Despite the fact that I’ve got a whole category dedicated to this one, major event in history, this is the first time I’ve actually written about the Depression specifically for my blog, probably because the Depression was just such a big thing and because it lasted so damn long! A whole decade!

In recent months, talk of depression has been on the rise, and since the original Great Depression is still within living memory (just!) and since this is just such a massive and pivotal moment in history, I think it’s time to write about it.

They Used to Tell Me they were Building a Dream…

The 1920s have not been given the name the “Roaring Twenties” for nothing. The end of the Great War in 1918 meant that people were free once again to live their lives as they chose. And in the 20s…people chose to party! The economic caffeine-shot of the First World War meant that technology was rapidly advancing, evolving and developing, giving folks new ways to have fun. Now, people found time and money to explore new things such as the motor-car, radio, jazz-music, the cinema, the talkies, the theatre and the roadtrip. Jobs created by new industries in music, entertainment, film, the automotive industry and radio, meant that money was plentiful and with money, people wanted to buy things. Prosperity and fun were the watchwords for the 1920s.

…And so I followed the Mob…

For nine years, the world enjoyed dizzying and euphoric prosperity, glad to leave the troubles of the Great War, which had killed millions, far behind. For nine years, people rode the thrilling and amazing rollercoaster that was the 1920s. The new jobs and new industries meant there was plenty of money, work and prosperity to go around. In the USA, Prohibition brought even more spice into the mix, with gangsters, crime-waves, illegal liquor and underground bars and nightclubs called ‘speakeasies’. However, all this glitz and glamour would not last and sooner or later it had to collapse.

Perched on the Precipice

With so much money changing hands and spinning around the world in the 1920s, people wanted to get their hands on as much mazoomah as they could. To do this, thousands of folks, from big city businessmen to Mr. Fenwick who ran the local general store, wanted to get in on the stock-market to buy shares, sell shares and make money on them. Share-values had been rising and falling steadily throughout 1929 and people became more and more excited, trying to make larger, grander and more impressive profits.

In essence, what caused the Crash of 1929 was the simple rule of “Supply and Demand”. The fewer products there are, the higher the prices are, the more products there are, the lower the prices are. Similarly, the fewer products there are, the higher their values will be; correspondingly, these values would drop if there was a sudden abundance.

With so many shares being bought in 1929, share-prices and values skyrocketed! With values up so high, people started selling shares to make as much money as they could. The only problem was…they were selling too many…too fast. With the market flooded, share-values dropped and soon, Wall Street was in freefall as people frantically tried to sell off their now worthless shares, while others tried to buy back more, to raise their value again!

Wall Street, Manhattan. End of October, 1929. The large building on the right is the New York Stock Exchange

Despite the best efforts of big investors and bankers, however, the Wall Street Crash was now spiralling out of control, whizzing downwards in an unstoppable freefall from its lofty perch, just a few months before. October 29, 1929, the date of the Wall Street Crash, led to the onset of the Great Depression.

The Start of Something Great

The Great Depression wasn’t called “Great” for nothing. Wall Street, as the center of the financial world, affected finances all over the globe. If America sneezed, the rest of the world caught a cold, as they say. And right now, the world was in hospital with a bad case of pneumonia. With the Crash and the loss of literally billions of dollars (a unit of measurement probably thought unimaginable in 1929!), the effects started being felt all around the world, within weeks, months and in rare cases, a couple of years.

Because the United States was rapidly losing money, the rest of the world started losing money, too. International deals broke down due to a lack of payment. International investments fell through and soon, the catastrophe was worldwide as international trade starting sliding further and further down towards calamity. But what was it like on a more local level? How could a disaster of this scale in the worlds of big business and finance destroy everything beneath it?

With the loss of shares, companies went bust. Lots of them. With the closure of their places of business, employees were out of work. With the slowing production of consumer-goods, shops started getting fewer and fewer products. Unable to sell their goods to a population which had no money, shopkeepers were forced to lower prices, which caused their shop-assistants to have to take pay-cuts, which meant they couldn’t buy as many goods as they could before, which caused further price-reductions, which…You get the idea. Granted, this is a rather simple example of how things panned out, but it was what happened, nonetheless.

