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The Greatest Generation Grows Up American Childhood in the 1930s By KRISTE LINDENMEYER Ivan R. Dee Copyright © 2005 Kriste Lindenmeyer
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-56663-660-5 Chapter One Stable and Fragile Families in Hard Times * * *
THE 1929 STOCK MARKET CRASH did not cause the Great Depression in the United States, but it certainly symbolized the economic crisis that touched the lives of many American children and their families over the next ten years. The approximately sixty-eight families living in Gee's Bend, Alabama, seemed to be far from the problems of Wall Street, but the repercussions from the nation's economic collapse in the fall of 1929 were also visible in this isolated rural community. Located in a U-shaped curve on the Alabama River, Gee's Bend was surrounded on three sides by water. A dirt road in and out of the area was impassable for much of the year. Even when conditions were good, traveling by land made the seven-mile as-the-crow-flies distance to the county seat of Camden a trip of more than forty miles. A rudimentary ferry provided an alternative route, but it operated only during good weather. Isolated and poor, the three hundred residents of Gee's Bend were the direct descendants of slaves who survived by sharecropping and a system of mutual support. Many residents had the last name Pettway, not necessarily because they were related but because their ancestors had been slaves on theplantation owned by a family with that name. In 1900 a Tuscaloosa attorney named Adrian Sebastian VandeGraaf had acquired all the land in the area, and his family became the region's absentee landlords.
A visitor to Gee's Bend in 1929 would have found children and adults living the same way that their ancestors had since the end of the Civil War: in simple shacks made of wood and mud, growing cotton and foodstuffs on small plots rented from the area's white landowner. There was only a rudimentary school. The area's residents were so isolated that other blacks in Alabama referred to the people in Gee's Bend as "Africans."
The lives of Gee's Bend residents had improved somewhat during World War I when cotton prices in New Orleans reached a high of $41.75 per pound. The end of the war, however, lowered demand, and by 1920 the price had fallen to 13.5 cents. That was enough to get by, but just barely. By the fall of 1929 things began to fall apart when the cotton market sank to 5 cents per pound. At that price families could not afford to pay the rents on their simple shacks, meet their tenancy payments, and pay off their debts to a local white merchant. Prices did not improve from 1929 to 1932, but families survived because the white merchant agreed to carry over their debts from year to year. This temporary solution collapsed when the merchant died during the summer of 1932. By that fall the merchant's widow demanded the immediate repayment of debts. Since Gee's Bend families had no cash or land, the widow's representatives confiscated anything of value, including wagons, chickens, household goods, oxen, and food. Threatened with violence if they did not cooperate, the Gee's Bend residents watched their meager but essential possessions carried away on a ferry.
Jennie Pettway was a young girl growing up in Gee's Bend during the 1930s. She remembers that the children and adults nearly starved to death that fall. The absentee landlord provided no help but did not force families off the land. Malnutrition and a lack of medical care encouraged the spread of tuberculosis and other opportunistic diseases. "Things were desperate," Jennie Pettway recalled. A Presbyterian minister from a nearby community visited Gee's Bend and was shocked at what he found. Children and adults were starving to death, illness was rampant, and there was no access to health care or basic education for children. He contacted the Red Cross, and with the help of the National Guard brought in emergency foodstuffs and shoes. The Red Cross administrator in the area remarked, "You can't imagine the horror of it. Starvation was terrific." 1 It was going to take more than traditional strategies of self-help, hard work, and charity to save the children and adults of Gee's Bend, much less bring them into the twentieth century's ideal of modern childhood.
The case of Gee's Bend is an extreme example of the deprivation brought to some Americans by the onset of the Great Depression. But for most children and their families, cutting back, making do, and doubling up became common phrases that characterized their lives during the country's worst economic crisis. Most American households were touched in some way by the Great Depression's hard times. Yet not every young person's family suffered economic loss during the 1930s. For example, the affluent family of Henry Barr, who was born in 1928, seemed far removed from the nation's economic slide. Henry's father held degrees from a prestigious college and law school. In the early 1920s the elder Barr headed the San Francisco branch of a New York law firm. He left that position in 1926 to start his own business. Henry's mother had attended an elite women's college before marrying. At the time of Henry's birth the Barrs also had a four-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter. During the 1930s the family lived in what an interviewer from the University of California at Berkeley's "Oakland Growth Study" described as "a large, vine-covered, masonry house set on a terraced lot, with substantial lawn and garden." Full-time nannies tended to Henry and his siblings, and the children attended schools with youngsters from similar family circumstances. Once Henry reached the upper-level elementary grades, he spent his summers at camp and enjoyed a variety of recreational activities. He received a "moderate" allowance from his parents, and from the age of twelve earned money at part-time jobs such as "gardening for neighbors, working as a stock boy, selling mistletoe at Christmas." Henry did not need the money; the jobs were supposed to instill a strong "work ethic" in the growing boy. From an early age, Henry felt he was "destined for the law," and his pathway to social and economic success as an adult was not hampered by the fact that he grew up during the worse economic crisis in U.S. history.
