Hard Times and Escapes in the 1930s

America 1930–1940 — Lecture 3.5

In the worst winter, which was the winter of 1932 into 1933, something between twelve and fifteen million American workers had no job — the count was never exact, because no one in the country was yet charged with keeping it — out of a labor force of perhaps fifty million. One worker in four. The aggregate has been in front of you for several lectures now, in the charts of output and prices and bank failures, and the aggregate is the thing least able to tell you what the years were actually like, because a quarter is a number and a hungry man is not.

Descend, then, from the chart into the kitchen.

What it meant, first, was the loss of the wage and the discovery of how little stood behind it. There was no unemployment insurance in most of the country. There was no federal relief of any kind when the decade opened. A man who lost his job in 1930 lost, with it, the whole apparatus that had made him a man in his own estimation — the pay envelope he brought home, the standing it bought him at his own table — and he found underneath it a very thin floor. Savings, if he had them, went first; then the insurance policy was cashed or lapsed; then the small debts to the grocer and the landlord mounted until the grocer’s credit ran out and the landlord’s patience did, and the family that had been respectable working people the year before was doubling up with relatives, three families in a flat meant for one, or moving to a cheaper street, and then a cheaper one.

The country filled with people in motion. Perhaps a quarter of a million of them were adolescents, boys and some girls who left homes that could no longer feed them and rode the freight trains from town to town looking for work that was not there, a floating population of children the railroads could not keep off the cars and the towns did not want when they arrived. On the edges of the cities the homeless built shantytowns out of packing crates and flattened tin, and the country named them, with the bitter humor that ran all through the decade, Hoovervilles — after the President — so that the newspaper a man pulled over himself on a cold bench was a Hoover blanket, and the empty pockets he turned out were Hoover flags, and the broken-down automobile hitched to a mule because he could not buy gasoline was a Hoover wagon.

In Pawnee County, Kansas, Frank did not lose a wage, because he had none to lose; what he lost was the price of his wheat, which fell until a bushel would not pay to haul it to the elevator, and then he lost, by slow strangulation, the margin between what the land earned and what he owed the bank on it. On the South Side of Chicago, Isaiah lost his job in the packinghouse in the first year, because the rule in hard times was old and understood without being spoken — last hired, first fired — and a Black man twenty-six years off the Delta was among the last hired everywhere. On the Lower East Side, the needle trades that had employed Rosa’s whole generation and now employed Connie’s contracted and contracted; Connie, who had clawed her way up to a clerk’s desk in a midtown office, held her place by a margin she did not examine too closely, and sent part of what she earned downtown to Rosa, who took it the way she took all charity, which was badly.

The strain reached into the most private decisions. Young people who would have married did not, or married and did not set up a household, because there was no household to be had; the marriage rate fell, and behind it the birth rate fell to the lowest it had ever been recorded in the country, as a whole generation quietly postponed its own future until the future should look survivable. A demographer can see the Depression in the population curve as plainly as an economist sees it in the price index. It is the same event, read in a different ledger — the ledger of lives not started.

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When the thin floor gave way, what was underneath it was not a national system, because there was none. What was underneath was a patchwork, and the shape of the patchwork is worth laying out, because its inadequacy is half the story of the early decade and the reason for much of what came after.

Relief in America in 1930 was a local affair, and a divided one. Some of it came from county and city governments, out of budgets that were themselves collapsing as tax receipts fell. Much of it came from private charity — the Community Chest drives, the Catholic and Jewish and Protestant relief societies, the Salvation Army with its kettles, the settlement houses in the immigrant districts — organizations built in a smaller-scaled age to catch the ordinary run of widows and orphans and injured breadwinners, and wholly unequal to catching a quarter of the workforce at once. And beneath both of those, still standing, still feared, was the oldest institution of all: the county poorhouse, the almshouse, the poor farm, where the destitute who had no other refuge were housed at public expense in conditions deliberately kept miserable. Tens of thousands of Americans still lived in these places in the 1930s. To end there was the terror that hung behind every eviction notice, the bottom below the bottom.