Brother Can You Spare A Dime?

Unemployment began to spread rapidly once the Depression properly took hold. Especially hard-hit countries included the United States (unemployment 25%), Australia (30%), the United Kingdom (20%), Canada (27%) and Germany (30%). Tariffs on imported goods were meant to encourage people to purchase goods made by their own, national companies and businesses, but this failed to work when competing countries started increasing tariffs as well, grinding international trade to a halt.

When the Depression hit, many people had to sell their most prized posessions to stay afloat. Here, bankrupt investor Walter Thornton is trying to sell his luxury roadster automobile in Manhattan after losing all his money in the Wall Street Crash

Industries that were affected included the big money-spinners like shipbuilding (the famous White Star Line and the competing Cunard Line only survived bankruptcy due to a merger), the entertainment industry (several piano-manufacturers went out of business when people could no-longer afford to buy such expensive instruments) and construction. The vast amounts of money required for public works simply wasn’t there, causing thousands of people in the construction-industry to lose their jobs.

…When there was Earth to Plough…

A big contributing factor to the severity of the Depression in the United States was the coming of the “Dust Bowl” in the early 1930s. Years of overgrazing and poor farming techniques in the rural areas of states such as Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas, had stripped the land of its vital topsoil and vegetation, which was crucial to keeping the fragile terrain in balance. Severe drought in during the first half of the 30s caused much of what was once fertile farming-land, to dry up and turn to dust, quite literally. This left thousands of farmers and their families homeless and without a source of income. Many of them packed up their worldly goods into their cars or trucks and drove West, towards California to find jobs, which put even more strain on the already fragile job-market, which could barely keep Californians employed, let alone all the Texans and ‘Okies’.

A photograph taken during the Dust Bowl. The wind whipped up huge sandbanks that blocked doorways and could trap people inside their houses

But the ‘Dust Bowl’ could not possibly be so bad as to actually FORCE people to leave their farms and homes…could it?

Yes, it could. The Dust Bowl was not just a mere inconvenience. It was a life-threatening environmental disaster. With no grass or trees to hold down the dried out topsoil, strong breezes whipped up the sand and created highly damaging sandstorms, which could make it impossible to see what you were doing or where you were going. Even hiding inside your house wasn’t any good, because the sand and the wind would be forced in through any cracks or crevices in the woodwork, the window-frames or the doorframes. Sand could get into your eyes, ears, nose, mouth…and worst of all, down your throat and into your lungs!

…When there were guns to Bear Arms…

As if the Great Depression couldn’t get any worse, with farming folk charging into the cities, and with cities having no jobs for their own people, let alone farmers, another group of people were about to take up the fight to try and earn some money, or at least get any money at all! This group of people was known as the Bonus Army.

The Bonus Army received its name because it was made up of former U.S. Army soldiers, who had served in the First World War (then called the Great War). It was called the ‘BONUS’ Army because these war-veterans wanted their bonuses! Or to be precise, they wanted their army-pensions and government entitlements. Unfortunately, with the U.S.A. rapidly losing money, the government was in no position to start giving handouts to retired soldiers. Frustrated by this lack of action, many members of the ‘Bonus Army’ set up shanty-towns and camps in the U.S. capital of Washington D.C. They named their camps “Hoovervilles”, a derisive term aimed at then-president Herbert Hoover, who never accepted that the Depression was as bad as people said it was.

The Bonus Army was a real pain in the neck and by mid-1932, the government was getting sick and tired of it. But the thing was, the Army wasn’t a bunch of grumpy old men banging walking-sticks on the doors of the U.S. Capitol…it was a real army made up of real soldiers! At its peak, it had some 43,000 members, made up of war-veterans and their famlies, who demanded cash-payments for service rendered during the War. Eventually, everything erupted when then Attorney-General William D. Mitchell ordered the Washington D.C. police-department, together with soldiers from the United States Army, to evacuate (a nice little euphamism for ‘force out’) the Bonus Army from the nation’s capital.

