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Great Depression Survivors Share Stories

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Great Depression Survivors Share Stories

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The Great Depression of the 1930s is on peoples' minds these days. If you have family members who lived through it, you may hear their stories at the dinner table this Thanksgiving.

It was a period of protests and hunger marches - and unionism spread like wildfire - but many people suffered quietly, ashamed of their poverty. No matter what their situation, the Great Depression changed those in the generation that survived it.

During those years, Chicago was especially hard-hit. Unemployment was as high as 40 percent in some neighborhoods. The city was more segregated than it is now.

Wanda Bridgeforth, who is from the Bronzeville area known as the "Black Metropolis," says she has rich memories of those years. It was a fairly affluent neighborhood - jazz great Louis Armstrong lived there, and so did Ida B. Wells - until hard times came.

"In the Depression, the men could not get jobs, and especially the black men," Bridgeforth says. "Here was my father with a degree in chemistry, and he could not get a job."

Bridgeforth's father was humiliated, she says. He fell apart, so her mother took what work she could find as a live-in domestic worker. Bridgeforth, who was in grade school, was boarded out.

"She told me that this is the way it has to be," Bridgeforth says. "So we either do it and survive, or don't do it and don't survive."

Bridgeforth was sent to live with relatives and sometimes with strangers.

"One house we lived in - there were 19 of us in a six-room house," she says.

Bridgeforth did learn to share and cooperate, she says, but so many years going without left a mark on her.

"The kids do say that I'm a pack rat," she says. "And they say, 'Well, what are you going to use this for?' and I say, 'I don't know, but I'm going to use it.' "
Surviving Winters Near Lake Michigan
In Chicago's oldest Mexican neighborhood, near Lake Michigan in South Chicago, Henry Martinez says the winters were so cold, they huddled around the potbelly stove.

Martinez's parents had 13 children, and they lived hand-to-mouth in a flat with shared bathrooms.

"You wanted to take a bath, you heat up the water in these big cans," Martinez says. "It was always a challenge to keep warm - we hugged each other on the floor. We had little beds that open and close. When I think about it, it was horrible. It was horrible. And then the sanitation of the community - garbage was just put in the alley - and did that create a condition? Yes it did: TB [tuberculosis]. I know my sister came down with TB. Sometimes I like to block that out and just say, 'Thanks God you're here.' "

He thanks God but says the Catholic Church didn't do much to help his family back then. At 76, Martinez works as a community organizer trying to help his old neighborhood, which is still poor.
Downtown Chicago Before The Unions
In a downtown Chicago office, right next to the El tracks, Les Orear remembers an easier childhood. Orear, 97, is now president emeritus of the Illinois Labor History Society.

But in the 1920s, Orear's father was a newspaperman, and Orear was in college when the stock market crashed.

"Pretty soon I got a call that I'd have to come back to Chicago and help support my family," Orear says. "Hm!"

He got a job at the stockyards making 37.5 cents a day. Chicago was a hotbed of union organizing in the 1930s, and Orear dedicated himself to bringing in the union. He says it made him feel useful.

"It was a wonderful time for me because here I was this young fella, and radical ideas are coming nowadays, I feel like I'm in the cusp," Orear says. "I'm one of those that is giving leadership to the working force that's going into the union. ... And it's going on all over the country. I'm not a lone warrior. I'm part of a vast machine."

But Orear has no memories of Thanksgiving or Christmas "whatsoever," he says.

"All of those holidays were so incidental," Orear says. "We in the yards did not have Christmas. We had Christmas off, but it was a day with no pay."

It was the same for Thanksgiving, and Orear says there were no vacations or benefits.

"It's hard now for young people - for anybody - to remember, that's the way the world worked in those days, before unions. That is the difference, kiddos."
Born To Immigrants In Bridgeport
Bridgeport, south of the Loop, is home to the White Sox. Church steeples sprout from this working class neighborhood of the Irish, Italians, Polish, Lithuanians, Chinese and Croatians of St. Jerome's Parish.

