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How the Great Depression heavily impacted children

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How the Great Depression heavily impacted children

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A worker’s got no right to have kids any more.

-unemployed worker, in This Fabulous Century

When the Great Depression hit in the 1930's a lot of families could not afford anything. A lot of families lost their homes and kids had no where else to go. Buying anything in general in the Great Depression was hard. A lot of families resorted to foods that were low quality and unhealthy for the long run. A lot of families worked day and night or the opposite instead of working they searched for jobs due to high demand and a lot of companies losing money which caused havoc and chaos.

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School

1930s: School was considered a luxury for low- and middle-income children. Schools were overpopulated, underfunded, and an estimated 20,000 schools in America closed. Transportation was an issue-there were no buses or cars so children had to walk often long distances. Racism was so prevalent that many schools were segregated. Roosevelt's New Deal promised for greater access to education, but failed on many accounts. During the Depression, many children took jobs to support the family rather than attend school.
Fun fact: In 1937, Chicago schools used the radio for instruction during the polio outbreak! This was the first time technology was used for virtual education.

Today: Children today are required to attend school from kindergarten through 12th grade and have many options-from home and online education, to public, charter, and private school options. Students in Minnesota generally have access to transportation and segregation has been outlawed nationally since 1964.

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A Child's Life in the 1930s Compared to Today | Children's Theatre Company

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The nation's largest, most acclaimed theatre for young people, creating experiences that educate, challenge, and inspire. Located in Minneapolis, MN.

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I have worked hard all my life, and all I have now is my  broken body.

-California field hand, in The Fabulous Century

People who migrated to U.S had a rough start from the Great Depression. Everything was hard for migrant workers. They were paid really poor such as them getting paid with fruit or cotton. Sometimes they would get paid $0.75-$1.25 a day. Everything they had to do was rough.

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Mass Exodus From the Plains | American Experience | PBS

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The Dust Bowl prompted the largest migration in American history; by 1940, 2.5 million had moved out of the Plains states.

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"Long as I can work, I’ll get along somehow."

- Mother suffering from tuberculosis, in This Fabulous Century

A lot of Women worked hard during the Great Depression. Just for a low pay women tried anyway to earn more such as protesting. Even if women were sick they still went to work because money was a important thing to keep them financially stable for their family. They worked all day and when they get home they have to clean and make food which is a lot of work.

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"When these winds hit us, we and our misery were suddenly covered with dust. Here in the Texas Panhandle we were hit harder than most anywhere else. If the wind below one way, here came the dark dust from Oklahoma. Another way and it was the gray dust from Kansas. Still another way, the brown dust from Colorado and New Mexico. Little farms were buried. And the towns were blackened."

- Texas farmer, in This Fabulous Century

April 14 1935 Farmers in Oklahoma were hit with a massive dust bowl where almost all their crops were destroyed. None of them were recoverable or can be fixed. This was during the Great Depression and it was a catastrophe for a lot of families that owned farms because they could not sell their crops nor use it to eat. Which put the in a state of spending more money or going hungry.

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What Caused the Dust Bowl?

The Dust Bowl was caused by several economic and agricultural factors, including federal land policies, changes in regional weather, farm economics and other cultural factors. After the Civil War, a series of federal land acts coaxed pioneers westward by incentivizing farming in the Great Plains.

The Homestead Act of 1862, which provided settlers with 160 acres of public land, was followed by the Kinkaid Act of 1904 and the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909. These acts led to a massive influx of new and inexperienced farmers across the Great Plains.

Many of these late 19th and early 20th-century settlers lived by the superstition "rain follows the plow." Emigrants, land speculators, politicians and even some scientists believed that homesteading and agriculture would permanently affect the climate of the semi-arid Great Plains region, making it more conducive to farming.

Manifest Destiny

This false belief was linked to Manifest Destiny -an attitude that Americans had a sacred duty to expand west. A series of wet years during the period created a further misunderstanding of the region's ecology and led to the intensive cultivation of increasingly marginal lands that couldn't be reached by irrigation.

Rising wheat prices in the 1910s and 1920s and increased demand for wheat from Europe during World War I encouraged farmers to plow up millions of acres of native grassland to plant wheat, corn and other row crops. But as the United States entered the Great Depression, wheat prices plummeted. In desperation, farmers tore up even more grassland in an attempt to harvest a bumper crop and break even.

