If it were possible to be transported back in time to the typical middle-class neighborhood of that year, it would probably be in a city; suburban areas had begun to form, but only 18 percent of the population lived there. It was still feasible for a man and his family to live decently within walking distance of his office. Arriving on a street in the neighborhood, a visitor from the 1970s would first notice superficial differences—stop signs were yellow, mailboxes green; milk bottles thick and heavy—and then the seedy appearance of the houses. Few had been painted since 1929; often those which had been under construction had been left unfinished. On Detroit’s East Jefferson Street, for example, the Elks suspended work on an eleven-story building, and its naked beams stood silhouetted against the sky for thirty-four years.
Appliances, gadgets, and creature comforts of the 1970s were rare. There were no power mowers, home air-conditioning units, automatic dishwashers, clothes driers, electric blankets, clock-radios, thermopane windows, nylons, drip-dry clothes, frozen foods, automatic coffee makers, cordless shavers, filter cigarettes, electric toothbrushes, vinyl floors, ballpoint pens, electric typewriters, modern Dictaphones, Xerox machines, Styrofoam, hi-fi stereo sets, Scotch tape, home freezers, cassette recorders, color or Polaroid film, Fiberglas fishing rods, garbage disposal units, tape recorders, snow blowers, electric knives, home hair driers, electric can openers, or Muzak, and although Gilbert Seldes was predicting in Harper’s that soon “we shall probably have the simple and comparatively inexpensive mechanisms, now being perfected, which will throw on a small screen set up beside the home radio set a moving picture projected from a central broadcasting station,” there was no television, not even plain black-and-white. Somehow the middle class survived the Depression—the entire decade of the Thirties—with none of these. O Pioneers!
Most American homes were heated by hand-stoked hot air furnaces, which had to be tended twice daily. The country needed nearly 400 million tons of coal to get through a winter, and it was brought to a house by a grimy man who would back his truck to a cellar window and empty the coal down a chute into a bin near the furnace. “Refrigerator” didn’t mean an electric refrigerator; it was an icebox, kept filled by an iceman who knew how many pounds a housewife wanted because she notified him by placing in her kitchen window a card with the figure 100, 75, 50, or 25 turned up. It was an affluent husband who bought his wife a toaster that would scorch both sides of a piece of bread simultaneously (“Our SUPREME toaster!” cried the Sears, Roebuck catalogue that year), for in most homes bread was singed in a gas oven or a coal or wood-burning “kitchen range.” The stove might also be used to heat heavy sadirons for pressing clothing that had come back from the laundry rough-dried, or, in a home without hot water, for heating bucketfuls before a bath.
Phonographs had to be wound by hand; they might be called Victrolas or Gramophones, but never record players. A housewife began her heavy cleaning by donning a dustcap, and as a rule her only mechanical help was a carpet sweeper; in December 1932, in all the houses served by the Alabama Power Company, there were exactly 185 vacuum cleaners. Most farms depended upon kerosene lamps for illumination. Electricity was available to one American farmer in every ten—in Mississippi the ratio was one in a hundred—and 90 percent of all rural families were without either bathtubs or showers. Seventy-five percent lacked indoor plumbing. Half carried their water from wells or brooks and did their laundry—and washed their children—outdoors. (For that matter, millions of urban housewives also had only a washboard to cope with the family laundry, which was usually hung out on Mondays.) Insects were always a summer problem. There was no DDT. Both on farms and in cities the only preventives were spray guns (“Quick, Henry, the Flit!”) and flypaper. A mother who wanted fruit juice for her children had to work at it. She bought Sunkist oranges and laboriously squeezed them, one by one, on an aluminum juice extractor.
