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This photograph shows two men looking for a job with signs in their bodies. It only shows how miserable and desperate they must’ve been. The signs show different reasons why they should be hired and although the man on the left has multiple reasons why, the man on the right only has one. This was probably because men with a family had a priority to have a job.

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This website talks about the effects of the Great Depression over the children. It describes how it was like growing up during this time and how were family roles altered.  It helps you have a clearer vision on the children and the family itself point of view of the Great Depression.

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Unemployment jumped from less than 3 million in 1929 to 4 million in 1930, 8 million in 1931, and 12 1/2 million in 1932. In that year, a quarter of the nation's families did not have a single employed wage earner.

Even those fortunate enough to have jobs suffered drastic pay cuts and reductions in hours. Only one company in ten failed to cut pay, and in 1932, three-quarters of all workers were on part-time schedules, averaging just 60 percent of the normal work week.

The economic collapse was terrifying in its scope and impact. By 1933 average family income had tumbled 40 percent, from $2,300 in 1929 to just $1,500 four years later.

Vagrancy shot up as many families were evicted from their homes for nonpayment of rent. The Southern Pacific Railroad boasted that it threw 683,000 vagrants off its trains in 1931. Free public flophouses and missions in Los Angeles provided beds for 200,000 of the uprooted.

To save money, families neglected medical and dental care. Many families sought to cope by planting gardens, canning food, buying used bread, and using cardboard and cotton for shoe soles. Despite a steep decline in food prices, many families did without milk or meat. In New York City, milk consumption declined a million gallons a day.

President Herbert Hoover declared, "Nobody is actually starving. The hoboes are better fed than they have ever been." But in New York City in 1931, there were 20 known cases of starvation; in 1934, there were 110 deaths caused by hunger. There were so many accounts of people starving in New York that the West African nation of Cameroon sent $3.77 in relief.

The Depression had a powerful impact on family life. It forced couples to delay marriage and drove the birthrate below the replacement level for the first time in American history. The divorce rate fell, for the simple reason that many couples could not afford to maintain separate households or pay legal fees. But rates of desertion soared. By 1940, 1.5 million married women were living apart from their husbands. More than 200,000 vagrant children wandered the country as a result of the breakup of their families.

Essential Questions:

What was it like to grow up during the Great Depression of the 1930s?

How did the Depression alter family roles?

Did Depression hardship strengthen or weaken family bonds?

Copyright Digital History 2021

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Unemployment jumped from less than 3 million in 1929 to 4 million in 1930, 8 million in 1931, and 12 1/2 million in 1932. In that year, a quarter of the nation's families did not have a single employed wage earner. Even those fortunate enough to have jobs suffered drastic pay cuts and reductions in hours.

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This photo shows how desperate families were and it shows how children must’ve been a big burden for them. They didn't have anything and still, had to provide for their children. It makes you understand and really see how  harder families with a lot of children had to struggle.

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This article from the University of Washington describes and talks about the way the Great Depression completely shifted American lives. It shows the way people and families lived during that time, and what they went through. It lays it down all as facts, to illustrate better how everyday life in the 1930's was like.

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The New Deal Gas and Grocery, 1935, in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle. The Great Depression and the New Deal changed everyday life for people in both overt and subtle ways. Click image to enlarge. (Courtesy of the Museum of History and Industry.)

The Great Depression transformed American social and political institutions and the ways individual people thought about themselves and their relationship to the country and the world. Though no two people had the same understanding of the Depression, everyone felt challenged and changed by the experience.

By 1932, three years after the initial crash, near thirty million Americans had lost their source of income, from unemployment or loss of a family breadwinner. This included more than a quarter of the population of Washington State. Of those lucky enough to have consistent work, many, perhaps most, took pay cuts or worked reduced schedules. Though there had been devastating economic depressions before, the 1930s crisis encompassed both urban and rural regions and devastated middle-class and working-class people alike.