Henry Barr's childhood was very different from the lives of children in Gee's Bend and, in fact, from those of most Americans growing up during the Great Depression. Still, even children and adolescents like Barr, whose parents were able to shelter them from the major deprivations of hard times, witnessed the shifts in popular culture and public policy influenced by the depression. Children and adolescents living in families that Franklin Roosevelt identified as "ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed" became the focus of New Deal efforts to ease the depression's worst effects. Many children and adolescents growing up in families that lost income during the 1930s took part in their parents' efforts to maintain a "brave social front that local canon of respectable competence require a family to present to its neighbors." Some historians have speculated that such issues may not have been as important to children from families that were already poor or members of the working class before the onset of the depression. But it appears that during the 1930s, many children, especially adolescents and youth at the lower rungs of American society, were unhappy about their families' circumstances and the inequities highlighted by the decade's economic challenges. Shifts in public policy and popular culture probably contributed to this trend.
Despite the infinite possibilities in individual circumstances, the 1930s generation shared some common features. For one, the median age in the United States had risen gradually, from twenty-three in 1900 to twenty-six in 1930, and then climbed sharply to twenty-nine during the depression decade. Adults simply chose to have fewer babies during hard economic times. This allowed them to focus their available family resources and energies on fewer children, thereby underscoring reformers' efforts to establish childhood and adolescence as a sheltered and protected stage of life for all American children. Life expectancy continued to rise, also contributing to the higher median age. During the depression, children under nineteen years of age formed a smaller portion of the total population than any generation to that date in U.S. history. As in the past, society depended on families to care for the economic security, psychological development, safety, and health of children. But the onset of the depression challenged the long-held belief that families could accomplish those tasks without help from the government. This shift occurred at the same time a growing number of Americans embraced a model of ideal American childhood as a period best spent in school and protected from adult responsibilities through age seventeen. By 1940 public policy and popular culture recognized this ideal as the sole model for modern American childhood.
Despite popular acceptance of the model, the decade's economic problems shook many stable families and completely toppled the most fragile ones. The same study that included Henry Barr also uncovered stories of other children in Oakland who lived in families directly affected by hard times. The mothers of children and adolescents in the study attributed "problems with offspring, kin, friends, and community roles ... to lack of money and its side effects." Many other families throughout the United States would have shared this circumstance. Seventy-seven percent of American households had incomes of less than $2,000 per year (the equivalent of $30,000 in 2000). Between 1929 and 1933 the national average household income fell from $2,300 to $1,500. New Deal programs aimed at providing work-relief pumped millions of federal dollars into the nation's infrastructure. Combined federal and state relief efforts kept the poorest American families from starving and also helped improve the lives of many children and adults who were not direct recipients of federal relief. But as late as 1940, 35 million American homes still had no running water, 32 percent continued to rely on outdoor privies, 39 percent did not have a bathtub or shower, and 27 percent contained no refrigeration device. From the perspective of a glass half full rather than half empty, these numbers also show that by the end of the depression decade most children did have access to at least the basic amenities associated with growing up in modern America. The years after Franklin Roosevelt's election in 1932 brought a new attitude to Washington that included the implementation of an alphabet soup of federal agencies and programs that helped ease the depression's worst effects for many children and their families. That shift was part of a new definition of modern American childhood that became embedded in law, public policy, and culture by the end of the decade. The trend continued through the 1940s, especially after World War II, making conveniences like electricity nearly universal for American families by 1950.
When I Was Young
Many people who grew up during the Great Depression talk about how the nation's troubled economic times permanently influenced their attitudes toward money and security. Throughout their lives the 1930s generation tended to be more frugal than those who followed. They saved more and were less likely to go into debt since they held what the sociologist Glen Elder calls "a heightened belief in the power of money." Memories of childhood in the 1930s expressed by Robert Hastings and Mary Caliguri are somewhat typical of those shared by many Americans who grew up in stable families but were still touched by the decade's hard times.