Before a girl learned how to handle bobby pins—at about the same age that boys were acquiring their first long pants—her mother had explained the difference between a lady and a woman. Being a lady had certain advantages. Men opened doors for her, stood up to give her a seat on buses and streetcars, and removed their hats when she entered elevators; butchers cut her meat to order, grocers took orders over the telephone and delivered to her door, and when she had a baby she was expected to stay in bed ten days (at a total cost, including the doctor’s fee, of $25). On the other hand, she was expected to defer to her husband; at the altar she had sworn “to love, honor, and obey him.” Her activities in public were circumscribed by convention. A middle-class lady could neither smoke on the street nor appear with hair curlers. In her purse she carried cosmetics in a small disc called a compact, but this, too, could be produced only in private or a ladies’ room. She never swore or told dirty jokes. (Sometimes she wondered what a lesbian was. But whom could she ask?) Advertising copywriters saw to it that she had enough worries anyway: halitosis, B.O., undie odor, office hips, paralyzed pores, pink toothbrush, ashtray breath, colon collapse, pendulosis, and athlete’s foot. Her skirts came to mid-calf. (Any woman whose hem did not cover the knee was assumed to be a prostitute.) A lady would no more leave the house without her cloche than her husband would without his snap-brim felt hat. She might squirt Ipana (for the smile-of-beauty) on her Dr. West toothbrush, and even use Tangee lipstick, but fingernail paint and hair dye were highly dubious. Hairdressers didn’t know how to use dye. Respectable women didn’t even talk about it; a clever young NYU chemistry major, who sold his homemade Clairol dye from door to door, discovered that to make ends meet he had to talk about hair “coloring.”
As a mother, the middle-class wife often had to double as a nurse. Illnesses were long and painful then. Even a visit to the dentist meant an hour of agony; Procaine, a primitive form of Novocaine, was widely used, but it had to be mixed at the chair and was accompanied by disagreeable side effects. Thousands of patients still had to take the big burring drill straight, and since fast drills hadn’t been invented, not much could be accomplished in one visit. In many hospitals, anesthesiologists were limited to chloroform; ether would soon succeed it, though the improvement was questionable. There were no sulfa drugs and no antibiotics. Meningitis killed 95 percent of its victims; pneumonia was often fatal. Even viral infections (called “the grippe” then) were a serious business. Though hospitals were comparatively inexpensive, practically no one had hospital insurance—the American Medical Association didn’t approve Blue Cross until 1933—so most patients remained at home, which meant with mother. She seldom had the help of medication. Ethical drugs were largely limited to a few barbiturates, notably phenobarbital. So remote was the drug nightmare of the next generation that 3,512 drug firms failed between 1932 and 1934, leaving liabilities of over 59 million dollars.
If motherhood was more difficult, it was also a greater challenge. Parents had a tremendous influence upon their children. The teen-age subculture did not exist; indeed “teenage,” as defined by Merriam-Webster, meant “brushwood used for fences and hedges.” Young people were called youngsters, and youngsters were loyal to their homes. Since the brooding omnipresence of the peer group had not yet arrived, children rarely felt any conflict between their friends and their families. No youngster would dream of discussing parental conflicts with other youngsters. If a middle-class family was going to take a drive in the country on Sunday afternoon, as it usually was, children quit the baseball or hopscotch game and hopped in the back seat. The Depression increased all family activities; a study of over a hundred white-collar and professional families in Pittsburgh discovered that a majority had increased family recreation—ping-pong, jigsaw puzzles, checkers, parlor games, bridge, and most of all listening to the radio.
As often as not, the radio was the most prominent piece of furniture in the living room. Whether an Atwater Kent, Philco, Silvertone, or Majestic set, it was likely to be a rococo console in high Grand Rapids style. Network programs were scheduled with the family in mind. Mother’s
serials came during the day; news, comedians, and variety programs in the evening. Between the two was sandwiched the children’s hour, part of which might be listed in the local newspaper as:
5:15 WTIC 1040 Tom Mix
WEAF 660 Story Man
5:30 WTIC 1040 Jack Armstrong
WJZ 760 Singing Lady
5:45 WJZ 760 Little Orphan Annie
6:00 WOR 710 Uncle Don
In the winter of 1932–33 a young middle-class boy wore, almost as a uniform, a sheepskin-lined tan cloth coat, a knitted hat, corduroy knickers, and high-cut lace-up boots with a small pocket on the side of one of them for a jackknife. (In summertime he wore short pants and Keds.) If he was lucky, he owned a Ranger 28-inch-wheel bike with a coaster brake and cushion tires, the tires protected by Neverleak and the whole locked, when not in use, by a $1.50 slip-shackle padlock. The times being what they were, he was very much aware of money and what it bought. A nickel would bring a three-flavored cake of brick ice cream, a Horton’s Dixie Cup, a candy bar, a loaf of bread, a local telephone call, a cup of coffee, or a copy of the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, or Liberty. For a penny you could get candy, a pencil, a postcard, a pad of paper, a glass marble, or your best friend’s thoughts.
