I just finished Poor But Proud, a history of poor White people in Alabama. I recommend it to you. Someone or another said that the poverty in the hill counties during the Depression was like something she had seen in China or the Philippines.
So I went to Amazon to find something on the subject and drew a blank. Just textbooks.
Can someone here tell me about the PI in the 1930s? Can someone point me toward a good book or article on the subject?
You might start here: History of the Philippines - Wikipedia
When you’re talking mainly subsistence farmers and dirt-poor peasants using available tech as found in the rural Philippines or rural China - I don’t think a recession affecting banks, manufacturing interests, cash-crop farmers and a generally integrated economy would matter much.
The peasants out east would be farming exactly the same as they had for centuries. They just might not sell as many chickens in town. The entire infrastructure of the USA was built on cash exchange - farmers grew wheat or corn or whatever, sold it to processors, the railroads hauled it around, the farmers and factory workers used the money to buy goods that made their life more 20th century than medieval - factory goods like cloth and clothing, tools, metal goods, commodities like salt that weren’t locally made, etc. When the money supply dries up, that aspect of life also dries up, and locals are forced to make do with what is locally available (possibly for barter). If you can’t buy cloth, you patch the rags you have with other rags; you do without salt; you stop using broken machinery and resort to farm animals that can eat the local grass, etc. Worst case you were tossed out of your house made of mill-sawn boards and glass windows, and you built a medieval-like shed out of garbage and local materials…
During the depression there was a severe curtailing of international trade that hurt most agricultural countries. However since the Philippines was a US colony they had privileged access to the American market for their sugar. Opposition to unlimited Philippine immigration led to a law in 1934 that granted the Philippines a measure of autonomy in exchange for ending immigration. That same law gave Philippine sugar a quota for the American market. Because of this there was a sugar boom, and the years of the great depression for mostly good for the Philippine economy.
Thank you all. Of course I read the Wikipedia article. My impression would have been the same as yours. A depression would mostly impact those in the cash economy. In fact what crushed poor Whites in Alabama was that they owed cash money to landowners, banks and others just as the price of their cotton and other crops crashed. They were just into the cash economy enough to hurt.
Yet (and I will not look up the quote) one observer compared the conditions in the Alabama hill counties to those in China or Philippines. That is to say the towns were bad but the rural backwoods were much worse.
Right, because with the collapse of the cash economy all those country people were reduced to subsistence farming. They couldn’t sell cash crops anymore, so everything they produced was for local consumption, and since they didn’t have the cash from the cash crops they couldn’t buy factory produced goods anymore.
So it’s back to a medieval style economy instead of an industrial economy. Subsistence farming, and if you couldn’t grow it on your farm you did without.
I think we have identified a book that needs writin’.
Things were bad during the Depression, but they didn’t actually turn society into some sort of medieval theme park. Credit was almost impossible to get during the depression years, but that didn’t mean a return to subsistence farming. It did mean that farmers had to make do, often without being able to upgrade their machinery, or other make capital investments. This was extremely unfortunate because farm technology was improving.
What hurt farmers worse was that, for various reasons, there was often plenty of food, but people in cities couldn’t buy it at that moment. So prices crashed, while food rotted on sidings. There probably was some overproduction and consequent soil exhausted (leading to the Dust Bowl), although I am highly dubious about the Roosevelt administrations attempts to “fix” the problem.
That being said, some of the more remote communities in the United States simply didn’t have the kind of transportation links that would enable to connect to the global market. So while I don’t doubt that the OP read that, I would question whether the writer was actually seeing something “new” in any sense.
As far as I know, the Philippines wasn’t affected much by the Great Depression. We don’t have tales of ruined investors throwing themselves out of windows. Indeed, the Manila Stock Exchange had just been established a couple of years prior. There wasn’t much of a stock market to speak of, hardly any investors, and certainly no big speculative bubble to pop.
Neither are there tales of migratory Okies desperately looking for work. Without a dust bowl, the land was a productive as it ever was. But most people were already dirt poor, barely connected to the national economy let alone the global one. They could hardly become poorer.
The major Philippine concern of the time was independence. First convincing Congress that the country was ready for it then, when the Tydings-McDuffie Act was passed establishing the Philippine Commonwealth, actually preparing for it. One could argue that the Depression hastened the granting of independence, as cheap commodities (mostly sugar) and cheap Filipino labor undercut mainland-based sources.
Thank you, Terminus Est.