The governing philosophy of the whole apparatus was inherited from the English Poor Law, and it had a name — less eligibility — and a purpose, which was to make relief so much worse than the worst job that no one would choose it who could possibly avoid it. In practice this meant that aid arrived wrapped in humiliation, and the humiliation was not a side effect but the design. The applicant submitted to the means test: an investigator came to the home and inventoried it, established that there was nothing left to sell and no relative able to help, and certified the family as genuinely destitute before a dollar or a food order changed hands. And the aid, when it came, often came not as money but as a grocery order or a scrip good only for certain goods at certain stores, or as a delivery of coal and flour, on the reasoning that the poor could not be trusted to spend cash on the right things — a final small stripping of the last adult dignity, the dignity of choosing what your own family would eat.

Understand what this did to a people whose deepest article of faith was that a man stood on his own feet. To go on relief was not, in the American moral vocabulary of 1931, a misfortune that had befallen you. It was a confession that you had failed — failed at the one thing a man was for. And so men hid it. They told the neighbors they had work. They sent the wife or the children to collect the grocery order so as not to be seen in the line themselves. They walked the pavements answering advertisements for jobs long filled, not because they expected work but because the walking let them leave the house at the hour a working man left the house, and come home at the hour a working man came home, and preserve before their own children the fiction that the father was still the father. Frank would not take relief at all for the better part of two years, and regarded the neighbors who did with a hard judgment he later, in a wet spring when the alternative was watching his own children go short, was obliged to unlearn. Isaiah found that the relief itself was divided by the same line that had divided the jobs: in many cities the Black family got less than the white family in the same circumstance, or was turned away where the white family was helped, so that the least cushioned people in the country fell onto the thinnest part of the patchwork.

The patchwork tore. By 1932 the private charities had exhausted their funds and their donors, the cities had exhausted their credit, and whole industrial towns had simply run out of relief with the need still rising — Philadelphia suspending payments to families it had been carrying, Detroit unable to meet its own, the localities that the whole American tradition had assigned to this work sitting bankrupt and empty-handed before a problem that had outgrown them by an order of magnitude. That collapse is the environmental fact — a catastrophe of a scale the inherited institutions were never built to hold — that forced the adaptation your other lectures trace, the reluctant, unprecedented turn to the federal government as the reliever of last resort. The turn cut against three centuries of American practice and against the sincere convictions of a great many decent people who believed that federal charity would corrupt both the giver and the receiver. It was made anyway, because the alternative, by 1933, was to let the patchwork’s holes swallow the country.

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Between the failure of the old relief and the arrival of the new, and alongside both, the country improvised. Much of the improvisation was hopeless, and it is the hopelessness that makes it worth recovering, because in these doomed and half-doomed efforts you can see a people refusing to sit still inside a catastrophe, inventing dignity and mutual aid out of whatever lay to hand.

Consider the apple sellers. In the winter of 1930 the apple growers of the Northwest had a surplus they could not move, and an association of shippers hit on a scheme to distribute the crop on credit to unemployed men, who could sell the apples on the street at a nickel apiece and keep the margin. Within weeks the corners of every large city held men — many of them formerly of the clerk-and-collar class, in the good overcoats they had not yet had to sell — standing behind a crate of apples, selling them one at a time. It was not a living. It was barely a pretense of one. But it let a man tell himself and the passing crowd that he was a merchant of something rather than a beggar of nothing, and the country understood the distinction perfectly, which is why the apple seller became one of the fixed images of the early Depression — dignity performed on a street corner over a wooden box.

Consider the penny auctions, in Frank’s part of the country. When a farmer fell far enough behind, the bank foreclosed and the sheriff auctioned the farm and its stock on the courthouse steps, and by the rules of the thing the highest bidder took it. So the neighbors learned to come to the auction — all of them, and some of them armed — and to make sure, by their silent and unmistakable presence, that the bidding stayed friendly. A team of horses worth a hundred dollars went for a quarter. A whole farm went for a few dollars in nickels and dimes, bid by a neighbor who then handed the deed straight back to the family that had lost it, while the banker’s agent stood in the crowd and read the temperature of it and declined to raise the price. In Iowa the movement organized itself under Milo Reno as the Farmers’ Holiday Association, blockaded the roads to withhold produce from a market that would not pay, and dumped the milk it could not sell into the ditches to make the point that a price below the cost of production was not, to the man producing, a price at all. It was, in the end, no answer to the farm depression, which had causes no county crowd could bid away. But it kept families on their land through a season or two, and it served notice that there were limits to what the countryside would watch happen quietly.