LEARN MORE

* Bellingham Families during the Depression: Changes in Everyday Life by Annie Morro

* The Banking Crisis of 1933: Seattle's Survival during the Great Depression Bank Closures, by Drew Powers

* Life in Raymond, Washington, during the early years of the Great Depression, by Jacob Monson

* The Great Depression in Kitsap County, 1929-1932, by Lauren Champa

* Emerging Opportunities in Dark Times: Japanese Americans in the Northwest, 1933-1934, by Yukio Maeda

* The 1932 Seattle Sports Scene: Helping the Emerald City through Hard Times, by Brian Harris

* Changing Advertising Trends in the Seattle Times During the Great Depression, by Yifeng Hua

* The Rainy City on the "Wet Coast": The Failure of Prohibition in Seattle, by Kayta Katherine Samuels

* Responding to Anti-Semitism in the Jewish Transcript: Seattle's Jews during America's Great Depression, by Stephanie Fajardo

* Murders, Gambling, and Suicides: Crime in Seattle during the Depression, by Sarah Lawrence

* Challenging Gender Stereotypes during the Depression: Female Students at the University of Washington, by Nicolette Flannery

* The Town the New Deal Built: Mason City, Grand Coulee Dam, and Visions of New Deal America, by Allison Lamb

Nevertheless, the pain was not equally distributed. Indeed some businesses did well even in the dark days of 1931 and 1932 and most families did not lose livelihoods or face privation. The impact varied according to industry, class, race, location, and luck. The construction trades and the lumber industry suffered greatly, and in the mill towns and lumber camps of Washington State, unemployment surged (see "Life in Raymond"). Workers in other kinds of factories often lost their jobs but those with advanced skills were less likely to be hurt. White collar jobs fared better than blue collar jobs and those lucky enough to work for a city, county, state, or at one of the military facilities generally held on to jobs. Farm families were mostly well positioned (see "Kitsap County"). Farm prices fell but not so drastically that many Washington farmers were forced to sell or abandon their homesteads. Indeed, the farm population grew during these hard times, as people who years before had left farmsteads for city jobs returned, moving in with relatives or friends.

Washington's tiny communities of color were hit especially hard. Employment discrimination doubled in intensity and African Americans and Asian Americans were pushed out of jobs, including domestic service and farm labor, that whites had previously shunned. Japanese Americans, the state's largest minority population, had built a thriving small business sector in Seattle in the decades before the Great Depression. Now many of those residential hotels and restaurants struggled for customers (see "Emerging Opportunities in Dark Times"). The crisis encouraged some families to leave. Seattle's Japanese American population fell during the 1930s, with some moving to rural areas and others to Japan.

For Washington residents of all backgrounds who lost jobs, the challenges were daunting. With no unemployment insurance and typically with only one breadwinner, the loss of wages had an immediate and devastating effect on families, often leading to eviction and homelessness. People squeezed in with relatives when possible or begged landlords to stay on rent-free. Wives and teenage children joined unemployed husbands in the desperate search for work. Minimal help with food or rent was sometimes available from churches and charities, and in some counties, governments raised property taxes in an attempt to feed the hungry. The need far outstripped these local resources.

Sudden poverty produces psychological damage. Families broke apart under the strain. Divorces escalated, as did informal divorces as one partner or another (mostly husbands) abandoned their family. Young people also fled, quitting school and setting off on the road. Marriage rates and birth rates plummeted as people worried that they could not afford to start families. Acts of domestic violence multiplied and the suicide rate increased dramatically (see "Murders, Gambling Suicide").

New Deal period

When Franklin Roosevelt assumed office in March 1933, the economy was nearly stalled. Congress quickly passed a sequence of emergency measures to rescue the banking system, to send emergency aid to the states, and to begin to re-employ the millions who were out of work. Federal funds to Washington State were funneled through the Washington Emergency Relief Administration, a state agency that dispersed some money directly to the poor in the form of cash grants while also launching dozens of public works projects that created new jobs. Soon there would be more jobs coordinated with federal agencies. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) would employ thousands of young men in the forests and national parks of Washington State. The Civil Works Adminstration set up small public works jobs, while the Public Works Administration planned huge new infrastructure projects that included Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams on the Columbia River (see "Mason City, Grand Cooley Dam"). In 1935 many of the jobs and construction programs were consolidated under the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

With federal help, the state economy began a dramatic recovery, faster than many other states. By 1937, income payments in Washington (our best measure of economic activity) had returned to 93 percent of the 1929 level. Nationally, the level was 88 percent. Employment in the region's key industry, forest products, keyed the recovery. In 1937, there were almost as many workers employed in the woods, sawmills, paper mills, furniture, and wood products factories as in 1929, although wages remained well below normal. Other parts of the economy had rebounded, though not so dramatically (see "Economics and Poverty").