Crops began to fail with the onset of drought in 1931, exposing the bare, over-plowed farmland. Without deep-rooted prairie grasses to hold the soil in place, it began to blow away. Eroding soil led to massive dust storms and economic devastation-especially in the Southern Plains.

When Was the Dust Bowl?

The Dust Bowl, also known as "the Dirty Thirties," started in 1930 and lasted for about a decade, but its long-term economic impacts on the region lingered much longer.

Severe drought hit the Midwest and southern Great Plains in 1930. Massive dust storms began in 1931. A series of drought years followed, further exacerbating the environmental disaster.

By 1934, an estimated 35 million acres of formerly cultivated land had been rendered useless for farming, while another 125 million acres-an area roughly three-quarters the size of Texas-was rapidly losing its topsoil.

Regular rainfall returned to the region by the end of 1939, bringing the Dust Bowl years to a close. The economic effects, however, persisted. Population declines in the worst-hit counties-where the agricultural value of the land failed to recover-continued well into the 1950s.

'Black Blizzards' Strike America

During the Dust Bowl period, severe dust storms, often called "black blizzards," swept the Great Plains. Some of these carried topsoil from Texas and Oklahoma as far east as Washington, D.C. and New York City, and coated ships in the Atlantic Ocean with dust.

Billowing clouds of dust would darken the sky, sometimes for days at a time. In many places, the dust drifted like snow and residents had to clear it with shovels. Dust worked its way through the cracks of even well-sealed homes, leaving a coating on food, skin and furniture.

Some people developed "dust pneumonia" and experienced chest pain and difficulty breathing. It's unclear exactly how many people may have died from the condition. Estimates range from hundreds to several thousand people.

On May 11, 1934, a massive dust storm two miles high traveled 2,000 miles to the East Coast, blotting out monuments such as the Statue of Liberty and the U.S. Capitol.

The worst dust storm occurred on April 14, 1935. News reports called the event Black Sunday. A wall of blowing sand and dust started in the Oklahoma Panhandle and spread east. As many as three million tons of topsoil are estimated to have blown off the Great Plains during Black Sunday.

An Associated Press news report coined the term "Dust Bowl" after the Black Sunday dust storm.

New Deal Programs

President Franklin D. Roosevelt established a number of measures to help alleviate the plight of poor and displaced farmers. He also addressed the environmental degradation that had led to the Dust Bowl in the first place.

As part of Roosevelt's New Deal, Congress established the Soil Erosion Service and the Prairie States Forestry Project in 1935. These programs put local farmers to work planting trees as windbreaks on farms across the Great Plains. The Soil Erosion Service, now called the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) developed and promoted new farming techniques to combat the problem of soil erosion.

Okie Migration

Roughly 2.5 million people left the Dust Bowl states- Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma-during the 1930s. It was one of the largest migrations in American history.

Oklahoma alone lost 440,000 people to migration. Many of them, poverty-stricken, traveled west looking for work. From 1935 to 1940, roughly 250,000 Oklahoma migrants moved to California. A third settled in the state's agriculturally rich San Joaquin Valley.

These Dust Bowl refugees were called "Okies." Okies faced discrimination, menial labor and pitiable wages upon reaching California. Many of them lived in shantytowns and tents along irrigation ditches. "Okie" soon became a term of disdain used to refer to any poor Dust Bowl migrant, regardless of their state of origin.

Dust Bowl in Arts and Culture

The Dust Bowl, and the suffering endured by those who survived it, captured the hearts and imaginations of the nation's artists, musicians and writers.

John Steinbeck memorialized the plight of the Okies in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. Photographer Dorothea Lange documented rural poverty with a series of photographs for FDR's Farm Securities Administration, and artist Alexandre Hogue achieved renown with his Dust Bowl landscapes.

Folk musician Woody Guthrie, and his semi-autobiographical first album Dust Bowl Ballads of 1940, told stories of economic hardship faced by Okies in California. Guthrie, an Oklahoma native, left his home state with thousands of others looking for work during the Dust Bowl.

Sources

FDR and the New Deal Response to an Environmental Catastrophe. Roosevelt Institute.
About The Dust Bowl. English Department; University of Illinois.
Dust Bowl Migration. University of California at Davis.
The Great Okie Migration. Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Okie Migrations. Oklahoma Historical Society.
What we learned from the Dust Bowl: lessons in science, policy, and adaptation. Population and Environment.
The Dust Bowl. Library of Congress.
Dust Bowl Ballads: Woody Guthrie. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.
The Dust Bowl. Ken Burns; PBS.

