That’s a good point, and one I wanted to start a thread about: how long did it take to really recover from the Depression?
I’ve seen photos of Manhattan neighborhoods and the city’s skyline from the 1950s and early 1960s, and there’s no postwar buildings to be seen. The place looked frozen in time; maybe the signs, cars and clothes were more modern, but the buildings were all quite old.
Here’s something a bit closer to home, in Buffalo, New York; aerial photos from the 1920s. See all the streets carved out in this photo? Development only began on them in the 1950s, 30 years after the photos were taken.
In Cleveland, Shaker Heights was once envisioned to extend to the Chagrin River, about 10 miles east of the current city boundary. The developers of Shaker Heights, the Van Sweringen brothers, purchased thousands of acres of land, subdivided it, and built an extensive system of roads and parkways, expecting that it would be built out by 1940. It wasn’t until the 1990s when the last lots of “Shaker Country Estates” were developed, and by then the land wasn’t part of the city of Shaker Heights, but suburbs that were formed later: Beachwood, Pepper Pike, and Gates Mills.
I’ve spoken to many people that believe Cleveland really never recovered from the depression. In the 1920s, large apartment and office buildings were built far from downtown. By the time there was actually a demand for them, the neighborhoods many such structures were in were Cleveland’s growing ghetto.
Or maybe you could build communication lines, rail lines, clean power facilities, electrical grids and bridges (and also maybe spend some money on health care) and you wouldn’t have to dump anything in the ocean.
It didn’t make the case that it was worse for black people, it just gave a couple of statistics particular to Harlem. 50% unemployment in Harlem stacks up pretty well to the unemployment rate in my grandfather’s town, which was basically 100%, because the only industry was coal mining, and none of the mines were running. My dad’s family squatted in a shack with no running water or electricity for two years and lived off their truck patch. (Well, there was also some occasional income from various informal transportation and delivery services my grandfather provided to some local gentlemen engaged in the distillation of certain grains.)
I don’t know how you would go about proving it was “worse” for blacks than for whites. It just strikes me as a “World Ends: Women, Minorities Hardest Hit” sort of assertion.
I’ve read numerous books on the Depression, on the Roosevelt presidency, and on American history in general for the mid-20th century.
There is no argument I’ve ever read from anybody on any side that says that blacks were not hurt far worse by the Depression than any other national group.
Blacks were the subject of massive, systemic prejudice in every part of the country and is every aspect of society for the entire period from the Civil War through the 1920s. Once the Depression hit, whites scrambled to toss any blacks they perceived to be ahead of them to the side. Black unemployment was higher, black opportunities were fewer. Only the desperate manpower urgency of the war provided a break to this cycle, and even there blacks were hired last, paid less, and fired first.
The Depression was bad for Americans. It was horrifying for blacks.
I’d buy that the Depression was harder for blacks. It was harder for women, too, for logical (but bad) reasons. If there are only 20 jobs for 200 people, the first people to get the jobs were white men. Black people and women go to the end of the line. That’s just the way it was then.
Based on the citations the article appears to have been written in the late 90’s, or approximately 8 decades since WWI. Has there been a top tax rate lower then 25% between 1918 and 1998?
When you are to the point of having to cut out flour from your diet, it doesn’t matter whether you are a man or a woman. Some of you talk about women being supported by their husbands as if the men had anything to support their women with.
I don’t know about city skylines, but their was definitely a construction boom in the 1950s. People were desperate for housing in post-war America.
Not a coincidence. The first serious tract in macroeconomics was only written in 1935 (Keynes: The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money). The national income and product accounts were designed by Simon Kuznets in the 1930s and 1940s: he later won a Nobel for this work.
So post-war data is a lot better than pre-war data.
(Sorry about the delay - I’ve only just come across this thread.)
The American Depression was one of the main causes of World War II? I thought it was mainly down to a gentleman in Europe called Hitler’s rather anti-social behaviour.
(I know you must know this, but I can’t grasp what you mean.)
My parents both lived through the depression and for my mother and her family (parents and siblings) it was far tougher. They were rural people and their was just no money- plus the tramps always after a cup of tea or a scrap of bread. Neither parent will today discard any item that may come in useful- such as string or buttons.
The American Depression was one of the main causes of World War II? I thought it was mainly down to a gentleman in Europe called Hitler’s rather anti-social behaviour.
(I know you must know this, but I can’t grasp what you mean.)
[QUOTE] Do you know that it wasn’t just an “American Depression”? It was world-wide.
In Germany, and in those European countries whose economies were closely tied to Germany, there were no Roaring Twenties. For the average person the economy was tough from the First World War and through to after the end of the Second. Everyone has seen the pictures taken during the hyperinflation years, when people burned Papiermarks for heat because the paper burned for longer than the amount of wood they would buy - but the German economy had been in trouble for years before that and continued to be in trouble after the hyperinflation had been brought under control. Many historians argue that the long period of economic depression encouraged the rise of extremist movements, as people lost faith in the systems that had been unable to prevent and were unable to solve the crisis.
I lived through the depression and we did get food, not food stamps or what we wanted to eat. We got some canned meat,dried apricots, sugar, flour, powdered milk and powered eggs, oatmeal,and farina. We moved from place to place and lived with another family for awhile. My father worked digging ditches on WPA, and my older brothers went to CCC camps. We did not have huge homes or electricity until 1943 so we had no utility bills, and we used wood and karosene stoves for heat, and not all rooms were heated. We used wool under shirts and high top shoes, if the soles came off we kept them on with rubber jar rings. We had one set of clothes for what we called good,or Sunday clothes and the rest of the time we had some clothes my mother made out of flour sacks or feed sacks.
We had no medical insurance even after world war 2. Our first insurance(life) came after I was married in 1951.We got health insurance came when my husband joined the Carpenter’s union and before that we just paid what we could.
Many doctors during the depression years took food or work exchange for their services. If one lived near some cities there was work but it depended on where one lived.
Roosevelt started the Social Security when he was president.
I was referring to the early Hoover-era years of the Depression.
Admittedly, there was some charities but they were locally based and generally underfunded. The Roosevelt administration organized relief on a national scale to cover everyone.
During the postwar decades, it was common in Spain to have “realquilados,” to take paying renters in your house, often to a point which would now be against occupation limits laws. For example, my grandparents’ approx. 900sq ft flat (4B, split bath, kitchen, common room) housed as many as 12 people, 4 of them in one of the small bedrooms.
These situations are now happening again, mostly with immigrants but also with other people.
Did that kind of situations happen (more than at other times) during the Depression?
The thing to remember: in the Depression, even if you were unemployed, you still had to pay your property taxes 9if you owned a house). So many big houses were chopped up into apartments, so you could raise some cash. If you worked for the government, you were pretty well off. You pay was worth more and more (deflation0 ,and your purchasing power increased.
Not to get into a contest of who it was worse for (I absolutely agree it was bad for everyone), women had children to feed, with or without a husband. They didn’t always have a lot of choice in having those children, either, (or, frankly, in those husbands) and weren’t given many basic human rights. Women weren’t considered persons under the law in Canada until 1929. You can imagine what other rights were missing when the basic consideration of a woman as a person wasn’t established until then. Hell, I remember when I was kid my mom couldn’t go into the bar to get my dad out when it was time to go home after an afternoon of shopping in the big city, and I’m not that old.
Well, my grandfather lost his farm in the depression. They has a great year, the year before, and expanded the farm and then couldn’t get enough for their product the next year to even cover the cost of the fertilizer.
Do you know that it wasn’t just an “American Depression”? It was world-wide.