# data[].attributes.headline
Survivors Of The Great Depression Tell Their Stories

# data[].attributes.subject
Survivors Of The Great Depression Tell Their Stories

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
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."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Survivors Of The Great Depression Tell Their Stories

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
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.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Story of the Great Depression in Photos

# data[].attributes.subject
The Story of the Great Depression in Photos

# data[].attributes.body
Images

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This collection of pictures of the Great Depression offers a glimpse into the lives of Americans who suffered through it. Included in this collection are pictures of the dust storms that ruined crops, leaving many farmers unable to keep their land. Also included are pictures of migrant workers-people who had lost their jobs or their farms and traveled in the hopes of finding some work. Life was not easy during the 1930s, as these evocative photos make plain.

Migrant Mother (1936)

This famous photograph is searing in its depiction of the utter desperation the Great Depression brought to so many and has become a symbol of the Depression. This woman was one of many migrant workers picking peas in California in the 1930s to make just enough money to survive.

It was taken by photographer Dorothea Lange as she traveled with her new husband, Paul Taylor, to document the hardships of the Great Depression for the Farm Security Administration.

Lange spent five years (1935 to 1940) documenting the lives and hardships of the migrant workers, ultimately receiving the Guggenheim Fellowship for her efforts.

Less known is that Lange later went on to photograph the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Farms for Sale

The drought, dust storms, and boll weevils that attacked Southern crops in the 1930s, all worked together to destroy farms in the South.

Outside the Dust Bowl, where farms and ranches were abandoned, other farm families had their own share of woes. Without crops to sell, farmers could not make money to feed their families nor to pay their mortgages. Many were forced to sell the land and find another way of life.

Generally, this was the result of foreclosure because the farmer had taken out loans for land or machinery in the prosperous 1920s but was unable to keep up the payments after the Depression hit, and the bank foreclosed on the farm.

Farm foreclosures were rampant during the Great Depression.

Relocating: On the Road

The vast migration that occurred as the result of the Dust Bowl in the Great Plains and the farm foreclosures of the Midwest has been dramatized in movies and books so that many Americans of later generations are familiar with this story. One of the most famous of these is the novel " The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck, which tells the story of the Joad family and their long trek from Oklahoma's Dust Bowl to California during the Great Depression. The book, published in 1939, won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a movie in 1940 that starred Henry Fonda.

Many in California, themselves struggling with the ravages of the Great Depression, did not appreciate the influx of these needy people and began calling them the derogatory names of "Okies" and "Arkies" (for those from Oklahoma and Arkansas, respectively).

Migrant Worker Walking Alone on a California Highway

With their farms gone, some men struck out alone in the hopes that they could somehow find somewhere that would offer them a job.

While some traveled the rails, hopping from city to city, others went to California in the hopes that there was some farm work to do.

Taking with them only what they could carry, they tried their best to provide for their family -- often without success.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Story of the Great Depression in Photos

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This collection of pictures of the Great Depression offers a glimpse into the lives of Americans who suffered through it.

# data[].attributes.body
Images

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Picture This: California Perspectives on American History

# data[].attributes.body
History Channel Video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Great Depression: Causes, Definition & Dates | HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Great Depression was the worst economic downturn in world history. Learn about the Dust Bowl, New Deal, causes of the Great Depression, a Great Depression timeline more.

# data[].attributes.body
Book: Bud, Not Buddy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A free community for sharing instructional videos and content for teachers and students. We are an education focused, safe venue for teachers, schools, and home schoolers to access educational for the classroom and home learning.

# data[].attributes.headline
Hoovervilles: The Shantytowns of the Great Depression

# data[].attributes.subject
Hoovervilles: The Shantytowns of the Great Depression

# data[].attributes.body
NewsEla

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

# data[].attributes.headline
Primary Sources: Interview on the Dust Bowl Storms of Oklahoma in 1934

# data[].attributes.subject
Primary Sources: Interview on the Dust Bowl Storms of Oklahoma in 1934

# data[].attributes.body
NewsEla

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Newsela | Primary Sources: Interview on the Dust Bowl Storms of Oklahoma in 1934

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Flora Robertson and her family moved to California to escape the dust storms in Oklahoma

# data[].attributes.body
NewsEla

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Newsela | The Many Causes of the Great Depression

# data[].attributes.body
Article

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
After the stock market crash of 1929, the American economy spiraled into a depression that would plague the nation for a decade.

# data[].attributes.headline
1930s: The Great Depression and Racial Segregation

# data[].attributes.subject
1930s: The Great Depression and Racial Segregation

# data[].attributes.body
video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
1930s: The Great Depression and Racial Segregation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Learn about the atmosphere of the 1930s, the Great Depression and racial segregation in the south as you prepare to read Harper Lee's famous novel, To Kill A Mockingbird. Homelessness, unemployment, segregation, and lynchings set the stage for Jem's and Scout's adventures in Maycomb, Alabama.

# data[].attributes.body
I know the picture below looks weird but this site is designed to inform students about this time period.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Learn about the Great Depression including its causes, the New Deal, Hoovervilles, Bonus Army, daily life, stock market crash, crime, entertainment, legacy, and facts. Educational article for students, schools, and teachers.

# data[].attributes.body
Book: Bud Not Buddy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Bud not Buddy Book Trailer, by Tina Chapman