Many of them were born during the '20s to immigrant parents.

Giggi Besic Cortese, 81, has lived in the neighborhood all her life. She lives on a block full of two-story brick and frame houses with narrow sidewalks between them. She said boarders stayed upstairs, including a man named John Vuk who took her to the show every Sunday.

"Do you known how I survived those days?" Cortese asks. "[It] was going to the show every Sunday to see Shirley Temple, but [I] tell you, she was my inspiration to go on living. Honest to goodness, I couldn't wait till Sunday, and we would sit and wait for John Vuk to say, 'Come, ve go to the show, ve go to the show today.' You can certainly say that people had heart for one another - and if they were able to help, more often than not they did."

Dusko Condic, 77, who is also from the Bridgeport neighborhood, says his father died "a relatively young man," in his early 40s.

"He left eight of us," Condic says. "Unfortunately, we lost the house. I can remember to this day - and I become emotional when I think of it - literally being placed on the sidewalk [with] every last possession that my poor mother had because she wasn't able to supposedly pay the mortgage. And an incredible number of people came to my mothers' aid, literally wheeling wheelbarrows of coal to help warm the house."

Condic and his friends have a lot of good memories, too. They were children glued to the radio every Sunday.

"There's nothing they like better than gathering around the table and telling stories from the old days," Condic says. "Today, on Thanksgiving, their children and grandchildren might ask about the Great Depression they say, but they're pretty sure the kids don't really understand."

"My brother Mark has 10 kids, and somewhere along the line they tend to disregard the value of money," Condic says. " 'Oh, Dad, it's only money. So what, I can make more.' And on more than one occasion, he tells them, 'Hey kids, God heaven forbid if the Depression comes around again. I won't be opening up the window and jumping out, but I can see you guys doing it.' I think that's probably true."

There's grit in this generation of Chicagoans - and something of a swagger, too. The man who cries about his mother's struggles can boast in the face of today's catastrophe.

Says Condic: "Tomorrow I could lose everything, but somehow I'm not afraid. I really am not."

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Survivors Of The Great Depression Tell Their Stories

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With the economy in shambles, people are worrried about going through another Great Depression. In the 1930s, unemployment was as high as 40 percent in some areas of Chicago. A few who lived through it tell their stories.

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The Dust Bowl got its name after Black Sunday, April 14, 1935. More and more dust storms had been blowing up in the years leading up to that day. In 1932, 14 dust storms were recorded on the Plains.

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In April 1936 a young photographer named Arthur Rothstein showed up in Boise City to take photographs for the federal government's Resettlement Administration.

Rothstein's boss, Roy Stryker, believed that pictures could be a powerful tool to show not only the multitude of problems the nation was facing, but what the government was doing about them.

Over the course of seven years, as the agency became part of the Farm Security Administration, Stryker would launch an unprecedented documentary effort, eventually amassing more than 200,000 images of America in the 1930s taken by a talented cadre of photographers, including Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Marion Post Walcott, John Vachon, and Dorothea Lange.
Click on the thumbnail images below to view the full photos.

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THE DUST BOWL chronicles the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history, in which the frenzied wheat boom of the 'Great Plow-Up,' followed by a decade-long drought during the 1930s nearly swept away the breadbasket of the nation.

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Many teenagers of this period were known for "riding the rails." Teenagers who felt that they were a burden to their families or were ashamed of their unemployment and poverty felt the need to leave their homes to find a life of their own.

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The Great Depression, Cause, Effect, and the End

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The Great Depression, Cause, Effect, and the End

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The Great Depression was a worldwide economic depression that lasted 10 years. It began in the United States on October 24, 1929, otherwise known as "Black Thursday," when panicked investors sold a record 13 million shares. Over the next four trading days, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a popular proxy for the U.S. stock market, fell nearly 25%. It continued to decline for the next three years, losing nearly 90% between October 1929 and July 1932.