Initially, the army-veterans thought that the U.S. Army was there to help them, but when their commanding officers (General Douglas MacArthur and then-Major George S. Patton) ordered the troops to charge the camps, anarchy ensued! Fires were lit, shots were fired and hundreds of people were injured in the confusion to follow.

When President Roosevelt came to office in 1933, he didn’t want to pay the army-bonuses either. But he did try to find work for the unemployed war-veterans, and both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt encouraged the former soldiers to enlist in the various civil-works programs which were being created under the “New Deal” scheme, to get Americans back to work.

Once I Built a Railroad, I Made it Run…

During the Depression, people found work any way at all, that they could. If a man was lucky, he found a job. But it was usually just the one, small job, working part-time. Some people managed to scrape things together and make ends meet for their families by working two or three part-time jobs a week, to make up a regular wage. With everything on a knife-edge and with so little money going around, employers could not afford to hire any staff full-time. People busked on the streets, playing music, doing magic-tricks or other forms of street-performance to try and scrape a few pennies together. Others went hunting to try and shoot or trap animals to feed their families. And this was provided that their families had places to live: A lot of landlords evicted entire families into the streets after they were unable to pay their rents.

But for those who could not hold onto their jobs, for those who couldn’t find jobs (even part-time ones on half-wages), for those who had no homes, the only alternative to starving to death or begging, was to become a hobo.

A hobo is a wandering worker, going from town to town, looking for employment. It’s thought to come from the term ‘Hoe-Boy’, a generic farm-worker who tilled the land with a hoe. For many hobos, travelling great distances to find work was the only way to survive. Many of them did not have cars (with no money for petrol, could you blame them?) and probably didn’t have bicycles as well (and if they did, probably couldn’t afford tyres). Thus, to travel around the vast stretches of the United States, many of them took to riding the rails.

Hobos sneaking into a boxcar of a stopped railroad locomotive

Riding the rails was a dangerous thing to do. It involved hobos climbing into box-cars attached to railroad locomotives as they travelled across the countryside, since hobos couldn’t afford tickets to ride legally. This practice of jumping into box-cars was dangerous for several reasons. The most obvious one is the speed of the train. Although steam-powered locomotives don’t go anywhere near as fast as what trains do today, the big ones could still top 90 miles an hour going full steam ahead on full-throttle. Managing to swing yourself into an open box-car when it’s thundering along at 70 or 80 miles an hour was not easy, and several hobos were killed falling from box-cars and being thrown under the wheels of the train, to be crushed to death.

Another less-obvious danger was that of being arrested. Many railroad-yards and stations employed railway police whose job it was to ensure safety and to make sure that there were no illegal activities going on (such as hobos trying to ride a train without a ticket!). Getting arrested was a big inhibitor to finding work, so hobos had to be doubly-careful not to be caught by a railroad policeman or ‘bull’ as they were commonly called.

Once I Built a Tower Up to the Sun…

One of the biggest consequences of the Great Depression was the ending of public works projects. Without money, construction companies ground to a halt and after their current building-project was finished, many hundreds of construction-workers found themselves out of a job. Schemes such as the construction of the Boulder Dam (which was its original name, today known as the Hoover Dam) were designed to get people back to work. It didn’t necessarily matter what kind of work, so long as people were working and earning money. Other famous buildings and structures constructed during the Depression included the Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia, the Golden Gate Bridge in California, USA, and the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings in Manhattan, New York City. In Germany, the construction of the famous autobahn highways gave many people much-needed jobs, which had the unfortunate backlash of making the Nazi Party increasingly popular in pre-war Germany. Similar road-building projects in the United States helped to put more people back at work.

Why Should I Be Standing in Line?