Consider Chicago, where in the fall of 1930 a soup kitchen opened on South State Street under a sign reading Free Soup, Coffee, and Doughnuts for the Unemployed, and served thousands of meals a day through the hardest winter — and was run, and paid for, by Al Capone, whose interest in the public welfare was not easily separated from his interest in public relations while the federal government was assembling the tax case that would shortly imprison him. The image is worth holding for what it says about the vacuum: when the legitimate institutions of relief had run dry, the man best positioned to feed the Chicago poor at scale was the city’s most notorious gangster, and the poor, being hungry, ate.

Consider the self-help cooperatives, which spread through the industrial cities and reached their fullest growth in California, where by the mid-decade hundreds of thousands of people belonged to associations that ran on barter and labor rather than money: the unemployed mechanic fixed the unemployed farmer’s truck, the farmer paid in vegetables, the vegetables went to the unemployed seamstress who had mended the mechanic’s coat, and a shadow economy of pure exchange grew up in the gap the money economy had left. Towns went further and printed their own currency when the banks closed and the federal money went into hiding — scrip, stamped and dated, that had to be spent quickly before it lost value; the town of Tenino, in Washington, printed its emergency money on thin sheets of wood, and the wooden dollars circulated, and worked, for as long as the neighbors agreed to honor them. These experiments could not scale and did not last. They were rafts, not ships. But a raft is what you build when the ship has gone down and you are still, for the moment, alive in the water.

And consider the rent party, in Harlem and in Isaiah’s Bronzeville, where a family short on the month’s rent would throw open the flat on a Saturday night, charge a quarter at the door, sell fried fish and a drink, hire or borrow a piano player, and let the neighborhood dance the rent into the landlord’s hand by Sunday morning. It was mutual aid disguised as a good time, and it points ahead to the second half of this lecture, because the same decade that drove people to improvise their survival drove them, with the same energy, to improvise their escape — and in the rent party the survival and the escape were the identical act, hunger and music in one hot crowded room.

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There was one region where the hard times were not only economic, and where the word environment needs no metaphor, because the environment itself rose up and drove the people out.

The southern plains — the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas, the far corners of Kansas and Colorado and New Mexico — had been broken to the plow in a single generation, on the strength of high wheat prices during and after the last war. The tractor and the disc plow had torn up the deep-rooted native grass that had held the light soil down through every drought since the last ice age, and had planted in its place a shallow-rooted crop that lived or died by the rain. Through the wet years of the 1920s the gamble paid, and the plains were plowed fence to fence. Then, at the turn of the decade, the rain stopped. And the wind, which had always blown across that country, now blew across bare ground with nothing to hold it, and lifted the soil into the sky.

What followed had no precedent in the settled history of the country. The dust storms — the people called them black blizzards — rolled in as walls of dirt a mile high, turning noon to midnight, burying fences and drifting against the houses like brown snow, sifting through every crack until it lay in ridges on the windowsills and gritted in the teeth and settled in the lungs, where in the worst-hit counties it killed the very old and the very young with what the doctors called dust pneumonia. The single worst day came in April of 1935, remembered afterward as Black Sunday, when a storm blackened the whole southern plains from the Dakotas to the Panhandle in an afternoon.

The figure who fixed the meaning of it belongs at the center of the story, and he is not a farmer or a politician but a soil scientist. Hugh Hammond Bennett had spent years surveying the erosion of American land and years more warning a distracted Congress that the nation was letting its topsoil wash and blow away, to an indifference born of the oldest American assumption of all, that the land was endless and would forgive any use. In the spring of 1935 Bennett was testifying before a Senate committee, pressing the case for a permanent federal program to conserve the soil, and he had arranged — or fortune had arranged for him — that a great dust storm then moving east off the plains was due in Washington. He spun out his testimony, stretching it, watching the window, until the sky over the Capitol turned a sudden dirty brown and the sun went copper and the senators rose from the table to stare at Oklahoma and Kansas falling as grime on the windowsills of the United States Senate. He had his agency before the storm had passed. It is as clean an illustration as the decade offers of a settled institution declining to move until the environment arrives, in person, and darkens the room.

