680 Chapter 25 From “Normalcy” to Economic Collapse: 1921–1933
the poor, always a challenge to democracy,
became more striking and engendered con-
siderable bitterness. “Unless something is
done to provide employment,” two labor
leaders warned Hoover,“disorder...issure
to arise....There is a growing demand that
the entire business and social structure be
changed because of the general dissatisfaction
with the present system.”
The communist party gained few con-
verts among farmers and industrial workers,
but a considerable number of intellectuals,
alienated by the trends of the 1920s,
responded positively to the communists’
emphasis on economic planning and the total
mobilization of the state to achieve social
goals. Even the cracker-barrel humorist Will
Rogers was impressed by reports of the
absence of serious unemployment in Russia.
“All roads lead to Moscow,” the former
muckraker Lincoln Steffens wrote.
Depression Breadlines in New York Cityat
http://www.myhistorylab.com
Burning Bonus Army Shacks, 1932at
http://www.myhistorylab.com
The Depression and Its Victims
Depressionis a word used by economists but also by
psychologists, and the depression of the 1930s had
profound psychological effects on its victims as well as
the obvious economic ones. Almost without exception
people who lost their jobs first searched energetically
for new ones, but when they remained unemployed
for more than a few months they sank gradually into
despair. E. Wight Bakke, a Yale sociologist who inter-
viewed hundreds of unemployed men in the United
States and England during the Depression, described
the final stage of decline as “permanent readjust-
ment,”by which he meant that the long-term jobless
simply gave up. The settlement house worker Lillian
Wald came to a similar conclusion. Unemployed peo-
ple at her famous Henry Street settlement, she
noticed, had lost both“ambition and pride.”
Simple discouragement alone does not explain
why so many of the jobless reacted this way. People
who had worked all their adult lives often became
ashamed of themselves when they could not find a
job. Professor Bakke reported that half the unem-
ployed people in New Haven that he interviewed
never applied for public assistance no matter how des-
perate their circumstances. A purely physiological fac-
tor was often involved as well. When money ran low,
people had to cut down on relatively expensive foods
View theImageView theImagelike fruit, meat, and dairy products. In New York City,
for example, milk consumption fell by a million quarts
a day. In nutritional terms people consumed more car-
bohydrates and less food rich in energy-building vita-
mins and proteins. Often they became listless.
The Depression affected the families of the job-
less in many ways. It caused a dramatic drop in the
birthrate, from 27.7 per thousand population in 1920
to 18.4 per thousand in the early 1930s, the lowest in
American history. Sometimes it strengthened family
ties. Some unemployed men spent more time with
their children and helped their wives with cooking
and housework. Others, however, became impatient
when their children demanded attention, refused to
help around the house, sulked, or took to drink.
The influence of wives in families struck by unem-
ployment tended to increase, and in this respect women
suffered less psychologically from the Depression. They
were usually too busy trying to make ends meet to
become apathetic. But the way they used this influence
varied. Some wives were sympathetic, others scornful,
when the “breadwinner” came home with empty hands.
When the wife of an unemployed man managed to find
a job, the result could be either gratitude and pride or
bitter resentment on the man’s part, resentment or a
sense of liberation on the woman’s. If there is any gener-
alization about the effects of the Depression on family
relations it is probably an obvious one—where relation-
ships were close and loving they became stronger, where
they were not, the results could be disastrous.The Election of xvi Contents
As the end of his term approached, President Hoover
seemed to grow daily more petulant and pessimistic.
The Depression, coming after twelve years ofA crowd of homeless men in New York City wait for the municipal lodging house
to open.