The Great Depression (1929-39) does not lend itself to ‘fun’ facts, but recalling it can help us cope during the pandemic. In The Four Winds (2021), Kristin Hannah writes a stirring story of an American family struggling to survive in the southern Great Plains during the Dirty Thirties — the decade-long Depression. Like us today, no one could anticipate at the outset how long it would last.
Although the pandemic restricts our lives, health authorities encourage us to go outdoors and embrace the healing power of nature. Not so in the dust bowl of the Depression. As drought destroyed crops, dust blew over the Great Plains. Inhaling the fine silt particles could lead to dust pneumonia, which was particularly lethal for infants, children and the elderly. In the book, the protagonist Elsa Martinelli observes: “Farmers studied the sky the way a priest read the world of God, looking for clues and signs and warnings… All of it with a faith in the essential kindness of our planet. But in this terrible decade, the weather has proven itself to be cruel. An adversary that we underestimated at our peril.”
Hannah started writing her historical fiction three years before COVID-19 struck but now acknowledges the timeliness of its publication. After reading of the hardships, I no longer grumble about the difficulty in getting fresh produce delivered to our door. About being prohibited from dining at restaurants, going to movies or travelling to our southern home and elsewhere. Following are a half dozen facts of the Great Depression:
FACTS
- Over 20 percent (15 million people) of the population was unemployed and nearly half the banks shuttered when Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933. In addressing the nation, FDR famously declared: “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
- In 1935 Congress passed the Social Security Act, providing Americans for the first time with unemployment, disability and pensions for old age (though the Act excluded farmers and domestic workers). The government also introduced a permanent jobs program that employed 8.5 million people from 1935-1943.
- Dust storms that turned daylight into darkness occurred often, the most severe on April 14, 1935 — called Black Sunday. An estimated 300,000 tons of Great Plains topsoil flew into the air, falling to the ground as far away as the East Coast. (To capture the sense of the day’s doom, folksinger Woody Guthrie composed “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You”.)
- Plagues of jackrabbits and grasshoppers descended on the Plains and devastated the meagre crops. Farmers beat the jackrabbits to death, the National Guard crushed grasshoppers and burned infested fields, while the Civilian Conservation Corps covered the land with an insecticide of arsenic, molasses and bran.
- The dust bowl was both a manmade and natural disaster. Farmers over-plowed and over-grazed the Plains. As a partial solution FDR established the Soil Conservation Service in 1935. Extensive re-plowing of the land into furrows, planting millions of trees to anchor the soil in shelterbelts, plus rotating crops resulted in a 65 percent reduction in the amount of soil blowing away by 1938.
- Despite massive unemployment, one group of Americans gained in jobs: women. From 1930 to 1940, the number of employed women in the U.S. rose 24 percent. (Of course women faced lower wages and ‘marriage bars’ in seeking employment. But those facts befit a different post.)
The current pandemic has caused more deaths than the Great Depression. And it has caused the worst economic downturn since that decade. Younger people and families are suffering more than I am. This pandemic may also be deemed “an adversary that we underestimate at our peril.” •
P.S. In 2020 Kristin Hannah added an author’s note: “We’ve gone through bad times before and survived, even thrived. History has shown us the strength and durability of the human spirit. In the end, it is our idealism and our courage and our commitment to one another — what we have in common — that will save us. Now, in these dark days, we can look to history, to the legacy of the Greatest Generation [so dubbed by Tom Brokaw] and the story of our own past, and take strength from it.”
P.P.S. Because The Four Winds takes place in Texas and California, the facts are American. However, the Great Depression was a worldwide social and economic shock. It hit Canada especially hard.
Sources: History.com, The Canadian Encyclopedia
Chris says
Pam, this was very interesting.
Pam McPhail says
Thanks, Chris. I like it when historical fiction inspires me to research its subject, as “The Four Winds” did.
Linda says
Great article Pam.
Pam McPhail says
Glad you enjoyed it, Linda!
Marie says
The effects of the Depression stayed with my parents all their life. They were extremely parsimonious, saved assiduously even on a scant income and always worried that they would run out of money. As a consequence, myself and my siblings, although we spend way more than my parents would consider seemly, all have a great fear of being in debt.
Tim McPhail says
Yes Marie, that was our family’s experience also. To this day, I always turn the lights off when I leave a room. I will add water to the ketchup bottle when it’s down to the hard to get last bits. Although I don’t clip grocery coupons like my Mom did.
Pam McPhail says
You also wear clothes until they’re threadbare, Tim. I’m remembering our Christmas gift to you of a Bishop’s University vest. It lasted for decades.
Pam McPhail says
The scars ran deep in many of the “Greatest Generation”, Marie. No spoiler alert about the novel, but Hannah’s detailed descriptions of hardships, including cruel discrimination against migrants from the Great Plains to California, caused me to cry.
Ian says
Pam, thanks for reminding us all about the dark years of the 1930s. What a miserable time that must have been. Do you think that many foresaw that more horrors were soon to follow (1939-1945)?
Pam McPhail says
Rather sadly ironic, Ian, the War as you know boosted the economy out of its slump — beginning with defense manufacturing to support Britain and France and, after Pearl Harbour, by expanding industrial production as well as widespread conscription. The unemployment rate dropped below its pre-Depression level.
Janet Anderson says
Thanks for an interesting read Pam, which I shared on Facebook.
Although we can’t control the weather, and farmers wish they could, let’s hope history doesn’t repeat itself for what followed, as Ian indicated above.
Pam McPhail says
The idiom “saving for a rainy day” has been a metaphor for hard times since the late 1500s. Yet in the drought of the thirties rain was what farmers most wanted, needed. They even turned to “rainmakers”, shysters all, in attempts to bring on precipitation for the crops.
Linda Richardson says
An interesting read Pam. I, too, am familiar with the phenomenon of “Depression Babies”, as they have been called. Having grown up during that period, they continued to be big savers throughout their lives and worried about going into debt. Despite being in a comfortable economic situation, my Mom saved string, elastics, paper bags, rags, bottles and jars, etc. and reused things wherever possible. My dad was a great wood worker and tinkerer and repaired whatever he could or found somebody else who could do so. Depression Babies didn’t buy a lot of clothes and mended them rather than throwing them out. It may be that clothing was better made in that era but it was definitely not a throwaway generation. Small and large appliances lasted for many decades because you could replace or repair the parts – no computer chips. There was an old fridge at our summer cabin that I believe was bought in the 1930’s and was still being used in the 1980’s or early ’90’s. The Depression Babies were light years ahead of the whole reduce, recycle, reuse movement that has gained so much traction over the last few decades. Interestingly, now Levi commercials are stressing the idea of buying better quality clothing so that we buy less and wear it longer and consequently. waste less So it appears we have come full circle.
Pam McPhail says
Love your observations, Linda. When I lived in Seymour Arm in the ’70s, an older woman teaching me how to live off the land said “if you have more than one small bag of garbage in a week, then you’re being wasteful.”
Colleen Kawalilak says
Hi Pam, I recall, back in the late 60s, that I always thought you were destined to have your voice heard. My goodness, that was 50+ years ago, can you believe it! I really enjoy your posts. You are such a critically reflective, thoughtful, and insightful writer. Just say’n! Wonderful to reconnect.
Pam McPhail says
Oh my, Colleen, you’ve heaped praise on me, and I thank you for it! I will send you an email to catch up on our lives but, more satisfying, will be seeing you at our East Edmonton Reunion to be held sometime in 2022.
Colleen Kawalilak says
👍