If you had an allowance (a Sunday nickel, say) or had earned some money shoveling snow or mowing lawns at a quarter apiece, the quickest place to spend it was at the corner drugstore, drinking a Coke at one of the marble-topped, wire-legged tables, though in Youngstown, Ohio, children bought ice-cream-on-a-stick from a confectioner who drove slowly through the suburbs in a white truck, ringing a bell, and who called himself the Good Humor man. A boy who accumulated as much as fifty cents could get the latest in the Tom Swift series. As David Riesman has pointed out, the heroes of boys’ literature were “ambitious. They had goals. And the reader identified with them and tried to emulate them…. The virtue which brought victory was frequently an ability to control the self, for instance, to be brave.” Significantly, the most widely read book in middle-class homes was Charles Lindbergh’s We.
Inner-direction (or, as Paul Elmer More then called it, “the inner check”) provided children with a built-in need to achieve, though the Depression discouraged them from reaching for anything beyond their grasp. In 1931 the Literary Digest had conducted a survey of vocation preference among children. Boys of eight wanted to be cowboys, aviators, or army officers when they grew up; girls wanted to be movie stars. At eighteen the boys were looking forward to being lawyers, electrical engineers, or architects; eighteen-year-old girls were taking stenographic and secretarial training. Adolescence was a sobering experience. But then, it wasn’t supposed to be much fun. “Childhood is so short and the balance of life so long,” Dorothy Dix explained. “At best, a mother can satin-pad the world for her children for a few years. Then they are bound to face realities, and it is a bitter price they must pay for her folly in turning them into weaklings, instead of strong men and women, and making them unable to cope with the difficulties that they are inevitably destined to encounter.”
One of the first lessons a child learned—because it would be a future asset when he applied for a job—was the importance of personal appearance. “Sit up straight!” he was told, and “Here’s fifteen cents, go get a haircut.” He might prefer a Flexible Flyer sled or a Simplex typewriter, but what he got first was an $8.95 blue serge suit comprising a coat, vest, and knickers, and a pair of black $2.98 Gold Bond shoes. He wore them Sundays and on the first day of each semester, when every mother examined her son like a first sergeant going over his men before a white-glove inspection. (Somehow he always forgot his white handkerchief.) She wanted his new teachers to have a nice impression. It is not recorded that any child ever asked why.
To school he also brought a Masterpiece tablet, bearing on its cover a blurry reproduction of a great painting; in it he laboriously copied assignments with a big, circular Palmer Penmanship script. Seats in the classroom were frequently arranged alphabetically. The walls of at least one room would be decorated with the ruins of Pompeii or a bust of Caesar, etchings and statues which, as Riesman noted, would “signify the irrelevance of the school to the emotional needs of the child.” Some of his lessons make interesting reading today. Young Lyndon Johnson had read in his geography book:
French Indo-China resembles Siam both in climate and the character of people. Its forest-covered hills yield valuable teak and ironwood, and in its valleys are extensive fields of rice and millet. Silk, cotton, tea and spices are other products and there are also extensive coal beds.
A civics textbook explained:
The child who has not learned obedience is handicapped for life. If he does not obey at home, he is not likely to observe the laws of the state, even though he helps elect the men who make them. Boys and girls who study our Government will quickly discover that obedience to authority is as necessary in a government by the people as in a monarchy.
And this paragraph appeared in Professor Thomas Marshall’s widely used American History, published by Macmillan in 1930:
The slaves. Although he was in a state of slavery, the Negro of plantation days was usually happy. He was fond of the company of others and liked to sing, dance, crack jokes, and laugh; he admired bright colors and was proud to wear a red or yellow bandana. He wanted to be praised, and he was loyal to a kind master or overseer. He was never in a hurry, and was always ready to let things go until the morrow. Most of the planters learned that not the whip, but loyalty, based upon pride, kindness, and rewards, brought the best returns.
