If I was living in, say, rural East Texas, in the early 1930s, the deepest part of the Great Depression, would I get up in the morning and say “Ho hum, one more day into the Great Depression” ?
In other words, would I KNOW there was a huge economic depression going on,* and would I call it that?
Or would I refer to the current “hard times,” or some other euphemism?
Uke
As terms in economics, ‘depression’, ‘recession’, ‘recovery’, etc. would have been used in those days. It wasn’t until it was over that the appellation ‘Great’ was used.
You know how your parents trips to school got longer and longer every time they talked about when they were your age, and ‘uphill both ways’? After the fact is when terms get fancy, I’d guess as a way to make people apprieciate what they’ve gone through, and maybe as an ego boost to themselves. Sort of like, “You think this is bad, well, during the GREAT depression…”
The country had gone through market crashes before, there were depressions, but none so bad as the 1930’s. Or maybe it just seemed so bad because the media was just beginning to grow, reporting on the hard times.
The widespread coverage would make it seem worse, since more people would know more about it.
If it jams, force it; if it breaks, it needed replacing anyway.
People were pretty aware a depression was going on. It’s not one of those things like getting drunk, where you only realized what happened the next day. Or like an earthquake in Los Angeles, that only happened to someone else with little or no effect on your own life in Texas. Depressions affect everyone and you’d have to probably be comatose or dead not to realize what had come about.
Cave Diem! Carpe Canem!
Banana, Uke. Get your PC euphemisms straight. During the Banana of 1979, some poor Administration spokesperson referred to it as a “recession.” He was duly chastized. On his next meeting with the press, he noted the problem, and said he would henceforth refer to the current economic unpleasantness as a “banana.”
As for your basic question:
If I’m not mistaken, the depression was the least of rural East Texas’ problems. There was also a horrible drought in those parts that caused all the farmers’ topsoil to dry up and blow away. Some of this county’s best farmland is lying at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.
Many people think that The Grapes of Wrath is about the devastating effects of the Great Depression on the Oklahoma farmer. It’s not. It was the “Dustbowl” that caused them such misery.
Hmm, is this really correct, and is there any cite you can provide for it? I was always under the impression that the Great Depression was worse than any this country had ever seen before, with incredibly high rates of unemployment and misery. It strongly affected my parents, especially my dad, who partly as a result never completed high school, instead going into a trade.
-Melin
Who is NOT Straight Dope Staff
Siamese attack puppet – California
I’ve been editing my Dad’s genealogy story, and the last chapter is spent on his parents and their life in north Texas/Oklahoma/Arkansas during the 1920s and 1930s.
Everyone heard about the stock market crash, and most everyone understood it was a Bad Thing. My grandfather didn’t pay much heed to it though, until the following spring. All of a sudden, the bank that usually financed his seed loan didn’t have any funds. Relatives on either side couldn’t help out, and when he tried to hire out for a paycheck, he found that no one had the money to spend on hired help. It was apparent to everyone early on just how bad things were, and the Dust Bowl compounded those problems terribly (Grandfather ended up moving to California and eventually sending enough money for Grandmother and their four children to come out). I don’t believe they called it the Great Depression early on, but I do think they were referring to it by that name by the mid to late 30s. At least, that’s the impression I get reading my father’s writings.
Okay, perhaps my OP was phrased incorrectly…it’s supposed o be a question of language rather than of history.
Say I’m sitting in the barber shop in 1932 in a small town down South, not waiting for a trim, because I can’t afford one, but just killing time reading the pulp magazines and conversing with the other locals.
“Hey, Uke, you get any work lately?” the barber asks me.
“Naw, the stockyards ain’t hirin’,” I say.
“Yep,” says the barber, “It’s the god damn depression.”
Uke
Remember, in the 1930s, the word “depression” was actually a euphemism. Previously, such an economic downturn was called a “panic.”
“Depression” then became a negative turn, so “recession” came on the scene.
“What we have here is failure to communicate.” – Strother Martin, anticipating the Internet.
By the fall or winter of 1930, when some of his earlier plans had seemed to have an effect and the collapse of the European economy (that would finally knock the props out from any hope for the American economy) was still a few months away, President Hoover announced that the “depression” was over.
In February 1932, in the journal Current History, Gerald W. Johnson wrote an article, “The Average American and the Depression” in which he stated “1931 was the year of the Great Depression. . . .”
The terms, then, seem to have been in use. To what extent they were used in common conversation, I’m not sure.
Tom~