The people the dust defeated went, in their hundreds of thousands, west — down Route 66 toward California, which had been advertised to them on handbills promising work in the fields, and which did not want them when they came. Here a scholarly caution is owed to the audience, because the legend has simplified the fact: a great many of the migrants California lumped together and called Okies were not fleeing the dust at all but the longer, quieter collapse of Southern tenant farming, tractored off land they had share-cropped, and the Dust Bowl became the emblem of a migration wider than itself. What they met at the end of the road was hostility of a kind that carries, for this series, a hard irony. In the Central Valley, Kenji — who had spent his American life on the wrong side of a nativism that called his own people unassimilable and unwanted — watched the state turn the identical language and the identical fear on a wave of migrants who were native-born white Protestant Americans from the middle of the country, penned now in ditchbank camps, blamed for the wages they undercut in their desperation, and turned back at the state line in 1936 by Los Angeles police officers posted hundreds of miles from their own city to keep the indigent out. The dust had made, out of the most native of Americans, a class of unwanted migrants, and taught them briefly what the unwanted had always known.

The migration found its witnesses. A photographer named Dorothea Lange, working for a federal agency documenting the rural poor, stopped at a pea-pickers’ camp in the spring of 1936 and made a photograph of a mother of seven, gaunt and staring past the camera with two children burying their faces against her shoulders — a picture that became, and remains, the face of the whole decade, though the woman in it, Florence Owens Thompson, thought little of the fame it never paid her for. And a migrant balladeer out of Oklahoma named Woody Guthrie set the exodus to music, in plain songs about the dust and the road and the growers, carrying the news of it in a form that traveled where the photographs did not. The plains that blew away are grassed over and farmed again now, under practices Bennett’s agency taught. What blew away with the soil did not all come back.

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Turn now to the other thing a people does under long pressure, which is to reach for release, and to reach hardest for figures who seem to carry the whole weight and lift it. The 1930s were a golden age of the manufactured hero, and the heroes were followed with an intensity that is hard to credit until you remember what the following was a relief from.

The purest case was a horse. Seabiscuit was an undersized, knock-kneed, badly-bred colt who had been raced into the ground as a nobody before an owner named Charles Howard bought him cheap — Howard himself an American story, a bicycle repairman who had ridden the automobile up into a fortune — and handed him to a silent, weathered trainer named Tom Smith, who saw something in the animal that the form charts did not, and to a half-blind former prizefighter of a jockey named Red Pollard. The three of them turned the reject into the most famous racehorse in America, and the country, which needed exactly such a story, took him to itself: the little horse who had been written off and came from behind. When Seabiscuit met the great War Admiral, winner of the Triple Crown and the aristocrat of the sport, in a match race in the fall of 1938 — Pollard injured, his friend George Woolf riding in his place — something like forty million people stopped what they were doing to hear it on the radio, and the little horse ran the big one into the ground, and a nation that had been losing for the better part of a decade got, for two minutes, to watch the written-off thing win.

The prizefighter Joe Louis was followed the same way and more, and here a single observation will do: that a Black man became the champion and the hero of a country which, in most of its territory, still made him ride at the back of its buses was a contradiction the decade carried without resolving. When Louis knocked out the German Max Schmeling in the first round of their rematch in June of 1938 — a fight the newspapers had loaded with the whole freight of the coming European quarrel — the country heard it on the radio, and on Isaiah’s block and a thousand blocks like it the neighborhood packed into whatever flat had a working set and spilled out into the street when it was over, two minutes and four seconds of unqualified triumph in a decade that had rationed triumph thinly. And the following summer, in the Yankee Stadium, a dying first baseman named Lou Gehrig, his body already failing from the disease that would take his name, stood at a microphone and told a silent stadium that he considered himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth — a man losing everything, giving the crowd a lesson in how to lose it, and the crowd loving him for it past the point where anyone could speak.

