I was so interested in this topic that I actually discussed it outside this thread. One of my friends just called to tell me he’d come across the following book, which does have all sorts of data:
A monetary history of the US, 1867 - 1960
You absolutely need to read a book on the Depression to get a sense of its scope. It was a systemic disaster and can’t be conveyed by anecdotes, or statistics for that matter. If you think a 33% drop in construction doesn’t sound that bad, you need a thorough grounding in economics. (Did you really expect a 90% drop? Numbers like that would mean the end of jobs altogether and millions starving in the streets. You have to understand that the context for 33% is that 3.3% is considered a disaster in normal times.)
While I’m sure it contains many statistics, Milton Friedman’s book is an academic study of his pet economic theory, which has been mostly discredited, or at least significantly downplayed, by modern economic theory. It isn’t the place for a beginner to start. And it concerns monetary policy, while it appears you are looking more for societal effects.
If there is one statistic that sums up the Depression era best to me, it’s zero. As in, for about 20 years, not a single major building was erected in any downtown in America. Zero. Downtowns were the economic engine and symbol of America. Our skyscrapers were unique in the world. The twenty years before the Depression saw downtowns in every city in the country soar skyward.
And then nothing.
The Empire State Building was the last to go up. It became a symbol, all right, but a symbol of nothingness. For years it had so much trouble attracting any tenants that it was known as the Empty State Building. The next major structure in Manhattan didn’t go up until the Lever House was built in 1951-2, and it was a relatively modest 21 stories. This in Manhattan.
Take a look around the downtown of your city. Note how many new buildings there are, how many construction cranes. Now imagine all that stopping for 20 years. How old and outdated and shabby and defeated would that downtown appear to you in 2028 if not a single new building had done up in the interim. And for some downtowns, rebuilding didn’t start until the late 1950s, making it a 30-year gap.
That’s how huge the Depression was.
Anecdote isn’t the plural of data, blah blah blah. You can find lots of people whose grandparents kept their jobs and whatnot. But then, my grandmother remembered that men would show up at their door almost every day asking for bread. And her family was just scraping by. My grandfather was abandoned by his parents.
The Depression was really, really bad, by the standards of an industrialized nation. It cannot be forgotten that it may well have been one of the main causes of World War II, was unquestionably the cause of copnsiderable political unrest throughout the world, and to be perfectly frank, if we were to have another, I would expect another terrible war.
The best at-time indicator of an economy’s health, if you absolutely had to pick one number, is unemployment. At the nadir of the Depression, unemployment in the United States was 25 percent. That doesn’t sound bad at first glance, you think, “Hell, 3 in 4 people had a job.” 25 percent is, in fact, absolutely crushing; it’s four times higher than it is today and a staggering loss of productivity guaranteed to reduce the living standards of everyone who does have a job. Between 1929 and 1933 unemployment went from about 7% to 25%, so an additional one in every six people went from having a job to not having one, but personal income for ALL Americans (Canadian data, for those fellow Canucks, is more or less the same) went down fifty percent. So even if you held a job there was an outstanding chance you were making less than you used to.
The resulting collapse in income and productivity, of course, had a series of social repercussions. Crime skyrocketed. Governments, since their tax revenues dropped, could not provide the same services as they had without either jacking taxes up or borrowing money (which was cheap to do, at least.) Charitable giving dropped, cutting off that avenue of support when it was most needed. Consumer spending cratered, killing off businesses.
I would say the war also had an impact, the war froze many projects for 10 years.
I know you’re looking for hard stats, but I second Dr. Paprika’s suggestion of Studs Terkel’s Hard Times. It’s an amazing oral history that spans the social and racial strata of the period.
As for how bad it was–a lot of it just depended on who and where you were. My grandparents grew up on farms in eastern North Carolina during the Depression. They never lost their land, but they had it pretty bad. My grandma would talk about wearing underwear made out of flour sacks. (I’ve actually found myself thinking about the recent financial trouble, “Things may be bad, but at least I can still buy underwear.”)
Really? I thought credit was very tight.
My dad was born October 23, 1929 and was poor until he went out into the world as an adult. Their rent was $17/mo (Chicago) and he had to contribute his paper route money to the household fund. His father had hurt himself in an industrial accident, and supported the family by gambling.
My mother’s father was a very successful salesman (Chicago) and she was cared for by a nanny.
Go figure.
I’m curious about this. If the bank more or less owns your home, but then the bank disappears, how is it that you lose your home? Who kicks you out?
That was pretty common. According to my dad, my uncle (who was a bit of a card) came to the breakfast table one morning and said “Mama, you’re going to have to be careful about how you sew my underwear. I pulled a pair on this morning and it said ‘Self-Rising’ right across the front!”
Someone (another bank, or an investor) buys the mortgage at a discount and takes it over. (Your mortgage is fully assignable.)