One of the best-known photographs of a Depression-Era breadline

In the days before government handouts and social security, people relied heavily on their neighbours for support if they found themselves unemployed. With the Depression and so many thousands of people out of work, feeding the homeless and unemployed became a real challenge. Breadlines and soup-kitchens opened up in major cities, offering cheap or free food for the poor, homeless and unemployed. They were run by charitable individuals, religious groups and in one instance…even members of the criminal classes! To escape the nosy faces of the boys in blue, infamous Chicago gangster Al Capone opened up soup-kitchens and breadlines to feed the unemployed to look good in the public eye, and draw away attention from his criminal activities.

Surviving the Depression was not easy. People faced constant fears and hardships, not knowing what would happen to them the next day. On a domestic level, housewives learnt how to be thrifty and cheap. Children learnt how to do without, and husbands and fathers learnt how to make their limited dollars stretch further. People who were able to hold onto their houses and jobs ate incredibly simple and cheap food, surviving on eggs, bread, flour, potatoes and vegetables. Foodstuffs such as fish and meat were hard to come by and were significantly more expensive (unless you managed to hunt or fish for your meat, that is).

Nothing was wasted in the Depression. Clothing was recycled over and over and over again, until it literally fell to pieces. Dress-shirts or business-shirts which were too old, worn out or dirty, became summer short-sleeeved shirts by chopping off the sleeves and sewing new hems and cuffs. Worn out summer short-sleeved shirts became handkerchieves by cutting up the fabric into squares. Worn out trousers became shorts. Any clothes worn out beyond use would be picked apart for its buttons and thread, and then probably scrunched up and used as fuel for the stove or fireplace. Jars and bottles were saved up to be reused for storing food, drink or anything else that might need a container to hold it. When the family car ran out of petrol or broke down and couldn’t be fixed for a long time, it was sometimes “put up on blocks”. This meant to put bricks or concrete blocks under the car’s axles to lift it off the ground, the purpose of this being to prevent damage to the tires and the suspension.

In the Depression, one of the main ways to forget one’s troubles was to go to the cinema. Cinema tickets were cheap and they allowed ordinary people to enjoy a couple of hours’ entertainment in a comfortable movie-theatre…even if they weren’t able to afford the popcorn, chocolates and coca-cola that would usually have made the experience complete. The motion-picture industry was one of the few big, expensive industries that managed to survive in the Depression because people bought millions of film-tickets to take their minds off their troubles. The famous adventure film “King Kong” was single-handedly responsible for saving film-studio RKO from imminent bankruptcy in 1933.

We’re In the Money!

The Depression was not universal, though, and some people and countries were very minimally affected by it. In industrialised western countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and other places, if you managed to hold onto your wealth and your job, the Depression became an easy time for you. With such cheap prices everywhere, people who weren’t ruined by the Wall Street Crash or its after-effects, were now able to afford things that they weren’t previously able, such as new clothes, automobiles and consumer goods. During the Depression, luxury car-makers such as Duesenberg and Pierce-Arrow, survived long enough (Duesenberg was defunct in 1937, Pierce-Arrow in 1938) to give the wealthy elite of the United States (who were able to hold onto their millions) some truly stunning vintage luxury automobiles and limosuines.

The Soviet Union was one of the few countries not affected in some way by the Great Depression. Due to the Union’s rejection of capitalism, the ripple-effect of the Wall Street Crash, which hit every other capitalist state in the world, was largely unfelt in the USSR, and as a result, emerged from the Depression largely unscathed.

Old Man Depression, you are through…

The coming of the Second World War in 1939 was what ended the Depression, be it a rather unfortunate catalyst for getting the world out of a jam. The necessity for mechanisation, mobilisation and workers to run factories and machines quickly put people back to work all over the world. The recovery was slow, however. Although the War did springboard many countries out of the Depression, it took several years for the global economy to recover from the battering it had received from the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

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The subheadings used in this article come from the lyrics of two famous Depression-era songs:

“Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” (1931).
“We’re In the Money” (1933).