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The other great release was music, and the music was made for release — loud, fast, and above all for dancing, which is the body’s own argument against despair.

The sound was swing, and it arrived on a particular night with a mechanism this series has already set up. A clarinetist and bandleader named Benny Goodman had spent the early part of 1935 touring west with a hot new book of arrangements to audiences that sat on their hands, and by the time the band reached the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles in August it was nearly ready to give up and go home. What Goodman did not fully grasp was that his band had been carried into Western living rooms months ahead of him by a late-night network radio program — the same parlor-to-ballroom machinery the last lecture described — which aired too late for dancing in the East but landed in prime evening time on the coast, so that the young people of Los Angeles had been learning his records in the dark for a season. When the band, half in despair, finally cut loose into its hottest numbers at the Palomar, the crowd surged the bandstand instead of dancing politely away from it, and the newspapers the next morning announced a craze, and the Swing Era had a birthday. Three and a half years later Goodman took the music into Carnegie Hall itself, planting the dance music of the slums and the ballrooms in the temple of European high culture, and the temple held.

What swing gave the decade was a place to put the body. The young danced the Lindy Hop and the jitterbug in the great ballrooms and the corner halls, an athletic, airborne, improvised dancing that had come up out of Black Harlem — out of the Savoy Ballroom, where Chick Webb’s band held the floor and a teenaged singer he had discovered named Ella Fitzgerald was beginning to be known — and spread to the whole country. Count Basie brought the hard-driving Kansas City beat east; Duke Ellington carried the music toward the condition of art; and Goodman, who was among the first white bandleaders to put Black and white musicians on the same public bandstand when he brought the pianist Teddy Wilson and the vibraphonist Lionel Hampton into his group, integrated his own small stage a decade or two ahead of the country around it. And where there was no band there was the jukebox, which multiplied through the bars and diners after the repeal of Prohibition put legal drink back on the counter in 1933, a coin-fed machine that would sell a man three minutes of the same swing for a nickel.

There was a shadow on this, as there was a shadow on everything in the decade, and it wore the shape of the dance itself. The dance marathon was a Depression invention of pure desperation: promoters put up a cash prize for the last couple left dancing, and couples with nothing else to try would shuffle in each other’s arms for hundreds and then thousands of hours, days and weeks on end, sleeping in fifteen-minute snatches while their partners held them upright, driven past collapse for the entertainment of a paying crowd that came to watch them break. It was escape turned inside out — the exhausted poor performing their own endurance as a spectacle for an audience only slightly less poor — and it is the truest reminder that in this decade the line between the hard times and the escape from them was never very thick.

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The cheapest escapes were the ones that reached deepest, because a broke country is a country with a great deal of empty time and very little money to fill it, and a whole industry of penny-and-dime consolation grew up to meet the need.

For the adults there were the jigsaw puzzle and the board game. The jigsaw puzzle, nearly forgotten as a craze now, swept the country in the depths of the slump — cheap, reusable, rentable for a few cents from the drugstore or the library, an evening’s absorption that a whole family could share around one table for the price of nothing, and at the height of it Americans were buying and borrowing them by the millions every week. The board game had its own emblem, and the emblem carries an irony worth the telling. In 1935 Parker Brothers began selling a game in which players moved around a board buying up property, charging one another rent, and driving one another into bankruptcy until one grasping winner owned it all, and a broke nation embraced this fantasy of ruthless real-estate wealth with such enthusiasm that it made the game’s promoter, a man named Charles Darrow, the first millionaire in the history of game design. What almost none of the millions who played Monopoly knew was that its bones had been designed decades earlier by a woman named Lizzie Magie, as a teaching device meant to demonstrate the evils of land monopoly and the way it beggared the many to enrich the few — a lesson turned so completely inside out that the warning became the entertainment, and the country in the pit of the Depression sat down of an evening to pretend, for fun, to be the landlord.