Nor did unreality stop there. In schools of the Thirties—including, for several years, Washington, D.C.—teachers were forbidden to so much as mention the Soviet Union. On maps the area occupied by Russia was left blank, like the many “unexplored” tracts in Africa. School days usually opened with both the pledge of allegiance to the flag and a Protestant prayer, in which Jewish and Catholic children were expected to share. God was very much alive in 1932, and he was something of a prig. There is a great deal of social comment in Time’s prissy review of Earl Carroll’s Vanities that October. Like Erskine Caldwell, Carroll sorely tested the Luce tolerance: “Mr. Carroll’s shows have long held the record for borderline humor. In Comedian Milton Berle is to be found the acme of hysterical vulgarity. While one part of the audience blushes and the other part guffaws, Comedian Berle proceeds to imitate a person of uncertain gender, quip about the show girls’ fundaments, shout depraved announcements into a loudspeaker. He seems to get a great deal of fun out of it.” What especially entertained Berle—and infuriated Time—was that some of the chorines appeared with their brassieres clearly visible.
Mae West appeared that year with George Raft in Night After Night, and there were gasps in middle-class America when, in reply to a friend’s remark, “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds,” Mae replied, “Goodness has nothing to do with it, dearie.” Will H. Hays, then czar of all the rushes, also overlooked an exchange in Busby Berkeley’s first musical, Forty-Second Street; one chorus girl said, “I’m afraid I gotta run,” the second said, “First door on your left,” and the first said, “In my stocking.” Such outrageous lewdness didn’t get by often. For adolescents, sex was the most forbidden of all subjects. Like the myths about bogeymen and truant officers and the lists of New Year’s resolutions which were faithfully made out each January 1 and broken within a week, the treatment of sex information virtually assured massive guilt feelings. Every growing boy knew masturbation led to brain damage and, in time, to the growth of hair on the palms of his hands.
Girls similarly worried over who had the reputation for being the “hottest” or “dirtiest” girl in school. Their difficulties were increased by the fact that the world of adolescence was largely male chauvinist. Girls were rarely invited to go bike riding, swap steelies or gum cards, discuss the Cleveland National Air Races, or play mumblety-peg, king-of-the-mountain, capture-the-flag, or (unless they were sisters or tomboys) ringolevio. A boy and girl might
hold a strained conversation about the relative merits of the Ipana Troubadors, the Cliquot Club Eskimos, and the A & P Gypsies, but girls were largely spectators who emitted squeals during the great annual festival of July 4, when the anniversary of independence was celebrated by firing Bangsite cannon, hurling torpedos at the sidewalk, and blowing up tin cans with two-inchers and cherry bombs.
Middle-class parents who could afford it—and at eight dollars a week the cost was not prohibitive—sent their children away for at least part of the summer, if only because of the annual polio terror. When an epidemic of infantile paralysis struck, people stayed home from movies and meetings; some wouldn’t even appear outdoors without gauze masks. Thus many a middle-class city child learned to swim at a Scout or YMCA camp, came to love the scent of honeysuckle and the flight of fireflies and June bugs around a campfire, and was told the sound of katydids in August meant frost in six weeks.
Sometimes the whole family would strap suitcases on the running boards of the new Chevrolet ($445, F.O.B. Detroit) and go “touring.” Touring was an adventure, with real hazards. The spare tire mounted on the back of a roadster or a sedan was frequently needed, and with the tires of that era a blowup was a real explosion. Automobiles were uncomfortable. Meals in “roadhouses” were of uncertain quality. Overnight rest was difficult; rooms were hard to find. According to the American Automobile Association, the average American on tour spent a week getting to where he was going and a week coming back, which seems like a lot of touring until you realize that on the roads of that day he could average only 234 miles a day. Route 1 went right through the center of Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Boston; you had to use ferries at the Delaware River and the Hudson (the George Washington Bridge was still under construction); and in Maine, Depression winters had left the roads high-crowned and weak-shouldered. Speed traps were everywhere. There were no interstate highways. The only way you could drive coast to coast from the east was to take route 30 (the Lincoln Highway) into the center of Chicago, where you picked up route 66. Both were two-lane roads, both had stretches of unpaved dirt, and 66 traversed the Rockies with ungraded hairpin curves.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 10