New concerns/ new possibilities

After 1933, the expansion of the New Deal meant that the government now intervened much more clearly in people's daily lives, employing them and giving them aid, as well as providing new forms of social insurance. The political mood also changed. A wave of labor strikes and unionization allowed for a new way of thinking about the power of ordinary people and racial and gender divisions. Some responded to the crisis by looking for different forms of social, political, and economic organization, and turned to radical- and sometimes, conservative -movements (see "Strikes and Unions"). Ethnic communities, marginalized by race or religious categorizations, sought out different strategies for economic and social survival. A new kind of civil rights activism became evident, especially in Seattle where it was centered in the African American and Filipino American communities and given voice in the Northwest Enterprise and Philippine-American Chronicle. Jewish organizations and activists played an important role in the civil rights struggles of the 1930s, as did the Communist Party and some left wing unions (see "Civil Rights").

Late in 1933, Utah ratified the 21st Amendment to the constitution, ending prohibition. The legal sale and consumption of alcohol and the reopening of bars and nightclubs changed the contours of everyday life in dramatic ways, bringing drinking out of the shadows, making it cheaper, safer, and more widespread. It was just one of the notable cultural changes of the Great Depression era. The repeal of prohibition changed how leisure was understood, while at the most intimate level, family relationships adapted to the new conditions of work and unemployment that the Depression brought.

Gender expectations were changing. Massive unemployment disrupted the husband-as-sole-breadwinner ideal. Women entered the paid labor force at higher rates than ever before, including married women and mothers. And some women reworked their understandings of their role in communities, in the nation, and in the world. This included female students at the University of Washington (see "Challenging gender stereotypes")
Copyright (c) 2019, James Gregory
Next: Culture and Arts During the Depression

Click on the links below to read illustrated research reports on everyday life during Washinton's Great Depression:

Bellingham Families during the Depression: Changes in Everyday Life by Annie Morro

The Town the New Deal Built: Mason City, Grand Coulee Dam, and Visions of New Deal America, by Allison Lamb

Mason City, WA was built by federal New Deal funds and private contractors to house the workers and families who were building the Grand Coulee Dam, and was consciously promoted as an example of the social vision, technological capacity, and high standard of living that New Deal America aspired to.

Changing Advertising Trends in the Seattle Times During the Great Depression, by Yifeng Hua

The Rainy City on the "Wet Coast": The Failure of Prohibition in Seattle, by Kayta Katherine Samuels

Responding to Anti-Semitism in the Jewish Transcript: Seattle's Jews during America's Great Depression, by Stephanie Fajardo

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Everyday Life in 1930s - Washington State

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The New Deal Gas and Grocery, 1935, in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle. The Great Depression and the New Deal changed everyday life for people in both overt and subtle ways. Click image to enlarge. (Courtesy of the Museum of History and Industry.)

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This political cartoon reflects very well how some of the families during the great depression looked like. You can see how sad and angry the dad is sitting on the couch without doing anything because he doesn’t have a job anymore. This is a not so horrible way to put how the Great Depression really was for most of the people, but for people who had it better, probably looked like this

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This infographic shows what were some of the tactics that families used during the great depression to save money. Since people didn't even have much to eat, they weren’t going to waste the money they had, on clothes or other items, so they “make it do”, which meant to pretty much fix whatever was broken and put things together with what you had to save money. This infographic shows clearly the alternatives people looked for to "survive" the Great Depression.

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Infographic: Great Depression Era Tactics for Saving Money | RECOIL OFFGRID

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The following infographic shows nine Great-Depression-era behaviors, and suggests some financial takeaway lessons associated with each.

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This is just a small painting showing a family waiting for his father to bring something home. He is probably out looking for a job or looking for something to eat. Here, you can also see the kids just looking and wondering when is his father coming back.

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In this photograph, you can clearly see a family of four just tired. Suffering from this huge economic crisis, that is being reflected on their lives. They seem hungry, dirty and with no excitement in life. It is a perfect way to illustrate how families might’ve felt during the great depression.

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This 2 minute video shows the way women and men during the great depression took care of their families and their farms. How they managed to have enough resources to get through this tough time. And also mentioning the ways they had to do things now, in comparison to before the Great Depression.

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Taking Care of Farm and Family During the Great Depression

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This poem written by Claudia Emerson in 2006, describes so clearly the hunger and the despair form people during the great depression. It also compares to people who had it worse and how this new era affected everyone. It is easy to understand and it speaks for the feelings of the people actually living this economic crisis.