And for the young there was a new thing entirely, born in the last years of the decade, born precisely of the hunger the decade had created. Two teenagers from Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the sons of immigrants, had spent years trying to sell a character they had dreamed up — a being from a doomed world, raised as an ordinary American boy, secretly possessed of powers no earthly force could stop, who used them to protect the weak and rescue the falling and set right what the powerful had put wrong. In 1938 they finally sold him, along with the rights to him, for a hundred and thirty dollars, and Superman appeared in the first issue of Action Comics, and the ten-cent comic book that his success invented became an industry inside a year, with Batman following the next spring. It is not difficult to read what the fantasy was answering. A generation of children had watched their fathers stand helpless before forces — the market, the bank, the drought, the layoff — that no ordinary man could push back against, and here, for a dime, was the pure inversion of that helplessness: a man who could not be hurt, who was never out of work, who caught the collapsing thing before it hit the ground. The invulnerable protector arrived in American culture in the one decade that had made Americans feel most thoroughly unprotected, and he has never left, because the need he was built for never entirely has either.

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The decade’s escapes had mostly pointed sideways or backward — into the ballroom, the ring, the ten-cent dream, the moonlit past on the movie screen. In its final year the country built itself, at enormous expense, an escape that pointed forward, and made of the future itself a consolation.

In the spring of 1939 the New York World’s Fair opened on drained marshland in Queens under the banner of the World of Tomorrow, and its emblem, raised where every visitor would see it first, was a pure white spike beside a pure white globe — the Trylon and the Perisphere — an assertion in plaster and steel that the future would be clean and rational and engineered, put forward at the precise moment such a proposition was hardest to believe. The heart of the Fair, drawing the longest lines on the grounds, was the General Motors pavilion, where a theatrical designer named Norman Bel Geddes had built Futurama: an enormous scale model of the America of 1960, a continent laced with fourteen-lane express highways and dotted with clean towered cities and green countryside, over which the visitor rode in a moving chair while a calm recorded voice narrated the good world to come, and stepped off at the end wearing a small blue-and-white button that said I Have Seen the Future. Much of what Bel Geddes drew — the great highways above all — would in fact be built, more or less as promised, which is the Fair’s standing puzzle: that the corporate dream of tomorrow was in some particulars exactly right and in the largest particular, the peace and ease it promised, about to be proven catastrophically wrong. Connie rode the Futurama chair on a summer Sunday and carried the button home to Rosa, who regarded it with the same suspicion she had once turned on the electric light. And on opening day the Fair unveiled its newest marvel almost in passing: as President Roosevelt spoke, his image was carried by television to a few hundred receivers scattered around New York, the first time a president had ever appeared on the new screen, to an audience that would have fit inside a single movie palace with seats to spare.

The shadow fell across the second season, and it fell hard. The Fair had opened in the spring of 1939; before it reopened in 1940 the world of tomorrow had arrived in a form no pavilion had modeled, for Germany had invaded Poland in September and the war the whole decade had watched approaching in the newsreels was on. The Polish pavilion now stood on the fairgrounds as a monument to a country that had been erased from the map since the visitors last walked past it. The Czechoslovak pavilion was the embassy of a nation already swallowed whole. The Soviet pavilion, prominent and boastful in the first season, was quietly taken down between the two, after Stalin’s pact with Hitler made the friendship an embarrassment. The World of Tomorrow closed its gates for the last time in the autumn of 1940 with Europe aflame, its clean towers and untroubled highways and rational peaceable future suspended for a term that no one filing out through the turnstiles could yet name.

Gather them, then, at the end of the decade and the end of the escapes, and see the whole strange range of it at once. The apple seller on the winter corner and the invulnerable man in the ten-cent book; the neighbors bidding pennies to save a farm and the crowd surging a bandstand in Los Angeles; the mother staring past Dorothea Lange’s camera and the little horse running the big one into the ground; the family dancing the rent into the landlord’s hand and the visitor stepping off the Futurama chair with the future pinned to his coat. A people had spent ten years finding ways to survive a catastrophe and ways to look away from it, and had built, out of hard times, an entire culture of endurance and release. And at the very end they had assembled a gleaming vision of the tomorrow that would rescue them — and the tomorrow that actually came was the war, which would end the Depression more decisively than any relief the decade had managed, and exact for the ending a price the World of Tomorrow had not put on display.

[ END OF LECTURE ]

End of Lecture 3.5

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