The stock market crash significantly reduced consumer spending and business investment. Consequently, U.S. GDP decreased dramatically in the first years of the Great Depression, dropping from $104.6 billion in 1929 to $57.2 billion in 1933. In comparison, GDP declined just 2% at the height of the Great Recession between 2008 and 2009.

Key Takeaways

Unemployment Reached 25%

The Great Depression affected all aspects of society. By its height in 1933, unemployment had risen from about 3% to nearly 25% of the nation's workforce. Some workers that kept their jobs saw their wages fall, many others had to work lower paying jobs that they were often overqualified for. From 1929 to 1932 the U.S. gross domestic product was nearly cut in half, dramatically decreasing from $104.6 billion to $57.2 billion, partly due to deflation. The Consumer Price Index fell 27% between November 1929 to March 1933, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Panicked government leaders passed the Smoot-Hawley tariff in 1930 to protect domestic industries and jobs, but it actually worsened the issue. World trade plummeted 66% as measured in U.S. dollars between 1929 and 1934.

The Depression's pain was felt worldwide, leading to World War II. Germans were already burdened with financial reparations from World War I. That caused hyperinflation. This added to the pressures that ultimately led the German people to elect Adolf Hitler's Nazi party to a majority in 1933.

Life During the Depression

The Depression caused many farmers to lose their farms. At the same time, years of over-cultivation and drought created the "Dust Bowl" in the Midwest, destroying agricultural production in a previously fertile region. Thousands of these farmers and other unemployed workers migrated to California in search of work.

Note

What Caused It

According to Ben Bernanke, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, the central bank helped create the Depression. It used tight monetary policies when it should have done the opposite. According to Bernanke in 2004, these were the Fed's five critical mistakes:

1. The Fed began raising the fed funds rate in the spring of 1928. It kept increasing it through a recession that started in August 1929.

2. When the stock market crashed, investors turned to the currency markets. At that time, the gold standard supported the value of the dollars held by the U.S. government. Speculators began trading in their dollars for gold in September 1931. That created a run on the dollar.

3. The Fed raised interest rates again to preserve the dollar's value. That further restricted the availability of money for businesses. More bankruptcies followed.

4. The Fed did not increase the supply of money to combat deflation.

5. Investors withdrew all their deposits from banks. The failure of the banks created more panic. The Fed ignored the banks' plight. This situation destroyed any of consumers' remaining confidence in financial institutions. Most people withdrew their cash and put it under their mattresses. That further decreased the money supply.

The Fed did not put enough money in circulation to get the economy going again. Instead, the Fed allowed the total supply of U.S. dollars to fall by a third. Later research has supported parts of Bernanke's assessment.

What Ended the Great Depression

In 1932, the country elected Franklin D. Roosevelt as president. He promised to create federal government programs to end the Great Depression. Within 100 days, he signed the New Deal into law, creating 42 new agencies throughout its lifetime. They were designed to create jobs, allow unionization, and provide unemployment insurance. Many of these programs still exist. They aim to help safeguard the economy and prevent another depression.

Note

Many argue that World War II, not the New Deal, ended the Depression. Still, others contend that if FDR had spent as much on the New Deal as he did during the War, it would have ended the Depression. In the nine years between the launch of the New Deal and the attack on Pearl Harbor, FDR increased the debt by $3 billion. In 1942, defense spending added $23 billion to the debt. In 1943, it added another $64 billion.

Reasons a Great Depression Could Not Happen Again

While anything is possible, it's unlikely to happen again. Central banks around the world, including the Federal Reserve, have learned from the past. There are better safeguards in place to protect against catastrophe, and developments in monetary policy help manage the economy. The Great Recession, for instance, had a significantly smaller impact.

Some argue that the sizes of the U.S. national debt and the current account deficit could trigger an economic crisis. Experts also predict that climate change could cause profound losses.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

When did the Great Depression end?

How many people died during the Great Depression?

How did the Great Depression change the role of government in America?

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What Happened During the Great Depression?

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The Great Depression of 1929 was a 10-year global economic crisis. Here are causes, impact, and chances of recurrence.