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Dust Bowl: Causes, Definition & Years - HISTORY

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The Dust Bowl refers to the drought-stricken southern plains of the United States, which suffered severe dust storms during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

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"Maybe we can start again, in the new rich land-in California, where the fruit grows. We’ll start over, But you can’t start. Only a baby can start. You and me-why we're all that’s been…. This land, is us; and the flood years and the dust years and the drought years are us. We can’t start again. "

-from The Grapes of Wrath

Wheat was expensive due to Dust Bowls in Oklahoma. It affected the economy for food and people homes were destroyed from dust bowls. A lot of families struggled during these times which was the hardest drought of Oklahoma. Not just farms it was other parts of the city and small towns in the state of Oklahoma. People did not have jobs due to this and could not get money.

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Home | Learn | What was the Dust Bowl?

What was the Dust Bowl?

To make things worse, the Dust Bowl started. Farmers plowed a lot of the new land on the prairie during World War I. The prairie needed its grass, or crops like wheat, to hold down the soil and dirt. When a drought started on the prairie in 1930, there was no grass or crops to hold down the dirt. Dust storms blew all across the country, taking dirt from Colorado all the way east to Washington, DC. Animals died without enough crops to feed them, and the price of food went up again. Without any crops or animals to sell, the prairie farmers had no money to pay the banks back. They lost their farms and their homes. Without farms, food was expensive and people without jobs, who had lost all their savings, could not afford to buy much of it. People were desperate. By 1934, it had turned the Great Plains into a desert that came to be known as the Dust Bowl. In Oklahoma, the Panhandle area was hit hardest by the drought.
Listen to Flora Robertson talk about her experience in the Dust Bowl.
This boy is on a farm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, during the Dust Bowl. Arthur Rothstein, 1936 (image courtesy of the Library of Congress).

Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and Kansas were all a part of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. In Oklahoma, the panhandle cities and towns suffered the worst droughts and dust storms (map courtesy of PBS).

Dorothea Lange's famous "Migrant Mother" photograph (image courtesy of the Library of Congress).

Farmer and sons walking in the face of a dust storm. Cimarron County, Oklahoma (image courtesy of the Library of Congress).

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What was the Dust Bowl? | Oklahoma Historical Society

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Their hunger was in their eyes, and their need was in their eyes.

-from The Grapes of Wrath

By the end of 1932 the Great Depression affected at least 60 million people. In Large cities they setup bread lines and food supplies to people in need but they were limited. Families needed food badly it got to a point that they needed to take money out of their savings. While the rich did not really suffer during the Great Depression, The middle class and lower class suffered a lot. A lot of women would sacrifice their food for their children just for them to survive and be healthy for the long term.

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Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? The Great Depression, 1929-1932

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The Depths of the Great Depression | US History II (OS Collection)

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By the end of this section, you will be able to:

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We ain’t no papers. We hold ourselves to be decent folks. We don’t want no relief. But what we do want is a chance to make an honest living like what we was raised.

-One of the down and out, in Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man

Not a lot of Mexicans made it to the U.S. They had to go through a long process such as going through labor camps. They had to have good behavior and a lot of them would revolt or do attacks on Americans. But as the Great Depression hit it was harder to maintain them during a lot of people struggling .What Mexicans workers do when they entered the U.S was find work and jobs. They were established with the work force and worked for industries of southwest. What they did was ranching and mining.

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Migrants, family of Mexicans, on road with tire trouble

The Great Depression of the 1930s hit Mexican immigrants especially hard. Along with the job crisis and food shortages that affected all U.S. workers, Mexicans and Mexican Americans had to face an additional threat: deportation. As unemployment swept the U.S., hostility to immigrant workers grew, and the government began a program of repatriating immigrants to Mexico. Immigrants were offered free train rides to Mexico, and some went voluntarily, but many were either tricked or coerced into repatriation, and some U.S. citizens were deported simply on suspicion of being Mexican. All in all, hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants, especially farmworkers, were sent out of the country during the 1930s--many of them the same workers who had been eagerly recruited a decade before.