Banks don’t just disappear. They go into bankruptcy (in which case their assets, including your mortgage, are sold) or they sell off their assets (including your mortgage) to pay their debts, or they are acquired by another bank (which then takes over your mortgage). A bank failure does not mean your mortgage disappears.
mortgages worked differently back then. You’d take a five-year mortgage for about half the cost of the house. At the end of the period there was the equivalent of a balloon payment at the end of a car lease. Since the payment was so big, most homeowners would take out a new mortgage to make the payment. Here’s a description:
Mortgage holders would have to pay that missing $5000 when the mortgage came due. Prior to the Depression, they’d take out another short-term mortgage (for $5000) and pay that off, halving their debt every five years until they could pay it all.
But when the banks stopped lending money, you couldn’t refinance. You had to pony up the $5000 (which you didn’t have) or lose your home. The bank the purchased your mortgage would get the payments, but no one would lend to you when it came time to refinance. And if you couldn’t keep up the payments, they’d foreclose.
One of the consequences of the depression was deflation-prices for commodities dropped, and farmers went broke, because the sell prices for their produce didn’t allow them to make a profit. So millions of small farmers left their land…and found unemployement in the cities. Roosevelt’s vaunted “New Deal” did NOT solve the deflation problem, and actually made things worse. The real thing that stopped the depression-WWII. The demand increase caused by the war lifted the world out of depression. So Roosevelt desrves much blame for prolonging the depression-and (in a perverse way0 gets credit for something he never accomplished.
Very, very bad in the prairies. The Depression times coincided with a major drought as well as plagues of grasshoppers. On the plus side, prairie farmers were immigrants who were used to making do with nothing, and being completely self-sufficient. There were relief camps in the prairies, with single unemployed men basically rounded up and moved around to work camps where they worked for very low wages, but there wasn’t much else for them to do since the extensive droughts were making farming almost impossible. They weren’t forced into the camps, but if they didn’t go, they could be arrested for vagrancy. These work camps were called “slave camps” by the men in them.
(From this site.) These work camps became fermenting grounds for socialism/communism, culminating in a riot in Regina in July of 1935 when the federal government quashed what they feared was a growing rebellion in the On To Ottawa Trek- the unemployed men from the western work camps were going to go have a talk with the Prime Minister; the Prime Minister was not interested in participating.
Married men often left the farming (what there was of it, for those who didn’t lose their farms) to their wives and tried to find work for pay in the towns and cities.
Both of my parents were born to prairie farming families just after the Great Depression. I saw the effects of it on both of them (our generation did not invent Reduce, Re-use, Recycle by a long shot). All of my grandparents were farmers during the Depression. My grandmother thought having two dresses was plenty all of her life. Nothing ever got thrown away until all vestiges of use were completely wrung from it.
You can still see some reminders of the Dirty Thirties on the prairies - lines of trees planted all over the Prairies as wind breaks, to prevent the topsoil from blowing into the Hudson Bay, gardens behind most of the houses in small prairie towns (and in a lot of yards in the cities, too), and an intense, abiding distrust of Ottawa. 
I forgot about the flour sack tea towels - that’s all we had for the longest time. My mom must have gotten them from her mom.
My maternal grandparents owned a business or two, I guess. My mom was born in '28, so would have still been young. She remembers her parents losing their business. Then grandpa disappeared never to be seen or heard from again. So, life was rough for mom & grandmom. At one point, grandmom forced my mom’s head into the oven and turned the gas on, intending on killing her because the world had gone to shit. Grandmom got sick and died in '43, when mom was 15. I guess that side of the family never really recovered from the depression.
One of the flour brands back then used the slogan “World’s Best.” My grandma said that she and her sisters would fight over who got the undies with “World’s Best” printed across the rear.
That’s not exactly true. Roosevelt’s policys were working to improve things; unemployment was falling and economic indicators were improving.
However, Roosevelt – who was a fiscal conservative – decided that things were going well enough to start cutting back on spending. That led to a second crash. It was a mistake, and a big one, but Roosevelt went back to what he had been doing once he realized.
This chart shows the situation. Note how the Misery Index they’re using drops at about the time FDR became president, then jumped up several years into his term (at the time he tried to tighten the budget). While it did take WWII to get full employment, the line was clearly trending down during FDRs terms before the war.
Actually Roosevelt’s “New Deal” wasn’t as successful as many thought it was and it was the war that pulled the country out of the Great Depression. The war called for lots more new projects than it delayed.
This is not a question that has been settled. The value of Roosevelt’s contributions to fighting the Depression is continually argued over by scholars. There is sort of a conservative/liberal split as well, with the conservative side saying that the New Deal wasn’t effective and the crisis continued until the war and the liberal side saying that the measures saved the country until the war. Everybody agrees that the huge amount of war deficit spending, something that would have been anathema to all conservatives of the time and also many liberals, brought the country to its feet. You can argue any position within those parameters, and people have.
As I said, the nation suffered from low demand, aggravated by the deflation of prices. The war solved the demand issue-because huge government orders meant that steel mills, auto factories, idle farmland could be started up again. I have often wodered-if there was no war, and you just built up all of those airplanes, ships, tanks, guns, etc.-and dumped them in the Pacific-would things have gone the same way?