"I didn't go hungry during the Depression, but some things I did get hungry for. Milk, for instance. I never got enough," Robert Hastings wrote in his memoir about growing up during the 1930s. Robert was born in 1924 in Marion, Illinois, where his ancestors had lived for several generations. He was the youngest of four children and probably "a surprise" for his parents since nine years separated him and his next-oldest sibling. Even if unplanned, "Bobbie" was welcomed to the family. When Robert was small, the milkman delivered a fresh bottle of milk each morning. That ended when the Old West Side Mine closed in 1930 and Robert's father lost his job. "From 1930 on," Robert recalled, "it was a day's work here and a day's work there, a coal order from the welfare office, a relief check, a few days on WPA [Works Progress Administration], a garden in the back yard, and a few chickens and eggs." The family "cut back on everything possible.... We stopped the evening paper, turned off the city water and cleaned out our well, sold our four-door Model T touring car with the snap-on side curtains and isinglass, stopped ice and milk delivery, and disconnected our gas range for all but the three hot summer months," chopping wood for the stove the rest of the year.
Like many families, the Hastingses cut back and made do, but also like most households in small towns and the rural countryside they had no telephone to disconnect. Their everyday lives were absent many of the conveniences available to urban Americans. Marion did attract a small for-profit utility company that provided gas and electricity, but the Hastingses had only a few electric lights in their house and one electrical appliance, an iron. The monthly bill for electricity had to stay under one dollar so they could afford even these minimal conveniences. The family spent only three dollars a year on natural gas fuel. Robert Hastings remembered the amounts because he rode his bicycle to town each month with the money to pay the utilities. Even from a young age, Robert remembers being very aware of family expenses and the best ways to save money. For example, the Hastingses used baking soda instead of toothpaste, pages from mail-order catalogues for toilet paper, and had no water or sewer bill since they relied on well water and had an outhouse. Reflecting his rural way of life, Robert had simple tastes. His favorite meal was milk and cornbread. Nonetheless he was bothered by his family's lack of money. He remembered being embarrassed about the lunches his mother made for him to take to school because they included sandwiches made with homemade biscuits rather than the store-bought white bread carried by some of his more affluent friends. Like the Hastingses, most families tried to save on food expenses, spending an average of 24 percent of their disposable income on food and rarely eating in restaurants. A single person could do well surviving on ten-to-fifteen-cent blue-plate specials in local diners, but even such inexpensive restaurant meals were out of reach for many families.
The Hastingses had it better than some but did not do as well as others. They had some good luck when the local bank offered to settle the outstanding debt on every mortgage in the community for ten cents on the dollar. Hundreds of banks closed after the 1929 crash when they were unable to collect on outstanding debts, mostly consisting of home mortgages. For the Hastingses, the bank's offer meant a single payment of $125-a bargain, but still more money than the family had on hand. An aunt who received a small pension for her late husband's military service during the Spanish-American War loaned them the money. Hastings recalled, "I knew my father for forty-four years, but I never remember a day when he showed more elation" than the day he came "home to tell us the house was saved-it was ours!"
There had never been much to do in small towns like Marion, Illinois. Children entertained themselves by playing games with friends, riding bicycles, and listening to the radio. Some older adolescents and youths in small towns often had access to cars and trucks since there was no public transportation and families depended on private vehicles as part of their survival. The onset of the depression, however, forced many families like the Hastingses to sell their cars. Living in town helped the Hastingses since stores, the local school, and other public buildings were within walking distance of their home. In communities like Marion, schools and churches served as centers of social activities. But especially in the early 1930s schools struggled to stay open due to a crippling loss of tax revenue, and many families quit going to church in order to avoid having to put money in the collection plate. Robert attended the local public school but noted that in the early 1930s the term was cut from nine to eight months in order to save money.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Greatest Generation Grows Up by KRISTE LINDENMEYER Copyright © 2005 by Kriste Lindenmeyer. Excerpted by permission.
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Contents Acknowledgments....................xi
Introduction....................3
1 Stable and Fragile Families in Hard Times....................9
2 Work, If You Could Find It....................46
3 Transient Youth: On the Road to Nowhere?....................78
4 The Importance of Being Educated....................110
5 Players and Consumers in Popular Culture....................156
6 Uncle Sam's Children....................206
7 Modern Childhood and the New Deal Generation....................241
Notes....................247
A Note on Sources....................282
Index....................291