The farmworkers who remained struggled to survive in desperate conditions. Bank foreclosures drove small farmers from their land, and large landholders cut back on their permanent workforce. As with many Southwestern farm families, a great number of Mexican American farmers discovered they had to take on a migratory existence and traveled the highways in search of work.

El Rio - Mexican FSA Camp - 1940

Many found temporary stability in the migrant work camps established by the U.S. Farm Security Administration, or FSA. The FSA camps provided housing, food, and medicine for migrant farm families, as well as protection from criminal elements that often took advantage of vulnerable migrants. The FSA set up several camps specifically for Mexican Americans in an attempt to create safe havens from violent attacks.

The camps also provided an unexpected benefit. In bringing together so many individual farm families, they increased ties within the community. Many residents began organizing their fellow workers around labor issues, and helped pave the way for the farm labor movements that emerged later in the century. This interview with a leader of the FSA camp in El Rio, California describes some of the day-to-day issues that the camp residents dealt with.

Two Mexican workers

Although farming was an important source of employment for Mexican immigrants, by the end of the 1930s Mexican Americans were established throughout the American workforce. Mexican immigrants and their descendants could be found in most of the industries of the Southwest, including ranching and mining. America's growing rail network was particularly important for Mexican immigrants. The railroad industry had long turned to immigrants from Mexico as a source of low-cost labor. In return, Mexican workers found that the railways offered not only employment, but also mobility. They often used this relatively inexpensive form of travel to move their families further into the North and East of the U.S., and into a more urban way of life.

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Depression and the Struggle for Survival | Mexican | Immigration and Relocation in U.S. History | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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Migrants, family of Mexicans, on road with tire trouble The Great Depression of the 1930s hit Mexican immigrants especially hard. Along with the job crisis and food shortages that affected all U.S. workers, Mexicans and Mexican Americans had to face an additional threat: deportation.

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Children working in the Great Depression for little amount of money

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Children working in the Great Depression for little amount of money

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"It was an enormously hard life… But there was also a sense of great satisfaction in being a child with valuable work to do and, being able to do it well, to function in this world."

-Margot Hentoff in Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letter from the Forgotten Man

Children during the Great Depression worked inside and outside of the house. Mainly things they did was try to get as much money from anyone such as cleaning things in a house and shining shoes. Boys mostly shined shoes and hustled papers but girls babysat and cleaned. Due to how much jobs have affected children school was a big problem. A lot of kids did not do school due to them working long hours of finding ways to earn money to support their family.

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"Growing Up in Down Times: Children of the Great Depression"

This essay provides historical perspective on the social, political, and economic circumstances of the Great Depression. It suggests some ways the hard times of the 1930s affected young people and left their mark on them as adults.

The United States' dynamic capitalist economy has been a rollercoaster of booms and busts, sparing no generation from its astonishing dips and climbs. New markets, products, and efficiencies have enabled many Americans to live comfortably and sometimes acquire great wealth, yet the nation has also suffered severe economic downturns throughout its history. Depressions were regular occurrences in the industrializing nineteenth century, striking at least once every decade except for the 1860s (which was visited by civil war). Generally understood as prolonged business slumps causing widespread unemployment, depressions are no less devastating for being so common. And most devastating of all in terms of its length and depth was the Great Depression of the 1930s. It began just before the stock market crash of 1929 and ended with the outbreak of World War II in 1941. In between, fifteen million Americans, a quarter of the work force, lost their jobs. Millions more lost their homes, farms, businesses, and life savings.

Historians still disagree about the causes of the depression, or rather about which combination of causes was most critical. Contributing factors generally include the overproduction of crops and manufactured goods, or their under-consumption due to low wages and the limited purchasing power of ordinary families. At the same time easy credit and overconfidence born of the prosperous 1920s prompted investors large and small to play the stock market like a carnival game and carry more personal debt than was prudent. Additionally, high tariffs and mismanagement of foreign debts stemming from the First World War stifled international trade. And an environmental crisis - partly natural and partly man-made - ravaged the Great Plains, stirring up droughts and dust storms that drove thousands of tenant farmers off their land. The resulting hardships can be glimpsed in iconic photographs of the period showing gaunt-faced migrant families driving west in over-packed jalopies; gangs of boys hopping freight trains in search of work; endless breadlines wrapped around city blocks, somber picketers demanding food, jobs, or housing; and angry strikers clashing with police.

