The Human Toll of the Great Depression

After more than half a century, images of the Great Depression remain firmly etched in the American psyche—breadlines, soup kitchens, tin-can shanties and tar paper shacks known as "Hoovervilles," penniless men and women selling apples on street corners, and gray battalions of Arkies and Okies packed into Model A Fords heading to California.

The collapse was staggering in its dimensions. Unemployment jumped from less than three million in 1929 to four million in 1930, eight million in 1931, and twelve and half 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. In the Pennsylvania coal fields, three or four families crowded together in one-room shacks and lived on wild weeds. In Arkansas, families were found inhabiting caves. In Oakland, California, whole families lived in sewer pipes.

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 old 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 twenty 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 families. 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.

The Depression inflicted a heavy psychological toll on jobless men. With no wages to punctuate their power, many men lost power as primary decision makers. Large numbers of men lost self-respect, became immobilized, and stopped looking for work, while others turned to alcohol or became self-destructive or abusive to their families.

In contrast to men, many women saw their status rise during the Depression. To supplement the family income, married women entered the work force in large numbers. Although most women worked in menial occupations, the fact that they were employed and bringing home paychecks elevated their position within the family and gave them a say in family decisions.

Despite the hardships it inflicted, the Great Depression drew some families closer together. As one observer noted, "Many a family has lost its automobile and found its soul." Families had to devise strategies for getting through hard times because their survival depended on it. They pooled their incomes, moved in with relatives in order to cut expenses, and did without. Many families drew comfort from their religion, sustained by the hope things would turn out well in the end, while others placed their faith in themselves, in their own dogged determination to survive that so impressed observers like Woody Guthrie. But many Americans no longer believed the problems could be solved by people acting alone or through voluntary associations. Increasingly, they looked to the federal government for help.

The Dispossessed

Economic hardship and loss visited all sections of the country. One-third of the Harvard class of 1911 confessed that they were hard up, on relief, or dependent on relatives. Doctors and lawyers saw their incomes fall 40 percent. But no groups suffered more from the depression than African Americans and Mexican Americans.

A year after the stock market crash, 70 percent of Charleston’s black population was unemployed and 75 percent of Memphis’s. In Macon County, Alabama, home of Booker T. Washington’s famous Tuskegee Institute, most black families lived in homes without wooden floors or windows or sewage disposal and subsisted on salt pork, hominy grits, corn bread, and molasses. Income averaged less than a dollar a day.

Conditions were also distressed in the North. In Chicago, 70 percent of all black families earned less than a $1,000 a year, far below the poverty line. In Chicago and other large northern cities, most African Americans lived in "kitchenettes." Six-room apartments, previously rented for $50 a month, were divided into six kitchenettes renting for $32 dollars a month, assuring landlords of a windfall of an extra $142 a month. Buildings that previously held sixty families now held 300.

The Depression hit Mexican American families especially hard. Mexican Americans faced serious opposition from organized labor, which resented competition from Mexican workers as unemployment rose. Bowing to union pressure, federal, state, and local authorities "repatriated" more than 400,000 people of Mexican descent to prevent them from applying for relief. Since this group included many US citizens, the deportations constituted a gross violation of civil liberties.

Private and Public Charity

The economic crisis of the 1930s overwhelmed private charities and local governments. In south Texas, the Salvation Army provided a penny per person each day. In Philadelphia, private and public charities distributed $1 million a month in poor relief. But this provided families with only $1.50 a week for groceries. In 1932, total public and private relief expenditures amounted to $317 million—$26 for each of the nation’s 12.5 million jobless.

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, D.C., 1960), p.70.

Depression Era Unemployment Statistics

Year

Population

Labor
Force

Unemployed

Percentage of 
Labor Force

1929

88,010,000

49,440,000

1,550,000

3.14

1930

89,550,000

50,080,000

4,340,000

8.67

1931

90,710,000

50,680,000

8,020,000

15.82

1932

91,810,000

51,250,000

12,060,000

23.53

1933

92,950,000

51,840,000

12,830,000

24.75

1934

94,190,000

52,490,000

11,340,000

21.60

1935

95,460,000

53,140,000

10,610,000

19.97

1936

96,700,000

53,740,000

9,030,000

16.80

1937

97,870,000

54,320,000

7,700,000

14.18

1938

99,120,000

54,950,000

10,390,000

18.91

1939

100,360,000

55,600,000

9,480,000

17.05

1940

101,560,000

56,180,000

8,120,000

14.45

1941

102,700,000

57,530,000

5,560,000

9.66

-->