continue with this on friday. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] did you know you can listen to lectures in history on the go . Stream it as a podcast anywhere anytime. You are watching American History tv. American history tv is looking back at the holidays in the Nations Capital throughout the years. The president boyhood home has this marvelous addition of the German Shepherd keane. My husband and his family had a series of German Shepherds all of whom were named king, and he had a black one when he was a little boy, and he was so surprised when he saw this session was it just yesterday when it was unfair because he had no idea this is what was going to be done this year. Some of you may remember from last year we had the white house last you with dozens of little socks in the windows and in the chimneys and on the yard. Watch more history of the holidays online at cspan. Org history. Our weekly series the presidency highlights the politics come policies of legacies of u. S. President s and first ladies. An American Historical Association Panel Explores why Many Americans hated thomas jefferson, a man like him, Lyndon Johnson and richard nixon. Can we talk about what was happening in the 1920s and 30s as prominence [inaudible] big call themselves evangelicals but many of them were exactly the same from 1930s to the 1950s. What you do, you could see signs the bible might layout and also in the new testament, a a sers of events that would tell us [inaudible] some of them are kind of hard to track. [inaudible] but far more important and much more interesting to me, we also closely watch global events pick their innocence students of foreign affairs. They have laid out a number of expert in 1880s and 1890s that they were preaching and preaching and preaching in the 1910s, 20s, 30s to see some of these predictions fulfilled. One of the important rules with the rise of a new restored roman empire [inaudible] i revitalize rome. They also knew was hitler was doing. They read mein kampf in german before hitler came to power and it was believed another sign of the times would be the return of jews to palestine. They saw hitler facilitating that. They didnt necessary support it in church but [inaudible] had helped set the stage for the battle of armageddon which would really happen in palestine. So all the stuff going on in the background. They understood the context with all the other things going on. Theres no doubt that his campaign in 1932 got off to an ominous start. On the first day of the balance of the Democratic National convention was that he received 666 votes. I thought it was too good to be true. Like that couldnt like that could be true. I went back and sure enough that was absolutely the case. This all reset them on the edge believing or Something Weird going on. After the election totalitarian leaders. Roosevelt has become such a revered person in American History that americans dont realize how much those who hated roosevelt in the 30s really truly despised him, just couldnt stand him. Watch this program and thousands more at cspan. Org history. You have been watching American History tv. Every saturday on cspan2 visit the people and places that tell the american story and watch thousands of historical stories online any time at cspan. Org history. You can also find us on twitter, facebook and youtube at cspan history. Now are guested at what it is our guest right now there are guest today professor caroline janney, and her book is ends of war the unfinished fight of lees army after appomattox. Lets take a quick look at it