An inability to reassure a battered public, let alone turn the economy around, led to the defeat of an immensely popular president, Herbert Hoover, and an end to the Republican Party's twelve-year reign in the White House. In his first hundred days in office in 1933, Hoover's successor, New York Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, launched a host of programs to aid farmers, workers, homeowners, and the unemployed. He repealed Prohibition, reformed the monetary system, and restored people's confidence in banks. Aided by a formidable first lady - Eleanor Roosevelt, economic advisers nicknamed "the brain trust," and a powerful new medium - radio, which enabled him to speak directly to the public, Roosevelt offered a route to recovery. Conservatives still argue that his liberal "New Deal" policies and support for labor unions actually delayed recovery, but without a doubt his actions helped keep millions of Americans and their hopes alive.

There are two schools of thought about the impact of the Great Depression on children. One school holds that the hard times left young people physically damaged and psychologically scarred. The other insists that the decade of dire want and desperate wandering served to strengthen their character and forge what became America's "greatest generation" of the World War II era. In fact, children's experience of the depression varied widely, depending on their age, race, sex, region, and individual family circumstances. Nevertheless, certain patterns have emerged. Demographically, birthrates fell during the decade to a low of 18 births per 1,000 population, and children's health declined due to the poorer nutrition and health care available.

Economically, many children worked both inside and outside the home; girls babysat or cleaned house, boys hustled papers or shined shoes, and both ran errands and picked crops. Yet the scarcity of jobs led record numbers of children to remain in school longer. Socially, high school became a typical teenage experience for the first time. A record 65 percent of teens attended high school in 1936; they spent the better part of their days together, forming their own cliques and looking to each other for advice and approval. Thus arose the idea of a separate, teenage generation.

Politically, the state began to play a larger role in children's lives. The federal government established day-care centers, supplied school lunches, built playgrounds, swimming pools, and ball fields. The 1935 Social Security Act provided aid for rural, disabled, and dependent children, while the Civilian Conservation Corps and National Youth Administration created jobs and educational opportunities for teens. Culturally, young people became a distinct market for comic books featuring Superman and other superheroes, movies starring child stars like Shirley Temple and Mickey Rooney, and Disney cartoons introducing Mickey Mouse and the Three Little Pigs, whose theme song, "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf" became an anthem of the era.

Source | Vincent DiGirolamo, "Growing Up in Down Times: Children of the Great Depression," American Social History Project, February 2007, http://www.ashp.cuny.edu/YA/detail.php?rec_id=140.
Item Type | Article/Essay

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"Growing Up in Down Times: Children of the Great Depression" · SHEC: Resources for Teachers

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Primary resources, classroom activities, graphic organizers and lesson plans produced by the American Social History Project designed for use in K-12 classrooms.

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I am a boy of 12 years… My father hasn’t worked for 5 months. He went plenty of times to relief, he filled out application. They won’t give us anything. I don’t know why… My father he staying home. All the time he’s crying because he can’t find work. I told him why are you crying daddy, and daddy said why shouldn’t I cry when there is nothing in the house. I feel sorry for him. That night I couldn’t sleep.

-letter to President and Mrs. Roosevelt, 1936 in Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letter from the Forgotten Man

During the Great Depression a lot of people did not have money to afford food and could not get employed for a job. Based off the quote a lots of mothers and father did not get jobs. To add on in the article a man experienced losing his house in the Great Depression where he lost his house and said . "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."

Not just one person is affected by the great Depression it affected a lot of people in every states. It shaped the world and how the economy is to this day.

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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 Negro must build on his own basis apart from the white man’s foundation if he ever hopes to be a master builder.”

-Marcus Mosiah

As African Americans entered the 1920s they experienced a lot of hardships such as they are still dealing with segregation and racism in the 1920s from white people. What African Americans do is that they created their own community such as creating commercial networks and businesses.

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African Americans and Consumerism | Introduction to Prosperity and Thrift | Articles and Essays | Calvin Coolidge Papers | Digital Collections | Library of Congress

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Prosperity and Thrift contains especially rich resources on African Americans in the consumer economy. While many African Americans, especially in the South, experienced continuing poverty and hardship in the 1920s, the decade was also to some extent an era of opportunities. The pursuit of a higher standard of living, increased personal autonomy, and less discrimination led many African Americans to migrate to the urban North from rural areas in the South. Once in the North, their employment situation benefitted from 1920s legislation restricting the number of immigrants allowed into the country.